Drew Darby > Recent Status Updates

One can dream, right?? Don't laugh!

"Knowledge is either poisonous or healing...One has to have a double attitude about it, the teaching of the felix culpa."

As I'm reading about the young James Joyce, I'm slightly intimidated by the writer, who presents snippets of writing from Joyce's teenage years and then casually remarks how amateurish and "silly" they are, when in fact I would have been quite impressed to receive a piece of writing of comparable quality from a student of mine! Another comment on the sorry state of education today?

If the concept of the hero is a physical one, then, just as Alexander the Great acquired heroic stature by modeling himself on Achilles, the conditions necessary for becoming a hero must be both a ban on originality and a true faithfulness to a classical model; unlike the words of a genius, the words of a hero must be selected as the most impressive and noble from among ready-made concepts.

Can there be any worse defeat than when one is corroded and seared from within by the acid secretions of sensibility until finally one loses one's outline, dissolves, liquefies; or when the same thing happens to the society about one, and one alters one's own style to match it? (p.48)

"Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too."

"Now, for the existentialist, there is really no love other than the one which manifests itself in a person's being in love. There is no genius other than one which is expressed in works of art; the genius of Proust is the sum of Proust's works; the genius of Racine is his series of tragedies. Outside of that, there is nothing. Why say that Racine could have written another tragedy, when he didn't write it?"

Yeah yeah, I'm on a Japanese kick. A friend's mom gave this to me, said I'd like it. Pretty entertaining, but could probably use a good scissor-job from an editor. The post-Perry era of Japanese history is terribly interesting though.

The stories have been pretty good so far. As the title indicates, the anthology covers an extremely interesting and fruitful period of Japanese literary history, a period which, in my opinion, has produced some of the greatest writers anywhere ever. I'm excited to find some more favorite authors among this lot, and I may have found one--Hori Tatsuo. His story 'Les Joues en Feu' was very nice.

Very interesting, but also pretty difficult to keep track of all the different kami. Sometimes I feel like if the names were transliterated, rather than being rendered so literally, I'd at least be able to keep tabs on some of them. Some of my faves so far are Master-of-the-Temple-of-Inada-Eight-Eared-Deity-of-Suga and Truly-Conqeror-I-Conquer-Conquering-Swift-Heavenly-Great-Great-Ears. Haha

I'm loving this book so far. As someone who grew up in the Vineyard, I've gotten more than one quizzical look in reaction to where my spiritual path has led, and I've been on the lookout for helps such as this in articulating why the ancient faith and practice of the catholic tradition means so much to me.

Reading this as part of my Lenten devotions. Another review mentioned that the person didn't like that it was divided up by Mathewes-Green for the 40 days of Lent, but I think it was a stroke of genius. The Canon of St. Andrew is wonderfully suited for this time of the liturgical year. I'm benefiting immensely from it so far.

This book is amazing. Honestly, I'm surprised at how entertaining I'm finding it to be!