August 27th, Feast of St David Lewis, martyr and the last Welsh Jesuit for 322 years
This is the Feast of St David Lewis, a Jesuit priest and martyr killed in 1679 for being a Catholic priest: David Lewis was born in Abergavenny in the year…
Category: complexity
Helen Andrews on the corporatisation of morality
A while back I featured Helen Andrews’ superb “Shame Storm” which drew on her own experience of online mobbing to look at the wider phenomenon. She has a new piece…
The late Michel Serres on angels and messengers
At the start of this month, the French thinker Michel Serres died aged 88. He had an eclectic range of interests, as evinced by his Wikipedia page: Over the next…
“The Sonnet Is Dead”, a sonnet by Joanna Cleary
From the Summer 2018 issue of Temz Review here is a sonnet (of course) by Joanna Cleary. I like its ironic treatment of contemporary lit crit certainties. And of course,…
David Monacchi: “Fragments of Extinction”, the sounds of vanishing nature
With the prospect of mass extinction in the news, it seems a good time to reflect on the loss of soundscapes. In Ireland, the corncrake and the curlew were once…
L.M. Sacasas on accusations of romanticising the past.
At The Frailest Thing blog, L.M. Sacasas identifies something I’ve often noticed and wish there was a handy word for: Steven Pinker and Jason Hickel have recently engaged in a…
” To Be Perfect Is to Have Changed Often”
It’s been a while since I posted anything linking to Adam deVille’s blog but I was struck by the title of the book he considers here. I am curious to…
Apologetic temperance
At The Frailest Thing, LM Sacasas has a post on digital detox provoked by this New York Times piece by Kevin Roose. The whole thing (in both cases) is worth…
Séamus Sweeney 