via the Twitters. And don’t miss the “meta-failure” at the end! Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible. I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me. As a result, they are more likely to attribute their own failures to themselves, rather than the fact that the world is stochastic, applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad days. This... Read more
Well, I’ve started Better Call Saul. I’m only through five episodes. I watched I think the first three seasons of Breaking Bad, hating Walter and sort of myself the whole time. Saul is more my speed. The main character is that one character type that will always, always get its claws right into my heart: the dutiful sleazebag. Make somebody both really sleazy and really willing to serve another human being, and I am there for you. (I had some... Read more
reviewed by Jendi Reiter: …Logos is a collection of persona poems set at a heroin treatment center of that name, in the South Bronx in the 1960s. It comes out of Fagiani’s own experience, first as an inpatient there, and later as a social worker at a Bronx psychiatric hospital and the director of a rehab center in Brooklyn. The desperation of addiction has a way of levelling distinctions between races, classes, and professional backgrounds. The first-person narrator of some... Read more
review at AmCon: Behavior, the 2014 movie from Cuban writer and director Ernesto Daranas that is still playing festival circuits in the U.S., is not one-of-a-kind. It is not unprecedented; it does not break (much) new ground. What it is, is an exceptionally heartfelt, moving, and artistically accomplished example of its genre. As Brooklyn is what an Irish-American romance should aspire to be, so Behavior is the “coming of age in the underclass” story at its most luminous. more Read more
I was at Calvin College to do a talk on “Christian Love and Kinship Outside of Marriage: Perspectives from a Gay Catholic.” (Here are my notes from Calvin’s Festival of Faith & Writing, tickets to which were an awesome perk for speaking.) I got a lot of great questions, including one which I super could not answer, about how architecture and city planning can move away from the post-19th c. model of single-family homes and warehouses for singles, nuclear families... Read more
in The Nation–this is short and powerful all the way through: …Not long ago, in the midst of making what I thought was a couch fort, he made his own art gallery. He turned the biggest cushion on its side and taped up his creations to the fabric. He’s also done an “installation” in which he taped greeting cards, string, an odd piece of paper from a grocery bag he cut out himself, and small toys to the wall. He... Read more
at Calvin College. This was a blast, guys. Here are some semi-cleaned-up excerpts from my notes. I don’t need a literary agent. I need a literary patient. This is a great poem. “The wall comes down.” Calvin vs #orthodoxerasure–there was a panel of Orthodox Christian poets, which had way too much bafflegabby “what is liturgy, what is poetry” for my taste (although I loved Scott Cairns’s “Poetry focuses your attention”) but also made me think there are two conflicting, equally-true... Read more
my take at First Things: Philip Larkin lamented that whether or not anybody refills your drink at a party “seems to turn on where you are. Or who.” In our divided Catholic Church, pastoral care is a lot like Larkin’s cocktails. Catholics who sincerely desire to submit themselves to the Church they love come to their local parish seeking the wine of resurrection; and receive sometimes water, sometimes vinegar. If you’re in an especially culturally-contentious position, you may be favored... Read more
you know this part stood out to me: …The other secret to their success is to let students lead — literally. The student body is divided into groups of about 25 kids each, in 7th to 12th grade, said Fr. Edwin. Each group has a student leader, and together with the other group leaders, they run the school. They know the grades of all of the kids in their section, and are involved in many of their discipline issues. They set the... Read more
In the continuing saga of am I the only person who remembers the ’90s, seriously people, am I going crazy?, let’s look at Hillary Clinton in her historical context: …The word “superpredator” is part of the long lineage of language used to strip black people of their humanity in order to justify treating them inhumanely. It became popular because it put a clever name to what was already in the air, and this dehumanization has had real, material consequences. It... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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