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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Simple: he was a liberal, homosexual, polyamormous, globetrotting unemployable risk-taker on the inside.
Oh, I get it – kinda like I’m really a lesbian trapped in a man’s body?
JOB
I mean, are any people really themselves?
Men should be what they seem.
We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, an accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody.
Yeah, when you’re at my house for dinner, you just keep that kind of talk to yourself.
I’m bad at parties.
You ain’t great outside of parties either.
Word to the wise, Rust: Also avoid trying to engage him in dinner-table conversation on genetic chimerism, multiverse hypotheses, the vastness of space, the vastness of time, and certain episodes of Doctor Who.
What he’s saying is, I cry easily. The Doctor Who mention was a bit rough, though.
There there, Mr Lickona. Strong men also cry.
Strong. Men. Also. Cry.
It might make you feel better!
–Wallace, David Foster. ‘Good Old Neon’. Oblivion. Emphasis added.
In some evolving civilizations, for reasons which we don’t entirely understand, the evolution of consciousness is attended by a disaster of some sort which occurs shortly after the Sy[mbol] breakthrough. It has something to do with the discovery of the self and the incapacity to deal with it, the consciousness becoming self-conscious but not knowing what to do with the self, not even knowing what its self is, and so ending by being that which it is not, saying that which is not, doing that which is not, and making others what they are not.
What does that mean?
Playing roles, being phony, lying, cheating. To say nothing of exotic disordering of the communicative apparatus of electronically-internetworked creatures.
What does that mean?
Internet pseudonyms.
Hey Promixa, if that’s even your real name, weren’t you reading Old King Cohle up there? The self, she is an illusion.
Cf. House of Words, p. 25.
“His wife didn’t like his poetry.”
That’s what friends are for…
Wait. That’s not always the case? What? Am I missing something here?
That hurts.
I do wonder how Wally would feel about you making him your poster boy in the kultur wars.
That’s just what I was trying not to do.
In fact, I honestly thought it was a good question about the source and manifestation of inspiration.
Really, I’m sorry if it seemed a turd in the punchbowl sort of question…
JOB
Call the mixer of big sidecars,
The spectacled one, and bid him slip
In tin tureens tempestuous turds….
You’re right, it’s a good question. There’s a secret life of Walter Mitty aspect to Stevens, but on such a high plane. There’s also a double-agent aspect to him. And an ex-suicide thing (ala Percy). The greatest poet in the world going to work every day at the firm because he didn’t have to.
Dana Gioia’s website has some extensive excerpts from Gioia’s book Can Poetry Matter? that are highly relevant to this discussion. Gioia treats the professional and artistic careers of Stevens, T.S. Eliot, James Dickey, and other businessmen-poets, and draws some very interesting conclusions:
‘Business and Poetry’
If you don’t have time to read that, Gioia also wrote a compact but substantial three-paragraph comment on his own seventeen-year career as a businessman-by-day/poet-by-night:
‘A Spy in the House of Commerce’
Both of these are well worth a look.
Still, the way you framed it did seem to have an axe-grinding edge to it.
But that’s just it, it wasn’t my question… In fact, the guy writing it in the review (note, in 1970, at the dawn of the culture wars,) seems to have an axe grinding going on – at best, I was merely axe grinding about his axe grinding…
For that matter aren’t you axe grinding on my axe grinding of his axe grinding?
Bah! Axe me no more questions and I’ll automattockly tell you no more lies!
—from ‘Business and Poetry’, by Dana Gioia
I was getting to that…
JOB
My bad. I didn’t notice that (a) you were quoting directly from the article and (b) it’s from 1970(!). I’m an idiot. Have you read the book? It would be fun to make Stevens the hero of a series of murder mysteries. Sort of like Fr. Brown, except he solves the crimes through a mixture of poetry and actuarial statistics.
All is forgiven in love and war and poetry and money as long as you remember that in some cases there is a substantial penalty for early withdrawal.
JOB