The Body of Death, Pictured. We are not at home in the world, at least not in our current damaged condition. As St. Augustine put it: we long to untangle ourselves from the earthly city and its wounding self-loves so that we can journey toward the heavenly city, but our bondage is self-wrought, and we cannot free ourselves. The paintings, images, and sculptures in the Museum of Biblical Art’s recently opened collection of Enrique Martinez Celaya’s work, “The Wanderer,” unsettle.
They do so because they evoke the fact that we are not at home in the world, that we are damaged and entangled in the earthly city. In his work, the human forms are always solitary and isolated, often slumping and sometimes seemingly wounded or injured. One figure, a boy, has been fabricated in a fashion that makes him look mummified. His mouth and genitals are covered with dried flower petals that look busy and aggressive, almost diseased. This in contrast to the garish, exhibitionist work of Damien Hirst. R.R. 50 Summer Reading Suggestions. [Note: Every Friday on First Thoughts we host a discussion about some aspect of pop culture. Today’s theme is imaginative literature worth reading in the summer. Have a suggestion for a topic? Send them to me at jcarter@firstthings.com.] The following is a list of favorite works of imaginative literature compiled by a literary snob. Unlike similar lists you won’t find anything as daunting as Finnegan’s Wake or as faddish as whatever Oprah is shilling to her book club.
In fact, on first glance the inclusion of children’s books and graphic novels might give the impression that it is rather lowbrow, if not philistine. Until recently I’ve tended to prefer non-fiction to fiction, so there isn’t much depth to my selections. A note about my prejudices: I prefer older to newer, short stories to long novels, magical realism to realistic narrative, and the fantastical to the mundane. Here then are my favorite works to read during the lazy days of summer: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 25 Favorite Short Stories.
In his Devil’s Dictionary , Ambrose Pierce defined a novel as “a short story padded.” This is an all too apt description. The inability to prune a story to its essential story is an unfortunate quality shared by many modern writers and the primary reason that bookshelves are filled with bloated novels. William Faulkner once wondered if writers didn’t become novelists after having failed at the short story, “the most demanding form after poetry.” Perhaps this is the reason there are even fewer great short stories than there are great novels. Since I don’t presume to know what works would fill the category of “greatest short fiction” (that’s a task better suited for Alan Jacobs), the following list of short stories is not intended to be representative of the best or most profound works in a particular category. These are merely my favorite 25 stories (at least the ones I could remember) and not necessarily the ones I would argue are the best. (Yes, I know. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Hard Times for Great Books. In November 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts published a report titled To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence . Building on its earlier research, in Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America (2004), the 2007 report provided, in the words of NEA chairman Dana Gioia, “a reliable and comprehensive overview of American reading today.”
Its findings are devastating. Teenagers are increasingly tossing aside books for other activities and a startling percentage of young adults (nearly 60 percent) don’t bother to pick the books up in the first place. The report concludes: Ultimately, reading skills and early habits of leisure reading may come to occupy the same relationship to artistic, cultural, and civic progress as “basic science” skills have had to technological breakthroughs. This distaste for Dickens is usually based on a single text, most often A Tale of Two Cities , Hard Times , or Great Expectations .
The Catholic Novel Is Alive and Well in England. Some people believe that the Catholic novel is either dead or terminally ill. In 1982, one critic referred to his book on the Catholic novel as an " elegy for an apparently dying form, " and two years later another wrote that " the religious or spiritual novel is in some sense only a memory . " Some attribute this demise to the imminent dissolution of the religion that inspired it, arguing that the dissent and chaos that have come in the wake of the Second Vatican Council are simply the death throes of a religion that is not sustainable in an age that is increasingly secular, liberal, scientific, and pluralistic.
Some Catholics believe that the great Catholic novels of the past reflect the fortress mentality of the pre¯Vatican II Catholic ghetto and have no place in today’s Church. Others, however, maintain that non-Catholic and even non-Christian readers still appreciate these distinguished novels. Thomas Woodman, in Faithful Fictions: The Catholic Novel in British Literature. JB: 6.27.06 OK, so this weekend... OK, so this weekend my wife and I indulged a guilty pleasure and rented The Shoes of the Fisherman to watch. You remember the 1968 film?
The indefatigable Anthony Quinn¯Hollywood’s favorite generic ethnic actor in those days¯plays an Eastern European priest elected pope. Laurence Olivier plays a Russian. David Janssen plays a troubled American journalist. And all in the service of a gimcrack story by Morris West, the most popular Catholic writer of the twentieth century, selling more than 60 million copies of books like The Shoes of the Fisherman and The Clowns of God . Back when he died in 1999 at age 83, I reread a swath of those books, trying to understand the phenomenon of Morris West. Indeed, that, more than anything else, was the territory he carved out for himself, tapping a surprising hunger to learn about the way things work behind the high walls of Rome. Perhaps that explains the condescension with which West’s death was noticed. Born on April 26, 1916, in St. The Secret Commonwealth. As the feast of All Souls nears, spare a piteous thought, if you will, for the poor Rev.
Robert Kirk, who lived from 1644 to 1692, and whose mortal remains rest”or do they?” In his parish kirkyard in Aberfoyle, a Scottish village lying near the Laggan River and at the foot of Craigmore. The great slab of his gravestone is in much the same condition as most of the other funerary markers that survive from the seventeenth century in those latitudes: smoothed and darkened by the winds and rains of three centuries, brindled with dark green and pale glaucous lichens, gently sunken to one side by a slight subsidence in the soil, and bearing an inscription (“Robertus Kirk, A.M. / Linguæ Hiberniæ Lumen ”) now worn down to a shallow and barely legible intaglio of milky gray. Such is the sad impermanence of stone. Perhaps it does not matter all that much, however; the marker may be only a cenotaph, when all is said and done.
If the legend is true, Rev. David B.