A Single Layer

I try not to post more than once in a day, but I finally saw the film Atonement this afternoon, and it bears blogging. I have developed a bad habit with movies that I know beforehand will be emotionally strenuous. If I even suspect a film of being serious enough to make me cry - a quality I once found almost essential in a good film (I was a melodramatic child) - I get nervous beforehand. I think this began when I saw Dancer in the Dark , a film ... .. I won't bother trying to describe it or its effects. Anyway, I get nervous now. It is better if I go to see it in a theatre, because the process of buying a ticket and wading through the previews reminds me that it is an event. The roll of the credits at the end, the slow walk out of the building, and the mindless drive home all serve to draw me back out of the story and into the world. Not so in my living room. How can I just drop the disc into the machine, curl up on the couch, watch the thing, and then stand back up again like ev...

I saw this on one of my favourite tumblelogs and thought I would pass it on, hoping it will lose none of its charm third-hand. It originally comes from the website Wooster Collective, which I will not attempt to advertise, but will simply direct you to .

Of all the things that have faded from my life, how many of the losses were my own fault? Which would have remained had I been more persistent, or even faithful? and which would have passed regardless of me?

i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth day of life and love and wings:and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any-lifted from the no of all nothing-human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened) - e. e. cummings

Not less than a millennium Has heard the hue and cry Of the scattered people of God crying Out to the dark heights. Now more than a millennium Has passed. Remembering, Still I beg with promises and flattering (as though it is not already done): Yeshua yeshua come down Oh, come down And make of our sinning an unholy crown And wear it and bear it Where we have no will But to nail and embed it With unholy skill. I’ll awaken the watchmen Alert the high crier Between garden walls And the city’s high spires Where statues rise up with cold cuddleless faces Where pedants and peddlers take their various places From the castle’s closed rooms To the cold catacombs In the wombs of the walls Where the bones are all sleeping I’ll beat out the baritoned sheeps’ gentle bleating ‘tween benjamin’s gate and the boards of the bridges That span the great gorge breaking earth’s trampled business And there in the corners And there in the caverns Inside the squares and the tucked away taverns I’ll advertise y...

from Richard John Neuhaus's Death on a Friday Afternoon : This is the cross point in the Great Story, from the "In the beginning" of creation to the last words of the Bible, "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!" At the cross point, everything is retrieved from the past and everything is anticipated from the future, and the cross is the point of entry to the heart of God from whom and for whom, quite simply, everything is. Here the beginning and the end come together, along with everything along the way from the beginning to the end. What is the Word of God but the love of God? In the beginning, God intended love. Why did God create? For love. Not for necessity, for, being God, he needed nothing, but that love might be, and that it might be more and more. Love is necessary, for "God is love." He created out of nothing - ex nihilo - but his love. The Word is both his love and his beloved. "Without him was not anything made that was made." Through him God ...

This is when we learn that Jesus wants to give to his people. Already, he has told his disciples: Unless you eat of my body and drink of my blood, you have no part with me. This is a hard thing. This means following him through Jerusalem and watching him hang in my place for hours, panting and bleeding and sweating, barely breathing, sometimes crying out. This also means all that goes before: the strangeness of being a follower of the man who leads harlots and thieves. the awkwardness of explaining this to your mother. the arguments that erupt in the marketplace after the fishmonger's query, 'so what do you do for a living?' camping across Galilee. praying when you'd rather be sleeping. feeling guilty for sleeping instead of praying. dodging the cops. the scorn in the temple from the priest who first heard your confessions as a young boy - yes, scorn from the fathers! It seems like a lot of confusion and sacrifice, though we know it is worth it. After all, to whom shall...

I would like to talk about distraction. I have noticed that Christians - Protestants in particular - spend a lot of energy feeling guilty for being distracted. Much of their guilt may be well-earned, a right response to careless error. Much of their guilt may be nothing more than spent energy. Hold on - this is not a 'their' 'them' matter. This is me as much as anyone. I have prayed against distraction, confessed it to my neighbour as one of my chief sins, fought and forgot about it over and over. I am distracted from thoughts of God by thoughts of the world, thoughts of myself, and even thoughtlessness. More specifically, I think oftener of food and boys and books and movies and which song to play in the car than I do of the great sacrifice made on my behalf by the Creator of the universe. And I am ashamed. Sometimes more than I should be. I am often ashamed because I have this notion that faith is proved by frequent and unique thought about God. In the same way that I...

Oh Death Where Is Thy Sting? IIa after Caravaggio 2007 by johnwalford / © All rights reserved (yes, that copyright means this is sort of stolen. but as i'm not sure how that sort of thing works on the internet, i will simply give you my source: http://flickr.com/photos/walford/ and encourage you to go there yourself.)

Let me tell you about the mountains. Not just any mountains, but the mountains in my desert. I have mentioned them before. I have mentioned how they are lit by the sunrise. I will mention it again, only this time with more words. More words about the mountains and fewer about palm trees and the definition of beauty. The mountains don't think much about the palm trees. Sometimes they watch them grow. They watch as the thin stalks sprout from their wooden crates, rise up like dazed giraffes, take root in firm earth, bend with the wind, wither, and pass away. The mountains see all this and more. They see the desert shrubs grow and beget more desert shrubs. They see the shrubs unearthed - the earth covered by another housing development. The people come and go. There are cars; there are planes; there are roads wide and winding. The mountains see all these things. The mountains bear with the howling winds. They shield the city from much of this. They shield the city, also, from much rai...

Flipping open A. S. Byatt's Possession , I find an excerpt from Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables inscribed in the beginning pages. I have not yet begun Byatt's novel. Rather, I started John Connolly's Book of Lost Things instead. To be more accurate, I began Connolly's novel over a month ago in the corner of my bookstore in the last few minutes of a lunch break. Soon realizing that the book deserved more than stolen time, I set it aside to begin in earnest at a later date. That date is the twelfth of March: today. I paused in my reading only to shut the back door, slice some strawberries (which were about to go bad), and make a cup of tea. Oh yes, and to casually open Byatt's novel to the Hawthorne inscription, note its happy relevance to my more committed novel, and blog about it. Here's the inscription: When a writer calls him work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and mater...

An observation all the more sad when one considers the date it was written... and how little things have changed.

Should any of you have been driving down Deep Canyon and 111 yesterday at 5:50 in the morning, I apologize for my erratic behaviour behind the wheel. I was distracted, you see, and if you had only glanced in your rear-view mirror as I did, you would have understood why. The sunrise was astonishing. It swept across the sky and cheered the tired, facing mountains, the one reprieve for those dry and dour rocks. I was looking, too, at the effect of the sunrise on the palm trees all around (for those, like Chaeli, who did not realize there are palm trees here, be assured: there are many). One of my mom's students in a recently assigned story referred to them as 'pom' trees. It is a right word for their undignified sprouting, suddenly made dignified by the elaborate light, the flamboyance of the dawn. The play of dark on light - the dancing lines - ribbing the colours of the sky with unsuspected variance. Staring as I did at the trees, lanky and delicate as giraffes, I was remind...

Somehow, this isn't as funny as some of the other ones. Not so much because it's personal. Maybe because I don't think most people with 'useless' masters degrees need any reminder that it makes them no more hireable or experienced than before. We are already a little embarrassed by our own education, and if anything is needed to keep us from pride, the monthly loan payments are surely enough! Even so, being once more included in the SWPL list has made me smile. Oh, blogger of cynicism, I can't help but think that your project is backfiring! when the White People chuckle to find themselves chuckled at...

This review of Frank Schaeffer's most recent book would come across as an indictment - indeed, it is an indictment, but... - if it weren't ultimately humbling. I am reminded of the sour taste in the mouth, the bitter hard knot in the centre of the heart, that much of today's irony inspires. I remember that I am often the bearer of that very irony. And while I think this site is fabulously clever, I know that it, too, subsists on this same sort of tearing-down of spirit. I will laugh and feel foolishly known, and that may be good in certain measure. But to turn and do the same to others... when will we learn how to speak the truth in love? Let us humble ourselves, recall ourselves and be made rightly low. Remember that I will never know a thing unless first I love it.

Watch this movie!!!!!!

I woke up this morning at a normal hour. Normal if I was working, of course, and I am not working. I don't have to be anywhere for another three hours, in fact. So I stayed in bed for as long as I could, fighting the very real need to get up and go hunt for some tissue, and the results were interesting. I had the first authentically academic thought I've had since my dissertation. So it's only taken about six months to recover. Bravo me. I thought I'd share the thought with you, if you care to read. Long have I been interested in two trains of thought related to literature and - as literature reflects socio-cultural trends - culture. These two trains are A) the loss of mythic sensibility in the modern world, and B) tourism. I have known that these two thoughts are intimately related for some time, but have often had trouble expressing why . I was, in fact, forced to forgo making the connection in my dissertation last summer precisely because I could not adequately prove...