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

[RHONDA MCDONNELL <rhonda_mcdonnell AT msn.com>]

Thanks to Pete and David for the commiseration!  I somehow ended up teaching four completely different courses, two of which are online. I always have papers to grade--they hover above me like vultures!
 
I don't remember if Percy wrote this in one of his letters to Shelby Foote or if it was in one of his essays, but he did say that he couldn't write and teach at the same time.  He said he couldn't imagine how people that do pulled it off.

--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

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Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2008 13:47:17 -0500
From: pbeurskens AT SOUTHEASTMN.EDU
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Palahniuk

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

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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

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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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