When you come to Wisconsin, we’ll make sure to find you a proper backstop, too!

JOB

JOB

JOB

Start with Old Fashioneds and work your way up.

Manhattans if you’re really daring.

There’s a place online you can go to find some pretty hip and mostly simple cocktails, but modesty doesn’t allow me to disclose it’s location.

JOB

I’m lying, of course.

It really is a hidden treasure. The Tom Waits homage is best (it’s on that one, right?)

(Did you notice, incidentally, that those folks are listed in Image’s masthead?)

JOB

–Peggy Olson

Leary: Science, as you so often point out, has failed man. But so, too, has God. How is art the solution for man as he aimlessly roams the cosmos?

Percy: Explain how God has failed. Does this mean that God exists but that he might have done a better job? Or that man has screwed up and supposed, therefore, that God has failed? I didn’t say art was the solution. I would agree that with a failure of religion for many people, art is often promoted as a quasi-religious vocation. I’m not sure how successfully this works, even for the most talented and committed artists and art lovers. I dealt with this interesting art-as-religion phenomenon in Lost in the Cosmos: for example, comparing the transcending God-likeness of Faulkner while writing The Sound and the Fury with the crash afterward — drunk for a week — and the exaltation of the moviegoer after seeing a fine movie — say, Wild Strawberries — and then what? One hour, two hours later, what? I called this the ‘reentry’ problem.

Leary: You give writers a lot of bad press in Lost in the Cosmos. Why do you suppose writers are different from others? Does their temperament differ significantly from other artists?

Percy: Also in Lost in the Cosmos: writers are in the front line of sensibility, like the canaries miners take down in the shafts to test the air. Also: writers are the ‘Protestants’ of art, with nothing but their Scripto pencils and Blue-Horse tablets; painters are the ‘Catholics’, with concrete intermediaries, clay, paint, models, fruit, landscape, etc. This is why writers drink more and painters live longer.

– Leary, Robin, ‘Surviving His Own Bad Habits: An Interview with Walker Percy’ (1983); published in More Conversations with Walker Percy (1993), p. 61.

(Emphasis added.)

Okay, I’m done. Thanks for the post.

In either event it’s bad.

What? No. The libertarian opposition to censorship is based on a lot of things, but in addition, libertarians would say that “being affected by” an artistic representation of something cannot possibly be considered a crime.

I’m not sure I totally get your question, but I do think we have to speak distinctly about distinct things: what society criminalizes, what society tolerates, what we consider virtue and vice, and what we consider harmful and harmless, what we promote, what we condone and condemn, etc.

The purpose of the law is (or should be, in a libertarian’s opinion) restricted to protecting people from force or fraud (and children from the heinous crime of child pornography), but is considered an ineffective tool for promoting virtue or curing social ills and maybe even an ineffective tool for acting as a collective “expression of” “our” general attitude with regard to what we consider virtue, vice, harmful, harmless, etc. The attitude of “live and let live” or “if there’s no harm, where’s the harm?” or “don’t do anything bad to anybody” is one of toleration, I would say, not virtue (if that is the American idea of virtue, then virtue is merely the absence of malice? The law is mainly prohibitive while virtue is active.)

But where am I going with all of this? I’m not sure it’s relevant. I think this writer is trying to make the point that this man’s actions ARE harmful to children by virtue of the fact that viewing child pornography makes a person more likely to harm a child, and so therefore it should be within the realm of the law to punish him for it, even though said harm is only a possibility, even if that possibility is a likelihood. And there is certainly an argument there to be made: one shouldn’t have to create a strawman to make it. I guess what I’m getting hung up on is the misrepresentation of the views of libertarians and what those views are founded on.

Do you think it is the role of literature to promote virtue?
(Big question, I know, for a Wednesday evening…)

“I’m definitely an excellent driver.”