Deep Down Things
Nicodemus, Doug Weaver
Pentecost 2012 issue.
The Restoration of Romance
The poem makes no pretense of its intentions: “If I had three lives, I’d marry you in two.” Does the poet hold back this third life for one of self-absorption?
Friday Links
with Daniel Larson in Front Porch Republic, Christian Lorentzen, a review of Denys Turners’ Dante, The Theologian by Peter Blair and Sara Holston in Fare Foreward, Art, the Sacred, and the Common Good: Scala Foundation Conference 2023
Words enfleshed
Man prides himself on his abstractive ability, on his detachment from earth, on his noetic flight—until his bowels growl.
Friday Links
with B.D. McClay in Commonweal, Alan Jacobs in Hedgehog Review, Dana Gioia on Charles Baudelaire, Kevin Perrotta
Whatever You Do for the Least of My Brethren: Social Justice Starts at Home, and at Church
Neediness is a social sin in our society, treated as if it was leprosy. But Christians are supposed to give sacrificially to those in need.
Taxpayer-funded programs to help the needy would be much less needed if we all gave Christian love and care to the ones God has given us to love in our daily lives.
And shouldn't we be doing whatever we can to make sure nobody feels left out? Perhaps we should give sacrificially of our time and concern and friendship too?
The land of spices; something understood
Reading George Herbert’s The Temple with Michael Yost.
Friday Links
with Three poems for Good Friday from Plough, CUA Chamber Choir: Jan Dismas Zelenka – Miserere I, Black Catholic Messenger on Dom Chrysostom’s final vows, Mark Baker
Shark Tooth Hunting
“Let the anxieties, frustrations, doubts, dreads, dreams, fears, and plans ebb, ebb, and ebb. Fully present to the present. Fully alive to and aware of the moment. Conscious of and rejoicing at the incarnation of it all. The stuff-ness of life. The this-ness of it. Its particularity. Its physicality. Skin, rocks, shells, water, salt, heat, cold, wet, dry, bones. Teeth. And part of the joy, the delight in it, is the very waste of it. The excess. Its non-utilitarian function. I mean, who really needs several hundred fossilized shark teeth?”
Friday Links
with Numinous Strangers by Lisa Wells, The Camino Voyage Documentary, Greg Wolfe on Dante’s Indiana, Randy Boyagoda with Jennifer Frey, John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14, and the winners of The Søren Kierkegaard Poetry contest
Announcing the winners of the Kierkegaard Poetry Competition
Announcing the winners of the Kierkegaard Poetry contest
For all of you who don’t want to write anymore
Welcome to the blessed rage
To live more musically
“I found myself in a place quite familiar to all those who have been to Brideshead before — Julia at the fountain….Waugh had me crying uncontrollably and from the deep places. I don’t know why. My returning roommate heard me and opened the door with a questioning alarm. All I could say was “Julia…” And she replied quite softly, “At the fountain?” I nodded yes. She slowly closed the door. This was between Waugh and me.”
Friday Links
Tamara Nicholl-Smith, Trinity Forum & Makoto Fujimura and Dana Gioia, Terence Sweeney, Ben Myers reviews J.C. Scharl, Jessica Hooton Wilson in Church Life Journal
Longing for Home
“As I read Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter last year, I felt that Hannah’s musings on place and community were deeply familiar because I saw them reflected in the people I know here; and I felt, too, how I do not have a place myself, and how I have grieved that lack without even having words for what I was missing.”
Friday Links
Seamus Heaney, W.B. Yeats read by Cillian Murphy, Collette Bryce, Scythian, In Their Thousands, Mick Flannery, The Dubliners and Jim McCann, Daniel McInerny, Haley Stewart, Phil, Jake & MBD on Manifesto! A Podcast, Roddy Doyle reads Maeve Brennan, Janille Stephens reviews Brian Doyle’s Mink River
In praise of queues
Life is full of waiting. Maybe that’s the point.
Friday Links
with Hannah Long in Plough, Mary Grace Mangano on Helen Pinkerton, Zina Hitz in Commonweal, Jane Greer on Josephine Jacobsen
The muse is not a trophy wife
Poets, professors, and philosophers should be part mad scientist, experimenting with the physical world, and part child gazing long at the unexplainable beauty around them, overjoyed that they have been invited to come out and play in it.
Tom Wolfe, American Social Critic?—and Me
When I met Tom Wolfe at a writers' conference at University of Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1977, I told him I was a great admirer of the kind of writing that he practiced and perhaps invented, which he called New Journalism.
Wolfe and I had a brief quiet conversation in the dining room. Wolfe was wearing one of the counter-cultural-straight-man painstakingly tailored pastel suits he always wore, even in the midst of the 70s, even when he was researching The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test with the tie-dyed, fringed, long-haired bell-bottom-jeans-wearing freaks on that psychedelic bus.
The night I met him, I was surprised that the wide-lapeled suit he wore was pale yellow. I fingered his lapel thoughtfully, to check the quality of the fabric, since I read where he’d written about how much he was into well-tailored fine fabrics, decided the material was linen, noticed his pocket handkerchief was made of silk, and then I told him I wanted to be a famous writer. And he said without a pause, You will be. For no apparent reason at all.
Friday Links
with The CUA Chamber Choir; James Matthew Wilson in Law & Liberty; Cynthia Lewis in The Hudson Review; Timothy Nerozzi in The Lamp, Aidan Hart and the Scala Foundation