Saturday Good Reads - Oct. 7, 2023

If you’ve never had a muffuletta sandwich from Central Grocery on Decatur Street in the New Orleans French Quarter, you have missed one of the great culinary experiences of life. The Italian grocery has been closed for two years, after a neighboring brick wall collapsed on its roof during Hurricane Ida and the rain flooded the place. But it’s back, and so is the muffuletta.  

I grew up between two distinct language cultures – the Brooklynesque of my mother’s family in New Orleans and the Deep South accent of my father’s family. I was the only member of either family that had no obvious accent; people often thought I was from the American Midwest. And I married into the Deep South accent, although my wife had very little of it herself. Experts are now saying that the iconic Southern accent is slowly disappearing. 

 

We have a friend who’s increasingly suffering with memory problems, and it’s a very hard thing for family and friends to watch and deal with a much-loved person who will likely not remember what happened yesterday. In a very long post which is a compendium of reflections and diary entries, Joseph Mussomeli at The Imaginative Conservative tells the 10-year-plus story of his wife’s Alzheimer’s disease. Fair warning: you will be in tears.

 

More Good Reads

 

Poetry

 

Happy New Year – Lisa Olstein at Literary Hub.

 

Village Home – Martin Rizley at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Writing and Literature

 

The power of a story – Mark at My book reviews/Thoughts of a Sojourner.

 

Life and Culture

 

The descent of man: The mainstreaming of misandry – Jess Gill at The Critic Magazine.

 

Political correctness contra aesthetics – Harry Clynch at The Critic Magazine.

 

Two Murders – and the Cost of Luxury Beliefs – Rob Henderson at The Free Press.

 

Art

 

Eleanor Crowe’s Everyday – Spitalfields Life.

 

Faith

 

The Christian Life Involves Dance, Not Drudgery – Bob Flayhart at GC Discipleship.

 

Why Learn Greek and Hebrew? – Rob Plummer at Desiring God.

 

A Case for Christian Optimism – Andrew Roycroft at Thinking Pastorally.

 

Dad, Where Are You Going? – Tim at Live for the Line. 

 

COVID-19

 

Anthony Fauci Was America’s Warmup Dictator and Footnote: I, Faucius – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

 

British Stuff

 

Gillian Tindall at St. Bride’s – Spitalfields Life.

 

White Cliffs in the distance – Timothy Jacobson at New Criterion.

 

American Stuff

 

American Homer: Celebrating the bicentenary of historian Francis Parkman – Luke Nicastro at City Journal.

 

The Early Days of American English – Rosemarie Ostler at Lapham’s Quarterly.

 

Video: First Love – The McClures

Painting: St. John the Evangelist at Patmos, oil on canvas (circa 1618) by Diego Velazquez (1599-1660). 

Choices

After Luke 10:38-42 

We make them – choices,

that is. Like Martha and

Mary, sisters they were,

we choose what’s

important to us. Do we

serve or do we listen

and learn? Do we

prepare the meal, or

do we break convention

to hear the lesson,

the teaching, spoken 

by the voice like 

no other. If the choice

is to serve, then set

grumbling aside. Others

 have made other 

choices. Do what you

have chosen to do, and

do it well, with

your whole heart.

 

Photograph by Burst via Unsplash Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

Competing Voices – Crystal Kershaw at Fieldstone Counseling.

 

His Christian Wish to God – poem by Robert Herrick at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin). 

 

What Do Christian Writers Owe Their Readers? – Samuel D. James at Digital Liturgies. 

 

Hanging by a thread – poem by Martha Orlando.

Some Thursday Readings

The renewables red herring – Derrick Berthelsen at The Critic Magazine. 

A sonnet for St. Francis – Malcolm Guite.

 

Now Available: “Stay and Fight It Out: The Second Day of Gettysburg” – Emerging Civil War.

Poet Laura: Goodbye – and Hello! – Dheepa Maturi at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Wednesday Readings

Off the beaten path at Antietam battlefield: The Upper Bridge – John Banks' Civil War Blog.

Book Review: “Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade” by Jonathan White – Neil Chatelain at Emerging Civil War.

The Worst Op-Ed in History? – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

Poetic Voices: Jessica Gigot and the Land

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, one half of the adult population worked on a farm in 1870. By 1900, it was a third, and then a fifth by 1950. In 2020, less than two percent of adults worked on a farm. As we moved from farms and small towns to cities and suburbs, we’ve experienced phenomenal gains in productivity and creativity. We’ve also severed ourselves from understanding and knowing the land. 

Poet Jessica Gigot originally trained as a biologist. When she was in her 20s, she experienced a kind of call for understanding the land. Inspired by the local food movement, she spent several years as a farm intern in the Pacific Northwest. She eventually earned an advanced degree in horticulture. As her 2021 memoir A Little Bit of Land makes clear, Gigot wanted to understand farming, but she also wanted to know why people farmed. What was it that kept so many generations of farmers on the land and attracted so many newcomers?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

How the Cultural Revolution Played Society Against Itself – Tania Branigan at Literary Hub. 

 

Autumn Summons – poem by Talbot Hook at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Ocean of Coins – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

Tolkien’s Literary Output: Fundamentally Religious and Catholic? – Holly Ordway at The Imaginative Conservative.

"Once Upon a Camino" by Matthew Wilson

Actor Martin Sheen starred in the 2010 movie The Way, a story of a father who walks the Camino de Santiago to connect with his son who died in an accident on the trail. The 400-mile pilgrimage crosses northern Spain, from the French border to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain, is based on a true story. The Camino is actually much longer, a network of routes stretching across Europe, but it it’s the Spanish segment that is the best known. The movie was released in 2010, but re-released this year.

Australian writer Matthew Wilson walked the Camino in 2010, and his experience became the basis for his second novel, Once Upon a Camino. It’s a story full of improbables, including time travel, but it rather surprisingly works, and works well.

 

Tom Anderson is a 20-something London investment banker, full of thoughts about his career and his girlfriend Ana, who’s Spanish but also lives and works in London. Tom wants to marry her, and off he goes to Spain to ask her grandfather for his blessing. Ana’s parents had died in an automobile accident, and she was raised by her grandparents.

 

Matthew Wilson

The grandfather, however, throws a wrench into Tom’s plans. To prove his love, the grandfather tells Tom he must walk the 400-miles Camino de Santiago. Tom’s up for the challenge, sort of, and he takes a train to the starting point and promptly falls asleep. When he awakes, the train journey has ended, he’s alone, his backpack (including his passport and mobile phone charger) is missing, and all he has left is his Apple iPhone, which has little battery left.

 

Then he discovers that it’s not 2010 but 1954, and he finds himself stumbling into the pilgrimage and trying to understand what has happened. He walks with a few companions, and their story gradually becomes part of his story. He will learn that one of his companions is the considerably younger grandfather of Ana, and that he himself has a mission to accomplish. If he fails, Ana will never be born.

 

Once Upon a Camino is a story of love, pilgrimage, sacrifice, and redemption. Tom Anderson will find himself attacked, stabbed, hunted by the national police, and often questioning his own sanity. And he will learn about true love being the act of self-sacrifice.

 

Wilson previously published The Devil’s in the Detail (2012). He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Some Monday Readings

 

On Shakespeare’s Two Heroic Friends That Saved the Bard’s Plays From Being Burned – Gregory Doran at Literary Hub.

 

Van Gogh would have loved to have seen the National Gallery’s exhibition on Hals – Martin Bailey at The Art Newspaper.

 

Kayaking with Lambs – Brian Miller at Front Porch Republic.

 

From A to Z, the Abecedarian Isn’t Just for Chaucer – Poetry Prompt! – Tweetspeak Poetry.

The priorities of sisters

After Luke 10:38-42 

One sister invites the man,

his entourage as well,

into her home to eat,

to talk, to rest. She works

to welcome, to feed, 

to serve. As she works,

she sees her sister

sitting at the man’s feet,

listening to his talk,

sitting there among

the men, itself a scandal.

Her frustration grows,

turns to anger, until

it spills over, and she

tells the man to send

her sister to help do 

the work. He declines,

noting what her sister

finds more important.

We understand the point,

of course, but we

sympathize with

the sister who works.

 

Photograph by Roberto Nickson via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

C.S. Lewis on Neutered Drones – Dwight Longenecker at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Michaelmas: A sonnet for St. Michael the Archangel – Malcolm Guite.

 

Suffering Honestly: Philip Yancey’s Undone – The Rabbit Room.

 

Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age – Tim Challies reviews Digital Liturgies by Samuel D. James.