I first read “A Confederacy of Dunces” when I was in my early twenties. Well, my valve slammed shut when I read the new essay in The New Yorker by Tom Bissell, in which he concluded that ACOD is overrated. Can you imagine? It’s like Dante’s poet pal Guido Cavalcanti squiring a fellow around Florence. Fred told Ken and me that many years ago, Thelma Toole, the mother of Confederacy author John Kennedy Toole, has given him a personal tour of all the sites in town that her son, who died a suicide before his novel was published, used in his book. Fred is also a devotee of A Confederacy Of Dunces, and was delighted that when I visited him on Sunday night, I recognized the bottle of Ignatius’s favorite tipple.
Fred is an academic, jazz clarinetist, author, and the owner of Lombard Plantation, an 1825 house and small property that he and his wife bought and restored in the New Orleans Bywater neighborhood. Frederick Starr and, on the right, the infamous New Orleans boulevardier Ken Bickford. Above you can see Self, in the attractive Ignatian millinery, with S.
0 kommentar(er)
