Author: D. A. Hosek
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Catholic Nerd Pilgrimage: St John of the Cross (one day late)
St John of the Cross parish has a Sunday evening Mass, a practice which has a sentimental attachment for me. Arriving at the church in the darkness of December, the first thing I noticed was a collection of handicapped spaces that rivals the size of some parishes’ entire parking lots. The liturgy itself was solidly…
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Catholic Nerd Pilgrimage: Shrine of Our Lady of Guadupe (three days late)
I’ve been trying to give priority to shrines when they’re an option, so for Our Lady of Guadalupe, I drove up to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe which claimed on its website that it would be holding a 7p Mass. As near as I could discover on arrival, there was no Mass taking…
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New poem: Corpse in the mirror
Whenever I write an 8-line poem, I find myself wondering if it can be turned into a pantoum, a poetic form which takes 8-lines of poetry and twists them into something else. As a sort of deterministic randomizer, this sort of thing felt like a good fit for the Dada issue of Exacting Clam and the…
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Writerly resolutions: November status
So I attempted to be a bit more focused in these last two months of the year, with minimal success: Read through We, the Rescued at least once and get my editorial notes in place: I’ve read 17 out of 29 chapters. I was hoping to have read the whole thing by now, but I think…
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A visit with my younger self: 22 May 1989
It’s kind of interesting to me how memory works: with no context, the bit about the Danaïds was sufficient for me to remember that I wrote this in a motel room in St Louis on the first trip I took to teach LaTeX classes. This was at a defense contractor in St Louis which dealt…
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Beautiful sentences: Roberto Bolaño
Veo el perfil de Neruda y el mío, pero en realidad me engaño, es sólo un árbol, veo un árbol, la silueta múltiple y monstruosa de la hojarasca, como un mar que se seca, un dibujo que sugiere dos perfiles y que en realidad es una tumba al aire libre partida por la espada de…
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Eternity
A week ago I saw a screening of the new movie, Eternity, which was a decent enough romantic comedy set in the afterlife.¹ I’m not going to write a review of the film itself, but instead there were two aspects of the afterlife as presented in the film that really captured my attention: First, the idea…
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Catholic Nerd Pilgrimage: Saint Columbanus (Saint Moses the Black)
Today is the feast of St Columbanus (albeit superseded by the feast of Christ the King). A number of options today, including an actual Christ the King parish, but I went with St Moses the Black (whose building was originally St Columbanus) because I really needed some Black church in my life. And while the…
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A visit with my younger self: 23 February 1989
I think at this point I may have been either on my way back to Chicago after dropping out of college or already there. I was largely writing down story ideas at this point. Plot line: a young man is dating a girl who cheats on him because he doesn’t have sex with her. The…