There is no doubt that Byrd is in part expressing the anguish of his co-religionists, caught up in the destruction of their worship and hopes. As an Advent text, though, it implicitly expects salvation, as shown by the repeated versicle Rorate caeli, “Drop down ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down the […]

The Imaginative Man by @LauraMallonee

In which C.S. Lewis punked T.S. Eliot. Sort of. The Imaginative Man by @LauraMallonee

Taylor Swift Trolls and the Lessons They Impart

Several years ago I posted an illustration by the artist Mark Summers that traced the artistic influence from Jonathan Swift to Taylor Swift. I thought it was funny. It was early on. I didn’t quite understand tumblr. It is by far the most popular post in the history of this tumblr with 194 notes (which […]

Words Are Stuff: Poet Scott Cairns

I don’t want to just complain about my upbringing, because I learned a lot – I learned the love of God from those people – but there was a suspicion about the physical body and stuff, the earth, a sense that the body is expendable and the earth is expendable and what matters is what […]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVobBhNbUtE?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281] “Those who imitate, imitate agents who must be either admirable or inferior. (Character almost always corresponds to just these two categories, since everyone is differentiated in character by defect or excellence.) Alternatively they must be better people than we are, or worse, or of the same sort…Homer imitates better people; Cleophon, people similar […]

There was in the world one who had an expectation, time passed, the evening drew nigh, he was not paltry enough to have forgotten his expectation, therefore he too shall not be forgotten. Then he sorrowed. And sorrow did not deceive him as life had done, it did for him all it could, in the […]

For all criticism is based on that equation: KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGMENT. The key word here is meaningful. People who have strong reactions to a work—and most of us do—but don’t possess the wider erudition that can give an opinion heft, are not critics. (This is why a great deal of online reviewing […]

Incantation

settledthingsstrange: Human reason is beautiful and invincible.No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.It establishes the universal ideas in language,And guides our hand so we write Truth and JusticeWith capital letters, lie and oppression with small.It puts what should be above things as they are,Is an enemy […]

Fathers become traditionalists who think that their way is the only way and their battles the only battles worth fighting. Fathers are tempted to keep their hands on the levers after they have become too feeble to be of much use. Other fathers slip away into a premature obsolescence, a retirement that is nothing more […]

Hammer Through Daisies

@curatormagazine posted my most recent essay. Surprise, I write about death again. And Dylan Thomas. Irony isn’t bad, of course. It allows us to grasp the nebulae of death or time or memory and examine them as things, briefly, because irony is a posture toward existence that grants the bizarre possibility that things like flowers […]