K2

Mel Gibson’s Sunset Boulevard .

The wise men; Joseph; the tiny infant; Mary; The cows; the drovers, each with his dromedary; The hulking shepherds in their sheepskins — they Have all become toy figures made of clay. In the cotton-batting snow that’s strewn with glints, A fire is blazing. You’d like to touch that tinsel Star with a finger — or all five of them, As the infant wished to do in Bethlehem. All this, in Bethlehem, was of greater size. Yet the clay, round which the drifted cotton lies, With tinsel overhead, feels good to be Enacting what we can no longer see. Now you are huge compared to them, and high Beyond their ken. Like a midnight passerby Who finds the pane of some small hut aglow, You peer from the cosmos at this little show. There life goes on, although the centuries Require that some diminish by degrees, While others grow, like you. The small folk there Contend with granular snow and icy air, And the smallest reaches for the breast, and you Half-wish to clench your eyes, or st...

Has fiction lost its faith ? Not quite . Come take a gander! Sincerely, Matthew Lickona p.s. Very glad to hear that you’ve got skin in the game these days. [Thanks to IC for the tip.]

Dear friends the Earth is spinning wildly While stars collide and comets zing. The universe, to put it mildly, Is fucking strange and has a sting. The beast of Bethlehem is breathing In our breath, and time is seething To feel its swirling down the drain, Derailing like a wayward train. O Death, your lipstick and mascara And holiday cards at Christmas time Can’t hide from us your latest crime— We see your camera obscura. O Death, dear friends, let us recall The painful light that woke us all.

The Awl discovers Catholic end-times literature.

No, seriously: check him out : I wouldn’t venture to guess just how many literate Catholics really do experience their faith journeys as passages toward a certain light, but at least one memoirist, a woman named Ellen Finnigan, seems to have pushed the meat of her story back toward the dark middle. According to an Amazon reviewer, Finnigan “falls for a Nietzsche-quoting ‘bad guy’ and self-described hedonist. As they carry on an illicit office romance in the absurd corporate culture of a failing start-up, and he tries to convert her to bohemianism, she is forced to doubt and examine herself and her own weakly held convictions.” In my subprime days, I knew my share of Nietzsche-quoting bad guys, and most of them were big, leaking douchenozzles. But this one, at least, seems to have done something rare — he seems to have given God a good run for His money. I haven’t read Finnigan’s book myself, but Amazon users are going wild for it. Maybe, a little unusually for a Catholic memoirist, the...

A couple of alert young guardsmen apprehended a man clothed in four new suits. A man named Adam Connel, lurking Behind the shell of what had been The tailor’s — where his wife was working When fire’d come like Adam’s sin — Peeked in. Against the soot, red dapples Attracted his attention: apples His wife had left behind, unburned Somehow and sweet, so Adam turned And, seeing no one looking, hastened Within to have a taste. The juice Was dribbling down his chin like sluice When Adam saw the suits. They glistened Like royal robes of silken thread. So Adam put them on and fled. image source

John Zmirak has a website.

At the very end of Lent 2012 , the six members of the Korrektiv Kollektiv received, as a gift from Matthew Lickona, cartoon portraits from the pen of the wonderful Daniel Mitsui . What Mitsui memorialized in those small and startling figures, with unobtrusive allusiveness and an unsettling but corrective touch of the grotesque that exemplified the Korrektiv ethos of the classic period, was a golden age: a flowering, a ripening, the sun at zenith. But flowers fade; ripeness turns to rot; light declines toward a slow, final failure; and shadows lengthen and coalesce unto the great shade, Night, who is herself the shadow of Death. You couldn’t have noticed all that fading, rotting, and declining, though, since none of it showed on the surface — until November 1. On that day — All Saints’ Day (bitter irony!) —  a mistake was made. Now, at the beginning of Advent 2012, Mr Lickona has once again hired Daniel Mitsui — not to memorialize glory this time, b...

I guess that makes this something of a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.