Uvrón’s Reviews > Myles Before Myles > Status Update

“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.”

“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?