Lo, these many moons ago, the Korrektiv Kollektiv gathered not once, not twice, but thrice in old New Orleans, there to bolster the nascent Walker Percy Center for Writing and Publishing. But o alas, academia proved, like Ed’s interior in Raising Arizona, a rocky place where our seed could find no purchase. The third Percy conference never happened, and the Center is a 404.
But the Walker Percy Weekend, with its corporate sponsors and its openly tourist bent? That has flourished, and is now entering its sixth year. And perhaps old man Percy would have willed it so, preferring no-bullshit commerce to high-flown intellectualism (“Metaphysical is a word, Bob.”) and riverside good-time gatherings to malaise-ridden milling in a library setting.
Tickets for this year’s Weekend go on sale tomorrow. David Brooks will be there, along with J.D. Vance, plus famous Friend of Korrektiv Jessica Hooten Wilson. And of course, co-founder and Mr. Benedict Option himself, Rod Dreher. I dunno; I swore off academic literary conferences after the Notre Dame gathering, but I see this sort of thing and remember that we were gonna be writers once upon a time.
Caraway Revisited