Friday Links
December 29, 2023
The martyrdom of St Thomas Becket, detail from a reliquary casket
Feast of St. Thomas Becket
A poem from Jon Bishop: “An Arrival”
Joseph Bottum: Christmas and the Boy Reader
Susannah Black Roberts interviews Makoto Fujimura: Making Art to Mend Culture
Matthew Milliner in Comment: After Zen, Mary
Peter B. Kaufman: Trances, Ecstasies, Raptures, and Levitations: On Carlos Eire’s They Flew
Feast of St. Thomas Becket
Today’s is the great saint’s feast day and this is the perfect time to learn (remind yourself) about his story. You could read part of the Canterbury Tales, or T. S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral. And then there’s the 1952 film of the same name. When he, somewhat unwillingly, became Bishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket went, in his own words, from “a patron of play-actors and a follower of hounds, to being a shepherd of souls.” If only that were the normal course for all bishops. . .
A poem from Jon Bishop: “An Arrival"
This red-cut sky, all gushed with blood. The sand
like bits of flesh from where the darkness creeps.
King of the things that slouch and slither, I
am miles from Bethlehem, was spawned in transit,
Read the rest. It is excellent.
Joseph Bottum: Christmas and the Boy Reader
With the triumph of eBooks and eReaders these days, you can't say that text has disappeared. If anything, the computer revolution has made written words more ubiquitous, more all-surrounding, more intrusive. But the fading of physical books seems to have brought with it a fading of a category we used to acknowledge: the boy reader.
Oh, there are still boys and still books. Still boys who read. But hard to find anymore is the culturally accepted category of the boy reader, the bright little kid who inhales books like oxygen—"reading as if for life," in Dickens's description of the young David Copperfield—and wants to know everything: living in books every life, feeling in characters every emotion. The little boy who needs to grasp the world.
Susannah Black Roberts interviews Makoto Fujimura: Making Art to Mend Culture
Susannah’s interviews are always fantastic. In this one, she and Makoto Fujimura discuss “culture care as an antidote to culture war.”
Matthew Milliner in Comment: After Zen, Mary
If you don’t know about Our Lady of Good Health At Velankanni, please read the whole essay. Even you do, please read it all:
If Lourdes is the great Marian healing shrine of the West, Velankanni is that of the East. It hosts millions of annual visitors, mostly landless laborers who work the area’s rice paddies along the Kaveri River plane. On Velankanni’s September feast day, the population of the town temporarily swells to over a million at once. As at Lourdes, there have been so many healings here that a museum displaying discarded medical paraphernalia was created on site. Before the healings began, Velankanni was first hallowed as the site where Mary appeared to Hindu children. One of these stories features a shepherd boy whom we might call the Indian Juan Diego. While delivering milk, he stopped to rest under a banyan tree by a water tank. He saw a vision of Mary and Jesus, and Mary asked him for some milk. He hesitated, wondering how he would account for the deficit, but gave her some anyway. When he arrived to make the delivery, his milk pot was filled again.
Peter B. Kaufman: Trances, Ecstasies, Raptures, and Levitations: On Carlos Eire’s They Flew
I’m reading this now and it is so fascinating.
Eire is a master storyteller. His memoir of growing up in and leaving Cuba, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, won a 2003 National Book Award. For They Flew: A History of the Impossible, a new book that has been 40 years in the making, he plunged into scores of archival sources—primary documents in French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, including reams of testimonies from eyewitnesses and transcripts from courtroom hearings and ecclesiastic inquisitions—plus hundreds of secondary accounts from the period: books and pamphlets about mysterious behaviors and events and, when they started to threaten people, how to stop them. The result is a tale about everyday people, usually people of the cloth, performing and recording the impossible—in a spellbinding narrative reminiscent of the best works of Carlo Ginzburg and Natalie Zemon Davis.
