My new piece — the one that was delayed for socio-political considerations — has gone up at tcj.com. It begins:

In 1961, Walker Percy published The Moviegoer, which came to mean a lot to many people, including me. “The search,” Jack “Binx” Bolling, the novel’s narrator, informed, “is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his life. … To be aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” In 1961, to be coming out of teenage years spent in the 1950s, which, if they were anything, were perennial “everydayness,” interrupted by the occasional Little Richard song, was a steady contest against despair.