On distractions — Curving toward the center
Of course there are distractions, says the Lord: When there are others, they are the distraction, and when you are by yourself, you are the distraction! You can try to…
Category: commonplace book
“No poor people please, I write for the New Yorker” – Daniel Kalder on Lawrence Wright in the TLS
Daniel Kalder had a review in the TLS a while back of Lawrence Wright’s God Save Texas. The full text is on Kalder’s own website. Entertainingly, while the review itself…
From Lee Watkins’s blog – Henry Miller’s Christmas
One of the nice things about growing older is that you lose some of the inhibitions about admitting you haven’t read a particular writer. One of the less nice things…
A first hand account of being in the eye of an online shame hurricane – “Shame Storm”, Helen Andrews |
At First Things, a highly thought-provoking essay by Helen Andrews on online shaming, and specifically her own experience. One of the most repellent features of online and social media discourse,…
Against the inspirational
A while back I posted about what I called the Inspirational Imperative; the pressure to craft suffering and distress and setbacks into more-easily-digestible, feelgood stories of “inspiration.” The need to…
Tim Miller on the Bush funeral and “the sad truth of public theatre”
At his blog Truth and Silence, Tim Miller has a post on the funeral of George H W Bush and what it reveals about the media and our culture.. We have…
Os Guinness on suffering in the digital age
The Table podcast features an interview with Os Guinness by Evan Rosa. Os Guinness is indeed the great-great-grandson of Arthur Guinness. This hasn’t exactly insulated him from suffering – two…
“I’m actually a quite different person, I just never get around to being him.”
I came across this quote by Jonathan Trejo-Mathys via The Frailest Thing blog – the concept of the “ever denser web of deadlines required by the various social spheres” reminded…
Séamus Sweeney 