7 Quick Takes

March 5, 2021 by Amy Welborn

— 1 —

Well, after who-knows-how-many years, I finally straight-up cancelled my Amazon Prime. Just a first step in disentangling my life from all of the tech behemoth, but…at least it’s a step. And it might be the easiest one. Over time, the “free shipping” has become less and less important, and in fact, less of a reality. The only other “benefit” of Prime that I use is Video, and what’s happened there is a) I have no interest in any of Prime’s original programming and b) most of the movies I’m interested in watching that are on Amazon at any given moment are hardly ever on Prime, and I end up paying for them anyway. Which you can do without paying for Prime. And if you are…you’re paying twice.

I don’t do Amazon music, Prime Reading (there’s hardly ever anything of interest to me), photo storage…etc.

I had been hoping that they would at least inquire as to my reasons, but alas. I had no chance to wax eloquent about their censorship and treatment of authors and destructive, arm-twisting manipulation of the market, and specifically, publishing.

Just a blip in their mega-universe, I know, but one less, at least.

— 2 —

Flannery’s coming!

Explore the life of Flannery O’Connor whose provocative fiction was unlike anything published before. Featuring never-before-seen archival footage, newly discovered journals and interviews with Mary Karr, Tommy Lee Jones, Hilton Als and more.

— 3 —

A piece on poet Claude McKay by poet James Matthew Wilson:

McKay is not the kind of poet likely to get a hearing in an age like ours. His variousness and complexity inconvenience almost everyone. At his most politically radical, he still loved the country that discriminated against him and his race. Anxious like many figures of the Harlem Renaissance to give voice to distinctively black experience, he did so in the language, and with the versecraft, of a tradition that was under assault by the novelty-craving experiments of literary modernism. Blunt in his political expression, he nonetheless took aesthetic pleasure in the shadows of Harlem and was content to live among them. Restless to see justice and a workers’ paradise on earth, he nonetheless saw from the beginning that there was a paradise beyond the radical dreams of communism to which all persons were called. He saw that there was a final truth that we do not use to advance our cause but in whose peace we are called to rest.
For this reason, McKay may be best remembered as the first great poet of the Harlem renaissance, but he should also be known as one of the first great poets of American Catholicism.

— 4 —

Tonight’s read: Stephen Crane’s The Monster – a long short story or novella. I mentioned that I’ve been reading a lot of Crane, sorting out what we should read around here for “class.”

This will make the cut.

It’s an astonishing, painful work about race, otherness, the dark side of small-town life and ethical questions related to life and death. I have written about the difficulties of encountering dated racial attitudes in writing from the past, and touched on the difference, as I see it, between an author’s accurate depiction of racist reality as she see it in front of her, and a racist authorial voice and perspective. Here, Crane walks that line, sometimes veering to one side, sometimes to the other. But that by no means overpowers the greater impact of the story, which is heartrending on a couple of levels.

The structure is fascinating and the writing, as per usual, is sharp, sharp, sharp.

Martha was shining a dish-pan, polishing madly. No reasonable person could see cause for this operation, because the pan already glistened like silver. “Well!” she ejaculated. She imparted to the word a deep meaning. “This, my prophecy, has come to pass.” It was a habit.
The overplus of information was choking Carrie. Before she could go on she was obliged to struggle for a moment. “And, oh, little Sadie Winter is awful sick, and they say Jake Winter was around this morning trying to get Doctor Trescott arrested. And poor old Mrs. Farragut sprained her ankle in trying to climb a fence. And there’s a crowd around the jail all the time. They put Henry in jail because they didn’t know what else to do with him, I guess. They say he is perfectly terrible.”
Martha finally released the dish-pan and confronted the headlong speaker. “Well!” she said again, poising a great brown rag. Kate had heard the excited new-comer, and drifted down from the novel in her room. She was a shivery little woman. Her shoulder-blades seemed to be two panes of ice, for she was constantly shrugging and shrugging. “Serves him right if he was to lose all his patients,” she said suddenly, in bloodthirsty tones. She snipped her words out as if her lips were scissors.

Crane and Gershwin. Two heartbreaking early deaths in American culture.

— 5 —

One of the newsletters I receive is by Matt Taibbi – a journalist with whom I’ve energetically taken issue in the past, but who in the past few years has stood firm as one of the few actually trying to cast a clear, cold, discerning, critical eye over parties on all ideologies and parties.

This isn’t particularly political, but related to cultural matters I was discussing earlier in the week. It’s on Gogol, whose deathiversary was this week. Taibbi comments:

Gogol would not do well in the modern world, which demands that artists be great people in addition to providing clear moral direction in their work. In life, Gogol was a small, neurotic, excuse-making, deeply silly man with a slate of inexplicable views, and his habit of turning even the characters he liked into flatulent buffoons would have rendered any efforts to produce “positive social commentary” disastrous. He’d have been canceled a hundred times over, and died covered in Twitter trolls instead of leeches.
Reading Gogol is a gluttonous, frenzied, disgusting experience: you laugh until you hurt yourself, then keep going. Incidentally, for a thin man, Gogol wrote about food in shocking quantities. When his characters sat for meals, all pretense of story or narrative would end, and his descriptions of dinners would devolve into maniacal, paragraph-length lists of pastries and meat pies and buckwheat kasha and mushrooms and vodka and other Russian tablestuffs that droned on until you could smell it all.
As one of his characters explained, there’s no such thing as being full. A stomach is like a village church that only seems packed: if the Mayor shows up, a place is quickly found. For all the darkness he saw, Gogol noticed one beautiful thing about us. For the good things in life, especially a laugh, we always find room for the Mayor.

— 6 —

Current read for the rest of the evening: South to Freedom:

The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837.

In South to Freedom, historian Alice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery’s future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.

— 7 —

Just a couple of images related to Scripture readings from upcoming liturgies.

Today’s (Friday’s) first reading is Joseph and his brothers:

This is the first and last page from The Loyola Kids Book of Bible Stories – so you can have a sense of the illustrations and then how I wrap up the end of every story, tying it into a truth related to Salvation history and spirituality, and then posing a question for reflection and a prayer suggestion.

Saturday’s Gospel, also from the Loyola Kids Book of Bible Stories – which is in the section on Lent. Remember that each story is in a section related to the liturgical season in which it’s most frequently heard, and each story ends with a tie-in to some aspect of Catholic life, as well as think/pray prompts.