Guest Post By Gregory Wolfe The following remarks were given by the author at his daughter’s wedding this past weekend. For Barry and Helena Wolfe-Blevins. When the father of the bride steps up to say a few words at the wedding reception, his remarks typically have a certain amount of—what should I call it?—leverage, given the sizeable contribution that’s been made to the wedding budget. But in this case, Helena and Barry have done such a wonderful job of making... Read more
Recently I completed work on the first season of The Americans, a new FX drama about Soviet spies posing as D.C. suburbanites in the Cold War heyday of early 1980s America. My prior job was on Boss, about a ruthless Chicago mayor desperate to hide and survive at any cost an equally ruthless degenerative disease. Loath as I often am to watch TV at night after a day spent creating it, I am hooked enough on Breaking Bad that ahead... Read more
I came late to the DC Comic’s collected Watchmen, the groundbreaking graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I backed into it really, watched the movie first with my sons. Though I tell them it’s usually best to read the book first, it seemed okay in this instance to watch the movie because it’s based on comic books. Of course the word comic is not a good description of what we get. Watchmen is the story of a retired... Read more
There’s something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone. I sat in my office the other day listening to Kris Kristofferson’s country standard. It wasn’t even a Sunday, as would presumably be the case. It was a Saturday, and I had to be there for an event that took up all of the good hours. But a touch of melancholy about the afternoon—pale, lazy, mute—gave me a hankering to hear him. His version of the song is the... Read more
“You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” –C.S. Lewis To be an artist is to be constantly dissatisfied. Many acclaimed artists have said this, and though not acclaimed, I identify. I have habit of sitting on projects for too long, afraid to let go until they’re absolutely perfect, a habit that usually doesn’t lead to perfection but preciousness, an inability to let go. In an attempt to be more at ease with doing... Read more
The morning I learned about the women in Cleveland, I knew from a single headline that there was more to be said, and horrified by, than I wanted to know: Cleveland Women Rescued From Ten Years’ Imprisonment in Captor’s Home. As the news poured in, the photos of balloons flapping from Amanda Berry’s porch and family members doubled over in relief, the weight in my stomach got heavier. And despite my attempts, I could not turn myself away from the... Read more
As a child, school did not rank high on my priority list, which meant my report cards led my parents to believe that, intellectually, I was probably about as dense as a baseball. While watching a Kansas City Royals game on TV with my father one day, however, I made the mistake of reciting the batting averages of a few players from memory. After verifying the statistics using the career information on my baseball cards, my parents realized—much to their... Read more
Guest Post By Tyler McCabe We set sail for Robben Island prison at noon amid five-foot swells. The Atlantic was dark and agitated like a clubbed fish, and my camera pitched around my neck. We would be attending the official educational tour of the island. Viewing, that is, the whole God-awful shebang: communal cells which held civilians and activists during apartheid, single cells which held Muslim leaders from the East Indies and indigenous African leaders, the limestone quarry where prisoners... Read more
“Who you actually are is far bigger than the narrative you construct about who you are,” writes Jon Kabat-Zinn in Mindfulness for Beginners. At this moment—end of semester, grades in, annual faculty record due, next year’s budget due, meetings to schedule, e-mails to respond to, office to clean, and the thousand and one things to do at home that have been ignored for months but there’s little time before I load the car and my son and I back out... Read more
For Hella Winston “To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God.” –Meister Eckhart It seems rather ghastly now, given that he is serving a sentence of nineteen-years-to-life for murdering a cocktail waitress, but when I was in high school, I became obsessed with music producer Phil Spector—the eccentric and reclusive originator of the “Wall of Sound” that echoed from a dozen girl groups in the early... Read more
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