Friday Links
Feast of St. Kateri Tekakwitha
UST Summer Literary Series
Cynthia Haven with Dana Gioia on his new book, Seneca: The Madness of Hercules
Micah Mattix: That Patricia Lockwood Essay on David Foster Wallace
Faith and Imagination Podcast with Sally Thomas & Micah Mattix
Haley Stewart on The Antidote to the Anti-Aging Scam
UST Summer Literary Series
Friday Links are light this week because I am in Houston for the UST Summer Residency. It’s so hot here it’s a miracle no one’s melted. The Residency has been wonderful—despite the mechanical failures, alpaca purses, and shocking amount of laughter from the fiction workshop—I blame Randy Boyagoda and Dorian Speed. The evening lectures, part of the UST Summer Literary Series have been especially good, with talks by Dana Gioia, Micah Mattix, Sally Thomas, and an interview with James Matthew Wilson and Randy Boyagoda. If you’re in Houston, please join us tonight to hear Ryan Wilson and tomorrow to hear Randy Boyagoda. On July 18, Haley Stewart will join us. If you are not in Houston, all the events are available via livestream. Details here.
Cynthia Haven with Dana Gioia on his new book, Seneca: The Madness of Hercules
Over at her indispensable blog, Book Haven, Cynthia Haven writes about Dana Gioia’s excellent translation of Seneca: The Madness of Hercules, which is available from Wiseblood Books.
“Seneca may be the season’s comeback kid. The former California poet laureate has just published a new verse translation of Seneca’s The Madness of Hercules(Wiseblood). Wiseblood notes that the violent and visionary play ‘takes the reader to the extremes of human suffering and beyond – including a descent into the Underworld, an account that echoes through the ages to Dante and Eliot.’ The also book includes a rich introduction that is almost as long as the text – a good reason in itself to buy the book. After so much neglect, a thorough reintroduction is more than overdue.”
Micah Mattix: That Patricia Lockwood Essay on David Foster Wallace
In this essay on his excellent Substack, Prufrock, Mattix writes looks at a recent Patricia Lockwood essay on David Foster Wallace, essentially asking: is it criticism? Not so much:
“In the end, her stylistic remarks are performative, which is perhaps how she views criticism. It is an occasion for the critic to create a text of her own. This has been with us since at least Edward Said’s 1983 remark that a work of criticism is not “secondary'“ to the work of literature. Criticism, he continues, “no less than any text, is the present in the course of its articulation” (emphasis mine).”
This sort of essay (the Lockwood sort) isn’t really helpful to readers because it so rarely engages the text as text—as a novel or poem or short story. As Mattix notes, the Lockwood essay goes the way of so many essays on Wallace—to Wallace as a person, not as a writer; to what Wallace’s actions, not his words.
Faith and Imagination Podcast with Sally Thomas & Micah Mattix
Listen to Sally and Micah talk about their impressive anthology, Christian Poetry in America Since 1940. If you don’t already own this book, you should buy it. And if you do, you should buy another copy for a friend.
Haley Stewart on The Antidote to the Anti-Aging Scam
In this issue of her excellent Substack, Haley Stewart writes on gratitude, the pressures of perpetual youth, and wanting something more.
The millisecond I turned 35, the algorithm started sending me ads for anti-aging serums, weight loss apps, and botox. I’m now 37 and the push to beat the effects of aging is relentless. I asked around and this seems to be a universal experience for women over 30 who use the internet. At every turn someone is trying to make money from the insecurity that you don’t look 22 anymore. And you should look 22, they say. You should look 22 forever!
No, you shouldn’t. One of the funny things about this kind of forever-young plastic surgery is that it doesn’t age well. As Stewart notes, “I wonder if the revolutionary antidote to the anti-aging scam is actually incredibly simple: gratitude to be alive.”
