Friday Links
Presentation of the Virgin Mary and the Virgin of the Burning Bush
December 20, 2024
I hope everyone is having a Blessed Advent. As we come closer to the end of the year, I want to thank all of you for reading and sharing Friday Links. It’s so much fun to get to do this week after week because it offers me the opportunity to share the wonderful and good work that is being done by so many artists. And, sometimes, to point out concerns for our community, and for the arts in general. Thank you again for reading, writing, and sharing.
May God bless you all and may you have a Happy and Holy Christmas, Love, Mary
While All the Earth in Darkness Sleeps
The Ghosts in the Machine: Spotify’s Plot Against Musicians
Out of the Vortex
The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction
Black Elk's Gift of Healing
T.S. Eliot and Abraham Lincoln: Christian Humanists
While All the Earth in Darkness Sleeps
This is truly glorious. The music is by Frank La Rocca with words by James Matthew Wilson. This production of the Benedict XVI Institute was performed at Star of the Sea in San Francisco December 15, 2024. If you have the financial means, I beg you to become a patron of the arts (if you aren’t already) and help to bring beauty such as this into the world. The world is gasping for it! I’ll make a quick plea for two organizations that are bringing beauty into the world: Dappled Things and Wiseblood Books. Please consider supporting the Benedict XVI, Dappled Things, Wiseblood Books, or one of the many other worthy organizations out there who need your help.
The Ghosts in the Machine: Spotify’s Plot Against Musicians
This is bad, my friends, from Liz Pelly in Harper’s Magazine:
I first heard about ghost artists in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was new to the music-streaming beat. I had been researching the influence of major labels on Spotify playlists since the previous year, and my first report had just been published. Within a few days, the owner of an independent record label in New York dropped me a line to let me know about a mysterious phenomenon that was “in the air” and of growing concern to those in the indie music scene: Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts. Some even speculated that Spotify might be making the tracks itself. At a time when playlists created by the company were becoming crucial sources of revenue for independent artists and labels, this was a troubling allegation.
Out of the Vortex
Jared Marcel Pollen writes about “David Jones’s parenthetical epic” for Commonweal:
Jones is exceptional for many reasons. In addition to being a poet, he was also a gifted draftsman and engraver, for which he is equally celebrated. He was one of the few “native” British modernists (so many of them were originally from Ireland or America). Though of the same generation as Joyce and Eliot, he was the last to arrive. In Parenthesiswasn’t published until 1937, at the tail end of modernism—1939 being a convenient marker for the end of the epoch, with the publication of Finnegans Wake and the start of the Second World War. And, of course, Jones is perhaps most exceptional for having been, in the most complimentary sense, an “amateur,” having never produced a major poetic work before In Parenthesis.
The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Kaye Cook and Melanie Jennings lament over what the Big Five houses have done to literature, but they offer a solution—small presses. I’m not sure the Big Five have killed literature, and, in fairness, they’ve helped it, at least sometimes, but yes, there are many good and great small presses, and they are the way:
The reader’s challenge now is to look beyond the Big Five’s mediocrity machine. This is not easy, considering how many imprints the Big Five holds, but it is possible. Readers are not just static consumers. If we choose which writers we want to read, we can also choose which publishers we want to buy from—and can recognize that, at this moment in time, the Big Five and the small presses are driven by entirely different incentives.
Black Elk’s Gift of Healing
Lydwine has taken their work onto Substack. Here Damien Costello writes on “Black Elk’s Gift of Healing”:
Brave Heart raised his staff and silently prayed, acknowledging in turn each of the six directions as he prepared to send up his voice. This mountain is a holy place. Crazy Horse fasted four days and nights in this area and received his vision, though only a few today know exactly where. Nicholas Black Elk, the Lakota holy man and Catholic catechist made famous by Black Elk Speaks, was brought to the peak in his Great Vision. Every spring, the Hehan Kaga Paka ceremony is performed to welcome back the Thunderbeings. In recent years, this mountain has been the epicenter of a spiritual shift in Native America that continues to radiate out across the globe, two waves of a single living spirit that Brave Heart has come to honor and bring together.
T.S. Eliot and Abraham Lincoln: Christian Humanists
Lee Oser writes for Religion & Liberty on the affinity, “rooted in an appreciation for people’s inheritance,” between Eliot and Lincoln:
Where Eliot speaks poetically of inheritance, Lincoln speaks to the American inheritance of 1776 and the Declaration of Independence. But Eliot’s case for sensibility and appreciation rests on a premise that Lincoln’s speech affirms: “The poetry of a people takes its life from the people’s speech and in turn gives life to it; and it represents its highest point of consciousness, its greatest power and its most delicate sensibility.” This is what Lincoln at Gettysburg achieves. His speech is the poetry of a people, given life and brought to “its highest point of consciousness, its greatest power and its most delicate sensibility.”
