Friday Links
Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque Contemplating the Sacred Heart of Jesus
by Corrado Giaquinto
October 18, 2024
Cluny Journal
“Has Houellebecq Found a Happy Ending?”
Patricia Snow on “Taylor Swift’s Sexual Revolution”
Mama Needs a Hysterectomy
Echolocations: Thoughts on Poems by A.E Stallings
Jason Guriel: In Praise of a Brazen Poet: On the Essays of Kay Ryan, Outsider
Cluny Journal
A new journal is part of the landscape now. Edited by Jordan Castro, Luke Burgis, and Nicolette Polek, Cluny publishes essays, trilogies, fiction, and poetry. Please do take a look. If their inaugural issue is anything to go by then this will be fantastic addition to the literary landscape.
“Has Houellebecq Found a Happy Ending?”
Joshua Hren reviews Annihilation, Houellebecq’s latest novel, for First Things.
Houellebecq’s new novel Annihilation, originally published in French in 2022, can be read either as a ruthlessly exacting description of liberalism’s effects or as an artful protest against them. But Houellebecq’s commitments are clear: Here is his horrified diagnosis of a culture of death that is euthanistic in more than one sense.
Patricia Snow on “Taylor Swift’s Sexual Revolution”
Snow writes some of the most thought-provoking essays, and this one is no exception. Even if you don’t want to hear another word about Taylor Swift, please read this one, as she is concerned with the larger meaning of Swift’s work, her success, and what it means not just for Swifties, but for society":
But what happens to a generation when real religion is off the table, and the only alternative to the life young people are living looks to them like a life-sentence of “long-suffering propriety,” a “gray” life urged on them by “judgmental creeps” in “empath’s clothing”? What happens when the rebellion of the 1960s has become a tradition all its own, a handed-down, parentally and societally sanctioned status quo? Even more to the point where women are concerned, what happens when certain core Christian teachings about self-sacrifice and expiatory suffering—teachings separated for a long time now from the tradition that made sense of them—persist in the romantic imagination in distorted, dangerous shapes, rogue applications especially seductive to the female sex? “I would’ve died for your sins,” Swift sings on her most recent album, “Instead I just died inside”—an example of the empathy trap, about which I have written elsewhere. Too many young women are being raised in a cult that we might call Christianity without Christ, a perilous contradiction in terms. For Swift and her friends, the cross is still there, but Christ is not on it, which means that the suffering and the self-offering are theirs alone.
Mama Needs a Hysterectomy
Our own Rhonda Ortiz shares her story of surgery, psychotherapy, and so much more. It is so, so good.
Andrea (not her real name) is my new, doctor-prescribed psychotherapist. Because I have bipolar disorder and ADHD, I have the pleasure of visiting medical offices with the words “behavioral health” blazoned upon the signage. I had skipped out on psychotherapy for months after my previous therapist left the practice, but when the erratic mood swings, paranoia, and suicidal ideations started happening, my psychiatrist insisted I get back down to business.
Echolocations: Thoughts on Poems by A.E Stallings
This is so exciting. A.E. Stallings looks at a poem and discusses what she admires about it. In this first issue, she explores “Cliché” by V. Penelope Pelizzon.
Jason Guriel: In Praise of a Brazen Poet: On the Essays of Kay Ryan, Outsider
Ryan started publishing poetry in the 1980s, and was writing in her mature style by the 1990s. But she didn’t publish many of her best essays until the aughts. A good number of them appeared in Poetry, under Christian Wiman’s editorship. They were charming and philosophical. They gave the impression of a master who had waited years to speak her mind; and of a mind that had required those years to mull its concerns: poetry, memory, time, Moore, Frost, Dickinson. The mind seemed calmly, irrefutably, itself. Unlike so many of her contemporaries, who had “given up way too much inside”—to workshops, to the online fracas, to the fiction of fellowship—here was a writer who had stayed steeped in her own acids.
