As requested by Angelico (ask and ye shall receive):
Letter from Flannery O’Connor to Walker Percy, dated 29 March 1962, from The Walker Percy Papers, UNC Chapel Hill Libraries.
As requested by Angelico (ask and ye shall receive):
Letter from Flannery O’Connor to Walker Percy, dated 29 March 1962, from The Walker Percy Papers, UNC Chapel Hill Libraries.
[…] Walker Percy at a used bookstore in the mission. I’ve wanted to read it since I stumbled upon this letter to Percy from Flannery O’Connor congratulating him for winning the National Book Award. If […]
A nod to Kierkegaard and Walker Percy: existentialist tomfoolery, political satire, literary homage, word mongering, a year-round summer reading club, Dylanesque music bits, apocalyptic marianism, poetry, fiction, meta-porn, a prisoner work-release program.
Søren Kierkegaard
Walker Percy
Bob Dylan
Literature & History
Letters from an American
Beau of the Fifth Column
This American Life
The Writer’s Almanac
San Diego Reader
The Stranger
The Inlander
Adoremus
Charlotte was Both
The Onion
From Empty Hands
Ellen Finnigan
America
Commonweal
First Things
National Review
The New Republic
All Manner of Thing
Gerasene Writers Conference
Scrutinies
DarwinCatholic
Catholic and Enjoying It
Bad Catholic
Universalis
Is My Phylactery Showing?
Quotidian Quintilian
En pocas palabras
William Wilson, Guitarist Extraordinaire
Signposts in a Strange Land
Ben Hatke
Daniel Mitsui
Dappled Things
The Fine Delight
Gene Luen Yang
Wiseblood Books
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Whoah!
Maybe not a first-class relic, but a first-rate find nonetheless. Thank you, Mr Potter, for the surprize.
It might be a double second-class relic.
AMDG,
Janet
Doubleplusgood!
I didn’t know people said ‘regards’ in 1962.
I still say “Huzzah” in 2011.
You also still say ‘Amen’ to the proposition that a frackin’ cracker is the Body of Christ.
I do – quietly, and sometimes desperately. Go figure.
To paraphrase another of Flannery’s letters, if it was only a ‘frackin’ cracker,’ “to hell with it.” But since it’s the “center of existence”, it’s a marvel we can say anything at all.
That relic would be lost if they had email back then.
More here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrmQB38aT5U
Give me William Shakespeare.
Great song, thanks JW.
‘Give me William Shakespeare.’
Hey, hey, hey! THAT’S WHAT I SAY!!!
Very cool, indeed.
Not that anyone was asking, but I seem to think there were at least two pieces of correspondence between O’Connor and J.F. Powers.
JOB
Always with the one-upmanship, aren’t you, Mr. Midwest?
Just sayin…
(He was the better writer qua writer. Go ahead – tell me differently.)
JOB
If by better you mean worse.
Oh, it’s on.
Haven’t gotten around to reading J.F. Powers yet myself, but TIM Powers should write a novel filling in the gaps in 20th-century Catholic writers’ biographies with paranormal secret history, connecting them all in one master plot. If it involves doppelgangers (maybe like O’Connor’s ‘The Crop’, but in reverse?), or alternate selves from time travel or divergent timelines (e.g., a Col. Walker Percy from a 20th century where the South had won the war and didn’t produce good literature), it could cast a new light on the phrase ‘the life you save may be your own’.
I smell screenplay.
A world where a project like this is commercially viable? That really would be an alternate reality.
Well, this made me have to look up and see what the letters were. The first was an unsolicited review of The Presence of Grace in which she said that she like his stories better than any others she knew. I would very much like to get a letter like that from MFOC, but since I haven’t ever written any stories, I guess I won’t–that and the other obvious difficulties.
The other was just about stuff, but she mentioned the library at U. of Michigan–Lansing, which, she had been told by the English faculty was “brand new and specialized in the second volumes of trilogies…,” which was a good enough laugh for the day.
She also said that he wrote two kinds of stories, “those that deal with Catholic clergy and those that don’t. Those that deal with the clergy are as good as any stories being written by anybody; those that don’t are not so good . . . .” I think this is pretty much true, although the stories about families, while very dreary, my pretty well reflect the lives of families in the current economy. I heard a reviewer say that people don’t read Powers anymore because the kind of priestly life that he describes no longer exists. I still like them very much, though.
Well, that is probably more than anyone wanted to read, but since you incited me to spend all this time doing things other than those which I ought to be doing, I thought I might return the favor.
AMDG,
Janet
“More than anybody wanted to read” is the secret motto of the Korrektiv. The shift in priestly life may hasn’t done too much damage to Powers, I don’t think – people still read about all sorts of things that are no more. And not that many people read him when he was alive, or when priests really did live like that. A writer’s writer, they called him.
“I know a page is satisfactory when it doesn’t make me throw up any more.”
I love it.
AMDG,
Janet
I think it’s Mr. New Jersey. A true midwesterner would have too much good sense to care.
Did Allen Ginsberg ever write to O’Connor? Or Sinatra? Or Abbot and Costello?
JOB
No good midwesterner would post on Korrektiv. No “mids” here.
I don’t have the Midwesterner cred yet: three generations laying six feet under and adjacent to a cornfield/dairy pasture.
I’m working on it, though. I’m working on it…
JOB