The August 8s :: Blogs

The August 8s :: Blogs - The most thought-provoking and world-opening blog posts I've stumbled on in the month of August

Recommendation :: The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight :: Gina Ochsner

Hands down, Gina Ochsner's The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight is the best book I've read all summer. Incredibly beautiful, deeply true, heartbreaking and funny.

Give it a read. (That's all I'll say)

Also: Meghan Young published a stunning review in The Other Journal. This makes for good reading too.
"An Ancient, Unbroken Song: A Review of Gina Ochsner's The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight"

Review :: The Red Letters Project :: Book of Matthew

I got excited when I saw that ViralBloggers had a musical interpretation of the words of Christ from Matthew up for review. Me and music go way back, just like me and the Gospel of Matthew. An artist can open up new ways of seeing familiar things. This happened for me my junior year of college with Apt.Core’s Rhythms of Remembrance; the Lord’s Prayer became the beat I live my life to with the song “Kingdom.” I hoped that The Red Letters Project: Book of Matthew would break me open to something new in the same way.

I was excited enough to save the three-disc project for a six hour road trip to visit some friends and their new baby in Evansville, Indiana. There is a lot of artistic space in Jesus’ words in Matthew. As I inserted disc one into my car CD player, I hoped Mario Canido (the artist behind TRLP) would open up the text of Matthew like a prayer candle in a Byzantine monastery.

Review :: This House of Sky :: Ivan Doig

If you want to see the country, there's no advice better than that of Peter Jenkins: Go on foot, with your life strapped to your back and, hopefully, a friend and a good camera by your side.  There's no other way to get to know the breadth and depth of the land on a personal basis.

But if cross-country backpacking isn't for you, Greyhound is a good second. Maybe crowded, usually behind schedule, often hot, cramped, prone to arguments and the occasional fistfight, Greyhound pushes travel up in your face (and in your nostrils). It's a journey not simply through miles and landscape but through people, the ones who get on and off at each stop for a smoke and chance to stretch out their legs.

I've just returned from a few weeks by bus, a pilgrimage to my birthplace to help my family reroof their secondhand farmhouse. As the bus moved me from the treed hills of Wisconsin through the cornfields of Minnesota and the stark, unending sky of North Dakota, I completed another journey: Ivan Doig's memoir, This House of Sky. My dad lent me the book with a high recommendations two years ago, and I first peeled back its cover somewhere in eastern Montana, that time by car, as we drove home. Two summers later, the time had come to see Doig through to the end.

I'm glad I did. Making the rounds of White Sulphur Springs' bars and cafes with Doig, riding miles of potholed highways in the Smith River valley, fighting the windblown drifts high in the Big Belt Mountains--these are all pieces of life, memories and stories I share with Doig. These people, these places, this way of life brings me home.

The July 8s :: Blogs

The July 8s :: Blogs - The most thought-provoking and world-opening blog posts I've stumbled on in the month of July