Gerasene ’17: The Kollektiv at Notre Dame

4a52b04c-9854-4f8d-857b-c68d95a89614-002[Image: the Mississippi gravesite of Senator LeRoy Percy, Walker Percy’s uncle.]

CONFIRMED: Two [hopefully three] members of the Korrektiv as panelists at this summer’s Trying to Say “God”: Re-enchanting Catholic Literature, June 22-24 at the University of Notre Dame. Rally, Korrektiv, rally!

Angelico Nguyen Likes This.

LikesThis謝謝,保祿

Pending

Perpetual_help_original_icon

12 July 2012

A slipper hangs from tiny toes: Our Lord –
A little child – has seen His cross and spear,
Has sped to her whose heart will know a sword.
She holds Him close. Her gaze is dark and clear.
They hang in golden silence…. Twitterings
Of careless birds bring day. Dawn fades the dark.
The clockwork clicks. The hammer hangs, then rings.
The planet turns, and swings along its arc….
The morning sun glides silent up the sky.
The moments pass beneath its sightless ray.
Some few hang solid like an ambered fly;
The rest, like Polaroids, fade fast away….
The noonday sun hangs high. Three things are all:
The point, the palm, the hammer poised to fall.

Selfie alert II

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels - alabaster lantern - afternoon

Dammit, Angelico

Just listen to all those references to the self. You could have made the single most relevant presentation of the whole durned conference.

You’ve seen, haven’t you, Maria Bustillos’ two posts on DFW and self-help?

Anyway, all I’m saying is, I think you’re now obliged to write a brilliant book (it doesn’t even have to be for KP) about DFW and Percy and suicide and self-help and possibly even drinking, and present it at Gerasene 2015 in New Orleans, while we’re running the “Walker Percy Saved My Life, What Can He Do For You?” conference at Loyola.

Is all I’m saying.

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‘… on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered flattered visage lies …’

At the very end of Lent 2012, the six members of the Korrektiv Kollektiv received, as a gift from Matthew Lickona, cartoon portraits from the pen of the wonderful Daniel Mitsui. What Mitsui memorialized in those small and startling figures, with unobtrusive allusiveness and an unsettling but corrective touch of the grotesque that exemplified the Korrektiv ethos of the classic period, was a golden age: a flowering, a ripening, the sun at zenith.

But flowers fade; ripeness turns to rot; light declines toward a slow, final failure; and shadows lengthen and coalesce unto the great shade, Night, who is herself the shadow of Death.

You couldn’t have noticed all that fading, rotting, and declining, though, since none of it showed on the surface — until November 1. On that day — All Saints’ Day (bitter irony!) —  a mistake was made.

Now, at the beginning of Advent 2012, Mr Lickona has once again hired Daniel Mitsui — not to memorialize glory this time, but folly.

Fittingly so: Our Faith teaches that wrongs can be not merely prevented, not merely undone, but actually redeemed. And this is true.

For example: Though my addition to this blog’s roster may be a loss for you, the reader (not to mention the dragging-down it entails for Jonathans Potter and Webb, Mr Finnegan, Mr Lickona, Mr JOB, and Ms Expat), I get a brilliant Mitsui portrait:

Enigmatic, spooky, funny, and a good likeness to boot, though enough obscured to provide a useful degree of plausible deniability. I could hardly be happier with it. If only it had not come at such awful cost to you, dear friends.

Thank you for the picture, Mr Mitsui. Thank you for the present, Mr Lickona.

Thank you (in advance) for forbearing to sting, scorpion.

Hipster Catholics, blogging at a time near the end of the world.

I don’t know who this Angelico character is, but has anyone noticed that his little intro line changes on a regular basis? Here’s his latest:

Fantastic. Surfing with Mel isn’t a commercial failure. It’s an underground smash.

достоевщина

The strangeness of the Dostoevskian universe, so well conveyed by Virginia Woolf (‘We open the door and find ourselves in a room full of Russian generals, the tutors of Russian generals, their stepdaughters and cousins and crowds of miscellaneous people who are all talking at the tops of their voices about their most private affairs’), which foreigners tend to ascribe to some peculiarities of the Russian national character, is just as strongly felt and often resented by Russians themselves.

Russian dictionaries list a common noun, derived from the writer’s name, dostoevshchina, which is a derogatory term describing an undesirable mode of behavior. A person guilty of dostoevshchina is being deliberately difficult, hysterical or perverse. Another possible meaning of the word is excessive and morbid preoccupation with one’s own psychological processes. The word is part of the normal Russian vocabulary, incidentally.

Simon Karlinsky, ‘Dostoevsky as Rorschach Test’, New York Times, 13 June 1971.  In Crime and Punishment (a Norton Critical Edition, Third Edition), edited by George Gibian, 615. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1989.

The Subtle Korrektiv

The painter Bryullov once made a correction [sic] on a student’s sketch. The pupil, looking at the transformed sketch, said: ‘You hardly at all touched my study, yet it has become entirely different.’ Bryullov answered: ‘Hardly-at-all is where art begins.’

Tolstoy, Leo. ‘How Minute Changes of Consciousness Caused Raskolnikov to Commit Murder’. Excerpt from ‘Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?’. Translated by George Gibian. In Crime and Punishment (a Norton Critical Edition, Third Edition), edited by George Gibian, 487. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1989. Originally published as introductory essay to a book on drunkenness by P.S. Alexeev (1890).

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Or: The Fraternal Korrektiv

I’ve found myself thinking the same thought about David Petraeus that I’d thought about Lance Armstrong a few weeks ago:

‘Too bad he’s not Catholic; then, he’d be fair game for Korrektiv!’

But hope springs eternal.

Has anyone called dibs on the Lives of Famous Catholics volumes about Conrad Black and Newt Gingrich?

好好学习,天天向上!

要使文艺很好地成为整个革命机器的一个组成部分,作为团结人民、教育人民、打击敌人、消灭敌人的有力的武器,帮助人民同心同德地和敌人作斗争。 (三十二)

[Our purpose is] to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy with one heart and one mind. (Chapter 32)

Rally, Korrektiv, rally!

“…nobody will be shocked by any amount of exposed sheet metal…”

This article does a good job of explaining the joy of Svexuality, explaining why others have fallen where stout Dominican hearts have made a final and persevering stand.

Lay down all thoughts; surrender to the void.

‘[O]nly in the far east and in modern times have artists valued blank space’, says Daniel Mitsui in his 2002 essay on horror vacui. ‘Only Buddhists and Nihilists are interested in nothingness.’

Ten years later, I still don’t know enough either to endorse or reject those assertions. But seeing these iPad miniTM billboards around town, which push Apple’s minimalist aesthetic to an extreme I find both self-parodic and vaguely unsettling, brought Mitsui’s essay to mind.

See also: The last stanza of Philip Larkin’s ‘High Windows’.

DCCCVIII

I went to a readers’ theater presentation of The Real Inspector Hound yesterday (which was absurd), and found myself a half-stroll from here. (Thanks, notrelatedtoted!)

Mr Potter, was that poem you wrote about throwing baseballs at a target autobiographical? If so, we need:

  1. A Spokane-to-SoCal plane ticket for Potter;
  2. A copy of Surfing with Mel in Word or PDF format, saved on a flash drive; and
  3. A baseball with a cavity carved in it to accommodate said flash drive.

Now then, Mr Potter: See those big corner windows?

‘A punctuation paradigm is shifting’, says Professor Yagoda.

‘About time’, say all right-thinking people.

Slate has the (year-and-a-half-old) scoop:

‘The Rise of “Logical Punctuation”.’

Where’s the Korrektiv Press style manual?

All Dominican Saints

There’s All Saints’ Day, and then there’s All Dominican Saints’ Day.

Take a gander at the Litany of Saints and Blesseds of the Order of Preachers, and you can see why.

(And note the invocation of St Dominic’s contemporary and fellow reformer, St Francis of Assisi, as ‘Holy Father Francis’.)

C O E X I S T

Comment from the St Martin de Porres post:

lickona says:

Already the Dominican creep begins here at the traditionally Benedictine Korrektiv. (Really, things started to go downhill when they let a guy in who wore the mark of a Carmelite.)

For what it’s worth:

St Benedict medal,

suspended from

Carmelite scapular,

suspended from

Dominican neck.

I need all the help I can get.