Don’t forget Frank Macon, old hunting pal, once a complex old-style sardonic black man, as compact of friendship and ironies as Prince Hamlet, as faithful and abusive as a Russian peasant. Now as distant and ironed out as a bank teller: Have a nice day. ***** We inmates, or rather detainees—assorted con men, politicians, ex-Presidential…
What’s going on? What do they have in common? Are they better or worse? Well, better in the sense that they do not have the old symptoms, as we shrinks called them, the ancient anxiety, guilt, obsessions, rage repressed, sex suppressed. Happy is better than unhappy, right? But—But what? They’re somehow—diminished. Diminished how? ***** Then…
The point of the test, of course, is that self-consciousness implies that there is a self. ***** And there was Debbie’s new lingo, her everlasting talk about dialoguing, creativity, community, intersubjectivity, centeredness (her favorite word, centeredness). And her new word, empowerment. What would happen, I wonder, if I asked them what they thought about God…
In Robert Gottlieb’s recently published memoir Avid Reader he briefly talks about the fraught relationship he had with Ken Toole. So in barely two pages devoted to Toole and in light of the critical and commercial status that Dunces has achieved worldwide, Gottlieb still dismisses Toole as sophomoric! Even with the benefit of the interim 50…
What a conspicuous omission by not mentioning Percy in this article. Here is an extract from my forthcoming paper. With Percy’s medical training echoing in the deep background, he took the view that the novelist is a diagnostician, “a literary clinician” so to speak, identifying “the particular [cultural] lesion of the age.” Percy extends the…
Great Catholic narratives grapple with suffering and doubt—experiences that transcend the faith and appeal to readers and viewers of different beliefs — The Atlantic a confederacy of duncesAnthony Burgess.CatholicismEvelyn WaughFlannery O’Connorgraham greeneJohn Kennedy Toolephilosophical literatureShūsaku EndōWalker Percy
He competed ferociously and successfully, his blood pressure went down, he slept better, but in the end he blew it and either withdrew or got kicked out. Why? Because he never caught on to the trick of Louisiana civility, the knack of banter and horsing around, easing up, joshing and joking—in a word, the American…
“Yes.” What I’m thinking is that Louisiana fishermen would not dream of speaking of such things, of my own people, of a way of life. If there is such a thing as a Southern way of life, part of it has to do with not speaking of it. “Tom, I’m what you call a jack-of-all-trades,…
Long ago Hudeen gave up ordinary conversation. Her response to any greeting, question, or request is not the substance of language but its form. She utters sounds which have the cadence of agreement or exclamation or demurrer. Uhn-ohn-oh (I don’t know?); You say!, You say now!, Lawsymussyme (Lord have mercy on me?); Look out!—an all-purpose…
Interesting piece by Yoram Hazony in Mosaic. How to shore up this collapsing front? Given the history I have described, it seems likely that there is now only one way: an alliance of Old Testament-conscious Protestants and nationalist Catholics and Jews who will seek to update the biblical and Protestant heritage of the West and restore it…
manwithoutqualities 