Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

["Peter Beurskens" <pbeurskens AT SOUTHEASTMN.EDU>]

Rhonda--I sympathize.  I too have a mountain of essays to face.  I do find it 
helps that I allow myself the reward of a long morning or evening of reading 
a book when I have completed a pile of papers.  I wonder how Percy faced the 
task of grading--how he considered it, philosophically.  But then when Percy 
taught, it was more creative writing and at the gradualte level, wasn't it?  
Anyone know?  I have tried to think of grading student writing as either 
humanitarian or holy, but someone it doesn't help.  
 
Pete 

________________________________

From: percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of RHONDA MCDONNELL
Sent: Tue 10/7/2008 7:59 PM
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Palahniuk


I have no answers, but you have reawakened in me a desire to read 
Palahniuk--as soon as I grade the mountain of essays that I'm presently 
avoiding. 


--Rhonda 

"You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because in spite of 
great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of 
who he is or what he is doing."
  
                                    Walker Percy


________________________________

Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2008 08:30:22 -0500
From: gregory.plemmons AT Vanderbilt.Edu
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Palahniuk

I've always wondered the same. Haven't re-read (or seen) _Choke_ since the 
movie came out, but there's a wonderful passage on page 151:

Every addiction...drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just 
another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of 
the apple.
Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory 
of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how 
beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood...

"We don't live in the real world anymore," she said. "We live in a world of 
symbols."

Like Percy also, the protagonist (Victor Mancini) also shares an incomplete 
medical education. But I've never heard Pahlaniuk comment on Percy in most of 
the interviews I've read.

Gregory Plemmons


-----Original Message-----
From: percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of Wade Riddick
Sent: Sun 10/5/2008 6:41 PM
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Palahniuk

>List,
>
>Just been reading _Survivor_ by Palahniuk.
>
>Many echos of Percy.
>
>Wonder if he ever read Percy?
>
>Such lines as "It's weird how the name outlives the person, the signifier
>outlasts the signified, the symbol the symbolized." (p.88 _Survivor_)
>speak to a common source.
>
>Any one know if Palahniuk ever spoke of Percy?
>

No, but I just saw _Fight Club_ again the other night and his attack on the
spiritual corrosiveness of consumer credit appears, in retrospect,
materially prophetic.  We seem to be stuck in one of those periodic
economic crises where all the supposedly "sin-less" businessmen have
awakened to the fact that their ticker symbols and other financial
instruments have drifted far afield of the underlying reality they were
supposed to represent.


--
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