Advent is the season of anticipation, and yet it so often prompts recollection. You look back on the past year; you look back, maybe especially if you had a Christian childhood (the hardest kind of childhood for a Christian to have), at those holidays when you were little. Harrison Lemke, a singer/songwriter whose haunting Genesis-inspired albums I wrote about here and here, has an Advent album called Thy Tender Care, whose songs are set pretty much entirely in memory. The... Read more
When I read that pop-history book about the beguines (laywomen who lived in community, basically), I wondered whether beguines paid so much attention to Purgatory, so much that they were even credited with releasing souls to Heaven through their prayers, in part because their spirituality was so influenced by courtly love. If love is passion–if love always comes hedged around by obstacles, by walls of thorn and rings of fire–then perhaps it’s intuitive that God’s love would be experienced by... Read more
at The Week: Any book titled Against Memoir will inevitably be a descent into the self. Michelle Tea’s new collection of “Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms” opens with a tribute to Valerie Solanas, who wrote the violent, viciously comic feminist SCUM Manifesto and then shot Andy Warhol; it’s also a portrait of Tea’s own adolescence, centered on her discovery that her stepfather had drilled peepholes in the walls of her bedroom and bathroom. In memory she revisits the scene, spying on... Read more
Earlier this year I edited an anthology, Christ’s Body, Christ’s Wounds: Staying Catholic When You’ve Been Hurt in the Church. The essays and poetry in the anthology explored how people who have been deeply hurt by other Catholics—by racism, gossip, financial crime, or various forms of abuse—come to learn that Jesus is not their abuser. The authors offered glimpses of faith they were still reshaping, trust they were still recovering. This has been a hard year to trust God in... Read more
which I review for America magazine: There is a moment toward the beginning of Rupert Everett’s new Oscar Wilde biopic, “The Happy Prince,” when Wilde interrupts his welcome-back-from-prison party to declaim, “I met Christ in prison.” His friend Reggie Turner (Colin Firth) quips, “Oh? What was she in for?”, but Oscar is having none of it: “Don’t joke, Reggie.” Everett, who is writer, director and star here, lets you hear all the curlicues in Oscar’s voice, the delectation of his... Read more
Well, the reason is my whole time-travel rosary thing, which I’m still doing (and will post about when I catch up with the present day, which should be early 2019). So I have been reading fanfiction and old LiveJournal posts, and while I did not reread the books because life is much too short, I did rewatch all the Harry Potter movies. Extremely scattered and pointless notes follow. BTW I still really like a lot of pogrebin’s fanfic–I like her... Read more
You will know if you want to read Catherynne Valente’s new novel, Space Opera, as soon as I tell you what it’s about: Aliens force the remaining members of a washed-up glam band to perform in an intergalactic Eurovision Song Contest, with the fate of the entire Earth on the line. There are two kinds of people in this world; I’m the kind who heard “intergalactic Eurovision Song Contest” and thought YES PUT IT IN MY FACE. Space Opera gave... Read more
A little while ago a Marist seminarian emailed me about his “sacred prog band,” the Radiant Obscurity Collective. I do not know what most of the words in that sentence mean, but I figured I would give the disc a spin; and I really enjoyed it. There’s a strong, ethereal woman’s voice, flutelike and lifting up toward the stars–it’s a voice like a shaft of moonlight, and the arrangements give it a lot of nice dark space to shine in.... Read more
demons are made of mouths: Lords of Chaos, a new biopic of the late founder of Norwegian death-metal, tells the story of a man who played the role of Satanist so well that he created an actual murderous death-cult, dying at the hands of a jealous disciple. He is the man who memed himself to death. more Read more
[sorry, removed as I work on this for publication] Read more
Eve Tushnet
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