Me. I was going through old emails, just reminiscing, and I came across this little nugget from an exchange with the guy I was seeing at the time. It was August 2010; he was a Ph.D. student in musicology at UVA. He wrote his master’s thesis about Rufus Wainwright’s Poses album and its connection to gay culture during the pre-AIDS era. I quickly became infatuated with him as he romanced me with stories about his undergrad romps in the frat houses at UGA and introduced me to musicians I had never heard of and took me to romantic dive bars where we got sloshed on vodka tonics and held hands under the table. We commiserated about our Southern evangelical upbringings and he actually helped me gain the courage to finally come out to my parents. He played the guitar, for god sakes, and he was super humble about his talent and intelligence. He had a cat though. Which is not usually a dealbreaker, it’s just that I’m super allergic and we always stayed at his place and I would usually end up looking like Will Smith in Hitch after an evening watching Designing Women in bed. My eyes would tear up and get all red and I would try to hide it so he didn’t feel bad about the impending asthma attack. He knew it was the kitty allergy but he’d always make me laugh because he would look at my irritated eyes and flowing tears and say, “Don’t feel bad. I know how you feel. Suzanne Sugerbaker just gets me so emotional too.” Anyway, his cat’s name was Joni. He was obsessed with 70s female songwriters (we bonded through our mutual adoration of our patron saint Dolly Parton) and I was obsessed with pets named after famous people and obscure historic figures. The point of this story is that, most recently, I have been planning to name my future dog Percy, after my favorite author of all time, but I had forgotten about Lucius and now I’m facing a serious dilemma because I’m almost 100% set on getting a dog when I start grad school in August and I don’t know how I’m going to decide which name to pick. 

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Walker Percy, The Art of Fiction No. 97, Interviewed by Zoltán Abádi-Nagy, May 4, 1973; the PARIS REVIEW

honeychurch asked: i just wanted to let you know that i adore your url! the moviegoer is such a fantastic book.

Thanks! Someone once told me that it was kind of pretentious and misleading to have a url named after a literary character. But every time I re-read it I can’t help but feel like Walker Percy wrote it for me and I am Binx Bolling. Percy (a Mississippi native) is one of my favorite authors and “The Moviegoer” is my all-time favorite book. And not in the “oh yeah, I remember reading half of it my sophomore year and this cute boy talked about it in class and I couldn’t stop staring at the brilliant things he had to say” kind of way. But in the “I read it twice a year and it never gets old, and at any given time I can find a quote or passage that connects to the way I feel about life or love or happiness or uncertainty at that exact moment in time” kind of way. Like now:

“How they take refuge in their cigarettes: the stripping of cellophane, the clash of Zippos, the rushing plume of lung smoke expelled up in a long hissing sigh.”

If Percy had written Binx as a redneck…

Or if I actually was Binx Bolling.

(Photo credit: the badassery that is South Toward Home)

Walker Percy