[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96LUAaaPqRc?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]
Michael Phillips channeling William Blake
[gallery] Michael Phillips has recreated the techniques by which William Blake made his illustrated books. Here he is choosing and mixing colors as Blake did.
Nothing to see here, folks. Just a vulgar woman who was snuck in. The Holy Spirit is definitely not afoot. It was practically an accident, really. Or perhaps it was some dastardly conservative bishop who allowed the cool pope to embrace someone universally despised by the great and good. She’s been married four times. Believe me, if he knew, he’d throw her into the well.
The scribes and the Jesuits are right on a very limited point. Based on the evidence, we cannot know what the pope’s gesture meant in an explicit way. We cannot know what was in his heart. But unlike the scribes and Jesuits, those with a mind habituated to liturgy know that the words and gestures prescribed by the hour and the office carry more meaning than can fit into the head of a single priest. They can express the divine intention even when the priest’s mind runs away to something trivial. Some might see mere routine in the pope’s encouragement, but the eyes of faith see something more: an act of humility, imposed by his lofty office. Even an act of trust and love. The world hates you. I do not.
For 20 years I taught James Joyce’s Ulysses every year, but I don’t get to anymore—new university, new job description. I miss it terribly, even though my opinion of its quality wavered from semester to semester. Ezra Pound said of its successor, Finnegans Wake, “Nothing short of a divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization.” I sometimes felt that way about the complications of Ulysses. But most of the time I believed it was a masterpiece, and I always thought that at the very least it contained extended passages of unsurpassed brilliance. Above all, I delighted in the challenge of taking undergraduates through it.
When they first looked at Ulysses their eyes grew round as saucers—“You’re expecting us to read this?”—but I strove for a constant tone of avuncular encouragement. I also had elaborate handouts outlining the book’s structure and offering advice, the first line of which was: “Try to read this when you’re fresh and rested. It is difficult at any time, but almost impossible when you’re tired or distracted.” We took it slow. Eventually I could see people, one by one, figuring things out—it was like lights going on in a city at dusk. The more that lights went on, the more I tended to feel that the book is a marvel after all. And surprisingly often, at the end of a semester people would say to me, “I’m so glad you made us read Ulysses.”
In the end, the show of force looked more like a show of fear – a case where American exceptionalism was merely our exceptional paranoid obsession with security. The troop buildup was a giant money suck, taking dollars away from the common good, and it was absolutely a restriction on one of the freedoms that Americans have come to cherish the most – freedom of movement. I can’t help but think the whole experience made us look like a weak nation to vistors from other lands.Of course, while 9/11 will always be cited as the justification for this over-the-top protection of “the homeland,” the only possible real justification for checkpoints is not so much al-Qaeda as the fact that America is a nation awash in guns, the bulk of them legal. Personally, I prefer the right to move freely from place to place over the right to pack heat. Because this weekend made it clear that the United States is a place that can’t easily handle both at the same time.
The most memorable encounter between Day and Auden took place in 1956. By then, the Catholic Worker Movement, with its network of shelters and communal farms, was established as a national manger for the homeless. Because Day’s pacifism and compassion for striking workers was deemed subversive, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI tried to nail her for sedition, but failed. Then, Day got a notice from the New York City fire department stating that unless she paid $250 to repair her “fire-trap” of a hospitality house, it would be closed. When she stepped out of the shelter to hurry to court, she saw a shabby group of men outside and assumed they were interested in the old-clothes bin. But one of them pressed something into her hands muttering, “Here’s two-fifty.” Only on the subway did she discover she’d been handed a cheque, not for $2.50 but $250, and that the hobo was the pre-eminent poet of the age.Auden had read about Day’s situation in the New York Times and shambled over from his famously unkempt apartment to do his bit, probably dressed in a rumpled, ash-smeared suit and carpet slippers. It wasn’t that he was rich. Scarcely a few days earlier he had written to his friend Stephen Spender, “How am I to live?” Still, he made his handsome donation. When he later examined his motivations, he concluded that he had been unconsciously selfish: it was to allay his conscience. He hated the camera, but he was good at taking moral selfies. For Day, the Catholic Church had a similar problem: “plenty of charity but too little justice.”
Day paid Auden back in the finest way possible. She told him that while in prison for refusing to participate in an air-raid drill, her co-inmate, a whore, had marched off to the weekly shower quoting the last line from a poem Auden had just published in the New Yorker: “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” For the rest of his life, Auden maintained it was the “nicest poetical compliment” he had ever received. “My God,” he thought, “I haven’t written in vain.” This from the poet who wrote, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” and never stopped repeating, especially after a few martinis, that all his revolutionary verse of the 1930s had not saved a single Jew from the ovens.
[gallery] Handmade embroidered notebooks, via thisiscolossal
[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17687”]
For Michaelmas: Jacob Epstein, St Michael’s Victory over the Devil (1958), Coventry Cathedral
[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17690”]
eastmanhouse: Main Street, Saratoga Springs, Original photographer: Walker Evans, 1931
gelatin silver print Image: 20.6 x 16.4 cm Overall: 25 x 20.1 cm National Origin: United States
