From rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com Fri Jul 18 03:20:08 2003 From: rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com (RHONDA MCDONNELL) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 00:20:08 -0700 Subject: [percy-l] reintroduction Message-ID: Since I've switched e-mail accounts, I thought I'd sign up again. Is there still life out there? Jay Leno mentioned tonight that a Japanese inventor has come up with an electronic invention that allows people to talk to their cats . . . Just thought you'd all get a chuckle out of that--tetradic communication with a cat??? Rhonda McDonnell ASU Ph.D Student -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From LTberrywtr at aol.com Fri Jul 18 08:10:45 2003 From: LTberrywtr at aol.com (LTberrywtr at aol.com) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:10:45 EDT Subject: [percy-l] reintroduction Message-ID: <146.159d54b1.2c493dc5@aol.com> Rhonda -- People have bveen talking to their cats (and dogs and horses and etc) for centuries. (I'd be willing to bet Walker talked to his dogs.) So what's new? Does the gizmo allow the cats to answer? If they did, all they'll do is ask for trout almondine for breakfast. And where does this get us? I love my bird dog, Easy. But she already knows how to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. She takes a nap. So she probably has very little to add to The Search. Cordially, Larry Thornberry -- Tampa From Nikkibar at aol.com Fri Jul 18 10:42:15 2003 From: Nikkibar at aol.com (Nikkibar at aol.com) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 10:42:15 EDT Subject: [percy-l] reintroduction Message-ID: <74.30513792.2c496147@aol.com> Dear Rhonda, Where can one get one of these wonderful inter species blackberrys? I wonder if it works only with the cats of Nippon. My cats seem to speak only Colonial English with a Maine accent. Meow-ah Nikki -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karey at charter.net Thu Jul 24 07:32:54 2003 From: karey at charter.net (Karey L. Perkins) Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 07:32:54 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] Percy triads vs. Peirce triads, bibliography, and the origins of language Message-ID: <000c01c351d7$52c5a950$0301000a@AFAC955012> Below this e-mail is an article from last week's NYTimes on the origins of language by Nicholas Wade. It's pretty interesting - refers to Chomsky, Pinker, FOXP2, and the family in England that's missing the gene - one of the main points is how little work has been done in the area. It seems like a good overview. What would Percy think? But I also have a burning question, well, many questions, but I'll start with just one, specifically for Ken Ketner though anyone who might know can offer an answer. I'm almost done with "A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy" (ed. by Patrick Samway) and I have thoroughly enjoyed it - it's been fun to read about "language theory" in the human context of two people writing letters, like a story; plus it's been very helpful. And some of Percy's questions to Ken are the same ones I have, so it's nice to have them answered without even asking. But what I cannot figure out is why Percy holds on to HIS triad, the triangle (three lines joining to form a triangle) when Ken so nicely and clearly explained Peirce's triad (three lines meeting in the center to form a point) is more appropriate. In that explanation, Percy's triad is just an illustration of three dyads forming a triangle, and not a true triad. Each element in Percy's triad can be just a result of (mediated by or mediator of) a cause-effect reaction. Perhaps I missed Percy's rationale for why he kept a triangle? Also, I think his (Percy's) retention of the triangle is one of the reasons why he was so VERY concerned about what the interpretant was (needing to find a name for it in "Thief" and ending "Message in the Bottle" with: "The apex of the triangle, the coupler, is a complete mystery. What it is, an 'I,' a 'self,' or some neurophysiological correlate thereof, I could not begin to say" (327).) See, as long as he retains the triangle, which is merely three dyads connected together, he hasn't successfully defeated the cause-effect determinists - which Ken pointed out. So, it seems to me he's now putting the weight of that responsibility on the poor little interpretant -- the interpretant now must be some special, different thing to pull it out of that realm (which is Percy's whole goal - to defeat deterministic science). And I think Percy really believes it is some special, different thing, and is trying to find out what that thing is. But now he fails to successfully defeat the Cartesian dualists (and he even says in the letters he's not sure that Peirce does defeat the dualists, reflecting more Percy's view of Peirce's accomplishment than Peirce's real accomplishment) because now he must add some special substance (spirit, soul) to the interpretant for the triangle not to be deterministic. Of course Percy was always concerned with the self, throughout all of his writings. But for him, the human self is something different than the rest of the world (even from animals?). I don't think Peirce would think that, would he? What do you think? Another question -- what has been written on this subject? Peirce and Percy that is. Though anything pertinent would be helpful. Most of the stuff on Percy that I've found (and I did send a abbreviated biblio. y'all's way) doesn't have much to do with his language philosophy -- it's more about his existentialism, etc.. This "Cenophythagoreanism" is hard stuff for those of us who haven't started out as Peirce scholars, since it is by definition interdisciplinary... Karey ----- Original Message ----- From: kdenney at mindspring.com To: Karey L. Perkins Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 3:10 PM Subject: origins of language >From yesterday's New York Times: Early Voices: The Leap to Language By NICHOLAS WADE Bower birds are artists, leaf-cutting ants practice agriculture, crows use tools, chimpanzees form coalitions against rivals. The only major talent unique to humans is language, the ability to transmit encoded thoughts from the mind of one individual to another. Because of language's central role in human nature and sociality, its evolutionary origins have long been of interest to almost everyone, with the curious exception of linguists. As far back as 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris famously declared that it wanted no more speculative articles about the origin of language. More recently, many linguists have avoided the subject because of the influence of Noam Chomsky, a founder of modern linguistics and still its best-known practitioner, who has been largely silent on the question. Dr. Chomsky's position has "only served to discourage interest in the topic among theoretical linguists," writes Dr. Frederick J. Newmeyer, last year's president of the Linguistic Society of America, in "Language Evolution," a book of essays being published this month by Oxford University Press in England. In defense of the linguists' tepid interest, there have until recently been few firm facts to go on. Experts offered conflicting views on whether Neanderthals could speak. Sustained attempts to teach apes language generated more controversy than illumination. But new research is eroding the idea that the origins of language are hopelessly lost in the mists of time. New clues have started to emerge from archaeology, genetics and human behavioral ecology, and even linguists have grudgingly begun to join in the discussion before other specialists eat their lunch. "It is important for linguists to participate in the conversation, if only to maintain a position in this intellectual niche that is of such commanding interest to the larger scientific public," writes Dr. Ray Jackendoff, Dr. Newmeyer's successor at the linguistic society, in his book "Foundations of Language." Geneticists reported in March that the earliest known split between any two human populations occurred between the !Kung of southern Africa and the Hadza of Tanzania. Since both of these very ancient populations speak click languages, clicks may have been used in the language of the ancestral human population. The clicks, made by sucking the tongue down from the roof of the mouth (and denoted by an exclamation point), serve the same role as consonants. That possible hint of the first human tongue may be echoed in the archaeological record. Humans whose skeletons look just like those of today were widespread in Africa by 100,000 years ago. But they still used the same set of crude stone tools as their forebears and their archaic human contemporaries, the Neanderthals of Europe. Then, some 50,000 years ago, some profound change took place. Settlements in Africa sprang to life with sophisticated tools made from stone and bone, art objects and signs of long distance trade. Though some archaeologists dispute the suddenness of the transition, Dr. Richard Klein of Stanford argues that the suite of innovations reflects some specific neural change that occurred around that time and, because of the advantage it conferred, spread rapidly through the population. That genetic change, he suggests, was of such a magnitude that most likely it had to do with language, and was perhaps the final step in its evolution. If some neural change explains the appearance of fully modern human behavior some 50,000 years ago, "it is surely reasonable to suppose that the change promoted the fully modern capacity for rapidly spoken phonemic speech," Dr. Klein has written. Listening to Primates Apes' Signals Fall Short of Language At first glance, language seems to have appeared from nowhere, since no other species speaks. But other animals do communicate. Vervet monkeys have specific alarm calls for their principal predators, like eagles, leopards, snakes and baboons. Researchers have played back recordings of these calls when no predators were around and found that the vervets would scan the sky in response to the eagle call, leap into trees at the leopard call and look for snakes in the ground cover at the snake call. Vervets can't be said to have words for these predators because the calls are used only as alarms; a vervet can't use its baboon call to ask if anyone noticed a baboon around yesterday. Still, their communication system shows that they can both utter and perceive specific sounds. Dr. Marc Hauser, a psychologist at Harvard who studies animal communication, believes that basic systems for both the perception and generation of sounds are present in other animals. "That suggests those systems were used way before language and therefore did not evolve for language, even though they are used in language," he said. Language, as linguists see it, is more than input and output, the heard word and the spoken. It's not even dependent on speech, since its output can be entirely in gestures, as in American Sign Language. The essence of language is words and syntax, each generated by a combinatorial system in the brain. If there were a single sound for each word, vocabulary would be limited to the number of sounds, probably fewer than 1,000, that could be distinguished from one another. But by generating combinations of arbitrary sound units, a copious number of distinguishable sounds becomes available. Even the average high school student has a vocabulary of 60,000 words. The other combinatorial system is syntax, the hierarchical ordering of words in a sentence to govern their meaning. Chimpanzees do not seem to possess either of these systems. They can learn a certain number of symbols, up to 400 or so, and will string them together, but rarely in a way that suggests any notion of syntax. This is not because of any poverty of thought. Their conceptual world seems to overlap to some extent with that of people: they can recognize other individuals in their community and keep track of who is dominant to whom. But they lack the system for encoding these thoughts in language. How then did the encoding system evolve in the human descendants of the common ancestor of chimps and people? Language Precursors Babbling and Pidgins Hint at First Tongue One of the first linguists to tackle this question was Dr. Derek Bickerton of the University of Hawaii. His specialty is the study of pidgins, which are simple phrase languages made up from scratch by children or adults who have no language in common, and of creoles, the successor languages that acquire inflection and syntax. Dr. Bickerton developed the idea that a proto-language must have preceded the full-fledged syntax of today's discourse. Echoes of this proto-language can be seen, he argued, in pidgins, in the first words of infants, in the symbols used by trained chimpanzees and in the syntax-free utterances of children who do not learn to speak at the normal age. In a series of articles, Dr. Bickerton has argued that humans may have been speaking proto-language, essentially the use of words without syntax, as long as two million years ago. Modern language developed more recently, he suggests, perhaps with appearance of anatomically modern humans some 120,000 years ago. The impetus for the evolution of language, he believes, occurred when human ancestors left the security of the forest and started foraging on the savanna. "The need to pass on information was the driving force," he said in an interview. Foragers would have had to report back to others what they had found. Once they had developed symbols that could be used free of context ??? a general word for elephant, not a vervet-style alarm call of "An elephant is attacking!" ??? early people would have taken the first step toward proto-language. "Once you got it going, there is no way of stopping it," Dr. Bickerton said. But was the first communicated symbol a word or a gesture? Though language and speech are sometimes thought of as the same thing, language is a coding system and speech just its main channel. Dr. Michael Corballis, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, believes the gesture came first, in fact as soon as our ancestors started to walk on two legs and freed the hands for making signs. Chimpanzees have at least 30 different gestures, mostly used to refer to other individuals. Hand gestures are still an expressive part of human communication, Dr. Corballis notes, so much so that people even gesticulate while on the telephone. He believes that spoken words did not predominate over signed ones until the last 100,000 years or so, when a genetic change may have perfected human speech and led to its becoming a separate system, not just a grunted accompaniment for gestures. Critics of Dr. Corballis's idea say gestures are too limited; they don't work in the dark, for one thing. But many concede the two systems may both have played some role in the emergence of language. Search for Incentives As Societies Grew the Glue Was Gossip Dr. Bickerton's idea that language must have had an evolutionary history prompted other specialists to wonder about the selective pressure, or evolutionary driving force, behind the rapid emergence of language. In the mere six million years since chimps and humans shared a common ancestor, this highly complex faculty has suddenly emerged in the hominid line alone, along with all the brain circuits necessary to map an extremely rapid stream of sound into meaning, meaning into words and syntax, and intended sentence into expressed utterance. It is easy to see in a general way that each genetic innovation, whether in understanding or in expressing language, might create such an advantage for its owners as to spread rapidly through a small population. "No one will take any notice of the guy who says `Gu-gu-gu'; the one with the quick tongue will get the mates," Dr. Bickerton said. But what initiated this self-sustaining process? Besides Dr. Bickerton's suggestion of the transition to a foraging lifestyle, another idea is that of social grooming, which has been carefully worked out by Dr. Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Liverpool in England. Dr. Dunbar notes that social animals like monkeys spend an inordinate amount of time grooming one another. The purpose is not just to remove fleas but also to cement social relationships. But as the size of a group increases, there is not time for an individual to groom everyone. Language evolved, Dr. Dunbar believes, as a better way of gluing a larger community together. Some 63 percent of human conversation, according to his measurements, is indeed devoted to matters of social interaction, largely gossip, not to the exchange of technical information, Dr. Bickerton's proposed incentive for language. Dr. Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the first linguists to acknowledge that language may be subject to natural selection, disputes Dr. Dunbar's emphasis on social bonding; a fixed set of greetings would suffice, in his view. Dr. Pinker said it was just as likely that language drove sociality: it was because people could exchange information that it became more worthwhile to hang out together. "Three key features of the distinctively human lifestyle ??? know-how, sociality and language ??? co-evolved, each constituting a selection pressure for the others," Dr. Pinker writes in "Language Evolution," the new book of essays. But sociality, from Dr. Dunbar's perspective, helps explain another feature of language: its extreme corruptibility. To convey information, a stable system might seem most efficient, and surely not beyond nature's ability to devise. But dialects change from one village to another, and languages shift each generation. The reason, Dr. Dunbar suggests, is that language also operates as a badge to differentiate the in group from outsiders; thus the Gileadites could pick out and slaughter any Ephraimite asked to say "shibboleth" because, so the writer of Judges reports, "He said sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right." Language in the Genome >From Family Failing First Gene Emerges A new approach to the evolution of language seems to have been opened with studies of a three-generation London family known as KE. Of its 29 members old enough to be tested, 14 have a distinctive difficulty with communication. They have trouble pronouncing words properly, speaking grammatically and making certain fine movements of the lips and tongue. Asked to repeat a nonsense phrase like "pataca pataca pataca," they trip over each component as if there were three different words. Some linguists have argued that the KE family's disorder has nothing specific to do with language and is some problem that affects the whole brain. But the I.Q. scores of affected and unaffected members overlap, suggesting the language systems are specifically at fault. Other linguists have said the problem is just to do with control of speech. But affected members have problems writing as well as speaking. The pattern of inheritance suggested that a single defective gene was at work, even though it seemed strange that a single gene could have such a broad effect. Two years ago, Dr. Simon Fisher and Prof. Tony Monaco, geneticists at the University of Oxford in England, discovered the specific gene that is changed in the KE family. Called FOXP2, its role is to switch on other genes, explaining at once how it may have a range of effects. FOXP2 is active in specific regions of the brain during fetal development. The gene's importance in human evolution was underlined by Dr. Svante Paabo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. In a study last year they reported that FOXP2 is highly conserved in evolution ??? in other words, that the precise sequence of units in FOXP2's protein product is so important that any change is likely to lead to its owner's death. In the 70 million years since people and mice shared a common ancestor, there have been just three changes in the FOXP2 protein's 715 units, Dr. Paabo reported. But two of those changes occurred in the last six million years, the time since humans and chimps parted company, suggesting that changes in FOXP2 have played some important role in human evolution. Sampling the DNA of people around the world, Dr. Paabo found signs of what geneticists call a selective sweep, meaning that the changed version of FOXP2 had spread through the human population, presumably because of some enormous advantage it conferred. That advantage may have been the perfection of speech and language, from a barely comprehensible form like that spoken by the affected KE family members to the rapid articulation of ordinary discourse. It seems to have taken place about 100,000 years ago, Dr. Paabo wrote, before modern humans spread out of Africa, and is "compatible with a model in which the expansion of modern humans was driven by the appearance of a more proficient spoken language." FOXP2 gives geneticists what seems to be a powerful entry point into the genetic and neural basis for language. By working out what other genes it interacts with, and the neural systems that these genes control, researchers hope to map much of the circuitry involved in language systems. Ending the Silence Linguists Return to Ideas of Origins The crescendo of work by other specialists on language evolution has at last provoked linguists' attention, including that of Dr. Chomsky. Having posited in the early 1970's that the ability to learn the rules of grammar is innate, a proposition fiercely contested by other linguists, Dr. Chomsky might be expected to have shown keen interest in how that innateness evolved. But he has said very little on the subject, a silence that others have interpreted as disdain. As Dr. Jackendoff, the president of the Linguistic Society of America, writes: "Opponents of Universal Grammar argue that there couldn't be such a thing as Universal Grammar because there is no evolutionary route to arrive at it. Chomsky, in reply, has tended to deny the value of evolutionary argumentation." But Dr. Chomsky has recently taken a keen interest in the work by Dr. Hauser and his colleague Dr. W. Tecumseh Fitch on communication in animals. Last year the three wrote an article in Science putting forward a set of propositions about the way that language evolved. Based on experimental work by Dr. Hauser and Dr. Fitch, they argue that sound perception and production can be seen in other animals, though they may have been tweaked a little in hominids. A central element in language is what linguists call recursion, the mind's ability to bud one phrase off another into the syntax of an elaborate sentence. Though recursion is not seen in animals, it could have developed, the authors say, from some other brain system, like the one animals use for navigation. Constructing a sentence, and going from A to Z through a series of landmarks, could involve a similar series of neural computations. If by some mutation a spare navigation module developed in the brain, it would have been free to take on other functions, like the generation of syntax. "If that piece got integrated with the rest of the cognitive machinery, you are done, you get music, morality, language," Dr. Hauser said. The researchers contend that many components of the language faculty exist in other animals and evolved for other reasons, and that it was only in humans that they all were linked. This idea suggests that animals may have more to teach about language than many researchers believe, but it also sounds like a criticism of evolutionary psychologists like Dr. Pinker and Dr. Dunbar, who seek to explain language as a faculty forced into being by specifics of the human lifestyle. Dr. Chomsky rejects the notion that he has discouraged study of the evolution of language, saying his views on the subject have been widely misinterpreted. "I have never expressed the slightest objection to work on the evolution of language," he said in an e-mail message. He outlined his views briefly in lectures 25 years ago but left the subject hanging, he said, because not enough was understood. He still believes that it is easy to make up all sorts of situations to explain the evolution of language but hard to determine which ones, if any, make sense. But because of the importance he attaches to the subject, he returned to it recently in the article with Dr. Hauser and Dr. Fitch. By combining work on speech perception and speech production with a study of the recursive procedure that links them, "the speculations can be turned into a substantive research program," Dr. Chomsky said. Others see Dr. Chomsky's long silence on evolution as more consequential than he does. "The fact is that Chomsky has had, and continues to have, an outsize influence in linguistics," Dr. Pinker said in an e-mail message. Calling Dr. Chomsky both "undeniably, a brilliant thinker" and "a brilliant debating tactician, who can twist anything to his advantage," Dr. Pinker noted that Dr. Chomsky "has rabid devotees, who hang on his every footnote, and sworn enemies, who say black whenever he says white." "That doesn't leave much space," Dr. Pinker went on, "for linguists who accept some of his ideas (language as a mental, combinatorial, complex, partly innate system) but not others, like his hostility to evolution or any other explanation of language in terms of its function." Biologists and linguists have long inhabited different worlds, with linguists taking little interest in evolution, the guiding theory of all biology. But the faculty for language, along with the evidence of how it evolved, is written somewhere in the now decoded human genome, waiting for biologists and linguists to identify the genetic program that generates words and syntax. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nelson at newulmtel.net Thu Jul 24 08:16:36 2003 From: nelson at newulmtel.net (Ryan Nelson) Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 07:16:36 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] (no subject) References: <000c01c351d7$52c5a950$0301000a@AFAC955012> Message-ID: <00d201c351dd$6da2e480$19d13c42@computer> Hi, this would be Ryan's mom. Just wanted to let you know that Ryan passed away, Saturday, July 19, due to complications of Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Thank you for including him. Sincerely Barb and Ross ----- Original Message ----- From: Karey L. Perkins To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 6:32 AM Subject: [percy-l] Percy triads vs. Peirce triads, bibliography,and the origins of language Below this e-mail is an article from last week's NYTimes on the origins of language by Nicholas Wade. It's pretty interesting - refers to Chomsky, Pinker, FOXP2, and the family in England that's missing the gene - one of the main points is how little work has been done in the area. It seems like a good overview. What would Percy think? But I also have a burning question, well, many questions, but I'll start with just one, specifically for Ken Ketner though anyone who might know can offer an answer. I'm almost done with "A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy" (ed. by Patrick Samway) and I have thoroughly enjoyed it - it's been fun to read about "language theory" in the human context of two people writing letters, like a story; plus it's been very helpful. And some of Percy's questions to Ken are the same ones I have, so it's nice to have them answered without even asking. But what I cannot figure out is why Percy holds on to HIS triad, the triangle (three lines joining to form a triangle) when Ken so nicely and clearly explained Peirce's triad (three lines meeting in the center to form a point) is more appropriate. In that explanation, Percy's triad is just an illustration of three dyads forming a triangle, and not a true triad. Each element in Percy's triad can be just a result of (mediated by or mediator of) a cause-effect reaction. Perhaps I missed Percy's rationale for why he kept a triangle? Also, I think his (Percy's) retention of the triangle is one of the reasons why he was so VERY concerned about what the interpretant was (needing to find a name for it in "Thief" and ending "Message in the Bottle" with: "The apex of the triangle, the coupler, is a complete mystery. What it is, an 'I,' a 'self,' or some neurophysiological correlate thereof, I could not begin to say" (327).) See, as long as he retains the triangle, which is merely three dyads connected together, he hasn't successfully defeated the cause-effect determinists - which Ken pointed out. So, it seems to me he's now putting the weight of that responsibility on the poor little interpretant -- the interpretant now must be some special, different thing to pull it out of that realm (which is Percy's whole goal - to defeat deterministic science). And I think Percy really believes it is some special, different thing, and is trying to find out what that thing is. But now he fails to successfully defeat the Cartesian dualists (and he even says in the letters he's not sure that Peirce does defeat the dualists, reflecting more Percy's view of Peirce's accomplishment than Peirce's real accomplishment) because now he must add some special substance (spirit, soul) to the interpretant for the triangle not to be deterministic. Of course Percy was always concerned with the self, throughout all of his writings. But for him, the human self is something different than the rest of the world (even from animals?). I don't think Peirce would think that, would he? What do you think? Another question -- what has been written on this subject? Peirce and Percy that is. Though anything pertinent would be helpful. Most of the stuff on Percy that I've found (and I did send a abbreviated biblio. y'all's way) doesn't have much to do with his language philosophy -- it's more about his existentialism, etc.. This "Cenophythagoreanism" is hard stuff for those of us who haven't started out as Peirce scholars, since it is by definition interdisciplinary... Karey ----- Original Message ----- From: kdenney at mindspring.com To: Karey L. Perkins Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 3:10 PM Subject: origins of language >From yesterday's New York Times: Early Voices: The Leap to Language By NICHOLAS WADE Bower birds are artists, leaf-cutting ants practice agriculture, crows use tools, chimpanzees form coalitions against rivals. The only major talent unique to humans is language, the ability to transmit encoded thoughts from the mind of one individual to another. Because of language's central role in human nature and sociality, its evolutionary origins have long been of interest to almost everyone, with the curious exception of linguists. As far back as 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris famously declared that it wanted no more speculative articles about the origin of language. More recently, many linguists have avoided the subject because of the influence of Noam Chomsky, a founder of modern linguistics and still its best-known practitioner, who has been largely silent on the question. Dr. Chomsky's position has "only served to discourage interest in the topic among theoretical linguists," writes Dr. Frederick J. Newmeyer, last year's president of the Linguistic Society of America, in "Language Evolution," a book of essays being published this month by Oxford University Press in England. In defense of the linguists' tepid interest, there have until recently been few firm facts to go on. Experts offered conflicting views on whether Neanderthals could speak. Sustained attempts to teach apes language generated more controversy than illumination. But new research is eroding the idea that the origins of language are hopelessly lost in the mists of time. New clues have started to emerge from archaeology, genetics and human behavioral ecology, and even linguists have grudgingly begun to join in the discussion before other specialists eat their lunch. "It is important for linguists to participate in the conversation, if only to maintain a position in this intellectual niche that is of such commanding interest to the larger scientific public," writes Dr. Ray Jackendoff, Dr. Newmeyer's successor at the linguistic society, in his book "Foundations of Language." Geneticists reported in March that the earliest known split between any two human populations occurred between the !Kung of southern Africa and the Hadza of Tanzania. Since both of these very ancient populations speak click languages, clicks may have been used in the language of the ancestral human population. The clicks, made by sucking the tongue down from the roof of the mouth (and denoted by an exclamation point), serve the same role as consonants. That possible hint of the first human tongue may be echoed in the archaeological record. Humans whose skeletons look just like those of today were widespread in Africa by 100,000 years ago. But they still used the same set of crude stone tools as their forebears and their archaic human contemporaries, the Neanderthals of Europe. Then, some 50,000 years ago, some profound change took place. Settlements in Africa sprang to life with sophisticated tools made from stone and bone, art objects and signs of long distance trade. Though some archaeologists dispute the suddenness of the transition, Dr. Richard Klein of Stanford argues that the suite of innovations reflects some specific neural change that occurred around that time and, because of the advantage it conferred, spread rapidly through the population. That genetic change, he suggests, was of such a magnitude that most likely it had to do with language, and was perhaps the final step in its evolution. If some neural change explains the appearance of fully modern human behavior some 50,000 years ago, "it is surely reasonable to suppose that the change promoted the fully modern capacity for rapidly spoken phonemic speech," Dr. Klein has written. Listening to Primates Apes' Signals Fall Short of Language At first glance, language seems to have appeared from nowhere, since no other species speaks. But other animals do communicate. Vervet monkeys have specific alarm calls for their principal predators, like eagles, leopards, snakes and baboons. Researchers have played back recordings of these calls when no predators were around and found that the vervets would scan the sky in response to the eagle call, leap into trees at the leopard call and look for snakes in the ground cover at the snake call. Vervets can't be said to have words for these predators because the calls are used only as alarms; a vervet can't use its baboon call to ask if anyone noticed a baboon around yesterday. Still, their communication system shows that they can both utter and perceive specific sounds. Dr. Marc Hauser, a psychologist at Harvard who studies animal communication, believes that basic systems for both the perception and generation of sounds are present in other animals. "That suggests those systems were used way before language and therefore did not evolve for language, even though they are used in language," he said. Language, as linguists see it, is more than input and output, the heard word and the spoken. It's not even dependent on speech, since its output can be entirely in gestures, as in American Sign Language. The essence of language is words and syntax, each generated by a combinatorial system in the brain. If there were a single sound for each word, vocabulary would be limited to the number of sounds, probably fewer than 1,000, that could be distinguished from one another. But by generating combinations of arbitrary sound units, a copious number of distinguishable sounds becomes available. Even the average high school student has a vocabulary of 60,000 words. The other combinatorial system is syntax, the hierarchical ordering of words in a sentence to govern their meaning. Chimpanzees do not seem to possess either of these systems. They can learn a certain number of symbols, up to 400 or so, and will string them together, but rarely in a way that suggests any notion of syntax. This is not because of any poverty of thought. Their conceptual world seems to overlap to some extent with that of people: they can recognize other individuals in their community and keep track of who is dominant to whom. But they lack the system for encoding these thoughts in language. How then did the encoding system evolve in the human descendants of the common ancestor of chimps and people? Language Precursors Babbling and Pidgins Hint at First Tongue One of the first linguists to tackle this question was Dr. Derek Bickerton of the University of Hawaii. His specialty is the study of pidgins, which are simple phrase languages made up from scratch by children or adults who have no language in common, and of creoles, the successor languages that acquire inflection and syntax. Dr. Bickerton developed the idea that a proto-language must have preceded the full-fledged syntax of today's discourse. Echoes of this proto-language can be seen, he argued, in pidgins, in the first words of infants, in the symbols used by trained chimpanzees and in the syntax-free utterances of children who do not learn to speak at the normal age. In a series of articles, Dr. Bickerton has argued that humans may have been speaking proto-language, essentially the use of words without syntax, as long as two million years ago. Modern language developed more recently, he suggests, perhaps with appearance of anatomically modern humans some 120,000 years ago. The impetus for the evolution of language, he believes, occurred when human ancestors left the security of the forest and started foraging on the savanna. "The need to pass on information was the driving force," he said in an interview. Foragers would have had to report back to others what they had found. Once they had developed symbols that could be used free of context ??? a general word for elephant, not a vervet-style alarm call of "An elephant is attacking!" ??? early people would have taken the first step toward proto-language. "Once you got it going, there is no way of stopping it," Dr. Bickerton said. But was the first communicated symbol a word or a gesture? Though language and speech are sometimes thought of as the same thing, language is a coding system and speech just its main channel. Dr. Michael Corballis, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, believes the gesture came first, in fact as soon as our ancestors started to walk on two legs and freed the hands for making signs. Chimpanzees have at least 30 different gestures, mostly used to refer to other individuals. Hand gestures are still an expressive part of human communication, Dr. Corballis notes, so much so that people even gesticulate while on the telephone. He believes that spoken words did not predominate over signed ones until the last 100,000 years or so, when a genetic change may have perfected human speech and led to its becoming a separate system, not just a grunted accompaniment for gestures. Critics of Dr. Corballis's idea say gestures are too limited; they don't work in the dark, for one thing. But many concede the two systems may both have played some role in the emergence of language. Search for Incentives As Societies Grew the Glue Was Gossip Dr. Bickerton's idea that language must have had an evolutionary history prompted other specialists to wonder about the selective pressure, or evolutionary driving force, behind the rapid emergence of language. In the mere six million years since chimps and humans shared a common ancestor, this highly complex faculty has suddenly emerged in the hominid line alone, along with all the brain circuits necessary to map an extremely rapid stream of sound into meaning, meaning into words and syntax, and intended sentence into expressed utterance. It is easy to see in a general way that each genetic innovation, whether in understanding or in expressing language, might create such an advantage for its owners as to spread rapidly through a small population. "No one will take any notice of the guy who says `Gu-gu-gu'; the one with the quick tongue will get the mates," Dr. Bickerton said. But what initiated this self-sustaining process? Besides Dr. Bickerton's suggestion of the transition to a foraging lifestyle, another idea is that of social grooming, which has been carefully worked out by Dr. Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Liverpool in England. Dr. Dunbar notes that social animals like monkeys spend an inordinate amount of time grooming one another. The purpose is not just to remove fleas but also to cement social relationships. But as the size of a group increases, there is not time for an individual to groom everyone. Language evolved, Dr. Dunbar believes, as a better way of gluing a larger community together. Some 63 percent of human conversation, according to his measurements, is indeed devoted to matters of social interaction, largely gossip, not to the exchange of technical information, Dr. Bickerton's proposed incentive for language. Dr. Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the first linguists to acknowledge that language may be subject to natural selection, disputes Dr. Dunbar's emphasis on social bonding; a fixed set of greetings would suffice, in his view. Dr. Pinker said it was just as likely that language drove sociality: it was because people could exchange information that it became more worthwhile to hang out together. "Three key features of the distinctively human lifestyle ??? know-how, sociality and language ??? co-evolved, each constituting a selection pressure for the others," Dr. Pinker writes in "Language Evolution," the new book of essays. But sociality, from Dr. Dunbar's perspective, helps explain another feature of language: its extreme corruptibility. To convey information, a stable system might seem most efficient, and surely not beyond nature's ability to devise. But dialects change from one village to another, and languages shift each generation. The reason, Dr. Dunbar suggests, is that language also operates as a badge to differentiate the in group from outsiders; thus the Gileadites could pick out and slaughter any Ephraimite asked to say "shibboleth" because, so the writer of Judges reports, "He said sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right." Language in the Genome From Family Failing First Gene Emerges A new approach to the evolution of language seems to have been opened with studies of a three-generation London family known as KE. Of its 29 members old enough to be tested, 14 have a distinctive difficulty with communication. They have trouble pronouncing words properly, speaking grammatically and making certain fine movements of the lips and tongue. Asked to repeat a nonsense phrase like "pataca pataca pataca," they trip over each component as if there were three different words. Some linguists have argued that the KE family's disorder has nothing specific to do with language and is some problem that affects the whole brain. But the I.Q. scores of affected and unaffected members overlap, suggesting the language systems are specifically at fault. Other linguists have said the problem is just to do with control of speech. But affected members have problems writing as well as speaking. The pattern of inheritance suggested that a single defective gene was at work, even though it seemed strange that a single gene could have such a broad effect. Two years ago, Dr. Simon Fisher and Prof. Tony Monaco, geneticists at the University of Oxford in England, discovered the specific gene that is changed in the KE family. Called FOXP2, its role is to switch on other genes, explaining at once how it may have a range of effects. FOXP2 is active in specific regions of the brain during fetal development. The gene's importance in human evolution was underlined by Dr. Svante Paabo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. In a study last year they reported that FOXP2 is highly conserved in evolution ??? in other words, that the precise sequence of units in FOXP2's protein product is so important that any change is likely to lead to its owner's death. In the 70 million years since people and mice shared a common ancestor, there have been just three changes in the FOXP2 protein's 715 units, Dr. Paabo reported. But two of those changes occurred in the last six million years, the time since humans and chimps parted company, suggesting that changes in FOXP2 have played some important role in human evolution. Sampling the DNA of people around the world, Dr. Paabo found signs of what geneticists call a selective sweep, meaning that the changed version of FOXP2 had spread through the human population, presumably because of some enormous advantage it conferred. That advantage may have been the perfection of speech and language, from a barely comprehensible form like that spoken by the affected KE family members to the rapid articulation of ordinary discourse. It seems to have taken place about 100,000 years ago, Dr. Paabo wrote, before modern humans spread out of Africa, and is "compatible with a model in which the expansion of modern humans was driven by the appearance of a more proficient spoken language." FOXP2 gives geneticists what seems to be a powerful entry point into the genetic and neural basis for language. By working out what other genes it interacts with, and the neural systems that these genes control, researchers hope to map much of the circuitry involved in language systems. Ending the Silence Linguists Return to Ideas of Origins The crescendo of work by other specialists on language evolution has at last provoked linguists' attention, including that of Dr. Chomsky. Having posited in the early 1970's that the ability to learn the rules of grammar is innate, a proposition fiercely contested by other linguists, Dr. Chomsky might be expected to have shown keen interest in how that innateness evolved. But he has said very little on the subject, a silence that others have interpreted as disdain. As Dr. Jackendoff, the president of the Linguistic Society of America, writes: "Opponents of Universal Grammar argue that there couldn't be such a thing as Universal Grammar because there is no evolutionary route to arrive at it. Chomsky, in reply, has tended to deny the value of evolutionary argumentation." But Dr. Chomsky has recently taken a keen interest in the work by Dr. Hauser and his colleague Dr. W. Tecumseh Fitch on communication in animals. Last year the three wrote an article in Science putting forward a set of propositions about the way that language evolved. Based on experimental work by Dr. Hauser and Dr. Fitch, they argue that sound perception and production can be seen in other animals, though they may have been tweaked a little in hominids. A central element in language is what linguists call recursion, the mind's ability to bud one phrase off another into the syntax of an elaborate sentence. Though recursion is not seen in animals, it could have developed, the authors say, from some other brain system, like the one animals use for navigation. Constructing a sentence, and going from A to Z through a series of landmarks, could involve a similar series of neural computations. If by some mutation a spare navigation module developed in the brain, it would have been free to take on other functions, like the generation of syntax. "If that piece got integrated with the rest of the cognitive machinery, you are done, you get music, morality, language," Dr. Hauser said. The researchers contend that many components of the language faculty exist in other animals and evolved for other reasons, and that it was only in humans that they all were linked. This idea suggests that animals may have more to teach about language than many researchers believe, but it also sounds like a criticism of evolutionary psychologists like Dr. Pinker and Dr. Dunbar, who seek to explain language as a faculty forced into being by specifics of the human lifestyle. Dr. Chomsky rejects the notion that he has discouraged study of the evolution of language, saying his views on the subject have been widely misinterpreted. "I have never expressed the slightest objection to work on the evolution of language," he said in an e-mail message. He outlined his views briefly in lectures 25 years ago but left the subject hanging, he said, because not enough was understood. He still believes that it is easy to make up all sorts of situations to explain the evolution of language but hard to determine which ones, if any, make sense. But because of the importance he attaches to the subject, he returned to it recently in the article with Dr. Hauser and Dr. Fitch. By combining work on speech perception and speech production with a study of the recursive procedure that links them, "the speculations can be turned into a substantive research program," Dr. Chomsky said. Others see Dr. Chomsky's long silence on evolution as more consequential than he does. "The fact is that Chomsky has had, and continues to have, an outsize influence in linguistics," Dr. Pinker said in an e-mail message. Calling Dr. Chomsky both "undeniably, a brilliant thinker" and "a brilliant debating tactician, who can twist anything to his advantage," Dr. Pinker noted that Dr. Chomsky "has rabid devotees, who hang on his every footnote, and sworn enemies, who say black whenever he says white." "That doesn't leave much space," Dr. Pinker went on, "for linguists who accept some of his ideas (language as a mental, combinatorial, complex, partly innate system) but not others, like his hostility to evolution or any other explanation of language in terms of its function." Biologists and linguists have long inhabited different worlds, with linguists taking little interest in evolution, the guiding theory of all biology. But the faculty for language, along with the evidence of how it evolved, is written somewhere in the now decoded human genome, waiting for biologists and linguists to identify the genetic program that generates words and syntax. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From evopsych at hotmail.com Fri Jul 25 00:08:26 2003 From: evopsych at hotmail.com (Joseph Cimino) Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:08:26 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] (no subject) Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From earthrisepress at comcast.net Fri Jul 25 16:03:04 2003 From: earthrisepress at comcast.net (Earthrise Press) Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 16:03:04 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] Unsubscribe References: <20030725160506.822F62005A@happyhouse.metalab.unc.edu> Message-ID: <004c01c352e7$c2b7e320$6401a8c0@glaysher2> unsubscribe ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Friday, July 25, 2003 12:05 PM Subject: Percy-L Digest, Vol 6, Issue 4 > Send Percy-L mailing list submissions to > percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of Percy-L digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Re: (no subject) (Joseph Cimino) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:08:26 -0400 > From: "Joseph Cimino" > Subject: Re: [percy-l] (no subject) > To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org > Message-ID: > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/attachments/20030725/c80ada81/attachment-0001.htm > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Percy-L mailing list > Percy-L at lists.ibiblio.org > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l > > > End of Percy-L Digest, Vol 6, Issue 4 > ************************************* > From rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com Wed Jul 30 05:51:18 2003 From: rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com (RHONDA MCDONNELL) Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 02:51:18 -0700 Subject: [percy-l] (no subject) Message-ID: Here's a question for all who are well-read. I've been reading the letters between Percy and Foote and I got to thinking that I've only read SHILOH and chunks of the CIVIL WAR trilogy. After reading the letters, I'd like to get a start on Foote, but, since I've limited time (okay, none . . . perhaps I'm avoiding writing my dss. for a few days), I'm looking for some recommendations. What do you all think is the best of Foote? Is it the history or one of the novels? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From LTberrywtr at aol.com Wed Jul 30 08:41:15 2003 From: LTberrywtr at aol.com (LTberrywtr at aol.com) Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 08:41:15 EDT Subject: [percy-l] (no subject) Message-ID: <1c4.d25b0e9.2c5916eb@aol.com> Rhonda -- If you're time is limited, I'd suggest "Love in a Dry Season." Two Missisippi families get cross-wise to each other, thanks at least in part to a carpet bagger on the make. Not Faulkner, but not bad. Worth the time. And at 250 pages, it won't take a lot of that. Best, Larry Thornberry -- Tampa From Nikkibar at aol.com Wed Jul 30 09:13:08 2003 From: Nikkibar at aol.com (Nikkibar at aol.com) Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 09:13:08 EDT Subject: [percy-l] (no subject) Message-ID: <39.3bfe405d.2c591e64@aol.com> Dear Rhonda, The Civil War magnum opus is somewhat daunting and certainly time consuming. On the other hand if you're interested in the Civil War it is the definitive work on the subject at least for our generation. More to the point so far as filling in the points of interest that one might have if you approach Foote mainly from the direction of Percy, I would suggest you sneak up on the Civil War by reading the Foote novel canon, starting with Follow Me Down and then deciding where to go from there, ending with September September. Bear in mind when pursuing this course that Walker and Shelby both were youthful builders of model airplanes. Walker built the balsa and tissue paper type which we are told flew like crazy and were meant to fly but his planes had a certain rag tag appearance. Shelby built the other type which came in shaped chunks of wood that you glued together and sanded down endlessly, painted with dope and glued on the window labels -- and then hung from a light fixture in the bedroom. They looked great but would not fly nor were they meant to. Biographers and critics have remarked that the same sort of thing tends to happen in their respective novels. I leave it to you to see if you agree. Nikki -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From LTberrywtr at aol.com Wed Jul 30 09:24:04 2003 From: LTberrywtr at aol.com (LTberrywtr at aol.com) Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 09:24:04 EDT Subject: [percy-l] (no subject) Message-ID: <63.206d5c31.2c5920f4@aol.com> From LTberrywtr at aol.com Wed Jul 30 09:25:59 2003 From: LTberrywtr at aol.com (LTberrywtr at aol.com) Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 09:25:59 EDT Subject: [percy-l] (no subject) Message-ID: <1e5.e2201c5.2c592167@aol.com> Nikki - The Foote novel canon? Is that a small Civil War era artillery piece? My, how you academics talk. Cordially, - LT From gypsyjimmy1 at yahoo.com Wed Jul 30 10:02:55 2003 From: gypsyjimmy1 at yahoo.com (Jim Wesson) Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 07:02:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [percy-l] foote In-Reply-To: <39.3bfe405d.2c591e64@aol.com> Message-ID: <20030730140255.61024.qmail@web10803.mail.yahoo.com> hi all, i am just finishing Foote's 3 vol. 'Civil War' never was able to get through even one third of a CW book before! Foote makes the reading so interesting, informative and enjoyable. jim --- Nikkibar at aol.com wrote: > Dear Rhonda, > > The Civil War magnum opus is somewhat daunting and > certainly time consuming. > On the other hand if you're interested in the Civil > War it is the definitive > work on the subject at least for our generation. > More to the point so far as > filling in the points of interest that one might > have if you approach Foote > mainly from the direction of Percy, I would suggest > you sneak up on the Civil War > by reading the Foote novel canon, starting with > Follow Me Down and then > deciding where to go from there, ending with > September September. > > Bear in mind when pursuing this course that Walker > and Shelby both were > youthful builders of model airplanes. Walker built > the balsa and tissue paper type > which we are told flew like crazy and were meant to > fly but his planes had a > certain rag tag appearance. Shelby built the other > type which came in shaped > chunks of wood that you glued together and sanded > down endlessly, painted with > dope and glued on the window labels -- and then hung > from a light fixture in > the bedroom. They looked great but would not fly nor > were they meant to. > Biographers and critics have remarked that the same > sort of thing tends to happen in > their respective novels. I leave it to you to see if > you agree. > > Nikki > > -- > > An archive of all list discussion is available at > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com From ttbrader at mindspring.com Wed Jul 30 11:26:45 2003 From: ttbrader at mindspring.com (Teresa Brader) Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 10:26:45 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] Shelby Foote In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <3F27E3B5.1090308@mindspring.com> I went to hear Shelby Foote speak at Barnes and Noble in Metairie (suburb of New Orleans) -- Sept. 1997. He read from one of his Civil War books and then answered questions. I asked him a Walker Percy question. Afterwards, I caught him alone and told him I *had* to ask him a Percy question, because Percy was my favorite writer. He said Percy was his favorite too. I asked him which was his favorite Percy book, and, after only a very small hesitation, he answered "The Last Gentleman". I digress ... during the questioning, someone had asked Foote what his favorite book of his own was, and he said "Follow Me Down". Perhaps that is as good a reason as any to read that one. Teresa RHONDA MCDONNELL wrote: > Here's a question for all who are well-read. I've been reading the > letters between Percy and Foote and I got to thinking that I've only > read SHILOH and chunks of the CIVIL WAR trilogy. After reading the > letters, I'd like to get a start on Foote, but, since I've limited > time (okay, none . . . perhaps I'm avoiding writing my dss. for a few > days), I'm looking for some recommendations. What do you all think is > the best of Foote? Is it the history or one of the novels? From cstuartchapman at yahoo.com Wed Jul 30 12:08:02 2003 From: cstuartchapman at yahoo.com (Stuart Chapman) Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 09:08:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [percy-l] Shelby Foote In-Reply-To: <3F27E3B5.1090308@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <20030730160802.52989.qmail@web40510.mail.yahoo.com> If I can jump in with suggestions about Foote books to read, I'd say "Love in a Dry Season" and "September, September." The best Foote work is obviously The Civil War because with the events all laid out, Foote is free to do set pieces, which is his best quality. His writing about the characters within the events is unbelievable. Foote's worst novels, as I argue in my biography, are those that rely on a heavy-handed narrative voice. Unlike Faulkner or Percy, Foote has a quality about him that leads him to do too much historical writing in a way that is awkward. (Most books have a formal or informal section that involves something like Here is the History of Missisippi, Bristol, whatever.) Faulkner and Percy can include history stuff subtly and organically, making it filter through folks' lives. Telling in this regard is even September, September, where Foote spent weeks reading through old newspapers, and in the midst of the book, at various times, he feels the absolute need to include these bits (about Sputnik, Sibelius, etc.) in what amounts to awkard inclusions, if not structural problems. I like SS and Love in a Dry Season because they are the books where historical events seem to intersect with characters' lives in real, direct ways, instead of feeling as though these historical events are superimposed by an outside novelist onto characters, much like a puppeteer. Teresa Brader wrote: I went to hear Shelby Foote speak at Barnes and Noble in Metairie (suburb of New Orleans) -- Sept. 1997. He read from one of his Civil War books and then answered questions. I asked him a Walker Percy question. Afterwards, I caught him alone and told him I *had* to ask him a Percy question, because Percy was my favorite writer. He said Percy was his favorite too. I asked him which was his favorite Percy book, and, after only a very small hesitation, he answered "The Last Gentleman". I digress ... during the questioning, someone had asked Foote what his favorite book of his own was, and he said "Follow Me Down". Perhaps that is as good a reason as any to read that one. Teresa RHONDA MCDONNELL wrote: > Here's a question for all who are well-read. I've been reading the > letters between Percy and Foote and I got to thinking that I've only > read SHILOH and chunks of the CIVIL WAR trilogy. After reading the > letters, I'd like to get a start on Foote, but, since I've limited > time (okay, none . . . perhaps I'm avoiding writing my dss. for a few > days), I'm looking for some recommendations. What do you all think is > the best of Foote? Is it the history or one of the novels? -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cstuartchapman at yahoo.com Wed Jul 30 12:08:02 2003 From: cstuartchapman at yahoo.com (Stuart Chapman) Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 09:08:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [percy-l] Shelby Foote In-Reply-To: <3F27E3B5.1090308@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <20030730160802.52989.qmail@web40510.mail.yahoo.com> If I can jump in with suggestions about Foote books to read, I'd say "Love in a Dry Season" and "September, September." The best Foote work is obviously The Civil War because with the events all laid out, Foote is free to do set pieces, which is his best quality. His writing about the characters within the events is unbelievable. Foote's worst novels, as I argue in my biography, are those that rely on a heavy-handed narrative voice. Unlike Faulkner or Percy, Foote has a quality about him that leads him to do too much historical writing in a way that is awkward. (Most books have a formal or informal section that involves something like Here is the History of Missisippi, Bristol, whatever.) Faulkner and Percy can include history stuff subtly and organically, making it filter through folks' lives. Telling in this regard is even September, September, where Foote spent weeks reading through old newspapers, and in the midst of the book, at various times, he feels the absolute need to include these bits (about Sputnik, Sibelius, etc.) in what amounts to awkard inclusions, if not structural problems. I like SS and Love in a Dry Season because they are the books where historical events seem to intersect with characters' lives in real, direct ways, instead of feeling as though these historical events are superimposed by an outside novelist onto characters, much like a puppeteer. Teresa Brader wrote: I went to hear Shelby Foote speak at Barnes and Noble in Metairie (suburb of New Orleans) -- Sept. 1997. He read from one of his Civil War books and then answered questions. I asked him a Walker Percy question. Afterwards, I caught him alone and told him I *had* to ask him a Percy question, because Percy was my favorite writer. He said Percy was his favorite too. I asked him which was his favorite Percy book, and, after only a very small hesitation, he answered "The Last Gentleman". I digress ... during the questioning, someone had asked Foote what his favorite book of his own was, and he said "Follow Me Down". Perhaps that is as good a reason as any to read that one. Teresa RHONDA MCDONNELL wrote: > Here's a question for all who are well-read. I've been reading the > letters between Percy and Foote and I got to thinking that I've only > read SHILOH and chunks of the CIVIL WAR trilogy. After reading the > letters, I'd like to get a start on Foote, but, since I've limited > time (okay, none . . . perhaps I'm avoiding writing my dss. for a few > days), I'm looking for some recommendations. What do you all think is > the best of Foote? Is it the history or one of the novels? -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sldye at bluegrass.org Wed Jul 30 13:00:30 2003 From: sldye at bluegrass.org (Steve Dye) Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 13:00:30 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] foote References: <20030730140255.61024.qmail@web10803.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <007401c356bc$167df620$e512a8c0@d247006> Enjoyed reading the latest "chat" about Foote. Hey, if anyone has heard him speak in person or even seen the Ken Burns "Civil War" series on PBS, he is wonderful to "hear" - for those of us from the South, he truly is like the neighbor next door or if you are not from the South, his diction, "accent" etc should be enthralling to you, I would hope. Maybe the nicest combination would be to have an audiobook of his novels, narrated by him. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Wesson" To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 10:02 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote > hi all, > i am just finishing Foote's 3 vol. 'Civil War' > never was able to get through even one third of a CW > book before! Foote makes the reading so interesting, > informative and enjoyable. > jim > > > > > > --- Nikkibar at aol.com wrote: > > Dear Rhonda, > > > > The Civil War magnum opus is somewhat daunting and > > certainly time consuming. > > On the other hand if you're interested in the Civil > > War it is the definitive > > work on the subject at least for our generation. > > More to the point so far as > > filling in the points of interest that one might > > have if you approach Foote > > mainly from the direction of Percy, I would suggest > > you sneak up on the Civil War > > by reading the Foote novel canon, starting with > > Follow Me Down and then > > deciding where to go from there, ending with > > September September. > > > > Bear in mind when pursuing this course that Walker > > and Shelby both were > > youthful builders of model airplanes. Walker built > > the balsa and tissue paper type > > which we are told flew like crazy and were meant to > > fly but his planes had a > > certain rag tag appearance. Shelby built the other > > type which came in shaped > > chunks of wood that you glued together and sanded > > down endlessly, painted with > > dope and glued on the window labels -- and then hung > > from a light fixture in > > the bedroom. They looked great but would not fly nor > > were they meant to. > > Biographers and critics have remarked that the same > > sort of thing tends to happen in > > their respective novels. I leave it to you to see if > > you agree. > > > > Nikki > > > -- > > > > An archive of all list discussion is available at > > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at > > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software > http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com > -- > > An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > From RWarren at boultcummings.com Wed Jul 30 12:43:36 2003 From: RWarren at boultcummings.com (Richard Warren) Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 11:43:36 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] foote Message-ID: There is an audiocassette version of Foote reading the unabridged 3 volumes if it is still available (Amazon says they can deliver it in 5 or 6 weeks). Also, the Modern Library excerpted the portion of the book detailing the Gettysburg campaign and later the siege of Vicksburg. Another place to hear Foote talking is in the documentary films about Southern literature "Tell About the South" from Ross Spears of the James Agee Project. I have only seen the first two hour installment, which includes an interview with Foote holding his cat in his lap and discussing Faulkner. I understand that he discusses Percy in one of the later two films. Richard Warren >>> sldye at bluegrass.org 07/30/03 12:00PM >>> Enjoyed reading the latest "chat" about Foote. Hey, if anyone has heard him speak in person or even seen the Ken Burns "Civil War" series on PBS, he is wonderful to "hear" - for those of us from the South, he truly is like the neighbor next door or if you are not from the South, his diction, "accent" etc should be enthralling to you, I would hope. Maybe the nicest combination would be to have an audiobook of his novels, narrated by him. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Wesson" To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 10:02 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote > hi all, > i am just finishing Foote's 3 vol. 'Civil War' > never was able to get through even one third of a CW > book before! Foote makes the reading so interesting, > informative and enjoyable. > jim > > > > > > --- Nikkibar at aol.com wrote: > > Dear Rhonda, > > > > The Civil War magnum opus is somewhat daunting and > > certainly time consuming. > > On the other hand if you're interested in the Civil > > War it is the definitive > > work on the subject at least for our generation. > > More to the point so far as > > filling in the points of interest that one might > > have if you approach Foote > > mainly from the direction of Percy, I would suggest > > you sneak up on the Civil War > > by reading the Foote novel canon, starting with > > Follow Me Down and then > > deciding where to go from there, ending with > > September September. > > > > Bear in mind when pursuing this course that Walker > > and Shelby both were > > youthful builders of model airplanes. Walker built > > the balsa and tissue paper type > > which we are told flew like crazy and were meant to > > fly but his planes had a > > certain rag tag appearance. Shelby built the other > > type which came in shaped > > chunks of wood that you glued together and sanded > > down endlessly, painted with > > dope and glued on the window labels -- and then hung > > from a light fixture in > > the bedroom. They looked great but would not fly nor > > were they meant to. > > Biographers and critics have remarked that the same > > sort of thing tends to happen in > > their respective novels. I leave it to you to see if > > you agree. > > > > Nikki > > > -- > > > > An archive of all list discussion is available at > > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at > > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software > http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com > -- > > An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. Mailscanner thanks transtec Computers for their support. *************************************************************************** CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail and any attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the named recipient, please notify the sender immediately and delete the contents of this message without disclosing the contents to anyone, using them for any purpose, or storing or copying the information on any medium. **************************************************************************M From sldye at bluegrass.org Wed Jul 30 13:20:17 2003 From: sldye at bluegrass.org (Steve Dye) Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 13:20:17 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] foote References: Message-ID: <00ac01c356be$d9bb1f80$e512a8c0@d247006> Thanks! Hearing Foote discuss Faulkner would be wonderful. Speaking of Faulkner, I visited Oxford last summer and rambled around his home, Rowan Oak, and visited his grave. I have a photograph of myself at his grave which I treasure. For what its worth, anyone interested should make that trip. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Warren" To: Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 12:43 PM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote There is an audiocassette version of Foote reading the unabridged 3 volumes if it is still available (Amazon says they can deliver it in 5 or 6 weeks). Also, the Modern Library excerpted the portion of the book detailing the Gettysburg campaign and later the siege of Vicksburg. Another place to hear Foote talking is in the documentary films about Southern literature "Tell About the South" from Ross Spears of the James Agee Project. I have only seen the first two hour installment, which includes an interview with Foote holding his cat in his lap and discussing Faulkner. I understand that he discusses Percy in one of the later two films. Richard Warren >>> sldye at bluegrass.org 07/30/03 12:00PM >>> Enjoyed reading the latest "chat" about Foote. Hey, if anyone has heard him speak in person or even seen the Ken Burns "Civil War" series on PBS, he is wonderful to "hear" - for those of us from the South, he truly is like the neighbor next door or if you are not from the South, his diction, "accent" etc should be enthralling to you, I would hope. Maybe the nicest combination would be to have an audiobook of his novels, narrated by him. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Wesson" To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 10:02 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote > hi all, > i am just finishing Foote's 3 vol. 'Civil War' > never was able to get through even one third of a CW > book before! Foote makes the reading so interesting, > informative and enjoyable. > jim > > > > > > --- Nikkibar at aol.com wrote: > > Dear Rhonda, > > > > The Civil War magnum opus is somewhat daunting and > > certainly time consuming. > > On the other hand if you're interested in the Civil > > War it is the definitive > > work on the subject at least for our generation. > > More to the point so far as > > filling in the points of interest that one might > > have if you approach Foote > > mainly from the direction of Percy, I would suggest > > you sneak up on the Civil War > > by reading the Foote novel canon, starting with > > Follow Me Down and then > > deciding where to go from there, ending with > > September September. > > > > Bear in mind when pursuing this course that Walker > > and Shelby both were > > youthful builders of model airplanes. Walker built > > the balsa and tissue paper type > > which we are told flew like crazy and were meant to > > fly but his planes had a > > certain rag tag appearance. Shelby built the other > > type which came in shaped > > chunks of wood that you glued together and sanded > > down endlessly, painted with > > dope and glued on the window labels -- and then hung > > from a light fixture in > > the bedroom. They looked great but would not fly nor > > were they meant to. > > Biographers and critics have remarked that the same > > sort of thing tends to happen in > > their respective novels. I leave it to you to see if > > you agree. > > > > Nikki > > > -- > > > > An archive of all list discussion is available at > > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at > > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software > http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com > -- > > An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. Mailscanner thanks transtec Computers for their support. *************************************************************************** CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail and any attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the named recipient, please notify the sender immediately and delete the contents of this message without disclosing the contents to anyone, using them for any purpose, or storing or copying the information on any medium. **************************************************************************M -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy From gorent at nts-online.net Wed Jul 30 18:30:54 2003 From: gorent at nts-online.net (Greg Taylor) Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 17:30:54 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] (no subject) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rhonda: I'd echo Nikki's suggestion concerning the Foote novels but my favorite is Jordan County - a Falkneresque fictional history that follows seven generations in a Miss. town. Jordan County and Follow Me Down are gripping reads. However, you can also find the American Mercury edition of Stars in Their Courses. This is a 290 page "book" which excerpts Foote's chapter concerning the Gettysburg campaign from the massive narrative. I believe that Foote's evenhanded and inspired treatment of the material about Gettysburg is much superior to Michael Shaara'a The Killer Angels (which seems to have grabbed the public imagination - not to mention the History Channel - over the past 10 years). If you only have time to read a small portion of Foote on the Civil War then Stars in Their Courses will fit the bill. -----Original Message----- From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org]On Behalf Of RHONDA MCDONNELL Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 4:51 AM To: percy-l Subject: [percy-l] (no subject) Here's a question for all who are well-read. I've been reading the letters between Percy and Foote and I got to thinking that I've only read SHILOH and chunks of the CIVIL WAR trilogy. After reading the letters, I'd like to get a start on Foote, but, since I've limited time (okay, none . . . perhaps I'm avoiding writing my dss. for a few days), I'm looking for some recommendations. What do you all think is the best of Foote? Is it the history or one of the novels? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com Thu Jul 31 03:08:22 2003 From: rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com (RHONDA MCDONNELL) Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 00:08:22 -0700 Subject: [percy-l] foote References: <20030730140255.61024.qmail@web10803.mail.yahoo.com> <007401c356bc$167df620$e512a8c0@d247006> Message-ID: I agree regarding hearing (and seeing) Foote, as you can in the Ken Burns piece. I know a h.s. history teacher who uses parts of the Burns in teaching the War. She says the students are always most enthralled with Foote, and will ask about him. When I read LANCELOT, I see Foote when I imagine Percival--anyone else do the same? ----- Original Message ----- From: Steve Dye To: Jim at AutumnLeavesBandB.com ; Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 10:00 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote Enjoyed reading the latest "chat" about Foote. Hey, if anyone has heard him speak in person or even seen the Ken Burns "Civil War" series on PBS, he is wonderful to "hear" - for those of us from the South, he truly is like the neighbor next door or if you are not from the South, his diction, "accent" etc should be enthralling to you, I would hope. Maybe the nicest combination would be to have an audiobook of his novels, narrated by him. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Wesson" To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 10:02 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote > hi all, > i am just finishing Foote's 3 vol. 'Civil War' > never was able to get through even one third of a CW > book before! Foote makes the reading so interesting, > informative and enjoyable. > jim > > > > > > --- Nikkibar at aol.com wrote: > > Dear Rhonda, > > > > The Civil War magnum opus is somewhat daunting and > > certainly time consuming. > > On the other hand if you're interested in the Civil > > War it is the definitive > > work on the subject at least for our generation. > > More to the point so far as > > filling in the points of interest that one might > > have if you approach Foote > > mainly from the direction of Percy, I would suggest > > you sneak up on the Civil War > > by reading the Foote novel canon, starting with > > Follow Me Down and then > > deciding where to go from there, ending with > > September September. > > > > Bear in mind when pursuing this course that Walker > > and Shelby both were > > youthful builders of model airplanes. Walker built > > the balsa and tissue paper type > > which we are told flew like crazy and were meant to > > fly but his planes had a > > certain rag tag appearance. Shelby built the other > > type which came in shaped > > chunks of wood that you glued together and sanded > > down endlessly, painted with > > dope and glued on the window labels -- and then hung > > from a light fixture in > > the bedroom. They looked great but would not fly nor > > were they meant to. > > Biographers and critics have remarked that the same > > sort of thing tends to happen in > > their respective novels. I leave it to you to see if > > you agree. > > > > Nikki > > > -- > > > > An archive of all list discussion is available at > > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at > > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software > http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com > -- > > An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com Thu Jul 31 03:12:17 2003 From: rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com (RHONDA MCDONNELL) Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 00:12:17 -0700 Subject: [percy-l] (no subject) Message-ID: Thanks to all for your insight and recommendations. Of course, it looks like I'll need to read all of Foote after seeing what you all had to say. Does anyone know if he's still working on the big project he wrote to Percy about throughout the last 25 or so years of their correspondence? The working title of it was TWO GATES TO THE CITY. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cstuartchapman at yahoo.com Thu Jul 31 09:40:05 2003 From: cstuartchapman at yahoo.com (Stuart Chapman) Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 06:40:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [percy-l] (no subject) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20030731134005.71225.qmail@web40508.mail.yahoo.com> He is not working on Two Gates. After, basically, three attempts over the years, he gave up a few years ago. A couple of years ago, he told me that he had only been able to put 60 pages together for the book. RHONDA MCDONNELL wrote:Thanks to all for your insight and recommendations. Of course, it looks like I'll need to read all of Foote after seeing what you all had to say. Does anyone know if he's still working on the big project he wrote to Percy about throughout the last 25 or so years of their correspondence? The working title of it was TWO GATES TO THE CITY. -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jdp at scn.org Thu Jul 31 10:11:39 2003 From: jdp at scn.org (Jonathan Potter) Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 07:11:39 -0700 Subject: [percy-l] foote References: <20030730140255.61024.qmail@web10803.mail.yahoo.com><007401c356bc$167df620$e512a8c0@d247006> Message-ID: <003301c3576d$a99a0140$e0add00c@attbi.com> When I read Lancelot, I see Percy as Percival and Foote as Lancelot. Foote as the hard-edged, passionate gnostic; Percy as the burned out sinner-saint, quietly arguing with him. Either way, the background of the friendship between the two men in the novel struck me, especially after reading the letters, as a fictionalized image of the friendship between Percy and Foote. I was surprised neither of the Percy biographies commented on the possible connection. Jonathan Potter Spokane, WA ----- Original Message ----- From: RHONDA MCDONNELL To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 12:08 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote I agree regarding hearing (and seeing) Foote, as you can in the Ken Burns piece. I know a h.s. history teacher who uses parts of the Burns in teaching the War. She says the students are always most enthralled with Foote, and will ask about him. When I read LANCELOT, I see Foote when I imagine Percival--anyone else do the same? ----- Original Message ----- From: Steve Dye To: Jim at AutumnLeavesBandB.com ; Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 10:00 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote Enjoyed reading the latest "chat" about Foote. Hey, if anyone has heard him speak in person or even seen the Ken Burns "Civil War" series on PBS, he is wonderful to "hear" - for those of us from the South, he truly is like the neighbor next door or if you are not from the South, his diction, "accent" etc should be enthralling to you, I would hope. Maybe the nicest combination would be to have an audiobook of his novels, narrated by him. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Wesson" To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 10:02 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote > hi all, > i am just finishing Foote's 3 vol. 'Civil War' > never was able to get through even one third of a CW > book before! Foote makes the reading so interesting, > informative and enjoyable. > jim > > > > > > --- Nikkibar at aol.com wrote: > > Dear Rhonda, > > > > The Civil War magnum opus is somewhat daunting and > > certainly time consuming. > > On the other hand if you're interested in the Civil > > War it is the definitive > > work on the subject at least for our generation. > > More to the point so far as > > filling in the points of interest that one might > > have if you approach Foote > > mainly from the direction of Percy, I would suggest > > you sneak up on the Civil War > > by reading the Foote novel canon, starting with > > Follow Me Down and then > > deciding where to go from there, ending with > > September September. > > > > Bear in mind when pursuing this course that Walker > > and Shelby both were > > youthful builders of model airplanes. Walker built > > the balsa and tissue paper type > > which we are told flew like crazy and were meant to > > fly but his planes had a > > certain rag tag appearance. Shelby built the other > > type which came in shaped > > chunks of wood that you glued together and sanded > > down endlessly, painted with > > dope and glued on the window labels -- and then hung > > from a light fixture in > > the bedroom. They looked great but would not fly nor > > were they meant to. > > Biographers and critics have remarked that the same > > sort of thing tends to happen in > > their respective novels. I leave it to you to see if > > you agree. > > > > Nikki > > > -- > > > > An archive of all list discussion is available at > > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at > > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software > http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com > -- > > An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sldye at bluegrass.org Thu Jul 31 13:47:25 2003 From: sldye at bluegrass.org (Steve Dye) Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 13:47:25 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] foote References: <20030730140255.61024.qmail@web10803.mail.yahoo.com><007401c356bc$167df620$e512a8c0@d247006> Message-ID: <002601c3578b$ceccba20$e512a8c0@d247006> That's a very interesting thought! ----- Original Message ----- From: RHONDA MCDONNELL To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 3:08 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote I agree regarding hearing (and seeing) Foote, as you can in the Ken Burns piece. I know a h.s. history teacher who uses parts of the Burns in teaching the War. She says the students are always most enthralled with Foote, and will ask about him. When I read LANCELOT, I see Foote when I imagine Percival--anyone else do the same? ----- Original Message ----- From: Steve Dye To: Jim at AutumnLeavesBandB.com ; Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 10:00 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote Enjoyed reading the latest "chat" about Foote. Hey, if anyone has heard him speak in person or even seen the Ken Burns "Civil War" series on PBS, he is wonderful to "hear" - for those of us from the South, he truly is like the neighbor next door or if you are not from the South, his diction, "accent" etc should be enthralling to you, I would hope. Maybe the nicest combination would be to have an audiobook of his novels, narrated by him. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Wesson" To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 10:02 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote > hi all, > i am just finishing Foote's 3 vol. 'Civil War' > never was able to get through even one third of a CW > book before! Foote makes the reading so interesting, > informative and enjoyable. > jim > > > > > > --- Nikkibar at aol.com wrote: > > Dear Rhonda, > > > > The Civil War magnum opus is somewhat daunting and > > certainly time consuming. > > On the other hand if you're interested in the Civil > > War it is the definitive > > work on the subject at least for our generation. > > More to the point so far as > > filling in the points of interest that one might > > have if you approach Foote > > mainly from the direction of Percy, I would suggest > > you sneak up on the Civil War > > by reading the Foote novel canon, starting with > > Follow Me Down and then > > deciding where to go from there, ending with > > September September. > > > > Bear in mind when pursuing this course that Walker > > and Shelby both were > > youthful builders of model airplanes. Walker built > > the balsa and tissue paper type > > which we are told flew like crazy and were meant to > > fly but his planes had a > > certain rag tag appearance. Shelby built the other > > type which came in shaped > > chunks of wood that you glued together and sanded > > down endlessly, painted with > > dope and glued on the window labels -- and then hung > > from a light fixture in > > the bedroom. They looked great but would not fly nor > > were they meant to. > > Biographers and critics have remarked that the same > > sort of thing tends to happen in > > their respective novels. I leave it to you to see if > > you agree. > > > > Nikki > > > -- > > > > An archive of all list discussion is available at > > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at > > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software > http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com > -- > > An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From marcus at loyno.edu Thu Jul 31 14:15:55 2003 From: marcus at loyno.edu (marcus at loyno.edu) Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 13:15:55 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] Atheist priest in Denmark Message-ID: <3f295cdb.1c20c0.0@loyno.edu> There's an odd Kierkegaard-ian element in this story. Percy would have smelled something interesting here. I also recall a Flannery O'Connor element in the story when it ran in the NYT early in July. Grosboll (several variant spellings have popped up)-- while reducing Jesus to a great ethical guide said that nevertheless following Jesis was like walking around with stones in your shoes. If anyone on the list has access to the BYT archives, try to find this story and check on the shoe stone imagery. Marcus Smith New Orleans From rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com Thu Jul 31 19:52:27 2003 From: rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com (RHONDA MCDONNELL) Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 16:52:27 -0700 Subject: [percy-l] Re: Two Gates References: <20030731134005.71225.qmail@web40508.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Thanks, Stuart. After reading the correspondence, the question of Two Gates was preying on me mind. Now, I can put it to rest. ----- Original Message ----- From: Stuart Chapman To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 6:40 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] (no subject) He is not working on Two Gates. After, basically, three attempts over the years, he gave up a few years ago. A couple of years ago, he told me that he had only been able to put 60 pages together for the book. RHONDA MCDONNELL wrote: Thanks to all for your insight and recommendations. Of course, it looks like I'll need to read all of Foote after seeing what you all had to say. Does anyone know if he's still working on the big project he wrote to Percy about throughout the last 25 or so years of their correspondence? The working title of it was TWO GATES TO THE CITY. -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com Thu Jul 31 19:55:36 2003 From: rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com (RHONDA MCDONNELL) Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 16:55:36 -0700 Subject: [percy-l] foote References: <20030730140255.61024.qmail@web10803.mail.yahoo.com><007401c356bc$167df620$e512a8c0@d247006> <003301c3576d$a99a0140$e0add00c@attbi.com> Message-ID: Yeah, okay, I can see that too, although in my reading, LANCELOT is in part Percy wrestling with his own leanings toward stoicism--not that I see LANCELOT as a roman a clef, but as a wrestling match between two philosophical forces. ----- Original Message ----- From: Jonathan Potter To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 7:11 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote When I read Lancelot, I see Percy as Percival and Foote as Lancelot. Foote as the hard-edged, passionate gnostic; Percy as the burned out sinner-saint, quietly arguing with him. Either way, the background of the friendship between the two men in the novel struck me, especially after reading the letters, as a fictionalized image of the friendship between Percy and Foote. I was surprised neither of the Percy biographies commented on the possible connection. Jonathan Potter Spokane, WA ----- Original Message ----- From: RHONDA MCDONNELL To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 12:08 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote I agree regarding hearing (and seeing) Foote, as you can in the Ken Burns piece. I know a h.s. history teacher who uses parts of the Burns in teaching the War. She says the students are always most enthralled with Foote, and will ask about him. When I read LANCELOT, I see Foote when I imagine Percival--anyone else do the same? ----- Original Message ----- From: Steve Dye To: Jim at AutumnLeavesBandB.com ; Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 10:00 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote Enjoyed reading the latest "chat" about Foote. Hey, if anyone has heard him speak in person or even seen the Ken Burns "Civil War" series on PBS, he is wonderful to "hear" - for those of us from the South, he truly is like the neighbor next door or if you are not from the South, his diction, "accent" etc should be enthralling to you, I would hope. Maybe the nicest combination would be to have an audiobook of his novels, narrated by him. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Wesson" To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 10:02 AM Subject: Re: [percy-l] foote > hi all, > i am just finishing Foote's 3 vol. 'Civil War' > never was able to get through even one third of a CW > book before! Foote makes the reading so interesting, > informative and enjoyable. > jim > > > > > > --- Nikkibar at aol.com wrote: > > Dear Rhonda, > > > > The Civil War magnum opus is somewhat daunting and > > certainly time consuming. > > On the other hand if you're interested in the Civil > > War it is the definitive > > work on the subject at least for our generation. > > More to the point so far as > > filling in the points of interest that one might > > have if you approach Foote > > mainly from the direction of Percy, I would suggest > > you sneak up on the Civil War > > by reading the Foote novel canon, starting with > > Follow Me Down and then > > deciding where to go from there, ending with > > September September. > > > > Bear in mind when pursuing this course that Walker > > and Shelby both were > > youthful builders of model airplanes. Walker built > > the balsa and tissue paper type > > which we are told flew like crazy and were meant to > > fly but his planes had a > > certain rag tag appearance. Shelby built the other > > type which came in shaped > > chunks of wood that you glued together and sanded > > down endlessly, painted with > > dope and glued on the window labels -- and then hung > > from a light fixture in > > the bedroom. They looked great but would not fly nor > > were they meant to. > > Biographers and critics have remarked that the same > > sort of thing tends to happen in > > their respective novels. I leave it to you to see if > > you agree. > > > > Nikki > > > -- > > > > An archive of all list discussion is available at > > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at > > http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software > http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com > -- > > An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: