Saturday Good Reads

This week, I’ve been reading Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land, the biography of T.S. Eliot by Robert Crawford of the University of St. Andrews. Yesterday, I had a meeting in mid-town St. Louis on Locust Street, which just happens to be the street where the Eliots lived, and actually only five blocks away. I knew the house at 2635 Locust was long gone, but I drove by anyway.

The property on the north side of Locust is now a fenced, unused, weed grown parking lot in a commercial / light industrial area. It set me to pondering the impermanence of life on this earth, and what had been an upper middle class neighborhood in the late 1880s and 1890s now resembled something of a waste land.

Good things in poetry this week, and photography, and writing. Another Planned Parenthood video was released, and I think I was right – with each video, the subject and details are getting worse.

And if you asked me what I think heaven might look like, I would say watch the video of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. Watch the faces. This is also a picture of what the church might be, might become.

Poetry

Franz Wright – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

First Words – Amy Billone at Verse Wrights (Hat tip: L.L. Barkat).

Noteworthy: On James Tate – Kelly McBride at Curator Magazine. And his obituary in The Guardian (the Brits do these so much better than we do).

County Crow – D.R. James at Curator Magazine.

Photography and Art

Bodark Obed Edom – Jack Baumgartner at The School of the Transfer of Energy.

Creating Paris Street, Rainy Day: New Discoveries about Caillebotte’s Process – Art Institute of Chicago.

Seeking Balance: The Lives of Evangelical Pastors in Rural Florida – Jeff Rich at Oxford American.

Monarch Caterpillars – Tim Good at Photography by Tiwago.

Writing

How to Write Your Story to Value the Honest Truth – Mick Silva.

Five Encounters with Vegetation – Will Blythe at Oxford American.

The Literature of Witness – Alex Miller Jr. at Curator Magazine.

Planned Parenthood

I Don’t Know if I’m Pro-Choice After Planned Parenthood Videos – Ruben Navarrette Jr. at The Daily Beast.

The Sixth Planned Parenthood Video – how Planned Parenthood and StemExpress planned “production and harvest” – Justin Taylor at The Gospel Coalition.

The Sanctity of Human Life – Matt Chandler of the Village Church.

The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir

Painting: Paris Street, Rainy Day, oil on canvas by Gustav Caillebotte (1877); Art Institute of Chicago.