Over at Townhall.com, Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Greenberg cites The Moviegoer: Binx’s search as exodus.
Amen.
Do the Dung Beetle!
October 24, 2012 by at 10:45 am
“…having only learned to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies–my only talent–smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle…”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
Prospering includes dancing, and now they’re being provided with rubbery boots made of silicon for some relief from their strenuous exertions.
“Dung beetles are the first example of an insect using a mobile, thermal refuge to move across hot soil,” researcher Jochen Smolka, a neuroethologist at Lund University in Sweden, told LiveScience. “Insects, once thought to be at the mercy of environmental temperatures, use sophisticated behavioral strategies to regulate their body temperature[s].”
The researchers discovered that beetles on hot soil climbed onto their excrement balls seven times more often than when on cooler ground. When the researchers painted rubbery boots made of silicone onto the legs of the insects to protect them from the heat, “beetles with boots on climbed their balls less often,” Smolka said. The scientists think the insects get on top of dung when it gets hot to give themselves a respite from scorching sands and help protect their brains from overheating.
I look forward to seeing kids imitate the dung beetle in discotheques all over the world. And I suppose we can now refer to the 21st century as the Great Discotheque of Scientific Humanism.
Read the straight poop at Live Science.
Teaching The Moviegoer to 17-Year-Olds
August 21, 2012 by at 6:20 pm
My 12th grade students read Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer over the summer and so we’re discussing it now in class. I love teaching novels that almost everyone in the class hates on their first read. And I get it; I can see why today’s 17 year old teenagers would hate The Moviegoer. It’s light on action and heavy on abstractions and is the product of an era distinctly not their own.
I wasn’t familiar with The Circe Institute before happening upon this lovely post, but they seem like nice people.
I want to teach my students to read well – and deeply – not because I want them to read good books by the bushels or stock their shelves with well aged classics. I want to teach them to read well because there is a God-breathed universe of truth available to those who, as Binx Bolling recognized in his own broken way, seek it.
July 25, 2012 by at 3:17 pm
Neo-Nazi Notes on The Moviegoer
February 14, 2012 by at 10:39 am
If passing a Jew on the street is like Robinson Crusoe seeing a footprint in the sand, to what shall we compare bumping into a Nazi on the Internet?
Reentry
October 17, 2011 by at 9:05 pm
It confused me that the valet had chosen to steal disc 5 of Author, Author
My first clue that something was amiss was that the radio had been switched to Voodoo 104; it seemed an arbitrary liberty to have taken for the sake of a 20-second parking job. In fact, I was pretty sure I had turned the player off entirely before handing over my keys.
But the loss of the CD – that was going to be a problem. I am currently on pretty good terms with the library and I didn’t want to have to explain the theft; besides that, it was sure to be expensive to replace.
And then I realized my problem was much bigger than just one disc.
Missing from the front seat were my provisions for the drive home – saltines, special Spokane souvenir fudge, Chamomile tea.
Missing from underneath the driver’s seat was the remainder of the audiobook.
Missing from the back seat were my jacket, insulated tote, folder, and who cares what else, because surely this meant my luggage and laptop had been stolen from the trunk. This was going to be quite expensive.
I pulled over in front of the Marriott on Canal Street, just short of the interestate. I walked around to the trunk and tried to remember what button to push on my husband’s keychain to make the lid pop up. It confused me that his car had Louisiana plates. Why would his car have Louisiana plates? What kind of con was this valet operation, anyway? I pulled out my phone to call for backup; I didn’t want to go in alone. Who knew what I would be up against at the parking garage.
And that’s when I noticed the car was Regatta Blue instead of Black Noir Pearl.
Nice, Mister Dr. Percy. Very nice. The Hyundai as “non-place,” ending the pilgrimage with a jarring repetition. Or maybe it was a rotation, I don’t know. The best I can do is to believe the parking crew when they assure me that they never, ever give customers the wrong car, and they are so sorry.
So I pulled back out onto Chartres Street, right behind another Black Noir Pearl, and set about finding my way back to Texas.
Why didn’t Binx participate in the Krewes?
October 6, 2011 by at 11:12 am
Josef Pieper may not have the total answer (although a total answer is perhaps found elsewhere in the same book), but this passage is too interesting not to share:
“Festivity is impossible to the naysayer. The more money he has, and above all the more leisure, the more desperate is this impossiblity to him.
“This is also true of the man who refuses to approve the fact of his own existence – having fallen into that mysterious, ineffable ‘despair from weakness’ of which Soren Kierkegaard has spoken and which in the old moral philosophy went by the name of acedia, ‘slothfulness of the heart.’ At issue is a refusal regarding the very heart and fountainhead of existence itself, because of the ‘despair of not willing to be oneself’ which makes man unable to live with himself. He is driven out of his own house – into a hurly-burly of work-and-nothing-else, into the fine-spun exhausting game of sophistical phrase-mongering, into incessant ‘entertainment’ by empty stimulants – in short, into a no man’s land which may be quite comfortably furnished, but which has no place for the serenity of intrinsically meaningful activity, for contemplation, and certainly not for festivity” [Emphasis mine]. – from In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity, pp.27-28 (1999, St. Augustine Press, South Bend, Ind.).
Falstaffian Hauteur in the Warm, Heavy Air
and
Read more about Percy’s aplomb, etc. at Slate