Just another writer
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Beautiful Sentences
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.
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Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny
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…
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Church exploring: St Giles
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…
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Beautiful Sentences
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.
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Church exploring
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…
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Beautiful Sentences
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)
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Beautiful Sentences
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.
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Tiered rejection from Granta
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…
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New York Public School’s banned words list
There’s a list getting some play of the 50 words/topics banned from standardized tests. It seems like it’s also a good check list to make sure that a piece of writing has some relevance to contemporary readers. In The Archbishop’s Son, I manage to get 16/44. The current novel I’m working on scores 13/44 (despite…