Wait a Minute…Don’t We Know this Guy?!
January 10, 2018 by at 2:01 pm
Sho’ nuff, FOK Christopher Carstens up and got hisself published (again!):
Lent is coming and my brother-in-law has eight kids to feed and clothe. Just sayin’…
Sign of the Times (Gone By)
December 31, 2017 by at 8:33 am
Ripe fruit left hanging on a tree: a sure sign that your children are not spending as much time at home as they used to.
Rally, Korrektiv, rally — here cometh Sister Sinjin!
February 8, 2017 by at 8:17 am
Friend of Korrektiv Betty Duffy has formed a band and recorded an album. Let that be a spur for your own efforts, and also a spur to go, listen, and purchase.
From the Sister Sinjin blog: What Does Creativity Look Like Within the Covenant and Constrictions of Life’s Obligations?
When we met for the first time we talked about creativity as our culture celebrates it: Freeing yourself from distractions, surrounding yourself with all things beautiful, being lost inside the space created for yourself whether in nature or a coffee shop, throwing off any labels the world has placed on you and discovering your true self. Who doesn’t want all of that from time to time?
We are at a different stage in our lives, however, where time for leisurely creativity is at a premium. And do we even want that? We all have families and loved ones that we’re not willing to sacrifice to art.
Elise threw out the phrase “Creativity of Obligation” as a topic for exploration. What does it mean to be creative while embracing the roles, responsibilities and obligations of mother, wife, friend, minister, employee, Christian?
What if creativity does not flow best into the limitless space we strive to create around ourselves? What if, instead, it is pressed out of us by the constant, repetitive, unending cycle of daily life? What if creativity is not the result of acting on our every desire, but rather what’s found after everything else has been drained from us?
Maybe there, in the uncomfortable realities of our lives is where creativity is expressed, because it must be in order to survive the exhausting and the mundane. Maybe creativity is more incarnation than transcendence.
Creativity of obligation requires us to show up with all our baggage and create something anyway.
Two weeks after we first met we began recording an album. We have carved out space though it has been brief and hard won. Most of our creative process, however, has happened with children surrounding us, in dirty kitchens and cluttered cars.
If we had all the time and resources in the world we could create something more grand, more elaborate, but not more beautiful. What results will be all of what we had to give in a brief period of time with pinched pennies and crying babies at our side.
Our obligations do not stop us from creating, they compel us.
Live-blogging the Brisket: Hour 2
August 21, 2016 by at 7:00 am
A smoking crucible of muscle, tendon, flesh and fat amid the bucolic landscape of Wisconsin…
Water for the pan, beer for the cook, a mop and mop for the meat…
In which the first mop is applied…
The expert hand of a pit-master…
Behold the astonishment of the crowd*!…
Those pictured: besides three of my seven daughters, our new French daughter, straight from Territoir de Belfort (in grey sweatshirt) in whose honor (and apparently it is her first sight of bbq brisket)and by way of official welcome, we are “doing it up,” as we Americans say, with a Sunday brisket.
The Profit
September 10, 2015 by at 9:33 am
When children kill we wring our hands and cry –
“The kingdom’s here and now and Christ is not
The crucified!” Confused, we butterfly
Our judgment, dissect humanity, gut
The soul and pick apart the truth. We love
Our sins so much we give them tongue to speak….
So heaven’s here and cold as stone above –
While hell’s beneath us. Spatchcock
The conscience, too, o modern primitive!
The temple’s vatic whisper will indict
Though pills become our lusty palliative
And love of death becomes our civil right.
We pay our tongues to serve the talk of peace –
We kill our kids so they can take our place.
The Last Crawdad, Man!
June 17, 2015 by at 7:48 am
Since the Kollektiv isn’t traveling south this year, Korrektiv Kollektiv: Soldiers Grove Unit decided to bring Nawlins up to Cheeseland for an evening in honor of Third Oldest Daughter’s birthday… That’s her in the middle with her sisters posing as Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos…
Spin, measure, cut…spin, measure, cut…. spin, measure, cut. OK. Got it.
Just a taste of what we’ll be missing this October – but, we hope, not next year…
All mine…?
Dad’s crawdads….
Let the games begin!
Crawdads and uncles…
Still life with escrevisse and cousins and beer can.
Mudbugs in the milieu…
Hand and claw…
Bernadette’s Feast
One fine evening in southwest Wisconsin…
Don’t forget the pie (One apple and one berry).
The Casa Missives – I
June 15, 2015 by at 8:55 am
Older Son graduated high school this year and instead of heading straight into college – perhaps to join his sister, Oldest Daughter, here – he has decided to take up an invitation from one of our diocesan priests who happens to be director of our diocesan-sponsored orphanage, Casa Hogar Juan Pablo II in Lurin (suburb of Lima), Peru. I will occasionally be posting updates as he plans to Youtube his experiences; so call it a guest posting or or call it a running narrative of a non-traditional trajectory to higher learning or call it a first hand account of a young man discerning his vocation. Whatsoever it turns out to be, there are some folk in southwest Wisconsin pretty proud right now…
Dear Papa, Mama, Barbara,Bernadette , Norah, Liam, Annie, Mara, Lucy and Claudia!!
I am just letting you know that I made it and that I am settling in fine. My Spanish is very rough but I’m working hard on it!! All the kids are incredibly cute even though I can’t understand most of what they say!! I took some videos of my plane flight but I wasn’t able to get any pictures of Lima because apparently people sometimes break the car windows just to steal cameras out of your hands.(yeah that’s a thing here) but I will try to get some pictures/videos of Casa Hogar and get them to you ASAP. It’s really hard getting used to not hearing my name so much because I had to pick a new name (they don’t have the SH sound) and I decided on Patricio (Spanish for Patrick) now before you go around saying my new name wrong remember to roll the R and the P doesn’t really make a P sound its sorta a genetic hybrid between a P and a B and the best way to know if you’re saying it right or not is to hold your hand a little ways away from your mouth and if you can feel the air you’re probably saying it wrong I miss you lots and love you that much more!!
~ Love Seamus (a.k.a. Patricio)
While we’re at it…
March 16, 2015 by at 8:14 am
Might as well call a spade a spade – or find out that we have critics in spades – and hearts – and clubs – and… Well.
A Poem for Barbara
March 6, 2015 by at 10:55 am
The settling fog, a ghostly brute that falls
Asleep for winter, slumped athwart the land,
Deludes perspective. Shade and light demand
A reckoning. In whites and greys, the hills
Are fused to valleys, acre, plat and yard.
A distant darkened mass where fog and rain
Condense becomes a barn in lonely guard
Collapsing on its rotten hoard of grain.
The foot that picks among the fallen brick,
Foundation’s ruined empire, counts and spells
The tired gloom wherein the future dwells.
In gravity, rain falls like logic’s laws
And touches lightly as the fog withdraws
And spiders spin a deeper rhetoric.
Not so fast, Mr. Broderick “Bugs Bunny” Barker….
January 20, 2015 by at 11:27 am
“Large families are the most splendid flower-beds in the garden of the Church; happiness flowers in them and sanctity ripens in favorable soil. Every family group, even the smallest, was meant by God to be an oasis of spiritual peace. But there is a tremendous difference: where the number of children is not much more than one, that serene intimacy that gives value to life has a touch of melancholy or of pallor about it; it does not last as long, it may be more uncertain, it is often clouded by secret fears and remorse.” – Pius XII.
And more here.
The Draconids
October 3, 2014 by at 12:02 pm
FOR NORAH
And especially were we led to cultivate that discipline developed in respect to divine and heavenly things as being the only one concerned with the study of things which are always what they are…
– Ptolemy, Preface to The Almagest
My daughter’s eyes dissolve in tears that turn
Her irises to violent shades of plum.
There’s not a single star to which she’s born
But romance has its seasons – some that come
With flowers, some to desolate the heart:
For heaven knows what breaks it, either whole or part.
Perhaps she feels her orbit tilts askew,
A teen-aged Pluto – distant, unobtained…
She casts her face against the residue
Of evening light – the setting sun has gained
It’s nadir. Soon the light that sets is lost;
The sky turns dark like velvet smirched with quartzose dust.
I vanquish pedantry’s old urge and bring
My daughter out beyond the pasture wire
Where thirsty cattle crowd around a spring
Of fresh discovery. We look and stare,
Our imaginations fixed as hooves in mud
And ruminate on stars as Guernseys, grain and cud.
Thus, constellations, clusters, nebulae
Offers more than a comet’s passing peace;
Consummate wonder weaves its fabulae
Of squibs from Northern Star to Southern Cross –
And counting up, my daughter can’t recall
An integer so wholly astronomical.
Resisting words, I let night speak – or sing –
For itself, spreading starry charts before
The autumn equinox which waits to spring
October’s Draconids across the door
And sill of space, showering eternity
With falling fire at tears’ escape velocity.
Returning through the fields, my daughter stopped
To watch as deicidal Draco squirms
In polar transit. Once, Athena stripped
The worm of tooth and claw, and now he warms
His artic blood by sloughing skin for flame
(Recurring fall to fall, his scales retain his name).
Beneath this snaking string of pearls, I pray
My daughter finds each star a widow’s mite –
Beyond our reach but held within the play
Of waxing grace, a shepherd satellite
That casts its shadow on the human soul,
And governs gravity with love’s more buoyant pull.
Oath and Abundance
September 18, 2014 by at 8:34 pm
For Elizabeth, on her birthday
Elisheba, young Aaron’s wife, saw
The scorching sun and torrid sand
On Israel’s treck avow no shadow
Nor soothe the azure sky – such land
Where all the colors drained from Eden
And drowns a rainbow’s hope for heaven…
The voided desert shades refuse,
In justice, spectrum’s seven hues.
Elizabeth, though, aging wife to
Old Zachariah, sits and rests
And waits to see her promised guests
Descend the everlasting hills now
From heaven’s blue – her mantled earth,
An advocate for mercy’s birth.
Details from the Early Hours of Mara Naomi
September 16, 2014 by at 1:03 pm
It’s dawn. Awake? Yes, awake. And each time
I marvel at your timing – arbitrary
As cloud’s deconstruction – inchoate shape
To form, animal to goblin, toy to dream;
Certain as logic’s tumble-grind of gears;
Quiet as mountain air before a storm.
Half-awake I detect your ramble down the hall,
As capricious as a dancing dust mote
That climbs its way down a staircase of sunlight
Pouring in through a generous window.
You pad into our room on monkey feet.
Suddenly beside our bed, blooming, spring’s first,
You cling to dawn’s hour like autumn’s last leaf.
Your touching face that no one sees is set
Against the dying darkness, encouraging it
To other hemispheres now that you are here.
With chill air and flailing sheets, you announce
The world is not as you left it last night.
Then turn your head away, because, after all, [Read more…]
Hey, look at that—AP says I’m Trump Country!
See me up there in the upper right-hand corner?
As Percy would say, I’m “validated” like the young man who sees his own town in a film or lights up William Holden’s cigarette without acknowledging that he knows Holden knows he knows who Holden is, etc.
(p.s. This is not meant as a provocation, so please if you have anything bad to say about the current president, I would refer you to previous dust-ups at this blog on that issue, which I won’t even link to because I don’t think it bears any relevance to this post. Here, it’s all peace and joy and I don’t really care what you think about the current president – I’m making a Percian point here, which is much more important.
As a smoking/meat-smoking friend of mine in California might say, “Oh, you don’t like my politics? That’s nice. Did I mention that I bake bread?”
Except in my case I would say, “Did I mention I make a helluva good Chicken Cacciatore and that I can make you a martini that you will never forget? Sit down right there at my kitchen table and I’ll stir us a couple, and then let’s light up a smoke—cigar for you? Perfect!—and cigarettes (unfiltered) for me. Let’s talk then about the beauties of poems that completely nail the execution of a perfect enjambment of lines, of women who wear their hair down, of early R.E.M. albums and whether they were meant to be concept albums in the tradition of Pink Floyd and Yes but tinctured with a Southern Gothic ethos, of love in a time near the end of the world, and of children and how, one way or another, the little dears are going to get you out of bed in the morning. Yes—oh, and how’s your drink? See? I told you so….Cacciatore will be ready in about 20 minutes. How ‘bout another round?” )