Friday Links, October 1, 2021
+ “Return to Beauty” Chicago in-person conference with Sorab Ahmari, Liz Lev, and Cameron O’Hearn.
+ Trevor Merrill reviews Portrait of a Mirror: A Novel.
+ Not too late to eavesdrop on a conversation that Mike Aquilina and Fr. Colum Power had last summer about fallen Catholic writers, Jack Kerouac and James Joyce.
+ Seven children’s books by famous authors, one of whom is James Joyce.
Return to Beauty Conference & Gala
The Drake Hotel, Chicago, Illinois
October 24, 2021 starts with Choral High Latin Mass at Baroque St. John Cantius Church
(Ticket sales end October 15, 2021)
Mark Nowakowski writes this, at the “Performers, Conductors, Composers, and Patrons” Facebook page, about the upcoming conference sponsored by the Catholic Art Institute:
“So are you going to the most inspiring event a Catholic artist can attend? It's going to be another fantastic conference, including the change to make facebook friends into real friends and make wonderful connections across the country. Next to Christmas Eve, this conference is my single favorite day of the year.”
For more information and how to sign up: https://www.catholicartinstitute.org/conference2021
Secular Sacraments
Katy Carl, Dappled Things editor in chief, recommends this review by Trevor Merrill of The Portrait of a Mirror: a Novel, by A. Natasha Joukovsky.
“Joukovsky repurposes the marriage plot as a witty, unsparing dissection of human vanity and a quasi-sociological look at the mores of America’s de facto aristocracy.’
This is the most interesting review of a novel I think I’ve ever read. (Oh help. I’m writing a review of a review! Is that even done?) Merrill is a DT contributor and author of Minor Indignities—published by Wiseblood Press. He examines the well-limned motivations of the novel’s characters in light of the theories of mimetic desire developed by Rene Girard (whom, as Merrill tells us, Joukovsky hadn’t read when she wrote the novel).
As Merrill perceptively points out, the way the novel’s characters try to obtain some essential “thing,” a kind of self fulfillment, from acquiring one another in marriage, was referred to by Girard as “‘deviated transcendence,’ a misdirected search for God in the merely human neighbor.’” Of course that theory does not sum up what promises to be a delightful post-rom-com story, which Merrill also tells us is sparkling, multifaceted, brilliant, and hilarious, and “delivered in prose of surpassing elegance.”
Joyce, Kerouac & Fallen Artists: Why the Catholic Imagination Won't Let Go
You might be interested in this video recording of a ZOOM discussion about “fallen artists.” The event was held last June 8 on the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, sponsored by the Benedict XVI Institute, and the discussion was led by Maggie Gallagher, B16 director. Mike Aquilina, who talks mostly about Jack Kerouac, is a DT contributor, Catholic apologist, poet, songwriter for his old friend Dion, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, and others, and author of many books. Aquilina is joined by theologian Fr. Colum Power, whose book, James Joyce's Catholic Categories, was published by Wiseblood Books. Fr. Power tells us he learned by close reading that Joyce had a substantial religious sensibility and that “we have little or nothing to fear from him.”
Obscure Children’s Books by Authors of Grown-Up Literature
Stories for children by famous writers, including James Joyce: What a moral cat has to do with a lost boy (James Joyce); a happy prince and a starling (Oscar Wilde); rules for little girls (Mark Twain); a widow and her parrot (Virginia Wolfe); T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats; Mary Shelly’s story of a boy looking for a home, and stories and fables from Leo Tolstoy’s classic primers.
