The Moviegoer – quotes and extracts – 9

walker percy

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I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see. Do not misunderstand me. I am no do-gooding Jose Ferrer going around with a little whistle to make people happy. Such do-gooders do not really want to listen, are not really selfish like me; they are being nice fellows and boring themselves to death, and their listeners are not really cheered up. Show me a nice Jose cheering up an old lady and I’ll show you two people existing in despair. My mother often told me to be unselfish, but I have become suspicious of the advice. No, I do it for my own selfish reasons. If I did not talk to the theater owner or the ticket seller, I should be lost, cut loose metaphysically speaking. I should be seeing one copy of a film which might be shown anywhere and at any time. There is a danger of slipping clean out of space and time. It is possible to become a ghost and not know whether one is in downtown Loews in Denver or suburban Bijou in Jacksonville. So it was with me.

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James Kurth and the Fate of Western Civilization

cultural criticism, culture wars

My chum Corey Abel’s usual elegance and eloquence. Kurth, by the way, is one of the great performers. Here is a free author’s copy.

Socrates pointed out that self-satisfaction is the death of philosophy. To pursue wisdom one must desire it. But to desire something, one has to understand not only its appeal but also one’s lack of it. We do not seek what we believe we already possess. Hobbes saw, like Socrates, that a major affliction of mankind was that everyone considers himself wise. So it is today. Only a brave few welcome bracing criticism and challenges to ideés reçus.

For decades Kurth has been a gadfly to the academic establishment and the cultural leadership of the United States, reminding them of unfashionable truths, and making the case to think fearlessly about the gravest problems facing the United States and Western powers generally.

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A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 78

A Confederacy of Dunces

“They would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cats and frozen food. Don’t you understand? Psychiatry is worse than communism. I refuse to be brainwashed. I won’t be a robot!”

“But, Ignatius, they help out a lot of people got problems.”

“Do you think that I have a problem?” Ignatius bellowed. “The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don’t like new cars and hair sprays. That’s why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions.”

Confederacy of Dunces-Original Paperback Cover Design

Empire of Sin

new orleans

Here is Walter Isaacson’s review of Gary Krist’s Empire of Sin.

Storyville’s sporting houses became cribs for jazz. Like most of the creative culture of New Orleans, this new style of music was spawned by the town’s diversity. Flowing together on the street corners were the sounds of marching brass bands, church spirituals, plantation blues, Creole orchestras, returning Spanish-American War cornetists, ragtime pianists, African drummers, Congo Square dancers and opera house singers. Like the pleasures of Storyville, jazz respected no color line. As a local newspaper wrote of a music hall, “Here male and female, black and yellow, and even white, meet on terms of equality and abandon themselves to the extreme limit of obscenity and lasciviousness.”

Rooting out sin may be worthy, but beware the unsavory motives that can lurk in the hearts of moral crusaders.

Empire of Sin hi-res