Adrienne Rich: May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012

Lots of poets of good calibre have passed away since I started writing Riparian Church. 

Adrienne Rich makes a special mark on me. 

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Some Notes On Editions of the Towneley Cycle: Part 3. Reception Before The First Edition

This is a continuation of my notes on the manuscript HM1, the only manuscript source for the Towneley Cycle, begun here and continued in Part 2 here. I look at the manuscript in terms of what Jerome McGann calls “bibliographic codes,” features of the manuscript that communicate non-lexical meaning (that is, meaning apart from the signification of the actual words of the text).

In this post I look at the work’s reception before the first modern edition of the work.

These posts are controlled substances, with heavy street value, used at parties to raise the euphoria to nearly-criminal levels.

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Nunsploitation Films And The True Sexual Conscience of Religion

We’ve all had that experience when we’ve been watching a nunsploitation film and wondered, “What collision between a religious conscience and libertinism does this genre represent?  How does it relate to the individual and collective conscience about sex, and what does it have to do with the fact that this allegedly medieval nun is wearing nail-polish and sporting a navel-piercing?”

Reflections on the nunsploitation genre, sex, Catholicism, guilt, French literature, Freud, and conscience.

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Reflecting on Lord Dunsany's Book of Wonder

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (24 July 1878 – 25 October 1957) Yes. I own a book stolen from a library.

“The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for sapphires; they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And the only use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is to attract to their larder a continual supply of food. In times of famine they have even been known to scatter rubies abroad, a little trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough their larders would soon be full again.”

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Some Notes On Editions of the Towneley Cycle: Part 2. Description of the Manuscript HM1

This is a continuation of my notes on the manuscript HM1, the only manuscript source for the Towneley Cycle, begun here. I look at the manuscript in terms of what Jerome McGann calls "bibliographic codes," features of the manuscript that communicate non-lexical meaning (that is, meaning apart from the signification of the actual words of the text).

You can't have more fun than this with your clothes on.

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Some Notes On Editions of the Towneley Cycle: Part 1

One of my interests is old manuscripts and how they come into the modern world.  Whether those texts are biblical, legal, historical, poetic, or whatever, they tend to preserve in their physical form some fingerprints of the time and place in which they originate.  As products of human minds and endeavors, they therefore also contain signals about the minds that produced them.

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The Soul Triptych: Harry Potter and Christian Literary Analysis

Sometimes we literary types are apt to shoehorn characters into boxes that don’t fit. We like symmetry. We like the feeling that there’s a plan, that writing is revealing something through the writer, that creative urges have the characteristics of revelation. Now and then, however, I feel that Christian literary scholars co-opt themes as “Christian” when in fact they are simply human. Are those two things synonymous?

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Eccentricity and Peace

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. "Plum" to his friends. Evelyn Waugh said he'd never met a duller man, but then when you're a man named Evelyn (slightly married to a woman named Evelyn, at times) you get to say these things about the best stylist in English since Shakespeare.Roger Ebert noted in 2009 that the top-selling Indian author in England was R.K. Narayan, while the top-selling English author in India was P.G. Wodehouse.  He hypothesizes that the two countries have a mutual fascination with eccentrics.

I hope he's right.  We suffer from a surfeit of seriousness about all the wrong things, principally God (who, whatever His faults, cannot be charged with taking Himself too seriously).

The way Wodehouse approached prose was very godlike: he mimicked the high and the low with equal felicity, and in presenting them, chose the words and phrases that would give to each their own valuation of themselves.

The heroes and heroines principally redeem themselves by being creatures who love simple things, like peace and harmony and sometimes love itself.

Wodehouse's Lord Emsworth is the sort of old parasite on the working classes that nobody should have to like, but one does, because in spite of his representing aristocratic indolence, we rather prefer his values to those of The Efficient Baxter who bothers him and suspects his fellow men of all manner of thing.

The love of peace is not a bad thing, even in a peer whose ancestors were obliged to make war on behalf of their sovereign's silly causes.

The human race, those aristocrats of nature, would do well to re-read Wodehouse, and take with less seriousness the things that drive them to the violence of the heart: jealousy, rage, fear, need, and vengeance.  At the least, they might leave God out of it, the old comedian.

Stop Teaching Good Books Until We Start Reading Them.

Reading the work is not really necessary anymore for this curriculum that was designed long ago when the only way to experience the text was to live with it. A twenty minute Google search now can give the diligent student more information about the book than the professor has. It's a different world. We have a different mind. The curriculum was established a long time ago before some enormous shifts in that mind came into being.

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Teaching Literary Analysis, Scripture, & The Very Odd Case of Exodus 4:24-26

To read the story theologically either leaves God lacking in omniscience (which I’m fine with but think most Christians will not be fine with); or random as hell. It leaves the Faithful groping vainly for some explanation that doesn’t create more questions than it answers.

But if you simply let the writer play by his own rules, and not the rules that demand the God of Exodus 4 conform to our needs and desires for him, we’re in decent shape, and thinking a lot more like Hebrews and a lot less like the rational, unpoetical creatures we tend to be.

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