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Alice Cooper as Presidential Candidate

Some may recall this bit of satire from the band 43 years ago — tricky Dicky was of course President. In the UK we had the perennial Screaming Lord Sutch, founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party taking the piss. The point is that perhaps it shouldn’t surprise one that that otherwise intelligent people of all political persuasions…

Walker Percy Wednesday 48

The game was the thing. One became impatient with non-game happenings—a nurse coming in to empty the urinal. Time disposed itself in short tolerable stretches between the bright beads of the games. The score itself, toted up and announced, had the cheerful workaday effect of a small tidy business. It came to be understood too…

WALKER PERCY WEDNESDAY 47

He sat down under the cistern and sniffed a handful of soil. The silence was disjunct. It ran concurrently with one and did not flow from the past. Each passing second was packaged in cottony silence. It had no antecedents. Here was three o’clock but it was not like three o’clock in Mississippi. In Mississippi…

Walker Percy Wednesday 46

When he woke, it was very cold. He lit the propane panel ray and, as he waited for the cabin to warm, caught sight of his own name in Sutter’s casebook. Barrett: His trouble is he wants to know what his trouble is. His “trouble,” he thinks, is a disorder of such a character that…

Walker Percy’s Theory of Hurricanes

Walter Isaacson in today’s NYT But Percy’s theory about the redemptive power of hurricanes goes beyond the fact that dangerous situations allow us to become action heroes or saints. “True, people help each other in catastrophes,” he wrote in “Lancelot.” “But they don’t feel good because they help each other. They help each other because…

Walker Percy Wednesday 45

Suicide considered as consequence of the spirit of abstraction and of transcendence; lewdness as sole portal of reentry into world demoted to immanence; reentry into immanence via orgasm; but post-orgasmic transcendence 7 devils worse than first. Man who falls victim to transcendence as the spirit of abstraction, i.e., elevates self to posture over and against…

David Madden and Walker Percy

From Black Mountain News In 1968, Madden began 24 years of teaching at Louisiana State University. Living near him in Covington for a while was the writer Walker Percy, author of “Love in the Ruins” and other novels. “He got on the faculty for just a quarter. I think his daughter was going to LSU,” Madden…

Walker Percy Wednesday – 44

Here he used to walk with his father and speak of the galaxies and of the expanding universe and take pleasure in the insignificance of man in the great lonely universe. His father would recite “Dover Beach,” setting his jaw askew and wagging’ his head like F.D.R.: for the world which seems To lie before…

Walker Percy Wednesday – 43

Sutter wrote: A w.d. and n. white male, circa 49. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth: neg. (upper dentures). Skin: 12 cm. contusion rt. occipital region Pleura: Neg. Lungs: Neg. Pericardium: 10 cc. pink frothy fluid Heart: infarcted anterior wall right ventricle; coronary artery: moderate narrowing, occasional plaque; recent occlusion anterior descending branch, right c.a. Abdomen: neg.…