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Quixote with a Camera
Monday September 27, 2010
Dave’s office is right next door the college library, which houses the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. He often comes home with a stack of obscure art films to watch after a long day of work. This is how my husband unwinds. “Which one do you want to watch?” He’ll ask, genuinely excited and unable to choose. I’ll pick through the titles, imagining each one to be more bleak, pretentious, incomprehensible, and French than the next—from the complete works of Godard to twenty three short science films by Jean Painlevè, score by Yo La Tengo. But recently he assembled a mini-festival of the “essay film,” which included the entire filmography of Ross McElwee. I’d never heard of McElwee, but the description on the box included the word “hilarious,” so I rolled the dice....
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Confronting My Poverty
Friday September 24, 2010
A long table was set up on the corner of Boylston just outside the main branch of the public library on the edge of Copley Square filled with cellophane bags of bread and Styrofoam plates of lunch meat, and sliced cheese. I had been standing on the rain-slicked steps of the library waiting to meet up with an old college friend for a lunch date. Ten or fifteen minutes passed as I watched a steady stream of homeless men assemble fat sandwiches and then walk off in all directions to eat. The book that I am currently working on stems from these ten or fifteen minutes. For some reason the image of these men making sandwiches in the rain has haunted me....
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Bell, Book, and Candle
Thursday September 23, 2010
Christopher Hitchens, journalist, author, and member of the “new atheists,” is in danger of death. After a recent diagnosis of cancer, he is reported to be building fortifications around his soul, to keep it from betraying his professed non-belief. As such, his position is now both foxhole and bunker, a place from which he lobs public promises against grace, and public vows to those with whom he stands in league. Any religious conversion that might occur, he swears, should be understood as nothing more than the ravings of a diseased mind. With his last will and testament, he desires to excommunicate himself: ring the bell—close the book—snuff the candle. But despite Mr. Hitchens’ wishes, I can only partly share his aspirations....
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The Better Story
Wednesday September 22, 2010
I am too credulous to entertain much religious doubt. I say that neither as a slam against myself nor as a compliment. Like so many things in life, my faith just is. I have brilliant friends who, when confronted with the same stimuli as myself, find that they cannot believe in God. I don’t think the fact that I interpret the data differently either makes me inherently smarter or dumber than them. I don’t primarily ascribe faith to intellect. Suffering happens. People die. Husbands cheat. Children go hungry. Governments disappoint. Sickness comes at the worst times. Our bodies fail us. When we most need friends, we go unseen and unheard. And yet, somehow, underneath the bedrock of fear and agony, and underneath the banal repetitions of anxiety, of cruelty, of self-excoriation, I believe that there is a God. That somehow, somewhere, sometime, God puts things to rights....
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Orphaned Children
Tuesday September 21, 2010
We were a little more than halfway through our two-week August vacation when our six-year-old son said that he did not want to read any more Harry Potter. We had just returned from a driving odyssey of some 2700 miles in our 1999 Volvo. Ten days with two children shouting in the back of the car for fast food as we descended through the Appalachians, rounded Lookout Mountain with its Confederate ghosts, passed the old steel towns of Birmingham, then westward through rich earthen fields and forests into Mississippi. We let up on the nightly reading while we were gone. The vacation itself was enough of a literary adventure. (This was Mississippi, after all.). When we got back home, and tried to settle back down to our chapter-a-night routine, he would have nothing more to do with Anglo wizards....
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Issue 71
Fiction by Larry Woiwode, interview with Joe Henry, art by Fabian Debora, essay by Barry Moser.
Good Letters: The Image Blog
