Deep Down Things
Nicodemus, Doug Weaver
Pentecost 2012 issue.
You Never Enter the Same Paragraph Twice
After our meeting, I asked myself, Yeah, what was I thinking when I wrote that? After all, it has been nearly two years since I wrote it. I can’t remember if it was one of those lines I perseverated on or one of those lines God gently placed in my mind like a feather. They say you never enter the same paragraph twice. Although I don’t know what I was thinking at the time, I can tell you what “holiness in the in-between” means to me today.
Friday Links, November 5, 2021
+ James Matthew Wilson podcast interview at Deep Down Things, the podcast (not us)
+ Kerry McCarthy, Early Music singer and biographer of Renaissance composers Byrd and Tallis, is interviewed about the traditional choir schools put down by the Reformation.
+ Word on Fire reminds us that “Momento Mori” is a Catholic thing.
+ In time for Christmas giving, a chance to order artwork by Daniel Mitsui and get a free Momento Mori giclée print you might keep for your own contemplation of the Four Last Things.
Europe in These Times: The Third Man
Taking a ride on the ferris wheel made famous in Graham Greene’s The Third Man
Friday Links, October 29, 2021
+ Dark stuff for Halloween
* An invitation to a ZOOM about vampires, werewolves & serial killers, O My!
* An essay with more about the blood-drinking undead at Catholic World Report
* An EWTN interview with K.V. Turley and Fiorella De Maria about their novel about Bela Lugosi
* An article by Turley about the real horrors lived by Lugosi
* Ghost stories collected by Gerard Manley Hopkins
* Thirst: A Novel: Death of a priest
* The first horror moving picture—in 1896 (it really was scary!)
+ A round-up of print and online essays in DT’s “Symposium on Motherhood and Art”
Ghost Stories with Gerard Manley Hopkins
Ghost stories from the notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Prepare to be frightened.
The Poetics of John the Baptist
The life and work of the Forerunner, especially as presented in the gospel of John, greatly illuminates the poetic character of Christian life—indeed of all life.
Friday Links, October 22, 2021
+ Workshop on how to make space for the muse.
+ Three poems by a DT associate editor
+ Maybe Catholic fiction is becoming important again?
Image: Caliope, the muse of poetry and eloquence, holding the Odyssey (c. 1634). By Simon Vouet and workshop. At the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. This work is in the public domain (wikimedia.org).
Creative Flow
I have birthed five babies and adopted two. We lived in a quirky, two-family flat converted into a house. I lost whole years of sleep, felt quite brain dead at times, and was convinced that I would never again read anything beyond endless loops of Peter Rabbit for the rest of my life. My coffee was cold. Poetry simply did not exist. Paris was only a dream within a dream. I listened to the nay-sayers and felt I had no other choice. I bid farewell to creativity and released it to more worthy souls than I. I assumed it flew. But it merely went dormant.
How Motherhood Transformed My Vocation as an Artist
Beauty and children both call for sacrifice. If we lay the sacrifices of time, money, and pride before God, he will return these sacrifices to us and to our spouses in the form of gifts.
Jen Fulwiler - People told me I wouldn’t be able to do this
Jen Fulwiler explains how she was discouraged from public speaking and practicing the art of comedy because she’s a mother. In fact, her children were far more valuable to the creative process than she ever would have predicted.
Motherhood and Creativity - A Symposium
Our symposium contributors practice a diversity of arts. They are poets, essayists, actresses, visual artists, comedy writers, fictionists. Several speak openly of how their art and their maternity nurture one another. Where there is tension, it typically grows from popular misperception or from pressures common to all artists, not from any intrinsic opposition. The relation between the two aspects of character is, to use the phrase from poet Laura Reece Hogan that I’ve chosen as a title in the print edition, “more organic than it may appear.”
Friday Links, October 15, 2021
+ Poet Dana Gioia talks about the strange, dark life of poet Edwin Arlington Robinson.
+ Architect Duncan Stroik talks about how when we design and fund beautiful buildings for the poor, we do them for Christ.
+ Michael O’Brien writes an Open Letter to Fellow Writers and Artists.
+ Fr. Michael Rennier writes about five recent books he wants to read.
Creativity and Obedience
A book review of Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick's new book Arise, O God: The Gospel of Christ's Defeat of Demons, Sin, and Death.
The Action of Grace in Territory Largely Held by Physicists
“This is what it means to live out your faith in Christ,” I told them. “It’s hard, it’s violent,” I said, gesturing toward the statues lining the church walls’ entire length from choir loft to sanctuary: each of the twelve Apostles, holding the instruments of their martyrdom. I meant it both of the Apostles and Flannery O’Connor’s writing.
Ripheus Saved
The Chosen, Social Media, and Dante
Friday Links, October 8, 2021
+ Ever wonder if Chaucer could save your life? Terence Sweeney tells you why not. And then tells why you should read him anyways.
+ Iconographer Raymond Vincent’s lectures cover the origins, the theology, and the growth of sacred art.
+ Michele McAloon interviews Katy Carl about her newly published first novel, As Earth Without Water.
+ Karen Ullo’s 2018 book, Jennifer the Damned, gets a glowing recommendation in a Tweet.
+ Ottowa’s Chaudiere Books asks resident writer Natalie Morrill six questions.
+ Prof. Timothy Bartel teaches how to read sonnets in a Catholic Literary Arts class.
What Lasts Recalls What’s Lost
Hazo’s poems are evidence that wisdom and delight are not enemies, but rather twin leaves off the same vine, the one balancing and beautifying the other.
