Rereading A Conspiracy of Dunces

 The book for the next meeting of our neighborhood book club is A Conspiracy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole. The last time I read the book was probably forty years ago. I found that I remembered it tolerably well--only one character, Professor Talc, seemed wholly new, and he is a minor character. But pretty much everyone else seemed familiar, if not by name then by role.

It struck me in the reading that I have very little sense of Ignatius O'Reilly's voice. Does he sound like Foghorn Leghorn? Does he sound like someone with a heavy New York accent of the type less frequently heard now? Should I be hearing a bass or a baritone, considering his size? This did not disturb me the first time I read the book. Yet given the rich absurdity of nearly everything Ignatius says or writes, it would be better to be able to imagine the voice. Most of the rest of the cast speaks an English that is just enough off to guide one: "Idnatius" for "Ignatius", "ersters" for "oysters", "nucular bum" for "nuclear bomb". But Ignatius has been to school, and acquired diction, if not sense.

And there seemed to a lot of screaming: desk sergeants at patrolmen, bar owners at their staff, the residents of Constantine Street at neighbors and family. Is the screaming what a Midwesterner would call "yelling"? I think of screaming as more nearly unhinged than yelling.

 The book aged pretty well, I thought. There are usually reservations when one rereads, and this was not an exception. It seemed to me that Burma Jones's dialogue would have improved by losing about every other "Whoa!". Mrs. Levy served a purpose in the plot, but otherwise cluttered the page without gaining plausibility or adding much. And as I said, I couldn't hear Ignatius's voice.

The Great Cryptogram

 Second Story Books has the two volumes of Ignatius Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays and will sell them to you for $37.50. Together, they amount to 998 pages. The thought of all that print brings to mind the fellow in Wodehouse, one of the Mulliners perhaps, who tried to ingratiate himself with his beloved's eccentric aunt by reading up on the Baconian theory: for his trouble he found himself the audience of her long and bewildering explanation of some point, an explanation said to be unusually short and lucid for a Baconian's. It also reminds me what heroic reading Samuel Schoenbaum undertook when writing Shakespeare's Lives.

Brought to You by the U.S. Air Force

 Happening to look back at the front matter of First-Order Logic by Raymond M. Smullyan, I noticed that

The research of this study was sponsored
by the Information Research Division, Air Force Office
of Scientific Research, under Grant No. 433-65.

  I had known of the Air Force's role in sponsoring studies in operations research and computing, but I had not known that it sponsored studies in logic per se.

Lost Manuscripts

 Today I noticed in looking into a volume by John Lukacs the passage

In one instance, the book was delayed when the secretary who was supposed to retype the manuscript (the ephemeral paramour of the chief editor) forgot it in the broom closet of her summer rental apartment on Fire Island.

The book was The Last European War, 1939-1941, the passage appeared first in Confessions of an Original Sinner.

 This recalled what Wright Morris says in A Cloud of Light of his second novel, The Man Who Was:

... one of my first readers, a teacher at the Baldwin School, a Swiss woman with a profound dislike for speed reading, called me to ask if there was not something peculiar with a line of text on page 219. This line read "To get her mind off Boulder Dam I took the road up Baldy wanted to know about Boulder Dam." I allowed as how the line did sound a bit strange. A word or a phrase had been dropped. I would hasten to check on it. On checking this out--which took some time since I lacked the original copy of the manuscript--I found that eight or ten pages were missing.... Some months later, conducting my own inscrutable investigation, I discovered that the editor in charge of the galleys had been suffering a mid-career crisis, complicated romantically, that had finally revealed itself in pages missing from assorted galleys. They had simply vanished. The prime exhibit, designed to calm small losers like myself, was a mystery novel, written by Marjorie Bonner, the wife of Malcolm Lowry, which  was published without its concluding chapter. No question that this book was a mystery that remained unsolved. Only a handful of readers, besides the author, took the pains to point this out.

Here I don't see how lost galleys should have created the gaps. One sent galley proofs out for proofreading and perhaps reviews: the galleys themselves, long, heavy trays of type, by then usually Linotype slugs, never left the printer's. I would have expected bits missing from galley proofs to appear as clusters unusually dense in missed errors. I suspect that it was pages of manuscript that went missing rather than galleys.

In my copy-editing days, I once stepped off a train at Metro Center, leaving an envelope of manuscripts behind. Realizing this just too late to step back on the train, I took the next train out to Stadium-Armory, where the Orange and Blue lines diverged. There I waited for I suppose the second Blue Line train heading west, stepped on, and retrieved the envelope. I can't say that romance made me leave the envelope--I was just absent-minded.

Physically Awkward

 On an early page of Claire Messud's novel The Emperor's Children, I read

A big, physically awkward man with a square head and jowls, Frank Clarke had been a Green Beret in Vietnam, which was where he had met Thu, Julius's mother, after whom the boy took.

I suppose that "physically awkward" is to contrast with the asserted grace of the son. But do the physically awkward make it through the training required to qualify for the Special Forces, or any elite infantry force? One of my high school teachers, who was also the wrestling coach, had served in the Special Forces.  He was not at all physically awkward. Frank Clarke seems me more prop than minor character.

Advertising

 In the late 1980s, I would sometimes listen to the classical musical station  WGMS while driving. Now and then after a piece had ended, a folksy voice would explain the importance of the F-16 for America's security. Of course this advertisement was not trying to sell an F-16 to the listeners directly. I suppose that it was aimed at lobbyists and congressional staff. And of course the advertisement never came with a price tag.

At that time, and for another dozen or more years, The Washington Post was full of advertisements. Department stores, for example, would run pages of advertisements for clothing, household goods, etc. There were prices given for the goods and a fairly accurate statement of any discounts offered. I would look at them when I needed clothes, pots and pans, or what have you.

Not long ago, I looked in The Washington Post for advertisements to bring to an ESL class. I was surprised to find that newspaper advertisements resemble must more the F-16 advertisements than the dry goods advertisements of 1989. In the main sections of the paper, one may find advertisements for goods as expensive as a house or as relatively inexpensive as clothing (a line, not items). Whatever the price range, one seldom sees a price. The Sunday advertising supplements are an exception.