("A Confederacy of Dunces", "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman", "Honor")

[fiefoe]

One can sense John Kennedy Toole was a young man, but even that doesn't excuse his playing Ignatius's execrable behavior towards his mother for laughs.

• New Orleans resembles Genoa or Marseilles, or Beirut or the Egyptian Alexandria more than it does New York, although all seaports resemble one another more than they can resemble any place in the interior. Like Havana and Port-au-Prince, New Orleans is within the orbit of a Hellenistic world that never touched the North Atlantic. The Mediterranean, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico form a homogeneous, though interrupted, sea. A. J. Liebling, THE EARL OF LOUISIANA
• Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person’s lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one’s soul... The outfit was acceptable by any theological and geometrical standards, however abstruse, and suggested a rich inner life.
• They must have had stomachs of iron to ride in that awful machine. Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.”
• “Yes,” Mancuso said with new confidence. “A great big prevert.” “How big?” “The biggest I ever saw in my whole life,” Mancuso said, stretching his arms as if he were describing a fishing catch.
• The luminous years of Abélard, Thomas à Beckett, and Everyman dimmed into dross; Fortuna’s wheel had turned on humanity, crushing its collarbone, smashing its skull, twisting its torso, puncturing its pelvis, sorrowing its soul. Having once been so high, humanity fell so low. What had once been dedicated to the soul was now dedicated to the sale.
• Note: I mailed this singular monograph to the library as a gift; however, I am not really certain that it was ever accepted. It may well have been thrown out because it was only written in pencil on tablet paper.) The gyro had widened; The Great Chain of Being had snapped like so many paper clips strung together by some drooling idiot;
• death, destruction, anarchy, progress, ambition, and self-improvement were to be Piers’ new fate. And a vicious fate it was to be: now he was faced with the perversion of having to GO TO WORK.
• Doris Day and Greyhound Scenicruisers, whenever they came to mind, created an even more rapid expansion of his central region. But since the attempted arrest and the accident, he had been bloating for almost no reason at all, his pyloric valve snapping shut indiscriminately and filling his stomach with trapped gas, gas which had character and being and resented its confinement.
• “Please go away!” Ignatius screamed. “You’re shattering my religious ecstasy.”
• The siren, a cacophony of twelve crazed bobcats, was enough to make suspicious characters within a half-mile radius defecate in panic and rush for cover. Patrolman Mancuso’s love for the motorcycle was platonically intense.
• It was a neighborhood that had degenerated from Victorian to nothing in particular, a block that had moved into the twentieth century carelessly and uncaringly—and with very limited funds.
• Some poor white from Mississippi told the dean that I was a propagandist for the Pope, which was patently untrue. I do not support the current Pope. He does not at all fit my concept of a good, authoritarian Pope. Actually, I am opposed to the relativism of modern Catholicism quite violently.
• So we see that even when Fortuna spins us downward, the wheel sometimes halts for a moment and we find ourselves in a good, small cycle within the larger bad cycle. The universe, of course, is based upon the principle of the circle within the circle. At the moment, I am in an inner circle. Of course, smaller circles within this circle are also possible.
• Ignatius imagined it was something in his mother’s family, a group of people who tended to suffer violence and pain. There was the old aunt who had been robbed of fifty cents by some hoodlums, the cousin who had been struck by the Magazine streetcar, the uncle who had eaten a bad cream puff, the godfather who had touched a live wire knocked loose in a hurricane.
• She says you woke her up this morning playing on your banjo.” “That is a lute, not a banjo,” Ignatius thundered. “Does she think that I’m one of these perverse Mark Twain characters?”
• Suddenly Mrs. Reilly remembered the horrible night that she and Mr. Reilly had gone to the Prytania to see Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Red Dust. In the heat and confusion that had followed their return home, nice Mr. Reilly had tried one of his indirect approaches, and Ignatius was conceived. Poor Mr. Reilly. He had never gone to another movie as long as he lived.
• “It’s a good thing your father’s dead. He should have lived to see this.” Mrs. Levy gave the shower shoe a tragic glance. “Now I guess you’ll spend all your time at the World Series or the Derby or Daytona. It’s a real tragedy, Gus. A real tragedy.” “Don’t try to make a big Arthur Miller play out of Levy Pants.”
• He was four workers in one. In Mr. Reilly’s competent hands, the filing seemed to disappear. He was also quite kind to Miss Trixie; there was hardly any friction in the office. Mr. Gonzalez was touched by what he had seen the previous afternoon—Mr. Reilly on his knees changing Miss Trixie’s socks. Mr. Reilly was all heart. Of course, he was part valve, too. But the constant conversation about the valve could be accepted. It was the only drawback.
• I really have had little to do with them, for I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one... In a sense I have always felt something of a kinship with the colored race because its position is the same as mine: we both exist outside the inner realm of American society. Of course, my exile is voluntary. However, it is apparent that many of the Negroes wish to become active members of the American middle class. I cannot imagine why.
• In addition, I would studiously avoid sitting near the middle class in lunch counters and on public transportation, maintaining the intrinsic honesty and grandeur of my being... 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.
• “Gimme that paper, Ignatius. We gonna take a look at them want ads.” “Is that true?” Ignatius thundered. “Am I going to be thrown out again into the abyss? Apparently you have bowled all the charity out of your soul. I must have at least a week in bed, with service, before I shall again be whole.”
• “You mean somebody broke into this house just to take one of your dirty sheets?” “If you were a bit more conscientious about doing the laundry, the description of that sheet would be somewhat different.”
• In the boiling water the frankfurters swished and lashed like artificially colored and magnified paramecia. Ignatius filled his lungs with the pungent, sour aroma. “I shall pretend that I am in a smart restaurant and that this is the lobster pond.”

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Angela Carter turned out to be heavy going, and the dialogue between the Ambassador and the Minister lost me.

• could not merge and blend with them; I could not abnegate my reality and lose myself for ever as others did, blasted to non-being by the ferocious artillery of unreason. I was too sardonic. I was too disaffected.
• the lawless images they were disseminating. Since mirrors offer alternatives, the mirrors had all turned into fissures or crannies in the hitherto hard-edged world of here and now and through these fissures came slithering sideways all manner of amorphous spooks.
• my heroes, who were all men of pristine and exquisite genius. And I knew that they must be joking for anyone could see that I myself was a man like an unmade bed. But, as for my Minister, he was Milton or Lenin, Beethoven or Michelangelo – not a man but a theorem, clear, hard, unified and harmonious.
• if Albertina has become for me, now, such a woman as only memory and imagination could devise, well, such is always at least partially the case with the beloved. I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.
• It was prosperous. It was thickly, obtusely masculine. Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with and my city settled serge-clad buttocks at vulgar ease as if in a leather armchair.
• I do not know who my father was but I carried his genetic imprint on my face, although my colleagues always contrived politely to ignore it since the white, pious nuns had vouched for me. Yet I was a very disaffected young man for I was not unaware of my disinheritance.
• Boredom was my first reaction to incipient delirium.
• Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time, the discarded times of all the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which grow like a wilfully organic thing, unfurl like the petals of a mired rose and yet lack evanescence so entirely that they preserve the past in haphazard layers,
• group of chanting pillars exploded in the middle of a mantra and lo! they were once again street lamps until, with night, they changed to silent flowers. Giant heads in the helmets of conquistadors sailed up like sad, painted kites over the giggling chimney pots.
• Slowly the city acquired a majestic solitude. There grew in it, or it grew into, a desolate beauty, the beauty of the hopeless, a beauty which caught the heart and made the tears come. One would never have believed it possible for this city to be beautiful.
• the enhanced glamour of the totally artificial
• his work consisted essentially in setting a limit to thought, for Dr Hoffman appeared to me to be proliferating his weaponry of images along the obscure and controversial borderline between the thinkable and the unthinkable.
• His political philosophy had the non-dynamic magnificence of contrapuntal, pre-classical music; he described to me a grooved, interlocking set of institutions governed by the notion of a great propriety. He called it his theory of ‘names and functions’.
• Yet, essentially, it was a battle between an encyclopedist and a poet.
• a sleep which had now become as aesthetically exhausting as Wagner,
• He was like a Faust who cannot find a friendly devil. Or, if he had done so, he would not have been able to believe in him.
• I could not see what there might be wrong with knowledge in itself, no matter what the price.
• The Minister possessed supernatural strength of mind to have stood out so long and it was his phenomenal intransigence alone which upheld the city. Indeed, he had become the city. He had become the invisible walls of the city; in himself, he represented the grand totality of the city’s resistance.
• expressed a kind of mindless evil that was quite without glamour, though evil is usually attractive, because evil is defiant.
• He was a manicured leopard patently in complicity with chaos. Secure in the armour of his ambivalence, he patronized us.
• Time and space are the very guts of nature and so, naturally, they undulate in the manner of intestines.
• A societal structure is the greatest of all the works of art that man can make. Like the greatest art, it is perfectly symmetric. It has the architectonic structure of music, a symmetry imposed upon it in order to resolve a play of tensions which would disrupt order but without which order is lifeless.
• AMBASSADOR: Do you regard the iconographic objects – or, shall we say, symbolically functioning propositions – which we transmit to you as a malign armoury inimical to the human race, of which you take this city to be a microcosm?

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Gave up after Thrity Umrigar gave one too many polished, quotable lines to the folk heroine Meena.

• As for those twilight evenings during the rainy season, when the spattering sun flung its embers across the sky and painted the city a luminescent orange? In all her travels, had any twilight ever compared with the twilights of her childhood?
• She had believed she was agreeing to spend a few days here to help Shannon get back on her feet. But instead, she found herself dealing with everything that she detested about this country—its treatment of women, its religious strife, its conservatism.
• Smita had seen this phenomenon all around the world—young women from low-income families, slender as reeds, working insane hours against insane odds to better their lives. And the gratitude they felt toward bosses or benefactors—anyone who tossed a morsel of kindness their way—was so heartfelt, so earnest, that it never failed to break her heart.
• as if the red earth of Georgia had hardened her bones and the blue waters of the Pacific flowed in her bloodstream. She was America, all of it—Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie, the snowcapped Rockies and the Mississippi Delta, Old Faithful in Yellowstone. In that moment, she felt so estranged from the city of her birth that she would have paid a million bucks to be transported back to her silent, monastic apartment in Brooklyn.
• He emitted a low whistle. “This poor woman,” he said. “Her . . . those scars. Her face looks like a map or something.” That’s it exactly, Smita thought. Meena’s face was a map created by a brutal, misogynistic cartographer.
• While waiting, I’d look up at the evening sky. I could hear the birds cawing as they made their way home. And it seemed to me that everything—every stalk of wheat, every stone on the ground, every bird in the sky—had its place in this world. Except me. That my true home was inside this loneliness. You understand me?” “I do.” Meena smiled. “I know you do, Didi,” she said. “From the minute you walked into our home, I saw it in your eyes—you have known this curse of loneliness, also.”
• Her journalistic ethics forbade it, but Smita longed to slip a few hundred-rupee bills into this querulous woman’s hands. Who, she wondered, would Ammi be if one could remove the financial stressors from her life? Would the better angels of her nature prevail, would she be able to set the grievous loss of her son alongside Meena’s loss of her husband, and realize their common pain?
• Sometimes, when I catch Ammi’s eyes resting on my daughter’s face, I know she is missing her son. Every day, she is going half mad, trying to decide whether she loves or hates Abru for looking so much like Abdul.” Could an Upper West Side therapist have shown greater psychological insight than Meena had? Could any priest, rabbi, or imam have shown a greater generosity of spirit than she had demonstrated?
• Months later, when I finally came home from the hospital, my stomach swollen with child, Ammi spat in my face. I let the spit run down the melted half of my face, unable to feel it, unwilling to wipe it away in her presence.
• “I honestly don’t know how to help you,” Mohan said. “It’s like I have to apologize to you for everything in this country. Everything I see is now filtered through your eyes. And it all looks ugly and backward and—”
• The image of Meena stroking her daughter with her melted hand. The land outside this car bore so much suffering. This land is your land . . . The words of the Woody Guthrie song she’d always loved came into her head, but somehow the lyrics seemed ironic, malicious even. Like it or not, this, too, was her land and she felt implicated and ensnared in its twisted morality and contradictions.
• In my heart, I felt the same feeling I had for Radha—protectiveness. I wanted to protect this man I had just met in the same way I wanted to protect my sister. For the first time since we started working, I gave thanks to Radha for forcing me to take this job. It was as if a gust of wind had blown open a window in my heart and a sweet bird had flown in and made a nest. I knew I must shoo it away, but what to do? For the first time in my life, I wanted something to stay.
• If Radha could have seen all the way to where her stubbornness would take us, maybe she would have buried her desire, and we would have never taken a step out of our village. Because traditions are like eggs—once you break one, it is impossible to put it back inside its shell.
• longed to be flung back into the anonymity of Manhattan, to walk its crowded streets experiencing that thrilling dilution of her individual self.
• She noticed the garland of yellow marigolds coiled around the beasts’ horns, and for some reason, the tenderness of the gesture broke her heart. This, too, was her country, this inheritance, her birthright. Except that it wasn’t. She had been deprived of it, much as Meena had been. Of course there was no comparison between what she had suffered and what was done to Meena—Smita’s hand flew involuntarily to her unblemished face. But despite her privilege, her heart ached, and she felt a different kind of homesickness than what she’d felt for New York—the loss of something that had never fully belonged to her. And yet, none of this—this bifurcated sense of self, this rending—was extraordinary. If her years as a reporter had taught her anything, it was these two things: One, the world was filled with people who were adrift, rudderless, and untethered.
• And two, the innocent always paid for the sins of the guilty.
• When she finally stopped screaming, she looked at me. “Let’s stay home, Didi,” she said. “These men will never give up until they destroy us. Their traditions mean more to them than their humanity.”
• As children, we were taught to be afraid of tigers and lions. Nobody taught us what I know today—the most dangerous animal in this world is a man with wounded pride.