Random Musings

 Kathryn Hughes

She is quite right to point out contradictions, and to blame Hetta Howes for presentism, whether that is the result of trade publishing or not. Dr. Fitzgerald was always on us about not using the word "feminist" to refer to medieval authors. At the time, I found that difficult to workaround (but they were!) but now that feminism has become synonymous with a lot of girlypop girlboss gatekeep gaslight nonsense I think it is better to highlight both discrepancies and what we would consider victories. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. Small rebellions gave way to us being able to vote in 1919. I won't spit upon my mothers. 

I am, however, very sick of modern diagnoses for religious phenomena (says the girl who claims Catherine of Siena had an eating disorder, instead of arguing that she was truly sustained by Christ; I think both things are true. There is a poem about John the Baptist, very homoerotic, that says something like, he comes to me smelling like garlic and I rejoice that he delights in his food, and from a man who ate locusts in the desert and repented, I love that; that Jesus came--as Jesus himself said, Eating and drinking, that man might call him a glutton and a drunkard. A time for fasting and a time for feasting). I do not think Margery Kempe had post-natal psychosis. I think that's bollocks. 

Dana Gioia 

It's like coming home to academia. I have no idea in what this article was published--First Things?--but his insistence on defining terms and his use of big words (I had to Google "tendentious") reminded me of any academic article written by one holier-than-thou. (What is Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All For you?).

If Catholic literature is not necessarily "explicitly religious," would The Sparrow or even Rumer Godden count as such? He doesn't mention her, Gioia doesn't. 

I do not recognize half of the names he brings up; he expects us to already be familiar with his reading library. I have heard of Confederacy of Dunces, although I could not tell you the first thing about it, never heard of Anthony Burgess or Ron Hanson, although Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark are familiar names, even if I couldn't speak to them (Waugh I have the distinct sense I ought to know something of; Spark, after reflecting, I have a book out now from the library, yet to be read). On page 35 he starts to list more names, few of them familiar and the ones that are, Flannery O'Connor excepted, do not strike me as Catholic (Jack Kerouac! Ernest Hemingway! No, no.) I have tried to read A Canticle for Leibowitz but cannot get past chapter one. 

More names on page 36 spark familiarity: Thomas Merton, Sigrid Undset, Czeslaw Milosz. Rene Girard, though? Of the triangle? 

My question is, If these authors are all truly Catholic writers--not ones bound up in religion through some strangeness of Gioia's--why did they stop being read? Why has only Tolkein survived, when even Chesterton, much beloved, is hard to find in stores and not widely read or known, when everyone knows Tolkein? Flannery O'Connor at least I read in high school--is she still read? 

The great and present danger to American literature is the growing homogeneity of our writers, especially the younger generation. Often raised in several places with no specific cultural or religious community, educated with no deep connection to a particular region, history, or tradition, now employed mostly in academia, the American writer is becoming as standardized as the American car--functional, streamlined, and increasingly interchangeable. Yes. Books nowadays seem either to be set in LA or NYC and there is no other place where life happens. 

Have we considered ever doing an English class on literature of the church? But I suppose, We don't have many religion majors now to take it.