 Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Poverty issues tie me up in complexities upon complexities and I started to write a post for Video Meliora until I realized that I don't have the foggiest notion what I was talking about. Rather than let it go completely to waste, I figured I'd fire it out on this blog. Post-Katrina, there has been a lot about poverty in the media. Part of the complexity of poverty is that it is not merely material but, as a social worker in the Dispatch said, also psychological. Hopelessness plays a role. Can we allow people to fail? For individual Christians (rather than the government) the answer would seem to be "no", at least if we see a spiritual parallel and ask ourselves if we would want Got to allow anyone to fail, that is to go to hell. We would want Him to go to heroic measures to insure success, we would want him to reach out to us while we were still sinners and we have seen in the example of the Incarnation and subsequent Crucifixion. One touches on the issue of free will of course, although it's always been odd for me to understand how someone, in true freedom, would choose their own destruction. But going back to material poverty, there is St. Paul's line about "those who do not work, shall not eat". Which suggests that Paul thinks some should be allowed to fail. But then you get into having to judge who is not willing to work and who is, and to what extent they are culpable for that decision given, say, psychological problems. And that seldom seems cut and dried. (2) comments • • • • • Friday, September 23, 2005
Waiter, There’s Brine in My Nostrils!What is this need for earthy stories that smell of sea and air? What of this craving for George Mackay Brown's tales and his simple childlike odes of sea and storm and soil that I should long to breath through these gills? All my life I’ve been arrested by the sea, by crustacians and sea nympths, by any of the sea creatures that call landlubbers to something more. Living in the land of the land-locked perhaps it’s natural to find the sea exotic, but still there is something plaintive in the calling of seals and of coastal Ireland in her far cliffs such that it’s possible the stray dangle of an obscure strand of DNA resolves it -- Somehow, somewhere down the ancestral line the sea got imbedded into my soul though no scientist has found evidence such. Somewhere, somehow the scent of salt-water and the welter of waves issued into me. I was surrounded by fishermen as a youth and I was oblivious, like the Baptized who is surrounded by God but is unawares. ~~ Oh the beauty of the fall! The script, in cursive, above the neighbor’s door details their address and is both wonderfully anachronistic and artistically offputting. A spectral porch light beckons, or beacons, and makes their backyard look like an empty high school football field and I feel the dew, wet and cold against my soles, already present and accounted for just after midnight. And oh do I ache for the scent of brine in my nostrils and to hear the sea roar! (7) comments • • • • • I read the blogs of the Bushhaters occasionally and I feel so alienated from the culture, so alienated even from Newsweek with its fat ladle of boring articles. I was tempted to write down the titles & summaries of all thirty-plus articles just to say: Is it just me? The post-Katrina mortem irritates me, mostly because expecting for government to act other than bloatful and wasteful seems silly, though I understand the need for the thirty lashes from Newsweek's wet noodle so that it might improve for the next 'cane. That is an excellent service of the media, but I just don't want to read it. Should I?Another article that ought draw my interest, the Roberts nomination, I'm not at all interesed in. I can tell you what happened at the hearings. Blowhard senators blew, hard, and now they’ll vote him in and the whole thing seems like a colossal waste of time. Roberts himself seems like a good person and that’s all we can ask for. Hopefully he’ll stand up to the tsunami winds of the gas-baggers of the D.C. dinner party set. Never underestimate the gravitational pull of peer pressure. That’s the sort of questions the senators should ask him. "Will you, Judge, be able to withstand dinner invitiations from Ben Bradley and Rupert Murdoch? Will you be able to attend without letting it go to your head or wanting to fit in with the eastern elites? Oh, that’s right, you’re already an eastern elite." But I looked at that Newsweek and I kept thinking that I should be getting something out of this. I should be engaged, this is our culture, this is our time, our age, this is an exciting age to live in...isn't it? Then why does it taste so tasteless and seem so unnourishing? (0) comments • • • • • Friday, September 16, 2005
It seems I’m always looking for that breakthrough in terms of writing, expression, fiction. But shouldn’t I look for breakthroughs in terms of giving, of caring, of charity? Steven Riddle says he has loggorhea, which I think means he likes to write, and I find great satisfaction in poetry and short stories. They are remarkably elusive. Maybe a couple a week. I marvel at Bill Luse’s ability to take a narrative and keep it going and going, consistently and in the same voice, not suddenly launching from here to there such that you can tell his mood by the chapter. It’s tighter and more seamless than I seem to have the capacity for. Reading it gave me to understand that novel writing just isn’t my thang. I don’t read many and even writing a short story within three pages I’m looking for a joke to tell. Dave Barry is my hero.Bill must have a good attention span. I think to be a good novelist you have to like novels, sort of like to be a good lover you have to love women. Too often I’ve not had the patience with novels, wishing they’d get to a point, and that is a reflection of a short attention spanning. Blogging is my medium though it doesn’t pay well. Short stories and poems get catapulted straight from the heart, they bring up the good dark, arterial blood and it’s a joy to see that burgundy on the page. They tend to wear well. Preachy posts don’t, because my lack of sanctity makes them seem embarrassing and neither do the nature posts because again nature is a fickle mistress. But when you get the arterial blood there you get something that has some juice, that has some play, because it strikes deep and there is an element of self-discovery within. I learn by writing, never more so than in what I call fiction. Writing a good non-fiction-disguised-as-fiction piece has a sexual release aspect to it that lasts about a day or two. (0) comments • • • • • Friday, September 02, 2005
Oh but it seemed like yesterday when I was vying for first fat male jogger to run shirtless through Goodale Park! Where did the time go? Now the fall pawns itself upon us, and everyone praises it, their favorite time of year they say, but it feels of me of endings, not beginnings, and it feels of nostalgia, not hope. Live in the moment! adulthood says, and yet how to live in the moment without being careless and foolish, and yet the reminders emblazon themselves across the sky--nature is against us, the air has the smell of apocalyptic about it, of 9/11 and now this, and we knew L.A. or Orleans would go, we just didn't know which first, and now the city of the dead is the city of the dead and dying and the birds fly formations as if a Siege was coming and I shower, and it's hot, and the soap smells good and I wonder how to reconcile that while at the same time thousands on the Gulf breathe stench and filth and there is no water? (0) comments • • • • • |
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