From wpercy2 at ibiblio.org Sat Jun 4 18:09:18 2005 From: wpercy2 at ibiblio.org (Henry P. Mills) Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2005 17:09:18 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] Brain region involved with metaphor comprehension discovered In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > From: Wade Riddick > Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 02:02:42 -0500 > To: Walker Percy List > Subject: Brain region involved with metaphor comprehension discovered > > They discovered a key region of the brain involved with understanding > metaphor. > > From kterrell at sheastokes.com Mon Jun 6 17:20:33 2005 From: kterrell at sheastokes.com (Karl M. Terrell) Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 17:20:33 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] Brain region involved with metaphor comprehensiondiscovered Message-ID: <7A5E4A01592B87438BF92B2CC0CA9DC20C8987@at01.sheamcnitt.com> * * This communication is CONFIDENTIAL * * I wonder how adept those with damaged "left angular gyrus" are at figuring out similes? Have any of the studies on the ability of apes to use language and symbols found any evidence of ability to understand simple similes? Do monkeys ever laugh at our jokes? -----Original Message----- From: Henry P. Mills [mailto:wpercy2 at ibiblio.org] Sent: Saturday, June 04, 2005 6:09 PM To: percy-l Subject: [percy-l] Brain region involved with metaphor comprehensiondiscovered > From: Wade Riddick > Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 02:02:42 -0500 > To: Walker Percy List > Subject: Brain region involved with metaphor comprehension discovered > > They discovered a key region of the brain involved with understanding > metaphor. > > -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy ************************************************************************************************ PRIVILEGED COMMUNICATION The information contained in this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is only for the use of the recipient(s) named above. This message, and its attachments, may contain information that falls under the attorney-client and/or work product privileges. Receipt of this message by an unintended recipient does not constitute a waiver by the sender of any and all applicable privileges. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail and any attachments, or an agent responsible for delivering it to the intended recipients, you are hereby notified that any use, dissemination, distribution, downloading, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately by e-mail, permanently delete the e-mail and any attachments immediately, and destroy all copies. ************************************************************************************************ From wriddick at usa.net Fri Jun 10 13:24:17 2005 From: wriddick at usa.net (Wade Riddick) Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 12:24:17 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] Brain processes behind interpreting sarcasm and irony Message-ID: The mental processes for interpreting irony and sarcasm are getting mapped. From willparish at hotmail.com Wed Jun 22 23:11:39 2005 From: willparish at hotmail.com (William Parish) Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 03:11:39 +0000 Subject: [percy-l] Are there any WP events or news? Message-ID: Dear Friends, I was wondering if anyone knows of any books or events planned this year that are Percy-related. Also, a retired professor friend of mine recently told me that he did not care for Walker Percy because he was a 'homophobe'. In the many bios, interviews and stories I have heard and read about WP's life -I have never heard or read anything about his position on homosexuals. Is he mistaken? Will Parish From chaslow53 at aol.com Thu Jun 23 00:13:39 2005 From: chaslow53 at aol.com (chaslow53 at aol.com) Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:13:39 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] Are there any WP events or news? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8C745C111ACFD65-A54-19DEF@mblk-r34.sysops.aol.com> <> I, too, was wondering specifically if the Percy confab held last year in mid-November in Covington was on for this year as well. <> I do not recall anything specific about this, but I remember reading in the Shelby Foote-WP letters a letter WP wrote in which he discussed his views on pornography, which were that most of it was not of interest to him one way or the other, but, except for some questions about access by minors, he didn't think it was particularly useful or appropriate for the state to involve itself. I remember actually thinking at the time that, mutatis mutandis, those might well be his views on the legal aspects of homosexual relationships as well. I am in Los Angeles on business and cannot quote the letter, but I am sure there are others on the list who will know to which one I refer. Chuck Lowry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Robert_Pauley at oxy.com Thu Jun 23 01:08:30 2005 From: Robert_Pauley at oxy.com (Robert_Pauley at oxy.com) Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 22:08:30 -0700 Subject: [percy-l] Are there any WP events or news? Message-ID: <7706697134D5C94781B111C8C298D674419FE9@olawexc8.naoxy.com> I would say it was a category of modern life or lifestyle on which Percy did not expend too much consciousness. But I'm sure somewhere in his writings he made a gamey crack or two about homosexuals, or offered up what might be seen as an "insensitive portrayal". It doesn't take much these days to be qualified as a "phobe" of one sort or another in some people's minds. Cheers, R. Pauley -----Original Message----- From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of William Parish Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 8:12 PM To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: [percy-l] Are there any WP events or news? Dear Friends, I was wondering if anyone knows of any books or events planned this year that are Percy-related. Also, a retired professor friend of mine recently told me that he did not care for Walker Percy because he was a 'homophobe'. In the many bios, interviews and stories I have heard and read about WP's life -I have never heard or read anything about his position on homosexuals. Is he mistaken? Will Parish -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy From mark.maier at gmail.com Fri Jun 24 08:23:34 2005 From: mark.maier at gmail.com (Mark Maier) Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 08:23:34 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] Re: Percy-L Digest, Vol 28, Issue 4 In-Reply-To: <20050623160040.C556E48894@metalab.unc.edu> References: <20050623160040.C556E48894@metalab.unc.edu> Message-ID: <10fb7f1205062405233cb6b145@mail.gmail.com> Richard Ford on the Moviegoer (http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2005/06/20050623_b_main.asp) Mark On 6/23/05, percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org wrote: > 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. Are there any WP events or news? (William Parish) > 2. Re: Are there any WP events or news? (chaslow53 at aol.com) > 3. RE: Are there any WP events or news? (Robert_Pauley at oxy.com) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 03:11:39 +0000 > From: "William Parish" > Subject: [percy-l] Are there any WP events or news? > To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org > Message-ID: > Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed > > Dear Friends, > > I was wondering if anyone knows of any books or events planned this year > that are Percy-related. > > Also, a retired professor friend of mine recently told me that he did not > care for Walker Percy because he was a 'homophobe'. In the many bios, > interviews and stories I have heard and read about WP's life -I have never > heard or read anything about his position on homosexuals. Is he mistaken? > > Will Parish > > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 2 > Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:13:39 -0400 > From: chaslow53 at aol.com > Subject: Re: [percy-l] Are there any WP events or news? > To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org > Message-ID: <8C745C111ACFD65-A54-19DEF at mblk-r34.sysops.aol.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > <> > I, too, was wondering specifically if the Percy confab held last year in mid-November in Covington was on for this year as well. > > <> > I do not recall anything specific about this, but I remember reading in the Shelby Foote-WP letters a letter WP wrote in which he discussed his views on pornography, which were that most of it was not of interest to him one way or the other, but, except for some questions about access by minors, he didn't think it was particularly useful or appropriate for the state to involve itself. I remember actually thinking at the time that, mutatis mutandis, those might well be his views on the legal aspects of homosexual relationships as well. I am in Los Angeles on business and cannot quote the letter, but I am sure there are others on the list who will know to which one I refer. > > Chuck Lowry > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/attachments/20050623/7269f1a2/attachment-0001.htm > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 3 > Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 22:08:30 -0700 > From: > Subject: RE: [percy-l] Are there any WP events or news? > To: > Message-ID: > <7706697134D5C94781B111C8C298D674419FE9 at olawexc8.naoxy.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > I would say it was a category of modern life or lifestyle on which Percy > did not expend too much consciousness. But I'm sure somewhere in his > writings he made a gamey crack or two about homosexuals, or offered up > what might be seen as an "insensitive portrayal". It doesn't take much > these days to be qualified as a "phobe" of one sort or another in some > people's minds. > > Cheers, R. Pauley > -----Original Message----- > From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org > [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of William Parish > Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 8:12 PM > To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org > Subject: [percy-l] Are there any WP events or news? > > > Dear Friends, > > I was wondering if anyone knows of any books or events planned this year > > that are Percy-related. > > Also, a retired professor friend of mine recently told me that he did > not > care for Walker Percy because he was a 'homophobe'. In the many bios, > interviews and stories I have heard and read about WP's life -I have > never > heard or read anything about his position on homosexuals. Is he > mistaken? > > Will Parish > > > -- > An archive of all list discussion is available at > http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Percy-L mailing list > Percy-L at lists.ibiblio.org > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l > > > End of Percy-L Digest, Vol 28, Issue 4 > ************************************** > From rgeckert at yahoo.com Fri Jun 24 11:01:03 2005 From: rgeckert at yahoo.com (Robert Eckert) Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 08:01:03 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book Message-ID: <20050624150103.35531.qmail@web32205.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Dear List, Peter Kramer, the author of _Listening to Prozac_, recently published _Against Depression_. The last chapter of _LP_ is "The Message in the Capsule" and deal extensively with Percy. Kramer corresponded with Percy at some point. However, to me he gets Percy quite wrong. On p.265 of _AG_ Kramer writes: "...Percy's position blurs distinctions we might want to make. It overstates the case only slightly to say that for Percy, there is no difference between treating epilepsy and treating alienation. Both are best approached via faith and revelation, not technology." It amazes me that Kramer could have read Percy's nonfiction, which he states he has (e-mail), and miss Percy's use of the Dyadic/Triadic distinction, especially: "I can even visualize the hospital of the future in which the first signs the patient sees in the corridor do not read INTERNAL MEDICINE, SURGERY, OB-GYN, DERMATOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY UPSTAIRS, but rather two big signs just inside the front door, one pointing left, one right (I won't say which is which), but one reading DYADIC DISORDERS; the other, TRIADIC DISORDERS." To Percy, the distinction is so profound that he feels the very architecture of the hospitals of the future could be based upon it! It is a shame that Kramer has broadly disseminated such a profound and fundamental misreading of Percy's work. Robert Eckert Rochester, New York --------------------------------- Yahoo! Sports Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From juliorivas at gmail.com Fri Jun 24 12:35:50 2005 From: juliorivas at gmail.com (J Rivas-Pita) Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 12:35:50 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book In-Reply-To: <20050624150103.35531.qmail@web32205.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050624150103.35531.qmail@web32205.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Dear Robert, In case you could spare a few minutes, could you tell us something more on the last quote from Percy, "I can even visualize..."? Is the essay (or interview) it comes from available online? Many thanks and all best wishes, Julio On 6/24/05, Robert Eckert wrote: > > Dear List, > > Peter Kramer, the author of _Listening to Prozac_, recently published > _Against Depression_. > > The last chapter of _LP_ is "The Message in the Capsule" and deal > extensively with Percy. Kramer corresponded with Percy at some point. > > However, to me he gets Percy quite wrong. > > On p.265 of _AG_ Kramer writes: > > "...Percy's position blurs distinctions we might want to make. It overstates > the case only slightly to say that for Percy, there is no difference between > treating epilepsy and treating > alienation. Both are best approached via faith and revelation, not > technology." > > It amazes me that Kramer could have read Percy's nonfiction, which he states > he has (e-mail), and miss Percy's use of the Dyadic/Triadic distinction, > especially: > > "I can even visualize the hospital of the future in which the first signs > the patient sees in the corridor do not read INTERNAL MEDICINE, SURGERY, > OB-GYN, DERMATOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY UPSTAIRS, but rather two big signs just > inside the front door, one pointing left, one right (I won't say which is > which), but one reading DYADIC DISORDERS; the other, TRIADIC DISORDERS." > > To Percy, the distinction is so profound that he feels the very architecture > of the hospitals of the future could be based upon it! > > It is a shame that Kramer has broadly disseminated such a profound and > fundamental misreading of Percy's work. > > Robert Eckert > Rochester, New York > > > ________________________________ > Yahoo! Sports > Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football > > > -- > An archive of all list discussion is available at > http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > > > -- Be Happy! (Fr. Benito Ballesteros, OSB, 1924-1996) S? feliz! (P. Benito Ballesteros, OSB, 1924-1996) From rgeckert at yahoo.com Fri Jun 24 15:26:50 2005 From: rgeckert at yahoo.com (Robert Eckert) Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 12:26:50 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20050624192650.95407.qmail@web32210.mail.mud.yahoo.com> It is from "Is a Theory of Man Possible" which is in _Signposts in a Strange Land_. I Kramer is a formidable writer who has pushed me some toward scientism. It is well that one such as he takes on depression. He also has an admirable way of questioning his own conclusions. I just wish he did Percy's nonfiction more justice. Years ago I worked on a psychiatric treatment team in a residential treatment facility and acquired a deep distrust of those who use psychotropic meds. Of course a kid is going to "behave" better if you drug them into a zombie state, which was common and is only more common throughout that field today. But, if the alternative is restraints then the lesser evil is not hard to pick. Reordering the environment to be less disturbing is no easy task, if not impossible. [Disturbed people come from disturbing environments]. But, the move now to introduce Prozac into third world countries is frightening--Soma, anyone? J Rivas-Pita wrote: Dear Robert, In case you could spare a few minutes, could you tell us something more on the last quote from Percy, "I can even visualize..."? Is the essay (or interview) it comes from available online? Many thanks and all best wishes, Julio On 6/24/05, Robert Eckert wrote: > > Dear List, > > Peter Kramer, the author of _Listening to Prozac_, recently published > _Against Depression_. > > The last chapter of _LP_ is "The Message in the Capsule" and deal > extensively with Percy. Kramer corresponded with Percy at some point. > > However, to me he gets Percy quite wrong. > > On p.265 of _AG_ Kramer writes: > > "...Percy's position blurs distinctions we might want to make. It overstates > the case only slightly to say that for Percy, there is no difference between > treating epilepsy and treating > alienation. Both are best approached via faith and revelation, not > technology." > > It amazes me that Kramer could have read Percy's nonfiction, which he states > he has (e-mail), and miss Percy's use of the Dyadic/Triadic distinction, > especially: > > "I can even visualize the hospital of the future in which the first signs > the patient sees in the corridor do not read INTERNAL MEDICINE, SURGERY, > OB-GYN, DERMATOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY UPSTAIRS, but rather two big signs just > inside the front door, one pointing left, one right (I won't say which is > which), but one reading DYADIC DISORDERS; the other, TRIADIC DISORDERS." > > To Percy, the distinction is so profound that he feels the very architecture > of the hospitals of the future could be based upon it! > > It is a shame that Kramer has broadly disseminated such a profound and > fundamental misreading of Percy's work. > > Robert Eckert > Rochester, New York > > > ________________________________ > Yahoo! Sports > Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football > > > -- > An archive of all list discussion is available at > http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > > > -- Be Happy! (Fr. Benito Ballesteros, OSB, 1924-1996) S? feliz! (P. Benito Ballesteros, OSB, 1924-1996) -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy --------------------------------- Discover Yahoo! Get on-the-go sports scores, stock quotes, news & more. Check it out! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Robert_Pauley at oxy.com Fri Jun 24 18:26:30 2005 From: Robert_Pauley at oxy.com (Robert_Pauley at oxy.com) Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 15:26:30 -0700 Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book Message-ID: <7706697134D5C94781B111C8C298D674419FEA@olawexc8.naoxy.com> "However, to me he gets Percy quite wrong." Everybody does. Percy is the most "gotten wrong" writer in American letters. With the exception of this fine list, of course. -----Original Message----- From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Robert Eckert Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 8:01 AM To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book Dear List, Peter Kramer, the author of _Listening to Prozac_, recently published _Against Depression_. The last chapter of _LP_ is "The Message in the Capsule" and deal extensively with Percy. Kramer corresponded with Percy at some point. However, to me he gets Percy quite wrong. On p.265 of _AG_ Kramer writes: "...Percy's position blurs distinctions we might want to make. It overstates the case only slightly to say that for Percy, there is no difference between treating epilepsy and treating alienation. Both are best approached via faith and revelation, not technology." It amazes me that Kramer could have read Percy's nonfiction, which he states he has (e-mail), and miss Percy's use of the Dyadic/Triadic distinction, especially: "I can even visualize the hospital of the future in which the first signs the patient sees in the corridor do not read INTERNAL MEDICINE, SURGERY, OB-GYN, DERMATOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY UPSTAIRS, but rather two big signs just inside the front door, one pointing left, one right (I won't say which is which), but one reading DYADIC DISORDERS; the other, TRIADIC DISORDERS." To Percy, the distinction is so profound that he feels the very architecture of the hospitals of the future could be based upon it! It is a shame that Kramer has broadly disseminated such a profound and fundamental misreading of Percy's work. Robert Eckert Rochester, New York ________________________________ Yahoo! Sports Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From BMclaughlin at nazarene.org Sat Jun 25 13:16:06 2005 From: BMclaughlin at nazarene.org (Bryon McLaughlin) Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 12:16:06 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book Message-ID: If Percy is often "gotten wrong," can someone on the list explain what areas is often gotten wrong, and possibly more importantly, WHY? Why is he gotten wrong? Is it that he is hard to understand, that he was at time cryptic? Why? Thanks. ________________________________ From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of Robert_Pauley at oxy.com Sent: Fri 6/24/2005 5:26 PM To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: RE: [percy-l] Kramer's new book "However, to me he gets Percy quite wrong." Everybody does. Percy is the most "gotten wrong" writer in American letters. With the exception of this fine list, of course. -----Original Message----- From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Robert Eckert Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 8:01 AM To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book Dear List, Peter Kramer, the author of _Listening to Prozac_, recently published _Against Depression_. The last chapter of _LP_ is "The Message in the Capsule" and deal extensively with Percy. Kramer corresponded with Percy at some point. However, to me he gets Percy quite wrong. On p.265 of _AG_ Kramer writes: "...Percy's position blurs distinctions we might want to make. It overstates the case only slightly to say that for Percy, there is no difference between treating epilepsy and treating alienation. Both are best approached via faith and revelation, not technology." It amazes me that Kramer could have read Percy's nonfiction, which he states he has (e-mail), and miss Percy's use of the Dyadic/Triadic distinction, especially: "I can even visualize the hospital of the future in which the first signs the patient sees in the corridor do not read INTERNAL MEDICINE, SURGERY, OB-GYN, DERMATOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY UPSTAIRS, but rather two big signs just inside the front door, one pointing left, one right (I won't say which is which), but one reading DYADIC DISORDERS; the other, TRIADIC DISORDERS." To Percy, the distinction is so profound that he feels the very architecture of the hospitals of the future could be based upon it! It is a shame that Kramer has broadly disseminated such a profound and fundamental misreading of Percy's work. Robert Eckert Rochester, New York ________________________________ Yahoo! Sports Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football From juliorivas at gmail.com Sat Jun 25 14:16:07 2005 From: juliorivas at gmail.com (J Rivas-Pita) Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 14:16:07 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Let me venture a possible answer. Percy is "gotten wrong" by people who'd rather get him wrong than having to realize that they lead a wrong life -an unaunthentic life. In kirkergaardian terms, familiar to most on this list, when you realize that you lead a wrong life you have but two choices left: repent and change (I'm not meaning those words in their televangelistic meaning of course) or make a decision to go the wrong way fully aware, taking responsability for your choice. Much more comfortable to get Percy (or life) wrong... Regards, Julio On 6/25/05, Bryon McLaughlin wrote: > If Percy is often "gotten wrong," can someone on the list explain what areas is often gotten wrong, and possibly more importantly, WHY? Why is he gotten wrong? Is it that he is hard to understand, that he was at time cryptic? Why? Thanks. > > ________________________________ > > From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of Robert_Pauley at oxy.com > Sent: Fri 6/24/2005 5:26 PM > To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org > Subject: RE: [percy-l] Kramer's new book > > > "However, to me he gets Percy quite wrong." > > Everybody does. Percy is the most "gotten wrong" writer in American letters. With the exception of this fine list, of course. > > -----Original Message----- > From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Robert Eckert > Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 8:01 AM > To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org > Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book > > > Dear List, > > Peter Kramer, the author of _Listening to Prozac_, recently published _Against Depression_. > > The last chapter of _LP_ is "The Message in the Capsule" and deal extensively with Percy. Kramer corresponded with Percy at some point. > > However, to me he gets Percy quite wrong. > > On p.265 of _AG_ Kramer writes: > > "...Percy's position blurs distinctions we might want to make. It overstates the case only slightly to say that for Percy, there is no difference between treating epilepsy and treating > alienation. Both are best approached via faith and revelation, not technology." > > It amazes me that Kramer could have read Percy's nonfiction, which he states he has (e-mail), and miss Percy's use of the Dyadic/Triadic distinction, especially: > > "I can even visualize the hospital of the future in which the first signs the patient sees in the corridor do not read INTERNAL MEDICINE, SURGERY, OB-GYN, DERMATOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY UPSTAIRS, but rather two big signs just inside the front door, one pointing left, one right (I won't say which is which), but one reading DYADIC DISORDERS; the other, TRIADIC DISORDERS." > > To Percy, the distinction is so profound that he feels the very architecture of the hospitals of the future could be based upon it! > > It is a shame that Kramer has broadly disseminated such a profound and fundamental misreading of Percy's work. > > Robert Eckert > Rochester, New York > > > > ________________________________ > > Yahoo! Sports > Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football > > -- > An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > -- Be Happy! (Fr. Benito Ballesteros, OSB, 1924-1996) S? feliz! (P. Benito Ballesteros, OSB, 1924-1996) From rgeckert at yahoo.com Sun Jun 26 00:33:01 2005 From: rgeckert at yahoo.com (Robert Eckert) Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 21:33:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20050626043301.53628.qmail@web32211.mail.mud.yahoo.com> His use of Peirce's ontology is where he is often gotten wrong. "A Semiotic Primer of the Self" in _Lost in the Cosmos_ is a good introduction. As to why, the subject matter of metaphysics is difficult so any description of it is necessarily going to be difficult. Robert Eckert Bryon McLaughlin wrote: If Percy is often "gotten wrong," can someone on the list explain what areas is often gotten wrong, and possibly more importantly, WHY? Why is he gotten wrong? Is it that he is hard to understand, that he was at time cryptic? Why? Thanks. ________________________________ From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of Robert_Pauley at oxy.com Sent: Fri 6/24/2005 5:26 PM To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: RE: [percy-l] Kramer's new book "However, to me he gets Percy quite wrong." Everybody does. Percy is the most "gotten wrong" writer in American letters. With the exception of this fine list, of course. -----Original Message----- From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Robert Eckert Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 8:01 AM To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book Dear List, Peter Kramer, the author of _Listening to Prozac_, recently published _Against Depression_. The last chapter of _LP_ is "The Message in the Capsule" and deal extensively with Percy. Kramer corresponded with Percy at some point. However, to me he gets Percy quite wrong. On p.265 of _AG_ Kramer writes: "...Percy's position blurs distinctions we might want to make. It overstates the case only slightly to say that for Percy, there is no difference between treating epilepsy and treating alienation. Both are best approached via faith and revelation, not technology." It amazes me that Kramer could have read Percy's nonfiction, which he states he has (e-mail), and miss Percy's use of the Dyadic/Triadic distinction, especially: "I can even visualize the hospital of the future in which the first signs the patient sees in the corridor do not read INTERNAL MEDICINE, SURGERY, OB-GYN, DERMATOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY UPSTAIRS, but rather two big signs just inside the front door, one pointing left, one right (I won't say which is which), but one reading DYADIC DISORDERS; the other, TRIADIC DISORDERS." To Percy, the distinction is so profound that he feels the very architecture of the hospitals of the future could be based upon it! It is a shame that Kramer has broadly disseminated such a profound and fundamental misreading of Percy's work. Robert Eckert Rochester, New York ________________________________ Yahoo! Sports Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From juliorivas at gmail.com Sun Jun 26 08:52:15 2005 From: juliorivas at gmail.com (J Rivas-Pita) Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 08:52:15 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] Countdown to a Meltdown Message-ID: Dear friends, This is a link to a quite enlightening exercise in futurology by The Atlantic's James Fallows: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200507/fallows I have the whole story in case any of you wants to read it -the link gives only an abstract, unless you are a subscriber. Have a nice Sunday! Julio -- Be Happy! (Fr. Benito Ballesteros, OSB, 1924-1996) S? feliz! (P. Benito Ballesteros, OSB, 1924-1996) From Robert_Pauley at oxy.com Mon Jun 27 22:00:54 2005 From: Robert_Pauley at oxy.com (Robert_Pauley at oxy.com) Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 19:00:54 -0700 Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book Message-ID: <7706697134D5C94781B111C8C298D674419FEB@olawexc8.naoxy.com> When I posited this idea I was thinking more about the list of annoying pop culture figures I've heard fatuously praise Percy (Bruce Springsteen, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Moby) than serious literary critics, who no one reads anyway. Percy as a darling of rich and rather sanctimonious left-leaning artists is kind of amusing. But I agree with Julio. What's interesting though is how many people who gush over Percy also, it would appear at least from the transcripts of their enthusiasm, get him wrong or inadequately. It is one thing to put down a Percy book before finishing it or dismiss him once you're done with it for the reasons of existential discomfort Julio cites, but it is another to embrace him passionately and still miss the point. An addition to the examples above would be Robert Coles. Percy, I believe, at one point, expressed a certain mild bewilderment at Coles' failure to grasp what he was about. I believe he once said (in his correspondence with Foote) something to the effect that Coles never understood his occasional impulse to tie a weighted bucket around his neck and throw himself into the bayou creek behind his house. But maybe somehow this paradox of interpretation is bound up in the paradox of expression. Percy's paradox, e.g., the "upside-downness" of modern life, feeling bad in so-called good environments, the assault of the "ravenous particles" of everydayness (as in Will Barrett's "seizure" at the Museum and Sutter Vaught's post-coital suicide attempt in the motel room), the deaths-head of despair that attends family holiday celebrations (the "Norman Rockwell paradox") and all the other many permutations of this idea may be hard to get. A lot of the people I've heard praising Percy talk more about his "humanism" than the dark involutions and ironies that lead him there, or to his splendid skewering of both the "good liberal life" with its zeal of compassion and good intentions as well as the country-club Republican life with its empty zeal of golf-course banter and GE Medallion homes. It's not as if the critiques I read are malicious or grossly wrong. They simply seem to miss a hemisphere of Percy's world. So be it. I am reminded of a moment in Jean Renoir's film "Grand Illusion" when the German commandant overhears a pseudo-intellectual prisoner express excited analytical praise for Pindar. The commandant shakes his head. "Poor Pindar," he mutters, and walks on. But Pindar will survive and so will Percy. (Of course, perhaps they would say I'm the one getting him wrong) -----Original Message----- From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of J Rivas-Pita Sent: Saturday, June 25, 2005 11:16 AM To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Subject: Re: [percy-l] Kramer's new book Let me venture a possible answer. Percy is "gotten wrong" by people who'd rather get him wrong than having to realize that they lead a wrong life -an unaunthentic life. In kirkergaardian terms, familiar to most on this list, when you realize that you lead a wrong life you have but two choices left: repent and change (I'm not meaning those words in their televangelistic meaning of course) or make a decision to go the wrong way fully aware, taking responsability for your choice. Much more comfortable to get Percy (or life) wrong... Regards, Julio On 6/25/05, Bryon McLaughlin wrote: > If Percy is often "gotten wrong," can someone on the list explain what areas is often gotten wrong, and possibly more importantly, WHY? Why is he gotten wrong? Is it that he is hard to understand, that he was at time cryptic? Why? Thanks. > > ________________________________ > > From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of Robert_Pauley at oxy.com > Sent: Fri 6/24/2005 5:26 PM > To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org > Subject: RE: [percy-l] Kramer's new book > > > "However, to me he gets Percy quite wrong." > > Everybody does. Percy is the most "gotten wrong" writer in American letters. With the exception of this fine list, of course. > > -----Original Message----- > From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Robert Eckert > Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 8:01 AM > To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org > Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book > > > Dear List, > > Peter Kramer, the author of _Listening to Prozac_, recently published _Against Depression_. > > The last chapter of _LP_ is "The Message in the Capsule" and deal extensively with Percy. Kramer corresponded with Percy at some point. > > However, to me he gets Percy quite wrong. > > On p.265 of _AG_ Kramer writes: > > "...Percy's position blurs distinctions we might want to make. It overstates the case only slightly to say that for Percy, there is no difference between treating epilepsy and treating > alienation. Both are best approached via faith and revelation, not technology." > > It amazes me that Kramer could have read Percy's nonfiction, which he states he has (e-mail), and miss Percy's use of the Dyadic/Triadic distinction, especially: > > "I can even visualize the hospital of the future in which the first signs the patient sees in the corridor do not read INTERNAL MEDICINE, SURGERY, OB-GYN, DERMATOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY UPSTAIRS, but rather two big signs just inside the front door, one pointing left, one right (I won't say which is which), but one reading DYADIC DISORDERS; the other, TRIADIC DISORDERS." > > To Percy, the distinction is so profound that he feels the very architecture of the hospitals of the future could be based upon it! > > It is a shame that Kramer has broadly disseminated such a profound and fundamental misreading of Percy's work. > > Robert Eckert > Rochester, New York > > > > ________________________________ > > Yahoo! Sports > Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football > > -- > An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ > > Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy > -- Be Happy! (Fr. Benito Ballesteros, OSB, 1924-1996) S? feliz! (P. Benito Ballesteros, OSB, 1924-1996) -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy From bluegrassboy913 at yahoo.com Tue Jun 28 12:30:00 2005 From: bluegrassboy913 at yahoo.com (Aaron Keith Harris) Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 09:30:00 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book In-Reply-To: <7706697134D5C94781B111C8C298D674419FEB@olawexc8.naoxy.com> Message-ID: <20050628163000.91033.qmail@web53507.mail.yahoo.com> I've not yet read Kramer's "Against Depression," though I plan to, and was wondering if there were any books/resources, including personal testimony, of people who have conquered depression, instead of merely trying to cope with it. --------------------------------- Yahoo! Sports Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rgeckert at yahoo.com Tue Jun 28 14:12:20 2005 From: rgeckert at yahoo.com (Robert Eckert) Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 11:12:20 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [percy-l] Kramer's new book In-Reply-To: <20050628163000.91033.qmail@web53507.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20050628181220.89620.qmail@web32201.mail.mud.yahoo.com> _In the Jaws of the Black Dogs: A Memior of Depression_ by John Bently Mays comes to mind. Robert Eckert "You never get over it, it just becomes part of you." Aaron Keith Harris wrote: I've not yet read Kramer's "Against Depression," though I plan to, and was wondering if there were any books/resources, including personal testimony, of people who have conquered depression, instead of merely trying to cope with it. --------------------------------- Yahoo! Sports Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kterrell at sheastokes.com Tue Jun 28 14:22:38 2005 From: kterrell at sheastokes.com (Karl M. Terrell) Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:22:38 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] Shelby Foote Message-ID: <7A5E4A01592B87438BF92B2CC0CA9DC20F0A80@at01.sheamcnitt.com> * * This communication is CONFIDENTIAL * * Shelby Foote has passed away. -----Original Message----- From: Robert Eckert [mailto:rgeckert at yahoo.com] Sent: Tue Jun 28 11:12:34 2005 To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Subject: Re: [percy-l] Kramer's new book _In the Jaws of the Black Dogs: A Memior of Depression_ by John Bently Mays comes to mind. Robert Eckert "You never get over it, it just becomes part of you." Aaron Keith Harris wrote: I've not yet read Kramer's "Against Depression," though I plan to, and was wondering if there were any books/resources, including personal testimony, of people who have conquered depression, instead of merely trying to cope with it. --------------------------------- Yahoo! Sports Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. ************************************************************************************************ PRIVILEGED COMMUNICATION The information contained in this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is only for the use of the recipient(s) named above. This message, and its attachments, may contain information that falls under the attorney-client and/or work product privileges. Receipt of this message by an unintended recipient does not constitute a waiver by the sender of any and all applicable privileges. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail and any attachments, or an agent responsible for delivering it to the intended recipients, you are hereby notified that any use, dissemination, distribution, downloading, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately by e-mail, permanently delete the e-mail and any attachments immediately, and destroy all copies. ************************************************************************************************ From JHForest at cs.com Wed Jun 29 05:30:39 2005 From: JHForest at cs.com (JHForest at cs.com) Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 05:30:39 EDT Subject: [percy-l] Civil War historian Shelby Foote dies Message-ID: <1f5.ca28ed0.2ff3c43f@cs.com> Associated Press / 29 June 2005 Civil War historian Shelby Foote dies By Woody Baird Memphis, Tenn. - With his pointy gray beard, soft Southern accent and gentlemanly carriage, Shelby Foote seemed to have stepped straight out of a Mathew Brady photograph. It was that style, coupled with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Civil War, that turned him into a national celebrity after he lent his observations on the conflict for Ken Burns' 1990 "Civil War" series. "We had planned to film 30 or 40 historians. Shelby Foote was in it 89 times or something like that. The next closest was seven or eight times," Burns said. Foote, who wrote a three-volume history of the Civil War and six novels before the Burns documentary, was remembered Tuesday as a gifted storyteller. He died Monday night at 88. "He had a gift for presenting vivid portraits of personalities, from privates in the ranks to generals and politicians. And he had a gift for character, for the apt quotation, for the dramatic event, for the story behind the story," said James M. McPherson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War historian. "He could also write a crackling good narrative of a campaign or a battle." Though a native Southerner, Foote did not favor the South in his history or novels and was not counted among those Southern historians who regard the Civil War as the great Lost Cause. He publicly criticized segregationist politicians and abruptly abandoned a move to the Alabama coast in the 1960s because of the racist attitudes he found there. "He was a Southerner of great intellect who took up the issue of the Civil War as a writer with huge sanity and sympathy," said Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford, a friend and fellow Mississippi native. Early in his career, Foote took up the habit of writing by hand with an old-fashioned dipped pen, and he continued that practice throughout his life. Foote said writing by hand helped him slow down to a manageable pace and was more personal than using a typewriter. Foote was born Nov. 7, 1916, in Greenville, Miss., a small Delta town with a literary bent. Walker Percy was a boyhood and lifelong friend, and Foote, as a young man, served as a "jackleg reporter" for the crusading editor Hodding Carter on The Delta Star. As a young man, Foote got to know William Faulkner. Foote attended the University of North Carolina for two years and served in World War II, though he never saw combat. After the war, he went back to Greenville to write commercials for a radio station. "Then I sold my first story to the Saturday Evening Post. I quit my job and haven't had another one since," he said. His first novel, "Tournament," was started before the war and published in 1949. Then came "Follow Me Down" in 1950, "Love in a Dry Season" in 1951, "Shiloh" in 1952 and "Jordan County" in 1954. That same year, Random House asked him to write a single-volume history of the Civil War. He took the job, but it grew into a three-volume, 3,000-page project finally finished in 1974. In 1999, the Modern Library ranked that work, "The Civil War: A Narrative," as No. 15 on its list of the century's 100 best English-language works of nonfiction. "Narrative history is the kind that comes closest to telling the truth. You can never get to the truth, but that's your goal," Foote once said. His final novel, "September, September," published in 1978, tells the story of an ignorant white couple who kidnap the son of a rich black businessman in the 1950s. It became the basis for a TV move starring fellow Memphis resident Cybill Shepherd. After Burns' 11-hour PBS series, Foote would say that being a celebrity made him uneasy, and he worried it might detract from the seriousness of his work. "This Civil War stuff is driving me crazy. I thought I had my discharge," he told the AP in 1990. "People keep wanting me to come somewhere and speak and I enjoy it. But I disapprove of it." In addition to his wife, Gwyn, he is survived by a daughter, Margaret Shelby, and a son, Huger Lee. A graveside service is planned in Memphis on Thursday. ON THE NET PBS: http://www.pbs.org/civilwar * * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karey at kareyperkins.com Wed Jun 29 21:42:37 2005 From: karey at kareyperkins.com (Karey) Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 21:42:37 -0400 Subject: [percy-l] Are there any WP events or news? References: Message-ID: <004a01c57d14$ff321f60$0301000a@220acadf9550KP> Was Uncle Will homosexual? I seem to recall something along those lines - not sure where, if it was from this list or a bio or some such. He never married. In that case, Percy would never have been "homophobe," though he was, as evidenced in his fiction, sexually conservative and definitely had some "madonna-whore" complex in him (evident in Tolson's bio as well as Percy's fiction). But, not uncommon in most southern men, so one can't blame him for that. KP ----- Original Message ----- From: William Parish To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 11:11 PM Subject: [percy-l] Are there any WP events or news? Dear Friends, I was wondering if anyone knows of any books or events planned this year that are Percy-related. Also, a retired professor friend of mine recently told me that he did not care for Walker Percy because he was a 'homophobe'. In the many bios, interviews and stories I have heard and read about WP's life -I have never heard or read anything about his position on homosexuals. Is he mistaken? Will Parish -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ 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 Wed Jun 29 23:06:18 2005 From: hpmills3 at austin.rr.com (Henry Mills) Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 22:06:18 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] Fwd: Shelby Foote biography Message-ID: From: EHeaton405 at aol.com Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 05:26:18 EDT To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: [percy-l] Shelby Foote biography Did Shelby Foote teach at Princeton circa 1960? I am pretty sure that I interviewed him on campus at that time. Thaks very much for any information you can provide. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From JHForest at cs.com Thu Jun 30 04:26:46 2005 From: JHForest at cs.com (JHForest at cs.com) Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 04:26:46 EDT Subject: [percy-l] Shelby Foote Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/2005 5:05:31 AM Romance Daylight Time, hpmills3 at austin.rr.com writes: > Did Shelby Foote teach at Princeton circa 1960? I am pretty sure that I > interviewed him on campus at that time. Here's the obit from the NY Times. No mention of his ever teaching at Princeton. Jim Forest * * * New York Times / www.nytimes.com / June 29, 2005 Shelby Foote, Historian and Novelist, Dies at 88 By Douglas Martin Shelby Foote, the historian whose incisive, seasoned commentary - delivered in a drawl so mellifluous that one critic called it "molasses over hominy" - evoked the Civil War for millions in the 11-hour PBS documentary in 1990, died on Monday at a Memphis hospital He was 88 and lived in Memphis. His death was reported by his wife, Gwyn, The Associated Press said. Mr. Foote's 89 cameo appearances in Ken Burns's series "The Civil War" were informed by his own three-volume history of the war, two decades in the making, that blended his practiced novelist's touch with punctilious, but defiantly unfootnoted research. His mission was to tell what he considered America's biggest story as a vast, finely detailed, deeply human narrative. He could focus on broad shifts in strategy or on solitary moments of poignancy, like the tearful but still proud Robert E. Lee picking his way through the ranks of his vanquished army to surrender. "He made the war real for us," Mr. Burns said. His goal was to emulate the authoritative narrative voice of the 18th-century British historian Edward Gibbon. Mr. Foote's books carried a great plot, and as academic historians increasingly saw themselves as social scientists armed with the tools of quantitative analysis, he turned to Shakespeare for metaphors and to colloquialisms for literary impact. "What sort of document was this anyhow?" he wrote of the Emancipation Proclamation, before going on to discuss it. Facts, Mr. Foote said, are the bare bones from which truth is made. Truth, in his view, embraced sympathy, paradox and irony, and was attained only through true art. "A fact is not a truth until you love it," he said. Critics suggested that Mr. Foote played down the economic, intellectual and political causes of the Civil War. Some said that Mr. Foote may have played down slavery so that Southern soldiers would seem worthy heroes in the epic battles he so stirringly chronicled. Mr. Foote is survived by his third wife, the former Gwyn Rainer, whom he married in 1956, and two children, Margaret Shelby and Huger Lee. Shelby Foote was born on Nov. 17, 1916, in Greenville, Miss., the cultural center of the Mississippi Delta. He was the only child of Shelby Dade Foote, a local businessman, whose roots ran deep in American history, and Lillian Rosenstock Foote. Among the Shelby-Foote direct ancestors was Isaac Shelby, a frontier leader in the Revolution and the first governor of Kentucky. Mr. Foote's great-grandfather, Capt. Hezekiah William Foote, a slave owner, fought for the Confederacy at Shiloh (where, he reported, his saber was bent and his horse's tail was shot off) and later became a judge. Less respectable was his grandfather, Huger Lee Foote, a planter who gambled away what would have been a substantial inheritance. Under the influence of William Alexander Percy, a local author and the uncle of young Shelby's best friend, Walker Percy, the boy took to books, discovering abiding favorites from Shakespeare to Dickens. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he wrote short stories and poems for the campus literary magazine before dropping out in 1937 without taking a degree. But he did find occasion, with Walker Percy, to visit William Faulkner in Oxford, Miss. The pair were cordially received. In 1940 Mr. Foote entered the United States Army and served as a battery captain of field artillery in Europe before his Army career ended abruptly in 1944, when he was caught sneaking off to Belfast, Ireland, to see a girlfriend. The Marine Corps recruited him, but the war ended, and in November 1945 he was discharged. He found odd jobs, including a stint as a reporter for The Delta Democrat Times, whose publisher, Hodding Carter, felt he spent too much office time writing fiction. In 1946 he sold his first short story to The Saturday Evening Post, and after rejections and rewrites he sold his first novel, "Tournament," to the Dial Press. Drawn from his own family history, the tale of a Delta planter who gambles away the family fortune was greeted, somewhat unoriginally, as a promising first novel. Not all critics felt that the promise was redeemed in the four novels, all set in the South, that followed. A New York Times reviewer wrote that "Follow Me Down" (1950), about a Mississippi farmer who murders a teenage girl, showed more virtuosity than depth, but a later reviewer had kind words for "Love in a Dry Season" (1951), a gritty Delta tale. "Shiloh," (1952), which became his best known novel, and a hint of his future achievements, offered an affecting account of the famous Civil War battle through the monologues of soldiers in the blue and the gray. And in 1954 came "Jordan County," seven Delta stories set in reverse chronological order, from 1950 to 1797. He wrote all these books in the garage behind his mother's house. His last major novel, "September, September," set in Little Rock, Ark., during the 1957 school-integration turmoil, appeared in 1978. In their six-decade friendship, Mr. Foote and Walker Percy exchanged scores of letters about their work. Mr. Foote, who was a few months the junior, played the mentor, but it was Percy who made the more impressive literary mark with his first novel, "The Moviegoer," which won a National Book Award in 1962. Mr. Foote was at his friend's bedside at his death in New Orleans in 1990. Mr. Foote's novels were treated respectfully: Southern literary journals carried long analyses, with at least one essayist faulting the literary establishment for its shameful neglect of his achievement, and French critics found resemblances in his experiments with time and points of view between the Foote world of Jordan County and William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County). But it was nonfiction that brought him widespread attention. What began as a Random House proposal for a short account of the Civil War as its centennial approached turned into an opus. Writing in an ornate script with an old-style dip pen in his rambling magnolia-shaded house in Memphis, where the Footes had moved in 1953, he produced the 2,934-page, three-volume, 1.5 million-word military history, "The Civil War: A Narrative." At 500 to 600 words a day, with times out to visit battlefields on the anniversaries of the battles, it took him 20 years. The volumes appeared between 1958 and 1974. Carrying readers from Fort Sumter to Appomattox, the work was greeted by most reviewers in the spirit of the New York Times Book Review contributor who called it "a remarkable achievement, prodigiously researched, vigorous, detailed, absorbing." Others used words like "monumental," "comprehensive," and "even-handed." In The New York Review of Books, C. Vann Woodward complimented the author on capturing the "intimacy of combat" with his "impressive narrative gifts and dramatic purposes." Responding to the observation that it took him five times as long to write the war as its participants took to fight it, Mr. Foote pointed out that "there were a good many more of them than there was of me." Inspired by the works of Tacitus, Thucydides, Gibbon and, more surprising, Marcel Proust, Mr. Foote's own specially prized writer for prose style, psychological insight and the sweep of his vision, he created a history as written by a novelist, with due bows to a line that included Tolstoy, Stendhal and Stephen Crane. In treating North and South evenhandedly and covering the campaigns in both east and west, Mr. Foote accepted the historian's standards of evidence without the baggage of footnotes, for which he was faulted by some academics, who also criticized his sketchy attention to politics, economics and diplomacy. But most were grateful. Louis D. Rubin Jr. summed up in The New Republic: "It is a model of what military history can be." Among the most vivid scenes was the description of Gen. Robert E. Lee's slow ride after his surrender: "Grief brought a sort of mass relaxation that let Traveller [Lee's horse] proceed, and as he moved through the press of soldiers, bearing the gray commander on his back, they reached out to touch both horse and rider, withers and knees, flanks and thighs, in expression of their affection." The work brought its author three Guggenheim Fellowships, a Ford Foundation grant and considerably more in royalties than any of his novels had earned, and he was admitted to a distinguished company of Civil War historians that included Bruce Catton, Allan Nevins and Douglas Southall Freeman. "They call you Gibbon and you know that's silly," he told an interviewer. "But if they don't call you Gibbon you get a feeling they're holding back." Still, it remained for television to carry him to fame. In 1985 Ken Burns, planning his television documentary on the war, called on Mr. Foote, who had been recommended by his fellow Southern writer Robert Penn Warren, to be a paid consultant. The choice of an accomplished stylist steeped in Southern lore was made to order, and Mr. Foote readily established himself as the viewers' surrogate. The series, a smash hit for public broadcasting, attracted an audience of 14 million over five nights and turned Mr. Foote into a prime-time star. His fans learned that he was a pipe smoker who loved Mozart and Vermeer and Proust (he said he had read "Remembrance of Things Past" from start to finish nine times) and drank bourbon outdoors and scotch indoors. His dog, Booker, an akita, dozed nearby as he wrote. At one point Mr. Foote was getting 20 calls a day from admirers who just wanted to have him over for dinner. He took a page from Ulysses S. Grant who, in reply to the remark "You must get lots of mail," said, "Not nearly so much as I did when I answered it all." Mr. Foote stopped writing back. * * * Walter Goodman, who died in 2002, contributed reporting and analysis for this article. * * * Jim & Nancy Forest Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands Jim's e-mail: jhforest at cs.com (alternative address: jhforest at gmail.com) Nancy's e-mail: forestflier at cs.com Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org Jim & Nancy Forest web site: http://incommunion.org/forest-flier/ photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/ * * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cstuartchapman at yahoo.com Thu Jun 30 07:22:20 2005 From: cstuartchapman at yahoo.com (Stuart Chapman) Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 04:22:20 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [percy-l] Shelby Foote In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20050630112220.68018.qmail@web40504.mail.yahoo.com> As a Foote biographer, I never came across any mention that he even set foot on the Princeton campus. But he did do a short artist-in-residence type thing around that time at UVA. Stuart Chapman JHForest at cs.com wrote: In a message dated 6/30/2005 5:05:31 AM Romance Daylight Time, hpmills3 at austin.rr.com writes: Did Shelby Foote teach at Princeton circa 1960? I am pretty sure that I interviewed him on campus at that time. Here's the obit from the NY Times. No mention of his ever teaching at Princeton. Jim Forest * * * New York Times / www.nytimes.com / June 29, 2005 Shelby Foote, Historian and Novelist, Dies at 88 By Douglas Martin Shelby Foote, the historian whose incisive, seasoned commentary - delivered in a drawl so mellifluous that one critic called it "molasses over hominy" - evoked the Civil War for millions in the 11-hour PBS documentary in 1990, died on Monday at a Memphis hospital He was 88 and lived in Memphis. His death was reported by his wife, Gwyn, The Associated Press said. Mr. Foote's 89 cameo appearances in Ken Burns's series "The Civil War" were informed by his own three-volume history of the war, two decades in the making, that blended his practiced novelist's touch with punctilious, but defiantly unfootnoted research. His mission was to tell what he considered America's biggest story as a vast, finely detailed, deeply human narrative. He could focus on broad shifts in strategy or on solitary moments of poignancy, like the tearful but still proud Robert E. Lee picking his way through the ranks of his vanquished army to surrender. "He made the war real for us," Mr. Burns said. His goal was to emulate the authoritative narrative voice of the 18th-century British historian Edward Gibbon. Mr. Foote's books carried a great plot, and as academic historians increasingly saw themselves as social scientists armed with the tools of quantitative analysis, he turned to Shakespeare for metaphors and to colloquialisms for literary impact. "What sort of document was this anyhow?" he wrote of the Emancipation Proclamation, before going on to discuss it. Facts, Mr. Foote said, are the bare bones from which truth is made. Truth, in his view, embraced sympathy, paradox and irony, and was attained only through true art. "A fact is not a truth until you love it," he said. Critics suggested that Mr. Foote played down the economic, intellectual and political causes of the Civil War. Some said that Mr. Foote may have played down slavery so that Southern soldiers would seem worthy heroes in the epic battles he so stirringly chronicled. Mr. Foote is survived by his third wife, the former Gwyn Rainer, whom he married in 1956, and two children, Margaret Shelby and Huger Lee. Shelby Foote was born on Nov. 17, 1916, in Greenville, Miss., the cultural center of the Mississippi Delta. He was the only child of Shelby Dade Foote, a local businessman, whose roots ran deep in American history, and Lillian Rosenstock Foote. Among the Shelby-Foote direct ancestors was Isaac Shelby, a frontier leader in the Revolution and the first governor of Kentucky. Mr. Foote's great-grandfather, Capt. Hezekiah William Foote, a slave owner, fought for the Confederacy at Shiloh (where, he reported, his saber was bent and his horse's tail was shot off) and later became a judge. Less respectable was his grandfather, Huger Lee Foote, a planter who gambled away what would have been a substantial inheritance. Under the influence of William Alexander Percy, a local author and the uncle of young Shelby's best friend, Walker Percy, the boy took to books, discovering abiding favorites from Shakespeare to Dickens. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he wrote short stories and poems for the campus literary magazine before dropping out in 1937 without taking a degree. But he did find occasion, with Walker Percy, to visit William Faulkner in Oxford, Miss. The pair were cordially received. In 1940 Mr. Foote entered the United States Army and served as a battery captain of field artillery in Europe before his Army career ended abruptly in 1944, when he was caught sneaking off to Belfast, Ireland, to see a girlfriend. The Marine Corps recruited him, but the war ended, and in November 1945 he was discharged. He found odd jobs, including a stint as a reporter for The Delta Democrat Times, whose publisher, Hodding Carter, felt he spent too much office time writing fiction. In 1946 he sold his first short story to The Saturday Evening Post, and after rejections and rewrites he sold his first novel, "Tournament," to the Dial Press. Drawn from his own family history, the tale of a Delta planter who gambles away the family fortune was greeted, somewhat unoriginally, as a promising first novel. Not all critics felt that the promise was redeemed in the four novels, all set in the South, that followed. A New York Times reviewer wrote that "Follow Me Down" (1950), about a Mississippi farmer who murders a teenage girl, showed more virtuosity than depth, but a later reviewer had kind words for "Love in a Dry Season" (1951), a gritty Delta tale. "Shiloh," (1952), which became his best known novel, and a hint of his future achievements, offered an affecting account of the famous Civil War battle through the monologues of soldiers in the blue and the gray. And in 1954 came "Jordan County," seven Delta stories set in reverse chronological order, from 1950 to 1797. He wrote all these books in the garage behind his mother's house. His last major novel, "September, September," set in Little Rock, Ark., during the 1957 school-integration turmoil, appeared in 1978. In their six-decade friendship, Mr. Foote and Walker Percy exchanged scores of letters about their work. Mr. Foote, who was a few months the junior, played the mentor, but it was Percy who made the more impressive literary mark with his first novel, "The Moviegoer," which won a National Book Award in 1962. Mr. Foote was at his friend's bedside at his death in New Orleans in 1990. Mr. Foote's novels were treated respectfully: Southern literary journals carried long analyses, with at least one essayist faulting the literary establishment for its shameful neglect of his achievement, and French critics found resemblances in his experiments with time and points of view between the Foote world of Jordan County and William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County). But it was nonfiction that brought him widespread attention. What began as a Random House proposal for a short account of the Civil War as its centennial approached turned into an opus. Writing in an ornate script with an old-style dip pen in his rambling magnolia-shaded house in Memphis, where the Footes had moved in 1953, he produced the 2,934-page, three-volume, 1.5 million-word military history, "The Civil War: A Narrative." At 500 to 600 words a day, with times out to visit battlefields on the anniversaries of the battles, it took him 20 years. The volumes appeared between 1958 and 1974. Carrying readers from Fort Sumter to Appomattox, the work was greeted by most reviewers in the spirit of the New York Times Book Review contributor who called it "a remarkable achievement, prodigiously researched, vigorous, detailed, absorbing." Others used words like "monumental," "comprehensive," and "even-handed." In The New York Review of Books, C. Vann Woodward complimented the author on capturing the "intimacy of combat" with his "impressive narrative gifts and dramatic purposes." Responding to the observation that it took him five times as long to write the war as its participants took to fight it, Mr. Foote pointed out that "there were a good many more of them than there was of me." Inspired by the works of Tacitus, Thucydides, Gibbon and, more surprising, Marcel Proust, Mr. Foote's own specially prized writer for prose style, psychological insight and the sweep of his vision, he created a history as written by a novelist, with due bows to a line that included Tolstoy, Stendhal and Stephen Crane. In treating North and South evenhandedly and covering the campaigns in both east and west, Mr. Foote accepted the historian's standards of evidence without the baggage of footnotes, for which he was faulted by some academics, who also criticized his sketchy attention to politics, economics and diplomacy. But most were grateful. Louis D. Rubin Jr. summed up in The New Republic: "It is a model of what military history can be." Among the most vivid scenes was the description of Gen. Robert E. Lee's slow ride after his surrender: "Grief brought a sort of mass relaxation that let Traveller [Lee's horse] proceed, and as he moved through the press of soldiers, bearing the gray commander on his back, they reached out to touch both horse and rider, withers and knees, flanks and thighs, in expression of their affection." The work brought its author three Guggenheim Fellowships, a Ford Foundation grant and considerably more in royalties than any of his novels had earned, and he was admitted to a distinguished company of Civil War historians that included Bruce Catton, Allan Nevins and Douglas Southall Freeman. "They call you Gibbon and you know that's silly," he told an interviewer. "But if they don't call you Gibbon you get a feeling they're holding back." Still, it remained for television to carry him to fame. In 1985 Ken Burns, planning his television documentary on the war, called on Mr. Foote, who had been recommended by his fellow Southern writer Robert Penn Warren, to be a paid consultant. The choice of an accomplished stylist steeped in Southern lore was made to order, and Mr. Foote readily established himself as the viewers' surrogate. The series, a smash hit for public broadcasting, attracted an audience of 14 million over five nights and turned Mr. Foote into a prime-time star. His fans learned that he was a pipe smoker who loved Mozart and Vermeer and Proust (he said he had read "Remembrance of Things Past" from start to finish nine times) and drank bourbon outdoors and scotch indoors. His dog, Booker, an akita, dozed nearby as he wrote. At one point Mr. Foote was getting 20 calls a day from admirers who just wanted to have him over for dinner. He took a page from Ulysses S. Grant who, in reply to the remark "You must get lots of mail," said, "Not nearly so much as I did when I answered it all." Mr. Foote stopped writing back. * * * Walter Goodman, who died in 2002, contributed reporting and analysis for this article. * * * Jim & Nancy Forest Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands Jim's e-mail: jhforest at cs.com (alternative address: jhforest at gmail.com) Nancy's e-mail: forestflier at cs.com Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org Jim & Nancy Forest web site: http://incommunion.org/forest-flier/ photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/ * * * -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/ Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy --------------------------------- Yahoo! Sports Rekindle the Rivalries. Sign up for Fantasy Football -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: