From Day by Day by Robert Lowell (probably Jeb O’Brian’s favorite poet).
NB: A first edition of this book was located in Dauphine Street Books in the French Quarter, a good place to ride the train to if you have the chance.
Check out the animated show Bat out of Hell on YouTube!
From Day by Day by Robert Lowell (probably Jeb O’Brian’s favorite poet).
NB: A first edition of this book was located in Dauphine Street Books in the French Quarter, a good place to ride the train to if you have the chance.
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
Cosmos the in Lost
Everything that Rises
Good Country People
Betty Duffy
Bitkin
By Way of Beauty
Charlotte was Both
I Have to Sit Down
The Onion
From Empty Hands
Ellen Finnigan
First Things
All Manner of Thing
Gerasene Writers Conference
Scrutinies
Transcendental Musings
The Ironic Catholic
DarwinCatholic
Inside Catholic
Catholic and Enjoying It
Catholic Radio International
Bad Catholic
Universalis
Is My Phylactery Showing?
Quotidian Quintilian
Babes in Babylon
Fort o' Tude
En pocas palabras
William Wilson, Guitarist Extraordinaire
Signposts in a Strange Land
Unpleasant Accents
Catholic Words and Pictures
Ben Hatke
Daniel Mitsui
Dappled Things
The Fine Delight
Gene Luen Yang
Labora / Editions
Tuscany Press
Wiseblood Books
Mr. Bones' Garden
Godspy
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Hard Questions
In the comments to the previous post, Duffer asks some hard questions of writers and maybe a few readers of Korrektiv.
As for myself, I can only say to the first, “Not yet, I guess”, and to the second, “Well, three anyway. Three and a half, if we count the opening of the WPC back in 2010 (or thereabouts).
Not that I haven’t tried. There was that decade reading the classics of Greek and Latin literature, not to mention a number of extended trips to such exotic locales as Zembla and McLean Hospital (in search of the ghosts of Vladimir Nabokov and Robert Lowell, respectively). But for reasons I can’t quite fathom, I always find myself back with other dissenters from the dissent, in the scrambled geography of Feliciana Parish.
For instance, I’ve just started reading The Innovators by Walter Isaacson, author of the Steve Jobs biography and a former editor at Time. Isaacson himself explains the Percy connection here, and I suppose that’s one of the things that sparked my interest in the book. It’s pretty great so far, beginning with a chapter on Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron and something of prophet of modern computers. A prophet and, as she herself would have it, a poet.
This sounded awfully familiar to me. Where had I read this before? Oh, yes, of course … Percy wrote something similar to this in his last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome.
Could that “great scientist” have been Ada Lovelace? Probably not, but the connection here is intriguing (to me, anyway). Ada Lovelace has an insight into the relationship between imagination and science in the early 19th century. Percy makes a comment based on a similar idea in a novel in 1987, by which time we might suppose Lovelace’s insight to be more commonplace——possibly picked up on by other mathematicians and scientists, some of whom Percy might have read.
But maybe an actual connection isn’t all that intriguing. Maybe it’s just true, or even a capital T Truth, but a Truth so general that anyone could make it, at almost any time. Causality and contingency be damned, maybe connections just are——between some things and other things, between people, between ideas, between propositions, between people and ideas and propositions … between anything and everything, so much so that I suppose there’s a possibility that in the end, none of it is much more than mildly interesting. Maybe it isn’t interesting at all.
But connections can take on a seemingly divine importance, as I was trying to get at in that poem last week, or as Catholics might more readily understand as the basis of the laying on of hands——we think, or at least hope that the Holy Spirit is guiding our way through these connections. Those we recognize, and probably many more that we don’t. Dash that “seemingly”!
Anyway, that’s one reason I can’t get over Walker Percy.