May 2012
2 posts
“The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental...”
– Wendell Berry, 2012 Jefferson Lecture, National Endowment of the Humanities.
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Further Out Into McCarthy's Darkness (In Response...
Ms Odradek was kind enough to reply to my last post on Cormac McCarthy’s drive towards the dark by linking to her mini-review of “Outer Dark”. Read her review here.
This response is somewhat of an exploration that her review implicated in me.
If Cormac McCarthy is writing tragedy for the purpose of catharsis, then perhaps he sees himself as Dante’s Virgil leading various...
April 2012
6 posts
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“Suttree wiped his plate with a piece of bread and sat back. He fell to studying...”
– Cormac McCarthy. Suttree. Vintage Edition, 1992. p. 89. Originally published in 1979.
We have been having a near-biblical plague of miller moths in Amarillo lately. I am reminded of this scene from Suttree as I read at night hearing the dusty smack of a billion flittering bodies against the window,...
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poetrysince1912:
The poet Christian Wiman is...
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Horae Canonicae - Sext
W.H. Auden
I
You need not see what someone is doingto know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes:a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision,a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear the same rapt expression,forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is,that eye-on-the-object look. To ignore the appetitive goddesses,to desert the formidable shrines of...
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Horae Canonicae - Terce
W.H. Auden After shaking paws with his dog, (Whose bark would tell the world that he is always kind,) The hangman sets off briskly over the heath; He does not know yet who will be provided To do the high works of Justice with: Gently closing the door of his wife’s bedroom, (Today she has one of her headaches) With a sigh the judge descends his marble stair; He does not know by what sentence...
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Horae Canonicae - Prime
W.H. Auden
Simultaneously, as soundlessly, Spontaneously, suddenly As, at the vaunt of the dawn, the kind Gates of the body fly open To its world beyond, the gates of the mind, The horn gate and the ivory gate Swing to, swing shut, instantaneously Quell the nocturnal rummage Of its rebellious fronde, ill-favored, Ill-natured and second-rate, Disenfranchised, widowed and orphaned By an historical...
January 2012
1 post
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Beauty & Justice
He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
– Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses. Knopf, 1992.
***
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground....
September 2011
6 posts
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Harold Bloom on the Future of the Novel
INTERVIEWER:
What direction do you see the form taking?
BLOOM:
I would suppose that in America we are leaning more and more towards terrible millennial visions. I would even expect a religious dimension, a satiric dimension, an even more apocalyptic dimension than we have been accustomed to. I would expect the mode of fantasy to develop new permutations.
(From an interview by Antonio Weiss, published in The Paris Review, Issue #118, Spring 1991.) (I admit, I may just be seeing it because that's my track of thinking these days, but I think considering "the end" leads to serious imaginative possibilities and questions.
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“I do not find, on the whole, that evangelicals are prone to unaffected removal...”
– Ryan Harper. The Possibility of an Evangelical Poet, Parts I & II. The Other Journal, August 17, 2011.
Ok, so here’s another post on eschatology, as it shows up in art, specifically poetry. Harper examines the possibility of an evangelical poet - he makes concessions early in the article...
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“More fearful than a final sleep, to me, is indefinite wakefulness in a world...”
– Tony Woodlief. Frozen Heads and Riven Hearts. Image Journal Blog. September 6, 2011.
The past few posts have been about the new hopeful eschatology cropping up in different disciplines (although Bob Dylan seems to be seeing though it, like he does). I’ve mentioned that it is showing up in...
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“Tennyson seems to have reached the end of his spiritual development with...”
– T.S. Eliot. “In Memoriam” An Appreciation of Tennyson.
The shallow age to which Eliot is referring is his own, the generation that witnessed the fall of modernism’s eschatological hopes and refused to finish the journey through the despair.
If I can draw a line through history...
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“…[An] image deeply embedded within the created order itself: that of new...”
– N.T. Wright. Surprised by Hope. HarperOne, 2008. First Edition. pg 103-104.
This serves as a follow up to yesterday’s post where I said that the new hopeful eschatology springing up from the rubble of post-modernism is generally reacting against one thing: a misreading of Christian...
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“…meaning and truth in Dante’s world reside in the afterlife, where...”
– - from “A Divine Comedy: Among the Danteans of Florence” by Elif Batuman. pg. 55-65. Harper’s, Sept 2011. — Special thanks to Tragos for pointing me to the article.
Batuman’s argument that the comedy (things ending well and whole) of the Divine Comedy is to be found in...
August 2011
2 posts
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““It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of...”
– The fact that T.S. Eliot copies Lancelot Andrewes almost verbatim deeply demonstrates Eliot’s closing to his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:
“The emotion of art is impersonal (meaning has its life in the art, not the artist). And the poet cannot reach this...
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Seeing Through Everything. And Seeing Nothing. →
by Christopher Myers
The benefit, of course, of seeing through everything is that not much is lost on you, and Franzen has an amazing ability to skewer hypocrisy and to layer everything in irony. In reading the novel though, I couldn’t help but be reminded of C. S. Lewis’s observation that to see through everything is to ultimately see nothing:
The whole point of seeing through something is to...
July 2011
5 posts
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Nature’s Grace: Encountering The Tree of Life →
“Nature is shot through with grace, such that it is impossible to separate one from the other. Grace is not some alien force that occasionally intrudes into a closed system (“nature”). As G. M. Hopkins declared, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” It is grace all the way down.” - Stewart Clem
Click the title to read a great review of Malick’s “The Tree of...
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Renaming the Reader
The Bible won’t be reduced to mere representations and symbols, although it has those. The Bible is much like the angel that Jacob wrestles, refusing to be pinned. Refusing to be named or seen completely. Able with a touch to ruin the reader and able to bless him forever. Even to rename the reader.
And the name it gives the reader? One who struggles with God.
Jack Baumgartner, an artist...
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“You can write what you know. But you can also write to figure things out....”
– Josh Ritter in an interview with Tom Ashbrook on NPR’s On Point.
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“When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story...”
–
Flannery O’Connor, from Mystery and Manners
I could stand to have this taped to the inside of my glasses.
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The Baker and the Cupbearer
(Rudiments of reading)
Simply as a piece of literature, the Holy Bible is a remarkable feat. Many different authors writing many different genres across many different geographical locations and thousands of years anthologized into an unbelievably consistent and unified work of literature. Contained in each smaller narrative are layers that point to a much larger narrative - what the New...
June 2011
6 posts
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“In a few minutes the door opened and a young mozo stood there and he and the...”
– I pulled this sentence from McCarthy’s The Crossing for a couple of reasons.
The content of the sentence isn’t profound, as in it will never be found in quotebooks, but it’s interesting to see how a master handles minutae. Three people meet and stand there looking at each other....
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The Parody of Human Endeavor. →
cwmyers:
“All human effort falls short of its intended potential, all human aspirations exist under judgement, and all human achievement is measured by the standards of the coming kingdom. In the present historical context, this means that Christians recognize that all social organizations exist as…
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“I’m convinced that bad art derives, like bad literary theory, from bad theology....”
– These are some highlights from an entry titled “Bad Christian Art” by Tony Woodlief over at Image.
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“So noir exists as the fiction of moral breakdown, the fiction of corruption, and...”
– J. Mark Bertrand in byFaith (via commentmagazine)
The rest of the article is the best lesson I’ve read on the noir genre, and yes, I have researched this before.
May 2011
5 posts
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Donate to Joplin Tornado Relief →
Our friends at Mystery Church in Joplin have been housing, feeding, and healing victims of the tornado. You can donate by clicking the Title of this Post.
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Published in Narrative
I had a story published in Narrative Magazine this week. If you’re interested in literature, follow this link and take a look around the site. They publish some great authors that I attempt to emulate. Maybe you’ll find something there as inspiring as I’ve found.
If you’d prefer to just read the story, here’s a link to the PDF: Under the Sun.
Also, my good friend...
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An Open Letter of Recommendation for Ryan Culwell
Around this time of the academic year, I am flooded with requests for letters of recommendation. Students need an authority to be witness to their character and aptitude as they apply for scholarships and internships. It’s in this spirit that I write the following, unsolicited recommendation for the songwriter Ryan Culwell.
May 13, 2011
To Whom It May Concern:
I am honored to write on...
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April 2011
7 posts
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Conditions of Ambition #1
If my ambition, for my family; for my work; for my time is the kingdom of God, then my ambition becomes more an icon, and less an idol.
If my ambition is the kingdom of God, then my family, work, and time must be a sign that points to something that ultimately gives my family, work, and time their value.
If my ambition is the kingdom of God, then I must decrease while He must increase.
If my...
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“On the second day of a trek into the Sawtooth Wilderness, in Idaho, we were all...”
– Jonathan Franzen. “Farther Away”. The New Yorker: 18 April 2011, p. 83.
Franzen, and his friend David Foster Wallace, shared the belief that the novel (writing) is a response and antidote to loneliness. In this essay, he asserts that he was able to enter community more easily after...
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Easter Poem
The Mistaken Gardener
by Seth Wieck
There was reclamation to be done The path being overrun with runners My foot having caught in the matrix of vines to skin my palms in the thorns that received me.
Read the rest of the poem here.
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“From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in—black ice...”
– Mary Karr, “Descending Theology: The Resurrection” (via commentmagazine)
Watchjeremycowart:
“A Portrait of Christ” by Jeremy Cowart
The process is a great way to understand Christ.
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9.5 Theses on Beauty →
By W. David O. Taylor Here then are 9.5 theses, a tenth of Luther’s number, in no particular order and by no means comprehensive. And a good cheer for not giving up on beauty altogether, because the world would be much poorer without it, theologically as well as actually.
9.5 Theses about beauty
1. Every discussion about beauty is necessarily a contextual discussion. There is no purely...
“I pray that the dreams I have as an old man will lighten the vision in the eyes...”
March 2011
4 posts
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Ash Wednesday
by T.S. Eliot
Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign? Because I do not hope to know again The infirm glory of the positive hour ...
“We are fundamentally noncognitive, affective creatures. The telos [end] to which...”
–
Smith, James K.A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Baker Academic. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 53
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Responsibility of the Artist
cwmyers:
“The ministry of Word and Sacrament is a single ministry, the Word proclaiming, and the Sacrament dramatizing God’s promises. Yet the Word is primary, since without it the sign becomes dark in meaning, if not actually dumb.” John Stott
Such is the problem when literature (art) uses the richness of biblical imagery and narratives without recognizing the intent behind them - the art...
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So Hamlet, Solomon, and Josh Ritter Walk Into a...
Author’s Note: You should own Josh Ritter’s catalog.
Last summer I saw Josh Ritter in Dallas. Around the middle of his set, his band left him alone on stage and he stopped the show completely. The stage lights were turned off, he unplugged his guitar, stepped away from the microphone and sang “In the Dark” (The Animal Years) standing on the edge of the stage. The theater, a floor and...
February 2011
6 posts
My Son →
My second son, Clark Christopher, was born yesterday. Read the letter telling the story of his name.
December 27, 2010
Your name is a story, and you will grow up in the telling of this story. Over meals, in our going out and our coming in, even in your lying down, you will hear this story. Your mother and I are eager to see your own story be told; each action and word and development; who...
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“…the epistle endures. This should come as no surprise to Christians. ...”
–
James K.A. Smith. “Apprenticeship by Correspondence”. Comment. Spring 2011.
There is divine authority in the correspondence between the children of God. Little children, fathers, and young men, as John says, have the word of life in their midst when their words are written in love;...
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The Stars That Move With My Vessel →
A few nights ago, some friends got together at my friend Patrick Schlabs’ house and had a worship jamboree. Each person brought a song that had been formative in their lives as worshipers of God and everybody joined in to sing and play. God is gracious. Click the link above to hear a recording.
“A book should be read with a pen.”
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Absalom & Oedipus: Redeeming Fathers & Sons
Follow the narrative: A young male pup named Hank is born, suckles his mother amongst the litter, grows and develops sexually, at which point he begins looking for a mate; however, Hank runs in a pack and each pack has an alpha male, which is probably the father to Hank’s litter, who dominates the other males and has his pick of the females. The other males can either challenge the alpha...
Paul's Exodus →
I’ve read stories from the Old Testament as allegory to the narrative of Christ delivering the world from sin, but this is the first time I’ve seen stories from the New Testament read that way.
From Peter Leithart: When Paul’s nephew learns about the plot to kill Paul in Jerusalem, he goes to the chiliarch, who gathers 200 Roman soldiers, seventy horsemen and two hundred spearmen...