From janetcantor37 at yahoo.com Mon Dec 5 13:23:48 2011 From: janetcantor37 at yahoo.com (janet cantor) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 10:23:48 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] from a movie review Message-ID: <1323109428.57543.YahooMailClassic@web125920.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Manohla Dargis, in a review of the movie Unknown, said this: "It's truer inspirations are those film noirs of the 19402 and '50s in which an Everyman wakes up with a lump on his head and asks the great essential question, Who am I?" ?I was reminded of Binx's movie about amnesia. Soon to come will be the rest of my comments on that Percy conference in Loyola in October. Janet Cantor -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gregory.plemmons at Vanderbilt.Edu Mon Dec 5 13:33:08 2011 From: gregory.plemmons at Vanderbilt.Edu (Plemmons, Gregory) Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 12:33:08 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] A brief mention of Percy In-Reply-To: <1323109428.57543.YahooMailClassic@web125920.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <1323109428.57543.YahooMailClassic@web125920.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1ED00130EB6B5246ABF8AAA28896D93F0B99D7D6D7@ITS-HCWNEM02.ds.Vanderbilt.edu> A brief piece in the Sunday paper this past weekend in Nashville, Tennessee: http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111203/NEWS06/312030030/Ray-Waddle-Percy-asked-whether-life-mistake-miracle Nashvillians will at least get to see the Percy documentary here on the local PBS station in January. All best, Gregory Plemmons, MD -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From randyattwood at hotmail.com Tue Dec 6 15:55:28 2011 From: randyattwood at hotmail.com (Randy Attwood) Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 14:55:28 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] Interesting note from Percy In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Percy fans may be interested in the tale of a note he sent to me about the opening chapters of a novel manuscript I sent him. http://randyattwood.blogspot.com/2011/09/note-from-walker-percy-about-41st.html > From: percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org > Subject: Percy-L Digest, Vol 90, Issue 1 > To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org > Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 12:01:17 -0500 > > 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. from a movie review (janet cantor) > 2. A brief mention of Percy (Plemmons, Gregory) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 10:23:48 -0800 (PST) > From: janet cantor > Subject: [percy-l] from a movie review > To: Percy-L at lists.ibiblio.org > Message-ID: > <1323109428.57543.YahooMailClassic at web125920.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > Manohla Dargis, in a review of the movie Unknown, said this: > > "It's truer inspirations are those film noirs of the 19402 and '50s in which an Everyman wakes up with a lump on his head and asks the great essential question, Who am I?" > > ?I was reminded of Binx's movie about amnesia. > > Soon to come will be the rest of my comments on that Percy conference in Loyola in October. > > Janet Cantor > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/attachments/20111205/39fc0244/attachment-0001.html > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 2 > Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 12:33:08 -0600 > From: "Plemmons, Gregory" > Subject: [percy-l] A brief mention of Percy > To: "'Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion'" > > Message-ID: > <1ED00130EB6B5246ABF8AAA28896D93F0B99D7D6D7 at ITS-HCWNEM02.ds.Vanderbilt.edu> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > A brief piece in the Sunday paper this past weekend in Nashville, Tennessee: > > http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111203/NEWS06/312030030/Ray-Waddle-Percy-asked-whether-life-mistake-miracle > > Nashvillians will at least get to see the Percy documentary here on the local PBS station in January. > > > All best, > Gregory Plemmons, MD > > > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/attachments/20111205/96cf7462/attachment-0001.html > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Percy-L mailing list > Percy-L at lists.ibiblio.org > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l > > > End of Percy-L Digest, Vol 90, Issue 1 > ************************************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From janetcantor37 at yahoo.com Sat Dec 10 10:01:08 2011 From: janetcantor37 at yahoo.com (janet cantor) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 07:01:08 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] part one - Loyola symposium for the 50th anniversary of publication of The Moviegoer Message-ID: <1323529268.53570.YahooMailClassic@web125905.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> I am going to do this in two parts because I have a lot to tell you. I will paraphrase my favorite insights and comments from speakers. There will be no attribution because when I edited my tapes down I did not make a record of? which scholar said what. I have the list of the speakers if anyone wants them. "If you've read the novel as many times as I have and you still find yourself waiting eagerly for the next phrase or sentence, you have a classic..." That is how my tape opens and I just love that. The next section I hope I am getting right. Satire attacks one thing in order to affirm another.It ridicules the inhuman in order to affirm the human. It is always launched in the mode of hope. Percy's satire did not spare his own Christian world view. He situates an alienated protagonist within a ubiquitous? complacent Protestant culture. Percy's six novels satirize materialistic and political coalitions in the reactionary South. Just as Kierkegard wrote in two forms, the religious works published under his real name and the philosophical works published under pseudonyms, Percy wrote in both of these modes in his novels. He used the philosophical, aesthetic mode subversively through irony and deception. In the Moviegoer the majority of the novel functions in the aesthetic manner and the epilogue moves into the religious and edifying. Read the paragraph on page 237 that begins As for my search... >From another speaker... Percy believed that the old South of his Uncle Will was informed by stoicism. The New South which Percy mocks has a nominal Christianity which took satisfaction in the dissolution of its values. The coherence of the stoic values found in the former South has been exchanged for the new South? of thriving businesses and Churches. Percy maps with deadly satire the broader landscapes of fractured community in America and its metaphysical incoherence through comments about the golf community in the Second Coming and much of The Last Gentleman. As the South pursued material prosperity, the region began to compromise its distinctiveness. A cranky novelist reflects on the Church and sees a devaluation of language and cheapening of the very vocabulary of salvation which dumbs down Southern Christianity. The lecturer who compared the Rabbit books of John Updike to Binx's story talked about Grace in both author's works. At the end of the Mpviegoer there is a scene where Binx sees a black man exiting a church on Ash Wednesday and he wonders if the man thinks he has come up in the world or does he feel G-d's presence there or maybe it's both...Page 235. "Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming here for the one and receiving the other as G-d's own importunate bonus?" By ending the novel this way, Percy sets up the epilogue perfectly where the influence of Lonnie will set Binx on his journey toward his salvation. The author's biographer, Jay Tolson gave the Keynote speech. He was funny and moving. He spoke of reading the novel on Kindle this time and he was trying to decide if it was a repetition or a rotation. He told us Percy's father's suicide did not affect him in the way you'd expect it to. He didn't feel responsible or guilty. He felt angry and was determined to make sure it didn't happen to him. Percy asserted that converting to Catholicism saved his life. He also had the good fortune of getting married and having a wonderful family late in his life to compensate for the complicated family he had early in his life. Another speaker said of Kate that we don't think of her as a spiritual quester, yet late in the novel when Kate sees the very ill Lonnie, she says, "He's dying Binx. It breaks my heart." For the first time she becomes less self absorbed; she is thinking of someone else. One evidence that Binx is changing is that whereas before Binx always called his siblings the Smiths, in the Epilogue he calls them his brothers and sisters for the first time. One speaker got a laugh when he said, "As someone who teaches the Moviegoer to colleges students whose favorite TV channel is not Turner Classic Movies..." and then he went on to tell of the difficulties of trying to tell what is evoked by inserting real people? like William Holden, John Wayne and Gregory Peck into the novel. If they don't know who these people are and haven't seen their movies, how does the modern reader understand their iconic presence? There was a spectacular essay given on the dung beetle. I will try to do it justice in just a few sentences here. As Binx tells us, he was lying injured, expecting to die, and he sees a dung beetle scratching under leaves. He decides if he ever gets out of this he will begin a search. The idea of a search is the opposite of despair, we learn from the Kierkegard quote and from the sense Binx gives us throughout the novel. This dung beetle becomes a major symbol in the novel. A dung beetle gets his nourishment by eating excrement which he finds by smelling. He eats death for his sustenance. After this presentation a commenter said the dung beetle is a symbol of resurrection because that was an emergence out of the dung. ?Binx is proud of his MG which he bought to avoid the malaise, but when he is riding home with Sharon, his secretary, Binx describes his MG as a symbol of despair because the everydayness of lots of people riding home, tired and bored, makes it that. He calls his car his beetle, a reference to the dung beetle? On page 206 there is? a strange passage - "There I see her plain, see plain for the first time since I lay wounded in a ditch and watched an Oriental finch scratching around in the leaves..." He is seeing Kate in a new light. But it wasn't a finch that he saw scratching around in the leaves; it was a dung beetle. Why did Walker do this? The speaker said between a beetle and a bird is a butterfly and perhaps Walker confused the images intentionally. A bird eats insects to live and fly. The reference to the beetle is there again but changed as Binx is changed and Kate is changing in his eyes. And in a key sentence in the novel, the longest run on sentence of the novel on page 228, Binx says, "Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage..." and he combines dung, dung beetles, smelling, malaise and settles the novel into the post modern age, and we come full circle. I don't know about you who are reading this now, but all of this escaped me and I think it's brilliant. I will stop here and give you? part two a bit later. Janet Cantor -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kathena1 at aol.com Sat Dec 10 10:40:13 2011 From: kathena1 at aol.com (kathena1) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 10:40:13 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] part one - Loyola symposium for the 50th anniversary of publication of The Moviegoer In-Reply-To: <1323529268.53570.YahooMailClassic@web125905.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <1323529268.53570.YahooMailClassic@web125905.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <003401ccb752$0267a550$0736eff0$@com> Hi Janet - Thanks so much for this great rendition of what happened - as well as your earlier description of the conference! Question: Do you have any info on the speaker's names and titles of the essays, or if they are presented or published elsewhere? Just curious. Karey Karey L. Perkins, M.A.T., Ph.D. Writer and editor, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies Master's candidate, Department of Philosophy Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303 From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of janet cantor Sent: Saturday, December 10, 2011 10:01 AM To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: [percy-l] part one - Loyola symposium for the 50th anniversary of publication of The Moviegoer I am going to do this in two parts because I have a lot to tell you. I will paraphrase my favorite insights and comments from speakers. There will be no attribution because when I edited my tapes down I did not make a record of which scholar said what. I have the list of the speakers if anyone wants them. "If you've read the novel as many times as I have and you still find yourself waiting eagerly for the next phrase or sentence, you have a classic..." That is how my tape opens and I just love that. The next section I hope I am getting right. Satire attacks one thing in order to affirm another.It ridicules the inhuman in order to affirm the human. It is always launched in the mode of hope. Percy's satire did not spare his own Christian world view. He situates an alienated protagonist within a ubiquitous complacent Protestant culture. Percy's six novels satirize materialistic and political coalitions in the reactionary South. Just as Kierkegard wrote in two forms, the religious works published under his real name and the philosophical works published under pseudonyms, Percy wrote in both of these modes in his novels. He used the philosophical, aesthetic mode subversively through irony and deception. In the Moviegoer the majority of the novel functions in the aesthetic manner and the epilogue moves into the religious and edifying. Read the paragraph on page 237 that begins As for my search... >From another speaker... Percy believed that the old South of his Uncle Will was informed by stoicism. The New South which Percy mocks has a nominal Christianity which took satisfaction in the dissolution of its values. The coherence of the stoic values found in the former South has been exchanged for the new South of thriving businesses and Churches. Percy maps with deadly satire the broader landscapes of fractured community in America and its metaphysical incoherence through comments about the golf community in the Second Coming and much of The Last Gentleman. As the South pursued material prosperity, the region began to compromise its distinctiveness. A cranky novelist reflects on the Church and sees a devaluation of language and cheapening of the very vocabulary of salvation which dumbs down Southern Christianity. The lecturer who compared the Rabbit books of John Updike to Binx's story talked about Grace in both author's works. At the end of the Mpviegoer there is a scene where Binx sees a black man exiting a church on Ash Wednesday and he wonders if the man thinks he has come up in the world or does he feel G-d's presence there or maybe it's both...Page 235. "Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming here for the one and receiving the other as G-d's own importunate bonus?" By ending the novel this way, Percy sets up the epilogue perfectly where the influence of Lonnie will set Binx on his journey toward his salvation. The author's biographer, Jay Tolson gave the Keynote speech. He was funny and moving. He spoke of reading the novel on Kindle this time and he was trying to decide if it was a repetition or a rotation. He told us Percy's father's suicide did not affect him in the way you'd expect it to. He didn't feel responsible or guilty. He felt angry and was determined to make sure it didn't happen to him. Percy asserted that converting to Catholicism saved his life. He also had the good fortune of getting married and having a wonderful family late in his life to compensate for the complicated family he had early in his life. Another speaker said of Kate that we don't think of her as a spiritual quester, yet late in the novel when Kate sees the very ill Lonnie, she says, "He's dying Binx. It breaks my heart." For the first time she becomes less self absorbed; she is thinking of someone else. One evidence that Binx is changing is that whereas before Binx always called his siblings the Smiths, in the Epilogue he calls them his brothers and sisters for the first time. One speaker got a laugh when he said, "As someone who teaches the Moviegoer to colleges students whose favorite TV channel is not Turner Classic Movies..." and then he went on to tell of the difficulties of trying to tell what is evoked by inserting real people like William Holden, John Wayne and Gregory Peck into the novel. If they don't know who these people are and haven't seen their movies, how does the modern reader understand their iconic presence? There was a spectacular essay given on the dung beetle. I will try to do it justice in just a few sentences here. As Binx tells us, he was lying injured, expecting to die, and he sees a dung beetle scratching under leaves. He decides if he ever gets out of this he will begin a search. The idea of a search is the opposite of despair, we learn from the Kierkegard quote and from the sense Binx gives us throughout the novel. This dung beetle becomes a major symbol in the novel. A dung beetle gets his nourishment by eating excrement which he finds by smelling. He eats death for his sustenance. After this presentation a commenter said the dung beetle is a symbol of resurrection because that was an emergence out of the dung. Binx is proud of his MG which he bought to avoid the malaise, but when he is riding home with Sharon, his secretary, Binx describes his MG as a symbol of despair because the everydayness of lots of people riding home, tired and bored, makes it that. He calls his car his beetle, a reference to the dung beetle? On page 206 there is a strange passage - "There I see her plain, see plain for the first time since I lay wounded in a ditch and watched an Oriental finch scratching around in the leaves..." He is seeing Kate in a new light. But it wasn't a finch that he saw scratching around in the leaves; it was a dung beetle. Why did Walker do this? The speaker said between a beetle and a bird is a butterfly and perhaps Walker confused the images intentionally. A bird eats insects to live and fly. The reference to the beetle is there again but changed as Binx is changed and Kate is changing in his eyes. And in a key sentence in the novel, the longest run on sentence of the novel on page 228, Binx says, "Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage..." and he combines dung, dung beetles, smelling, malaise and settles the novel into the post modern age, and we come full circle. I don't know about you who are reading this now, but all of this escaped me and I think it's brilliant. I will stop here and give you part two a bit later. Janet Cantor -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From janetcantor37 at yahoo.com Sat Dec 10 12:06:07 2011 From: janetcantor37 at yahoo.com (janet cantor) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 09:06:07 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] part one - Loyola symposium for the 50th anniversary of publication of The Moviegoer In-Reply-To: <003401ccb752$0267a550$0736eff0$@com> Message-ID: <1323536767.39463.YahooMailClassic@web125906.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> I have it all. If you send me your address, I can copy it and mail it to you. I have a second part I am going to do now. How is it sounding so far? Is it helpful and understandable? Janet Hi Janet ? ?Thanks so much for this great rendition of what happened ? as well as your earlier description of the conference!? Question:? Do you have any info on the speaker?s names and titles of the essays, or if they are presented or published elsewhere? ?Just curious. ?Karey ? ?Karey L. Perkins, M.A.T., Ph.D.Writer and editor, Andrew Young School of Policy StudiesMaster?s candidate, Department of PhilosophyGeorgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303 ? ? ?From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of janet cantor Sent: Saturday, December 10, 2011 10:01 AM To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: [percy-l] part one - Loyola symposium for the 50th anniversary of publication of The Moviegoer ?I am going to do this in two parts because I have a lot to tell you. I will paraphrase my favorite insights and comments from speakers. There will be no attribution because when I edited my tapes down I did not make a record of? which scholar said what. I have the list of the speakers if anyone wants them. "If you've read the novel as many times as I have and you still find yourself waiting eagerly for the next phrase or sentence, you have a classic..." That is how my tape opens and I just love that. The next section I hope I am getting right. Satire attacks one thing in order to affirm another.It ridicules the inhuman in order to affirm the human. It is always launched in the mode of hope. Percy's satire did not spare his own Christian world view. He situates an alienated protagonist within a ubiquitous? complacent Protestant culture. Percy's six novels satirize materialistic and political coalitions in the reactionary South. Just as Kierkegard wrote in two forms, the religious works published under his real name and the philosophical works published under pseudonyms, Percy wrote in both of these modes in his novels. He used the philosophical, aesthetic mode subversively through irony and deception. In the Moviegoer the majority of the novel functions in the aesthetic manner and the epilogue moves into the religious and edifying. Read the paragraph on page 237 that begins As for my search... >From another speaker... Percy believed that the old South of his Uncle Will was informed by stoicism. The New South which Percy mocks has a nominal Christianity which took satisfaction in the dissolution of its values. The coherence of the stoic values found in the former South has been exchanged for the new South? of thriving businesses and Churches. Percy maps with deadly satire the broader landscapes of fractured community in America and its metaphysical incoherence through comments about the golf community in the Second Coming and much of The Last Gentleman. As the South pursued material prosperity, the region began to compromise its distinctiveness. A cranky novelist reflects on the Church and sees a devaluation of language and cheapening of the very vocabulary of salvation which dumbs down Southern Christianity. The lecturer who compared the Rabbit books of John Updike to Binx's story talked about Grace in both author's works. At the end of the Mpviegoer there is a scene where Binx sees a black man exiting a church on Ash Wednesday and he wonders if the man thinks he has come up in the world or does he feel G-d's presence there or maybe it's both...Page 235. "Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming here for the one and receiving the other as G-d's own importunate bonus?" By ending the novel this way, Percy sets up the epilogue perfectly where the influence of Lonnie will set Binx on his journey toward his salvation. The author's biographer, Jay Tolson gave the Keynote speech. He was funny and moving. He spoke of reading the novel on Kindle this time and he was trying to decide if it was a repetition or a rotation. He told us Percy's father's suicide did not affect him in the way you'd expect it to. He didn't feel responsible or guilty. He felt angry and was determined to make sure it didn't happen to him. Percy asserted that converting to Catholicism saved his life. He also had the good fortune of getting married and having a wonderful family late in his life to compensate for the complicated family he had early in his life. Another speaker said of Kate that we don't think of her as a spiritual quester, yet late in the novel when Kate sees the very ill Lonnie, she says, "He's dying Binx. It breaks my heart." For the first time she becomes less self absorbed; she is thinking of someone else. One evidence that Binx is changing is that whereas before Binx always called his siblings the Smiths, in the Epilogue he calls them his brothers and sisters for the first time. One speaker got a laugh when he said, "As someone who teaches the Moviegoer to colleges students whose favorite TV channel is not Turner Classic Movies..." and then he went on to tell of the difficulties of trying to tell what is evoked by inserting real people? like William Holden, John Wayne and Gregory Peck into the novel. If they don't know who these people are and haven't seen their movies, how does the modern reader understand their iconic presence? There was a spectacular essay given on the dung beetle. I will try to do it justice in just a few sentences here. As Binx tells us, he was lying injured, expecting to die, and he sees a dung beetle scratching under leaves. He decides if he ever gets out of this he will begin a search. The idea of a search is the opposite of despair, we learn from the Kierkegard quote and from the sense Binx gives us throughout the novel. This dung beetle becomes a major symbol in the novel. A dung beetle gets his nourishment by eating excrement which he finds by smelling. He eats death for his sustenance. After this presentation a commenter said the dung beetle is a symbol of resurrection because that was an emergence out of the dung. ?Binx is proud of his MG which he bought to avoid the malaise, but when he is riding home with Sharon, his secretary, Binx describes his MG as a symbol of despair because the everydayness of lots of people riding home, tired and bored, makes it that. He calls his car his beetle, a reference to the dung beetle? On page 206 there is? a strange passage - "There I see her plain, see plain for the first time since I lay wounded in a ditch and watched an Oriental finch scratching around in the leaves..." He is seeing Kate in a new light. But it wasn't a finch that he saw scratching around in the leaves; it was a dung beetle. Why did Walker do this? The speaker said between a beetle and a bird is a butterfly and perhaps Walker confused the images intentionally. A bird eats insects to live and fly. The reference to the beetle is there again but changed as Binx is changed and Kate is changing in his eyes. And in a key sentence in the novel, the longest run on sentence of the novel on page 228, Binx says, "Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage..." and he combines dung, dung beetles, smelling, malaise and settles the novel into the post modern age, and we come full circle. I don't know about you who are reading this now, but all of this escaped me and I think it's brilliant. I will stop here and give you? part two a bit later. Janet Cantor ? -----Inline Attachment Follows----- -- 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 Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add @ sign when addressing email) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kathena1 at aol.com Sat Dec 10 13:19:40 2011 From: kathena1 at aol.com (kathena1) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 13:19:40 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] part one - Loyola symposium for the 50th anniversary of publication of The Moviegoer In-Reply-To: <1323536767.39463.YahooMailClassic@web125906.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <003401ccb752$0267a550$0736eff0$@com> <1323536767.39463.YahooMailClassic@web125906.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <005a01ccb768$4932f5a0$db98e0e0$@com> Janet ? Yes ? it?s very interesting too! Makes me want to go back through and re-read some of his books, especially in regard to some of those passages. You can email me at kathena1 at aol.com Thanks! Karey From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of janet cantor Sent: Saturday, December 10, 2011 12:06 PM To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion Subject: Re: [percy-l] part one - Loyola symposium for the 50th anniversary of publication of The Moviegoer I have it all. If you send me your address, I can copy it and mail it to you. I have a second part I am going to do now. How is it sounding so far? Is it helpful and understandable? Janet Hi Janet ? Thanks so much for this great rendition of what happened ? as well as your earlier description of the conference! Question: Do you have any info on the speaker?s names and titles of the essays, or if they are presented or published elsewhere? Just curious. Karey Karey L. Perkins, M.A.T., Ph.D. Writer and editor, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies Master?s candidate, Department of Philosophy Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303 From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of janet cantor Sent: Saturday, December 10, 2011 10:01 AM To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org Subject: [percy-l] part one - Loyola symposium for the 50th anniversary of publication of The Moviegoer I am going to do this in two parts because I have a lot to tell you. I will paraphrase my favorite insights and comments from speakers. There will be no attribution because when I edited my tapes down I did not make a record of which scholar said what. I have the list of the speakers if anyone wants them. "If you've read the novel as many times as I have and you still find yourself waiting eagerly for the next phrase or sentence, you have a classic..." That is how my tape opens and I just love that. The next section I hope I am getting right. Satire attacks one thing in order to affirm another.It ridicules the inhuman in order to affirm the human. It is always launched in the mode of hope. Percy's satire did not spare his own Christian world view. He situates an alienated protagonist within a ubiquitous complacent Protestant culture. Percy's six novels satirize materialistic and political coalitions in the reactionary South. Just as Kierkegard wrote in two forms, the religious works published under his real name and the philosophical works published under pseudonyms, Percy wrote in both of these modes in his novels. He used the philosophical, aesthetic mode subversively through irony and deception. In the Moviegoer the majority of the novel functions in the aesthetic manner and the epilogue moves into the religious and edifying. Read the paragraph on page 237 that begins As for my search... >From another speaker... Percy believed that the old South of his Uncle Will was informed by stoicism. The New South which Percy mocks has a nominal Christianity which took satisfaction in the dissolution of its values. The coherence of the stoic values found in the former South has been exchanged for the new South of thriving businesses and Churches. Percy maps with deadly satire the broader landscapes of fractured community in America and its metaphysical incoherence through comments about the golf community in the Second Coming and much of The Last Gentleman. As the South pursued material prosperity, the region began to compromise its distinctiveness. A cranky novelist reflects on the Church and sees a devaluation of language and cheapening of the very vocabulary of salvation which dumbs down Southern Christianity. The lecturer who compared the Rabbit books of John Updike to Binx's story talked about Grace in both author's works. At the end of the Mpviegoer there is a scene where Binx sees a black man exiting a church on Ash Wednesday and he wonders if the man thinks he has come up in the world or does he feel G-d's presence there or maybe it's both...Page 235. "Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming here for the one and receiving the other as G-d's own importunate bonus?" By ending the novel this way, Percy sets up the epilogue perfectly where the influence of Lonnie will set Binx on his journey toward his salvation. The author's biographer, Jay Tolson gave the Keynote speech. He was funny and moving. He spoke of reading the novel on Kindle this time and he was trying to decide if it was a repetition or a rotation. He told us Percy's father's suicide did not affect him in the way you'd expect it to. He didn't feel responsible or guilty. He felt angry and was determined to make sure it didn't happen to him. Percy asserted that converting to Catholicism saved his life. He also had the good fortune of getting married and having a wonderful family late in his life to compensate for the complicated family he had early in his life. Another speaker said of Kate that we don't think of her as a spiritual quester, yet late in the novel when Kate sees the very ill Lonnie, she says, "He's dying Binx. It breaks my heart." For the first time she becomes less self absorbed; she is thinking of someone else. One evidence that Binx is changing is that whereas before Binx always called his siblings the Smiths, in the Epilogue he calls them his brothers and sisters for the first time. One speaker got a laugh when he said, "As someone who teaches the Moviegoer to colleges students whose favorite TV channel is not Turner Classic Movies..." and then he went on to tell of the difficulties of trying to tell what is evoked by inserting real people like William Holden, John Wayne and Gregory Peck into the novel. If they don't know who these people are and haven't seen their movies, how does the modern reader understand their iconic presence? There was a spectacular essay given on the dung beetle. I will try to do it justice in just a few sentences here. As Binx tells us, he was lying injured, expecting to die, and he sees a dung beetle scratching under leaves. He decides if he ever gets out of this he will begin a search. The idea of a search is the opposite of despair, we learn from the Kierkegard quote and from the sense Binx gives us throughout the novel. This dung beetle becomes a major symbol in the novel. A dung beetle gets his nourishment by eating excrement which he finds by smelling. He eats death for his sustenance. After this presentation a commenter said the dung beetle is a symbol of resurrection because that was an emergence out of the dung. Binx is proud of his MG which he bought to avoid the malaise, but when he is riding home with Sharon, his secretary, Binx describes his MG as a symbol of despair because the everydayness of lots of people riding home, tired and bored, makes it that. He calls his car his beetle, a reference to the dung beetle? On page 206 there is a strange passage - "There I see her plain, see plain for the first time since I lay wounded in a ditch and watched an Oriental finch scratching around in the leaves..." He is seeing Kate in a new light. But it wasn't a finch that he saw scratching around in the leaves; it was a dung beetle. Why did Walker do this? The speaker said between a beetle and a bird is a butterfly and perhaps Walker confused the images intentionally. A bird eats insects to live and fly. The reference to the beetle is there again but changed as Binx is changed and Kate is changing in his eyes. And in a key sentence in the novel, the longest run on sentence of the novel on page 228, Binx says, "Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage..." and he combines dung, dung beetles, smelling, malaise and settles the novel into the post modern age, and we come full circle. I don't know about you who are reading this now, but all of this escaped me and I think it's brilliant. I will stop here and give you part two a bit later. Janet Cantor -----Inline Attachment Follows----- -- 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 Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add @ sign when addressing email) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From janetcantor37 at yahoo.com Sat Dec 10 13:25:30 2011 From: janetcantor37 at yahoo.com (janet cantor) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 10:25:30 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] Part two of 50th anniversary of The Moviegoer - notes from the Symposium Message-ID: <1323541530.12433.YahooMailClassic@web125904.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Professor Eddie Dupuy got off a great one liner: Celebrity can only arise in a secular society. Hmmm. More notes on the dung beetle - the symbol comes from the last scene of All Quiet on the Western Front, a movie mentioned in the book.? After his dense presentation, this speaker said that doing this study of the symbolism of the dung beetle in The Moviegoer put him onto the search and kept him from despair for a while. In pre modern societies the ends of life were given to you by your family or community. If your father was a farmer, or a blacksmith, or owned a store, you probably would follow in his footsteps. In modern cultures that is not as assured. Now you choose your trade, your lifestyle. as the culture shifts. The Moviegoer came out in 1961 just about the time our culture was going to undergo lots of radical shifts for good or ill. The next two sessions were all about movies. One was so perfect I couldn't take notes. The presenter promised to make a movie out of the whole thing. I hope he keeps his promise. He took the movies named or alluded to in the book and showed which ones Walker meant or may have meant. Then someone spoke about the way movies were named in the novel. He described a kind of contrapuntal listing of opposites. So if Stagecoach is named,? starring a true blue American hero, John Wayne, of the evil/good black/white easy morality variety, then The Third Man is mentioned, an ambiguous movie with a non hero and darker perspective . The scene? where hero John Wayne shoots a baddie is juxtaposed with an image of a cat slinking around the ankles of Orson Welles in a dark doorway. If It Happened One Night is named, a screwball comedy, it is followed by a mention of The Oxbow incident, a new kind of western, again dark and sinister. A simple Fort Dobbs is followed by Dark Waters. Tarzan is followed by All Quiet on the Western Front. ( We also got some details of these movies that had some similarities to the novel) With The Oxbow Incident we confront a story where war is more dangerous than the economy. The depression now takes a back seat to World War II. Novels of flight were also popular at this time. On the road kinds of things also influenced the novel. Before the 1940's we lived in an almost innocent age and our movies reflected that. We had the First World War and the depression, but so far knowledge of communism's horrors was limited. After the Second World War we learned of the capabilities of man's inhumanity to man from the Nazis and their allies and then from Communism's scale of murders by the millions. So now theater had absurdists, because frothy plays or romances wouldn't do after we lost our innocence, and the existentialists came into vogue. Percy traces this change and recognizes it in the way he places these movies suggesting knowledge of our loss of innocence this way in the book. So hope vs. cynicism, comedy vs. satire, light vs. dark are placed side by side intentionally as I listed in examples above. All this came before European cinema's arrival here. The text of The Moviegoer, its style of being in the moment in the story without a neat beginning middle and end matched the stylistics of European movies with? their sensualism and meandering plots.? Percy was aware of this and used it all as subtext, not overtly. Before the 1950's 80 to 100 million Americans went to the movies weekly. Reality was in the movies for many American families. Then came television and that changed; people stayed home. Then foreign movies came to the states, French New Wave, Kurasawa, the moderns. It became fashionable to go to out to the movies again. For all of his snarkiness, "it has been said" and mocking asides like that, Binx is actually sympathetic. And in the Epilogue the book proves hopeful. In the novel Binx is turning 30, the age when Jesus began his ministry. The novel ends on St. Charles, a fitting place. It is at the church on St. Charles on Loyola's campus where Percy decided to convert to Catholicism. I asked what it was that the National Book Award Committee saw in this book that got them to choose it. The answer was that it was 1961 and people were tired of war stories like Catch 22, and the teenage stuff like Franny and Zooey was interesting, but The Moviegoer broke new ground. If the 50's writers were modernists, then Percy was a post modernist someone suggested. This would mean that he was against the moderns. I liked that because in my Amazon review I said Percy was really an anti existentialist in some ways. The National Book Committee recognized that in The Moviegoer, here was something new, a new way of perceiving things. My tape ends with a presentation by Charles? J. Lowry who also contributes to the Percy Lists on occasion. This was so perfect an essay that I didn't edit one second of it. He spoke of how The Moviegoer influenced him and how it can help us all lead a better life.? (Charles, if you are reading this and want a copy of this tape, let me know.) I could listen to Lowry's essay over and over and I'm sure I will. It was musical, clear and so moving, it almost brings me to tears, especially the part about how Binx teaches us how to love. I have not gone into the philosophy speakers or the religious ones. I missed most of those sessions anyway because of the ones I chose. And those I attended were a bit over my head. Conclusion: A self serving comment. I wrote a review of the novel after having read it three times in a row. I said I could come back a year or two later and write a completely different review depending on what I chose to emphasize. Well, I guess I was right about that. But I am not ashamed of my little review. As I said before, it was as if the entire weekend was scripted for me. I kept getting my opinions validated by the analysis of each speaker. The main sense I got is that the body of the book is the search, where Binx is in limbo, the modern man with his emptiness trying to find meaning. And then Aunt Emily grounds him in reality and tells him to take responsibility. And Lonnie touches Binx and influences him on his road to salvation. Binx must learn to stop being so self centered and care for someone else; that is his earthly life's journey. And he must begin his road to his eternal life. Some book, huh? Oh, yes, and the first question Percy asked anyone who talked to him about the book is, "Did you laugh?" -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jhforest at gmail.com Sun Dec 11 13:26:44 2011 From: jhforest at gmail.com (Jim Forest) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:26:44 +0100 Subject: [percy-l] Part two of 50th anniversary of The Moviegoer - notes from the Symposium In-Reply-To: <1323541530.12433.YahooMailClassic@web125904.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <1323541530.12433.YahooMailClassic@web125904.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Janet, following up on your fascinating collection of notes, I decided to see if I could find your review of The Moviegoer on the book's Amazon page. Are you the reviewer you identifies yourself as "Honey"? Jim Forest * * * A masterpiece, September 25, 2010 By honey "honey" (philadelphia, pa) - See all my reviews SPOILER ALERT. Do not read this review until after you have finished the book and considered it for yourself. If fifteen people read and reviewed The Moviegoer, they could create fifteen different descriptions of it. If one person read it a year later, he could write a completely different review of it from the one he wrote the year before. It all depends on what is emphasized, the southernness, New Orleans, the story of ancestries, the blacks and whites or the relationship of the story to Kierkegard. There are so many aspects of the novel to consider. This is a funny book, an endearing book. The writing is gasp inducing gorgeous. This is a book of its time, post Becket, the existentialists, and the absurdists. It follows a half century of the realization of the great scale of the horror man is capable of perpetrating on his fellow men. Salinger has been writing about teenage angst. Yet, while it is so relevant to the late nineteen fifties, Binx's story finds resonance to this day. It is funny to read how Binx plots to make his secretary fall in love with him. The descriptions of movies and their use to him and how he makes a movie house more real are wonderful. Look on page 216 for a line that gives the reader pause on the subject of the title. Binx's elaborate descriptions of the components of his search make up a good portion of the story. Yet every time he is with Aunt Emily, he either can't talk about it or it seems to be smaller in importance. And in the face of Aunt Emily's big rant at him in part five, he understands that he is finished with his search. His search, he tells us, is to forestall the everydayness; in his head he criticizes other people who are satisfied with ordinary lives. All the while he is thinking and working out the details of his search, he is carrying out normal activity and conversation, and no one having discourse with him, knows about his interior life. The only one who knows it all is his fellow mentally discomfited, Kate. In the end, he will accept everydayness as he takes care of Kate. It is a great theme in a lot of literature, the concept of coming home. Ulysses, The Wizard of Oz, Pippin, the musical, where he realizes he is not extraordinary and will settle as man, woman, child in an every day existence, and Candide, who after his upsetting adventures will join with his love and just make his garden grow. And so it is here. The epilogue may be one of the most gorgeous things I have ever read. Tender, quiet, accepting; Kate and Binx will make it, I believe. The book is described as an existential novel. What kind of existential protagonist loves his job, loves making money, and goes to great lengths to protect his clients' accounts? What kind of existential character loves others, his half brother, Lonnie and Aunt Emily? He even has a kind of love for minor characters like Mr. Kinsella and the ladies in ticket booths. And Kate and Binx have a kind of love for each other. This book doesn't seem to be an existential novel as much as a rebuke to the existentialists. Walker Percy seems to be saying to them, "Come off it. Get with the program. It's enough already." Aunt Emily as she scolds Binx in Part Five represents this. To discuss this book and leave out Aunt Emily is to forget someone central to it all. For this reader she is most important of all for Binx. It is his love of her, he even enjoys it when she scolds him, that keeps him from going off the deep end. And her brilliantly written big rebuke at the end is what saves him from himself. One is reminded of the biblical verse that says now I am become a man and must put away childish things. One is reminded of another biblical verse when the book is over. And now abideth faith, hope and charity (love) but the greatest of these is charity. Lonnie's Faith is pure and perfect. The scenes between Lonnie and Binx are utterly exquisite. Binx couldn't care less about religion, yet his love of Lonnie makes him happy and interested as Lonnie describes his faith to him. And when Lonnie tells Binx he is taking his communion for Binx, that is a spectacular moment. Hope? Is there hope for Binx? I think so and I think Walker Percy thinks so, too. And, as has already been noted, love runs throughout the novel. I don't think this is an existential novel. I think it is a Christian Morality Tale. * * * On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 7:25 PM, janet cantor wrote: > Professor Eddie Dupuy got off a great one liner: Celebrity can only arise > in a secular society. Hmmm. > > More notes on the dung beetle - the symbol comes from the last scene of > All Quiet on the Western Front, a movie mentioned in the book. After his > dense presentation, this speaker said that doing this study of the > symbolism of the dung beetle in The Moviegoer put him onto the search and > kept him from despair for a while. > > In pre modern societies the ends of life were given to you by your family > or community. If your father was a farmer, or a blacksmith, or owned a > store, you probably would follow in his footsteps. In modern cultures that > is not as assured. Now you choose your trade, your lifestyle. as the > culture shifts. The Moviegoer came out in 1961 just about the time our > culture was going to undergo lots of radical shifts for good or ill. > > The next two sessions were all about movies. One was so perfect I couldn't > take notes. The presenter promised to make a movie out of the whole thing. > I hope he keeps his promise. He took the movies named or alluded to in the > book and showed which ones Walker meant or may have meant. > > Then someone spoke about the way movies were named in the novel. He > described a kind of contrapuntal listing of opposites. So if Stagecoach is > named, starring a true blue American hero, John Wayne, of the evil/good > black/white easy morality variety, then The Third Man is mentioned, an > ambiguous movie with a non hero and darker perspective . The scene where > hero John Wayne shoots a baddie is juxtaposed with an image of a cat > slinking around the ankles of Orson Welles in a dark doorway. > > If It Happened One Night is named, a screwball comedy, it is followed by a > mention of The Oxbow incident, a new kind of western, again dark and > sinister. > A simple Fort Dobbs is followed by Dark Waters. > Tarzan is followed by All Quiet on the Western Front. > ( We also got some details of these movies that had some similarities to > the novel) > > With The Oxbow Incident we confront a story where war is more dangerous > than the economy. The depression now takes a back seat to World War II. > Novels of flight were also popular at this time. On the road kinds of > things also influenced the novel. > > Before the 1940's we lived in an almost innocent age and our movies > reflected that. We had the First World War and the depression, but so far > knowledge of communism's horrors was limited. After the Second World War we > learned of the capabilities of man's inhumanity to man from the Nazis and > their allies and then from Communism's scale of murders by the millions. So > now theater had absurdists, because frothy plays or romances wouldn't do > after we lost our innocence, and the existentialists came into vogue. > Percy traces this change and recognizes it in the way he places these > movies suggesting knowledge of our loss of innocence this way in the book. > So hope vs. cynicism, comedy vs. satire, light vs. dark are placed side by > side intentionally as I listed in examples above. > > All this came before European cinema's arrival here. The text of The > Moviegoer, its style of being in the moment in the story without a neat > beginning middle and end matched the stylistics of European movies with > their sensualism and meandering plots. Percy was aware of this and used it > all as subtext, not overtly. > > Before the 1950's 80 to 100 million Americans went to the movies weekly. > Reality was in the movies for many American families. Then came television > and that changed; people stayed home. > Then foreign movies came to the states, French New Wave, Kurasawa, the > moderns. It became fashionable to go to out to the movies again. > > For all of his snarkiness, "it has been said" and mocking asides like > that, Binx is actually sympathetic. And in the Epilogue the book proves > hopeful. > > In the novel Binx is turning 30, the age when Jesus began his ministry. > The novel ends on St. Charles, a fitting place. It is at the church on St. > Charles on Loyola's campus where Percy decided to convert to Catholicism. > > I asked what it was that the National Book Award Committee saw in this > book that got them to choose it. The answer was that it was 1961 and people > were tired of war stories like Catch 22, and the teenage stuff like Franny > and Zooey was interesting, but The Moviegoer broke new ground. > If the 50's writers were modernists, then Percy was a post modernist > someone suggested. This would mean that he was against the moderns. I liked > that because in my Amazon review I said Percy was really an anti > existentialist in some ways. > The National Book Committee recognized that in The Moviegoer, here was > something new, a new way of perceiving things. > > My tape ends with a presentation by Charles J. Lowry who also contributes > to the Percy Lists on occasion. This was so perfect an essay that I didn't > edit one second of it. He spoke of how The Moviegoer influenced him and how > it can help us all lead a better life. (Charles, if you are reading this > and want a copy of this tape, let me know.) I could listen to Lowry's essay > over and over and I'm sure I will. It was musical, clear and so moving, it > almost brings me to tears, especially the part about how Binx teaches us > how to love. > > I have not gone into the philosophy speakers or the religious ones. I > missed most of those sessions anyway because of the ones I chose. And those > I attended were a bit over my head. > > Conclusion: A self serving comment. I wrote a review of the novel after > having read it three times in a row. I said I could come back a year or two > later and write a completely different review depending on what I chose to > emphasize. Well, I guess I was right about that. But I am not ashamed of my > little review. As I said before, it was as if the entire weekend was > scripted for me. I kept getting my opinions validated by the analysis of > each speaker. > The main sense I got is that the body of the book is the search, where > Binx is in limbo, the modern man with his emptiness trying to find meaning. > And then Aunt Emily grounds him in reality and tells him to take > responsibility. And Lonnie touches Binx and influences him on his road to > salvation. Binx must learn to stop being so self centered and care for > someone else; that is his earthly life's journey. And he must begin his > road to his eternal life. > > Some book, huh? Oh, yes, and the first question Percy asked anyone who > talked to him about the book is, "Did you laugh?" > > > > > > -- > 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 > > Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add @ > sign when addressing email) > > -- *Jim & Nancy Forest* Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands photos of my recent travels in Poland: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/72157628050528457/ Reflections on a visit to Auschwitz: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2011/11/28/auschwitz/ Three recent books: *All is Grace* my revised and expanded biography of Dorothy Day: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2006/03/24/all-is-grace/ *Saint George & the Dragon* a children's book: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2011/04/04/saint-george-and-the-dragon/ *For the Peace From Above* a resource book on war, peace and nationalism: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2011/09/08/for-the-peace-from-above-an-orthodox-resource-book-on-war-peace-and-nationalism/ Jim & Nancy web site: www.jimandnancyforest.com Jim's books: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/books/ Photo collections: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/ In Communion site: www.incommunion.org Forest-Flier Editorial Services: www.forestflier.com On Pilgrimage blog: http://jimandnancyonpilgrimage.blogspot.com/ A Tale of Two Kidneys blog: http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/ * * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From janetcantor37 at yahoo.com Mon Dec 12 00:39:27 2011 From: janetcantor37 at yahoo.com (janet cantor) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 21:39:27 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] Part two of 50th anniversary of The Moviegoer - notes from the Symposium In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1323668367.12521.YahooMailClassic@web125902.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Yes. I also once pot it on the Percy Lists. How did you guess I was Honey? Janet, following up on your fascinating collection of notes, I decided to see if I could find your review of The Moviegoer on the book's Amazon page. Are you the reviewer you ?identifies yourself as "Honey"? Jim Forest * * * A masterpiece, September 25, 2010 By honey "honey" (philadelphia, pa) - See all my reviews SPOILER ALERT. Do not read this review until after you have finished the book and considered it for yourself.? If fifteen people read and reviewed The Moviegoer, they could create fifteen different descriptions of it. If one person read it a year later, he could write a completely different review of it from the one he wrote the year before. It all depends on what is emphasized, the southernness, New Orleans, the story of ancestries, the blacks and whites or the relationship of the story to Kierkegard. There are so many aspects of the novel to consider.? This is a funny book, an endearing book. The writing is gasp inducing gorgeous.? This is a book of its time, post Becket, the existentialists, and the absurdists. It follows a half century of the realization of the great scale of the horror man is capable of perpetrating on his fellow men. Salinger has been writing about teenage angst. Yet, while it is so relevant to the late nineteen fifties, Binx's story finds resonance to this day.? It is funny to read how Binx plots to make his secretary fall in love with him. The descriptions of movies and their use to him and how he makes a movie house more real are wonderful. Look on page 216 for a line that gives the reader pause on the subject of the title.? Binx's elaborate descriptions of the components of his search make up a good portion of the story. Yet every time he is with Aunt Emily, he either can't talk about it or it seems to be smaller in importance. And in the face of Aunt Emily's big rant at him in part five, he understands that he is finished with his search.? His search, he tells us, is to forestall the everydayness; in his head he criticizes other people who are satisfied with ordinary lives. All the while he is thinking and working out the details of his search, he is carrying out normal activity and conversation, and no one having discourse with him, knows about his interior life. The only one who knows it all is his fellow mentally discomfited, Kate. In the end, he will accept everydayness as he takes care of Kate.? It is a great theme in a lot of literature, the concept of coming home. Ulysses, The Wizard of Oz, Pippin, the musical, where he realizes he is not extraordinary and will settle as man, woman, child in an every day existence, and Candide, who after his upsetting adventures will join with his love and just make his garden grow. And so it is here. The epilogue may be one of the most gorgeous things I have ever read. Tender, quiet, accepting; Kate and Binx will make it, I believe. The book is described as an existential novel. What kind of existential protagonist loves his job, loves making money, and goes to great lengths to protect his clients' accounts? What kind of existential character loves others, his half brother, Lonnie and Aunt Emily? He even has a kind of love for minor characters like Mr. Kinsella and the ladies in ticket booths. And Kate and Binx have a kind of love for each other.? This book doesn't seem to be an existential novel as much as a rebuke to the existentialists. Walker Percy seems to be saying to them, "Come off it. Get with the program. It's enough already." Aunt Emily as she scolds Binx in Part Five represents this.? To discuss this book and leave out Aunt Emily is to forget someone central to it all. For this reader she is most important of all for Binx. It is his love of her, he even enjoys it when she scolds him, that keeps him from going off the deep end. And her brilliantly written big rebuke at the end is what saves him from himself. One is reminded of the biblical verse that says now I am become a man and must put away childish things.? One is reminded of another biblical verse when the book is over. And now abideth faith, hope and charity (love) but the greatest of these is charity.? Lonnie's Faith is pure and perfect. The scenes between Lonnie and Binx are utterly exquisite. Binx couldn't care less about religion, yet his love of Lonnie makes him happy and interested as Lonnie describes his faith to him. And when Lonnie tells Binx he is taking his communion for Binx, that is a spectacular moment.? Hope? Is there hope for Binx? I think so and I think Walker Percy thinks so, too.? And, as has already been noted, love runs throughout the novel.? I don't think this is an existential novel. I think it is a Christian Morality Tale. * * * On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 7:25 PM, janet cantor wrote: Professor Eddie Dupuy got off a great one liner: Celebrity can only arise in a secular society. Hmmm. More notes on the dung beetle - the symbol comes from the last scene of All Quiet on the Western Front, a movie mentioned in the book.? After his dense presentation, this speaker said that doing this study of the symbolism of the dung beetle in The Moviegoer put him onto the search and kept him from despair for a while. In pre modern societies the ends of life were given to you by your family or community. If your father was a farmer, or a blacksmith, or owned a store, you probably would follow in his footsteps. In modern cultures that is not as assured. Now you choose your trade, your lifestyle. as the culture shifts. The Moviegoer came out in 1961 just about the time our culture was going to undergo lots of radical shifts for good or ill. The next two sessions were all about movies. One was so perfect I couldn't take notes. The presenter promised to make a movie out of the whole thing. I hope he keeps his promise. He took the movies named or alluded to in the book and showed which ones Walker meant or may have meant. Then someone spoke about the way movies were named in the novel. He described a kind of contrapuntal listing of opposites. So if Stagecoach is named,? starring a true blue American hero, John Wayne, of the evil/good black/white easy morality variety, then The Third Man is mentioned, an ambiguous movie with a non hero and darker perspective . The scene? where hero John Wayne shoots a baddie is juxtaposed with an image of a cat slinking around the ankles of Orson Welles in a dark doorway. If It Happened One Night is named, a screwball comedy, it is followed by a mention of The Oxbow incident, a new kind of western, again dark and sinister. A simple Fort Dobbs is followed by Dark Waters. Tarzan is followed by All Quiet on the Western Front. ( We also got some details of these movies that had some similarities to the novel) With The Oxbow Incident we confront a story where war is more dangerous than the economy. The depression now takes a back seat to World War II. Novels of flight were also popular at this time. On the road kinds of things also influenced the novel. Before the 1940's we lived in an almost innocent age and our movies reflected that. We had the First World War and the depression, but so far knowledge of communism's horrors was limited. After the Second World War we learned of the capabilities of man's inhumanity to man from the Nazis and their allies and then from Communism's scale of murders by the millions. So now theater had absurdists, because frothy plays or romances wouldn't do after we lost our innocence, and the existentialists came into vogue. Percy traces this change and recognizes it in the way he places these movies suggesting knowledge of our loss of innocence this way in the book. So hope vs. cynicism, comedy vs. satire, light vs. dark are placed side by side intentionally as I listed in examples above. All this came before European cinema's arrival here. The text of The Moviegoer, its style of being in the moment in the story without a neat beginning middle and end matched the stylistics of European movies with? their sensualism and meandering plots.? Percy was aware of this and used it all as subtext, not overtly. Before the 1950's 80 to 100 million Americans went to the movies weekly. Reality was in the movies for many American families. Then came television and that changed; people stayed home. Then foreign movies came to the states, French New Wave, Kurasawa, the moderns. It became fashionable to go to out to the movies again. For all of his snarkiness, "it has been said" and mocking asides like that, Binx is actually sympathetic. And in the Epilogue the book proves hopeful. In the novel Binx is turning 30, the age when Jesus began his ministry. The novel ends on St. Charles, a fitting place. It is at the church on St. Charles on Loyola's campus where Percy decided to convert to Catholicism. I asked what it was that the National Book Award Committee saw in this book that got them to choose it. The answer was that it was 1961 and people were tired of war stories like Catch 22, and the teenage stuff like Franny and Zooey was interesting, but The Moviegoer broke new ground. If the 50's writers were modernists, then Percy was a post modernist someone suggested. This would mean that he was against the moderns. I liked that because in my Amazon review I said Percy was really an anti existentialist in some ways. The National Book Committee recognized that in The Moviegoer, here was something new, a new way of perceiving things. My tape ends with a presentation by Charles? J. Lowry who also contributes to the Percy Lists on occasion. This was so perfect an essay that I didn't edit one second of it. He spoke of how The Moviegoer influenced him and how it can help us all lead a better life.? (Charles, if you are reading this and want a copy of this tape, let me know.) I could listen to Lowry's essay over and over and I'm sure I will. It was musical, clear and so moving, it almost brings me to tears, especially the part about how Binx teaches us how to love. I have not gone into the philosophy speakers or the religious ones. I missed most of those sessions anyway because of the ones I chose. And those I attended were a bit over my head. Conclusion: A self serving comment. I wrote a review of the novel after having read it three times in a row. I said I could come back a year or two later and write a completely different review depending on what I chose to emphasize. Well, I guess I was right about that. But I am not ashamed of my little review. As I said before, it was as if the entire weekend was scripted for me. I kept getting my opinions validated by the analysis of each speaker. The main sense I got is that the body of the book is the search, where Binx is in limbo, the modern man with his emptiness trying to find meaning. And then Aunt Emily grounds him in reality and tells him to take responsibility. And Lonnie touches Binx and influences him on his road to salvation. Binx must learn to stop being so self centered and care for someone else; that is his earthly life's journey. And he must begin his road to his eternal life. Some book, huh? Oh, yes, and the first question Percy asked anyone who talked to him about the book is, "Did you laugh?" -- 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 Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add @ sign when addressing email) -- Jim & Nancy Forest Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands photos of my recent travels in Poland: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/72157628050528457/ Reflections on a visit to Auschwitz:?http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2011/11/28/auschwitz/ Three recent books: All is Gracemy revised and expanded biography of Dorothy Day:http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2006/03/24/all-is-grace/ Saint George & the Dragona children's book: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2011/04/04/saint-george-and-the-dragon/ For the Peace From Abovea resource book on war, peace and nationalism:http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2011/09/08/for-the-peace-from-above-an-orthodox-resource-book-on-war-peace-and-nationalism/ Jim & Nancy web site: www.jimandnancyforest.comJim's books: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/books/ Photo collections: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/ In Communion site: www.incommunion.org Forest-Flier Editorial Services: www.forestflier.com On Pilgrimage blog: http://jimandnancyonpilgrimage.blogspot.com/ A Tale of Two Kidneys blog: http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/ * * * -----Inline Attachment Follows----- -- 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 Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add @ sign when addressing email) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jhforest at gmail.com Mon Dec 12 04:26:50 2011 From: jhforest at gmail.com (Jim Forest) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:26:50 +0100 Subject: [percy-l] Part two of 50th anniversary of The Moviegoer - notes from the Symposium In-Reply-To: <1323668367.12521.YahooMailClassic@web125902.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <1323668367.12521.YahooMailClassic@web125902.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: The tip-off was your comments on existentialism in both the conference report and your Amazon posting. Jim On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 6:39 AM, janet cantor wrote: > Yes. I also once pot it on the Percy Lists. > How did you guess I was Honey? > > > Janet, following up on your fascinating collection of notes, I decided to > see if I could find your review of The Moviegoer on the book's Amazon page. > Are you the reviewer you identifies yourself as "Honey"? > > Jim Forest > > * * * > > A masterpiece, September 25, 2010 > > By honey "honey" (philadelphia, pa) - See all my reviews > > SPOILER ALERT. Do not read this review until after you have finished the > book and considered it for yourself. > > If fifteen people read and reviewed The Moviegoer, they could create > fifteen different descriptions of it. If one person read it a year later, > he could write a completely different review of it from the one he wrote > the year before. It all depends on what is emphasized, the southernness, > New Orleans, the story of ancestries, the blacks and whites or the > relationship of the story to Kierkegard. There are so many aspects of the > novel to consider. > > This is a funny book, an endearing book. The writing is gasp inducing > gorgeous. > > This is a book of its time, post Becket, the existentialists, and the > absurdists. It follows a half century of the realization of the great scale > of the horror man is capable of perpetrating on his fellow men. Salinger > has been writing about teenage angst. Yet, while it is so relevant to the > late nineteen fifties, Binx's story finds resonance to this day. > > It is funny to read how Binx plots to make his secretary fall in love with > him. The descriptions of movies and their use to him and how he makes a > movie house more real are wonderful. Look on page 216 for a line that gives > the reader pause on the subject of the title. > > Binx's elaborate descriptions of the components of his search make up a > good portion of the story. Yet every time he is with Aunt Emily, he either > can't talk about it or it seems to be smaller in importance. And in the > face of Aunt Emily's big rant at him in part five, he understands that he > is finished with his search. > > His search, he tells us, is to forestall the everydayness; in his head he > criticizes other people who are satisfied with ordinary lives. All the > while he is thinking and working out the details of his search, he is > carrying out normal activity and conversation, and no one having discourse > with him, knows about his interior life. The only one who knows it all is > his fellow mentally discomfited, Kate. In the end, he will accept > everydayness as he takes care of Kate. > > It is a great theme in a lot of literature, the concept of coming home. > Ulysses, The Wizard of Oz, Pippin, the musical, where he realizes he is not > extraordinary and will settle as man, woman, child in an every day > existence, and Candide, who after his upsetting adventures will join with > his love and just make his garden grow. And so it is here. The epilogue may > be one of the most gorgeous things I have ever read. Tender, quiet, > accepting; Kate and Binx will make it, I believe. > > The book is described as an existential novel. What kind of existential > protagonist loves his job, loves making money, and goes to great lengths to > protect his clients' accounts? What kind of existential character loves > others, his half brother, Lonnie and Aunt Emily? He even has a kind of love > for minor characters like Mr. Kinsella and the ladies in ticket booths. And > Kate and Binx have a kind of love for each other. > > This book doesn't seem to be an existential novel as much as a rebuke to > the existentialists. Walker Percy seems to be saying to them, "Come off it. > Get with the program. It's enough already." Aunt Emily as she scolds Binx > in Part Five represents this. > > To discuss this book and leave out Aunt Emily is to forget someone central > to it all. For this reader she is most important of all for Binx. It is his > love of her, he even enjoys it when she scolds him, that keeps him from > going off the deep end. And her brilliantly written big rebuke at the end > is what saves him from himself. One is reminded of the biblical verse that > says now I am become a man and must put away childish things. > > One is reminded of another biblical verse when the book is over. And now > abideth faith, hope and charity (love) but the greatest of these is > charity. > > Lonnie's Faith is pure and perfect. The scenes between Lonnie and Binx are > utterly exquisite. Binx couldn't care less about religion, yet his love of > Lonnie makes him happy and interested as Lonnie describes his faith to him. > And when Lonnie tells Binx he is taking his communion for Binx, that is a > spectacular moment. > > Hope? Is there hope for Binx? I think so and I think Walker Percy thinks > so, too. > > And, as has already been noted, love runs throughout the novel. > > I don't think this is an existential novel. I think it is a Christian > Morality Tale. > > * * * > > > On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 7:25 PM, janet cantor > > wrote: > > Professor Eddie Dupuy got off a great one liner: Celebrity can only arise > in a secular society. Hmmm. > > More notes on the dung beetle - the symbol comes from the last scene of > All Quiet on the Western Front, a movie mentioned in the book. After his > dense presentation, this speaker said that doing this study of the > symbolism of the dung beetle in The Moviegoer put him onto the search and > kept him from despair for a while. > > In pre modern societies the ends of life were given to you by your family > or community. If your father was a farmer, or a blacksmith, or owned a > store, you probably would follow in his footsteps. In modern cultures that > is not as assured. Now you choose your trade, your lifestyle. as the > culture shifts. The Moviegoer came out in 1961 just about the time our > culture was going to undergo lots of radical shifts for good or ill. > > The next two sessions were all about movies. One was so perfect I couldn't > take notes. The presenter promised to make a movie out of the whole thing. > I hope he keeps his promise. He took the movies named or alluded to in the > book and showed which ones Walker meant or may have meant. > > Then someone spoke about the way movies were named in the novel. He > described a kind of contrapuntal listing of opposites. So if Stagecoach is > named, starring a true blue American hero, John Wayne, of the evil/good > black/white easy morality variety, then The Third Man is mentioned, an > ambiguous movie with a non hero and darker perspective . The scene where > hero John Wayne shoots a baddie is juxtaposed with an image of a cat > slinking around the ankles of Orson Welles in a dark doorway. > > If It Happened One Night is named, a screwball comedy, it is followed by a > mention of The Oxbow incident, a new kind of western, again dark and > sinister. > A simple Fort Dobbs is followed by Dark Waters. > Tarzan is followed by All Quiet on the Western Front. > ( We also got some details of these movies that had some similarities to > the novel) > > With The Oxbow Incident we confront a story where war is more dangerous > than the economy. The depression now takes a back seat to World War II. > Novels of flight were also popular at this time. On the road kinds of > things also influenced the novel. > > Before the 1940's we lived in an almost innocent age and our movies > reflected that. We had the First World War and the depression, but so far > knowledge of communism's horrors was limited. After the Second World War we > learned of the capabilities of man's inhumanity to man from the Nazis and > their allies and then from Communism's scale of murders by the millions. So > now theater had absurdists, because frothy plays or romances wouldn't do > after we lost our innocence, and the existentialists came into vogue. > Percy traces this change and recognizes it in the way he places these > movies suggesting knowledge of our loss of innocence this way in the book. > So hope vs. cynicism, comedy vs. satire, light vs. dark are placed side by > side intentionally as I listed in examples above. > > All this came before European cinema's arrival here. The text of The > Moviegoer, its style of being in the moment in the story without a neat > beginning middle and end matched the stylistics of European movies with > their sensualism and meandering plots. Percy was aware of this and used it > all as subtext, not overtly. > > Before the 1950's 80 to 100 million Americans went to the movies weekly. > Reality was in the movies for many American families. Then came television > and that changed; people stayed home. > Then foreign movies came to the states, French New Wave, Kurasawa, the > moderns. It became fashionable to go to out to the movies again. > > For all of his snarkiness, "it has been said" and mocking asides like > that, Binx is actually sympathetic. And in the Epilogue the book proves > hopeful. > > In the novel Binx is turning 30, the age when Jesus began his ministry. > The novel ends on St. Charles, a fitting place. It is at the church on St. > Charles on Loyola's campus where Percy decided to convert to Catholicism. > > I asked what it was that the National Book Award Committee saw in this > book that got them to choose it. The answer was that it was 1961 and people > were tired of war stories like Catch 22, and the teenage stuff like Franny > and Zooey was interesting, but The Moviegoer broke new ground. > If the 50's writers were modernists, then Percy was a post modernist > someone suggested. This would mean that he was against the moderns. I liked > that because in my Amazon review I said Percy was really an anti > existentialist in some ways. > The National Book Committee recognized that in The Moviegoer, here was > something new, a new way of perceiving things. > > My tape ends with a presentation by Charles J. Lowry who also contributes > to the Percy Lists on occasion. This was so perfect an essay that I didn't > edit one second of it. He spoke of how The Moviegoer influenced him and how > it can help us all lead a better life. (Charles, if you are reading this > and want a copy of this tape, let me know.) I could listen to Lowry's essay > over and over and I'm sure I will. It was musical, clear and so moving, it > almost brings me to tears, especially the part about how Binx teaches us > how to love. > > I have not gone into the philosophy speakers or the religious ones. I > missed most of those sessions anyway because of the ones I chose. And those > I attended were a bit over my head. > > Conclusion: A self serving comment. I wrote a review of the novel after > having read it three times in a row. I said I could come back a year or two > later and write a completely different review depending on what I chose to > emphasize. Well, I guess I was right about that. But I am not ashamed of my > little review. As I said before, it was as if the entire weekend was > scripted for me. I kept getting my opinions validated by the analysis of > each speaker. > The main sense I got is that the body of the book is the search, where > Binx is in limbo, the modern man with his emptiness trying to find meaning. > And then Aunt Emily grounds him in reality and tells him to take > responsibility. And Lonnie touches Binx and influences him on his road to > salvation. Binx must learn to stop being so self centered and care for > someone else; that is his earthly life's journey. And he must begin his > road to his eternal life. > > Some book, huh? Oh, yes, and the first question Percy asked anyone who > talked to him about the book is, "Did you laugh?" > > > > > > -- > 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 > > Contact the moderator: percy-l-owner at lists.ibiblio.org (note: add @ > sign when addressing email) > > > > > -- > *Jim & Nancy Forest* > Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands > > photos of my recent travels in Poland: > http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/72157628050528457/ > > Reflections on a visit to Auschwitz: > http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2011/11/28/auschwitz/ > > Three recent books: > > *All is Grace* > my revised and expanded biography of Dorothy Day: > http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2006/03/24/all-is-grace/ > > *Saint George & the Dragon* > a children's book: > http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2011/04/04/saint-george-and-the-dragon/ > > *For the Peace From Above* > a resource book on war, peace and nationalism: > > http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2011/09/08/for-the-peace-from-above-an-orthodox-resource-book-on-war-peace-and-nationalism/ > > Jim & Nancy web site: www.jimandnancyforest.com > Jim's books: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/books/ > Photo collections: www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/collections/ > In Communion site: www.incommunion.org > Forest-Flier Editorial Services: www.forestflier.com > On Pilgrimage blog: http://jimandnancyonpilgrimage.blogspot.com/ > A Tale of Two Kidneys blog: http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/ > > * * * > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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