Category: literature
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Spiva Center for the Arts : Rebecca Kanan’s Poem based on Mearcstapa
Thanks to F.C. Schultz for the heads up. Rebecca Kanan wrote a poem for Spiva Center for the Arts based on the album cover Mark Neuenschwander and Dave Mehrens made for my failed Kickstarter album: She wrote it for Spiva Center for the Arts “1,000 Words” project in which poets and tellers are invited to write…
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love America
Film buffs will know I pulled my title from Dr. Strangelove or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” The film is a comedy of errors in which the entire world is summed up in a cowboy who literally cackles and cheers as he rides a nuclear explosive from the heavens down…
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Eugene Peterson and His All Out War on the Nonprofit Industrial Complex
Often we hear historians say that the greatest critiques of the church come from the radicals inside her. Eugene Peterson has fit this bill for years, pastoring pastors on how to pastor instead of coddling and enabling them to stay in their addictions to greed and power and graceful lusts and fame. I’m reminded of…
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Good Criticism is Hard
Recently, I had a conversation with my friend and brother Doug Welch about good criticism. Since the conversation, I’ve been meditating on everything that makes good criticism and deep reflection difficult. Doug always pushes me to think harder, broader, deeper, further — if I’ve ever added anything helpful to the critical and reflective world, the seeds of those contributions were…
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Baltimore Buildings
…are a weird weave. Windows, for instance, Speak of the seasons of certain men In America and their Maids — of the Michigan sticky And Virginia giant juniper leaves And the Boston bricks baking and the drenched Patoka tempest that tidally rises The rivers nine. Read of the south’s And the northern nuance’s names and acts…
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Foundation Asimov Book Club Discussion
Foundation Asimov We’re going to talk about Isaac Asimov’s Foundation for today’s Book Club discussion. (The last two discussions were about The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Man in the High Castle, so feel free to go back to those posts and comment). Up next for book club discussions: Silence by Shusaku Endo — March 21st, 2017 Fletch by Gregory…
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Monomyth Definition: A Defense of The Hero’s Journey
Let me again pick up a standard that has fallen on our literary battlefield: the standard that marks the entrance of The Defender of The Common. It would seem a silly thing to need to defend common things, but in truth we have grown quite accustomed to tearing down good things simply because great things exist.…
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Bad Vinyl : horrible album covers and the angsty literary stories behind them
Bad Vinyl Album Covers In my ongoing creative collaboration with Mark N. Photo — a collaboration we’re starting to call The Brothers brothers — we started writing angsty literary stories for cheesy album covers Mark found at antique stores. It’s over on Tumblr: https://bad-vinyl.tumblr.com/post/156323515343/don-was-a-country-boy-alright-but-not-in-the https://bad-vinyl.tumblr.com/post/156583733378/they-had-been-eating-mashed-taters-when-deciding https://bad-vinyl.tumblr.com/post/156366071583/theyd-asked-pete-for-years-to-let-his-hair-down . . . cover image by andrechinn
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The Best Amateur Website Still Uses Canva
Featured Tool: Click here to access the main tool that the best amateur websites use. Awhile back when I went cruising around for advice on my site, I found the best amateur website still using the same service that all of these other amateur websites used. I hesitate to mention it because I don’t want to…
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absolutely convinced atheist
“An absolutely convinced atheist, it often seems to me, is simply someone who has failed to notice something very obvious—or, rather, failed to notice a great many very obvious things.” ― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
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Mr. Two Face Dark Knight : Meeting Jongluers and Troubadours in my Dark Knight Rewatch
I could be called Mr. Two Face Dark Knight when it comes to analysis and thinking — reflectively — on the films and books I read. I don’t know about you, but I find myself wrong more often than I’m right. Likely that’s because everything we don’t know is infinite. Everything we do know is finite. And…
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Cuckoo’s Calling Discussion for BOOK CLUB!
It’s time to talk through The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith! I’ll start off the discussion with this question: The theme of fame and misfortune takes the center stage in the Cuckoo’s Calling. Knowing that Robert Galbraith is J.K. Rowling’s pseudonym, how do you think she is processing through fame in anonymity? Certainly book one of…