q. i. f?

Stewardship of words is a high calling, though not one that can be relegated to professionals. We are all called to be responsible hearers, speakers, and doers of the word. Still, telling the truth is something like an extreme sport for the very committed. . . . We learn, gradually, from those who do it well, how to tolerate the “intolerable wrestle with words and meanings,” as Eliot put it, and even to delight in it. We calibrate the differences between what we want words to mean and how they may be heard; we pick them up from the dusty corners where most of the good ones have been consigned to disuse and re-introduce them, hoping to ambush the listener who is contented with cliché. Like Adrienne Rich, who called herself “a woman sworn to lucidity,” we pledge our energies to the work of smithing words for purposes they have never before had to serve. We temper our urgencies (if we are inclined to prophesy) with play because no responsible word work can happen with out it . . . .

 
From Marilyn McEntyre’s Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies.

Very gradually I’ve found my way in to some fiction, even to novels, again, after a long time doing without. It’s hard to account in clear terms for getting away from this kind of reading in the first place, and likewise hard to account for coming back to it. It’s not a matter of having time for it, exactly. This kind of reading — even (or so it often felt) when it was reading that had to be done for class — has always meant neglecting other business I should, on one ground or another, be about. But it is partly a matter of practical opportunity in a different way, since I’m terribly cautious these days about buying books on one hand, and on the other rarely now feel, and even more rarely follow, any inclination to poke around in a library. What’s had to happen is some alignment of two conditions, my minimal-effort access to free or very cheap stuff and my attraction to stories conceived & written more than a few generations ago. With the internet, of course, minimal-effort access to free or very cheap stuff covers a very wide range of stuff. And a lot of it, especially stuff more likely to be under copyright, is junk or appeals to quite specific sensibilities. Then there’s the great store of stuff that is no longer subject to copyright — if you want it. The missing connection has been in that I haven’t really wanted the older, uncopyrighted stuff for a while. Until recently. Thinking a bit, as I read, about why that is, what’s changed or is changing.

Jesse Boykins III, Amorous

San Francisco Jazz Collective, Superstition

  N. Fremont Ave. & Harlem Ave.

What I know for sure is this: as much as he’s willing to work and as earnest as he is about getting straight, Will most likely will never get his GED, never get a full-time job that pays him enough to do any more than live from week to week, and, never get free of the drugs that are all but foisted on him from all sides — from family, friends, and just about anybody he meets on the street.
    The problem isn’t in Will, it’s in everything that surrounds him. As much as I dislike David Simon’s The Wire — because it’s so pessimistic — I have to grant that Simon has this much right: drugs aren’t going away. Ever.

I don’t share Tanner’s confidence about the pure exteriority of the problem this young man faces — or about practical benefits to be gained from the sweeping complex of government-administered socioeconomic measures his list of things we all ought to be able to agree on could be expected to call forth. But Tanner’s managed a direct personal & economic connection to the harshest of social realities in this part of the western world, and that puts him in a position to talk which most of the people who’d dismiss his understanding as tired leftism are far from enjoying. I’d rather know what a guy like Tanner thinks is going on, concretely, than hear many a guy to whose conclusions about healthy political and social order my own thinking perhaps comes closer. And I’d rather be a guy like Tanner, in the end.

Reinhardt, Grappelli, J’attendrai

‘I was asking a banker the other day if and when building resumes, will banks be loaning money for complex projects, like mixed-use transit oriented development, or will they go with the same old auto-oriented projects on the edge of town, which tend to be a lot easier. He said they’d be going with the easy stuff.’

That does look like fun, doesn’t it?

Cardinal Kasper described ecumenism as work that is “not done at the desk.” “Dialogue is life,” he said. “Dialogue is an integral part of the life of the Church.”

“Strob,” Vivo Sonhando (Jobim)

The Church has been horrifyingly corrupt in previous eras and still survived. It’s been led by ecclesiastics who make Bernard Law’s hands look clean, and still survived. It’s faced fiercer enemies than Richard Dawkins and still survived. Time after time, Chesterton wrote, ‘the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs.’ Each time, ‘it was the dog that died.’ But if the Church isn’t finished, period, it can still be finished for certain people, in certain contexts, in certain times. And so it is in this case: for millions in Europe and America, Catholicism is probably permanently associated with sexual scandal, rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Ross Douthat, in a little piece for this month’s Atlantic’s ‘Ideas’ feature.

“It’s un-American to think about tearing down housing. But we have a long history of ghost towns.”