Noontime roundup …

… Courtesy of Dave Lull:



… Crossing the badlands: The Madness of Art | Dissent Magazine.

WE’RE IN the habit of reading the passage as if Dencombe had ended with “This is the madness of art”—as if he were grandly encapsulating everything he’d just said. But he didn’t.The rest is the madness of art. The artist’s calling is to do what one can, to give what one has; the artist’s calling is to explore one’s doubt, one’s task, one’s passion. And the madness of art? The madness of art is everything else.

…  Honoring the past: Real books should be preserved like papyrus scrolls.

As the era of the book wanes, it will be the rare-book library's major prerogative to hold on to what it has. The book may not have a future – and there will be fewer and fewer handwritten manuscripts – but such written material has a past that must be preserved and treasured.

… Speaking of books and the past: The romance of certain old books.

[Books] are sadly familiar to us, because they are canonical; that is, because we read them in the present, with the standards and expectations of the present, as towering figures of the present. To be borne into the past, boats beating against the current, the best books are those which are least familiar: the books no one is assigned on any syllabus, the books discussed in no classroom.

 … Stalking the mythical beast: William Logan and the Role of the Poet-Critic.

 To call myself a “poet-critic” would be to give myself airs. My own imaginative life is lived almost entirely in poetry. I could give up criticism tomorrow with only minor regret, so to dwell in this interview on criticism is to represent myself in a way amusingly prejudicial. I’m merely a poet who has opinions and has sometimes been paid to publish them.

… In case you wondered: How We Love Our God.

Me, I knew these things were true as a matter of theological conviction, but they had not taken sufficient root in my heart and imagination until I read theCommedia, and gone on pilgrimage with Dante. My life will never be the same.

… The harvest of meditation: Silent communion.

This is ‘faith’, then, not as some watered-down alternative to propositional belief, but a commitment made and remade even while its object comes into view only gradually and uncertainly (‘through a glass, darkly’, as St Paul put it). It’s a commitment, too, to facing whatever silence throws at you. Boredom and busy schedules are familiar obstacles in any meditation practice, Christian or otherwise, but tougher still are those times when practitioners find themselves frightened or unwilling to follow where the silence seems to be leading them.

… Review: ‘The Guts,’ by Roddy Doyle, a sequel to “The Commitments”.