Status Updates From Myles Before Myles

“These silly letters are significant, because, as I have suggested — or have I? — the face of truth is often most truly reflected in the mirror of folly.
On the serious letters I do not intend to comment here.

Yours, etc.,
Patrick Kavanagh
Dublin”

“Foreigners may hurl at us the jibe that we fiddle while Rome burns, but posterity remembers Nero and his lovely music when the tuneless screaming of the burnt has faded totally from aural ken.”

“I replied that to the bibliophile like myself every minute spent away from the company of my beloved books represented sixty golden seconds gone down the waste-pipe of time… At that juncture I discharged my game piece through the window as a hint that the interview was at an end, and musingly watched them retreat in disorder.”

“never for one moment was I deceived by Miss O’Brien’s delicious fooling when she alluded to herself as a stuffy old gentleman.”

Myles(or ?) writing as a woman accusing Myles(or ?) of being a woman impersonating a man when she wrote letters claiming that Joseph Conrad was born Josephine Cumisky.

I knew the quote but didn’t know just how trans the context was. 😂

Warning: a rather horrible jarring end to a comedic piece that I note down for style-pondering

“A poor German I know was very fond of three and made every aspect of his life a thing of triads. He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled on a photograph of his wife with his dying hand goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.”

“The only essential in the bus-driving profession is to yield to the bus’s gregarious instinct by driving it in a herd… if buses travelled alone at frequent intervals, suburban dwellers would have an even chance of getting into town, only to be corrupted in the Big City. It is the business of a driver to prevent this at all costs.”

“You will find the rat sitting at the piano playing one of rarer Chopin Etudes. Say nothing but go downstairs again and fetch two quick-firing field-pieces. When you return, the window will be open and the room will be empty.”

From a newspaper’s advice on what to do if you invite their own editor in for tea. Of course.

“Blather
THE ONLY PAPER EXCLUSIVELY DEVOTED TO THE INTERESTS OF CLAY-PIGEON SHOOTING IN IRELAND

…

Blather doesn’t care. A sardonic laugh escapes us as we bow, cruel and cynical hounds that we are. It is a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men. Do you get the smell of porter?”

Tropes already tired enough by the 30s for Myles to mock them:

-the phrase “live, laugh and love”

-stories of a wicked man ennobled and uplifted by a woman

-descriptions of said woman as “not beautiful, but a shortened nose, a slightly crooked mouth and eyes that seemed brimful of a simple complexity seemed to spell a curious attraction, an inexplicable charm”

Ah the tale of Bruder Barnabas, the ancient man whose ‘cultivation of peat parking-poles is all that tethers his feeble wits to the earth.’ You’d never know from his convulsions in tbe bog that this is the man who ‘crossed dog-whips’ with Der Grosse Kaiser Wilhem, witnessed the fighting pits for poets’ Psyches, met Sherlock Holmes to—

That is to ask, what is happening?

“When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”
-Niels Bohr

(This quote does not appear in this volume.)

Myles advertised six classes of eating companions for hire back in 1933 and yet is never mentioned in the official annals of mukbang.

Of course it is well supported that he later invented the NFT. (“Please do not make an exhibition of yourself by asking what you get for your money. You get nothing you can see or feel”)

When will the world he built credit him?

“There will be no examination in Applied Maths, as it has been found that, except in very rare cases, they can never be applied with success.”

I wish my own university cadre had devoted ourselves more to stupid jokes. It seemed to have formed 60% of Myles’ student efforts. (I use the possessive form once reserved for Jesus and Moses.)

No other author so consistently makes me want to share such funny quotes that are so unintelligible out of context.