March 17, 2014 & March 17, 1992
“Saint Jack”
“For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler.
and from the deadly pestilence.” – Psalm 91
I’m going to find this in a box in a couple of days − it would have been too coincidental to have come upon it this morning, the day it was written 22 years ago, or the date it was written; the day was a Tuesday. It’s from my cousin Jack, then a Presbyterian “minister of the word and sacrament,” serving by chance, or grace, or one of those rare odd concatenations of the two, one town over from the one I grew up in.
In our mid-thirties then, when Jack wrote, though mentally we were probably still sophomores in high school, even if we’d read a bit since then. See the reference elsewhere in the letter to Tom Jones, which was one of the books in a canon of “scripture” that four or five of us were forming to describe life as it fallibly, comically was instead of as Leviticus and the Apocalypse thought it should be. It was then, and always, an ongoing project, still in the suggestion stage. So, in the P.S., Jack is proposing Humphry Clinker.
I’ve titled this post, “Saint Jack,” partly because Paul Theroux’s novel by that name was on our list to be considered. I was pushing instead for the movie with Ben Gazzara. The canon was open in that way (as well as just open): plays, movies, music, paintings, sculptures, no category of culture − high, medium, low, or outside − ruled out. Bob Castle, a lawyer, proposed the “monkey trial,” “not the movie with whoever was in it but the trial itself, The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes," or at least Mencken’s coverage of it for the Baltimore Sun. There was some push-back. Then, Castle proposed Secretariat.
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(bicbw)
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