ABOUT MACSINCLAIR

–For issues of literature and music written with some levity, check out my pages above “Literature,” “Music,” “Literary Criticism.” I have started adding material.

I am a pixilated professor of a small northeastern college somewhere between New York and Boston, who suffers frequently from delusions that I can somehow change the world with my vast knowledge of literature. Ultimately, on a daily basis, such delusions evaporate.

Meanwhile, at a University also somewhere between New York and Boston, I am stretching out the completion of my Ph.D. for one more final semester (once again) so I can keep my medical insurance. (By the way, neither of my academic institutions is at the location pictured above.) Never before has someone taken so long to put their citations and endnotes on a dissertation! I am endlessly discovering one more article in order to add one more citation. Ironically, my dissertation is about the difficult and perplexing nature of twentieth century narrative endings.

My dissertation is titled, Narrative and Eschatology: Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and a Theology of Narrative Endings. It explores how an author and an era’s belief in eschatology (death, hell, heaven and judgment) influences the means by which narratives draw to a close. By exploring the effects that an increasingly personal relationship the human has toward death in the modern world upon the difficulty with which modern and postmodernist novelists bring their novels to an ending, I bring literary studies and Christian theology into a conversation. Waugh, Greene and Spark converted to Catholicism in the early twentieth century, a literary period increasingly hostile toward faith. All three reconcile existentialism and Christianity in their works in varying manners; however, I argue that a concern with eschatology becomes the dominant aesthetic framework for the modern Catholic novelist, which I reveal by examining the three novelists’ complex depiction of death and the perplexing endings to their novels.

It is also ironic that my dissertation proves that I am fascinated with the relationship between Christian theology, literature and literary theory, and that the novelists I focus upon are Catholic. I grew up Catholic, and remained an active Catholic for thirty six years until, one night in which I was driving from New Haven to Guilford in thunder, lightning and pouring rain, I pulled over to the side of the highway, gripped the steering wheel, and decided I had to finally come forward as a victim of clergy abuse. A year of hearing the Boston scandal on the news daily finally prodded me into action. Within a month, I went public, and stood by my name in several newspapers–which is why I have no problem being up front here–that a prominent priest, Daniel McSheffery, had sexually and physically abused me from the age of eleven until I shuffled off to college, only to endure post traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism.

I have been trying to come to terms with something which is impossible to come to terms with. I am not sure what my love for writing, literature, art, music and all of that stuff has to do with my past. I am not sure how the two will come together on this blog.

There is one thing that I am certain about: without silliness, weirdness, urgency and intensity, all which I attribute to great expression, I do not think that I could bear this world. Nor could I bear this world without glimpses of hope in humankind, which I find in family, the occasional friend and the students that I teach each semester. Despite what happened to me, too, I do believe that there is a Christianity that transcends authority, that transcends the attitude a majority of humans harbor that if might is right then wrong is quite correct.

As for silliness:

Despite the fact that I profess the enduring superiority of literature, I secretly enjoy listening to music and playing the piano and guitar more than reading.

Sometimes I produce and record record albums in my head.

My dissertation, which is relevant to about .0001 percent of the American population, spends a great deal of time on Graham Greene, who I think had a healthy attitude toward Catholicism. That is, he was never able to peg exactly what he believed.

Ever since I moved into a house I can’t afford in a town whose standard of living is beyond the means of almost every location on the face of the earth, my boarder collie has been suffering post traumatic stress.

I have a secret desire to be a talk show host. Now that Tim Russert is dead, Chris Matthews is my hero.

I entertain myriad conspiracy theories.

In the past, I have created fictitional friends who tell me government secrets.

In reality, a lot of people do seem to have a penchant for telling me their deep dark secrets.

Sometimes I feel like the soundtrack to my life is the theme song to the Benny Hill Show.

I am haunted by what has happened to Hamlet between Act IV and Act V.

I like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, the Kinks (only 1965-1970), Bob Dylan, Tom Waites, the Who (only 1965-1970), and a lot of other assorted music of that great period of 2 - 4 track recording from 1964 to 1969.

I also like Ravel, Faure, Mozart, and various other classical this’s and that’s.

I also enjoy good films, old comic strips (particularly Pogo), political banter that doesn’t go anywhere, American history . . .

I am easily outraged by the myriad atrocities committed because of greed, lust and power.

I value interpretation that can roam over many different subjects and that is willing to ask questions and explore answers without necessarily requiring a definitive conclusion.

John Henry Newman was right when he said people who quickly make their minds up tend to be bigots. Hamlet was the inverse of the bigot.