In a message dated 97-12-19 22:08:38 EST, [log in to unmask]
writes:

> I just reread the Horses Mouth last year and found it as wonderful as I had
>  30 years ago.
>
>  Don't know much of anything about his life, though, except that he spent a
>  fair amount of time in Africa, which never left any of the Brits without
>  developing a cruel streak.

Joyce Cary bio, _Joyce Cary_, Malcolm Foster, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1968.
Probably out of print. I picked up a copy years ago at the Strand Bookstore.
Seem to have read it and forgotten everything.

For twenty years I have been working on a novel called _The Horses Ass, or,
the Horses Half-Brother_. Mostly a conceptual novel, meaning it is higher on
concept than reality as with many of my diversionary projects. Though I have
written a bunch of pages, it is mostly crap that I get around to revising
every few years, then give up. I can't seem to lose or burn the thing. I'm
into continual revision without closure. Some of it is coming out in G&E (THA
is where Etidorpha Orgrease originated and from the Utopian novel _Etidorhpa,
The End of Earth, The Strange History of a Mysterious Being and The Account of
a Remarkable Journey as communicated in manuscript by LLewellyn Drury who
promised to print the same, but finally evaded the responsibility which was
assumed by John Uri Lloyd with many illustrations by J. Augustus Knapp_, John
Uri Lloyd, 189 - note the modern spelling of E's name). Regardless, a few
years back, wanting to revive my memory on Joyce Cary, I stopped in a used
bookstore and asked the proprietor if he had a copy of _The Horse's Ass_,
thereby making something of an ass of myself, particularly when I realized my
error and corrected myself be informing the bepuzzled bookseller that I had
not finished writing it as yet.

For several years I worked on a project in Harlem and took the subway between
home (then camping in Brooklyn) and the project. I was reading Joyce Cary's
_The African Witch_ at the time and took great care to conceal the cover lest
I be approached by a black feminist activist and forced to defend my reading
interests.

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