‘The seminary building, parked smack in the middle of the campus, looked west to Davis Hall (women), south to another women's dorm building, and east to the vocationless, unharnessed men of Beast Hall. What did they expect, with so many earthly reminders of flesh around us? Out of the fourteen young men who discerned the call, few, very few, made it to ordination.’
There are problems with this picture. One, we’re not all there, and two, the photo itself is impure. The man in the middle, without a hat, is a Yankee, somewhere from Peoria or Des Moines or one of the right-angled states of the Midwest. He was a friend; but he was not one of us. We were from Tenn…
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‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘The burden in law on the pregnant person is to show that they are at risk, in need; they must ask, and hope, rather than demand.’
Memoir by Andrea Brady.
‘When I was growing up in his house, religion was his crutch, a justification for his behaviour.’
Kevin Childs on growing up queer in a Catholic household.
‘I used to be ashamed of it, though I’m not sure what exactly felt shameful.’
On training to be an opera singer.
‘A state of grace, Lispector writes, should be short-lived, episodic.’
Sinéad Gleeson on Clarice Lispector’s Brazil.
‘As I began to flip through a literary magazine, I was stopped by a photograph of myself as a young girl, standing beside my college professor.’
‘It’s about the music of it. “It’s Hollywood,” Mario said, and assured me the same is true of political speech-making.’
