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“Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.”

― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

 

 

Why a Confederacy of Cruisers?

When it came time to name my newly invented company, I thought of all that symbolized and embodied what I love about New Orleans, and it came back, every time, to the book that originally drew me here with the characterizations of a city that didn’t seem like it could possibly be real.  Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole is the greatest book of New Orleans fiction ever written, and as a tale of a time that is both gone and being forgotten, a time just 50 years ago when New Orleans was still truly separate from the United States, nothing like it can ever be written again. Its influence is in everything in my life, so. But parts of it are still real. The first job I ever applied for was a French Quarter hot dog vendor so I could tread the same streets as the books main character, Ignatius J Reilly.


The novel captures the pulse, style and numerous accents of the city. In a course on New Orleans life, including the acceptance and celebration of its characters that might not survive outside of our city, it would be the bulk of the class.

 

The author, after the book was rejected by all NY publishing houses eventually committed suicide. A decade later his mom brought the manuscript to renowned local author Walker Percy who got it published and it won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for Mr. Toole.

 

Ironically, the epigram that began the book, an old Jonathon Swift quote, must have been exactly like Mr. Toole eventually felt in the time before his death: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

 

In this newer era of politics, I have been told by many that my decade-old name is costing me customers and money, and I am OK with that, the book had a profound effect on my love of this city, the quirks, and eccentricities that made it home for me.

 

We are a Confederacy of old-fashioned slow moving bicycles against whatever faster modern problems that will come against us, so the name will remain forever.

I hope everyone can appreciate why.​
 

​

Jeff​



“I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.”

― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Confederacy of Dunces Bike Tour
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