Friday Links
September 29, 2023
Michaelmas
“Archangel Michael defeating Satan” by Guido Reni
J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction
Joshua Hren on “The Afterlife of Coetzee’s Secular Commedia”
“Byung-Chul Han and the Subversive Power of Contemplation” by Robert Wyllie
Michaelmas: A sonnet for St. Michael the Archangel
The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk
Work of the Hands: The Ordinary and Divine in Contemporary Art
J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction
Dappled Things J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction opens for submissions on October 1. Please follow the link for submission guidelines and best of luck! We can’t wait to read your stories.
“One foot in this world and one in the next”: that’s how J.F. Powers described the Midwestern priests he wrote about in his fiction. Having one foot in another world can be awkward, and Powers’ characters are known not for their graceful mysticism, but for the humiliating and mordantly entertaining stumbles they make while trying to live their faith. We’re looking for carefully crafted short stories with vivid characters who encounter grace in everyday settings—we want to see who, in the age we live in, might have one foot in this world and one in the next.
Joshua Hren on “The Afterlife of Coetzee’s Secular Commedia”
Joshua Hren grapples with Coetzee’s latest novel, The Pole, in light of eternity. Please, read the whole thing. It’s worth your time.
By incarnating our self-deceits and being honest about confession without God—above all by exploring, unflinchingly, the cost of secularity and how hard it is for humans not to be homo religiosis as they pass through the saeculum—Coetzee cracks a secular ceiling that is fast falling, is sometimes crashing around us, furnishing from these shards of glass the form and matter from which we can build a novel Hôtel-Dieu: a hospital to heal our deceitful desires as we await our final reparation in a Paradise not of our own making—in saecula saeculorum, Amen.
“Byung-Chul Han and the Subversive Power of Contemplation” by Robert Wyllie
Robert Wyllie reviews Byung-Chul Han’s book, The Scent of Time, “philosophical reflections on the art of lingering.
Contemplation is Han’s strategy for resistance to the violence of positivity that consumes the burnout society. Han takes up the late, contemplative Heidegger’s interest in Gelassenheit(“releasement”), a term he borrows from the Christian mystical tradition that means “letting things be as they are.”[17] Han also draws upon Zen, and sometimes echoes the therapeutic language of the “mindfulness” movement, but also points to resources that are specifically (if not uniquely) Christian. Most notably, he discusses the Sabbath[18] and the narrative time of the medieval calendar.[19] These are not simply days of rest or relaxation. They mark time by bringing us into close proximity to something Other (in this case God) that cannot be reduced to some consumable difference and used for our own projects. Feast days are days of Gelassenheit, an occasion for contemplation that lets God’s world be God’s. Only when we “linger” in contemplation can we find something outside of ourselves to commit ourselves to. Han argues this is an expression of love, as opposed to pornification, that is, to let Others be as they are.[20]
Michaelmas: A sonnet for St. Michael the Archangel
A lovely sonnet from Malcolm Guite for today’s feast day.
The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk
The wonderful Boris Dralyuk has translated this mystery novel by Andrey Kurkov, “the Ukrainian Stieg Larsson.” If you are like me and love a good mystery novel and need a new one to read, look no further:
Kyiv, 1919. World War I has ended in Western Europe, but to the East, six factions vie for control of Ukraine. Amidst the instability, young Samson Kolechko places his engineering career on hold. But in the city of Kyiv where competing patrols, black-market enterprise, and mayhem prevail everything remains up for grabs and new opportunity lurks just around the corner . . .
Work of the Hands: The Ordinary and Divine in Contemporary Art
Collegium has a number of exciting events coming up, including the Global Catholic Literature online seminar, Dying Well to Live Well: Explorations from Tolstoy to Tolkien, á Kempis to Bellarmine; their Tenth Anniversary Celebration; and the Ars Vivendi Arts Initiative: Work of the Hands: The Ordinary and Divine in Contemporary Art, which looks pretty amazing.
