See also an adapted AA saying in this evening's previous post,
and Mary Karr in a "Damnation Morning" post.
Monday, June 27, 2016
View from a Member
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Sunday, April 10, 2016
Bodies for Crosses
The saying of poet Mary Karr that
"there is a body on the cross in my church,"
together with the crosses of the previous post,
suggests a synchronicity check of the
date discussed in that post —
“Be serious, because
The stone may have contempt
For too-familiar hands”
— Adrienne Rich in “The Diamond Cutters” (1955)
Blackboard Jungle , 1955 —
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Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Surrealistic Alarm Clock*
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Sunday, September 27, 2015
Box Office
This suggests the recent link (in the Sept. 22 post Geometry for Jews)
to the post Red October (Oct. 2, 2012). That post mentioned the first
version of Hotel Transylvania.
See also Mary Karr's look at American culture in today's NY Times
Sunday Book Review .
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Monday, June 30, 2014
Toward Evening
(Friday’s Latin Club posts, continued)
The poet Allen Grossman reportedly died in
the morning on Friday, June 27, 2014.
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Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Brightness at Noon (continued)
The eight parts of the semaphore circle
in the previous post suggest some context
for Fritz Leiber's eight-limb "spider" symbol:
See Mary Karr, Time on the Cross, and chuahaidong.org.
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Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Labyrinth 23
The title refers to a search (see below)
suggested by three things—
- David Foster Wallace biographer D. T. Max—
"There's a note in one of my files where he says something like,
'Infinite Jest was just a means to Mary Karr's end, as it were.' " - "There is a body on the cross in my church ." —Mary Karr
- A body.
The search— Labyrinth 23.
(Within the search results, note particularly the post "The Infinity Point.")
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Thursday, May 24, 2012
Dark, Dark, Dark
|
From her left arm hung a black handbag that closed with a drawstring and from which protruded the tip of a silvery object about which I found myself apprehensively curious. Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question. The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent.
Except for the bangs she wore her hair pinned up. Her ears were flat, thin-edged, and nicely shaped, with the long lobes that in Chinese art mark the philosopher. Small square silver flats with rounded corners ornamented them. Her face might have been painted by Toulouse-Lautrec or Degas. The skin was webbed with very fine lines; the eyes were darkly shadowed and there was a touch of green on the lids (Egyptian?—I asked myself); her mouth was wide, tolerant, but realistic. Yes, beyond all else, she seemed realistic. |
|
You’re not afraid to show yourself at your lowest ebb. In Lit, you stop breast-feeding because you’ve started drinking again. You describe yourself hiding in a closet with a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of Listerine, and a spit bowl. It’s not a proud moment. The temptation in Lit was to either make myself seedy or show some glamour. But there wasn’t any. It was just dark, dark, dark for days. Ugly. Were you surprised by how deeply people related to this dark stuff? If I’m doing my job then I’m able to make the strange seem familiar. Bad memoirs try to make the strange stranger, to provide something for people to gawk at. I try to create an experience where no matter how bizarre something is, it seems normal. I don’t want readers to balk, I want them to be in the experience. My goal isn’t for people to go, “Oh, poor little Mary Karr,” but rather to have the reader go, “I can be an asshole too,” or just to have enthusiasm for the possibility for change. |
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Sunday, March 27, 2011
Frames
"I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids."
— Mary Karr, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer"
See also "Signs and Symbols."
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Sunday, March 13, 2011
Twenty-Four
"Poetry never left me stranded, and as an atheist most of my life, I presumed its mojo was a highbrow, intellectual version of what religion did for those more gullible believers in my midst— dumb bunnies to a one, the faithful seemed to me, till I became one.
In the Texas oil town where I grew up, fierceness won fights, but I was thin-skinned— an unfashionably bookish kid whose brain wattage was sapped by a consuming inner life others didn’t seem to bear the burden of. I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids."
— "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer," by Mary Karr
"The original movie had been slowed to a running time of twenty-four hours.
What he was watching seemed pure film, pure time.
The broad horror of the old gothic movie was subsumed in time."
— Point Omega , by Don DeLillo
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Sunday, July 12, 2009
Sunday July 12, 2009
In honor of
William York Tindall
(yesterday's entry):
A Literary Symbol
for Boyne Day
Mary Karr was "an unfashionably bookish kid whose brain wattage was sapped by a consuming inner life others didn't seem to bear the burden of. I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids."
Click for animation.
Karr is Catholic.
Geneva is not.
Related material:
Calvinist Epiphany
for St. Peter's Day
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Saturday, March 21, 2009
Saturday March 21, 2009
Interpreter's Booth
Tonight's online New York Times:
Tonight's online New York Times:
Click to enlarge.
Mary Karr,
"Facing Altars:
Poetry and Prayer"–
"There is a body
on the cross
in my church."
Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman
in "The Interpreter."
Click to enlarge.
"My card."
|
"Is Heart of Darkness the story of Kurtz or the story of Marlow’s experience of Kurtz? Was Marlow invented as a rhetorical device for heightening the meaning of Kurtz’s moral collapse, or was Kurtz invented in order to provide Marlow with the centre of his experience in the Congo? Again a seamless web, and we tell ourselves that the old-fashioned question 'Who is the protagonist?' is a meaningless one."
|
— Wayne C. Booth, p. 346 in
The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961),
as quoted by Paul Wake in
"The Storyteller in Chance"
The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961),
as quoted by Paul Wake in
"The Storyteller in Chance"
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Friday, January 9, 2009
Friday January 9, 2009
Stories
for Mary Karr
for Mary Karr
"In reality, my prose books
probably sit between
I Was a Teenage Sex Slave
and some other contemporary
memoir written in five minutes…."
— Mary Karr in the NY Times
of July 6, 2007
See also
Ballet Blanc
and the true story
0, 1, 2, 3, ….
"In a dream scenario, my memoirs…
would find another shelf.
They’d sit between St. Augustine
and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory…."
— Mary Karr, loc. cit.
Recall the
mnemonic rhyme
"Nine is a Vine."
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Monday, July 28, 2008
Monday July 28, 2008
Continued
“There is a body on
the cross in my church.”
— Mary Karr, quoted
here on July 10, 2007
From Jan. 20, 2004,
opening day of the first
Tennessee lottery–
Song of the Father
“Gonna buy me a shotgun,
long as I am tall,
Buy me a shotgun,
long as I am tall,
Gonna shoot po’ Thelma,
just to see her jump and fall.”
— Jimmie Rodgers, known as
“the father of country music.”
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Monday, July 16, 2007
Monday July 16, 2007
Confirmation
“They took all the trees,
put ’em in a tree museum
and they charged the people
a dollar and a half just to see ’em”
From an article (full version contains spoiler) on Bridge to Terabithia:
“In the book, a girl named Leslie Burke moves in next door to a chore-ridden farm boy, Jess Aarons, and imagines for him a kingdom she names Terabithia. Over a fall and winter, they ride the bus home from school together (sharing a seat in spite of catcalls from schoolmates), dump their backpacks at the edge of the road, and run across an empty field to the edge of a creek bed, where ‘someone long forgotten had hung a rope.’ They use the rope to swing across the gully into Terabithia, a wooded glade that Leslie makes magic….”
Art by Wendell Minor from the cover
of Magic Time, by Doug Marlette
From Bridge to Terabithia:
“I know”– she was getting excited– “it could be a magic country like Narnia, and the only way you can get in is by swinging across on this enchanted rope.” Her eyes were bright. She grabbed the rope. “Come on,” she said.
LOS ANGELES – Roger Cardinal Mahony, leader of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese, the nation’s largest, apologized yesterday for what he called a “terrible sin and crime” as the church confirmed it would pay a record $660 million to people sexually abused by priests.
“Magic Time”—Mary Karr,
“Facing Altars:
Poetry and Prayer“–“There is a body
on the cross
in my church.”
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Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Wednesday July 11, 2007
… And One More
for the Road
cartoonist and author
of Magic Time.
for the Road
In memory of Doug Marlette,
cartoonist and author
of Magic Time.
Marlette died in a highway
accident yesterday at about
10 AM CT. He was
"on his way to Oxford
[Mississippi]… to help a
troupe of high school students
put on a play based on
his nationally syndicated
comic strip, Kudzu."
— Chris Joyner,
Clarion-Ledger,
Jackson, Mississippi
Log24 yesterday,
7:59 AM ET:
Mary Karr,
"Facing Altars:
Poetry and Prayer"–
"There is a body
on the cross
in my church."
"I started kneeling to pray morning and night– spitefully at first, in a bitter pout. The truth is, I still fancied the idea that glugging down Jack Daniels would stay my turmoil, but doing so had resulted in my car hurtling into stuff." —Mary Karr
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Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Tuesday July 10, 2007
Fewer frames
for Mary Karr
for Mary Karr
Mary Karr was “an unfashionably bookish kid whose brain wattage was sapped by a consuming inner life others didn’t seem to bear the burden of. I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids.”
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Tuesday July 10, 2007
Pulp Fiction
“There is a body on the cross in my church. (Which made me think at first that the people worshipped the suffering, till my teenage son told me one day at Mass: ‘What else would get everybody’s attention but something really grisly? It’s like Pulp Fiction.’ In other words, we wouldn’t have it any other way.)” —Mary Karr
Corpus Hypercubus,
by Dali.
“Does the word ‘tesseract’
mean anything to you?”
— Robert A. Heinlein
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