Friday Links
August 1, 2025
John Henry Newman by Sir John Everett Millais
M.I. Devine on poetry and unexploded bombs
Meeting David Jones at the laundromat
Jeffrey Bilbo: What Problem Does ChatGPT Solve?
Hermetic Angelology: Ryan Wilson on Versecraft
The Nile Flows into the Shannon
M.I. Devine on poetry and unexploded bombs
Pray to the unexploded bomb in the Genoa cathedral because it’s a miracle, because it’s a form for measuring time like a sonnet; and it lets time do what time does to every form, which is simply this: It makes forms legible. That’s what happens to forms over time: Change by not changing at all. You read them and read them again and they are not as they were and you are not as you were. All things become new and possible. A sonnet. A bomb. A bomb in a cathedral.
Meeting David Jones at the Laundromat
If you are not reading Liv’s work, you should be. Here she is on reading David Jones’s The Anathemata on washing day:
Would he not be more comfortable at the aforementioned dusky tavern? The stamped tin ceiling and ornately carved oak and mahogany bar of mysterious origin make for a more romantic setting. While there I can sip on scotch as he introduces me to The Lady of the Pool. A few of the more literary minded bar tenders might even join in the conversation, and we could have a party.
Jeffrey Bilbo: What Problem Does ChatGPT Solve?
I think Bilbo is nicely telling you that using ChatGPT will make you stupid and lazy, and he’s right. Do the work or, at least, be honest and say you couldn’t be bothered to create something on your own:
When we struggle to put the right words in the right order in an effort to articulate some splinter of truth, we exercise our human intelligence and creativity and become more capable of being responsible and redemptive agents. Such a struggle may not be pleasant. It may often be tedious. But without this struggle we cannot learn and grow, and to the extent that we are invited to outsource the effort of sense-making, our intellectual and creative abilities will atrophy and our relationships will suffer.
Hermetic Angelology: Ryan Wilson on Versecraft
A not to miss episode from Elijah. This print issue of this will appear in an upcoming issue of DT, but you will want to listen to this episode now and read it later.
The Nile Flows into the Shannon
Connie Marshner on Ireland’s Byzantine Heritage:
Until recently, most scholars dismissed out of hand the idea that monks in the early Irish Church could have had any contact with the Mediterranean. This assumption perhaps was prejudiced by the image first presented by Giraldus Cambrensis, later elevated to enduring myth by Edmund Spenser, that Ireland was a wasteland populated by uneducable, barbaric aborigines. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite. From the days of antiquity and late antiquity until 1179, when much of Ireland was subdued in the Anglo-Norman invasion, the little island on the western edge of Europe was in the mainstream of European culture and had a lively cultural exchange with the Mediterranean.
