[percy-l] LITR Slow Read
Marshall Smith
mhsmithjrlaw at gmail.com
Fri Jun 27 15:03:07 EDT 2014
I don't feel qualified to lead a discussion, but would enjoy participating.
Marshall Smith
Lexington, Mississippi
On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 1:45 PM, Charles Cowherd <charlescowherd at hotmail.com
> wrote:
> All,
> I would love to participate in the reading of "Love in the Ruins" and to
> lead a weekly discussion, if necessary.
> ~ Charles R. Cowherd
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Percy-L [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of
> percy-l-request at lists.ibiblio.org
> Sent: Friday, June 27, 2014 1:00 PM
> To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: Percy-L Digest, Vol 107, Issue 13
>
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> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: Walker Percy on the Cil War (RHONDA MCDONNELL)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 12:42:17 -0500
> From: RHONDA MCDONNELL <rhonda_mcdonnell at msn.com>
> To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion"
> <percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org>
> Subject: Re: [percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War
> Message-ID: <BAY407-EAS300ECDBEE5D9CD0AE52299CE41B0 at phx.gbl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> My understanding of a slow read is that we (the list) divide the novel up
> into sections (using Percy's divisions is natural). Someone volunteers to
> be a "discussion leader" of sorts for each section. We discuss one section
> a week (hence the term "slow read"). The discussion leader starts each
> week
> off with an initial post reflecting on that section. As long as we remain
> connected to the text, I think it's fair to say that anything
> goes--connections to contemporary politics, politics in the 1970s,
> philosophy, science, Percy's other fiction, Percy's non-fiction, etc.
>
> It looks like (based on my kindle edition) that the sections are as
> follows:
> 1. July Fourth
> 2. July First
> 3. July Second
> 4. July Third
> 5. July Fourth (again)
> 6. Five Years Later
>
> So over a period of six weeks, we'd engage in a spirited discussion of
> Percy's novel without straining those of us busy with other projects,
> academic or otherwise.
>
> I'd happily take the first section and have an initial post up by Monday,
> June 30.
>
> Then if five others would be willing to lead sections, we'd look for
> initial
> section posts on Sunday/Monday of each following week: Section 2 on July
> 6/7; Section 3 on July 13/14; Section 4 on July 20/21; Section 5 on July
> 27/28; and Section 6 on Aug. 3/4.
>
> To me, it seems like a brilliant way to spend July during a time when the
> center is not holding.
>
> Is anyone else game to take on a section?
>
> Rhonda
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> > On Jun 27, 2014, at 12:21 PM, "Karl M. Terrell"
> <kterrell at stokeswagner.com> wrote:
> >
> > In Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy described an imagined America in which
> we ?have turned against each other.? He wrote, ?There are Left states and
> Knothead states, Left towns and Knothead towns, but no center towns.?
> >
> > I agree certainly with the comments that Percy skewered both left and
> right, and that it was not his intent to make a political statement, per
> se.
> I agree with you that, if here today, he would skewer (for example) Mayor
> Bloomberg?s attempt to regulate the cup sizes of our favorite sugar
> beverages (and I would laugh right along).
> >
> > Percy?s intent, at the political level, was to describe the potential for
> the disintegration of our ?beloved USA.? This is reflected in his
> borrowing
> from Yeats? The Second Coming, when first describing the situation of the
> LeftPapas and Knotheads: ?The center did not hold,? Percy described. (As
> Yeats spot-on put it, ?The ceremony of innocence is drowned / The best lack
> all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity?).
> >
> > I know we shouldn?t drag the discussions on this list into a
> political-bickering fest. But, Percy did create his imaginary America out
> of the cloth of the country in which he lived, and so some degree of
> political comment, I think, is fair game. He described, for example, the
> Knothead Party as derived from the ?old Republican Party,? and which
> initially called itself the Christian Conservative Constitutional Party
> (until someone pointed out the acronym ? CCCP ? is the same as that for the
> USSR in their alphabet). ? And so, Percy pretty accurately foresaw the
> rise
> of the Tea Party, and the center failing to hold.
> >
> > I perhaps fell victim to my own passions of the present era when
> describing my personal disagreements with the current-day Knotheads. I did
> not mean to offend, or drag this list into a political discussion. And I
> can certainly agree not all Tea Partiers are racist ? but I can?t avoid my
> ability to observe (being old enough to remember Jim Crow and the attitudes
> then openly expressed, and knowing that such attitudes don?t just
> disappear)
> that there are still plenty of racists out there. Unfortunately, for the
> Tea Party, it?s hard to deny that a lot of them have aligned themselves in
> your camp.
> >
> > You?re obviously an intelligent and thoughtful person. I accept your
> denial of racist motives on the part of the Tea Party you know, and I
> respect the fact you took offense at the suggestion of being lumped with
> racist cretins. But to deny those cretins are out there is a mistake.
> >
> > Someone made the suggestion of doing a ?slow read? of LITR on this list.
> I don?t know how that works, but it sounds like a good idea to me. I think
> spirited comment and comparison to present-day political realities would be
> appropriate, but I agree ?name-calling? should be avoided, and agree again
> that it was not Percy?s intent to advocate any particular political
> viewpoint.
> >
> > Karl Montague Terrell
> >
> >
> >
> > From: Percy-L [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of
> > janetcantor37--- via Percy-L
> > Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2014 11:07 AM
> > To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
> > Subject: Re: [percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War
> >
> > I have taken to answering some things in personal E-mails rather than
> sullying the Lists with the mere political.
> >
> > But, sir, you go too far.
> >
> > I am a Tea Party member. I know dozens of other Tea Party members. I have
> NEVER met or known indirectly one member who, to use President Obama's
> phrase, has a smidgeon of racism in choosing to be a Tea Party member.
> > When the president was elected, my liberal friend asked how I felt. I
> told
> her, "He is my president. I hope he does good work for the country and may
> G-d be with him."
> >
> > If it makes you feel better or superior to state what you have said here,
> it is a free country and I would be the last one to try to stop you because
> as a Tea Party member we are about protecting individual freedom and
> remembering and honoring the Constitution and thus the Bill of Rights.
> > Please, everybody, cease and desist from this name calling. I am no
> liberal in my political persuasion. But I do not impugn the motives of
> liberals. I like to think liberals want what is best for this country and I
> would sincerely enjoy it so much better if the left would stop impugning my
> motives, because, believe me, sir, I have the best motives in the world.
> > I want a return to Constitutional government, a return to smaller
> government that does not make up new rights everyday.
> > I do not believe Walker Percy would be pleased with all of this business
> of telling us what to eat, how to live, what the government has the right
> to
> do to us to keep us in line. And I will best Percy would not describe the
> knot heads as those who believe in an overweening government. I think that
> would disturb him no end. Read Father Smith in the Thanatos Syndrome
> warning
> us that "All tenderness leads to the gas chambers." I could write reams
> here.
> >
> > But I will just ask, please, stop calling others you disagree with names.
> It always amazes me that liberals love to consider Tea Party people closed
> minded and savage. But do they ever listen to themselves? Listen to
> yourself, for example, Mr. Terrell. I do not insult you or your motives.
> Please stop insulting mine.
> > Respectfully,
> > Janet Cantor
> >
> > From: Karl M. Terrell <kterrell at stokeswagner.com>
> > To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
> > <percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org>
> > Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2014 9:56 AM
> > Subject: Re: [percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War
> >
> > Well put, I say. I have had Percy?s Knotheads on my mind ever since the
> emergence of the Tea Party, and the ?birthers,? and all the others
> viscerally at odds with the image of a black man in the White House. **
> These folks are careful to avoid (most of the time) obvious racist
> comments,
> but racism is clearly driving them.
> > I am currently re-reading (after 30 or more years) the Strange Career of
> Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward, and Kenneth Stampp?s revisionist history
> (written in 1965) of Reconstruction. Woodward teaches that Jim Crow didn?t
> erect himself until the 1890s, following a period in which ? relatively
> speaking ? there was a real progress in race relations. Stampp points out
> that the South?s retrospective loathing of Reconstruction was distorted to
> an unwarranted extreme by histories written in 1890 ? 1910 sympathetic to
> the fantasy of the patrician South.
> > There was, at that time in 1890 - 1910, growing sympathies in the North
> to
> the situation of the white man in the South vis a vis the Negro, prompted
> by
> (among other factors) xenophobic reactions in the North to immigration from
> southern and eastern Europe. The sociology, anthropology and psychology
> popular at that time supported a racist view, as did the law (e.g., Plessy
> v
> Ferguson?s imprimatur of the demonstrably unsound and intellectually
> bankrupt notion of ?separate but equal?). Racism was its height then. The
> KKK re-emerged, the movie Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith, etc.
> > These things come in waves. Maybe the waves are weaker each time, but
> the
> Tea Party wave is very real. It is full of people who, at its most nakedly
> obvious, are like that fellow out West, Clive Bunden I think is his name
> (?Now, let me tell you another thing about the Negro ??). This wave could
> grow larger ? particularly if the GOP takes the Senate in November. Or
> maybe they?ll just make bigger asses out of themselves, and it will all
> blow
> over. That?s usually what happens. It is, after all, what happened the
> last time around, mid-century, when the segregationists made their last
> stand
> > In any event, we need Walker Percy, and his vision of the Knotheads. I
> like, therefore, what you said: ? Percy pointed to the power of irony to
> rescue us from this condition. It highlights hypocrisy and contradiction
> for us. It gives us a perspective outside of ourself to see ourselves and
> therein lies the possibility of freedom.?
> > ** I bet Percy would have loved Randy Newman?s ironic song released
> > during the 2012 election, I?m Dreaming of a White President (sung to
> > the tune of White Christmas) Karl Montague Terrell
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > From: Percy-L [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of
> > Wade Riddick
> > Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2014 10:18 AM
> > To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org
> > Subject: Re: [percy-l] Walker Percy on the Cil War
> >
> >
> > The Knots ARE the Tea Party, envisioned 30 - 40 years before they ever
> came about.
> > The knotheads - and thus the Tea Party - are not very new. They are, in
> fact, very old. They represent a strain of Southern self-righteousness
> that
> goes back well beyond the outbreak of the Civil War and trace themselves to
> the imagined courtliness of the planter classes who secretly believed
> confiscating the private property of black people by making them slaves was
> really a form of liberty. These were enemies to the Constitution.
> >
> > Rand Paul is a perfect example of the anti-liberty libertarian streak
> > still alive in the neofeudalists among us. He believes,
> >
> > 1) Defending the value of the dollar is one of the most important jobs
> of
> the federal government. This is why he's mad at the Federal Reserve. He
> believes they're devaluing money by printing dollars (ignoring for the
> moment that he's been wrong about imminent inflation for six years now;
> money behaves differently in a depression, as Keynes proved). The simple
> fact is money is a good like any other in that its price (the interest
> rate)
> can fluctuate due to demand. This is not "devaluation" per se.
> >
> > 2) Paul believes it's anti-property rights to force businesses not to
> discriminate on the basis of race (or sex or religion) when doing business
> with their customers. He's against the public accommodations provisions of
> the civil rights era laws. This is a David Duke-esque message of "reverse
> discrimination" or well-cultivated white Southern Christian victimhood
> designed to appeal to the militantly overprivileged rightwing Pharisees who
> now constitute his base. This is why all these guys talk about succession
> and state's right and nullification and other imaginary concepts that never
> survived the 13th and 14th Amendments. They're the sons and grandsons of
> the white citizenship councils and sovereignty commissions that Walker
> Percy
> loathed in the '60s and '70s and targeted squarely in _Love in the Ruins_.
> >
> > Combine 1 + 2: Paul believes it's a top job of the government to defend
> the value of the greenback except when the hand holding it is black and
> then
> corporation can infinitely devalue it to zero.
> >
> > What sense does that make?
> >
> > It makes plenty of sense when you realize there's a long tradition in the
> South dating back to before _Dred Scot_ declaring that black people can't
> be
> American citizens and thus they're free targets (Obama's citizenship
> "controversy" fits into this pattern; they don't think he's a citizen for
> no
> other reason than the color of his skin, even if they can no longer say so
> openly). I think this is why Percy was fascinated with Nazi death camps
> and
> the culture of death. American racism in the South fit in a literary sense
> with religious and class warfare in Europe.
> >
> > Rand Paul got his political theory from Ayn Rand who believed
> Christianity
> was for rubes and altruism was a form of delusion. She literally
> worshipped
> psychopaths for their "will" - i.e., lack of conscience. (Wouldn't that
> just tickle Goebbels who said, "Intellectual activity is a danger to the
> building of character?") It's an irony but no mere coincidence that so
> many
> white Evangelical Christians now believe the same. They're not Christians
> as much as they are Southern Nationalists in the stripe of Thomas Jefferson
> (an historical figure I've come to loath the more I age and read).
> >
> > The modern Tea Party pushes for voting restrictions when the original Tea
> Party stood for no taxation without representation.
> >
> > The fact is the modern Tea Party hates liberty. Liberty isn't just
> > the freedom to do something like speak your mind - it's also the
> > obligation to use that freedom responsibly on behalf of a better
> > society. Liberty, to paraphrase the founding fathers, is the
> > responsible exercise of self-government. Tea Party anger is nothing
> > but incoherent id, barbarian-yawping like Jim Bond. (Oh, God. Stop
> > me from having another Faulkner episode.) A true conservative
> > stresses social responsibility. A true conservative doesn't lie about
> > science. These people aren't conservatives. They're radicals
> > hell-bent on overturning campaign finance laws so they can turn
> > America into a newly reborn plantation economy where we're all
> > corporate serfs. Since the Civil War the South has had one central,
> > consistent response to economic development which is to drive down the
> > cost of labor - (infinitely to zero, in the case of slavery). This is
> > the "moonlight and magnolias" economic strategy that fo
> cuses on tax credits/giveaways to rich businessmen because apparently they
> are lazy and have to be paid to make money and create jobs whereas workers
> have to be punished because they work for a living and thus are, well, in
> need of punishment. (Refusing to accept matching Medicaid funds is a great
> example of believing it builds character to ration medical care to the
> sick.)
> >
> > Percy pointed to the power of irony to rescue us from this condition. It
> highlights hypocrisy and contradiction for us[1]. It gives us a
> perspective
> outside of ourself to see ourselves and therein lies the possibility of
> freedom. Listen to John Kyl on the floor of the Senate saying with a
> straight face, "This may not be a factually true statement," and tell me
> the
> Republicans aren't so lost they no longer have even irony?
> >
> > Being lost is the human condition. It's when you think you've found
> yourself all on your own that you are truly in the dark. Anyone who's ever
> understood grace knows that.
> >
> > Wade Riddick
> >
> > 1. Without this tension, "meaning" itself would be impossible; things
> have to be different or "contradict" to fall into he same category and
> define a term. You must have different colors like red and blue to have a
> concept of "color." Percy was probably thinking of all of these linguistic
> currents and eddies as he was manipulating old Southern contradictions and
> ironies for his novels.
> >
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> >
> > * Contact the Moderator: percy-l-owner (at) lists.ibiblio.org
> >
> > * Visit The Walker Percy Project: http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy
> >
> >
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