q. i. f?

In the last of an otherwise not especially satisfying short series of articles for National Catholic Reporter, covering his objections to Robert Sirico‘s Catholic-flavored economic libertarianism, Michael Sean Winters arrives at something I found pretty wonderful, an idea that elevates the whole series: ‘the model for Christian creativity is the receptive, dependent, suffering creativity of Jesus, the Son’ — which he attributes to David Schindler. I take with caution Winters’ elaboration, that ‘there is nothing protean, nothing self-made, nothing frugal or thrifty, nothing self-assertive, nothing competitive, nothing greedy or self-interested in the lives of Jesus and His Mother,’ since it is certainly possible in a qualified way to see the Jesus of the gospels as self-assertive and competitive (to the point of combativeness) in his social and political context. (The all-important qualification is that Jesus’ self-assertion comes with, and for a believing reading definitely out of, a messianic self-awareness oriented to revelation and relationship to transcendent authority. It may even be promethean (as I think Winters means), in a sense, but apart from a prejudicial reading, from sources external to the narratives themselves, it can never be taken for mere self-expression or self-satisfaction.)

From the beginning of my off-&-on writing here I’ve wanted to explore my sense — from experience, mainly — that creativity is basically receptive (not to say passive) rather than productive. I’ve never really done so explicitly, though. At best, I guess, I’ve been oblique, on rare occasion — hinting I’d like to re-frame my old interest in ‘design culture’ as belonging to ‘reading.’ For one thing, my theological background just isn’t up to the discussion, and I think getting anywhere with it demands a theology. Finding Winters’ reference here gives me some hope of coming to the theme anew.

Scratchy little (~ 3 1/2” high) red pen Hellboy on 3 × 5 card. Drawing very infrequently these days. Interest in Mignola stories flagged a while back & has stayed low. But I still like the idea of playing with this.

Drawing remains irregular as ever, but here’s some head-neck-torso practice from the last couple of days to show the itch is still with me.

It goes without saying that there’s a lot of nudity to work with on the web. For this kind of exercise, though, p––n’s mostly unsuitable, in my judgment. Yoga sites (and ‘yoga’ sites, too, sometimes) turn out to be good sources, though.

Still the occasional light noodling & doodling (in ballpoint, here) on Mignola characters. Male ones, that is. I haven’t come up with the nerve to fool around with his female characters yet — though they’re key, no question, to what makes the stories appealing.

Stephen Fry, Big Think interview

Stewardship of words is a high calling, though not one that can be relegated to professionals. We are all called to be responsible hearers, speakers, and doers of the word. Still, telling the truth is something like an extreme sport for the very committed. . . . We learn, gradually, from those who do it well, how to tolerate the “intolerable wrestle with words and meanings,” as Eliot put it, and even to delight in it. We calibrate the differences between what we want words to mean and how they may be heard; we pick them up from the dusty corners where most of the good ones have been consigned to disuse and re-introduce them, hoping to ambush the listener who is contented with cliché. Like Adrienne Rich, who called herself “a woman sworn to lucidity,” we pledge our energies to the work of smithing words for purposes they have never before had to serve. We temper our urgencies (if we are inclined to prophesy) with play because no responsible word work can happen with out it . . . .

 
From Marilyn McEntyre’s Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies.

Very gradually I’ve found my way in to some fiction, even to novels, again, after a long time doing without. It’s hard to account in clear terms for getting away from this kind of reading in the first place, and likewise hard to account for coming back to it. It’s not a matter of having time for it, exactly. This kind of reading — even (or so it often felt) when it was reading that had to be done for class — has always meant neglecting other business I should, on one ground or another, be about. But it is partly a matter of practical opportunity in a different way, since I’m terribly cautious these days about buying books on one hand, and on the other rarely now feel, and even more rarely follow, any inclination to poke around in a library. What’s had to happen is some alignment of two conditions, my minimal-effort access to free or very cheap stuff and my attraction to stories conceived & written more than a few generations ago. With the internet, of course, minimal-effort access to free or very cheap stuff covers a very wide range of stuff. And a lot of it, especially stuff more likely to be under copyright, is junk or appeals to quite specific sensibilities. Then there’s the great store of stuff that is no longer subject to copyright — if you want it. The missing connection has been in that I haven’t really wanted the older, uncopyrighted stuff for a while. Until recently. Thinking a bit, as I read, about why that is, what’s changed or is changing.

Jesse Boykins III, Amorous

San Francisco Jazz Collective, Superstition

  N. Fremont Ave. & Harlem Ave.

What I know for sure is this: as much as he’s willing to work and as earnest as he is about getting straight, Will most likely will never get his GED, never get a full-time job that pays him enough to do any more than live from week to week, and, never get free of the drugs that are all but foisted on him from all sides — from family, friends, and just about anybody he meets on the street.
    The problem isn’t in Will, it’s in everything that surrounds him. As much as I dislike David Simon’s The Wire — because it’s so pessimistic — I have to grant that Simon has this much right: drugs aren’t going away. Ever.

I don’t share Tanner’s confidence about the pure exteriority of the problem this young man faces — or about practical benefits to be gained from the sweeping complex of government-administered socioeconomic measures his list of things we all ought to be able to agree on could be expected to call forth. But Tanner’s managed a direct personal & economic connection to the harshest of social realities in this part of the western world, and that puts him in a position to talk which most of the people who’d dismiss his understanding as tired leftism are far from enjoying. I’d rather know what a guy like Tanner thinks is going on, concretely, than hear many a guy to whose conclusions about healthy political and social order my own thinking perhaps comes closer. And I’d rather be a guy like Tanner, in the end.

Reinhardt, Grappelli, J’attendrai