Checking In
I just scrapped a long post entitled “My Own Personal Apocalypse” that included all of my hot takes on the Luka trade, the Super Bowl Halftime show, the Assyrian relief on the Inter-Continental Hotel in Chicago, Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga and the periodic conversations I have with people I grew up with. Instead I’ll point you in a few directions that involve way fewer half-baked, scatological ideas. Man, I had some zingers in that other post though.
What I’m Reading
Italian POWs and a Texas Church: The Murals of St. Mary’s by Donald Mace Williams. This book has also been published under the title Interlude in Umbarger, which if you know me, then you know that I grew up in the unincorporated farming community of Umbarger. Towards the end of World War II, America captured Italian prisoners of war and shipped them to prison camps in rural Texas. Several of these POWs were commissioned by the Catholic diocese to adorn the tiny church in my hometown. In the early 1990s, Williams a poet and journalist that I’ve written about before, wrote the definitive history of the project, even traveling to Italy to interview the surviving artists. The book was adapted into an opera at Texas Tech when I was in high school; although most of the people depicted in the opera claimed that “liberties were taken.” This is not the first time I’ve read this book.
The Gospel in the Stars by Joseph Seiss, originally published in 1883. Jonathan Geltner recommended it the other day on X. A book whose preface proposes “to read the Gospel of Christ from those uncouth figures and outlines of men and monsters usually scribbled over celestial globes and maps.” I think I’ll slowly make my way through it with pleasure along with A Moriarty Reader: Preparing for an Early Spring. My friend Jack has spoken about John Moriarty frequently over at
.Ambiguity & Belonging: Essays on Place, Education, & Poetry by Benjamin Myers. For Front Porch Republic, I’m conducting some interviews with authors of books I admire. I’ve long admired Ben’s poems and think he should be better known. This collection of essays covers a lot of ground, as the sub-title implies, but soon I’ll be interviewing him for the series.
I’ve also been slowly making my way through a collection of Ross Macdonald novels. He was third in a lineage of hard-boiled, private detective novelists that inspired that Humphrey Bogart in a fedora kind of story. Third chronologically after Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. So far he’s also ranked third in my mind because those other two had such great sentences. His aren’t bad, but Chandler’s sentences would stand up and walk on their own.
Some Publications
It’s been a while since I’ve published much of anything, including here. However, in the last month, several of my pieces have arrived in various places.
Stratford-upon-Nothing. A poem about a farmer outside of Stratford, Texas, that constructed a forty-foot windvane alongside an empty country road. It’s over at
which arrived on the scene like Will Clark hitting a homerun in his first major league at bat against Nolan Ryan! By the way, my poem benefits from having read Hamlet, but is not dependent on it. In the play, Hamlet commissions a traveling theater troupe to stage a play called The Mousetrap. Hamlet asks if he can write “some dozen or sixteen lines” to add to the play “wherein he’ll catch the conscience” of the murderous king. The idea is that creating art and giving it to the world “catches our conscience” or awakens us to see what God is doing in the world. Or it’s just a poem about a farmer building a strange contraption. However you would like to read it.Marking the Year on Two Calendars. For the Front Porch Republic author interview series, I have interviewed Matthew Miller about his latest book Leaves of Healing: A Year in the Garden. We also interviewed him on
, so you can listen or read or do both, but I recommend that you go read his book before it warms up so you’ll be able to follow along with it and plant a garden.A Losing Hand. The beautiful Dappled Things has published a short story of mine that starts off in a game of dominoes in 1977 and ends a couple of years ago. Several people have commented as if the story had happened to me because it’s written in first person, but it is indeed fiction. That doesn’t make it untrue though. Also, my friend
’s wife Emily has painted this issue’s cover art, and Eric Cyr has a story in it.I hope you are all well. Thanks for the company!
I hope you kept that scrapped post in the drafts. I’m thinking you should market it to an exclusive VIP paid clientele. I’m intrigued by the takes therein.