Adapted from the Twitter and Facebook feeds, Sunday night, January 26, 2020. Posted Tuesday night, January 26, 2021.
Bourbon Street in New Orleans. February 12, 2010. Chris Litherland, via Wikimedia Commons.
From the Department of In Search of Lost Time:
A year ago tonight we were up at the Old Mannion Homestead, just for a long weekend visit. We had no idea that our next visit would last four and a half months. Pop Mannion was a fan of Walker Percy, and I was looking through his collection of Percy’s novels and nonfiction and landed on this from the essay collection “Signposts in a Strange Land”...
By no means a lesser virtue of Toole’s novel is his rendering of the particularities of New Orleans, its back streets, its out-of-the-way neighborhoods, its odd speech…
But Toole’s greatest achievement is Ignatius Reilly himself, intellectual, ideologue, deadbeat, goof-off, glutton, who should repel the reader with his Gargantuan bloats, his thunderous contempt and one an war against everybody---Freud, homosexuals, heterosexuals, protestants, and other assorted excesses of modern times. Imagine an Aquinas got to pot, transported to New Orleans…
I hesitate to use the word comedy---though comedy it is---because that implies simply a funny book, and this novel is a great deal more than that. A great rumbling farce of Falstaffian dimensions would better describe it…
---Walker Percy in his introduction of “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole.
I'll always regret that I didn't read "A Confederacy of Dunces" when we were down in New Orleans in the spring of 1990. Ditto Walker Percy’s "The Moviegoer".
I did read "The Earl of Louisiana" that trip, but on the train ride home.
Percy died two months after we were there.
Before I learned how sick he was at the time, I used to regret not having gone over to Covington to knock on his door. We did take a ferry over to Covington, but only to have lunch at a restaurant on the wharf friends recommended. I’m not sure it even occurred to me knocking on his door was a possibility. When it did occur to me, we were already back in Fort Wayne. It may have occurred to me when I read that he’d died.
Like I said, I used to regret it, but not the way I regret not having gone up to Ipswich when we were in Boston to knock on Updike's door.
Or not having knocked on Vonnegut's door in NYC when we moved here and his door was less than hour and a half away,
Warning to writers I admire: I'm talking myself into showing up to knock on your doors.
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