For expert writers like Bellow, Woolf, Carter and Nabokov, excess, somewhat paradoxically, is of the essence – so that excess might not even be the correct term after all. Life, they seem to say, is rarely transparent, and therefore neither are their sentences. More than this, their sentences do not merely reflect reality in any […]

msodradek: Still from chapter 8 of Roberto Rossellini’s Francesco, giullare di Dio (Francis, God’s Jester, 1950) Franciscan Grotesquerie … [Francis of Assisi]’s public appearances … are always impressive, graphic, and indeed scenic. The anecdotes which relate them are very numerous, and among them there are some which strike later taste as almost grotesque or even […]

http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/album=3452440983/size=venti/bgcol=FFFFFF/linkcol=4285BB/ I have a friend, Ryan Culwell, who writes and performs songs out in Nashville. It’s been a few years and a move across the country since he released anything, but here is the latest thing: Golden On the Plains. I think it’s pretty great. Next month, he’ll release a four song EP called Winter […]

So decrepit and so abused is the language of the Judeo-Christian religions that it takes an effort to salvage them, the very words, from the husks and barnacles of meaning which have encrusted them over the centuries. Or else words can become slick as coins worn thin by usage and so devalued. One of the […]

Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual experience, for many of us, amounts mostly to an essential, deeply felt and necessary but ultimately inchoate and transitory feeling of oneness or unity with existence. It is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a thorn in the brain. […]

aaroncanipe: Jim Alinder Driving through America is the antidote to sentimentality.  Ecclesiastes 2: I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards:I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kind of fruits: I made me pools of water, to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees:I […]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfuwVnggIKM?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=375] Christian Wiman delivers the commencement address at North Central College in Illinois. It’s disheartening watching peoples’ expressions as the best speech they’ve ever heard flies over their heads. Unfortunately, I probably would have ignored it as a 22-year-old college graduate, too. More unfortunately, in ten years, I’ll probably regret the things I ignored […]

Jacob Recalls the Fight at Peniel

by John Paisley (Click the author’s name for his biography) Upon that night the others were away – Wives, children, all the troubled world And I was there alone and quiet until he came Unheralded, mysterious. As one awaking from a dream I knew, at first, only that I struggled, then slowly Grew aware of my […]

The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly […]

Further Out Into McCarthy’s Darkness (In Response to Ms Odradek)

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 […]