Isha

From Southern Partisan 02.3, 1982: The cream of Southern writers and thinkers gathered this spring at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, for a literary reunion. Present were Andrew Lytle, Cleanth Brooks, George Garrett, Peter Taylor, and Eudora Welty, who regaled a large and enthusiastic audience of students and townspeople with readings from their works and informal discussions of Southern literature. The highlight of the two-day gathering was a roundtable discussion between all of the principals except Miss Welty, on the South. Peter Taylor, one of America's greatest short-story writers recalled how William Faulkner's Absalom Absalom, considered by many today as the American novel, was first received by New York critics: it was officially opined that the book had been written by a crazy man. Taylor went on to describe what he feels Southern literature is all about: it is a struggle to humanize modern life by understanding it and reconciling it with the Christian tradition of the West. No small task, but one which Southern writers have mastered. Cleanth Brooks, one of America's greatest literary scholars, commented on today's culture. The students of today are, he fears, outside Western civilization. They are equally cut off from both the old traditional oral culture of the West and from the written high culture. According to Brooks, the three bastard America muses hold sway in literature. These are Sentimentality, Propaganda, and Pornography, the latter a billion dollar industry predicated upon the unwillingness or inability of Americans "to see reality as a whole." And only the writers of the South still have the cultural base to see the present situation for what it is, rather than to be a part of it. The key to Southern literature, Andrew Lytle (perhaps the greatest living practitioner of Southern literature) told the assembled audience, is that it is still Christian and still has a Christian grasp of the reality of evil. The Southern tradition is squarely at odds with the Puritan or Northern tradition. The Puritan puts evil in the object---whiskey, a gun, a bad environment, etc.---rather than in the human heart. Once evil is projected into the object, the Puritan is able to justify to himself his right to attack and reform others in the name of his own sanctity. This reduces to a disguised form of a will to power. What the Puritan wants is not salvation but power. He is, in the final analysis, a minion of the Devil. George Garrett, poet and novelist, described with some relish the economic and cultural decay of the once powerful Northeast and declared his belief that, judging from the youngest writers just coming on the scene, Southern literature is still great and still Southern and will continue to be for a long time.

It’s time to seriously talk ticks here in the Ozarks. My buddy in Benton County who used to diagnose a couple cases of Alpha-Gal a month—now multiple per day. Everybody’s dog has ehrlichiosis, and highest ER visits ever for rocky mtn tick fever in Arkansas last year.

🚨🇺🇸 Meanwhile in America “Look at them crawling out of there - millions of Ticks” The story is so insane - Farmers continue to report finding Boxes full of Ticks on their farmland, clearly left their on purpose. Now the US has already seen a sharp increase in the number of Tick related diseases.

Worth watching the video. Perhaps coming to much of the world in the next 30-60 days Some would blame this on the US. It might enrage those people, but I would argue just the reverse. Iran has been militarily capable of shutting the Strait or imposing tolls for the last 50 yrs 1