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 will be moving back to Charlottesville, VA to work with Mockingbird and serve in the Fellows Program at Christ Episcopal Church.
If you’ve seen the trailer for Virginia, Dustin Lance Black’s newest film, you would be hard-pressed to find something resembling the narrative simplicity of his greatest inspiration, When Harry Met Sally. There’s guns, sons babying moms, politician affairs, and yet his favorite scene–his most returned-to scene, he told NPR–is that emblematic Meg Ryan-Carrie Fisher “Rolodex Scene.” When Harry Met Sally is the classic rom-com. Palatable love loss, recovery, reuniting–it’s the narrative spun in most of its kind following, a love against all odds, a love returned. It’s a narrative, I think Black understands quite rightly, that we all long for.
It…
So often we talk about how much we hunger for the burden to be taken from us; we beg mercy. We communicate a wanting for something other than the mode of exchange that so elementally buries us. And yet, and yet, most of the time, we don’t really want it. Our bondage, our birthwrought marriage, subsumes even our desires–that our fidelity to the Law (and its punishment!) fills the comprehensive whole, to the very inner-self. Freedom renders anxiety. When it comes down to it, we want the Preacher of Proving, we want the Very Right Reverend Reciprocity. This from Chapter…
Another gem from the Johnny Cash Files:
So when this Day was ended / I was still not satisfied
For I knew ev’rything I touched / Would wither and would die
And Love is all that will remain / And grow from all these Seed;
Mother Nature’s quite a Lady / But you’re the one I need
Flesh And Blood need Flesh And Blood / And you’re the one I need.
In line with the boomers-stickers speech from Wendell Berry, Christian Smith’s Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood is a sociological look into the hyper-relativist boom-ist mentality of today’s 18-23 year old. His book identifies five of the premier values of emerging adults today (consumption, sexual relativism, binge drinking, political apathy, etc.), all of which point to an infantilized adulthood, an adulthood priding itself on mobile acceptance, a conception of freedom which paradoxically kills it. Smith is a bit heavy on the criticism, to the point that his understanding misses empathy, as well as too much of the…
And little by little, Google crafts a creature-comfort Terminator. Here’s a look into the anticipated Google Project Glass:
It’s not that these probably won’t be the norm in five years–it’s that I always wanted to be the Terminator, and yet this Terminator is so lame. This Terminator is still kind of a control-freak, a hollow-bodied, short-attentioned ukelele-lover. He’s not an explosive-toter, a renegade Savior–he’s a Manhattan dweller who still doesn’t know where the Strand is, much less can he remember when a show is, or how long ago his friend said he’d meet him for “Mud Truck”. Bah! That sounds just…
For anyone unaware, the Opinionator over at the NY Times has been on a roll lately. Whether it’s a memoir, a pop psychology piece, an odd look into time zones, really thoughtful writers are bringing out really interesting stories that connect. The most recent being this piece from New York artist David Kramer, talking about his bouts with anxiety, his strange love for his anxiety, and his strange love affair with cigarettes–the choice coping mechanism he uses to steer it. Seriously potent self-descriptions and a relatable anthropology to boot, Kramer points the problem back at himself, looks with a questioning…
And he said, “Let the little children come to me.” A New York Times article that gives us an amazing portrayal of the lengths to which we go to accessorize and craft an identity that will justify us. Interestingly, Jesus tells us, like Charles James, that we must become little children: “Most American fashion is based on older women trying to look like babies.” Ironically, this trend towards the accessorization of children, and the fashion industry’s relevance-seeking chops, has inverted the biblical paradigm–and children are becoming adults, way too soon.
In the last year or two, Lanvin, Gucci, Stella McCartney and…
Last Monday, Wendell Berry, widely known as today’s quotable agriprophet, America’s modern man of letters, was given the prestigious honor of presenting the Jefferson Lecture, the nation’s highest prize for “distinguished intellectual achievement.” What he spoke of–beyond his grandfather’s h0meland loyalty and the tragic industrial legacy of James B. Duke, for whom Duke University is named–was an ethic of affection, a turning way from the Diaspora of Modern Mobility–our privatized and lonesome Babylon–a repentance and return to a culture of sympathetic humility to one’s own. Berry’s essay was titled “It All Turns on Affection.”
I am from Kentucky, my family has…
Weary with toil I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head
To work my mind when body’s work’s expired;
For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see:
Save that my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which like a jewel hung in ghastly night
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.
Lo, thus by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee, and for myself, no quiet find.
As if there weren’t enough people writing about it already, I suppose for posterity’s sake we’ll continue unfurling the scrolls. Apparently there’s an opinion out there that says that if we’re everywhere at once, we’re nowhere at all. That technology–most significantly the ever-presence of the smartphone, the synced life, the facebooked life–has kept anyone from knowing anybody. Why, though? Having a sister who lives 2,000 miles away, I’m glad I have a chance to watch my nieces and nephew grow up by way of her Instagram updates. Is there anything wrong with that? It’s a great way for me see…
Premonition
Take Shelter at MOVIECLIPS.com
Premonitions of a storm coming, a storm that turns your loved ones into something they are not–strangers dangerous, poisoned, violent. The storm comes and things are taken–the life you’ve known is under alarming arrest–and your power to resist it is futile. The storm stands in your window and stares at your children, it surreal, god-like lifts your home and all that is within it, it rips from you the order you’ve had in control up to this point and gives you the life of Job–a storm-squalled widower made widower by a private act of God.
Well, it’s…
I’d selected Fielding and my other hosts after scrolling through hundreds of profiles, winnowing out those whose narratives included “party,” “vegan,” and “free spirit,” and the phrases “I believe in the journey,” “Never stop learning, never stop loving,” and “Burning Man.” Among those to whom I did not write “couch requests” were a “travelling magician and professional fool” from New Mexico; a sixty-three-year-old gay semi-retired handyman in Pahoa, Hawaii, whose mission is “looking for more nudists”… another Hawaiian, this one describing himself as “just a guy who has three acres of land, living in a shipping container house”; a woman…
Mockingbird’s 5th annual New York City Conference is a week away and we are honored to present, during Session C of Friday’s breakout sessions, the poet Brad Davis, who will be reading from his new collection of poems, Self Portrait w/ Disposable Camera (as well as his inspired Opening King David collection, which we’ve highlighted on here before). An accomplished poet, Davis’ poems in this new collection have been published in such journals as the Paris Review, Image, Poetry, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. Davis has an indelible fixation on the confessional moments of Coram Deo, the presence of God…
From Cormac McCarthy’s spare tour de faith, in dramatic form, between Black and White. Black has “saved” White from an attempted suicide–a head-on leap into an oncoming train, the Black-nomered “Sunset Limited“–a “saving” White didn’t want, a “saving” he still doesn’t want. Black, though, is a man of hope, an ex-con and ex-addict, and sees his life in light of the providence of God. White, on the other hand, sees randomness and discord–Sound and Fury, if you will. Black and White are confronting the love of God and the depths to which it descends–does God love those who do not…
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