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Wednesday 2 July 2008

Update from Image

The latest Image Newsletter highlights the recent album from Sam Phillips and a collection of essays on the work of Flannery O'Connor:

On Sam Phillips' Don't Do Anything "spiritual themes drift in and out of shadow. "Can't Come Down" was inspired by a popular Los Angeles preacher from the 1930s. Struggling with faith and hope, "Signal" provides one of the album's most beautifully haunting images as the song's narrator looks for a sign, something "Between heart and skin / Through the shoulders where the wings might have been." After more than twenty years of having her ex-husband, T Bone Burnett, work the production helm, Phillips produced Don't Do Anything on her own. The result is an album of precarious and searching urgency. The listener - like many of the song's narrators - is kept slightly off balance, tottering on the brink of some loss or discovery."

"A new anthology, Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction, collects essays by ten intrepid souls. O'Connor studies is now a varied and changing field, observes Jon Parrish Peede in his introduction. Four decades after her death, dominance is shifting from those critics who knew her as a woman to those who know her as a body of work ... Critical essays like these do nothing to diminish the pleasure, shock, and devastation of the stories, and this reviewer knows because she tried it afterwards. Perhaps the highest compliment that can be paid to a book like this is that it makes one want to reread O'Connor immediately."

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Sam Phillips - Don't Do Anything.

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