Continued from yesterday. Recently I sang Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem with the Seattle Symphony. In his adaptation of The Requiem, Britten juxtaposes Wilfred Owen’s poetry with the Latin mass. The male soloists sing Owen’s poem “The Parable of the Old Men and the Young,” the story of Abraham and Isaac, right up to the angel and the ram. But in Owen’s poem, Abraham kills Isaac, “and half the seed of Europe one by one.” Turning an ancient story on its... Read more
“Tell me a story,” my son has started to say after reading his bedtime books. The first time he made the request, I looked at him as I don’t do often enough, seeing the soft cheeks and hands already changing so fast for his three years, blue eyes looking at me with trust more complete than I could understand anymore. I looked at him with awe, awe for who he was, that he was, that somehow I had been given... Read more
With sinister skulls on their black Metallica and Megadeth T-shirts, the teenagers who snaked alongside me in the queue to ride the Screamin’ Eagle roller coaster at Six Flags in St. Louis, Missouri, looked like diplomats of death to my twelve-year-old self. Only line dividers separated us as we waited in a series of sheltered areas, each one connected to the next by a flight of stairs that led the amusement park’s patrons ever closer to exhilaration—and perhaps death. In... Read more
Guest Post By Lindsey DeLoach Jones For most new parents, the first glimpse of the life they’ve created is a grainy ultrasound printout, when the baby resembles—if not a human being—at least a gummy bear. In my daughter’s first photograph, three inches by five and black-and-white, she is microscopic in size. She is a five-day-old blastocyst, smaller—as one website puts it—than Roosevelt’s eye on the face of a US dime. She looks like a flaky-crusted apple pie. Our sneak peek... Read more
I hate mowing the lawn. I hate lawnmowers. Our unkempt yard stands out among our neighbors’ lush green lawns. Their leaves and sticks are promptly removed after storms, their yards are neatly mown, and their borders are crisply edged. My wife and I imagine that we get a pass on our shaggy, limb-cluttered yard because everyone knows we’re academics, bookish types who aren’t much use at real work—otherwise we might have already been voted off the street. I don’t see... Read more
Imagine that you’re in grade school in the 1950s. At Thanksgiving, Uncle Richard turns to you and asks, “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?” Ah, but this is a trick scenario. Uncle Richard will turn to you only if you’re a boy. And you’ll answer “a mailman” or “a doctor” or “a policeman.” If you’re a girl, Uncle Richard won’t turn to you with this question. As far as his question goes, you’re invisible. Because... Read more
July 4, 1984. I don’t remember the day, but surely jokes were made back then; the irony of America’s anniversary, celebrating liberty and self-reliance—falling within the year that symbolizes tyranny and oppression. Few are unacquainted with Orwell’s masterwork, 1984, featuring an ever-present state, “Big Brother,” with an eponym that connotes good, wholesome things—family, protection, strength. In the novel, Big Brother ominously moves about life’s foreground, reminding civilians that the system is perpetually awake, watching out “for” them. Ah, the ambiguity... Read more
Guest Post By Lucas Kwong Today I want to take up the question that ended yesterday’s post: Is Superman the Übermensch? As a host of commentators have pointed out, Superman’s conventional morals have never positioned him as the destroyer of societal norms that Nietzsche championed. In Man of Steel, our hero’s forbearance toward his human antagonists make it clear he isn’t about to super-speed beyond good and evil anytime soon. Yet all the loving compassion in Henry Cavill’s baby blues... Read more
Guest Post By Lucas Kwong We may have taken Jesus out of our schools, but from May to September, you can find him at Regal Cinemas 13. It’s hard to find a movie from the past few summers that isn’t an HD variation on the Passion, whether we’re dealing with Harry Potter’s death and resurrection, Bruce Wayne’s dalliance with the ultimate sacrifice, or Captain Kirk’s own saintly renunciation. Of late our boy wizards and starship captains have practically surged into... Read more
On Wednesday, June 12, 2013, at more or less the same time that I was standing in a Greek Orthodox cathedral for the memorial prayers honoring the second anniversary of my mother’s passing, the Funeral Mass for David “Deacon” Patenotte was about to take place at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in my hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi. I am a longtime Mississippi exile by this point, but I would have given anything to be in both places at once. As... Read more
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