Friday Links
November 28, 2025
Remember they cannot pray for themselves so we must take it upon ourselves to help speed them to heaven.
Fit Audience Let me Find
Rage Against the Machine, Or Don’t
Heaney on the Underground
The Rusty Paperweight
A Literary Gift to you from Wiseblood Books
Fit Audience Let me Find
When I commit the passages to memory, I extend and enhance both my reading and the printed words that permit it. Those words do not vanish in the air. They are there, on the pages, in the book. I may turn back to what I have read before, as I often do, if only to check my memory. I take the book at a natural and human pace. It does not distract me with sudden advertisements. It does not set mental snares in my path. I can shut the book while opening it within me, hearing the words again and considering them. Indeed, consideration is what the book rewards, as I let it work its way into my mind. As Milton did, so I too now hear the Latin beneath the English word: to consider, as to gaze upon the sidera, the stars and their constellations above.
Rage Against the Machine, Or Don’t
J.C. Scharl reviews Paul Kingsnorth’s Rage Against the Machine. I’m grateful for this review. Kingsnorth is an important thinker because he challenges us. He surely is not always right, but his ideas are worth contemplating, and, when need be, arguing with. Jane captures something in this review that most other reviews have missed:
The real problem, according to Kingsnorth, is that “the sign [no longer] points to the signified.” The boundaries between “real” and “fake” have dissolved, and we can no longer differentiate between them. This has happened not only with our material surroundings but also with more foundational things: “real” love and “fake” love, “real” men and women and “fake” men and women, “real” passion and “fake” passion. When we can accept, straight-faced, the claims of a company that it is “passionate” about frozen carrots (which Kingsnorth mentions in chapter 15), something vital has been drained out of us.
Heaney on the Underground
In honor of the release of The Poems of Seamus Heaney, Don Paterson adapted this essay from a talk he gave shortly after Seamus Heaney’s death.
The Rusty Paperweight
Every month New Verse Review gathers together links some of the good things going on in poetry. The Rusty Paperweight is always worth bookmarking and reading through.
A Literary Gift to you from Wiseblood Books
Here’s a little treat from Wiseblood Books that I’m also sharing here. Most of these writers will be familiar to all of you. Enjoy!
