From Nikkibar at aol.com Sat Oct 1 16:36:40 2005
From: Nikkibar at aol.com (Nikkibar at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 16:36:40 EDT
Subject: [percy-l] Group Read Suggestions??
Message-ID:
>From here it is beginning to look as though a good bit of the overblowing of
the violence may have just possibly come from ex-Chief Compass himself,
although my jury is still out on that one. What seems a good deal more certain
however from an eyewitness to the medical scene may be found at:
_http://webpages.charter.net/wmchugh/ScottsDiary.pdf_
(http://webpages.charter.net/wmchugh/ScottsDiary.pdf)
It will blow your mind and break your heart. It is at times like this that I
really miss being able to talk the actually developing situation over with
Walker -- as I did on the occasion of the Mark Dixon sniping incident at the
Holiday Inn, another of his presciences come true.
Nikki Barranger
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
From Nikkibar at aol.com Sat Oct 1 16:40:35 2005
From: Nikkibar at aol.com (Nikkibar at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 16:40:35 EDT
Subject: [percy-l] off topic but then back to LitR
Message-ID: <1ad.40264fed.30704e43@aol.com>
On the question of Nicholas Lemann's New Yorker article, my own take is one
of immense disappointment that for once our Nicholas got it wrong. I think he
was not only horribly unclear in what he said, but mean spirited and
unnecessarily bitter in those few instances where (after the third reading) I found
him simi-understandable. How say you Marcus?
Nikki
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
From Nikkibar at aol.com Sat Oct 1 16:53:38 2005
From: Nikkibar at aol.com (Nikkibar at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 16:53:38 EDT
Subject: [percy-l] Pauley and Mitchell's smug, self righteousness
Message-ID: <1ff.b6827d4.30705152@aol.com>
In a message dated 9/26/2005 6:07:43 PM Central Standard Time,
Robert_Pauley at oxy.com writes:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_08_31_05ng.html
Open response to Mr Pauley:
You have just proven my point. The article which you cite from a magazine
unknown to me and written by one even more unknown, vaguely mentions the former
Marc Morial administration as being corrupt; probably true (even though the
jury has yet to be empaneled on that one) but then the writer sneaky-cleverly
tries to tar Ray Nagin with the same brush. Not fair to Ray by a long shot.
And true, he is overwhelmed but who wouldn't be. From where I stand Ray seems
to be trying his level utmost to bring the best and brightest minds together
from the greater New Orleans area to brainstorm the problem. And
condemnations like that in the article are the direct opposite of helpful.
Nikki Barranger
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
From ttbrader at mindspring.com Sat Oct 1 19:53:53 2005
From: ttbrader at mindspring.com (Teresa)
Date: Sat, 01 Oct 2005 18:53:53 -0500
Subject: [percy-l] LitR
Message-ID: <433F2191.90405@mindspring.com>
I'm sorry I can't remember whose suggestion it was to read LitR as a
group, but I'd like to thank you for it. This will be, I believe, my
fourth reading (and the first in a long time) of LitR and I'm loving it
once again. The writing and the theme are holding up tremendously (at
least, the first section is, which is as far as I've gotten) even after
the passing of thirty years. I'm glad I had this nudge -- reading it
has been a comfort, strange though that may be to say.
Teresa
From tfa at brickengraver.com Sat Oct 1 22:50:26 2005
From: tfa at brickengraver.com (Tommy Armstrong)
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 22:50:26 -0400
Subject: [percy-l] Group Read Suggestions?? Plea
In-Reply-To:
Message-ID: <20051002025002.KQZH14345.imta06a2.registeredsite.com@compaqupstairs>
Ok people, this Group Read thingy was kind of my idea, and as such I would
like to suggest a few ground rules--actually just one. Make sure to put LITR
in the subject line. Use other subject lines for hurricane, political, and
religious stuff if not directly related to LITR. All other posts will go
through but it makes it much easier to follow the thread with some kind of a
consistant subject heading.
Now of course we are not Nazis and I am sure no one will be excommunicated
for breaking this rule, but why not just do it for simple politeness.
Thanks in advance.
Tommy Armstrong
Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find
easier ways to do something.
Robert Heinlein
_____
From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Nikkibar at aol.com
Sent: Saturday, October 01, 2005 4:37 PM
To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Group Read Suggestions??
>From here it is beginning to look as though a good bit of the overblowing of
the violence may have just possibly come from ex-Chief Compass himself,
although my jury is still out on that one. What seems a good deal more
certain however from an eyewitness to the medical scene may be found at:
http://webpages.charter.net/wmchugh/ScottsDiary.pdf
It will blow your mind and break your heart. It is at times like this that I
really miss being able to talk the actually developing situation over with
Walker -- as I did on the occasion of the Mark Dixon sniping incident at the
Holiday Inn, another of his presciences come true.
Nikki Barranger
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
From sldye at bluegrass.org Mon Oct 3 08:57:09 2005
From: sldye at bluegrass.org (Dye, Steve)
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2005 08:57:09 -0400
Subject: [percy-l] LitR
Message-ID: <60790682A484FF4080B3EA134C564CBD013C90E9@batman.Bluegrass.Board>
Couldn't have said it better myself...
-----Original Message-----
From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Teresa
Sent: Saturday, October 01, 2005 7:54 PM
To: Percy list
Subject: [percy-l] LitR
I'm sorry I can't remember whose suggestion it was to read LitR as a
group, but I'd like to thank you for it. This will be, I believe, my
fourth reading (and the first in a long time) of LitR and I'm loving it
once again. The writing and the theme are holding up tremendously (at
least, the first section is, which is as far as I've gotten) even after
the passing of thirty years. I'm glad I had this nudge -- reading it
has been a comfort, strange though that may be to say.
Teresa
--
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 sldye at bluegrass.org Mon Oct 3 11:57:46 2005
From: sldye at bluegrass.org (Dye, Steve)
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2005 11:57:46 -0400
Subject: [percy-l] LitR
Message-ID: <60790682A484FF4080B3EA134C564CBD013C91E3@batman.Bluegrass.Board>
Excerpt from Newsweek October 3 issue..."The Battle to
Rebuild"...."Conspiracy theories abound in the Lower Ninth. It is taken
as a given that, during Hurricane Betsy in 1965, the city blew up a
levee and intentionally flooded the ward in order to save the mostly
white and tourist-friendly French Quarter. This is an urban legend, but
it indicates the depth of resentment felt by people who historically
have been left behind. They have some reason to be suspicious. Finis
Shelnutt, who owns a number of businesses near the French Quarter
(including a bar named after his wife, former Bill Clinton paramour
Gennifer Flowers), does not hide his feelings about the Lower Ninth.
Sitting on his bicycle, draped with Mardi Gras beads, he told Newsweek
that he is already talking to Florida investors about building
high-rises in the French Quarter that can withstand Category 5
hurricanes. And what about the Lower Ninth? "Give it to us, and we'll
turn it into golf courses. I heard that in Gaelic, "Katrina" means "to
purify", said Shelnutt."
Its been a while since I have read Love in the Ruins, but if memory
serves me well, is Mr. Shellnutt (a name right out of Percy!) REALLY Art
Immelman??? If not, Percy could have made Shellnutt up!
-----Original Message-----
From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Teresa
Sent: Saturday, October 01, 2005 7:54 PM
To: Percy list
Subject: [percy-l] LitR
I'm sorry I can't remember whose suggestion it was to read LitR as a
group, but I'd like to thank you for it. This will be, I believe, my
fourth reading (and the first in a long time) of LitR and I'm loving it
once again. The writing and the theme are holding up tremendously (at
least, the first section is, which is as far as I've gotten) even after
the passing of thirty years. I'm glad I had this nudge -- reading it
has been a comfort, strange though that may be to say.
Teresa
--
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 Robert_Pauley at oxy.com Tue Oct 4 01:41:28 2005
From: Robert_Pauley at oxy.com (Robert_Pauley at oxy.com)
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2005 22:41:28 -0700
Subject: [percy-l] Pauley and Mitchell's smug, self righteousness
Message-ID: <7706697134D5C94781B111C8C298D67441A047@olawexc8.naoxy.com>
I'm not sure what the point is, though. That New Orleans is not corrupt
or that I am smug. Or both. At the risk of sounding smug, I re-submit
that New Orleans is the most catastrophically corrupt and incompetently
managed city in America. Lehman is dead-on. And these charges are
helpful, for sunlight is the truest enemy of corruption and
incompetence. As Walker Percy said, it is better to identify the lesion.
Inasmuch as it painful to hear and to read about New Orleans'
"unimaginable" dysfunction, the more attention brought to the matter the
less chance it will repeat itself in a rebuilt New Orleans. I don't
think we would wish the same on any place or anybody. No, the truth is
good.
-----Original Message-----
From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Nikkibar at aol.com
Sent: Saturday, October 01, 2005 1:54 PM
To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Pauley and Mitchell's smug, self
righteousness
In a message dated 9/26/2005 6:07:43 PM Central Standard Time,
Robert_Pauley at oxy.com writes:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_08_31_05ng.html
Open response to Mr Pauley:
You have just proven my point. The article which you cite from a
magazine unknown to me and written by one even more unknown, vaguely
mentions the former Marc Morial administration as being corrupt;
probably true (even though the jury has yet to be empaneled on that one)
but then the writer sneaky-cleverly tries to tar Ray Nagin with the same
brush. Not fair to Ray by a long shot. And true, he is overwhelmed but
who wouldn't be. From where I stand Ray seems to be trying his level
utmost to bring the best and brightest minds together from the greater
New Orleans area to brainstorm the problem. And condemnations like that
in the article are the direct opposite of helpful.
Nikki Barranger
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
From MorrisJD at aol.com Tue Oct 4 10:30:17 2005
From: MorrisJD at aol.com (MorrisJD at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2005 10:30:17 EDT
Subject: [percy-l] Pauley and Mitchell's smug, self righteousness
Message-ID:
The point is that NOLA's corruption or not doesn't excuse the abysmal
failure of the federal government to protect the people there. Nor does it explain
or excuse the federal government's continuing failure to aid people in south
Louisiana outside NOLA and elswhere along the gulf coast.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
From armstron at ohiou.edu Wed Oct 5 17:01:23 2005
From: armstron at ohiou.edu (Ken Armstrong)
Date: Wed, 05 Oct 2005 17:01:23 -0400
Subject: [percy-l] LitR Training
In-Reply-To: <60790682A484FF4080B3EA134C564CBD013C91E3@batman.Bluegrass. Board>
References: <60790682A484FF4080B3EA134C564CBD013C91E3@batman.Bluegrass.Board>
Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.2.20051005165904.037f8118@oak.cats.ohiou.edu>
It's been quite a while since I've even seen my copy of Love in the Ruins,
but on the chance I can turn it up AND find the time to read it, is there a
schedule or date to commence discussion and not to include anything Katrina
under the LitR subject line?
Thanks,
Ken A.
From tfa at brickengraver.com Wed Oct 5 17:18:43 2005
From: tfa at brickengraver.com (Tommy Armstrong)
Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 17:18:43 -0400
Subject: [percy-l] LitR Training
In-Reply-To: <6.2.1.2.2.20051005165904.037f8118@oak.cats.ohiou.edu>
Message-ID: <20051005211842.CQDW5784.imta02a2.registeredsite.com@compaqupstairs>
I kind of thought start October 1 with a chapter a week.
Tommy
Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find
easier ways to do something.
Robert Heinlein
-----Original Message-----
From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Ken Armstrong
Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2005 5:01 PM
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
Subject: Re: [percy-l] LitR Training
It's been quite a while since I've even seen my copy of Love in the Ruins,
but on the chance I can turn it up AND find the time to read it, is there a
schedule or date to commence discussion and not to include anything Katrina
under the LitR subject line?
Thanks,
Ken A.
--
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 RGray at montreat.edu Thu Oct 6 09:45:01 2005
From: RGray at montreat.edu (Gray, Rich)
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 09:45:01 -0400
Subject: [percy-l] LITR
Message-ID:
Percy wrote the essay "Notes for a Novel about the End of the World"
while he was writing Love in the Ruins. A common theme to both works is
the blessing of cataclysm, which jerks people out of their tranquilized
routines. In their comfortable routines, Percy thought people --
Catholics as well as other believers and agnostics -- were callous
toward God.
Tom More opens the novel in a serious rut: rejected by his wife,
dependent on alcohol, and largely unsuccessful in his psychiatric
practice. His concern for the decay of America and his invention of the
lapsometer mark his attempt to throw off his stupefying midlife tedium.
Then the comedy kicks in. Tom with the lapsometer seems like Don
Quixote with his lance -- they have a winsomeness, yet they are
completely ineffective in changing the world.
Rich Gray
________________________________________
From sldye at bluegrass.org Thu Oct 6 11:07:29 2005
From: sldye at bluegrass.org (Dye, Steve)
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 11:07:29 -0400
Subject: [percy-l] LitR Training
Message-ID: <60790682A484FF4080B3EA134C564CBD013C9A5D@batman.Bluegrass.Board>
Hey, I find myself LIKING this list again!
-----Original Message-----
From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Ken Armstrong
Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2005 5:01 PM
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
Subject: Re: [percy-l] LitR Training
It's been quite a while since I've even seen my copy of Love in the
Ruins,
but on the chance I can turn it up AND find the time to read it, is
there a
schedule or date to commence discussion and not to include anything
Katrina
under the LitR subject line?
Thanks,
Ken A.
--
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 tfa at brickengraver.com Thu Oct 6 12:20:56 2005
From: tfa at brickengraver.com (Tommy Armstrong)
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 12:20:56 -0400
Subject: [percy-l] LITR
In-Reply-To:
Message-ID: <20051006162051.VOLS14345.imta06a2.registeredsite.com@compaqupstairs>
"But I will be all right as soon as I get home and take my drug, which is
the best of the consciousness-expanding community-simulating self
integrating drugs"
When Rich mentioned that essay I of course had to go and pull it off my
shelf and that is what I had underlined from it (among other things). I kind
of think it sums up a great deal of the insight and humor that is present
throughout Percy. He brings views of the world from a truly different
vantage points. That is his strength both then and now--an extra-consumerist
vantage point, an extra-science vantage point, an extra-political vantage
point.
I once took a course in college a long back named "Beththoven and
Revolution" by an incredibly smart and gifted professor named Dr. David
Green. In it we explored we explored all kinds of seemingly disparate things
like the Renaissance, Chinese Scroll Painting, the structure of Bethoven's
string quartets and symphonies, Lao Tsu, Confucius, Sartre, etc. And let me
not forget Mahler--that prof had listened to a Mahler piece every day of his
life for 10 straight years--something of an expert on him. The one
overriding thing that tied them all together was essentially vantage point.
When that sculptor, forget his name, discovered (or created) (or
rediscovered) single point perspective, and created those famous cathedral
doors it changed Western Civilization forever. Now it was possible for
people to study the natural world, for they could do it from a single point
of reference. Things can be measured and quantified and mapped. And thus
began linearity.
The novel was one of the consequences of that type of perspective as was
calculus.
Without that discovery by an artist at the beginning of the Renaissance (in
fact who started the Renaissance), there would have never been science as we
know it.
The Chinese, however never discovered spp--and they had a view of the world
much closer to how humans actually see the world--multi-point perspective.
Scroll paintings do not exhibit spp. We Westerners now look at them (and all
art prior to spp) as somehow inferior, or at least, not as "sophisticated".
But the fact is that the human does not see like a camera--the ultimate tool
and demonstrator of spp. Even as we walk to the bathroom and take a tinkle,
our vantage point constantly changes, and not only our vantage point but our
area of focus literally hundreds of times.
Now what I am saying is not that science and technology is not useful, but
this whole rational view of the world presupposes the validity of spp being
the "correct" perspective. But it is definitely not hardwired into the human
brain. In fact it was never even existent before those doors on that
cathedral were created. It took only a hundred or so years to become
hardwired into our culture--but not in our being. And there perhaps is the
genesis of schism of science and humanity. For what is natural for a homo
sapiens --constantly seeing the world from different vantage points and
areas of focus--and what is natural for the culture--seeing the world from a
single point of view--something to be measured, classified, and dissected,
are really at odds with each other.
Tommy Armstrong
PO Box 484
Lillington, NC 27546
http://www.brickengraver.com
...with the method of science one beholds what is generally true about
individuals, but art beholds what is uniquely true.
Walker Percy
Signposts in a Strange Land
-----Original Message-----
From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Gray, Rich
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2005 9:45 AM
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
Subject: [percy-l] LITR
Percy wrote the essay "Notes for a Novel about the End of the World"
while he was writing Love in the Ruins. A common theme to both works is the
blessing of cataclysm, which jerks people out of their tranquilized
routines. In their comfortable routines, Percy thought people -- Catholics
as well as other believers and agnostics -- were callous toward God.
Tom More opens the novel in a serious rut: rejected by his wife, dependent
on alcohol, and largely unsuccessful in his psychiatric practice. His
concern for the decay of America and his invention of the lapsometer mark
his attempt to throw off his stupefying midlife tedium.
Then the comedy kicks in. Tom with the lapsometer seems like Don Quixote
with his lance -- they have a winsomeness, yet they are completely
ineffective in changing the world.
Rich Gray
________________________________________
--
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 kterrell at sheastokes.com Fri Oct 7 14:44:12 2005
From: kterrell at sheastokes.com (Karl M. Terrell)
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 14:44:12 -0400
Subject: [percy-l] LITR
Message-ID: <7A5E4A01592B87438BF92B2CC0CA9DC2212954@at01.sheamcnitt.com>
* * This communication is CONFIDENTIAL * *
Re: single-point and multi-point perspectives, do you see parallels to
the experimentation with psychedlic drugs during the 60s as a breaking
away from the former? I refer not to a glorification of illegal drug
use, but to a brief (historical, I believe) period when young adults and
a few others, using LSD, marijuana, etc. as tools in a positive and
creative way, were attempting to break free of the restraints of what I
think you refer to as 'single point perspective.' Of course, it was
doomed to failure, as we live resolutely in an spp world, and because
drugs are bad for your health, but .... some vestige I believe of this
experimental non-spp thinking (if you will) lives on, and has been
advanced as a force in our culture. Some aspects of this, as in the
arts, and as applied to philosophies/practices on how to live your daily
life, have been to the good, and some aspects not.
Perhaps my own fleeting passage through this history explains part of my
attraction to Percy.
Karl
-----Original Message-----
From: Tommy Armstrong [mailto:tfa at brickengraver.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2005 9:21 AM
To: 'Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion'
Subject: Re: [percy-l] LITR
"But I will be all right as soon as I get home and take my drug, which
is the best of the consciousness-expanding community-simulating self
integrating drugs"
When Rich mentioned that essay I of course had to go and pull it off my
shelf and that is what I had underlined from it (among other things). I
kind of think it sums up a great deal of the insight and humor that is
present throughout Percy. He brings views of the world from a truly
different vantage points. That is his strength both then and now--an
extra-consumerist vantage point, an extra-science vantage point, an
extra-political vantage point.
I once took a course in college a long back named "Beththoven and
Revolution" by an incredibly smart and gifted professor named Dr. David
Green. In it we explored we explored all kinds of seemingly disparate
things like the Renaissance, Chinese Scroll Painting, the structure of
Bethoven's string quartets and symphonies, Lao Tsu, Confucius, Sartre,
etc. And let me not forget Mahler--that prof had listened to a Mahler
piece every day of his life for 10 straight years--something of an
expert on him. The one overriding thing that tied them all together was
essentially vantage point.
When that sculptor, forget his name, discovered (or created) (or
rediscovered) single point perspective, and created those famous
cathedral doors it changed Western Civilization forever. Now it was
possible for people to study the natural world, for they could do it
from a single point of reference. Things can be measured and quantified
and mapped. And thus began linearity.
The novel was one of the consequences of that type of perspective as was
calculus.
Without that discovery by an artist at the beginning of the Renaissance
(in fact who started the Renaissance), there would have never been
science as we know it.
The Chinese, however never discovered spp--and they had a view of the
world much closer to how humans actually see the world--multi-point
perspective.
Scroll paintings do not exhibit spp. We Westerners now look at them (and
all art prior to spp) as somehow inferior, or at least, not as
"sophisticated".
But the fact is that the human does not see like a camera--the ultimate
tool and demonstrator of spp. Even as we walk to the bathroom and take a
tinkle, our vantage point constantly changes, and not only our vantage
point but our area of focus literally hundreds of times.
Now what I am saying is not that science and technology is not useful,
but this whole rational view of the world presupposes the validity of
spp being the "correct" perspective. But it is definitely not hardwired
into the human brain. In fact it was never even existent before those
doors on that cathedral were created. It took only a hundred or so years
to become hardwired into our culture--but not in our being. And there
perhaps is the genesis of schism of science and humanity. For what is
natural for a homo sapiens --constantly seeing the world from different
vantage points and areas of focus--and what is natural for the
culture--seeing the world from a single point of view--something to be
measured, classified, and dissected, are really at odds with each other.
Tommy Armstrong
PO Box 484
Lillington, NC 27546
http://www.brickengraver.com
...with the method of science one beholds what is generally true about
individuals, but art beholds what is uniquely true.
Walker Percy
Signposts in a Strange Land
-----Original Message-----
From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Gray, Rich
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2005 9:45 AM
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
Subject: [percy-l] LITR
Percy wrote the essay "Notes for a Novel about the End of the World"
while he was writing Love in the Ruins. A common theme to both works is
the blessing of cataclysm, which jerks people out of their tranquilized
routines. In their comfortable routines, Percy thought people --
Catholics as well as other believers and agnostics -- were callous
toward God.
Tom More opens the novel in a serious rut: rejected by his wife,
dependent on alcohol, and largely unsuccessful in his psychiatric
practice. His concern for the decay of America and his invention of the
lapsometer mark his attempt to throw off his stupefying midlife tedium.
Then the comedy kicks in. Tom with the lapsometer seems like Don
Quixote with his lance -- they have a winsomeness, yet they are
completely ineffective in changing the world.
Rich Gray
________________________________________
--
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
--
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 tfa at brickengraver.com Fri Oct 7 18:46:50 2005
From: tfa at brickengraver.com (Tommy Armstrong)
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 18:46:50 -0400
Subject: [percy-l] LITR
In-Reply-To: <7A5E4A01592B87438BF92B2CC0CA9DC2212954@at01.sheamcnitt.com>
Message-ID: <20051007224642.ZQTR14345.imta06a2.registeredsite.com@compaqupstairs>
I had not thought about the drug connection--but you are probably right. The
confines of a spp world are in many ways the antithesis of the human
experience or rather the way humans actually experience the world. Once it
was discovered, it essentially became the defacto method of viewing the
world, at least intellectually--and did so incredibly fast. Without it,
there would be no science as we know it today, there would be no structured
linear music, or the novel would never have come into being.
For a novel essentially has a beginning, a middle, and an end--a plot--and
is told from the vantage point of the narrator. I remember in high school
plotting the plot of Madame Bovary on a chart--my English teacher thought it
to be the penultimate novel because of its careful construction. How
consistent it is, how it "holds together", the denouement, the rise the fall
and the conclusion. How it inexorably moves to the conclusion. I am sure
that English prof could clean up my thinking, and I of course would welcome
him to chime in. The Stream of Consciousness thing was really a rejection of
those confines. As was Jazz in my opinion--as it went in whatever direction
that the musician felt he wanted it to go at the moment of creation.
Improvisation is really a lot closer to the way I think humans actually live
and more importantly think. For example as I sit and write this, I have
jumped in my mind from high school to college to looking at a scroll
painting today that was in a take out Chinese restaurant to thoughts about
the drying beds at my sewer plant. Nothing linear about it--no real "rhyme
or reason" to why my mind went to those disparate thoughts.
And I am not saying that humans are not capable of "scientific" reasoning,
which is essentially spp reasoning--I am just saying that it is not their
natural state. We are, I think non-linear creatures living in a linear
culture. I hesitate to say linear world, as that implies that the world is
linear--which no matter what the scientific experts say, it is not.
For me that is reality. And, yes now that I think of it, drugs are a way of
escaping that linearity and "going to a place" that is more human friendly.
Early Times does seem to work well, especially with Carol Sloane singing
Jazz. Of course to others, good weed listening to Jimi Hendrix is the
escape, or Opera or Mozart or whomever.
French Impressionists such as Matisse abandoned it, i.e. spp as too
confining and not really conveying how humans actually perceived things.
http://www.lyons.co.uk/html/large/Redroom.htm
Now don't get me wrong--I am no art historian or expert, but simply looking
at the above picture, to the "normal" westerner, to the person on the
street, it looks much like what a child might paint. It was a rejection of
the use of spp. It is not trying to convey an "accurate (accurate in linear,
Cartesian sense) representation of the room, but what the room is, from a
non-linear human perspective, from the perspective of the artist.
Try the experiment of just walking into a room with the "explorers hat on".
Try and keep up with what each and every vantage point and area of focus
that your eyes go to. One thing will stand out, you will focus on it and
perhaps think about it, then you will move your eyes until they come to rest
on something else. Its very much not a linear experience. If it was, you
could simply stand at the door, and absorb all the room from that vantage
point. But the eye can only focus on one thing at a time. It moves from
thing to thing constantly refocusing. The camera does focus on everything at
one time--a distinctly non-realistic way of depicting things from a human
perspective. And notice those photographs that are really good, that really
make an impact. They are invariably the ones that are focused on a single
subject. A really good photo only has one subject, for if it has two--they
are constantly competing with each other--and the work becomes un- unified.
Just as the human being can only focus on one thing at a time,
That multitasking stuff has from what I understand been "scientifically"
debunked.
Tommy Armstrong
PO Box 484
Lillington, NC 27546
http://www.brickengraver.com
...with the method of science one beholds what is generally true about
individuals, but art beholds what is uniquely true.
Walker Percy
Signposts in a Strange Land
-----Original Message-----
From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Karl M. Terrell
Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 2:44 PM
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
Subject: Re: [percy-l] LITR
* * This communication is CONFIDENTIAL * *
Re: single-point and multi-point perspectives, do you see parallels to the
experimentation with psychedlic drugs during the 60s as a breaking away from
the former? I refer not to a glorification of illegal drug use, but to a
brief (historical, I believe) period when young adults and a few others,
using LSD, marijuana, etc. as tools in a positive and creative way, were
attempting to break free of the restraints of what I think you refer to as
'single point perspective.' Of course, it was doomed to failure, as we live
resolutely in an spp world, and because drugs are bad for your health, but
.... some vestige I believe of this experimental non-spp thinking (if you
will) lives on, and has been advanced as a force in our culture. Some
aspects of this, as in the arts, and as applied to philosophies/practices on
how to live your daily life, have been to the good, and some aspects not.
Perhaps my own fleeting passage through this history explains part of my
attraction to Percy.
Karl
-----Original Message-----
From: Tommy Armstrong [mailto:tfa at brickengraver.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2005 9:21 AM
To: 'Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion'
Subject: Re: [percy-l] LITR
"But I will be all right as soon as I get home and take my drug, which is
the best of the consciousness-expanding community-simulating self
integrating drugs"
When Rich mentioned that essay I of course had to go and pull it off my
shelf and that is what I had underlined from it (among other things). I kind
of think it sums up a great deal of the insight and humor that is present
throughout Percy. He brings views of the world from a truly different
vantage points. That is his strength both then and now--an extra-consumerist
vantage point, an extra-science vantage point, an extra-political vantage
point.
I once took a course in college a long back named "Beththoven and
Revolution" by an incredibly smart and gifted professor named Dr. David
Green. In it we explored we explored all kinds of seemingly disparate things
like the Renaissance, Chinese Scroll Painting, the structure of Bethoven's
string quartets and symphonies, Lao Tsu, Confucius, Sartre, etc. And let me
not forget Mahler--that prof had listened to a Mahler piece every day of his
life for 10 straight years--something of an expert on him. The one
overriding thing that tied them all together was essentially vantage point.
When that sculptor, forget his name, discovered (or created) (or
rediscovered) single point perspective, and created those famous cathedral
doors it changed Western Civilization forever. Now it was possible for
people to study the natural world, for they could do it from a single point
of reference. Things can be measured and quantified and mapped. And thus
began linearity.
The novel was one of the consequences of that type of perspective as was
calculus.
Without that discovery by an artist at the beginning of the Renaissance (in
fact who started the Renaissance), there would have never been science as we
know it.
The Chinese, however never discovered spp--and they had a view of the world
much closer to how humans actually see the world--multi-point perspective.
Scroll paintings do not exhibit spp. We Westerners now look at them (and all
art prior to spp) as somehow inferior, or at least, not as "sophisticated".
But the fact is that the human does not see like a camera--the ultimate tool
and demonstrator of spp. Even as we walk to the bathroom and take a tinkle,
our vantage point constantly changes, and not only our vantage point but our
area of focus literally hundreds of times.
Now what I am saying is not that science and technology is not useful, but
this whole rational view of the world presupposes the validity of spp being
the "correct" perspective. But it is definitely not hardwired into the human
brain. In fact it was never even existent before those doors on that
cathedral were created. It took only a hundred or so years to become
hardwired into our culture--but not in our being. And there perhaps is the
genesis of schism of science and humanity. For what is natural for a homo
sapiens --constantly seeing the world from different vantage points and
areas of focus--and what is natural for the culture--seeing the world from a
single point of view--something to be measured, classified, and dissected,
are really at odds with each other.
Tommy Armstrong
PO Box 484
Lillington, NC 27546
http://www.brickengraver.com
...with the method of science one beholds what is generally true about
individuals, but art beholds what is uniquely true.
Walker Percy
Signposts in a Strange Land
-----Original Message-----
From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Gray, Rich
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2005 9:45 AM
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
Subject: [percy-l] LITR
Percy wrote the essay "Notes for a Novel about the End of the World"
while he was writing Love in the Ruins. A common theme to both works is the
blessing of cataclysm, which jerks people out of their tranquilized
routines. In their comfortable routines, Percy thought people -- Catholics
as well as other believers and agnostics -- were callous toward God.
Tom More opens the novel in a serious rut: rejected by his wife, dependent
on alcohol, and largely unsuccessful in his psychiatric practice. His
concern for the decay of America and his invention of the lapsometer mark
his attempt to throw off his stupefying midlife tedium.
Then the comedy kicks in. Tom with the lapsometer seems like Don Quixote
with his lance -- they have a winsomeness, yet they are completely
ineffective in changing the world.
Rich Gray
________________________________________
--
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
--
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.
****************************************************************************
********************
--
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 JHForest at cs.com Tue Oct 11 14:27:02 2005
From: JHForest at cs.com (JHForest at cs.com)
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 14:27:02 EDT
Subject: [percy-l] "The Orthodox Avant-Garde"
Message-ID: <1c0.32e7f458.307d5df6@cs.com>
I just came upon this text, which connects Walker Percy, Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, Martin Luther King Jr., G.K. Chesterton and others in
what the author sees as an "orthodox avant garde".
Jim Forest
* * *
Christianity Today, Week of July 25, 2005
The following article is located at:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/130/12.0.html
The Orthodox Avant-Garde
Armed with traditional faith, these Christians subverted the establishment,
putting secular ideas under the microscope of the eternal.
Interview by Rob Moll | posted 07/26/2005 09:00 a.m.
>> It's not easy to place thinkers as diverse as Walker Percy, Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, Martin Luther King Jr., G.K. Chesterton, and Northrop
Frye into the same category. But Robert Inchausti, English professor at
California State Polytechnic, San Luis Obispo, says they were all
avant-garde orthodox Christians. No matter their different political,
denominational, or literary positions, they all sought to be faithful to
Jesus while engaging the world. In Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws,
Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise, Inchausi discusses
Christian thinkers, writers, and activists who challenged secular
worldviews on their own turf, yet remained thoroughly Christian. <<
Q: Who are the avant-garde Orthodox?
These were orthodox Christian thinkers and artists who were not theologians
and made important and somewhat revolutionary contributions to various
secular disciplines. They're interesting people because they're both
subversive of the existing modern order, but they are not subversive of the
church or subversive of the faith.
They have a unique status as people who model for us how it is possible for
believing Christians to enter into dialogue with the secular culture in a
way that revolutionizes and transforms the secular culture and doesn't just
protest against it or isolate from it.
If you look at some of the major Christian artists and thinkers and social
critics over the last hundred years, you find a variety of political,
artistic, and intellectual schools within which they operate. Yet, they
still share Christ as their major inspiration. You have somebody like
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who from an American political perspective would be
very conservative. He single-handedly did away with Marxism as an attractive
philosophy for Paris intellectuals. And at the same time you have somebody
like Dorothy Day, whose entire witness to the poor in the United States was
to defend small families and small farms and collectives and indigenous poor
against a social Darwinism that she thought was running away with American
culture during the Cold War years.
Few people know these believers were Christians. E.F. Schumacher, the Small
Is Beautiful fellow, is often recognized as the guy who wrote about Buddhist
economics, because of a chapter in his book Small Is Beautiful. But he was a
Christian, and he said he put in Buddhism because he didn't want it to seem
like special pleading. He just wanted to make it clear that the economic
systems had religious under pinning. In order to demonstrate that in a way
that he could get a hearing, he used the example of Buddhism. But he himself
was a Christian thinker.
Q: Not only was their Christianity misunderstood, but often their message was
misunderstood. You include Jack Kerouac, who dismissed his hippie followers
who got into Buddhism, but Kerouac was a conservative and a Catholic.
Kerouac was really only a Buddhist for three years of his life. He was a
very traditional Catholic growing up, and then he toyed with Buddhism for
about three years. He came back to his faith and wrote a lot of stuff about
Jesus and refused to give up his love of Jesus for the Buddha. Later, when
he was having a hard time kicking his alcoholism, he started getting
attacked by the New York critics for a pretty accurate description of his
work, in which they said, This is a form of Christian primitivism.
Q: Kerouac captures a spiritual search in a way that many novelists don't.
You make the point that the novel has the ability to probe the soul in a way
that Enlightenment attempts to discover truth can't.
That's why Solzhenitsyn was so wise to novelize his history of the gulag.
When he transformed the sufferings of millions of people into stories we
could feel, it became real. Pasternack, in Doctor Zhivago, made the
spiritual sufferings of the lost intelligentsia of the revolution real in a
way that we could feel. Kerouac does the same thing with a spiritual longing
that was useful in the 50s and 60s to say there's more going on then just
the Cold War. We should be telling our stories to one another about our
inner lives.
Q: Thomas Merton was another Catholic writing spiritual literature during the
Cold War years.
The Seven Storey Mountain was a great conversion story. It provided a
criticism of materialism, modernism, the Bohemian art theme, and left-wing
politics, all these things that tempted him, that he turned away from 20
years before anybody else in the country had discovered them.
Then after he died, all his journals and letters came out, and it turns out
that all those years that he was in the monastery, he was having these deep
conversations with people from all different backgrounds and was thinking
through his faith and bringing it into dialogue with all kinds of things,
which made him a different writer. Now, we even read The Seven Storey
Mountain differently.
Q: It's ironic that while Merton had left the world for the monastery,
through
his letters, he was active politically. Many of these Christians have a
different take on political action.
If you want to argue politics in the modern world you immediately find
yourself hamstrung by definitions imposed on you by politicians who have
laid out the rhetorical terrain. So the best way to deal with it is to
refuse to play the game by the rules. These Christians offer an alternative
vision that addresses political problems from a humble and inclusive
Christian perspective that doesn't argue about things so much as reveal
things.
Let me give you an example of this. At the end of my book, I say these
people don't want to change the world. Changing the world is not their
number one priority. Their number one priority is to love and serve the
world in the light of Christian revelation. Now if that means that you have
to stand up to an injustice, if that means you have to change the way the
mass media is run, or change curriculums or something, that will mean that
you will engage in dialogue with people, and you will witness, and you will
listen. You don't come in with this top down agenda and take everybody's
life apart so that you can put it back together again.
Kentucky writer and farmer Wendell Berry's method is to ask how this
reform is going to affect my community and enter into dialogue with the
people for whom these political reforms are going to change. The guy I think
who was really on to this is Dostoyevsky. I guess you could call him a
sentimental naturalist in his first book, Poor Folk. And then he was sent to
the camps and he had his eye opened to the true nature of human beings. He
came back and said until we deal with the irrational in man and healing
one's suspicions of another, you could have the greatest political ideology
and people would subvert it out of sheer spite. Somehow, trust has to be
regained between people before you can talk about politics. And that's why
ideological posturing, even if you're right, is counterproductive.
Q: What kind of impact have these thinkers had, or should have?
In the 20th century, the contemplative side of Christianity was made much
more accessible by Merton's Seven Storey Mountain. Solzhenitsyn also had a
great world impact.
Some of Martin Luther King Jr.'s views have been misunderstood or co-opted.
We think of him more as a civil-rights icon than as an engaged prophetic
Christian trying to figure out non violence. I think he had a much more
troubled, interesting, complex message to America than what we have decided
it was in our history books and in our one-paragraph summaries of him. I
would say that his legacy probably has not been fully understood.
I don't think the full impact of what Schumacher has written about economics
has really hit yet, the defense of family business and local community
economies. That's starting to have resurgence in the third world with these
micro credit organizations. If you start taking Schumacher seriously, then
economics is due for a quantum leap, and that hasn't happened yet. We need
to rethink the way we do economics, to question the assumption that we're
all self-maximizing individuals.
I think Northrop Frye is another one who was understood too quickly, or
misunderstood. Literary studies over the past 20 years has been struggling
with a lot of competing materialisms. Frye had offered in the early 60s a
radical mystic contemplative vision of the literary studies, which doomed
him to obsolescence in 1963. But now that practices like lectio divina and
those contemplative ways of reading are being rediscovered, you look back at
Northrop Frye, and he's the guy who provides the most interesting ideas and
paradigms. But I think such a recovery is going to have to be done by
religious folk. Because if you try secularizing his categories, they just
don't work. It's only through religious eyes that Frye's literary cosmology
makes sense, in the same way that Lord of the Rings has a deeper meaning to
those who see its Christian themes.
In Frye's letters and journals and also his sermons, because he was a
pastor, you get to see the full Christian dimension of his thinking. He
discussed how to read prophetically, how to read contemplatively. These were
issues that Frye addressed that the last 20- 25-five years of literary
criticism just ignored. I think what's going to happen in about 10 years is
they're going to rediscover the language in which Frye was writing and learn
he was trying to teach us how to read in a way that deepened our inner
lives, not just increased our intellectual sophistication.
* * *
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
From mfrentz_2 at comcast.net Wed Oct 12 21:55:50 2005
From: mfrentz_2 at comcast.net (Mike Frentz)
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 21:55:50 -0400
Subject: [percy-l] "The Orthodox Avant-Garde"
In-Reply-To: <1c0.32e7f458.307d5df6@cs.com>
References: <1c0.32e7f458.307d5df6@cs.com>
Message-ID: <576EBCD9-F954-4478-8133-E1D254C72357@comcast.net>
Interesting, but not at all surprising. After all, authentic
Christianity (especially as embodied in the inept, corrupt, scandal-
ridden, imperfect, humanly executed/divinely inspired Catholic
Church) has despite its faults, been the most progressive force the
world has ever known to anyone who is familiar with its history --
unfortunately a consistently small minority.
It's pretty clear that those known contemporarily as "progressives"
are interested in anything but progress -- 44,000,000 U.S. dead since
Roe v. really isn't a rational measurement of progress at all is it?
It's time to reclaim the language!
Mike
On Oct 11, 2005, at 2:27 PM, JHForest at cs.com wrote:
> I just came upon this text, which connects Walker Percy, Aleksandr
> Solzhenitsyn, Martin Luther King Jr., G.K. Chesterton and others in
> what the author sees as an "orthodox avant garde".
>
> Jim Forest
>
> * * *
>
> Christianity Today, Week of July 25, 2005
>
> The following article is located at:
> http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/130/12.0.html
>
> The Orthodox Avant-Garde
>
> Armed with traditional faith, these Christians subverted the
> establishment,
> putting secular ideas under the microscope of the eternal.
>
> Interview by Rob Moll | posted 07/26/2005 09:00 a.m.
>
> >> It's not easy to place thinkers as diverse as Walker Percy,
> Aleksandr
> Solzhenitsyn, Martin Luther King Jr., G.K. Chesterton, and Northrop
> Frye into the same category. But Robert Inchausti, English
> professor at
> California State Polytechnic, San Luis Obispo, says they were all
> avant-garde orthodox Christians. No matter their different political,
> denominational, or literary positions, they all sought to be
> faithful to
> Jesus while engaging the world. In Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws,
> Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise, Inchausi discusses
> Christian thinkers, writers, and activists who challenged secular
> worldviews on their own turf, yet remained thoroughly Christian. <<
>
> Q: Who are the avant-garde Orthodox?
>
> These were orthodox Christian thinkers and artists who were not
> theologians
> and made important and somewhat revolutionary contributions to various
> secular disciplines. They're interesting people because they're both
> subversive of the existing modern order, but they are not
> subversive of the
> church or subversive of the faith.
>
> They have a unique status as people who model for us how it is
> possible for
> believing Christians to enter into dialogue with the secular
> culture in a
> way that revolutionizes and transforms the secular culture and
> doesn't just
> protest against it or isolate from it.
>
> If you look at some of the major Christian artists and thinkers and
> social
> critics over the last hundred years, you find a variety of political,
> artistic, and intellectual schools within which they operate. Yet,
> they
> still share Christ as their major inspiration. You have somebody like
> Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who from an American political perspective
> would be
> very conservative. He single-handedly did away with Marxism as an
> attractive
> philosophy for Paris intellectuals. And at the same time you have
> somebody
> like Dorothy Day, whose entire witness to the poor in the United
> States was
> to defend small families and small farms and collectives and
> indigenous poor
> against a social Darwinism that she thought was running away with
> American
> culture during the Cold War years.
>
> Few people know these believers were Christians. E.F. Schumacher,
> the Small
> Is Beautiful fellow, is often recognized as the guy who wrote about
> Buddhist
> economics, because of a chapter in his book Small Is Beautiful. But
> he was a
> Christian, and he said he put in Buddhism because he didn't want it
> to seem
> like special pleading. He just wanted to make it clear that the
> economic
> systems had religious under pinning. In order to demonstrate that
> in a way
> that he could get a hearing, he used the example of Buddhism. But
> he himself
> was a Christian thinker.
>
> Q: Not only was their Christianity misunderstood, but often their
> message was
> misunderstood. You include Jack Kerouac, who dismissed his hippie
> followers
> who got into Buddhism, but Kerouac was a conservative and a Catholic.
>
> Kerouac was really only a Buddhist for three years of his life. He
> was a
> very traditional Catholic growing up, and then he toyed with
> Buddhism for
> about three years. He came back to his faith and wrote a lot of
> stuff about
> Jesus and refused to give up his love of Jesus for the Buddha.
> Later, when
> he was having a hard time kicking his alcoholism, he started getting
> attacked by the New York critics for a pretty accurate description
> of his
> work, in which they said, This is a form of Christian primitivism.
>
> Q: Kerouac captures a spiritual search in a way that many novelists
> don't.
> You make the point that the novel has the ability to probe the soul
> in a way
> that Enlightenment attempts to discover truth can't.
>
> That's why Solzhenitsyn was so wise to novelize his history of the
> gulag.
> When he transformed the sufferings of millions of people into
> stories we
> could feel, it became real. Pasternack, in Doctor Zhivago, made the
> spiritual sufferings of the lost intelligentsia of the revolution
> real in a
> way that we could feel. Kerouac does the same thing with a
> spiritual longing
> that was useful in the 50s and 60s to say there's more going on
> then just
> the Cold War. We should be telling our stories to one another about
> our
> inner lives.
>
> Q: Thomas Merton was another Catholic writing spiritual literature
> during the
> Cold War years.
>
> The Seven Storey Mountain was a great conversion story. It provided a
> criticism of materialism, modernism, the Bohemian art theme, and
> left-wing
> politics, all these things that tempted him, that he turned away
> from 20
> years before anybody else in the country had discovered them.
>
> Then after he died, all his journals and letters came out, and it
> turns out
> that all those years that he was in the monastery, he was having
> these deep
> conversations with people from all different backgrounds and was
> thinking
> through his faith and bringing it into dialogue with all kinds of
> things,
> which made him a different writer. Now, we even read The Seven Storey
> Mountain differently.
>
> Q: It's ironic that while Merton had left the world for the
> monastery, through
> his letters, he was active politically. Many of these Christians
> have a
> different take on political action.
>
> If you want to argue politics in the modern world you immediately find
> yourself hamstrung by definitions imposed on you by politicians who
> have
> laid out the rhetorical terrain. So the best way to deal with it is to
> refuse to play the game by the rules. These Christians offer an
> alternative
> vision that addresses political problems from a humble and inclusive
> Christian perspective that doesn't argue about things so much as
> reveal
> things.
>
> Let me give you an example of this. At the end of my book, I say these
> people don't want to change the world. Changing the world is not their
> number one priority. Their number one priority is to love and serve
> the
> world in the light of Christian revelation. Now if that means that
> you have
> to stand up to an injustice, if that means you have to change the
> way the
> mass media is run, or change curriculums or something, that will
> mean that
> you will engage in dialogue with people, and you will witness, and
> you will
> listen. You don't come in with this top down agenda and take
> everybody's
> life apart so that you can put it back together again.
>
> Kentucky writer and farmer Wendell Berry's method is to ask how this
> reform is going to affect my community and enter into dialogue with
> the
> people for whom these political reforms are going to change. The
> guy I think
> who was really on to this is Dostoyevsky. I guess you could call him a
> sentimental naturalist in his first book, Poor Folk. And then he
> was sent to
> the camps and he had his eye opened to the true nature of human
> beings. He
> came back and said until we deal with the irrational in man and
> healing
> one's suspicions of another, you could have the greatest political
> ideology
> and people would subvert it out of sheer spite. Somehow, trust has
> to be
> regained between people before you can talk about politics. And
> that's why
> ideological posturing, even if you're right, is counterproductive.
>
> Q: What kind of impact have these thinkers had, or should have?
>
> In the 20th century, the contemplative side of Christianity was
> made much
> more accessible by Merton's Seven Storey Mountain. Solzhenitsyn
> also had a
> great world impact.
>
> Some of Martin Luther King Jr.'s views have been misunderstood or
> co-opted.
> We think of him more as a civil-rights icon than as an engaged
> prophetic
> Christian trying to figure out non violence. I think he had a much
> more
> troubled, interesting, complex message to America than what we have
> decided
> it was in our history books and in our one-paragraph summaries of
> him. I
> would say that his legacy probably has not been fully understood.
>
> I don't think the full impact of what Schumacher has written about
> economics
> has really hit yet, the defense of family business and local community
> economies. That's starting to have resurgence in the third world
> with these
> micro credit organizations. If you start taking Schumacher
> seriously, then
> economics is due for a quantum leap, and that hasn't happened yet.
> We need
> to rethink the way we do economics, to question the assumption that
> we're
> all self-maximizing individuals.
>
> I think Northrop Frye is another one who was understood too
> quickly, or
> misunderstood. Literary studies over the past 20 years has been
> struggling
> with a lot of competing materialisms. Frye had offered in the early
> 60s a
> radical mystic contemplative vision of the literary studies, which
> doomed
> him to obsolescence in 1963. But now that practices like lectio
> divina and
> those contemplative ways of reading are being rediscovered, you
> look back at
> Northrop Frye, and he's the guy who provides the most interesting
> ideas and
> paradigms. But I think such a recovery is going to have to be done by
> religious folk. Because if you try secularizing his categories,
> they just
> don't work. It's only through religious eyes that Frye's literary
> cosmology
> makes sense, in the same way that Lord of the Rings has a deeper
> meaning to
> those who see its Christian themes.
>
> In Frye's letters and journals and also his sermons, because he was a
> pastor, you get to see the full Christian dimension of his
> thinking. He
> discussed how to read prophetically, how to read contemplatively.
> These were
> issues that Frye addressed that the last 20- 25-five years of literary
> criticism just ignored. I think what's going to happen in about 10
> years is
> they're going to rediscover the language in which Frye was writing
> and learn
> he was trying to teach us how to read in a way that deepened our inner
> lives, not just increased our intellectual sophistication.
>
> * * *
> --
> 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 JHForest at cs.com Thu Oct 13 05:18:59 2005
From: JHForest at cs.com (JHForest at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 05:18:59 EDT
Subject: [percy-l] re LITR
Message-ID: <196.48eb61c7.307f8083@cs.com>
from Mike's posting:
>> After all, authentic Christianity (especially as embodied in the inept,
corrupt, scandal-ridden, imperfect, humanly executed/divinely inspired
Catholic Church) has despite its faults, been the most progressive force
the world has ever known to anyone who is familiar with its history --
unfortunately a consistently small minority. <<
This strikes me as one of the main points Percy is making in Love in
the Ruins. We discover a not-quite-now future in which a battered remnant
of the Catholic Church survives after a schism that produces on the one
hand the American Catholic Church (with its Property Rights Sunday) and
the Dutch Catholic Church (in which political relevance is the main
item). Then there's the rag-tag Roman Catholic Church, poor as a
church mouse, bell-less, celebrating Mass in abandoned garages.
Jim
* * *
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 (alternative address:
forestflier at gmail.com)
Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org
Jim & Nancy Forest web site: http://incommunion.org/forest-flier/
photo web site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/
* * *
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
From MorrisJD at aol.com Mon Oct 24 14:24:59 2005
From: MorrisJD at aol.com (MorrisJD at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 14:24:59 EDT
Subject: [percy-l] LITR
Message-ID: <1e5.479dacc5.308e80fb@aol.com>
Is there any ongoing discussion?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
From sldye at bluegrass.org Mon Oct 24 14:28:23 2005
From: sldye at bluegrass.org (Dye, Steve)
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 14:28:23 -0400
Subject: [percy-l] LITR
Message-ID: <74C25147FD45F644AAB363F7A432E5F527895C@KingKong.Bluegrass.Board>
I am asking the same question. It was my understanding we would be
starting a discussion of LITR in October with the first chapter.
-----Original Message-----
From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of MorrisJD at aol.com
Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 2:25 PM
To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [percy-l] LITR
Is there any ongoing discussion?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
From tfa at brickengraver.com Mon Oct 24 21:47:57 2005
From: tfa at brickengraver.com (Tommy Armstrong)
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 21:47:57 -0400
Subject: [percy-l] LITR
In-Reply-To: <1e5.479dacc5.308e80fb@aol.com>
Message-ID: <002001c5d906$200e0cb0$6501a8c0@compaqupstairs>
Not much, so start it up and maybe some will follow.
Tommy Armstrong
"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find
easier ways to do something."
Robert Heinlein
_____
From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of MorrisJD at aol.com
Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 2:25 PM
To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [percy-l] LITR
Is there any ongoing discussion?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: