over at Catholic Mental Heath: Would you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself? Hey. I’m 41, raised & currently living in Washington, DC. I was raised more or less Reform Jewish in a progressive family and community. I came out in middle school and helped to found the gay/straight alliance at my high school. In college I met Christians (mostly Catholics) who were able to describe their own faith in Christ in terms which invited me... Read more
linked by the lives of the authors. Dunstan Thompson, Here at Last Is Love: Selected Poems. I first found out about this Catholic, gay, celibate poet from Dana Gioia’s essay on his life and work. I’ve had to admit that I am not a person who easily grasps poetry, so I picked this up basically because he’s One Of Us and you have to show the flag, no? But then I read it and discovered how much I love this... Read more
James H. Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree is probably the most haunting and best-constructed spiritual book I’ve read this year. Cone argues that the lynching of black people is a blatant reenactment of the Crucifixion in our country; that white Christians’ refusal to look at lynching and racism in these terms has damaged our ability to recognize Christ and cling to His Cross; and that the theology developed in black communities and black liberation movements can illuminate the... Read more
In which my whole time-travel rosary shtik reaches that great drowned continent, the 1990s. But first! Earth Girls Are Easy: Hey whaddaya know, I do like ’em big and stupid! Geena Davis is charming as always in this dumb, ephemeral, pleasurable movie about aliens in late ’80s LA. There’s absolutely no reason you should watch this unless you want to, but if you’re the kind of person who’d want to, you’re the kind of person who’ll like it. Bringing Out... Read more
at the University Bookman: At a certain point you realize that David Foster Wallace is as much a horror writer as Stephen King, and the monsters under his bed are twins: absorption and distraction. Infinite Jest, Wallace’s massive 1996 masterpiece, has as its ouroboros spine the story of a video so absorbing that it destroys the people who watch it. In Jest characters are absorbed by addiction, depression, and the screen-mediated entertainment that is symptom, cause, and synecdoche of both.... Read more
at America magazine: “Blood Quantum,” the sharp and bloody new film from the writer and director Jeff Barnaby, does something surprisingly rare in the relentlessly popular zombie genre: It makes the return of the dead a symbol of the legacy of past injustice. In this fast-paced, startlingly gory, character-driven tale, the people of a fictional Canadian First Nations reservation watch the beginning of an apocalyptic zombie outbreak—and then realize that only people with a sufficient amount of Native blood are... Read more
I recently finished two books trying to do difficult structural things, by authors I love, and they were sharp reminders of the dangers of difficult structure. Lol I’m currently writing a novel that alternates between dream and reality so I’m not trying to hear this…. Lynda Barry, Cruddy. I’ve loved Barry since I was a junior high school weirdo flipping to the back of the City Paper for “Ernie Pook’s Comeek.” Cruddy is an “illustrated novel” which, like Comeek, reads... Read more
I Are The Mutants: The standard story of the postwar media landscape centers on the rise of television: news anchors and variety shows, cowlicked children of white couples who sleep in separate beds, the same flickering glow from every home—Donna Reed across the face of the world forever. But a series of books from PM Press points out that the television era was also the golden age of the pulp paperback. By the 1950s, a weedy efflorescence of experimental and... Read more
Paperhouse: Good old-fashioned nightmare fuel! This is an emotionally-rich story of an unhappy eleven-year-old girl escaping into a dreamworld created by her drawings, and also a perfect example of 1980s children’s films’ total willingness to horrify. I mean, I think it’s a children’s film. It stars children and is about children’s concerns. But there’s also a scene where a girl’s drunken dream father beats her half to death. There’s a dream father stalking scene. The closest comparison I can make... Read more
magazine, though also country: “Things began to come together. I got a job scrubbing toilets, that honestly I am grateful for. It taught me about humility and showing up to do a good job, no matter what job I’m doing. It stripped me of my ego in the best possible way.” This is a description of life in early sobriety written by Hannah Lund in 2017 for The Voices Project, a grassroots recovery organization. It is an especially clear and... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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