More on: Essays

ONE SUMMER at the lake house, I forgot my swimming suit and found one of my grandmother’s—an old, plastic mold of a suit, perhaps unworn for twenty years—hanging like a replica of her younger body in the upstairs cedar closet. The suit smelled green and sweet, like the lake. When I pulled it onto my…

IN MAY 2001 I found myself at the Cannes Film Festival on a six-member ecumenical jury. Every year the festival hosts other accredited juries besides the star-studded official one, and since 1974 an ecumenical jury made up of Catholics and Protestants has given awards to films in Cannes’s competitive selection. Dutifully we attended all the…

On Becoming Divine: Within Theological School, and Without I HAVE NEVER BEEN smote on the head, or anywhere else, for that matter, with religious conviction. Yet, after years of milking cows, traveling, graduate study in poetry, teaching college writing, shoveling horse manure, and stints as a researcher and writer, I found myself applying to theological…

FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS I’ve been saving up the fiction of Anthony Trollope as a sort of mid-life treat. At least I hoped it would be a treat. Trollope is the kind of author who is often ridiculed as a literary lightweight: a Victorian lacking the range and energy of Dickens; a drawing-room chronicler…

  LAST MONTH MY BEST FRIEND, Jeff Deal, and I made a road trip from Charleston, South Carolina, to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to visit my older son Zebulun, a cavalry scout with the 101st Airborne. Jeff’s son Russell is in the army as well, our two boys having made a pact while they were undergrads…

THE WORK OF British-born artist Chris Ofili, Turner Prize–winner in 1996 and 2003 British representative at the Venice Biennale, poses a particular challenge. Almost every review of his major 2010 retrospective at London’s Tate Britain alluded to the “spirituality” of the work of this former altar boy; the artist himself often gives religious titles to…

IN  2009, BRITAIN’S NATIONAL Portrait Gallery acquired Self by Marc Quinn. The museum’s press release described the work as “unconventional, innovative, and challenging.” That is an understatement. Self is made of eight pints of Quinn’s own blood, approximately the amount in an adult male body. It was extracted over a period of a year, then…

I’M DOING A CLEANSE,” Odin says. “Me and Mara. Just broth all day.” We’re standing at the corner of Grant and Polk by city hall in San Francisco, waiting for our ride to the Headlands where we will meet DT and do the vernal equinox ritual—“I know of a sacred tree,” he’d said, “at Rodeo…

THE LORD GOD BIRD fled its home on the Singer Tract in the bayou of Louisiana in 1944 and hasn’t been conclusively seen or heard from since. Its official name is the ivory-billed woodpecker. Campephilus principalis. The bird was the largest woodpecker in America until its purported demise. Great God, people were known to say.…

HISTORY IS WRITTEN by the victors, so the saying goes. It would be pleasant to believe that the history of literature (or the arts in general) might prove an exception to this rule, that artistic merit will always be recognized in its own time, regardless of fashion or ideology. But we know that’s not true.…