Sick Pilgrim
Yo guys, Matt here. Again this month, I bothered my fellow sick pilgrims to come up with a couple of things that kept them alive. And they did it. A+ for effort, sick pilgrims. F- for timeliness.
So here, in August, is our reflection on the things that gave us joy in July.
This month I discovered the Before trinity of movies, directed by Richard Linklater. Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight follows the connection and relationship of two people, each movie nine years apart. Most of the movies are the dialogue between these two, intense and deep conversations that obliterate the idea of small talk. Fans of action and explosions in movies, don’t watch this. (Linklater also directed Spy Kids and School of Rock. Weird.[edit: Linklater acted in but did not direct Spy Kids; apologies to Robert Rodriguez]) For those of us with a love of deep and existential connection between people, these movies are more exciting than Optimus Prime versus Godzilla.
Let’s hear from others in our merry band. Sick pilgrims, what small things kept you alive in July?
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The Fear of 13. When my husband goes out of town I often take the opportunity to unintentionally find the scariest thing on TV and spend the rest of the night frozen in my bed with the covers at my chin jittery and jumping at every insect colliding with the window. In an effort to stay true to torturing myself, last weekend while the hubs was at a conference I found a documentary on Netflix about a death row inmate who wrote to a judge to demand his own execution called The Fear of 13. If you need another reason to campaign for the sanctity of life, or if you just want to remember the power of storytelling, then listen to the tricky truth as told by Nick Yarris, a convicted murderer. Yarris’s monologue keeps you pulled in close. He is thorny, eager, and melodramatic. He winds and weaves and probably lies a little but in the end, I pushed pause on a full still of his face and prayed some of my most earnest prayers for him. Gripping. Beautiful. Crushing. I highly recommend it.
Whip Sunless Tanning Lotion. This may seem superficial. This is superficial. I am fine with the point deduction. When you live on the surface of the sun, it’s good to look the part and I once had a stranger tell me that I was so white I was blue. Whip goes on evenly, turns a believable hue of flesh color, and doesn’t smell like a factory. You will not grow wings smelling this creamy concoction of coconut and your shorted legs will thank you.
Karl Persson blogs at The Inner Room and is Sick Pilgrim’s Viking correspondent.
Ben Lerner’s recent book, The Hatred of Poetry. Lerner sets out to explain why so many people adamantly hate poetry – not 
just dislike it, but hate it with a passion. Part of his explanation is that people hate it because any poems – even bad poems, by negative example – remind us of something transcendent we want to reach with our words but never fully can. Poetry haters are former romantics (read children) who have given up on dreams but also feel a little bad about that too – hence the aggressive hatred rather than mere indifference – they protest too much. If we bring in C. S. Lewis’s concept of unfulfilled longing as a pointer to heaven, we might extrapolate and suggest that people hate poetry because it lies too close to a Reality they don’t dare believe in, a Reality we can only barely gesture toward with words that ultimately fail (where there are tongues, they will cease). The good news though is that even in the failure of words, a space of longing is opened, so that even what is widely considered the worst poem in the the English language (McGonagall’s “The Tay Bridge Disaster”) becomes for Lerner something of an inverted sign pointing toward transcendence by suggesting the existence of something it is not – a good poem. I don’t know that I will ever write great poetry – the kind that leaves a wordless gap gesturing toward transcendence – and I hope I will be self-aware enough not to outdo McGonagall. But the idea of poetry as a kind of “failing upward with words” has helped me find something in writing poems that makes it worthwhile even though I hate it – because that hatred of what my poems fail to achieve is really just the flip side of deep longing. I hate because I love.
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Jessica Mesman Griffith is the cofounder of Sick Pilgrim.
Toby D’Anna is a middle school English teacher, a Catholic convert, and Sick Pilgrim’s Bookish Bubba in Residence
Dark Night. A true Batman tale which fills that all too rare niche of autobiographical account of trauma and recovery, this epic Batman graphic novel refreshes my love of the caped crusader. Coming off the success of Tiny Toons, writer-producer Paul Dini had just moved on to Warner Brothers Animation’s darker and less campy treatment of our hero in Batman: The Animated Series. Here Dini made his most enduring contribution to Batman mythology by co-creating Harley Quinn, the Joker’s love struck assistant in making mischief in Gotham City. At the height of his professional career, Dini was mugged and brutally beaten while walking home from a bad date. Where his imagination had been a refuge in a bullied childhood and socially awkward adult life, it now reinforced the demons of that night. Dini is haunted by not only the extensive rogues gallery of the dark knight, but also by Batman himself, the hero that was not there to rescue him and whose standards of machismo could not be replicated in real life. Dini’s dark night of the soul is chronicled through his recovery with brilliant illustrations from Eduardo Rizzo.
suffered working in Christian retail, this cross-promotional Star Trek/ Precious Moments figurine demanded my attention according to Facebook’s ad algorithms. If you’re unfamiliar with Star Trek, I can’t help you, but you might need an introduction to Precious Moments, a brand of Christian and American themed art so kitschy and sugary sweet that Thomas Kinkade looks like Edvard Munch in comparison. This time the wide teardrop shaped eyes of an innocent boy and girl are staring at Captain Kirk on a television screen. So is their dog, adorably dressed up as Mister Spock and totally oblivious to the tribbles surrounding him. It may shock sick pilgrims to learn they can take a sick pilgrimage to the Precious Moments theme park in Missouri, home of a Sistine inspired Precious Moments chapel. Me, I’m waiting to see if this team up results in a separate Star Trek land at the park. Precious Moments, make it so.
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