Friday Links
January 6, 2023, Feast of the Epiphany
Triptych: Adoration of the kings, 16th century, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp
“The world promises you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.”
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI dies
Collegium Institute and Dappled Things present The Lost Women
Paul Pastor on J.V. Cunningham
Living Outside of Time, Gary Saul Morson in NYRB, on Eugene Vodolazkin
How Sigrid Undset went from Secretary to Nobel Prize Winner
Music for the Epiphany, “Mater Ora Filium” & “Where is This Stupendous Stranger” & “The Virgin’s Cradle Hymn”
A poem from the DT Archives, “A Roadside Epiphany” by Don Russ
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI dies
While Benedict was 95 years old and ailing, the death of a pope is always a shock. Of course, there’s a lot out there — obituaries, articles, T.V. specials — looking at Benedict and his life. The Pillar has published several excellent pieces on Benedict, Francis, the papacy, and what the future might hold. J.D Flynn’s piece on Tuesday was excellent and includes links to some of the best material available on Pope Benedict. May his memory be eternal.
Collegium Institute and Dappled Things present The Lost Women
Please join Collegium Institute and Dappled Things for this special online Ars Vivendi Initiative event on January 12, 2023 at noon: The Lost Women: Recovering the Other English Catholic Literary Revival. We will look to recover these lost Catholic women writers, from Caryll Houselander to Sheila Kaye-Smith and Josephine Ward, and explore how the obscuring of women’s participation in the Catholic Literary Revival has distorted the movement’s intellectual legacy.
Joined by Bonnie Lander Johnson and Julia Meszaros, editors of Catholic University of America’s new Catholic Women Writers series, and moderated by Dappled Things editor in chief Katy Carl, we will investigate the need to recover these female voices, how they contribute to the Catholic imagination, and what the tradition is gaining with their voices entering back in. These lost stories and women are needed to make the Body whole again.
Paul Pastor on J.V. Cunningham
In LARB, Paul Pastor reviews J.V. Cunningham’s newly released (by Wiseblood Books) The Exclusions of a Rhyme: Poems and Epigrams. Cunningham led an interesting life, and that drama comes through in his work. As Pastor notes, in Cunningham’s poetry, “we witness love, sex, lying, death, drunkenness, regret, distraction, curiosity, grudges, derangement, laziness, useless scholarship, torment, aging, confusion, conflicted allegiance, poverty, weeds, sorrow, an unresponsive God, snakes, wasps, spousal bliss, spousal hell, and — threading it all together — wisdom.” How could you not want to read this collection?! This new Wiseblood edition includes Cunningham’s first four books of poetry (as well as many of his Latin translations). According to Pastor, Cunningham “published only a few hundred poems, most of them extremely short, all of them essentially perfect.” You can order the book and decide for yourself. And later this year, Wiseblood will release The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham, with a definitive introduction by James Matthew Wilson.
Living Outside of Time, Gary Saul Morson in NYRB, on Eugene Vodolazkin
Gary Saul Morson explores the work of Eugene Vodolazkin in The New York Review of Books. There’s no way I could sum up this sweeping essay on Vodolazkin’s novels. Morson ably leads readers through not just the novels, but the themes that preoccupy Vodolazkin and make his novels so fascinating. The essay is quite long, but well worth your time. Plough will be releasing Vodolazkin’s newest novel, A History of the Island, in May of this year.
How Sigrid Undset went from Secretary to Nobel Prize Winner
Over at his wonderful Substack, The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia reviews Sigrid Undset’s masterpiece, Kristin Lavransdatter. This is a sweeping review, but also really fun. Please do read it. If you haven’t read Kristen Lavransdatter then you really need to do that, immediately. Undset, as Gioia writes, “plays by different rules. Her story gets deeper, but at no point does it get simpler, nor do her characters abandon their paradoxical, but all too human, demeanor.” It’s one of the greatest novels ever written. Undset accomplishes magnificent things in this novel, drawing us deeply into the lives of her characters. Undset’s vision and writing helped lay the groundwork for a more expansive fiction. One might say that Undset was grandmother to that particular approach to art that Joshua Hren calls contemplative realism. Katy Carl, in her new Substack, Depth Perception, defines contemplative realism as fiction that “draws attention to both the horizontal (natural) and vertical (supernatural) aspects of human experience. It countenances both mystery and ambiguity but acknowledges the innate elevation of mystery over ambiguity. It holds out hope for the possibility of redemption while never forgetting the cost of grace.” If you’re interested in contemplative realism, please sign up for Katy’s Substack and join the conversation.
