April 22, 2013 • 1 note
Pardon me for being so reactionary, but religion itself was never as shaming nor as degrading as this society we’ve built for ourselves. At least the Christian religion (in its original form) had a mechanism to cope with these pressures; you speak to a priest, you confess your sins, you do penance and are forgiven of those sins so that you may live your life. But nowadays we’re not just asked to be our own priests; we’re told implicitly by society that if we do anything wrong whatsoever, we’d better damned well keep it a secret, because if the public finds out, we will be forced into a kind of shame and self-loathing that will make life so unbearable that death will seem preferable. And every single person we know, everyone we meet, everyone we see will encourage this perception of ourselves. We tell ourselves that we’ve freed ourselves from morality and moralism, that we’re no longer held hostage by those ideas from the past; what we’ve really freed ourselves from is mercy, forgiveness, compassion, and love. And disturbs me in a way that I have trouble adequately expressing.
Astounding that this reflection on ever-remembering social media and modern culture’s lack of forgiveness could be found on, of all places, Metafilter. Despite the depiction of “the Christian religion (in its original form)”, the whole bit is worth reading.
April 16, 2013 • 2 notes
It happened one day when we was coming on to some holy feast or other. I was in the kitchen yard helping cut up a pig they’d slaughtered for it the day before. I’d been there for the slaughtering as well, catching the blood in a pail for black pudding when they shoved a knife in its throat and helping drag it over to the pile of straw where they got twists for singeing off the bristle. We poured water on the carcase and scraped it and singed it again and finally with a gambrel between the hind legs hoisted it up to a crossbeam. Then a monk with yellow braids sliced open its belly and groping around up to his elbows delivered it of a steaming tubful of pink slippery insides I carted off to the kitchen in my two arms. They left it hanging overnight to cool with a sack wrapped around its long snout to keep the cats from it and the next day after matins the yellow-braid monk and I set to cutting it up, Ita being at her quern across the yard from us. Hams, trotters, eyepieces, ears for making brawn with, brains, chops—we was laying it all out in the straw when Ita come over and drew me aside to where we kept a black stone on the wall for whetting. She told me with Jarlath’s leave she wanted me to go with Brendan though she didn’t so much as know my name then.
“It’s a smirchy sort of business you’re at with that pig, some would say,” she said. “There’s many a monkish boy either he’d beg out of it or turn green as a toad doing it. But it’s neither of those with you, I see. You could be laying the holy table for mass the way you set those cuttings out. That’s the deep truth of things no matter or not if you know it.”
Ita’s eyes disappeared entirely when she smiled.
“Smirchy and holy is all one, my dear,” she said. “I doubt Jarlath has taught you that. Monks think holiness is monkishness only. But somewheres you’ve learned the truth anyhow. You can squeeze into Heaven reeking of pig blood as well as clad in the whitest fair linen in the land.

From Frederick Buechner, Brendan, pages 34-35.

Smirchy and holy is all one, my dear.

April 8, 2013 • 4 notes

Democratic capitalism is only a way station along the way of the destruction of the ancient world.

Rich Bledsoe, “Christian Imperialism”, over at Trinity House Institute. A dense and at times opaque article studded with some absolutely thrilling distillations of what it means for Jesus to be King—the above quote is among the least of these.

March 12, 2013 • 1 note
I’m made for this summer logging,” said Arn Peeples. “You Minnesota fellers might like to complain about it. I don’t get my gears turning smooth till it’s over a hundred. I worked on a peak outside Bisbee, Arizona, where we were only eleven or twelve miles from the sun. It was a hundred and sixteen degrees on the thermometer, and every degree was a foot long. And that was in the shade. And there wasn’t no shade.
From Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams (p. 16)…
March 1, 2013
I hefted the chain and swung it at the table like a biker taking out an unsuspecting member of a rival gang. It rattled across the surface and the nails and chainsaw pieces bit fast into the wood. Extracting the weapon, I examined my work. In just three seconds I had added forty years’ worth of hard-won experience and poignant memories to about two square feet of the tabletop. The center board had a terrific gouge from where a chainsaw tooth had torn up a chunk of pine from around a nail hole.
Me, from “Selling a Table”, published at the worthy Curator Magazine.
February 25, 2013

The Moral of Pierre by one Timothy Burke

I’m not sure who Timothy Burke is or where exactly he’s coming from, but this is a superb piece on how neoliberal societies try to get people to change:

“If you want an explanation of the meanness of 21st Century American public discourse, for the fractures in the body politic, this will do as a starting place. “Get that guy to wear his helmet, because otherwise he’s going to cost you money.” “Get that woman to lose weight, because otherwise she’s going to cost you money.” “Hassle that couple because their kid plays too many video games and might slightly underperform in school and not make the contribution to net productivity that we are expecting of him.”

Questions concerning how people treat one another, I believe, are ultimately theological. Whatever we think people are will determine what we think the problems are and why we must solve them. If we think of people primarily as gobs of material or units of economic activity, then we’ll get diagnoses like the above-quoted. 

But what would happen if we acknowledged man as the image of God, as capable having his humanity completed and fulfilled in Christ, brought into the fellowship of the Trinity, and finally able to live at peace with himself and his neighbor? 

January 2, 2013
There are meals that come in courses. Meals that use broths boiled for 24 hours, cuts of pork kneaded daily for a week. Meals in which humans share their humanness and become open and vulnerable with one another. You could call my hamburger a meal, but then you’d have to call piss marks in the sand a work of art.
My friend, Josh Stevenson, who wrote Fed with the Burger of Tears.
November 28, 2012

There’s a sweet spot on a rifle trigger where just an ounce more of pressure will fire it. There I held my finger, waiting for my shot. Twice, and then three times, the barrow paused, almost at the right angle but never quite. A fourth time, and he paced again. I grit my teeth and snorted, tense and rigid. He circled around the pen again and barely glanced at me.

Into the muddle of “dammits!” and “stand stills!” in my head, I fit a prayer for his swift death, then exhaled slowly. On his next circuit, he paused a fifth time, the spot just twelve inches from the muzzle, my eyes on it, his eyes on me. I gave the trigger that one more ounce.

In a thousandth of a second: he jerked his head as if startled by the pop; a black hole appeared on the bridge of his snout; he screamed and rammed the fence by Rusty, shoving his snout underneath the wire and lifting the entire panel.

Me, in a piece I had titled “One Shot”, but now called “Dispatch from Idaho: Shooting the Hog” over at Curator Magazine.
November 16, 2012 • 1 note
From The Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog:  Item #02-6818686 Waffle batter dispenser Williams-Sonoma says: ”Measures out uniform circles in three sizes.” Price: $29.95 Notes from Drew: How about a spoon? How about you use a fucking spoon to dole out your waffle batter? The waffle iron itself tells you when it’s had enough batter. If you overload it because you’re a fat greedy pig, the batter spills off the side. You don’t need a dispenser. OH BUT HOW WILL I KNOW I’VE USED THE EXACT RIGHT AMOUNT OF BATTER?! Now this waffle will never fit in my grain sack!

From The Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog: 

Item #02-6818686 Waffle batter dispenser

Williams-Sonoma says: ”Measures out uniform circles in three sizes.”

Price: $29.95

Notes from Drew: How about a spoon? How about you use a fucking spoon to dole out your waffle batter? The waffle iron itself tells you when it’s had enough batter. If you overload it because you’re a fat greedy pig, the batter spills off the side. You don’t need a dispenser. OH BUT HOW WILL I KNOW I’VE USED THE EXACT RIGHT AMOUNT OF BATTER?! Now this waffle will never fit in my grain sack!

October 30, 2012

Interviews with writers I love in The Paris Review

Not necessarily in any order of preference:

Walker Percy

Marilynne Robinson

Tobias Wolff

Tom Wolfe (Somehow I can still say this even after reading that 700-page bowel movement called A Man in Full)

Honorable mention (because he was interviewed by Ron Hansen, not because I’ve knowingly read a word he’s written): John Irving

And a couple with the next two writers I plan to dive into: Barry Hannah and Raymond Carver.