Plan B or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Special Fields Exam
An unexpected call, just before the exam starts. A worried glance down at a phone, a quick “excuse me.”
Ben DeVries (’15) graduated with degrees in literature and writing. He and his wife Jes, a fellow Calvin grad, live in Champaign, Illinois, where Ben is looking to add some letters behind his name. On the academic off-seasons, he reads fantasy and works as a glorified “go-fer” at the Champaign Park District. He’s been known to make a mean deep-dish pizza.
R is for Rapture
Maybe my own childhood obsession with Jesus’s nuke-bright descent onto little Lansing, Illinois, reflected my peripheral engagement with wider, turn-of-the-millennium Evangelical culture
Jes
Between the Jes I think I know and that other Jes, the inexhaustible Jes, the one who slips briefly into view whenever she offers an unexpected comment, a laugh out of place, a sideways glance.
Palate Cleanser, Palate Changer
Although my diet has, in some respects, shifted closer to the views I first formed in college, it has remained effectively the same.
The Goats, the Sheep, the End
I’d go as far as to argue that we crave fictions of the end.
Beelzepup: One Year Later
So here I now find myself, a year later, not with a record of instances—some long calendar of thresholds met and surpassed by Jes and me and Toph—but with the accretion of slow change.
The King Is Dead. Now Bury Him.
What would it mean for Game of Thrones if, after expressing such disillusionment with the myth of the rightful ruler, it conjured up exactly that ruler to conclude its story?
The VeggieTales Effect
I want to get at the heart of your questions by offering some modest but practical advice for cultivating a more omnivorous media diet.
Going Back
So what happens, then, when this desire for mastery, reinforced by habit and nourished by the stories we tell and the media we consume, begins to look elsewhere for fulfillment?
Aquaman and Its Discontents
While the film isn’t without interesting ideas—the notion of an environmental reckoning, for one—these ideas dart, glimmering and mostly unconsidered, through the nets that Aquaman reserves for its preferred but drabber game: the return of the king.
All I Want for Christmas Is You (and Single-Payer Healthcare)
We call this tradition—because why wouldn’t we—our “Filling Out of the Carle Foundation Hospital’s Application for Financial Assistance Christmas Tradition,” or FOCFHAFACT, for short.
Imagining the End
What matters here instead is the implicit challenge, the casual middle finger, that the novel tosses off at the rest of the genre.
Wish It Was Sunday
“I think the water’s boiling, Jes.”
“Can you get that?”
“Caffeine or decaf?”
Cthulhu Fhtagn
So, we should ask again, and with renewed urgency: why Lovecraft? In the face of his cultural saturation and manifest awfulness, how do we account for and reckon with his appeal?
Pete
All I know about the donut scene in Champaign, Illinois, I owe to a man named Pete.
Read fantasy. Not much else. Mostly Tolkien.
For a long time, my reading habits resembled a Michael Pollan polemic, if Michael Pollan had been trying to cure the Western diet with genre fiction instead of carrots: Read fantasy. Not much else. Mostly Tolkien.
To Be Intimate
Or to put it another way: what happens when marriage comes to be defined by the promise of sex?
Enter Toph
I spent a good chunk of my prewriting time for this blog post keeping Satan at bay.
Looking At, Shooting At, and the Weirdness of Annihilation
We’re used to standing apart from the places we occupy, fillers and subduers of the earth that we are.
We Would Prefer Not To
Turning out in droves despite rain and wind and snow, we marched and chanted and beat on bucket-drums and blew on whistles and papered the campus with fliers. We disrupted classes. We shut down buildings.
In Solidarity: A Letter before Striking
I do not want to strike. No one wants a strike. But if it comes to it, Jes and I will be on the picket line February 26, bright and early, because at that point we will have no other choice.
The X-Files Season 11: Still Waiting on the World to End
Season 11 aired its first episode on January 3 of this year and picks up, sort of, where its predecessor left off. I say sort of advisedly.
Poetry and Padawans, with Apologies to My English Teachers
Still, having experienced it myself now, I can sympathize with the twinge I’m about to give my many well-meaning English teachers when I divulge this next bit of information.
Reticent Wizards and Founding Fictions
“Merdarth, general of the Dark Lord’s army, stood, terrified, before the Orb.”
Stumping for Calvin
If nothing else then, the Illinois Regional College Fair confirmed for me what I already knew: I would make a terrible salesperson.
Chocolate Milk
The smoothies are revoltingly healthful. One recipe, dubbed “The Beginner,” calls for pear, banana, pineapple, avocado, and a full six cups of kale.
Farewell, Orphan Black
Like any good sci-fi tale, then, Orphan Black is finally far less interested in predicting what might be, than it is in describing what exists now.
Wiggles and Jiggles
The cheese cube relish, while very much not my thing, had a sort of melt-away pickle flavor that was not wholly unpleasant.
Mega Screen
Two weeks ago, in the lead-up to a concert, I got to read poetry off a video screen that was larger than the end zone of a football field.
Cheesecakes and IRB Forms
Toward the end of the graduate bible study my wife and I led this past academic year, two things were almost always certain: cheesecakes and IRB forms.
