The latest Stones album has dropped. The reviews seem to be universally glowing and for a change devoid of the tired journalistic cliches that typically accompany a Stones release, not too mention the accompanying label hype that “this is the best thing they have done since . . . Tattoo You/Some Girls/Exile on Main Street” — you know the score. The sound, at least going by below does seem to have an exciting early 60s freshness to it.
Martha
Walker Percy: Pathologist, Philosopher, and Novelist
Here is the just published collection of papers in ZYGON. A big thanks to all the contributors and to ZYGON’S ecumenical editor for his patient shepherding of the project.
The economics of political correctness
Here’s a very sharp and interesting take on what I’ve been calling virtue-signaling. The article is a couple of years old but nonetheless it is as incisiveness and salient as ever especially to one who has a basic grasp of market price signals and coordination dynamics. Isn’t it telling that despite academia being firmly under the regressive left’s management for a long time now they are bleating about a whole range of phony “inequities” — under their watch. Perversely, the thought that the problem must surely lie with them simply just does not occur to them. As Douglas Murray said in conversation with Sam Harris, there is a supply-and-demand problem for the regressive left and with ever decreasing circles they have started to cannibalize themselves. Topical update but not nearly as sharp in The Atlantic.
Political Correctness is really just a special form of conspicuous consumption, leading to a zero-sum status race.
Once you have successfully exorcised a word or an opinion, how do you differentiate yourself from others now? You need new things to be outraged about, new ways of asserting your imagined moral superiority.
You can do that by insisting that the no real progress has been made, that your issue is as real as ever, and just manifests itself in more subtle ways. Many people may imitate your rhetoric, but they do not really mean it, they are faking it, they are poseurs . . . You can also hugely inflate the definition of an existing offense . . . Or you can move on to discover new things to label ‘offensive’, new victim groups, new patterns of dominance and oppression.
Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel
Philosophical filmmakers are few and far between, understandably so, but even more depressing is that professional philosophy is perversely plagued by the unphilosophical — i.e. the virtue-signalers and thought and language police. Anyway, one of the few philosophically orientated filmmakers is Wim Wenders and one of my favourite films of all is his Wings of Desire/Der Himmel über Berlin. As per Wikipedia: “A subplot follows Peter Falk, who has arrived in Berlin to make a film about Berlin’s Nazi past. As the film progresses, it emerges that Peter Falk was once an angel, who, having grown tired of always observing and never experiencing, renounced his immortality to become a participant in the world”. Falk was brilliantly cast “as himself” knowing full well that his identity is pretty much coextensive with his fictional alter-ego Columbo. What comes through is the beautiful moral disposition and subtle wisdom of Falk/Columbo and why I mention this is that I happen to know someone who is just like this. And just as in the film, there is a tacit gleam of recognition between these people sprinkled amongst us as a force for good.
As one can take only so much of infinity, Damiel’s longing is in the opposite direction, for the genuineness and limitedness of human existence in the world, perhaps a reference to Dasein, or Existenz.
Bourbon vs Scotch
Having just cracked open a long anticipated bottle of Yellowstone I have bourbon on my mind — and this coincides with Julia Reed’s discussion taking wing from Walker Percy’s famous essay. Sociological musings aside, I’m of the view that the pitching of Bourbon vs Scotch is a false dichotomy: there is no legitimate comparison. If I had to choose a daily tipple Scotch would always win out so long as it was qualifiedly confined to the single malts especially those from Islay. There is a whole range of uninteresting Scotch available including the high-priced blended ones such as Chivas (a by-word for “luxury”) and a vast middling layer of other well-known brands that are really pretty grim, ones that Julia mentions. This is where bourbon comes into its own. A top-notch bourbon is a cost-effective way of getting something more interesting than over-packaged Scotches — unless one, along with a chum, polishes off a bottle of Blanton’s in the bar of The Read House in Chattanooga. Yellowstone was recommended to me purely on the grounds that the purveyor (a Charleston gem called The Tavern) was allocated only three bottles and hadn’t yet tried it himself. It is good but unremarkable as per this review. In addition to Julia’s witty musings, check out Lenore Ealy’s rich writing on the topic. Though I appreciate Churchill’s style and commitment to alcohol I’m more of the WC Fields school: “Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore always carry a small snake”/”Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water”/”It was a woman who drove me to drink, and I never had the courtesy to thank her for it”/”Drown in a cold vat of whiskey? Death, where is thy sting?”/”Now don’t say you can’t swear off drinking; it’s easy. I’ve done it a thousand times”/”I drink therefore I am”/”I never drink water; that is the stuff that rusts pipes”/”I never worry about being driven to drink; I just worry about being driven home”/”Set up another case bartender! The best thing for a case of nerves is a case of Scotch”/”There are only two real ways to get ahead today – sell liquor or drink it”/”Sleep – the most beautiful experience in life – except drink”/”The cost of living has gone up another dollar a quart”/”Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch”/”I never drink water. I’m afraid it will become habit-forming”/”If I had to live my life over, I’d live over a saloon”
The second was that no wonder this country of ours is so messed up—how the hell else are you supposed to keep Percy’s noxious particles and the general trauma of everyday existence at bay without the odd nip?
When the young Winston Churchill covered the Second Boer War as a correspondent for the Morning Post, he took along roughly $4,000 worth of wine and spirits, including 18 bottles of St.-Emilion and another 18 of 10-year-old Scotch.
Mr. Okra
Speaking of New Orleans characters here is a lovely 60 second outline of the joy this man brings to New Orleans (H/T OffBeat).
Booker’s Mysterious Knoxville Concert
Jack Neely reports in The Scruffy Citizen. (Thoroughly appreciate Cheryl Anne Grace‘s artistic rendition of Booker and my other favourite characters Ernie K-Doe, Fats, Allen Toussaint and Mr. Okra).
This machine kills fascists
This famous slogan was etched into one of Woody Guthrie’s guitars. I’d rather someone of the calibre and integrity of Woody Guthrie in my corner than most of the collective brain power of thousands of the regressive left humanities academics who so fraudulently claim to stand up for the down-trodden. Having recently visited the superb Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa what is patently clear is that Woody, though he was not formally educated, was authentic in the sense that he had “skin in the game” and never played the illiberal idiocratic identitarian politics card — moreover he was always a patriot. No wonder the aforementioned academic hucksters are so frustrated by the cultural rumblings of late now that they are the castrati. Isn’t it remarkable that a major driver of social liberalism and the attendant sexual revolution was popular music (jazz, blues, country and western, folk, rockabilly, rock and roll, boogie-woogie and even gospel) — yet these dissident and radical artistic pioneers would be deemed to fall squarely into the “basket of deplorables”. So kids pick up a guitar, get to grips with some STEM subjects, and avoid the vulgar indoctrination of much of the humanities. And you’ll have much more fun and meaning to boot.
Walker Percy Wednesday 112
A lot happened to her. She married, not a Notre Dame boy, but Buddy Dupre, Ed’s brother, a pleasant Tulane DKE, not merely pleasant but charming, the sort of Southern charmer who drinks too much. He had that sweetness and funniness which alcoholic Southern men often have, as if they cannot bear for the world not to be as charming as they are.
*****
It is as if she had only just now decided to become a woman, but not entirely seriously. Having failed at marriage, she has succeeded in farming and doctoring and has discovered that succeeding at anything is a trick, a lark. She’s enjoying herself. She is also exhilarated by my failure and disgrace.
*****
It, the déjà vu, came from the smell of hot Chevy metal and vinyl and seat stuffing tingling in the nostrils and radiating up into the hippocampus of the old brain and into the sights and sounds of the new cortex, which gathers into itself a forgotten world, bits and pieces of cortical memory like old snapshots scattered through an abandoned house.
*****
Mrs. Ernestine Kelly, wife of councilman Jack Kelly, an old fisherman friend of mine and sometime barmate at the Little Napoleon, a very pretty grayhaired woman with a solemn, even sad, expression, whom one thinks of as pious in the old sense, who still observes the old Catholic devotions, still makes First Fridays, sends vials of Lourdes water to sick friends, and from time to time mails me a holy card with a saint’s picture and always the same note: Praying for you and your intentions, on which occasions I always wonder what she is praying for, my doing time in Alabama? mine and Jack’s drinking? my loss of faith? Ellen’s neglect of me for duplicate bridge? And Jan Greene, a youngish, intense blade of a brunette, ex-New Orleanian, wife of a gynecologist colleague and an old-style Catholic who wants to rescue the Church from its messing in politics and revolution, from nutty nuns and ex-nuns, from antipapal priests and malignant heterodox Dutch theologians, and so revive the best of the old Church, that is, orthodox theology, without its pious excesses, meaning Ernestine’s holy pictures and First Fridays.
