Friday Links
December 5, 2025
Self-portrait by Ann Bilińska
Dappled Things at 20
Blue Walls Falling Down: A Review from Alex Taylor
Advent: The Playlist From Fr. Herman Majkrzak
“Stubbornness is essential”: An Interview with Daniel Cowper
A Quarrel With the World: Miłosz’s complicated Second World War
Our Holy Home
Dappled Things at 20
Will you help us to get to 20 more?
Twenty years ago, we set out to fight for the future of Catholic culture. We must, of course, continue on that same path. Yet twenty years ago, no one wondered whether writers and artists would soon be replaced by machines. The word “slop” mainly referred to bad food, and although YouTube had been founded just a few months earlier, we didn’t have to drown in a tsunami of “content” to find works of true beauty. These developments spur us to dream bigger, aim higher. We must continue to fight for excellence in Catholic culture, but we must understand that doing so now constitutes a struggle for human culture at large.
Blue Walls Falling Down: A Review from Alex Taylor
Taylor’s review of Joshua Hren’s novel Blue Walls Falling Down is, not surprisingly,. very good. Taylor is an insightful reviewer. Here Joshua has shared (with permission from the European Conservative) a PDF of Alex’s review.
Advent: The Playlist From Fr. Herman Majkrzak
You can read more about this wonderful playlist HERE or check it out on Youtube. Fr. Herman knows what’s what when it comes to music. Enjoy!
“Stubbornness is essential”: An Interview with Daniel Cowper
Thank you New Verse Review and Jason Guriel for this interview":
Earlier this year, Daniel Cowper landed on the Island of Misfit Verse Novelists with aplomb. His excellent Kingdom of the Clock (McGill-Queen’s UP 2025), a novel in couplets, takes place in an unnamed city that contains twenty-first-century multitudes: an artist-cum-barista, a gambling addict whose wife tracks him by way of app, a con artist armed with a pitch deck, and more. The couplets are blank, and the characters, convincing; Cowper has a way with details and dialogue that earns the reader’s trust.
And he has a way with words that earns the poet’s; his writing is “often envy-inducing,” an adjective I use in the blurb I was happy to compose for Kingdom of the Clock. (Us verse novelists have to stick together, right?)
We talk about all of this, and a lot more, in the interview below, including the limitations of lyric poems, what it takes to go long in verse, how to kill an opera, a life-changing William Logan poem, an anxiety-inducing P.T. Anderson picture, why you should give your character a pipe, and the intersection between poetry and spreadsheet.
A Quarrel With the World: Miłosz’s complicated Second World War
Alan Jacobs reviews: Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946–1953 Czesław Miłosz; trans. by Robert Hass and David Frick:
In his introduction to the book, Hass points out that Miłosz had never been happy with the poems of this period: Even when he first published them in book form, in 1953, he struggled to find a coherent order in which to present the poems and, later on, felt that he had never discovered that order. Perhaps he came to dislike the poems themselves: In the New and Collected Poems, only thirteen poems from this period appear, while Poet in the New World gathers forty-five. Hass and Frick came to believe, though, that if all the 1946–1953 poems were translated and presented in roughly chronological order, one could see them as telling a story of a highly gifted man who had undergone multiple kinds of trauma and was trying to think and write his way back to mental and moral health. About this I believe they were correct.
Our Holy Home
Our Holy Home is a line of home goods from Catholic Concepts, the company behind the beloved quirky apparel at Sock Religious! Our Holy Home has Christmas greeting cards designed by Catholic artists (each artist receives a portion of the proceeds from sales of their designs). DT readers can use the code: Dappled20 for 20% off the Catholic Christmas Card Collection.
