Thelma being . . . Thelma . . . what with the ubiquitous piano. (Also I’ve just noted that the excellent documentary on Toole, a collaboration between Toole biographer Corey MacLauchlin and film-maker Joe Sanford, has been updated — and there is now a transcript which I’d have found handy when writing my forthcoming review of…
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…
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…
I would agitate against the bemused person who was attempting to help me upward, that is. The agitation would take the form of many protest marches complete with the traditional banners and posters, but these would say, “End the Middle Class,” “The Middle Class Must Go.” I am not above tossing a small Molotov cocktail or…
At least its climate is mild; too, it is here in the Crescent City that I am assured of having a roof over my head and a Dr. Nut in my stomach, although certain sections of North Africa [Tangiers, etc.] have from time to time excited my interest. The voyage by boat, however, would probably…
Although residing along the Mississippi River [This river is famed in atrocious song and verse; the most prevalent motif is one which attempts to make of the river an ersatz father figure. Actually, the Mississippi River is a treacherous and sinister body of water whose eddies and currents yearly claim many lives. I have never…
The scene which met my eyes was at once compelling and repelling. The original sweatshop has been preserved for posterity at Levy Pants. If only the Smithsonian Institution, that grab-bag of our nation’s refuse, could somehow vacuum-seal the Levy Pants factory and transport it to the capital of the United States of America, each worker…
Once again I have Kafka on my mind. I’ve been amending a review of Toole’s biography Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces by the very excellent Cory MacLauchlin to appear in the Journal of Mind and Behavior. Here is a snippet: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The…
manwithoutqualities 