King Philip F.
14K posts
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.
Candidate for congress Shelby Campbell believes that men will vote for her because she twerks for them on social media
Reject the self-help slop. Embrace the Great Man biography.
@GhuneCru @Docquistador @HomericFuturist Exactly. Most seem to want to have what we have, but don't realize how long it took for us to get here. And what we did to get here. Then tell us we ruined everything because they can't have what we have right now. Fuck'em.
