Friday Links
September 5, 2025
Mushrooms, Merion Botanical Gardens, Merion, PA
The Catholic Writer Today: A Retrospective Interview with Dana Gioia a Decade Later
Poetry in an Age of Diminishing Life in Public
What Happens If No One Reads
Criteria: Triumph of the Heart
Interintellect reads J.C.Scharl’s Sonnez Les Matines
The Catholic Writer Today: A Retrospective Interview with Dana Gioia a Decade Later
In case you missed the wonderful conversation between Dana Gioia and Bernardo Aparicio. It was very good.
Poetry in an Age of Diminishing Life in Public
To paraphrase Tocqueville: these social technologies allow us to mix with other citizens but see them not; to touch but feel them not; to maintain the sense of self solely within the circle of family and friends while having no sense of the self in relation to the larger community we call society. Yes, the internet is in many ways a godsend because it allows us access to athletic events, films, museums, and other civic and cultural institutions without leaving home. But home is not where public life is lived.
Where does the poet fit in all of this? Poetry is produced in private, most of it I assume, at home. Poetry—all poetry—is intensely personal because the language of every poem is shaped by the poet’s personal voice. In what sense, then, can we speak of public poetry—that is, poetry that speaks to and about our life as members of a public?
What Happens If No One Reads
It’s easy (and fun) to imagine what sorts of “key insights” a chatbot might extract from the classics for the benefit of a Shopify mogul. “The Iliad: Leverage your assets at work.” “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Underpromise, overdeliver.” I asked Grok about The Brothers Karamazovand it told me, “We’re all a mess of contradictions.” And so we are. Why didn’t Dostoyevsky just say that?
Here is why. Relatively early in the novel, the protagonist Alyosha hears a story in which a nasty old hag dies and wakes up in hell. Her guardian angel pleads before God on her behalf, and recounts the one good deed she ever did in her life: She gave an onion to a hungry beggar. The angel takes that onion and holds it out to the wretched sinner, telling her to grab on to it so that she can be pulled up to heaven. And just like that, every soul in the lake of fire clutches at her heels and starts getting carried up along with her. “But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them. ‘I’m to be pulled out, not you. It’s my onion, not yours.’ As soon as she said that, the onion broke.”
Criteria: Triumph of the Heart
James and Thomas of The Catholic Culture’s Film Podcast discuss the film soon-to-be-released film about St. Maximilian Kolbereview. They say it is “outstanding and very intense . . . set mostly in the starvation cell in Auschwitz as Kolbe and his companions try to find a way to die with hope and dignity.” In theaters September 12.
Interintellect reads J.C.Scharl’s Sonnez Les Matines
So good!!! And Jane’s next play, The Death of Rabelais, is coming out in September from Wiseblood Books and it is great! Make sure to look at the pretty, pretty cover, too.