I Also Paraphrase Him Often, Saying “The Most Overrated Things in the World Are Oral Sex and Duke University”

There's to be a Walker Percy movie. Hearing that news has made me uncharacteristically happy. He's one of my favorite writers, and this will hopefully earn him the following he deserves.

If my “library” weren't in storage, I'd grab my copies of his novels and copy a few passages for you to give you an idea of what you're in for. Since everything is still boxed up in the basement, I'll leave you with this, instead, a few paragraphs from my favorite essay, his thoughts on bourbon:

I can hardly tell one bourbon from another, unless the other is very bad. Some bad bourbons are even more memorable than good ones. For example, I can recall being broke with some friends in Tennessee and deciding to have a party and being able to afford only two-fifths of a $1.75 bourbon called Two Natural, whose label showed dice coming up 5 and 2. Its taste was memorable. The psychological effect was also notable. After knocking back two or three shots over a period of half an hour, the three male drinkers looked at each other and said in a single voice: “Where are the women?” I have not been able to locate this remarkable bourbon since.

Not only should connoisseurs of bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth—all real dangers. I, too, deplore these afflictions. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of bourbon drinking, that is, the use of bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic. What, after all, is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at him but just past the side of his head, and there's Cronkite on the tube and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the sadness of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: “Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?

Do yourself a favor, and click the link to read the rest of it.

And if you've got nothing better to do—and you don't—go read The Moviegoer. It's this month's Biff's Pick for literature.