“We shall storm the office very shortly, thereby surprising the foe when his senses are still subject to the psychic mists of early morning.” “Hey, Mr. R., pardon me,” a man called out from the crowd. “Somebody tell me you in trouble with a po-lice. Is that right?” A wave of anxiety and uneasiness broke…
“Ain that fine. Whoa! I never go to school more than two year in my life. My momma out washing other people clothin, ain nobody talking about school. I spen all my time rollin tire aroun the street. I’m rollin, momma washing, nobody learning nothin. Shit! Who looking for a tire roller to give them…
“The problem come from not havin no vocation skill,” Jones was saying to Mr. Watson. Jones was perched on a wooden stool, his legs bent under him like ice tongs ready to pick up the stool and boldly carry it away before Mr. Watson’s old eyes. “If I had some trainin I wouldn be mopping…
Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the death penalty. I doubt whether you would know that St. Cassian of Imola was stabbed to death by his students with their styli. His death, a martyr’s honorable one, made him a patron saint of teachers. Pray to him, you deluded fool, you…
As a lecturer Dr. Talc was renowned for the facile and sarcastic wit and easily digested generalizations that made him popular among the girl students and helped to conceal his lack of knowledge about almost everything in general and British history in particular. a confederacy of duncesJohn Kennedy Toolenew orleansphilosophical literature
We do correspond quite regularly, the usual theme of Myrna’s correspondence tending to urge me to participate in lie-ins and wade-ins and sit-ins and such. Since, however, I do not eat at lunch counters and do not swim, I have ignored her advice. The subsidiary theme in the correspondence is one urging me to come…
She had chiseled quite a bit of money from her father to go away to college to see what it was like “out there.” Unfortunately she found me. The trauma of our first meeting fed each other’s masochism and led to an affair (platonic) of sorts. (Myrna was decidedly masochistic. She was only happy when…
As the magnificence and originality of my worldview became explicit through conversation, the Minkoff minx began attacking me on all levels, even kicking me under the table rather vigorously at one point. I both fascinated and confused her; in short I was too much for her. The parochialism of the ghettoes of Gotham had no…
The New Yorker a confederacy of duncesJohn Kennedy Toolephilosophical literatureRobert GottliebWalker Percy
She and I could live most pleasantly in some moldy shack in the slums in a state of ambitionless peace, realizing, contentedly that we were unwanted, that striving was meaningless. A project for the future could be a social history of the United States from my vantage point; if The Journal of a Working Boy…
