back from vacation

Well, I dropped off the face of the earth for a week; now I'm back! My wife and I just spent the week in New Orleans. We had a wonderful time.

While in the city, I picked up a copy of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. I had been made to read this book in high school, but I distinctly remember not enjoying the book at all. This is a quintessential New Orleans novel, so I decided to give it another try. Given another decade of education and a trip to New Orleans, I was in a much better position to appreciate the novel. To begin with, it is absolutely hilarious. Ignatius J. Reilly's combination of absurdly learned discourse and "worldview" with his complete shiftlessness was immediately compelling -- I couldn't put the book down.

A couple of choice quotes from Ignatius:

"Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate."

and

"'Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age,' Ignatius said solemnly. 'Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books...I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he's found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.'"

But Toole sets this larger-than-life screwball in the midst of a landscape filled with equally flawed characters all convinced of their personal rectitude. This is ultimately what drives the book and what engenders its most powerful lessons.

More soon...

Good night!