"Employers sense in me a denial of their values"

I suppose that could be an autobiographical line but, in truth, it's just one of many of my favorite quotes from A Confederacy of Dunces whose 30th anniversary is being celebrated in spectacular fashion by Loyola University this year.

The observance began during the summer, when every freshman received a copy of the novel as part of background reading to prepare for the move to New Orleans.

On Friday, there will be bus tours to some of the sites in the novel, including the statue of Reilly that stands in front of the Canal Street building that used to house D.H. Holmes department store, marking the spot where Reilly is waiting for his mother as the book begins. Faculty members will lead discussion groups all over the Uptown campus, and the Monroe Library will feature an exhibit of “Dunces” covers representing the 35 languages into which the book has been published.

More information about the Loyola program can be found here. As a long time advocate of the idea of a C.O.D. driving tour, I am pleased to see them running with this.

The genius of A Confederacy of Dunces is that it does for New Orleans what The Simpsons does for the rest of America. Each is an exploration of the general absurd incompetence of just about everything and everyone. And neither can be fully appreciated unless one sees this essential truth as a sort of reassuring discomfort. New Orleans is a place that magnifies and rewards that sensibility. On any given day one finds oneself saying "goddammit nobody knows what the hell they're doing" only slightly less often than one says, "Oh thank god they don't actually know what they're doing". Dunces is such a singular work of literature for its success in capturing that.

By contrast, it's the utter absence of anything like this satirical perspective in a pretentious TV melodrama like Treme that makes it such a miserable failure. Or maybe it just lacks the proper theology and geometry or something. This is just a thought but this may help explain why no one has succeeded adapting Dunces for film yet. They don't know how to properly render the realism in the humor. Maybe it needs to be animated.

Update: Following the Loyola links a bit, we get to this Blogger site which meticulously photographs and describes settings from the book. I'm not sure if these locations comprise the Loyola bus tour but it's certainly worth a look anyway.