From mfrentz_2 at comcast.net Tue Mar 2 09:39:59 2004 From: mfrentz_2 at comcast.net (Mike Frentz) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 09:39:59 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] language theory In-Reply-To: <002a01c3fc7c$405df6f0$0301000a@AFAC955012> References: <006801c3f2a1$4ffe7b00$0301000a@AFAC955012> <7223BACA-65BA-11D8-B62E-000A9593AB24@comcast.net> <002a01c3fc7c$405df6f0$0301000a@AFAC955012> Message-ID: <7B242A42-6C57-11D8-9891-000A9593AB24@comcast.net> Karey, Sorry for the delay. I routinely filter all of my Percy-l and Peirce-l stuff into one mailbox and given the volume on the latter (that I haven't kept up with at all, of late), I missed your message until now. I'll be interested in hearing about the pearls that you find in your new library collection. Speaking as one amateur to another (in the classical sense of the word, of course..) it seems as if you have a good survey -- though I have to admit I am not familiar with most, except possibly to recognize their names. Others that I've been impressed with: The Atoms of Language by Mark G. Baker (he's a Chomskyan, but I don't hold that against him), and I'm also fascinated by Michael Arbib (various papers and books), and Rudi Keller (A Theory of Linguistic Signs). I find that the difficulty with this area is that it is so interdisciplinary (by virtue of its being so innate to being human, I'm assuming). So many books, so little time.. I also agree with your supposition of Percy's reputation, but given the segmentation of this whole area, I think the implicit 'dissing' of others outside one's own area is probably not limited to Percy. The linguists, semioticians, and philosophers are so busy ignoring each other that you'd think they wouldn't even have time to ignore Percy :-). FYI, Lonergan was a Jesuit theologian (I try not to hold that against him, either :-), at his prime in the 1940's-70's, who stumbled into the area of cognition after doing an eleven year study of Aquinas and realizing how intertwined Aquinas' work was with human psychology/cognition. To that point of view, he is an even more contemporary researcher mining the scholastics (who have also endured their share of 'dissing' in turn) than Peirce was . I also lean a bit more towards Aquinas vs Scotus now, as a result. Minsky is one of the legends of the MIT-instantiations/institution of Artificial Intelligence. Very good 'disser', I might add.. I'm not quite sure how to answer your dyadic/triadic question. I struggle with it, as well. Needless to say, there have been many much smarter than me who've tackled it and lost. The way I like to think about it is that certain things are irreducibly triadic, e.g. tool-making: I'm riding my bike through the woods when the bolt holding the pedals opposite each other works itself out (because it has lost the nut). I can't pedal without reinserting the bolt (and it needs to be forcibly inserted). I have a goal that I want to accomplish (reinserting the bolt), I have a set of objects within my grasp that I could readily employ (hands, pocket knife, sticks, rocks, whatever else is around), and I have a role that I want it to play (in this case, as a hammer). This goal, the object employed, and the role in which it is employed are a triad, corresponding to Peirce's Interpretant, Object, and Representamen. Depending on which two of the triad are available (e.g. goal and object) you are deriving the third (e.g. role for the object to adopt). Depending which two you have, you get a specific type of reasoning (in the toolmaking case, it is inductive). Approaching from the other two directions gives you deductive or abductive reasoning (deductive, would be following a trail marker that someone had set up -- you have a role, and an object and are deriving a goal). It kind of works for me, but it's also very difficult to parse these labels correctly sometimes, as well. Something about being too near to the problem, I think. There are also definite analogues between the linguistic and physical domains, it would appear. Mike On Feb 26, 2004, at 10:21 AM, Karey L. Perkins wrote: > Mike, et al -- > ? > Thanks so much for this, Mike. ?I've ordered Deacon's and Deledalle's > books (you've mentioned Deledalle in the past), as well as?several > other ones on language evolution/origin of language, mostly > collections of essays that would provide a diversity of perspectives, > that seemed like they might provide a good background for what's > happening in this area now:? > ? > --Approaches to the Evolution of Language:? Social and Cognitive Bases > (James Hurford, ed.) > --The Transition to Language (Oxford Linguistics) [conference > proceedings] > --Language Evolution [Christiansen, ed.] (This is the one you refer to > below, I believe) > --Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain: The Subcortical Bases of > Speech, Syntax and Thought (Perspectives in Cognitive Neuroscience) > (I'm assuming this will be above my head, but Percy would probably > have read it and understood it) > --The Evolutionary Emergence of Language:? Social Functions and the > Origins of Linguistic Form (Chris Knight, ed.) > --The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (Pinker -- I > ordered this only because it seems that he should be read, he's so big > in the field) > --Foundations of Language:? Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution > (Jackendoff) > ? > What do you think?? Some of these were mentioned in the July 15 2003 > Nicholas Wade New York Times article, "Early Voices: The Leap to > Language" that I had forwarded to the list a while back, that sort of > reviewed new developments/books in the area.?? If you know of any of > these, or?would recommend one over another, let me know.? It's a great > area, new developments seem to abound, and it does relate?to what > Percy was doing -- not all of what he was doing, but some of what he > had mentioned. > ? > I too joined the Peirce list in search of more enlightenment on > Peirce, as well as symbol/sign,?and those guys are really good -- too > good for me!! ?I'm not following all of it --?Peirce is very wide and > deep -- but as I read more of him/about him,?I hope it will help.??I > did print out some of the papers at the Peirce site as well as the > "Memes as Signs" one you had mentioned so long ago... > ? > I do not know "Lonergan" or "Minsky" but I hope I'll come across their > names in the process of this reading.? I couldn't agree more about > "postmodern-polluted academia"!!? > ? > Percy and Peirce both mention Duns Scotus (scholastic guy) in terms of > sign/symbol and?realism, and I'm reading about him now. > ? > Again, thanks for the input on this -- from my research on it, it > seems not many people are as interested in pursuing the language > theory side of Percy as the other sides.? Only?3 or so dissertations > devoted peripherally?to that topic, only one devoted directly to > it,?and it seems the linguists and semioticians and > philosophers?completely ignore him altogether (Why?? Because he's a > novelist, so perceived as an amateur, not a professional, in > semiotics?? I don't know).? So I feel kind of like I'm shooting in the > dark sometimes. > ? > Still struggling with the other question I had mentioned last time > ("If there is a physical/biological brain location for language > (surely dyadic), how is that this dyadic structure creates triadic > thought? Aren't we back to Descartes' dilemma of how a mind/body > interacts?").? I didn't quite understand Ken's answer:? ("More like > we're already in it when we assume that the dyadic and the > triadic happen in totally different contexts. Why not one is subsumed > to the other???But can that be explained dyadically? No.") > ? > Karey > ? > ? > ? > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Mike Frentz > To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion > Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2004 11:40 PM > Subject: Re: [percy-l] language theory > > Karey, > > I'm sorry I really haven't gotten a chance to go back a re-look at our > earlier discussion. One of the key things that I had been impressed > with was Terrence Deacon's book, the Symbolic Species: The > Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (1997). That is an excellent > starting point for the state of the art from one scientist's > perspective a half dozen years after Percy's death. Bonus is that > Deacon is Peirce literate, as you'll see in his description of icon, > index, and symbol. > > Googling Deacon's name I just came across this link on a book on > Language Evolution. > http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-924483-9 > I haven't seen this book but it looks interesting at first glance. A > PDF sample was available which seemed small enough that I attached it > (I got it from the linked website of the softcover edition [reposted > without attachment]). Deacon has been saying for several years now > that he has a follow-on to Symbolic Species, called Homunculus, in > preparation, but I don't think it is yet out. > > I also recall that there was some interesting material on > genetic-based language research about a year ago -- someplace in > England I believe, but I'd have to track it down. > > From my perspective, Percy seems to have come to grips with the > importance of the cognizance of self in forming judgments, which is a > critical last step in the understanding of knowledge (per Bernard > Lonergan's approach in "Insight"). Lonergan seems to have > independently developed a "Percy-like" perspective in this area, by my > read (though there is no apparent connection/citing by either to the > other). Tekippe makes a comment in his commentary on Lonergan ("What > is Lonergan up to in INSIGHT?: A Primer") that in order "to find an > adequate stress on judgement, one must go back to the medieval > philosphers. Thomas Aquinas, in particular, places a strong emphasis > on judgment as the single criterion of truth." (p 122). Percy, and a > very small minority of only partially connected or disconnected others > (e.g. Peirce, Lonergan, Aquinas), seem to be adding something in > coming from a humanistic perspective that a purely scientic > perspective (e.g. Deacon, Minsky, Chomsky) seem to be oblivious of > (which I attribute to the lack of moorings and underlying, but > apparently totally blind, agenda which appears to be prevalent in > current postmodern-polluted academia (not to mention mass media). I > think there is probably much in current scientific advances that could > add to the track that Percy was pursuing. > > Just my blathering.. > > Best, > Mike > > On Feb 13, 2004, at 9:21 PM, Karey L. Perkins wrote: > > > This is addressed specifically to Mike Frentz, and generally > addressed?to the vast and superior?collective knowledge of the Percy > listserv as a group: > ? > Several months ago (years?) Mike, you said, that much > research/knowledge had been done/gained on language acquisition > and?language theory since Percy's death.? What is this, specifically?? > I know the list has discussed the FOXP2 gene.? Has more been > discovered/explored?? What were you referring to when you made this > comment? > ? > I am continuing my exploration of?Percy's language theory/radical > anthropology.? He seems specifically concerned with the "third > element" of the triad, the human self, and what is happening > there:?Among other things, Percy? refers to the work of Norman > Geschwind:? his discovery of a ?recently evolved structure, ?the human > inferior parietal lobule, which includes the angular and supramarginal > gyri, to a rough approximation areas 30 and 40 of Brodmann?? (Message > in the Bottle?326).? Percy elaborates on?Geschwind?s findings that > this structure is not present in the macque, and only rudimentarily > present in higher apes.? It seems Percy WAS interested in finding a > neuro-physiological/anatomical correlate (as he discusses in this > essay in Message in the Bottle).? But I would venture to guess that > much work has been done since Geschwind. > > ? > And here's a question to throw out to all:? if there is a > physical/biological brain location for language (surely dyadic), how > is that this dyadic structure creates triadic thought? Aren't we back > to Descartes' dilemma of how a mind/body interacts? > > ? > Karey > > ? > ? > -- > > 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 -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 12624 bytes Desc: not available URL: From armstron at ohiou.edu Tue Mar 2 15:48:50 2004 From: armstron at ohiou.edu (Ken Armstrong) Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 15:48:50 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] language theory In-Reply-To: <002a01c3fc7c$405df6f0$0301000a@AFAC955012> References: <006801c3f2a1$4ffe7b00$0301000a@AFAC955012> <7223BACA-65BA-11D8-B62E-000A9593AB24@comcast.net> Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.2.20040302153348.00b8ae60@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> At 10:21 AM 2/26/2004 -0500, you wrote: >Still struggling with the other question I had mentioned last time ("If >there is a physical/biological brain location for language (surely >dyadic), how is that this dyadic structure creates triadic thought? Aren't >we back to Descartes' dilemma of how a mind/body interacts?"). I didn't >quite understand Ken's answer: ("More like we're already in it when we >assume that the dyadic and the >triadic happen in totally different contexts. Why not one is subsumed to >the other? But can that be explained dyadically? No.") > >Karey Sorry if my answer was cryptic. I think the answer to your question, in part, is that the dyadic brain structure does not create thought. I know that this answer will be unacceptable to some, but it seems to me that your question has brought to bear the usefulness of the Peirce/Percy terms dyadic and triadic. Keeping a close focus on the dyadic of the brain will bring all sorts of wondrous insights into the physical processes that accompany thinking and speech, but cannot answer what it is that creates thought. Percy addressed something similar in Message in the Bottle when he noted that the physical explanation for triadic phenomenon regresses until proponents are brought to the idea of homunculi pulling the strings of the brain, etc. We can know more and more about the dyadic, but, to paraphrase, there is no progress in the triadic. Ken A. From kenneth.ketner at ttu.edu Wed Mar 3 16:53:13 2004 From: kenneth.ketner at ttu.edu (Kenneth Ketner) Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 15:53:13 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] language theory References: <006801c3f2a1$4ffe7b00$0301000a@AFAC955012> <7223BACA-65BA-11D8-B62E-000A9593AB24@comcast.net> <5.2.0.9.2.20040302153348.00b8ae60@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: <404653C9.7090800@ttu.edu> Why would brain processes be only dyadic (i.e., "surely dyadic")? Ken Armstrong wrote: > At 10:21 AM 2/26/2004 -0500, you wrote: > >> Still struggling with the other question I had mentioned last time >> ("If there is a physical/biological brain location for language >> (surely dyadic), how is that this dyadic structure creates triadic >> thought? Aren't we back to Descartes' dilemma of how a mind/body >> interacts?"). I didn't quite understand Ken's answer: ("More like >> we're already in it when we assume that the dyadic and the >> triadic happen in totally different contexts. Why not one is subsumed >> to the other? But can that be explained dyadically? No.") >> >> Karey > > > Sorry if my answer was cryptic. I think the answer to your question, in > part, is that the dyadic brain structure does not create thought. I know > that this answer will be unacceptable to some, but it seems to me that > your question has brought to bear the usefulness of the Peirce/Percy > terms dyadic and triadic. Keeping a close focus on the dyadic of the > brain will bring all sorts of wondrous insights into the physical > processes that accompany thinking and speech, but cannot answer what it > is that creates thought. Percy addressed something similar in Message > in the Bottle when he noted that the physical explanation for triadic > phenomenon regresses until proponents are brought to the idea of > homunculi pulling the strings of the brain, etc. We can know more and > more about the dyadic, but, to paraphrase, there is no progress in the > triadic. > > Ken A. > -- > > 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 > -- Kenneth L. Ketner Paul Whitfield Horn Professor Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism - MS 0002 Texas Tech University Charles Sanders Peirce Interdisciplinary Professor School of Nursing Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Lubbock, TX 79409-0002 806 742 3128 Office email: kenneth.ketner at ttu.edu Home email: ketner at arisbeassociates.com Office website: http://www.pragmaticism.net Personal website: http://www.wyttynys.net From karey at charter.net Wed Mar 3 19:06:58 2004 From: karey at charter.net (Karey L. Perkins) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 19:06:58 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] language theory References: <006801c3f2a1$4ffe7b00$0301000a@AFAC955012> <7223BACA-65BA-11D8-B62E-000A9593AB24@comcast.net><5.2.0.9.2.20040302153348.00b8ae60@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> <404653C9.7090800@ttu.edu> Message-ID: <006d01c4017c$9ec85c80$0301000a@AFAC955012> It seems that the process some neuroscientists/others are now going through: i.e.: searching for a physical brain location for language (which it seems much progress is being made recently, and these brain candidates for language locale have been actually been found) doesn't go anywhere towards solving the problem of how thought is created or how it arises from the physical brain. In other words, maybe the FOXP2 gene really is responsible for language, let's say it is; does that really tell us any more about the language phenomenon? I have to agree with Ken Armstrong, we're making dyadic progress, but really not getting any farther into understanding HOW this triadic process happens. But then I have to admit I'm a novice with dyads and triads. I understand Percy's explanation of it, but those guys on the Peirce list leave me way behind. So maybe I just don't have enough background to "get it"...can anyone help?? Perhaps Deledalle will be of some help. KP ----- Original Message ----- From: Kenneth Ketner To: Percy-L at happyhouse.metalab.unc.edu :Literary and Philosophical Discussion Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 4:53 PM Subject: Re: [percy-l] language theory Why would brain processes be only dyadic (i.e., "surely dyadic")? Ken Armstrong wrote: > At 10:21 AM 2/26/2004 -0500, you wrote: > >> Still struggling with the other question I had mentioned last time >> ("If there is a physical/biological brain location for language >> (surely dyadic), how is that this dyadic structure creates triadic >> thought? Aren't we back to Descartes' dilemma of how a mind/body >> interacts?"). I didn't quite understand Ken's answer: ("More like >> we're already in it when we assume that the dyadic and the >> triadic happen in totally different contexts. Why not one is subsumed >> to the other? But can that be explained dyadically? No.") >> >> Karey > > > Sorry if my answer was cryptic. I think the answer to your question, in > part, is that the dyadic brain structure does not create thought. I know > that this answer will be unacceptable to some, but it seems to me that > your question has brought to bear the usefulness of the Peirce/Percy > terms dyadic and triadic. Keeping a close focus on the dyadic of the > brain will bring all sorts of wondrous insights into the physical > processes that accompany thinking and speech, but cannot answer what it > is that creates thought. Percy addressed something similar in Message > in the Bottle when he noted that the physical explanation for triadic > phenomenon regresses until proponents are brought to the idea of > homunculi pulling the strings of the brain, etc. We can know more and > more about the dyadic, but, to paraphrase, there is no progress in the > triadic. > > Ken A. > -- > > 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 > -- Kenneth L. Ketner Paul Whitfield Horn Professor Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism - MS 0002 Texas Tech University Charles Sanders Peirce Interdisciplinary Professor School of Nursing Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Lubbock, TX 79409-0002 806 742 3128 Office email: kenneth.ketner at ttu.edu Home email: ketner at arisbeassociates.com Office website: http://www.pragmaticism.net Personal website: http://www.wyttynys.net -- 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 hpmills3 at austin.rr.com Sat Mar 6 18:23:10 2004 From: hpmills3 at austin.rr.com (Henry Mills) Date: Sat, 06 Mar 2004 17:23:10 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] 2004 Oxford Conference for the Book dedicated to Walker Percy Message-ID: Dear Percy-L: For those of you interested, the 2004 Oxford Conference for the Book is dedicated to Walker Percy and will be held April 1-4 at the University of Mississippi. I?ve pasted below the general announcement. For more details go to: http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/events/index.htm Looks like a great celebration all around with some interesting talks on Percy. Regards, Henry Mills? ------------- Oxford Conference for the Book Announcement Notable authors, editors, publishers, and others in the trade as well as educators, literacy advocates, readers, and book lovers will gather for the 11th Oxford Conference for the Book, set for April 1-4, 2004. The program will begin on Thursday afternoon with two sessions and a special conference edition of Thacker Mountain Radio and continue through Sunday afternoon with addresses, panels, and readings. The 2004 conference will be dedicated to author Walker Percy (1916-1990) in recognition of his contributions to American letters. Author and editor Paul Elie will present a lecture on Percy. A panel with the author's daughter Mary Pratt Percy Lobdell, grandson Robert Livingston Lobdell, William Jay Smith, and Patricia Sullivan, English professor at the University of Colorado, will discuss Percy's life and work. Dr. Luke Lampton will give a presentation about his extensive collection of Percy's writings. Another special part of the 2004 conference will be the celebration of Mildred D. Taylor Day in Mississippi. The April 2 program will bring young readers, teachers, parents, and others together to recognize the achievements of this outstanding author. Participating in the annual session celebrating National Poetry Month will be Jonathan Galassi, author of two poetry volumes Morning Run and North; William Jay Smith, poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (the position now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate) and author of ten collections of poetry; and Graham Lewis, whose poems are collected in Forever Came Today. Poets Beth Ann Fennelly, Ann Fisher-Wirth, and Tom House will also read at the conference. Among the notable fiction writers scheduled to read and talk about their work are Kaye Gibbons, whose seventh novel, Divining Women, will be published this spring; Beverly Lowry, author of six novels and two nonfiction books, Crossed Over and Her Dream of Dreams; and Margaret McMullan, author of two new books, In My Mother's House and How I Found the Strong; and Bruce Murkoff, whose first novel, Waterborne, wasa recently published. Barry Hannah, David Galef, and Tom Franklin, who teach creative writing at the University, will also be on hand to discuss fiction, as will Amy Stolls, program officer in the literature division of the National Endowment for the Arts. Ole Miss journalism professor Curtis Wilkie will moderate a session on writing from the world's hot spots with journalists Tom Bissell (Chasing the Sea), Alan Huffman (Mississippi in Africa), and Sebastian Junger, best-selling author of The Perfect Storm. Newsweek managing editor Jon Meacham will discuss his Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, and Gail Collins, editorial page editor of the New York Times will talk about her new book, American Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. Other nonfiction authors also scheduled are Roy Blount Jr., one of America's best-known humorists; this year's Grisham writer, Janisse Ray; Ben McClelland, author of the memoir Soldier's Son; and two Mississippi natives: University alumnus Ralph Eubanks, author of Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi's Dark Past; and Julia Reed, home to celebrate the publication of her first book, Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomenon. This year's Grisham writer, Janisse Ray, will read from her work and moderate a panel with author Tony Dunbar and publisher Randall Williams. The hour-long live Thacker Mountain Radio Show will feature a program of music by the house band and visiting musicians as well as readings by visiting authors. Another program of literature and music will be presented by Reckon Crew, who will perform selections from William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, Connie May Fowler's Remembering Blue, and other works of fiction they have translated to the musical stage. Reckon Crew members are Tommy Goldsmith, an editor at the Raleigh News and Observer; poet and folk singer Tom House, author of a new poetry collection The World according to Whiskey; and Karren Pell, a country music songwriter, producer, performer, and author of Alabama Troubadour. The conference is open to the public without charge. To assure seating space, those interested in attending should preregister through the Center's Web site (http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/south). Reservations and advance payment are required for three optional events honoring conference speakers: a cocktail buffet at Isom Place ($50), a cocktail party at Off Square Books ($25), and a country dinner at Taylor Catfish ($25). Conference sponsors include the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Department of English, Department of Journalism, John Davis Williams Library, Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, John and Ren?e Grisham Visiting Writers Fund, Barksdale Reading Institute, Sarah Isom Center for Women, Junior Auxiliary of Oxford, Lafayette County Literacy Council, and Square Books. The 2004 conference is partially funded by the University of Mississippi, a contribution from the R&B Feder Foundation for the Beaux Arts, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tribal State Compact Fund, the Mississippi Humanities Council, and the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From maryjones200 at latinmail.com Wed Mar 10 14:58:18 2004 From: maryjones200 at latinmail.com (Mary Jones) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 20:58:18 +0100 Subject: [percy-l] DONATION FOR THE LORD Message-ID: <20040310195848.B3F5120070@happyhouse.metalab.unc.edu> From: Mrs Mary Jones PLEASE ENDEAVOUR TO USED IT FOR THE CHILDREN OF GOD. I am the above named person from Kuwait. I am married to Dr. Harry Jones who worked with Kuwait embassy in Ivory Coast for nine years before he died in the year 2000. We were married for eleven years without a child. He died after a brief illness that lasted for only four days. Before his death we were both born again Christians.Since his death I decided not to re-marry or get a child outside my matrimonial home which the Bible is against.When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of$8.6Million (Eight Million six hundred thousand U.S. Dollars) with one finance/security company in Amsterderm Holland. Presently, this money is still with the Security Company. Recently, my Doctor told me that I would not last for the next three months due to cancer problem. Though what disturbs me most is my stroke sickness. Having known my condition I decided to donate this fund to church or better still a christian individual that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct here in. I want a church that will use this fund to fund churches, orphanages and widows propagating the word of God and to ensure that the house of God is maintained. The Bible made us to understand that Blessed is the hand that giveth. I took this decision because I don?t have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are not Christians and I don?t want my husband?s hard earned money to be misused by unbelievers. I don?t want a situation where this money will be used in an ungodly manner. Hence the reason for taking this bold decision. I am not afraid of death hence I know where I am going. I know that I am going to be in the bosom of the Lord. Exodus 14 VS 14 says that the lord will fight my case and I shall hold my peace. I don?t need any telephone communication in this regard because of my health because of the presence of my husband?s relatives around me always. I don?t want them to know about this development. With God all things are possible. As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact of the Finance/Security Company in Amsterderm Holland. I will also issue you a letter of authority that will prove you as the original- beneficiary of this fund. I want you and the church to always pray for me because the lord is my shephard. My happiness is that I lived a life of a worthy Christian. Whoever that wants to serve the Lord must serve him in spirit and truth. Please always be prayerful all through your life. Any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing for a chuch or christian individual for this same purpose. Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I stated herein. Hoping to hearing from you. N.B-PLEASE I WILL ADVICE YOU TO GIVE THE LAWYER IN CHARGE A CALL IN HOLLAND IMMEDIATELY, HE DOES EVERYTHING ON MY BEHALF AND HE'S VERY UNDERSTANDING AND I BELIEVE HE WILL LEAD YOU TO YOUR SUCCESS IN JESUS NAME, THE LAWYER'S NUMBER IS.+31-628-614-319 NAME-BARRISTER BEN DOE Remain blessed in the name of the Lord. Yours in Christ, Mrs Mary Jones From JHForest at cs.com Tue Mar 30 05:59:25 2004 From: JHForest at cs.com (JHForest at cs.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 05:59:25 EST Subject: [percy-l] Walker Percy on Bouron Message-ID: <42.4a367f29.2d9aad0d@cs.com> Walker Percy on Bouron Potent Potables >From Signposts in a Strange Land by Walker Percy, 1975 "This is not written by a connoisseur of Bourbon. Ninety-nine percent of Bourbon drinkers know more about Bourbon than I do. It is about the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking in general and in particular of knocking it back neat. I can hardly tell one Bourbon from another, unless the other is very bad. Some bad Boubons are even more memorable than good ones. For example, I can recall being broke with some friends in Tennessee and deciding to have a party and being able to afford only two-fifths of a $1.75 Bourbon called Two Natural, whose label showed dice coming up 5 and 2. Its taste was memorable. The psychological effect was also notable. After knocking back two or three shots over a period of half an hour, the three male drinkers looked at each other and said in a single voice: 'Where are the women?' I have not been able to locate this remarkable Bourbon since. Not only should connoisseurs of Bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth--all real dangers. I, too, deplore these afflications. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking, that is, the use of Bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic. What, after all, is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at him but just past the side of his head, and there's Cronkite on the tube and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the sadn ess of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: 'Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?' If I should appear to be suggesting that such a man proceed as quickly as possible to anesthetize his cerebral cortex by ingesting ethyl alcohol, the point is being missed. Or part of the point. The joy of Bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C(2)H(5)OH on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime--aesthetic considerations to which the effect of the alcohol is, if not dispensable, at least secondary. By contrast, Scotch: for me (not, I presume, for a Scot), drinking Scotch is like looking at a picture of Noel Coward. The whiskey assaults the nasopharynx with all the excitement of paregoric. Scotch drinkers (not all, of course) I think of as upward-mobile Americans, Houston and New Orleans businessmen who graduate from Bourbon about the same time they shed seersuckers for Lilly slacks. Of course, by now these same folk may have gone back to Bourbon and seersucker for the same reason, because too many Houston oilmen drink Scotch. Nothing, therefore, will be said about the fine points of sour mash, straights, blends, bonded, except a general preference for the lower proofs. It is a matter of the arithmetic of aesthetics. If one derives the same pleasure from knocking back 80-proof Bourbon as 100-proof, the formula is both as simple as 2 + 2 = 4 and as incredible as non-Euclidean geometry. Consider. One knocks back five one-ounce shots of 80-proof Early Times or four shots of 100-proof Old Fitzgerald. The alcohol ingestion is the same: 5 X 40% = 2 4 X 50% = 2 Yet, in the case of the Early Times, one has obtained an extra quantum of joy without cost to liver, brain, or gastric mucosa. A bonus, pure and simple, an aesthetic gain as incredible as two parallel lines meeting at infinity. An apology to the reader is in order, nevertheless, for it has just occurred to me that this is the most unedifying and even maleficent piece I ever wrote--if it should encourage potential alcoholics to start knocking back Bourbon neat. It is also the unfairest. Because I am, happily and unhappily, endowed with a bad GI tract, diverticulosis, neurotic colon, and a mild recurring nausea, which make it less likely for me to become an alcoholic than my healthier fellow Americans. I can hear the reader now: Who is he kidding? If this joker has to knock back five shots of Bourbon every afternoon just to stand the twentieth century, he's already an alcoholic. Very well. I submit to this or any semantic. All I am saying is that if I drink much more than this I will get sick as a dog for two days and the very sight and smell of whiskey will bring on the heaves. Readers beware, therefore, save only those who have stronger wills or as bad a gut as I. The pleasure of knocking back Bourbon lies in the plain of the aesthetic but at an opposite pole from connoisseurship. My preference for the former is or is not deplorable depending on one's value system -- that is to say, how one balances out the Epicurean virtues of cultivating one's sensory end organs with the greatest discrimination and at least cost to one's health, against the virtue of evocation of time and memory and of the recovery of self and the past from the fogged-in disoriented Western world. In Kierkegaardian terms, the use of Bourbon to such an end is a kind of aestheticized religious mode of existence, whereas connoisseurship, the discriminating but single-minded stimulation of sensory end organs, is the aesthetic of damnation. Two exemplars of the two aesthetics come to mind. Imagine Clifton Webb, scarf at throat, sitting at Cap d'Antibes on a perfect day, the little wavelets of the Mediterranean sparkling in the sunlight, and he is savoring a 1959 Mouton Rothschild. Then imagine William Faulkner, having finished 'Absalom, Absalom!', drained, written out, pissed-off, feeling himself over the edge and out of it, nowhere, but he goes somewhere, his favorite hunting place in the Delta wilderness of the Big Sunflower River and, still feeling bad with his hunting cronies and maybe even a little phony, which he was, what with him trying to pretend he was one of them, a farmer, hunkered down in the cold and rain after the hunt, after honorably passing up the does and seeing no bucks, shivering and snot-nosed, takes out a flat pint of any Bourbon at all and flatfoots about a third of it. He shivers again but not from the cold. Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust. 1926: As a child watching my father in Birmingham, in the exurbs, living next to a number-6 fairway of the New Country Club, him disdaining both the bathtub gin and white lightening of the time, aging his own Bourbon in a charcoal keg, on his hands and knees in the basement sucking on the siphon, a matter of gravity requiring cheek pressed against the concrete floor, the siphon getting going, the decanter ready, the first hot spurt into his mouth not spat out. 1933: My uncle's sun parlour in the Mississippi Delta and toddies on a Sunday afternoon, the prolonged and meditative tinkle of silver spoon against crystal to dissolve the sugar; talk, tinkle, talk; the talk mostly political: "Roosevelt is doing a good job; no, the son of a bitch is betraying his class." 1934: Drinking at a Delta dance, the boys in bi-swing jackets and tab collars, tough-talking and profane and also scared of the girls and therefore safe in the men's room. Somebody passes around bootleg Bourbon in a Coke bottle. It's awful. Tears start from eyes, faces turn red. 'Hot damn, that's good!' 1935: Drinking at a football game in college. UNC versus Duke. One has a blind date. One is lucky. She is beautiful. Her clothes are the color of the fall leaves and her face turns up like a flower. But what to SAY to her, let alone what to do, and whether she is 'nice' or 'hot' -- a distinction made in those days. But what to SAY? Take a drink, by now from a proper concave hip flask (a long way from the Delta Coke bottle) with a hinged top. Will she have a drink? No. But that's all right. The taste of the Bourbon (Cream of Kentucky) and the smell of her fuse with the brilliant Carolina fall and the sounds of the crowd and the hit of the linesmen in a single synesthesia. 1941: Drinking mint juleps, famed Southern Bourbon drink, though in the Deep South not really drunk much. In fact, they are drunk so seldom that when, say, on Derby Day somebody gives a julep party, people drink them like cocktails, forgetting that a good julep holds at least five ounces of Bourbon. Men fall face-down unconscious, women wander in the woods disconsolate and amnesiac, full of thoughts of Kahil Gibran and the limberlost. Would you believe the first mind julep I had I was sitting not on a columned porth but in the Boo Snooker bar of the New Yorker Hotel with a Bellevue nurse in 1941? The nurse, a nice upstate girl, head floor nurse, brisk, swift, good-looking; Bellevue nurses, the best in the world and this one the best of Bellevue, at least the best-looking. The julep, an atrocity, a heavy syrupy Bourbon and water in a small glass clotted with ice. But good! How could two women be more different than the beautiful languid Carolina girl and this swift handsome girl from Utica, best Dutch stock? One thing was sure. Each has to be courted, loved, drunk with, with Bourbon. I should have stuck with the Bourbon. We changed to gin fizzes because the bartender said he came from New Orleans and could make good ones. He could and did. They were delicious. What I didn't know was that they were made with raw egg albumen and I was allergic to it. What a lovely fine strapping smart girl! And thinking of being invited into her apartment where she lived alone and of her offering to cook a little supper and of the many kisses and the sweet love that already existed between us and was bound to grow apace, when on the Brooklyn Bridge itself my upper lip began to swell and little sparks of light flew past the corner of my eye like St. Elmo's fire. In the space of thirty seconds my lip stuck out a full three-quarter inch, like a shelf, like Mortimer Snerd. Not only was kissing out of the question but my eyes swelled shut. I made it across the bridge, pulled over to the curb, and fainted. Whereupon this noble nurse drove me back to Bellevue, game me a shot, and put me to bed. Anybody who monkeys around with gin and egg white deserves what he gets. I should have stuck with Bourbon and have from that day to this. POSTSCRIPT: Reader, just in case you don't want to knock it back straight and would rather monkey around with perfectly good Bourbon, here's my favorite recipe, "Cud'n Walker's Uncle Will's Favorite Mint Julep Receipt." You need excellent Bourbon whiskey; rye or Scotch will not do. Put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water. Next, very quickly--and here is the trick in the procedure -- crush your ice, actually powder it, preferably with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand. Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything else, with Bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the top. The glass will frost immediately. Then settle back in your chair for half an hour of cumulative bliss." * * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From PARLINS at culver.org Tue Mar 30 15:36:34 2004 From: PARLINS at culver.org (PARLINS at culver.org) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 15:36:34 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] Walker Percy on Bouron Message-ID: <580A6654EC74D511B41600034779BEDE07059872@exchangeserver.culver.org> Thanks...this comes at a fitting time for me. -----Original Message----- From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org]On Behalf Of JHForest at cs.com Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2004 5:59 AM To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: [percy-l] Walker Percy on Bouron Walker Percy on Bouron Potent Potables >From Signposts in a Strange Land by Walker Percy, 1975 "This is not written by a connoisseur of Bourbon. Ninety-nine percent of Bourbon drinkers know more about Bourbon than I do. It is about the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking in general and in particular of knocking it back neat. I can hardly tell one Bourbon from another, unless the other is very bad. Some bad Boubons are even more memorable than good ones. For example, I can recall being broke with some friends in Tennessee and deciding to have a party and being able to afford only two-fifths of a $1.75 Bourbon called Two Natural, whose label showed dice coming up 5 and 2. Its taste was memorable. The psychological effect was also notable. After knocking back two or three shots over a period of half an hour, the three male drinkers looked at each other and said in a single voice: 'Where are the women?' I have not been able to locate this remarkable Bourbon since. Not only should connoisseurs of Bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth--all real dangers. I, too, deplore these afflications. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking, that is, the use of Bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic. What, after all, is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at him but just past the side of his head, and there's Cronkite on the tube and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the sadn ess of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: 'Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?' If I should appear to be suggesting that such a man proceed as quickly as possible to anesthetize his cerebral cortex by ingesting ethyl alcohol, the point is being missed. Or part of the point. The joy of Bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C(2)H(5)OH on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime--aesthetic considerations to which the effect of the alcohol is, if not dispensable, at least secondary. By contrast, Scotch: for me (not, I presume, for a Scot), drinking Scotch is like looking at a picture of Noel Coward. The whiskey assaults the nasopharynx with all the excitement of paregoric. Scotch drinkers (not all, of course) I think of as upward-mobile Americans, Houston and New Orleans businessmen who graduate from Bourbon about the same time they shed seersuckers for Lilly slacks. Of course, by now these same folk may have gone back to Bourbon and seersucker for the same reason, because too many Houston oilmen drink Scotch. Nothing, therefore, will be said about the fine points of sour mash, straights, blends, bonded, except a general preference for the lower proofs. It is a matter of the arithmetic of aesthetics. If one derives the same pleasure from knocking back 80-proof Bourbon as 100-proof, the formula is both as simple as 2 + 2 = 4 and as incredible as non-Euclidean geometry. Consider. One knocks back five one-ounce shots of 80-proof Early Times or four shots of 100-proof Old Fitzgerald. The alcohol ingestion is the same: 5 X 40% = 2 4 X 50% = 2 Yet, in the case of the Early Times, one has obtained an extra quantum of joy without cost to liver, brain, or gastric mucosa. A bonus, pure and simple, an aesthetic gain as incredible as two parallel lines meeting at infinity. An apology to the reader is in order, nevertheless, for it has just occurred to me that this is the most unedifying and even maleficent piece I ever wrote--if it should encourage potential alcoholics to start knocking back Bourbon neat. It is also the unfairest. Because I am, happily and unhappily, endowed with a bad GI tract, diverticulosis, neurotic colon, and a mild recurring nausea, which make it less likely for me to become an alcoholic than my healthier fellow Americans. I can hear the reader now: Who is he kidding? If this joker has to knock back five shots of Bourbon every afternoon just to stand the twentieth century, he's already an alcoholic. Very well. I submit to this or any semantic. All I am saying is that if I drink much more than this I will get sick as a dog for two days and the very sight and smell of whiskey will bring on the heaves. Readers beware, therefore, save only those who have stronger wills or as bad a gut as I. The pleasure of knocking back Bourbon lies in the plain of the aesthetic but at an opposite pole from connoisseurship. My preference for the former is or is not deplorable depending on one's value system -- that is to say, how one balances out the Epicurean virtues of cultivating one's sensory end organs with the greatest discrimination and at least cost to one's health, against the virtue of evocation of time and memory and of the recovery of self and the past from the fogged-in disoriented Western world. In Kierkegaardian terms, the use of Bourbon to such an end is a kind of aestheticized religious mode of existence, whereas connoisseurship, the discriminating but single-minded stimulation of sensory end organs, is the aesthetic of damnation. Two exemplars of the two aesthetics come to mind. Imagine Clifton Webb, scarf at throat, sitting at Cap d'Antibes on a perfect day, the little wavelets of the Mediterranean sparkling in the sunlight, and he is savoring a 1959 Mouton Rothschild. Then imagine William Faulkner, having finished 'Absalom, Absalom!', drained, written out, pissed-off, feeling himself over the edge and out of it, nowhere, but he goes somewhere, his favorite hunting place in the Delta wilderness of the Big Sunflower River and, still feeling bad with his hunting cronies and maybe even a little phony, which he was, what with him trying to pretend he was one of them, a farmer, hunkered down in the cold and rain after the hunt, after honorably passing up the does and seeing no bucks, shivering and snot-nosed, takes out a flat pint of any Bourbon at all and flatfoots about a third of it. He shivers again but not from the cold. Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust. 1926: As a child watching my father in Birmingham, in the exurbs, living next to a number-6 fairway of the New Country Club, him disdaining both the bathtub gin and white lightening of the time, aging his own Bourbon in a charcoal keg, on his hands and knees in the basement sucking on the siphon, a matter of gravity requiring cheek pressed against the concrete floor, the siphon getting going, the decanter ready, the first hot spurt into his mouth not spat out. 1933: My uncle's sun parlour in the Mississippi Delta and toddies on a Sunday afternoon, the prolonged and meditative tinkle of silver spoon against crystal to dissolve the sugar; talk, tinkle, talk; the talk mostly political: "Roosevelt is doing a good job; no, the son of a bitch is betraying his class." 1934: Drinking at a Delta dance, the boys in bi-swing jackets and tab collars, tough-talking and profane and also scared of the girls and therefore safe in the men's room. Somebody passes around bootleg Bourbon in a Coke bottle. It's awful. Tears start from eyes, faces turn red. 'Hot damn, that's good!' 1935: Drinking at a football game in college. UNC versus Duke. One has a blind date. One is lucky. She is beautiful. Her clothes are the color of the fall leaves and her face turns up like a flower. But what to SAY to her, let alone what to do, and whether she is 'nice' or 'hot' -- a distinction made in those days. But what to SAY? Take a drink, by now from a proper concave hip flask (a long way from the Delta Coke bottle) with a hinged top. Will she have a drink? No. But that's all right. The taste of the Bourbon (Cream of Kentucky) and the smell of her fuse with the brilliant Carolina fall and the sounds of the crowd and the hit of the linesmen in a single synesthesia. 1941: Drinking mint juleps, famed Southern Bourbon drink, though in the Deep South not really drunk much. In fact, they are drunk so seldom that when, say, on Derby Day somebody gives a julep party, people drink them like cocktails, forgetting that a good julep holds at least five ounces of Bourbon. Men fall face-down unconscious, women wander in the woods disconsolate and amnesiac, full of thoughts of Kahil Gibran and the limberlost. Would you believe the first mind julep I had I was sitting not on a columned porth but in the Boo Snooker bar of the New Yorker Hotel with a Bellevue nurse in 1941? The nurse, a nice upstate girl, head floor nurse, brisk, swift, good-looking; Bellevue nurses, the best in the world and this one the best of Bellevue, at least the best-looking. The julep, an atrocity, a heavy syrupy Bourbon and water in a small glass clotted with ice. But good! How could two women be more different than the beautiful languid Carolina girl and this swift handsome girl from Utica, best Dutch stock? One thing was sure. Each has to be courted, loved, drunk with, with Bourbon. I should have stuck with the Bourbon. We changed to gin fizzes because the bartender said he came from New Orleans and could make good ones. He could and did. They were delicious. What I didn't know was that they were made with raw egg albumen and I was allergic to it. What a lovely fine strapping smart girl! And thinking of being invited into her apartment where she lived alone and of her offering to cook a little supper and of the many kisses and the sweet love that already existed between us and was bound to grow apace, when on the Brooklyn Bridge itself my upper lip began to swell and little sparks of light flew past the corner of my eye like St. Elmo's fire. In the space of thirty seconds my lip stuck out a full three-quarter inch, like a shelf, like Mortimer Snerd. Not only was kissing out of the question but my eyes swelled shut. I made it across the bridge, pulled over to the curb, and fainted. Whereupon this noble nurse drove me back to Bellevue, game me a shot, and put me to bed. Anybody who monkeys around with gin and egg white deserves what he gets. I should have stuck with Bourbon and have from that day to this. POSTSCRIPT: Reader, just in case you don't want to knock it back straight and would rather monkey around with perfectly good Bourbon, here's my favorite recipe, "Cud'n Walker's Uncle Will's Favorite Mint Julep Receipt." You need excellent Bourbon whiskey; rye or Scotch will not do. Put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water. Next, very quickly--and here is the trick in the procedure -- crush your ice, actually powder it, preferably with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand. Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything else, with Bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the top. The glass will frost immediately. Then settle back in your chair for half an hour of cumulative bliss." * * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: