Today’s service is the blessing of the animals, and the congregation is clustered on the lawn with designer dogs on extendable leashes and mysterious scuttling boxes lined with hand towels and one leopard gecko that, waiting for its blessing, relieves itself on its young owner’s father. He scrubs at his shirt at the sink in the church basement, where J and I are helping to set up for the post-service coffee hour, halving banana bread and quartering bagels and decimating cantaloupe. The man blessed by his son’s gecko may need to be reminded of the copy on the service’s tri-fold program: We do not bless animals to make them holy; we bless them because they are already holy. The program asks us to save animals like Noah, to care for them like Francis. It reminds us of upcoming youth group events.
All posts tagged: 2014
Rehab
I did not know who Bowe Bergdahl was when I first heard about him on the news in June. I followed his rehabilitation, which was briefly reported for a week or so and happened in ordinary details. Sergeant Bergdahl was returned from Afghanistan through a prisoner exchange with the Taliban, who had held him for five years. He was welcomed back by his parents and President Obama in front of the White House press corps in the Rose Garden.
Review: Land of Love and Drowning
Book by TIPHANIE YANIQUE
Reviewed by
It’s hard for anyone to write a magical realist novel today without inviting comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez. Especially in the wake of his death this year, the Colombian literary giant has been mythologized as the master of blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. Tiphanie Yanique’s debut novel Land of Love and Drowning is a magical realist work that calls to mind García Márquez, yet still manages to stake out new territory—both geographic and literary.
Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Yanique’s novel is a multigenerational saga.Land of Love and Drowning traces the story of a Virgin Islands family over six decades of the 20th century. The novel opens in 1917, just as the islands of St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix are transitioning from Danish to American rule. When a shipwreck kills Captain Owen Arthur Bradshaw, patriarch of the Bradshaw family, and his wife dies soon after, sisters Eeona and Anette are orphaned and forced to fend for themselves. Yanique’s novel follows the lives of these two women as they attempt to work their way out of their newfound poverty, experiencing a string of ill-fated love affairs along the way.
Texas Book Festival
Join The Common at the Texas Book Festival! Come to the Kirkus Reviews Tent on October 25 at 4pm, where Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker will be moderating a conversation between Matthea Harvey and Nicole Callihan, “WordArt”:
Poets have a knack for creating brilliant images by using only words. But when visual art is added to the mix, these poets elevate their work from beautiful to something truly magical. Join Matthea Harvey and Nicole Callihan as they discuss how they ignite the imagination through the combination of image and word.
Issue 08 Launch Party
Join us at The Monkey Bar in Amherst on Wednesday, October 22, 6:30–8:30pm for an evening of drinks, games, prizes, and scary stories. Featuring Ralph Sneeden, Amity Gaige, and Katherine Jamieson.
Ask a Local: Jason Hardung, Fort Collins, CO
With JASON HARDUNG
Your name: Jason Hardung
Current city or town: Fort Collins, Colorado
How long have you lived here? I moved here from Cheyenne, Wyoming in 2003. Although, some family members have lived here my whole life, so I wasn’t brand new to Ft. Collins. I have been coming here to visit my whole life.
Pen Pals
By ALAN BARSTOW
With a respectful snap she beckons. She points to capital letter-less prose. Purple ink. I’s dotted with hearts or stars.
“Sir, what does it mean ‘What is your tribal name?’”
Thoreau’s Borderlands
In Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking” he writes, “Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.” It is this longing for wildness that drove Thoreau to live and continue to return to Walden pond; to seek out nature whether along rivers, or the seashore, in the Maine woods, or his home town.
But at times Nature complicates Thoreau’s idealism by presenting raw, untamed forces—true wilderness, rather than just wildness—that stand in stark contrast to the pastoral that he often evokes in his writing.
Spritehood
The continent, it turned out, was not ready for people. The settlers chopped down every tree and killed every animal, then started in on each other. They hoarded finite resources—furs, lumber, ore—until there weren’t any left to use. Counterfeiters discovered a way to alchemize gold, bringing about hyperinflation and economic collapse. The strong terrorized the weak, not just once but repeatedly, hounding them through one life after another. Normal people became outright thugs, enacting fantasies of domination. Dominated people had a tendency to become informal police, enacting fantasies of justice. Every so often a server crash would plunge everyone weeks into the past, to the most recent backup.
The Teak House
I like pressing my cheek up against the cool embrace of the teak floor, letting the chill lap against my face, chest, arms, and legs. I especially like the feeling of a freshly mopped teak floor. The wood becomes softer, more soothing like a cool straw mattress in the hot summer. When I walk barefoot, the gentle tickle below my feet beckons me to lie down. I like the rush of wooden veins flowing underneath my thighs and arms, brushing them into slumber.I’ve tried resisting the temptation on many occasions, but I always succumb to the elbow-rubbing intimacy that ensues. Remain too far away and there is nothing to smell. Rub too close and all the pleasure is gone. But get close enough to brush your tingling nose against the grainy grooves on the surface and you become lost in the aroma. I steal another whiff; the smell is subtler than rosewood, more subdued than pine, but sweeter than cedar.