Friday Links
July 26, 2024
The Meeting of Joachim and Anne outside the Golden Gate of Jerusalem by Filipino Lippi
Christian Wiman: Music and Mystery
Sir James MacMillan Discusses Tradition and Creativity in Music
The Bookshelf: Waxing Poetic with A. M. Juster
The philosophical genius of P.G. Wodehouse by William Fear
Lucas Smith on Remembering Christopher Koch, our greatest Catholic novelist
Dr. Daniel McInerny on Popular Entertainment and the Good Life
Christian Wiman: Music and Mystery
What a delightful review of The Letters of Seamus Heaney (from FS&G, edited by Christopher Reid):
This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I’m waking with Seamus Heaney sizzling through—not me, exactly, but the me I was thirty-four years ago when I first read him, in a one-windowed, mold-walled studio in Seattle, when night after night I woke with another current (is it another current?) sizzling through my circuits: ambition. Not ambition to succeed on the world’s terms (though that asserted its own maddening static) but ambition to find forms for the seethe of rage, remembrance, and wild vitality that seemed, unaccountably, like sound inside me, demanding language but prelinguistic, somehow. I felt imprisoned by these vague but stabbing haunt-songs that were, I sensed, my only means of freedom.
N.B.: The book is a whopping 848 pages and costs $45 (my birthday is on October, hint, hint, anyone, anyone).
Sir James MacMillan Discusses Tradition and Creativity in Music
Behold, I Make All Things New: A Discussion on Sacred Music and Popular Culture and a Concert of New Sacred Music by Living Composers was organized by the Catholic Sacred Music Project and co-sponsored by the Scala Foundation, Benedict XVI Institute, Magnificat Institute, and the Aquinas Institute of Princeton University.
The above link is from a discussion between Sir James MacMillan, Dr. Margarita Mooney Clayton, and Peter Carter “on how noble and accessible sacred music can once again shape all popular culture. The discussion was followed by a choral concert of music by all living composers: eight new choral works based on the texts of the Antiphons of Corpus Christi as well as music by renowned composers James MacMillan and Paul Jernberg.”
The Bookshelf: Waxing Poetic with A. M. Juster
A. M. Juster and Matthew Franck have a frank (sorry, not sorry!) discussion about poetry. Juster, as always, makes astute observations about the state of poetry today and offers some positive means by which we can improve the situation, including “us[ing] the Internet to bring the traditional tools of English poetry back to the people.” Juster is pretty much the model for how to use the internet, in his case Twitter, for the good of poetry (as the saying goes, “be like Mike”).
He mentions the deplorable state of poetry education in the “postmodern academy” and he’s not wrong, though I will offer a friendly reminder that one graduate program is teaching the art of prosody, the UST MFA.
Catholic Literary Arts is also offering a class this fall that will interest those who want to learn more about formal verse: Mastering Poetic Sound and Meter, Part 1 with Ryan Wilson.
The world’s on fire, my friends, and, personally, I don’t think prose will cut it. Epic times call for epic poetry. But seriously, the combination of meter, music, and meaning that can only be found in formal poetry offers us a way to read and write about these . . . “interesting” times.
The philosophical genius of P.G. Wodehouse by William Fear
What runs through Wodehouse’s books like a seam of gold is the idea that everything will come right in the end. His stories are defined by an inexhaustible optimism that is not only comforting, but intelligent and thoughtful. Beneath the japes, scrapes, pig-stealing and aunt-dodging, there’s a genuine attention to the texture of human existence.
Lucas Smith on Remembering Christopher Koch, our greatest Catholic novelist
From Lucas Smith on Christopher Kock, author of The Year of Living Dangerously and other great novels:
As a dramatic substrate, evil has, for obvious reasons, more potential than good. It was this type of evil, that in the words of Joshua Hren, “chill us with the gelid metaphysical breath of the hell-bound” that Koch explored most thoroughly in The Doubleman (1984). But Koch’s narratives ultimately are larger than any evil, taking in the sweep of war, romance, and drama at personal and international scale. With a Tolstoyan authorial omniscience he peered into the thoughts and hearts of his characters, always granting them their complexity, their susceptibility to outside forces, their good and bad motivations, and the spiritual dimension of their lives.
Dr. Daniel McInerny on Popular Entertainment and the Good Life
If anyone is in doubt that the theme of popular entertainment is important for any Catholic to reflect upon, let him consider that one of the Church’s foremost theologians, as well as one of its exemplar doctors, himself reflects upon the positive nature of popular entertainment in his monumental work, the Summa Theologiae (specifically, in the Secunda secundae, the “Second part of the second part,” question 168, articles 1-4). In fact, it is in his discussion of the cardinal virtue of temperance, and, in particular, his discussion of the modesty required in our exterior bodily movements, that St. Thomas Aquinas locates the theme of popular entertainment.
