Sinead, check in!

I have read that Ireland's health workers have the world's highest rate of Covid-19, so please check in Siobhan Sinead. I'm worried about you.  Reader response is (obviously) low these days (moral of story: don't  put up and close down blogs every couple of years), but occasionally I wonder how my old readers are doing. 

Meanwhile, I have finished my review for Peter Kwasniewski's Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright (Angelico Press, 2020). I possibly went overboard on the feasting analogy, but I discovered it was the best way to describe the structure and properties of the book. One day I hope to write something with as much substance--something as meaty, as it were.  But what I most admire about Peter K is that he works on his writing craft day after day. 

Kwasniewski is prolific, but he's not cranking it out. He's thinking, structuring, and polishing those lovely or striking metaphors. Back in Jesuit theology school, I was taught to mark up books with symbols denoting desolation, consolation, new ideas, important information, and questions. For PK I have added a little daisy for phrases or sections I find particularly lovely. It's moving that in promoting the Traditional Latin Mass, Kwasniewski is striving to write about it as beautifully as he can. 

"Beauty will save the world," said Fyodor Dostoevsky. I learned that in Jesuit theology school, too. 

Now on the top of my pile is Fr. Armand de Malleray's X-ray of a Priest in a Field Hospital.  What works in a homily does not necessary work in a book, so I have no idea what to expect. I've reviewed three Kwasniewski books now, so I will begin reading his next with a general idea. I was going to say that nobody (except Peter and Angelico Press) will want me to review PK's next one, but it occurs to me that I am developing much background knowledge. I can say authoritatively "This is an improvement on his last" or "This element that so distinguished his last is sadly MIA." 

My undergraduate English professors at the University of Toronto were very old fashioned, fortunately for me, and I believe they were all New Critics. What this meant, in practise, is that they trained us to read every word of the books we read and judge the works on their beauty, balance, shapes--I'm not articulating this correctly. At any rate, I can tell you that the last words in Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright are "Printed in the United States." That's how hard "read every word" was banged into me as an undergrad.  Naturally I am teaching my homeschoolers to read every word, too, and to look at how essays, stories and novels are structured.  

I have just pondered what a feminist critique of Kwasniewski's works would look like and shuddered.  On the other hand, I have been out of academia so long, I don't know what the latest fashion is. Possibly students of English Literature no longer write essays but defecate on books in public and then set fire to them as their classmates film the acts and post them to Instagram. When one of the hopeful sprigs of the local TLM indicated a desire to study English Literature at university, all the university-educated adults in earshot shrieked in horror.

On second thought, though, I suppose a student might be well-served by the English Department at a Newman-approved college. Also, I do read and write for a living, so my B.A. in English Lit/Classical Civ. was not useless, however I feel about my appalling English Lit M.A.  Still, my undergrad professors were New Critics, and may God's perpetual light upon them. May those no longer with us rest in peace. (Special mention of Fr. Charles Leland, CSB, whose rendition of the first lines of A Streetcar Named Desire, once heard, could never be forgotten.)