J. Greg Deane
2021
It is my great pleasure, and Greater Privilege to introduce this Brilliant new work, The cross-eyed impostor: The librarian who corrected his strabismus, by the literary genius J. Greg Deane, an author whom only a madman could not admire and strive to emulate, though of course true emulation of such greatness is only an impossible dream for the vast majority of mortals. Mr. Deane's new work is a sequel to his earlier work, A gondolier of dogmatic fallacies, a hilarious yet erudite examination of moral turpitude behind masks of virtue, and an atmosphere of meretricious self-seeking. In the earlier work the protagonist, Gregorio Agitalancia bears the same name as his descendant who admires his ancestor from three centuries before him. The later Gregorio reveres the cowardice of his forerunner, which he regarded as prudent good sense, but is not brave enough to follow in his cowardly footsteps. Much as he recognises the greater virtue there is in the ignominy of the poltroon he occasionally allows himself to be seduced by the transitory glory of bravado, even heroic chivalry. Of course, he has the wisdom to know the true glory and heroism of cowardice, he is obliged to despise himself for his surrender to worldly concepts of fortitude. He commits acts of dangerous heroism, even without compulsion, and undergoes agonies voluntarily for the sake of love, something his more renowned ancestor never had to do, as the most revered poltroon in the whole Italian peninsula. He was inundated with a surfeit of lovers, which brought complications that he only survived through pusillanimity. His descendant and namesake comes to despise his mother, Giustina, for her brutality under the mask of piety, but he does not cease to pity her or show her compassion. The gondolier of the 17th century was abandoned by his mother before he could learn to despise her, but being abandoned from an early age he was not burdened with a resentment that he stewed into a self-devouring canker. He was n
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