May 2013
6 posts
4 tags
The Books of 2013: May
A partial list.
Agatha Christie. The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. 1962. (again)
Agatha Christie. Sleeping Murder. 1976. (again)
Agatha Christie. At Bertram’s Hotel. 1965. (again)
Agatha Chrstie. Nemesis. 1971. (again)
4 tags
Cloudland Revisited: Before Midnight
As a teenager I was too cynical for Before Sunrise, but it was a canonical movie of my generation and I saw it more than once. I saw Before Sunset in the theater with the guy I was dating at the time, and I loved it, but we had a wrenching conversation afterwards that foreshadowed our relationship’s eventual bitter end a year later. I am bracing myself for Before Midnight.[[MORE]]
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Soulstirring at the University Church in Yale: A...
Come Holy Spirit,
Hover in the air like a dove,
the beating of your wings becoming the beating of our hearts,
your rushing wind roaring in our ears like the sound of the ocean,
your heat traveling over our bodies like a blush,
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embers becoming flame,
flame becoming fire,
fire spreading from our center to the edges and setting us alight,
the glowing coal touching our lips,
our...
7 tags
Soulstirring at the University Church in Yale: A...
For those of us who live on the academic calendar,
May is a month of changes.
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For those of us who live in New Haven year round
It’s a time when campus starts to clear out
And the city gets quieter.
If we work indoors,
We might start to get antsy on sunny days.
If we can,
We’ll throw open the windows
And listen to the wind in the leaves.
When we finally get out in the sun
...
3 tags
Elizabeth Smart on Abstinence and Sexual Violence →
As a blonde, cherished, educated, devout American citizen in pearls, Elizabeth Smart can find an audience that so many survivors can’t. I say this not to diminish her work at all, not even a little: I have so much respect for what she is doing. But she is so radiant with all the conventional markers of innocence and value, and too many survivors who aren’t these things are met with...
2 tags
A Kitchen of One's Own/A Kitchen With a View
In my circles it’s sometimes seen as reactionary and retrograde to express domestic desires that involve marriage or reproduction, so I’ll come out say something even more shocking and indefensible, which is that I crave solid domestic real estate and the life I imagine I might live in it. Look at that amazing sunny window out which to gaze at flowering shrubs as you do dishes! How...
April 2013
1 post
3 tags
Now, Voyaging
I don’t really have anything new to say about Now, Voyager, except to say that I have been loving it since I was young and now I have finally grown into it. And the rest of my life will be spent panning for stardust in the same dark galaxies where it always leaves me.
March 2013
2 posts
5 tags
The Books of 2013: March
Toni Morrison. Jazz. 1992. (again)
Toni Morrison. Beloved. 1987.
Gillian Rose. Love’s Work. 1995.
Agatha Christie. The Moving Finger. 1942.
Agatha Christie. Murder at the Vicarage. 1930.
Agatha Christie. Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories. 1932-1961.
Josephine Tey. Brat Farrar. 1949. (again)
Maria Semple. Where’d You Go, Bernadette. 2012.
Marilynne...
4 tags
Soulstirring at the University Church in Yale: A...
This week,
a friend of mine posted a diagram on facebook.
It was a semi-serious timeline of The Creative Process,
From the first moment
To the final deadline. [[MORE]]
At the beginning of the timeline,
there was a little mark showing the moment where the project begins.
And then there was a huge long stretch of the timeline,
maybe 90% of it,
devoted to the first stage of the process:
...
February 2013
4 posts
3 tags
The Books of 2013: February.
James Baldwin. Another Country. 1962. (again)
India Knight. Comfort and Joy. 2011.
James Baldwin. Giovanni’s Room. 1956. (again)
Josephine Tey. A Shilling for Candles. 1936. (again)
James Baldwin. Go Tell It On the Mountain. 1953. (again)
2 tags
Ava DuVernay on Friendship and Fashion →
3 tags
Baldwin on Bette Davis
“A little woman and not pretty, with a lewd, brutal swagger, saying to the whole world: ‘You can kiss my ass.’ Nothing tamed or broke her, nothing touched her, neither kindness, or scorn, nor hatred, nor love. She had never thought of prayer. It was unimaginable that she would ever bend her knees and come crawling along to anybody’s altar, weeping for forgiveness....
3 tags
Cloudland Revisited: Briallen on Border Incident →
January 2013
8 posts
3 tags
Baldwin, Robinson: Resurrection
“Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song.
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Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had...
1 tag
Martin Luther King Jr. Day
For everyone who struggles and fails with their dissertation and goes on to live a useful life. For everyone who doubts. For everyone who says the risky loving thing. For everyone who hears the prophetic utterance in the voices of people who cannot read, who are not presentable, who are not white or male or straight or citizens. For everyone who refuses to align the boundaries of their care with...
1 tag
The Movies of 2013: January
Border Incident. 1949.
Silver Linings Playbook. 2012.
Feeling Right: Note #1 →
Linked above, a reductive and cynical account of the ethics of feeling from the New York Times.
Last night I was talking to a friend of mine who is a chaplain at Yale-New Haven Hospital— the trauma hospital where they bring all the region’s deadly accident and violence victims, with the usual oncology and so on mixed in. Sometimes my friend is paged to respond to several deathbeds in...
Produce and Productivity →
My New Haven family-of-choice and I are sharing a CSA! Connecticut veggies for your reading pleasure:
arugula, beans, beets, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, collards, sweet corn, cucumbers, eggplant, garlic, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, lettuce, onion, okra, peas, peppers, potatoes, pumpkins, radishes, yellow squash, zucchini squash, butternut squash, acorn...
3 tags
The Books of 2013: January
Josephine Tey. The Singing Sands. 1952. (again)
P.D. James. A Mind to Murder. 1963.
India Knight. The Dirty Bits for Girls. London: Virago, 2006.
Sarah Dunn. Secrets to Happiness. New York: Little, Brown, 2009. (again)
Briallen Soulstirring at the University Church in... →
3 tags
Something Sensational to Read on the Train
Reading Tatler on the train. I should subscribe; every sentence is quotable. From “150 People You Might Like to Sleep With”: on Benedict Cumberbatch: “He’s a fan of fruit bats— and looks a bit like an otter.” On Lily Robinson: “She hunts— a lot— and does very good impressions, including an uncanny take on Miss Havisham.” On Idris Elba:...
December 2012
2 posts
Briallen Soulstirring on Killing the Buddha →
2 tags
Briallen Soulstirring at the University Church in...
Like many of you,
I spent Friday in tears.
[[MORE]]
Just thirty miles from where we are,
In a quiet Connecticut elementary school,
Twenty irreplaceable children lost their lives.
Six irreplaceable adults were killed.
Several courageous women literally sacrificed themselves
trying to protect the children in their care.
A mother was killed by her son in her own home.
A troubled...
November 2012
1 post
Briallen on HuffPost Live →
A Mormon, a Muslim, a Jew, an evangelical Christian, and a liberal Protestant walk into a HuffPo television segment…
September 2012
2 posts
Birmingham Sunday: September 15, 1963 →
Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley said he listened to Joan Baez singing “Birmingham Sunday” every day for years as put together the case against the terrorist Dynamite Bob Chambliss. I’ve been thinking about that ritual: the daily sustaining power of art, and what art can and can’t make possible. It can give endurance, it can be a guide on the path to a legal justice,...
1 tag
Briallen on Kodi Smit-McPhee →
Kodi is the nicest and only movie star I’ve ever had the pleasure of profiling. I highly recommend Let Me In as the smartest, sweetest, scariest favorite vampire-related cultural object I know (and I say this as someone who has spent way too much time with True Blood and Twilight).
The website is lovely, but you should still order a copy of Document. You’ll get an armful of creamy...
August 2012
2 posts
Jane Clementi Comes Out →
The long work of mourning continues. May some families be spared because of these parents telling this story. If you love your children, leave the churches that hurt them.
Carolyn Cooper Asks Who is Jamaica? →
“Out of many, one” was also the founding motto of the United States, but after almost two centuries the US replaced E Pluribus Unum with In God We Trust— not an improvement. If Jamaica doesn’t want their motto anymore maybe we can trade and get it back.
Which is to say that I don’t think “out of many, one” has to mean that “the idealized face of the...
July 2012
3 posts
Susan Celia Greenfield on Having It All →
I’m thinking of my great-grandma the laundress a century ago. There was no birth control, so she was pregnant for almost twenty consecutive years. She had to start over in another country and another language more than once. And doing laundry before electricity was no joke: it meant vats on the stove and irons in the fire and mangles. Of “it all,” of the things on the white...
Briallen Soulstirring at Broadway United Church of... →
Ross Douthat on Liberal Christianity →
Douthat’s critique is incoherent. Yes, there are fewer and fewer liberal mainline Protestants and progressive Catholics, but there are also fewer and fewer Southern Baptists and conservative Catholics. Douthat thinks the moral here is that liberals need to change or die. But if “life” is being measured by the numbers, doesn’t this mean traditional conservatives also need to...
June 2012
4 posts
My Sisters Beat Their Tiny Fists Against the... →
2 tags
A Time to Mourn for Nora →
I loved Nora. I didn’t know till today she was the oldest of four sisters. My dad has lived on the West Coast for 36 years but he always says that if he were sick or hurt and trying to get home to die he would crawl to New York City. He is maybe a little dramatic. Meanwhile I read all kinds of things but if I am ever hurt and trying to get home in a book— to heal or to hide— I...
2 tags
Style, the Meaning of Gay Culture →
I do love the cycles of nostalgia, “plus ca change” argument Halperin makes here. We didn’t invent nostalgia. We can even be nostalgic for past nostalgia! I also have sympathy for anti-assimilationism. And this piece causes me to wonder once again whether I am actually an older gay man. I was probably one of the few people reading this op-ed who a) knew what Lalique was and...
Briallen at the University Church in Yale →
May 2012
8 posts
Briallen and Joey on the Radio →
Nikki Muller on Princeton →
Cloudland Revisited: Briallen on Bette Davis →
The NYT on How Student Debt is Crushing a... →
I went to community college for a year and a half to save money, transferred to a local 4-year school and lived with my parents till graduation to save money, got Pell Grants (serious street cred there, look it up!), national merit scholarships, merit scholarships from my college, community service scholarships from my college, need-based scholarships from my college, and even a textbook voucher...
Ashley Makar on Healing Prayer →
5 tags
April 2012
7 posts
3 tags
My Sister Joey on Not Going to College
Johanna Hopper writes, “The voluntary decision of any young person not to go to college ought to be respected, not lamented.
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“It is not only a Bachelors degree that can qualify you for a meaningful life, and as our society obscures that fact, intelligent, non-college-educated adults find themselves condescended to, pitied, and oftentimes simply dismissed as failures. A...
Briallen on the New Los Angeles Review of Books... →
I’m not actually this pretty, but the new LARB website is!
Highland Fling and Christmas Pudding by Nancy... →
When I was a teenager in England I had a one-volume edition of the complete Radlett novels of Nancy Mitford (The Pursuit of Love (1945), Love in a Cold Climate (1949), The Blessing (1951), and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960)), which I loved and lost. Penguin has just released an attractive and unwieldy turquoise tome that includes all these plus Highland Fling (1931), Christmas Pudding (1932),...
Briallen Soulstirring at the University Church in... →
Briallen & Joey on an NPR Education Blog →
Briallen & Joey on the Yale Alumni Magazine Blog →
