All posts by Phil

Poetry

Hiding from Autumn at the Inn

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Wayside Inn

Longfellow tells us:

“A cold, uninterrupted rain,

That washed each southern window-pane,

And made a river of the road;

A sea of mist that overflowed

The house, the barns, the gilded vane,

And drowned the upland and the plain,

Through which the oak-trees, broad and high,

Like phantom ships went drifting by;

And, hidden behind a watery screen,

The sun unseen, or only seen

As a faint pallor in the sky;–

Thus cold and colorless and gray,

The morn of that autumnal day,

As if reluctant to begin,

Dawned on the silent Sudbury Inn,

And all the guests that in it lay.” Read on

Reading

Reading Through Deep Depression

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A reader of The Paris Review asks for recommendations to him through depression: “books that will show me why to live and how, and books that will allow me to escape my present torture. Both need to be pretty easy to follow.” This post suggests many titles, and blog reader recommend many more. I don’t know if any of the readers recommend the Bible (Oh, I see someone does), but I think the poetry suggestion is very good: old sonnets, Wordsworth (even his silly stuff), Robert Frost, Billy Collins. I also wonder if painting, cooking, or gardening would help this person.

Uncategorized

What’s the Purpose of My Children’s Education?

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Niki Parker, Grade 11, Homeschool, reads her poem "Limousines" (2nd Place, 10th-12th Grade)Alan Jacobs rebuffs old arguments made against homeschooling which say to keep your children from public school is to ignore your “missional” responsibilities as a Christian. Jacobs replies that we need to think in longer terms. He says:

Because when properly understood education is for something — it is preparatory to the assumption of full adult responsibilities. In John Milton’s great essay “Of Education” he writes, “I call therefore a compleat and generous Education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publick of Peace and War.” You might feel that you’re doing your part for the “societal contract” by sending your kids to public schools for twelve years, and indeed you might be — but what if those schools do little or nothing to prepare those kids to serve the communities in which they live for the remaining sixty or seventy years of their lives? Intrinsic to both conservatism and Christianity as I understand them is the necessity of thinking in the longest possible terms, and well beyond the impulses, gratifications, and calculations of the present moment.

The girl in the photo above was in 11th grade in 2011 and was taught at home. She is reciting a poem in a county library contest, in which she won second place in her bracket.

Writing

Writing on the Job

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Your day job can be a means to an end by putting food on your table while you write, but it could be an end to your means by sucking the life out of you. This Writer’s Digest blog takes the first approach, describing the benefits of interacting with people and learning non-writing job skills. How else are you going to learn the sound of man’s last breath after he has been stabbed? You learn that kind of thing on the job.

Elsewhere on the web, Joss Whedon didn’t need a vacation after shooting The Avengers; he needed a working vacation on a radically different movie. So his wife insisted he take up an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing.

“I’m a huge proponent of the no budget movie,” Whedon says. “I love working on location. It makes you a better filmmaker. You don’t have everything conveniently placed for you. People are using the environment and it spices things up. I think of myself as a classical storyteller, which is why the digital era excites me. Classical storytelling is about getting a story told. It started with cave people around a campfire saying, that wooly mammoth was enormous, you should have been there! For me, that’s all that matters. It’s why I love writing comic books and I love writing prose. I love all mediums.”

Poetry

Deep Longing for Home, Hiraeth

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Pamela Petro talks about longing for a home that is not her’s–Wales.

I’m American, but I have a hiraeth on me for Wales. I went there first as a grad student in the 1980s. I learned to drink whiskey and do sheep impressions (I can differentiate between lambs and ewes). I learned what coal smoke smells like (nocturnal and oily). And I fell in love with the earth. It happened one late afternoon when I went for a walk in the Brecon Beacons. (The dictionary defines beacons as “conspicuous hills,” which is about as apt as you can get.) When I set off from sea level the air was already growing damp as the sun faded. Ahead of me the Beacons’ bald, grey-brown flanks were furrowed like elephant skin in ashes-of-roses light. It soon became chilly but the ground held onto its warmth, so that the hills began to smoke with eddying bands of mist. That dusk was unspeakably beautiful and not a little illicit. It seemed, for a millisecond, as if I were witnessing the earth drop its guard and exhale its love for the sky, for the pungent cattle, the rabbits whose bones lay underfoot, and for me, too. I felt as if my bodily fluids, my wet, physiological self, were being summoned to high tide. The hills tugged on my blood and it responded with a storm surge that made me ache—a simple sensation more urgent and less complicated than thought, like the love of one animal for another. Or the love of an animal for its home.

Fiction, Reviews

Themes, Observations on Bertrand’s ‘Back on Murder’

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Greenway Plaza Houston TexasWhen I review novels here, I fight with myself over wanting to write something deep with observations on the rich parts of the book vs. saying too much and spoiling it for new readers. Since it’s easier to go light, I usually do, so I doubt you expect to read great, thoughtful posts from me. No, no. It’s my fault. I’ve already given you a positive, light-handed review of J. Mark Bertrand’s Back on Murder (A Roland March Mystery), but some readers have complained that they found little Christianity in the Roland March series. I’ve only read the first one, but here are some observations I made on the Christian themes of Back on Murder. Do I need to warn you against possible spoilers? Continue reading Themes, Observations on Bertrand’s ‘Back on Murder’ →

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Mythical Maps

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Caricature Map of Europe 1914 by ~Keithwormwood on deviantART

The artist of this map says it’s “a political caricature map depicting different nations in the alternate world history of the book Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld.” I’ve begun to believe that most of the really good books out there are the ones with maps in the front, and these are just the type of maps I’m talking about.

Writing

Patience and Perseverance

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John Vorhaus writes about writing:

So that would seem to leave us with a pretty clear choice, wouldn’t it? Write, and improve; or don’t write, and don’t improve.

Why is it not that simple?

Because the forces of evil are arrayed against the desire to write. And the biggest evil of all is the need to be good. Burdened by the unrealistic expectation of all quality all the time, we often find that we just can’t write at all.