the semester is just about over, with only one more to go. i’m looking to apply at trinity in the next month or so, just as soon as i can get through the necessary standardized testing. the MAT. i won’t be starting for another year and a half, but i want to maximize my chance of getting scholarships and/or grants. most of my work is done for this fall, barring a couple small papers and final exams.
not much else to report at this juncture. i don’t much like living at home. too much commotion, late into the night, with nowhere to go. but i’ll be there probably for the next year, since i can’t justify paying for an apartment with so many pending financial obligations. i just want my own space. every day after dinner i try to think of somewhere to go and just sit, look at a book, do homework, dick around. but nowhere. i don’t ask much, and even still i’m unsatisfied. it probably reflects on my pessimistic outlook on life and general analness.
i’m going to be working in aliquippa, pennsylvania next summer, just north of pittsburgh, at a non-profit ministry that joel repic (a tfc graduate of a couple of years ago and former classmate of mine) has started. it’s an inner city ministry working with at-risk kids and their families. aliquippa was the site of huge steel mill which went under in the eighties, leaving the city a complete economic disaster. it will be a big challenge personally but i stand to learn a lot. dean, evan and i spent fall break in aliquippa with joel and his wife chelsea. dean has spent the last couple of summers there getting things started with joel and the rest of them, and he's pretty sold on it. i can’t lie that i was pretty taken with it myself. it’s a destitute place but there is a real sense of community among joel and his friends, a sense of purpose and resolve. the kingdom of God taking root among the poor and underpriviliged.
been trying to read more poetry, the gaping hole in my reading. hopkins, eliot and frost. slow going, of course. reading stuff that’s so dense (think the quartets) is initially very frustrating, just like writing it is. i was talking to a couple at lunch the other day who each confessed to hating poetry: spoken with an air of being above it, as in “i get art, just never cared for poetry. it’s just never worth bothering with the stuff.” the whole genre in one swell foop. i was pissed off for a while after that. how can anyone be that dense? naivete doesn’t account for it. this bible college i go to… sometimes i just don’t know anymore. my own efforts at writing over the past month or so have yielded some results, but it’s all pretty limited in scope. i seem to be writing the same stuff over and over. it’s such a discipline, just when you might be tempted to think of art as spontaneous or immediate. but there are a couple of new contrail songs which are really pretty, both in sound and components. i haven’t really enjoyed playing this much in a long, long time. maybe ever. we’ve got a show this weekend for the hometown kids and i really hope they turn out; if they do it could be a great night.
reading:
t.s. eliot: the four quartets
robert frost: in the clearing
listening:
new contrail shit
"But God's own descent" by Robert Frost
But God's own descent
Into flesh was meant
As a demonstration
That the supreme merit
Lay in risking spirit
In substantiation.
Spirit enters flesh
And for all it's worth
Charges into earth
In birth after birth
Ever fresh and fresh.
We may take the view
That its derring-do
Thought of in the large
Is one mighty charge
On our human part
Of the soul's ethereal
Into the material.
-frontspiece from "In the Clearing" (1962)
