Ethan Richardson is a contributing staff member for Mockingbird. Born and raised in Lexington, KY, he graduated from the University of Virginia in 2009, majoring in Religious Studies and English. In June of 2011, he finished two years of teaching 5th grade in the inner city of New Orleans, and now lives in Charlottesville, VA and works for Mockingbird along with serving at Christ Episcopal Church.
n+1 has a new piece on the changing landscape of the “sellout,” and the assertions of authenticity that have been re-shaped in the relationship between art and commerce. Evan Kindley is writing a review on a few books in the topic, one of which is spotlighted, by Timothy Taylor, The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. Going back to the origin of music being used for advertising ends, the book archives the radio-days of musicians crafting Lucky Strike jingles, all the way to the visual age of musicians having their own songs (and personas) implanted into…
We have posted one of Brian Jay Stanley‘s essays before, and heaven knows we’ve posted nearly everything that’s come from the Opinionator’s “Anxiety” series. This one is an unique take. Stanley here is talking about the body-soul/body-mind dualism we still believe today, the gnostic cleanliness we desire over the viscera and guts of nature. We are made anxious, in other words, by the body and the parts of nature’s innards we cannot control. Stanley points to Plato’s discourse of mind over matter, and inverts it: as much as we’d like to lord our big hearts and nervy wits over the…
A wheelhouse piece, just in time for Mother’s Day: a litany of confessionals from the mothers of America about their partners-in-crime. It seems–as ever–that Dad could do more around the house, that his “assistance,” if it is there at all, becomes one more thing (or two, or three…) that requires surveillance and handholding and discipline. In other words, for most mothers, the father becomes another child. And for the most part, he is a more difficult child, because of what he should be.
This is not so much a repeat post on the “manchild syndrome” as it is an interesting glimpse…
1) The Atlantic provided an insightful zinger to the finger-waggers of today’s adultescent. Looking at today’s young people, of whom I am one—blogging away, shoes off—the piece is a response to the recent cover article of Time magazine, “The Me Me Me Generation.” The Time piece is a backhanded spotlight on the millennials, a heat-ray at their unique and insipid self-absorption, their phones, their extended stays at home. Contrary to this, Elspeth Reeve writes that the Me, Me, Me Generation is every generation—that we’ve been locating (and writing about) the narcissism of youth since we’ve written. She then delineates a…
Modern Reformation’s May-June issue is out! If you haven’t already picked up a copy, this issue, entitled “Wired and Tired,” deals mostly with this our age of technology, and the unexpected weight it has brought to its users. Coming from the angle of identity and authenticity, one of the featured articles comes from yours truly. In it I’m discussing the era of social media, and its connection to the era (my era) of the validated child. For children raised in the 80s and 90s, with destiny- and distinction-talk portioned at the dinner table and decorating public school banners, these same…
This week we slip into the mind of George Saunders, contemporary and friend to the late DFW, and colleague of Mary Karr at Syracuse University. “Winky,” a very short story, was published here in the New Yorker for you to read in full (if you are a subscriber), or you could just buy the collection of stories (highly recommended), Pastoralia.
“I’m lost!” You cried. “I’m wandering in a sort of wilderness!”
“Hey, You, come on over!” shouted a girl across the stage, labeled “Inner Peace.” “I bet you’ve been looking for me your whole life!”
“Boy, have I!” said You. “I’ll be right…
We know the old trope, either in family sitcoms or from within our own dramatic units: the inner-mirror moment when we realize we’ve just said something we always hated our parents saying. We find ourselves–or someone close finds us–doing the things we promised we’d never do when we got out of the house, when we one day had kids, when we held a steady job… The revelations in these vernaculars are generally lighthearted, but not all are, and it is nearly always painful to see that we have “accidentally” become the non-example we had striven to prove wrong.
This is what…
1) The Chronicle released a preview last month to Wiman’s newest piece of work, My Bright Abyss, which we’ve already pulled from a couple of times, here and here, and the life and the illness that spurred it. Jay Parini writes that poetry criticism and commentary began by pulling the fabric of a piece of work as closely as possible upon the tables of lived experience, but Parini also notes that contemporary criticism has become so po-mo-phobic of plainspeak that it winds up saying nothing at all. But Wiman, on the other hand, with sickness, has been voided of this…
This is–who knew?–Rodney Mullen’s TED talk at University of Southern California, on innovation and imagination, and its connection with belovedness and freedom. As you’ll remember, we recently covered Rodney’s ethereal wisdom in DZ’s Bones Brigade review–a Netflix streamer we couldn’t recommend more highly. Here Mullen talks, among other things, about the Nobel Prize as “the tombstone of all great work” and, conversely, about losing’s connection to creativity, and creativity’s inseparable tie to individuality and belonging (ht PB).
P.S. For more skateboarding-related wisdom, this time of a spiritual variety, Christian Hosoi is no poseur, either.
Over at the The Atlantic, Emily Esfahani Smith released a book review-slash-sociological study last week on the relationship between ambition and community. She sets up her article on the recently released memoir of Rod Dreher, whom we’ve mentioned on here before, entitled The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, A Small Town, and the Secret of the Good Life. Ruthie Leming is Rod’s sister, the sister who stayed home in small-town Louisiana, who embedded herself in her childhood community, who embraced the ordinariness of her present and who, in her time of great and unexpected weakness (cancer), found…
Here, in the title essay for Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss, he talks about the perennial nostalgia “seasoned” Christians tend to feel about the faith of younger years. Often selectively remembered (and often unhelpfully untrue), selves of the past are conjured up as a judgment upon the faith that is lacking here and now. We think about the devotion we used to have, the fervor. We used to journal, we say, we used to pray, really pray, as we walked to work–bible studies used to feel like something. Now it doesn’t so much–so what does that say about where the…
For you have I been absent in the spring
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leapt with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew;
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose.
They were but sweet, but figures of delight
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those;
Yet seemed it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.
In an interview about his new release, Phosphorescent’s Matthew Houck described the title as something of a self-rebuke: “If you see someone who is getting uppity, you might just say to them, ‘Hey, muchacho, settle down.’ I was in Mexico, by myself, feeling pretty raw, and I remembered a line in a Neruda poem somewhere. I can’t even remember what it was, but it was something like, ‘This is how it is, muchacho.’” It doesn’t take long in the album to get the sense that he felt Neruda was talking to him, that Muchacho is complementary to its predecessor, aptly…
You think you know me? Well, I know you Deputy Marshall Raylan Givens. I know you like to shoot bad people…I heard about you shooting that gun thug in Miami, but you know? At any point, when you were looking at that gun thug, did you see your daddy’s face?
These are the words of Boyd Crowder, longtime friend and archenemy of Raylan Givens, in the show’s pilot episode. In the modern carriage of the Western Sheriff trope, Givens represents the unbending, truth-toting hand of justice. And with this trope—of law and order and “shooting bad people”—comes the necessary prospect any…
1) If you are a sports fan, today is (arguably, I know) day two of the best four days in college sports every year. March Madness has begun, and Grantland is the place to be for the most hare-brained predictions and analyses—including a Charles Barkley shark jump and a Marshall Henderson moment only Marshall Henderson could think up. It’s not all fun and games, though—this story on the South Dakota State University Jackrabbits is one of the best team profiles I’ve read in a while. I defy you not to root for this team in the tournament, even it means…
karen: Nick: I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your columns/posts at MB. Than...
Melissa: Is jake smith's breakout session available on audio?...
Tricia: Or the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert where Coca Colas, beer, ...
Ken: This reminds me of the story of Bill Graham explaining basic economics...
David Zahl: Matt- Not sure if you've had the chance to read My Bright Abyss yet, ...