Critic Cal

As someone with a healthy recognition of my need for the mercy of God, as well as a less-than-healthy capacity for shame and religious anxiety (people, we really need to help each other learn the difference), Psalm 51 – King David's great prayer of contrition and repentance – has long been close to my heart. Have mercy on me, O God,     according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy     blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,     and cleanse me from my sin! ( Psalm 51 :1-2) But I've had a growing unease with it ever since the following was pointed out to me. "Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight..." confesses David to God (Ps 51:4). Meanwhile, the short context-providing note at the start of the psalm explains the particular sin which has prompted this humbled outcry: "A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba." If "...

Every Christian in Rightville liked Christmas a lot... But the Liberals, who lived left of Rightville, did NOT! They wanted to swap it for "holiday season"! And Rightvillers knew that they knew the true reason: It wasn't about a desire to be broad; It wasn't to make it so none were ignored; Those Liberals were out to destroy their religion Beginning by banning their bestest tradition! What next? It was surely a slippery slope From “Warm Season’s Greetings!” to loss of all hope. There’d be boys dressed in pink! Girls playing with trucks! And both made to study that “theory” of Chuck’s; While restrooms would sink into free-for-all madness, And teens would know how to use condoms for badness, And most of each hard-work-earned dollar would go Towards helping the lazy die slightly more slow. Now the Trump, in his tower, gazed out on the land Thinking, “How can I make myself EVEN MORE grand?” So he looked down on Rightville, and saw their distress Wit...

This is a poem I started and abandoned a few times over the last year or so. Recent events have helped edge it towards something more of a thing. NIGHT TERRORS   Through dark and lonely reaches of the night It hunts me with a restless ruthlessness: The question — what if They in fact are right? They say it all comes down to might on might, And mine I cannot muster to contest Alone, and in the darkest realms of night. The world has ceased to render black and white To me; I do not know; I fear to guess; To Them, there is no question but They’re right. They vouch that They are walking in the light While, “wilfully contrary”, I digress And wander lonely in the dark of night. I am the orienteer of my plight. To retrace now would be to acquiesce… I cannot countenance that They are right. Day dawns, and braver others rise to fight; Till dusk there’s rumours of a just redress. But then I am alone, and it is night, And in the summing up, They’re counted right...

A thing that I made for  Sophia Network's Poetry Month  ...                  JARRING                  ...that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.                 She was always giving him lip                 these days; she used                 to hold her peace, at least, he mused.                 He was the pain in her neck that would                 not lift; she’d left   ...

There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening—and he was among the victors! He lived on Park Avenue, the street of dreams! He worked on Wall Street, fifty floors up, for the legendary Pierce & Pierce, overlooking the world! He was at the wheel of a $48,000 roadster with one of the most beautiful women in New York—no Comp. Lit. scholar, perhaps, but gorgeous—beside him! A frisky young animal! He was of that breed whose natural destiny it was…to have what they wanted! ( Tom Wolfe , The Bonfire of the Vanities ,  ch.4, p.100) Sherman McCoy is (at least, at the start of Wolfe's 'quintessential novel of the 1980s') a Master of the Universe. The realisation dawns on him "one fine day, in a fit of euphoria, after he had picked up the telephone and taken an order for zero-coupon bonds that had brought him a $5...

patriarchy , n .  Pronunciation:  Brit. /ˈpeɪtrɪɑːki/ , /ˈpatrɪɑːki/ , U.S. /ˈpeɪtriˌɑrki/ Forms:  15 patriarchie , 16– patriarchy .  1.  A term used by feminists, to blame men for all their problems.  Jane: "Why have we ran out of bread?"  Gill: "Because of the patriarchy."   Ooh, those cheeky  Urban Lexicographers ! Still ... they kinda got a point, right? It does  seem a fair amount of feminist fuss about nothing. Women these days ... I mean, career advancement can be slow for those insisting on the whole 'time off to play with babies' thing, but we've got jobs ... the vote ... I'm pretty sure the Spice Girls never would've happened if Patriarchy. Not to mention Buffy. Work hard, make smart choices, quit complaining ... you'll do fine, ladies! Worked for me. Well done me. Well done for being white, Western, wealthy, heterosexual, educated, childless .... Hmm. Thing is, see (I'm starting to, a bit, I think) -- this is...

Was reminded of this when trying to say whatever it was I was trying to say last time I tried to say something . I know, I know ... it's cheating to re-punctuate but it's the best I could manage so far. Who'd have thought a form with only five distinct lines could prove so problematical! I TRIED (a triolet) The whole world set to fighting; I tried to be the one who didn't. Envy, rivalry, back-biting – The whole world! Set to fighting It – contenting, quieting Myself – I found I was no different. The whole world set to. Fighting, I tried to be 'the one'. Who didn't?  Carolyn Whitnall, August 2014 "What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spe...

I wasn't going to write anything about 12 Years a Slave ; if ever there was a film which speaks for itself... But the morning after seeing it I was reading Habakkuk, and found in there a striking unison: O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save? Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted. […] You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he? ( Habakkuk 1 :2-4, 13) Much of the rest of the short book is about the terrifying judgment of the Lord. The sort of stuff that attracts a considerable amount of bad press around "the God of the Old Testame...

First Witch When shall we three meet again In thunder, lightning, or in rain? Second Witch When the hurlyburly's done, When the battle's lost and won. Third Witch That will be ere the set of sun. First Witch Where the place? Second Witch Upon the heath. Third Witch There to meet with Macbeth. (Shakespeare, Macbeth , Act I, Scene I) That fateful meeting on the heath plants the seed of a dark ambition: Macbeth is to be king of Scotland. He eagerly believes the witches' prophecy -- though not quite enough, it seems, to prevent him taking matters into his own hands. Spurred on by Lady M, he murders the visiting King Duncan as he sleeps, and frames his servants in the morning. Duncan's sons flee in fear, and Macbeth assumes the throne. And then, objective ostensibly gained, all manner of madness proceeds ... Macbeth, remembering the witches' other prediction that his friend Banquo would be father to a line of kings, is racked with anxiety at this thr...

America. The near future. Society has run to seed. Promiscuity, prostitution and sexual degeneracy are rife. Abortion, contraception, nuclear radiation, toxic waste and STDs are taking a worrying toll on birth rates. Women are objectified, degraded by pornography, at risk of sexual violence. This unwholesome nation is in desperate need of the reinstatement of some good old-fashioned Biblical values. And so (according to Margaret Atwood 's awfully superb work of dystopian speculative fiction ' The Handmaid's Tale ') a subtle coup is staged. An apparent terrorist attack destroys the President and most of Congress, and throws the country into a state of emergency. The Constitution is suspended. The "Sons of Jacob" movement sets to work "restoring order". Non-white people are shipped to "appropriate" homelands. Women are returned to their "rightful" stations, as baby-makers and domestics. It becomes illegal to employ them, and at a...

"I promise that I will do my best To do my duty to God; To serve the Queen, To help other people, And to keep the Brownie Guide Law." We'd chant this soporific, semi-circular in front of a melamine toadstool and a formidable middle-aged woman known only by the misleadingly congenial title of 'Brown Owl'. And then we'd dance around the toadstool, singing a song about the propitious time of day to the tune of Big Ben. And then we'd ceremoniously dismantle the toadstool and return its various parts and accoutrement to the cupboard. And then we'd break out into our sixes: Elves, Sprites, Pixies, Fairies, Imps and -- by far the least attractive or agreeable of the legendary supernatural namesakes, and therefore necessarily the one to which I was assigned -- Gnomes. And then we'd get to work devising desperately futile money-making schemes, all with the stated aim of finally, one day, restoring to its former glory our dear Brownie hut, burnt entire...