Reason versus The Bulwark has to be the most hollow, vacuous debate I have ever listened to.
Forgiving: A glimpse of a farther world.
It helps me to see that forgiveness isn’t so much a transactional repair of an old world. Rather, it is a glimpse of a more profoundly coherent new one. It is as we eventually come to feel ourselves at home in this new world that we experience the forgiveness given and received.
And this “new world“ (i.e., “reality”) is a world with an “inexhaustive range of future possibilities.”
This was good, and fits perfectly with James Lawson and Joseph Pieper. In my own brief obsession with Polanyi, Esther Meek was a delight. (See this “poem, prose, prose”.)
Patchwork Quilt • Flying into Bozeman, Montana. A throwback to June 2023, when this little guy was still breathing amniotic fluid and starting to curl his toes. (Clifford Besher’s “folds in the earth” reminded me of this.)
Diaper change
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.