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Reading a difficult book
Poem: none, instead Steve reads a quote from the work:
“Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name. Is it for Mrs. Prouty, for a drink, for both: for a party, for youth, for the good times, for dear good drinking and fighting comrades, for football-game girls in the fall with faces like flowers? Comes the longing and it has to do with being fifteen and fifty and with the winter sun striking down into a brick-yard and on clapboard walls rounded off with old hard blistered paint and across a doorsill onto linoleum. Desire has a smell: of cold linoleum and gas heat and the sour piebald bark of crepe myrtle. A good-humored thirty-five-year-old lady takes the air in a back lot in a small town.” ― Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins
Statement of the Whole: What does a reader do with a difficult text? Steve and Jason take on the humorous and bizarre text of Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins by discussing both the text and strategies for working with a text designed to put you off kilter. “I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all.” Join in the conversation.
