K2

Miss Ellen interviews Mr. Matthew … and does crackerjack job of it.

Jonathan Galassi comments on Farrar Straus & Giroux: It all began in 1945, when Roger W. Straus Jr., a brash young New Yorker fresh out of the Navy, decided to apply his talent for public relations to starting a publishing house. Straus was the black sheep in a powerful “Our Crowd” family with a burning desire to make good on his own. Roger was no littérateur, but he loved the glamour and excitement of books. He was destined to be the last of a string of Jewish “gentleman” publishers, including Horace Liveright, Alfred Knopf, Bennett Cerf, and Donald Klopfer, who broke into a Wasp-controlled business and ended up dominating it. An aristocrat with powerful connections (his uncle Harry Frank Guggenheim was the publisher of Newsday ; Peggy Guggenheim was a cousin), Roger was a rank newcomer to publishing and knew he needed an editor with a name to give him credibility. So he asked John Farrar, recently cashiered from the Wasp house of Farrar & Rinehart, to come in with him. But it...

The AV Club has been in something of a tailspin since most of its senior staff took off for The Dissolve. But when you give the Criterion release of Babette’s Feast a C+ and lead with a graf like this… Anyone looking put themselves into a quick coma for some reason should consider sitting down and watching a lot of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winners from the ’80s and ’90s. Most of these films aren’t bad, by any means, but AMPAS tends to be drawn—even today, but especially back then—to blandly inspirational period pieces rather than to the truly vital work being done all over the world. Babette’s Feast, which won the award in 1988, exemplifies the kind of foreign film the Academy loves: tasteful, literary, unchallenging, faintly dull.

La tempête a béni mes éveils maritimes. – Rimbaud The scalloped curve of the empty seashell Is barren and barely beauty reaching as far As it can before all is flushed from heart and soul – O, the covetous rush! And the cavernous lust Becomes a mere apology for the senses, Disengaged, amused, parsed out, abused, Passed on, withdrawn… The whorling spires yield A frank anatomy of bone, a fluid flesh Itself shedding finer, more erotic robes Once keel’s draft is drawn. Anonymity preserves The graveyard of bowed mastheads and nude figureheads. The shabby rag-bagged baggage of pornography Adorns the wavering sea with weird images. A curse of doldrums and stale maps promise nothing else. The compass needle begins its spin, its long drawn Curvature reminiscent of earth and sea and… Hybrids and homunculi…Succubi and sarcophagi… Monsters and maelstroms… Man is born threadbare, Awash upon a beach of strange allegories, Marooned, nearly naked, but unable to resist The temptation to dream of f...

… along with Charles Taylor via David Brooks, and some guy named Ari Schulman. Apparently Dreher has just recently read The Moviegoer for the first time. Which in itself is amazing: from Louisiana, a writer, and a convert to Catholicism, and he’s just now getting around to the most important Catholic novel of the last 50-odd years? In any case, he certainly gives it due consideration . The mash-up with MacIntyre is especially interesting. Nothing would seem to be further from Heidegger’s universal ontology (to which Percy, through Binx, pays considerable homage) than MacIntyre’s Virtue Ethics. But Dreher (and Schulman) are absolutely right, and it fits perfectly: MacIntyre claims, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” But for Binx, this question can only be answered if he can answer the prior question, “Of what world or worlds do I find myself a part?” And indeed...

Imagine Walker Percy in place of Norman Mailer here. That’s sort of what my Still Lost in the Cosmos paper (co-authored with Read Schuchardt ) will aim to do. Rumor has it, McLuhan’s library (now in his son’s possession) contains several heavily annotated Percy titles. See Also . See you in New Orleans.