Juxtaposition

Posted on by albrooke

Having just finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s masterful An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s (2024), I came across an article by Lisa Russ Spaar. “Maximalisma,” The American Scholar (May 16, 2025) [link].

Start with the book. The late Dick Goodwin and Doris Kearns Goodwin were each important people in the lives of JFK, LBJ and RFK before they married. They were Zelig-like in their ability to be in the background of truly important events. The premise/impetus for the book was that Dick Goodwin saved everything from drafts of presidential speeches to the shattered nightstick he picked up in a Chicago hotel (after Eugene McCarthy talked the police out of punishing the college students they had incorrectly thought had pelted them with debris). He kept every kind of paper and memento in 100s of banker’s boxes. With the Goodwins’ recollections of events and DKG’s historical research, they went box-by-box through the Sixties. After his death in 2018, DKG wrote this amazing book about the time, their times, and their day-by-day journey through the boxes. This book was wonderful.

Then today Austin Kleon Alan Jacobs Lore Wilbert Sarah Rowell Nate Silver Neil Paine Joe Posnanski Andrew Sullivan Robin Sloan, no, Cherie Harder [link] sent out a link to the article. It was an excellent insight in to the mind and attic of the person who saves just a little too much. Spaar says:

  • I have to admit, at 68, that all of these “things” comfort and inspire me no less than my college dorm room décor helped me, 50 years ago, feel like the person I wanted to be. At the same time, however—perhaps because I’m closer to Erikson’s stage eight now—I do worry about those who will have to make their way through all of this meaningful-to-me matter if I don’t do it first. It’s not so much that I don’t want my grown children (or worse, my grandchildren) to come upon that small batch of youthful Polaroids (where are they?). Or to plumb the histrionic depths of my teenage journals. Or to dig out, with disbelief, that long-unused bit of lingerie from the bottom of a drawer. It’s that I feel a responsibility, after a lifetime of gathering, to cull those personal treasures.

Or, hey, maybe she should write a book! Yes, THAT’s why I am saving all this stuff!

Worth your time

Posted on by albrooke

The Trinity Forum, The Rabbit Room, and the WindRider Institute sponsored a conversation with Makoto Fujimura yesterday, and it was a delight to “get to know” this painter. Here’s the [link].

Makoto Fujimura, “Walking on Water: Azurite II” (2016) (Taipei City).

He spoke generally about “Art + Faith: A Theology of Making” but these nuggets especially caught my attention:

  • how “forced binaries” (conservative-progressive, left-right, etc.) satisfy our “lust for certainty”;
  • how the Japanese art of Kintsugi (which “repairs” broken pottery and calls attention to the repair, where the Western goal is to make it appear that there was never any break) may inform how we are to receive other broken people; and
  • how there are still “burning bushes” though we have stopped taking our shoes off.

Well worth an hour of your time. Watch, don’t just listen, for Fujimura’s delightfully expressive and joyful face.

I hope you have been following the ever reliable Sarah Willard (Blind Mule Blog) and Alan Jacobs (Snakes and Ladders), as both have been amazingly prolific over the last few months. Don’t wait for me to point you to specific posts!