But my father’s is an artist’s eye as much as a craftsman’s, and it can see other things too—things thạt mine cannot. With his hands and face almost intimately close to the boards, he’s trying to divine the ebb and flow of the grain. To see, and to see past, the flaws. To intuit beneath the shrouds of grime the traces of a scene, a movement, or simply an energy. Something he can coax out and bring to life with his carving chisels.
My most commonly used dopamine habit comes from an entirely self-curated algorithm: Kindle. Sometimes I just scroll through highlights from the few books I’ve read there. Rereading Peter Hooton/Bonhoeffer on Thursday was plenty to mull over, but picking up Richard Wilbur Thursday night… Wow!
A message from Jeffrey Foucault:
Friends,
Last summer while I was waiting around for The Universal Fire to come out, I re-recorded all the songs from the new album alone, playing everything myself. I worked mornings and evenings in my friend Maria’s barn fronting a meadow and sheep pasture, with the windows open to the late season birds and crickets, wind in the trees, an occasional truck lumbering up the hill. I tried to work fast, and leave things a little rough.
As I found new ways into the songs, I began to add in some of the songs that hadn’t made it onto the studio version, and by the end there were seven new songs – Straightaway, High, I Miss (The Way It Used to Feel), If I Could Find It in My Heart, How Do You Know It’s Heaven (If It Never Ends), Someplace Left to Stand, and Sun Is Going Down – almost a whole second album.
I began because I knew I’d need to make some money by the end of the year. Touring a five-piece band for four months is a hell of a fun way to go broke, but at the end you’re still broke. But drilling down on these songs from new angles, hearing them against the unreleased songs, it began to feel like a valid piece of art, something that stands up on its own. At least I hope it does.
It’ll remain unreleased for now, so if you’re in the industry, please don’t play it on the radio, or use it on your podcast. I’ll put it out sometime next year, but for now I’m making it available as a pay-what-you-want download, and only to my mailing list, and ONLY THIS MONTH.
We’ve set it up so you can use any of the various payment methods, including a check to my P.O. Box. So if you’re broke like me, download it and get me back later. If you’re feeling flush, decide what it’s worth to you. There’s no wrong answer, but nothing exceeds like excess.
Thanks for supporting my deal. If you wonder how this job works, the answer is that mostly it doesn’t. It requires patronage from some real fans, and I’ve just been lucky. – JF
If you like country-folk-blues, or just like what he’s doing, you can sign up here.
We grew up watching a lot of Don Knotts films, and I simply cannot listen to House of the Rising Sun and its organ music without thinking of The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.
One of the benefits of reading speradically — er, I mean widely and diversely — is that you can randomly find some overlap bewteen, say, Nick Catoggio, Malcom Guite, and William Carlos Williams.
Induction
Heavens to Betsy — lovelily is an actual word! I haven’t been just making up an adverb all these years when people ask, How are you doing?
OED’s earliest evidence for lovelily is from before 1400, in Cursor Mundi: a Northumbrian poem of the 14th century.
Apparently that poem is the “second most heavily quoted work in OED1/2 after the Bible and the fifth most quoted source altogether.”
A brief excursion shows it spelled “luflyly,” and that it also shows up in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Dougald Hine:
We are dealing with something that implies a transformation we have hardly begun to acknowledge. Even the bold talk about human extinction can be a way to defer acknowledgement: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the world as we know it. The hard part is to imagine still being here, to imagine lives worth living among the ruins of what we thought we knew, who we thought we were and where we thought the world was headed.
Hine is talking about climate change and climate change language, but, wow, does this have broader applications. And it’s a perfect opportunity to channel Walter Brueggamann!
(This was a draft post from a month ago that I never published, probably because I wanted to do more with it. But it’s a theme that bears repeating.)
I’ve been thinking of the line from James Lawson (via David Dark), “You have to keep in your mind an imagery of infinite possibility.” (“I give that to you as an oracle of beloved community,” Dark adds.) And I’ve been occasionally picking back through Pieper’s On Hope, and came across this highlight:
it is above all when life grows short that hope grows weary; the “not yet” is turned into the has-been, and old age turns, not to the “not yet”, but to memories of what is “no more”.
For supernatural hope, the opposite is true: not only is it not bound to natural youth; it is actually rooted in a much more substantial youthfulness. It bestows on mankind a “not yet” that is entirely superior to and distinct from the failing strength of man’s natural hope. Hence it gives man such a “long” future that the past seems “short” however long and rich his life. The theological virtue of hope is the power to wait patiently for a “not yet” that is the more immeasurably distant from us the more closely we approach it.