Friday Links
May 10, 2024
Dorian Speed reviews Wildcat
Love the Smell of Old Books? This Bookseller Would Like You to Leave.
Mike Mastromatteo reviews James Matthew Wilson’s Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds
“Real, Real Gone”: A Monk with a Passion for the Blues by Michael Ford
The Monster and the Monstrance” A Sacramental Worldview Beyond Mere Aesthetics
Dorian Speed reviews Wildcat
The inimitable Dorian Speed reviews Wildcat, Ethan Hawke’s much-discussed new film about Flannery O’Connor. Dorian assures me that the film is worth watching and that (thankfully!) no ducks were harmed during production.
Wildcat does not present itself as a conventional biopic of O’Connor, although it faithfully incorporates her piety and her wit via her own words from her prayer journal and private correspondence. Rather, it serves as an introduction to several of her stories and the mind that created them. The film juxtaposes these stories with scenes from the pivotal period in O’Connor’s life leading up to her diagnosis and her realization that her hopes of being a New York writer will not come to fruition. As she comes home to Milledgeville and the care of her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, the young Flannery surveys her surroundings. From them, she creates highly original work that initially struggled to find an audience.
Love the Smell of Old Books? This Bookseller Would Like You to Leave.
Unlike napalm, which only smells good in the morning, old books always smell good. It’s one of the reasons we love them, right? Dwight Garner reviews Marius Kociejowski’s memoir, A Factotum in the Book Trade. Garner writes that Kociejowski’s memoir
is memorable because a) it’s well-written, and b) it’s close in touch with the books. Kociejowski, now in his early 70s, never owned his own shop. He struggled financially while raising a family on an employee’s earnings. He simply loved the work because, he writes, “the book trade is a floating world for people of intelligence unsuited for anything else.”
Mike Mastromatteo reviews James Matthew Wilson’s Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds
Wilson is a poet who can fabricate a poem out of the most prosaic circumstances, leaving the house in early-morning darkness, helping a young boy devise a plot for his first book. Or take the poem Register, where a grocery-store check-out line becomes a tableau of the human tendency to form judgments about strangers based simply on appearances.
“Real, Real Gone”: A Monk with a Passion for the Blues by Michael Ford
Read about Gerard Garrigan, jazz aficionado, poet, Benedictine monk, and Dappled Things contributor. Here are two of Fr. Gerard’s poems.
Gerard’s mother, Isabelle, exposed him from a young age to all the musical genres emerging from the African American experience, and a friend from his schooldays, the jazz pianist Mike Sissin, introduced him to “so much fine music” and still accompanies him to performances of the St. Louis Symphony. But there may be another explanation for Gerard’s love of jazz: Monks are liminal people. They live on the edge of society, away from the norm, a life that is a distinct subculture within the broader mainstream culture. Likewise, historically, the African American culture that produced jazz and blues has also been a subculture, a liminal world on the margins of a larger, a predominantly white majority culture in the United States.
Bonus content, “Real Real Gone” by Van Morrison, a song that makes you want to dance with joy. And here’s a few versions of “Carrickfergus,” one of my favorite songs: Van the Man & the Chieftains, The Dubliners & Jim McCann, Liam O’Maonlai (in the Irish, Do Bhí Bean Uasal), &, finally, Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole, who really own a few of the verses.
The Monster and the Monstrance” A Sacramental Worldview Beyond Mere Aesthetics
Jennifer Newsome Martin considers the poetry of Charles Péguy in her response to William Cavanaugh’s essay on commodity fetishism and the Eucharist, which appeared in an earlier issue of Church Life Journal. According to Martin, Cavanaugh’s essay:
sends a shot across the bow to those who would be tempted to de-materialize and dis-embody the Eucharist or deny its liberative power in and beyond the polis. It deftly unveils the constitutive strangeness, even horror, of the zombie commodities which daily appear upon our doorsteps, eliding entirely the live contributions of the human labor it takes to conceive, source, produce, and distribute them. It marshals rich biblical and Catholic traditional resources in order to present a compelling alternative vision where the material is elevated, where human work is not only made visible, but celebrated and sacralized, and where everyone is extended the invitation to come to the table of giftedness. As the prophet Isaiah says in another context, everyone who is thirsty is invited to come partake: “you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Isa 55:1-2).
