I like the crust, as long as there’s something still stuck to the bread. I like the remnants of things.
Michael Winter, The Big Why.
I like the crust, as long as there’s something still stuck to the bread. I like the remnants of things.
While reading T. S. Eliot’s The Use of Poetry & The Use of Criticism, I came across an interesting observation:
For the simplest auditors there is the plot, for the more thoughtful the character and conflict of character, for the more literary the words and phrasing, for the more musically sensitive the rhythm, and for auditors of greater sensitiveness and understanding a meaning which reveals itself gradually.
While Eliot is talking here about people’s reaction to a play of Shakespeare, I found that this also rather accurately describes a lot of what I do in my writing. In the first draft(s), I’m focusing on the plot, then character and conflict, then language, and deeper meanings. It’s of course, not quite as linear as all that, but this does give a rough approximation of what’s going through my mind in the writing process.
This week, I went to the 5p mass at St Giles. The north end of Oak Park is by far the most suburban section of our village. It largely lacks multi-family housing and is far enough away from the two “L” lines that run through Oak Park that people are far enough away that the residents are dependent on cars for their commuting. This means, among other things, that the parish has a good-sized parking lot and the parishioners are whiter than even St Edmund’s (although, I should note, the parish is still not completely white).
The most notable thing about the parish, I would say, is the architecture. The interior of the church is gorgeous, showing some prairie style influences in the design, with a curious marble canopy over the sanctuary. And the sound system worked, meaning that I could actually understand what the priest was saying. But I didn’t find the worship especially uplifting. Maybe it’s me.
One other observation: This is now two weeks in a row that the Apostle’s Creed was used rather than the Nicene Creed. I wonder if, with the other changes in liturgical language, that parishes are shifting to the shorter creed (and its lack of the problematic “for us men and for our salvation”).
I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.
I’ve decided to look around for a somewhat more satisfying faith community, so as one step in that direction, my wife and I went to mass at St Catherine of Sienna/St Lucy parish. The parish community is certainly more diverse than St Edmund’s, which is 95% white (at least). The St Catherine/St Lucy community is roughly 50-50 white/African-American.
The music was piano/cantor at the 10.30a mass, which was a bit of a disappointment, but it might be the case that the choir had the week off (as I recall, when I was in the Holy Name Cathedral choir, we never sang the Sunday after Easter).
The sound system was a bit poor and I had a hard time understanding the priest.
One of the coolest things about the parish was that the first reading was given by a young woman with Down Syndrome. I loved the radical inclusivity of this, although I do confess that I couldn’t understand her at all. But then, I couldn’t understand the priest.
The other unusual feature of the mass was that there was an anointing of the sick during the mass. I’ve never seen this happen—ever, anywhere—before.
This is a strong contender, although I think I need to come to a mass where the music ministry is in full force.
We all—in the end—die in medias res.
Mona Simpson, “A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs” (The New York Times 30 October 2011)
I don’t know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but that is how it always was for me in those days.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.
I don’t intend, as a rule, to write much about rejections. For that I’ve got Rejection Wiki, but I just got a tiered rejection from Granta in my e-mail. Considering that I’d put Granta in the top-three markets worldwide for fiction (alongside The New Yorker and The Paris Review), this was pretty exciting for me. The piece that garnered it, “In Extremis” has gone 3/10 for tiered rejections which makes it, objectively, the best piece of writing I’ve done. I considered using this as my writing sample for my MFA applications. Maybe I should have gone ahead and done so.