![\"512px-Billy_Clark_town_crier_Nantucket\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/226\/2015\/05\/512px-Billy_Clark_town_crier_Nantucket.jpg\")
<\/a>Hello, class!<\/p>\nI\u2019m Joe Allen<\/strong>, your new substitute teacher, so to speak.\u00a0You know how Dr. Evil had his \u201cMini-Me\u201d? \u00a0For a while, I\u2019m going to be Overstreet\u2019s Mini-Me. I\u2019m a new Looking Closer intern, shouting out the news from the Looking Closer front porch, and helping fill the gaps while our usual show host strives to stay afloat amidst the stormy seas of a full-time job and graduate school.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll take notes he sends me and pass them along to you\u2014on writing<\/strong>, on music<\/strong>, on movies<\/strong>, and on that mysterious miscellany<\/em> of arts and culture that I call \u201cmysteryellany<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n And if you have anything to report, or any questions, please feel free to post them in Comments <\/strong>below, or on Overstreet\u2019s Twitter<\/a> or Facebook<\/a> accounts.\u00a0<\/p>\n This, via David Dark: from an interview with poet Geoffrey Hill<\/strong><\/a>:\u00a0\u201c[E]very word has a bit of itself that is rebellious to one\u2019s desire to make easy use of it.\u201d (Thanks to David Dark for the link.)<\/span><\/p>\n And this, via Helen Wiley: An intriguing new series in\u00a0The Atlantic\u2014<\/em>\u201cWriters Should Look For What Others Don\u2019t See<\/a>,\u201d featuring Charles Simic<\/strong>.<\/p>\n This, from Leslie Jamison<\/strong><\/a>, author of The Empathy Exams<\/em>, on fiction:<\/p>\n I think the excellence comes in letting consciousness be messy. Sometimes what can bother me about New Yorker pieces \u2026 is the urge to extract a moral, or clean up the mess. \u2026 There is a humanizing impulse in that, but it also seems to turn people into cogs supporting a theory or a thesis. And part of what seems like we\u2019re really getting at with consciousness is that it\u2019s always kind of pushing back against itself or any statement. With my students, I\u2019m always talking about \u201cconflicting vectors,\u201d I\u2019m sure they get sick of the phrase, but I think that\u2019s what I mean by it: having a piece that expresses not necessarily contradictory truths, but a couple of things that don\u2019t rest together so easily.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This, via Darren Hughes: \u00a0From a profile of sci-fi writer Gene Wolfe<\/strong><\/a> in The New Yorker<\/em>:<\/p>\n Partly what readers are excavating is Wolfe\u2019s Catholicism, which he is quick to say figures into his writing. \u201cWhat is impossible is to keep it out,\u201d he told me. \u201cThe author cannot prevent the work being his or hers.\u201d Flannery O\u2019Connor, in her essay \u201cNovelist and Believer,\u201d cautions novelists to use religious concerns in ways that do not alienate the reader, to render encounters with the ineffable so that even those who might not understand or care for a particular metaphor\u2014Aslan the Lion as Christ, for example\u2014can still be moved by it.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n David Brooks<\/strong> on the experience of studying Augustine<\/a>: <\/span><\/p>\n I have a book-ish nature. I understand faith the way C.S. Lewis did, which is that I like books that help explain the world to me. A lot of theology helps explain the world. I think reading theology is one of the most rewarding things I did in the course of researching this book. Some of it was by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. I read a lot of C.S. Lewis, Augustine, Harry Emerson Fosdick\u2019s \u201cOn Becoming a Real Person.\u201d Those b<\/span>ooks were amazingly useful and were a great education. I wish there were more theology and more religion in the public square for the faithful and those who are not faithful. I now consider Augustine the smartest human being I\u2019ve ever encountered in any form. His observations about human psychology and memory are astounding, especially given the time. What\u2019s even more amazing is he combines it with emotional storms. He\u2019s at once intellectually unparalleled and emotionally so rich a character. I portray him as sort of an Ivy League grad. He portrays himself in \u201cThe Confessions\u201d as this sexual libertine, but he wasn\u2019t really that. He was just an ambitious and successful rhetorician and teacher who found that being a successful rhetorician was too shallow for him. He felt famished inside. I think his confession is a very brave renunciation of ambition.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n With him what I found so attractive, and this is more a Christian concept, is the concept of grace, the concept of undeserved love.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Here\u2019s\u00a0Alissa Wilkinson<\/strong>, in\u00a0Books and Culture,\u00a0<\/em>giving thanks for\u00a0David Foster Wallace<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n I opened a copy of Wallace\u2019s first essay collection,\u00a0A Supposedly Fun Thing I\u2019ll Never Do Again<\/span>. And it lit me on fire.<\/p>\n I fell violently in love with the narrator, because any person who can say what you\u2019re thinking before you find the words is irresistible. He wrote long, beautiful, tumbly sentences and invented adjectives like \u201cmethamphetaminic\u201d and made me laugh till I hiccupped at inappropriate jokes. Then he turned around and said something about what it was like to be a person, and I\u2019d forget to breathe for a while. He wrote about David Lynch and math and tennis and TV and despair induced by a luxury cruise, and I thought someone had pointed a firehose directly into my brain and\u2014soon\u2014my soul.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This: Try to fathom the patience it must have taken to create Son Lux<\/strong>\u2018s new music video<\/a>.<\/p>\n This: Bono<\/strong>\u2018s final heart-to-heart conversation with Tony Fenton<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\nWriting<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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