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

[Doug Brown <wply1223 AT gmail.com>]

Hi Henry,

That same Paul Elie essay is used as an afterword in a recent paperback edition of The Moviegoer.

I did not know that Jim Forrest had died. Thank you for sharing that news, sad though it is to hear. Jim was very kind to me. He and I had a few exchanges on this listserv as well as through our own emails. He was kind and encouraging about my writing. I am sure others here also had pleasant interactions with him. He will be missed.

Thank you,

Doug Brown

On Thu, Feb 22, 2024 at 12:55 AM Henry P. Mills III <wppdirector AT gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you, Chuck and Marcus, for the enjoyable posts reminding us of Binx's "birthday" and offering the vivid images of the start of Lent in New Orleans.

I recall a Paul Elie essay, which appeared in the New Yorker a few years ago, that Jim Forrest posted earlier. Jim was a long-time member of our community from Holland who passed not long ago. Many of you may recall him as quite a prolific writer.

Here is the introduction to Elie's essay and the New Yorker link, and also a chance for us to remember Jim in gratitude,

Best wishes,

Henry

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*We Still Live Within the Mediated, Alienated World of The Moviegoer"

www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/we-still-live-within-the-mediated-alienated-world-of-the-moviegoer

By Paul Elie

The New Yorker / 2 January 2019

Walker Percy's novel, from 1961, may be the first work of what we call
contemporary American fiction.

That it isn't really about movies is the first surprise. Binx Bolling, the
novel's main character, is only an occasional moviegoer, both by the
standards of postwar America (when Martin Scorsese would see a movie a day)
and those of the present, when many of us spend most of our time looking at
one screen or another.

The Moviegoer isn't really about movies, and yet the title remains
unexpectedly apt, just as it was when the novel, published in 1961, became
a surprise winner of the National Book Award and made a sudden Southern
eminence of its author, Walker Percy, a nonpracticing physician and
self-taught philosopher in early middle age. It's apt because it moves the
novel (and our expectations for the novel) out of the South. It intimates
that this novel, set in New Orleans, the region's most storied city, isn't
about history or legacy, isn't about place at all: it's about how we see
things --  a novel of perception and sensibility, dealing with the search for
authenticity in a scripted, stylized, mediated world...

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