Moto Guzzi - It makes no difference, Mama

It makes no difference, Mama

It was raining horizontally, haphazardly,
unenthusiastically in fits and starts,
drizzling spasmodically, spitting ironically
into the wind with no inclination to fall
or dribble down. Be that as it may,
one could only say, emphatically,
there was no trace, not the slightest,
of Florentine fingerprints on the front
spaghetti fender of Rudolpho’s Moto Guzzi
as the fat left hand of Detective Suzzi,
held high in the air swore
while his right hand rested solemnly on
The Little Golden Book of Mother Goose.

Rudolpho’s mother, Donna Caterina,
having one hundred and ten years
but looking not a day over one hundred and two,
sat in the front row on a plump tapestry pillow,
dabbing with a lavender scented hankie
her crocodile tears, wondering whether she
should roast some pork tonight
or perhaps a chicken. She turned to
Rudolpho and whispered in his ear,
seeking his opinion. He farted twice
and said loud enough for all to hear:

“It makes no difference, Mama.”

Leocadia

Bob Dylan's Jams

Gioya in New Orleans

Ma sœur à la Nouvelle Orléans. Belle!

Fleur de Paris

Wikipedia -Empowering People Everywhere - the most important and beautiful site on the web

source: one guess :-) Jimmy Wales 

 When I was a kid I wanted more than anything a set of Encyclopedia Britanica.  I settled for visits to the public library when I could get there.  Later, in 1969, with four children of my own, I again felt that longing to have those 24 volumes at our fingertips, always there, so we could spontaneously search for knowledge.  I even went so far as to invite an encyclopedia salesman to our house so we could discuss the possibility of  purchasing such a wonderful set of books. His name was Mr. Livolsi and he reeked of a sweet sickening cologne.  He was an ambitious salesman and I wanted those books so badly (the revised 14th edition) that I signed that dotted line.

It never did pan out; it was too costly.  I had buyer's remorse and tried for days to reach Mr. Livolsi in order to cancel my agreement within the allotted time.  It was the late sixties; no voice-mail, no home computers.  I thought he was purposely avoiding me, he may have been, but finally he answered his phone and I cancelled.  I remember the experience as being very sad, disappointing, and oddly traumatic.

Encyclopedia Salesman

He left his scent
all over my telephone.
I resent that.
I try to call him.
His line is always busy.
$899.00 is too much.
I shouldn't rush
into such things.
I'm gong to cancel.
This thing has
given me a headache.
Knowledge!
Why is it so expensive?
I said if.
He didn't know what if meant.
What does if mean?
Look it up Mr. Livolsi.
Answer your phone.
I'll tell you what if means.
Everytime I pick up the phone
I gag - that's what if means.
Sure, it would be nice
to know exactly
what a codfish is
and what a codfish isn't
but holy cow Mr. Livolsi
$800.99?

Today, forty years later, I am still in love with knowledge, but even more so I am in love with the  concept of knowledge being universally distributed free of charge and literally at our fingertips.  Wikipedia is like a dream come true, for me personally, yes of course, but also for its founder, Jimmy Wales and his team. This past year I decided it was time, finally, for me to show my appreciation for such a precious gift of knowledge by making a modest financial donation to help the cause.  Today I was happy to recieve the following email from the Wikimedia Fundraising Team. 

Dear Leo,

 Thanks to more than a million generous donations, our annual fundraiser was over in record time. We said thank you on Wikipedia at the end of 2012. In case you missed that, we're saying it again here. 

Your donation makes it possible for the Wikimedia Foundation to provide thousands of volunteer editors with the tools and infrastructure they need to keep Wikipedia going -- software developers, a data center fit to serve the world's fifth most popular site, support programs around the world and more.

Have you ever wondered who wrote the millions of articles on Wikipedia? This year we made a video to introduce you to just a few of them. If you have a few minutes, please watch: (above)

We also convinced a pair of independent filmmakers to donate this clip from their upcoming documentary film showing a remote village in Peru where children learn to edit Wikipedia and add an article about their own community: (above)


The 2012 fundraiser was our shortest and most successful ever. Thanks to our readers, we've been able to spend less time asking for donations each year even as rising readership and new challenges -- such as the rise of mobile -- increase our expenses.

In 2013 we're going to experiment with a significant change in the way we fundraise. We're going to try showing our readers fundraising messages one or a few times outside of our annual fundraiser. This will allow us to receive donations from a broader population of readers (rather than only those who happen to visit during the end-of-year fundraising days) while showing far fewer messages to users overall. We're not sure how this will work. Please let us know if you feel you are seeing our fundraising messages repeatedly before December. Our goal is to show our readers as few fundraising messages as possible, but for everyone to see them at least once.

If you have any feedback -- positive or negative -- about our fundraiser please reply to this email or send a message to: donate@wikimedia.org

Once again, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for supporting what we believe is the most important and beautiful site on the web, and a community of volunteers who we love and respect.

Sincerely,
The Wikimedia Fundraising Team

Saint Blaise

Saint Blaise

BLESSING OF CANDLES
on the Feast of St. Blaise, Bishop and Martyr

P: Our help is in the name of the Lord.
All: Who made heaven and earth.
P: The Lord be with you.
All: May He also be with you.

Let us pray.

God, almighty and all-mild, by your Word alone you created the manifold things in the world, and willed that that same Word by whom all things were made take flesh in order to redeem mankind; you are great and immeasurable, awesome and praiseworthy, a worker of marvels. Hence in professing his faith in you the glorious martyr and bishop, Blaise, did not fear any manner of torment but gladly accepted the palm of martyrdom. In virtue of which you bestowed on him, among other gifts, the power to heal all ailments of the throat. And now we implore your majesty that, overlooking our guilt and considering only his merits and intercession, it may please you to bless and sanctify and impart your grace to these candles. Let all men of faith whose necks are touched with them be healed of every malady of the throat, and being restored in health and good spirits let them return thanks to you in your holy Church, and praise your glorious name which is blessed forever; through Christ our Lord.

All: Amen.


 BLESSING OF THROATS
on the Feast of St. Blaise

{This is one of the most popular blessings. St. Blaise was bishop of Sebaste in Cappadocia, and was martyred by beheading about A.D. 316. Not much more can be affirmed of him with any degree of historical accuracy, but legends about him are numerous. One day- -so goes the legend--Blaise met a poor woman whose only pig had been snatched up in the fangs of a wolf but at the command of the bishop the wolf restored the pig alive to its owner. The woman did not forget the favor, for later, when the bishop was languishing in prison, she brought him tapers to dispel the darkness and gloom. To this story may be attributed the practice of using lighted candles in bestowing the blessing of St. Blaise. While in prison he performed a wonderful cure on a boy who had a fishbone lodged in his throat and who was in danger of choking to death. From this account we have the longtime custom of invoking the Saint for all kinds of throat trouble.}

After blessing the candles on the feast of St. Blaise, the priest holds two candles fastened like a cross to the throat of the person kneeling before him, and says:
By the intercession of St. Blaise, bishop and martyr, may God deliver you from every malady of the throat, and from every possible mishap; in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

R. Amen.

Dirge

Dirge

I hate myself for lovin’ you and the weakness that it showed
You were just a painted face on a trip down Suicide Road
The stage was set, the lights went out all around the old hotel
I hate myself for lovin’ you and I’m glad the curtain fell

I hate that foolish game we played and the need that was expressed
And the mercy that you showed to me, who ever would have guessed?
I went out on Lower Broadway and I felt that place within
That hollow place where martyrs weep and angels play with sin

Heard your songs of freedom and man forever stripped
Acting out his folly while his back is being whipped
Like a slave in orbit, he’s beaten ’til he’s tame
All for a moment’s glory and it’s a dirty, rotten shame

There are those who worship loneliness, I’m not one of them
In this age of fiberglass I’m searching for a gem
The crystal ball up on the wall hasn’t shown me nothing yet
I’ve paid the price of solitude, but at least I’m out of debt

Can’t recall a useful thing you ever did for me
’Cept pat me on the back one time when I was on my knees
We stared into each other’s eyes ’til one of us would break
No use to apologize, what diff’rence would it make?

So sing your praise of progress and of the Doom Machine
The naked truth is still taboo whenever it can be seen
Lady Luck, who shines on me, will tell you where I’m at
I hate myself for lovin’ you, but I should get over that

 

Copyright © 1973 by Ram's Horn Music; renewed 2001 by Ram’s Horn Music

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

My sister took this picture of me standing next to the statue of

Ignatius J. Reilly. It was Easter week of 1997 and at the time we had

no idea who the statue represented. It looked like a fireman to me.

Recently, while going through our NOLA photos, looking for a few

I could enlarge and frame as a gift to my sister, I found the above. 

An internet search revealed the statue's identity. I can only surmise

 that what is now Chateau Sonesta was formerly Hotel New Orleans.

The bronze statue of Ignatius J. Reilly, sculpted by William Ludwig in 1996, stands 71 inches tall under the clock at the former site of the D.H. Holmes Department Store, now the Chateu Sonesta Hotel. The statue mimics the opening scene from John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, where “in the shadow under the green visor of the cap, Ignatius J. Reilly’s supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D. H. Holmes Department Store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress.” The statue is modeled on New Orleans actor John "Spud" McConnell, who portrayed Ignatius in a stage version of the novel.

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. 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.
--from A Confederacy of Dunces

A Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980, 11 years after the author's suicide. The book was published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy (who also contributed a revealing foreword) and Toole's mother Thelma Toole, quickly becoming a cult classic. Set in New Orleans in the early 1960's, the story revolves around Ignatius J. (Jacques) Reilly, an intelligent but slothful man still living with his mother at age 30 in the city's Uptown neighborhood, who, because of family circumstances, must set out to get a job. In his quest for employment he has various adventures with colorful French Quarter characters.

Walker Percy's Foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces
"Perhaps the best way to introduce this novel -- which on my third reading of it astounds me even more than the first -- is to tell of my first encounter with it. While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown from me. What she proposed was preposterous. It was not that she had written a couple of chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class. It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it. Why would I want to do that? I asked her. Because it is a great novel, she said.

 Over the years I have become very good at getting out of things I don't want to do. And if ever there was something I didn't want to do, this was surely it: to deal with the mother of a dead novelist and, worst of all, to have to read a manuscript that she said was great, and that, as it turned out, was a badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon.

 But the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained -- that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.

 In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. I shall resist the temptation to say what first made me gape, grin, laugh out loud, shake my head in wonderment. Better let the reader make the discovery on his own.

Here at any rate is Ignatius Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of -- slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one -- who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt, in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, who between gigantic seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective.

 His mother thinks he needs to go to work. He does, in a succession of jobs. Each job rapidly escalates into a lunatic adventure, a full-blown disaster; yet each has, like Don Quixote's, its own eerie logic.

His girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff of the Bronx, thinks he needs sex. What happens between Myrna and Ignatius is like no other boy-meets-girl story in my experiences.

 By no means a lesser virtue of Toole's novel is his rendering of the particularities of New Orleans, its back streets, its out-of-the-way neighborhoods, its odd speech, its ethnic whites -- and one black in whom Toole has achieved the near-impossible, a superb comic character of immense wit and resourcefulness without the least trace of Rastus minstrelsy.

 But Toole's greatest achievement is Ignatius Reilly himself, intellectual, ideologue, deadbeat, goof-off, glutton, who should repel the reader with his gargantuan bloats, his thunderous contempt and one-man war against everybody -- Freud, homosexuals, heterosexuals, Protestants, and the assorted excesses of modern times. Imagine an Aquinas gone to pot, transported to New Orleans whence he makes a wild foray through the swamps to LSU at Baton Rouge, where his lumber jacket is stolen in the faculty men's room where he is seated, overcome by mammoth gastrointestinal problems. His pyloric valve periodically closes in response to the lack of a "proper geometry and theology" in the modern world.

I hesitate to use the word comedy -- though comedy it is -- because that implies simply a funny book, and this novel is a great deal more than that. A great rumbling farce of Falstaffian dimensions would better describe it; commedia would be closer to it.
It is also sad. One never quite knows where the sadness comes from -- from the tragedy at the heart of Ignatius's great gaseous rages and lunatic adventures or the tragedy attending the book itself.

 The tragedy of the book is the tragedy of the author -- his suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two. Another tragedy is the body of work we have been denied.

 It is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing. But he is not, and there is nothing we can do about it but make sure that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers."