“The Thing I Am”, Jorge Luis Borges
From The Paris Review online: I have forgotten my name. I am not Borges (Borges died at La Verde, under fire) Nor am I Acevedo, dreaming of battle, Nor my…
Category: commonplace book
Henry Williamson on Curlews: From “Tarka the Otter”
From Tarka the Otter Within the moor is the Forest, a region high and treeless, where sedge grasses grow on the slopes to the sky. In early summer the wild…
Henri Nouwen on Passion
From “The Road to Daybreak”: This moment when Jesus is handed over to those who do with him as they please is a turning point in Jesus’ ministry. It is…
“Alienated America”, Timothy Carney, reviewed by James Bradshaw, Position Papers
Found this review extremely interesting. Some highlights: Carney begins his account of social alienation in an unusual location: Chevy Chase, Maryland. Far from being a depressed post-industrial town in the…
A poem for Palm Sunday – “The Donkey”, G K Chesterton
I find Chesterton a somewhat mixed bag , and that applies to his poetry also, but this has always moved me deeply, and is all the more effective for concealing…
“Seduced by sinners, fools, & jerks I delight in as I write in my study, my pen my poker, my thoughts often bloody” – ‘Flannery and St. Thomas, Take II’ by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
I posted Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s “Flannery and Dante” the other day. Here is another poem by O’Donnell, this time dealing with Flannery O’Connor and St Thomas Aquinas. “Flannery and St…
Flannery and Dante – a poem by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
At The Other Journal I come across this poem “riffing on Flannery O’Connor’s fandom for Dante” as the site itself puts it: Flannery and Dante For my money Dante is about as…
John Ayliff – “Is Thomas the Tank Engine hard science fiction?”
A 2015 blog post by John Ayliff observes: The early Railway stories were based on real railway incidents, and the characters were based on real models of locomotive (Thomas is…
Séamus Sweeney 