Friday Links
September 8, 2023
Birth of the Virgin by Luca Giordano
The Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Catholic Culture Podcast and Carla Galdo on the poetry of St. John of the Cross
What I am Reading: How Gloria Mark broke my heart by Ben Christenson
The Most Unfashionable Poet Alive: Charles Causley by Dana Gioia
Kathleen B. Jones on The Beauty of Physical Encounters with Rare Books
Talbot Brewer on The Great Malformation: A personal skirmish in the battle for attention
Joan Bauer reviews Katy Carl’s Fragile Objects for Psaltery and Lyre
The Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary
“Mary’s birth, in fact, is a sort of ‘prologue’ to the Incarnation: Mary, like the dawn, ushers in the sun of the ‘new day,’ foretelling the joy of the Redeemer.”—Pope Saint John Paul II
Catholic Culture Podcast and Carla Galdo on the poetry of St. John of the Cross
Carla Galdo and Thomas Mirius chat about the poetry of St. John of the Cross and Rhina Espaillat’s new book of translations of his work, The Spring that Feeds the Torrent. (Please say a prayer for Carla’s husband Michael, who was in a serious accident while riding his bike.)
Carla Galdo joins the podcast to discuss Espaillat’s translations of St. John of the Cross. Comparing them with earlier translations by Roy Campbell (a friend of Tolkien and Lewis) provides opportunity to highlight various approaches and problems in translating poetry. Carla and Thomas also discuss common misconceptions about the dark night of the soul, and John’s use of the classic mystical symbolism of bride and bridegroom representing the relationship between the soul and God.
What I am Reading: How Gloria Mark broke my heart by Ben Christenson
How can you resist reading a book review that starts like this?
I am a sucker for self-help books. You know the type: punchy title, snappy cover, riveting anecdotes to open each chapter. Atomic Habits, Effortless, Indestructible, Deep Work: these are my book candy. When I came across Attention Span by Dr. Gloria Mark, which promises a “groundbreaking way to restore balance, happiness and productivity,” I couldn’t resist. Attention Span did indeed give me a kick in the pants but more by accident than design.
The Most Unfashionable Poet Alive: Charles Causley by Dana Gioia
As always, Dana is a delight to read. In this review, he discusses the unfashionable poet Charles Causley. It’s worth reading not just to learn more about Causley and his poetry, but to learn more about poetry. Dana offers insights and lessons that will help both readers and writers of poetry.
Causley has written accessibly in fixed forms in a period that prizes originality and unpredictability. He has endorsed the importance of narrative verse in an age which has called the very notion of poetic narrative into question. He has consistently addressed a common reader whom most critics maintain no longer exists. He has been a Christian poet in an agnostic age. He has even written poetry for children and placed some of it in his Collected Poems without qualification or apology. No wonder Causley goes unmentioned in critical literature. What words could adequately describe the magnificent indifference of the au courant to such as him–a homespun regionalist writing in discredited genres for an audience that has been declared extinct?
Kathleen B. Jones on The Beauty of Physical Encounters with Rare Books
Jones writes on the mysterious beauty of handmade books and her “obsession with the medieval manuscripts of Christine de Pizan. . .”
Iron-gall ink fashioned from crushed oak gall nuts and ferrous sulphate, gum arabic for thickening. Red ink from vermillion and egg white. A polishing rub, a ruling of the sheet, a marking off of boxes for illuminated puzzle initials or decorated miniatures. A knife in one hand to steady the vellum, and a quill in the other, the writing begins. Stacks of folios accumulate, are divided amongst artists for decoration. Reassembled, stitched together to bands attached horizontally to the spine and threaded onto boards, then wrapped in leather.
Talbot Brewer on The Great Malformation: A personal skirmish in the battle for attention
A must read essay:
Culture is the soil, the sunlight, the nourishment that we human beings need to come into our own. Just as we cultivate the earth and try to make it fruitful with the received practices that we call agriculture, so too we cultivate successive generations of human beings and try to make their lives fruitful by passing along the received practices that we call culture. Yet there is a crucial difference between these two forms of cultivation. We grow crops and raise livestock with our own good foremost in mind. But unless we are truly abysmal parents, we raise our children with their good foremost in mind. We may differ greatly in our ideas of what our children’s good consists. But we have almost everywhere and always strived to pass along a way of life that will be good not merely for our generation, which will soon be gone, but for our children, so that they, and hence in the largest sense we (the polity, human beings), might have a worthy future.
Joan Bauer reviews Katy Carl’s Fragile Objects for Psaltery and Lyre
Joan Bauer’s review for Katy Carl’s debut collection of short stories, Fragile Objects, is so perceptive:
In a follow-up to her lyrical debut novel, As Earth Without Water, Katy Carl trains her unflinching gaze on the body, both in its frailty and its mysterious power. The stories collected in Fragile Objects are understated yet harrowing, with a touch of the gothic. It can be dangerous here to venture out of the city, away from the familiar.
