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No Faking It
Though I’m not Aryan (German-Irish), I was raised in typical Midwestern household that preached (though we were Catholic) the Protestant work ethic of discipline and moderation, making the syncopation of jazz and the soulful, showy, one-upmanship of improvising both thrillingly liberating, and the key to showing me how artists (I knew none) work if they expect to be successful....
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Writing Catholic After the Abuse Scandal
“Where have all the Catholic writers gone?” Robert Fay asked on the literary/culture blog The Millions at the end of November. As someone who identifies as a Catholic writer, when I read the headline I was like, “Oh, no he didn’t.” This is a sore subject for my wife and me. Our shelves are filled with the authors Fay mentions—Merton, O’Connor, Tolkien, Spark, and Percy—authors that most literate folks....
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We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
Back home, reading the freshly inscribed copy of Blue Nights, I am reminded of advice I read once in a driving manual, something about how to avoid serious injury if you should find your vehicle headed straight for a telephone pole or tree: angle the vehicle left-of-center so that the car is dealt a glancing blow. Again and again, Didion seems set on a crash-course for a head-on collision with despair....
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I Am the 99%
I love my office. It’s the best office I’ve ever had; actually, it’s the only office I’ve ever had, and it’s beyond messy. The messiness is an embodiment of my rangy to-do lists. Just last night at an All-Saints feast, a student commenting on the state of my office said that she feared that something would emerge from the stacks of books and papers and eat her. I could walk to work—we live just on the edge of the campus where I am a professor in a house owned by the College—but these days....
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Welcome to the "New Normal"
My colleague and I tag-team back and forth. I teach a few class sessions in a row, then he jumps in—back and forth, back and forth, what an offensive coordinator might call a good mix of run and pass. His stuff is the hard-nosed between the tackles running, and my stuff is the risky, long-bomb passing. At least that’s how it feels to me. This isn’t to say that the foreign policy reading....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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