Erstwhile Okie on St. Mark's Place. "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
On this Day
When my 7th-great-grandfather George McCullough died early in 1791 in his mid-thirties, his family moved onto land owned by James Daugharty who--like George--had come from Ireland prior to the American Revolution.
Daugharty charged George's widow and young children "pepper corn rent", an evidently traditional means of giving someone a place to live for a nominal amount--a single pepper corn per annum.
Came across a very brief summary of Daugharty's life which struck me as amusing:
"At or near this place once lived James Daugherty. He was a character, and if I could transfer him to paper, it would well repay that trouble; but the hope is vain!
He was an Irishman; he always kept bar, as it was called, for Major Nance, in time of court; that is he sold spirits for cash; he never gave change; he always made it his rule that the change should be taken in drink.
He was also the Sexton of the burying ground of Friends at Bush Biver. He dug a grave for a female acquaintance; by mistake, he put the head where the feet should have been. Her sister complained and said "Jamie, how could thee serve her so?"
"Done it on purpose: she never was like any body else, if you were to die, I'll dig your grave cross ways,'' was the reply.
He was a thriving farmer, always had corn to sell or give away: a poor man, Robin Perkins, came to Jamie for a grist; it was freely given, and while shelling it, dinner came on; Robin was invited in to take "pot luck." When seated, he said to Jamie, "May I say grace ?"
"Yes, say grace, poor soul."
He began and continued, until Jamie's stock of patience was exhausted; he broke in upon Robin's lengthened petitions, by saying, "Hoot toot, man cut it short!"
Jamie's wit and love of liquor brought him to poverty before life closed. He died an old man, full of years, near to the plantation of his friend, John Kelly."
Down with his ship.
I play hangman with Sammy in the church bulletin during services. This is one he made for me yesterday which am keeping on my desk as another work week begins.
Have had a miserable couple weeks; all of it (as always) first-world problems that gnaw at me until I manufacture genuine crises. Then, having it out of my system, I crawl gradually back into the quiet life of dull daily habits which I remind myself is a life 99% of the world would swap for.
In the midst of the crawl-back, I reluctantly return to a daily Bible reading. Of course I know it's critical. Of course I know it's the answer. But I never think I'll get anything from it, especially since my current reading plan is a survey of minor prophets.
Just the same, I picked back up today and it was the Book of Jonah, which every kid who ever spent a day in Sunday School knows since he got eaten by a fish or a whale or something. But that's really a pretty minor detail.
The real story is that God tells him to go save a group of people he hates and he tries his best not to. When left with no choice, he (sort of) does what God tells him to do, it works, and Jonah is incensed because he does not want them to be forgiven; they don't deserve it.
Ultimately God tries to give Jonah an illustration by providing him shade from the sun then killing the thing that provides the shade. Jonah is upset and God asks essentially whether he should care about the loss of the thing shading him more than a group of people who did not know any better than to be the sort of people Jonah hated.
It's a nice lesson about having compassion for enemies, but I've never really struggled with that. I forgive everyone everything because:
1) I tend to avoid situations where anyone could wrong me, and
2) I don't think I have sufficient value that it would be anything other than absurdly self-important to hold a grudge.
But this morning, I saw the story through the prism of when the enemy is yourself.
I could go on, and I usually do, but I'd just encourage you to read it (the Book of Jonah has only four, very short, books--maybe a ten minute read).
I'll only say that God does not need our guilt or our judgment, He needs our obedience. And even that, He can wait on. Nearly every action of Jonah's is disobedient in this book. And in a sense he recognizes it, and believes that God's just response should be to kill him. He has himself thrown into the sea, and eventually commands God to just kill him outright.
But his justice is not God's. And ultimately, he is left with a much greater challenge: to accept God's compassion.
For me at least, that feels easy to do unto others, but when I see myself as the wicked people undeserving, and also myself as the person demanding divine punishment, I find the real challenge.
The thing that comforted me most is in the last verse when God asks why he should not spare a city full of people who "cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand".
When I hate myself, I think I ascribe a certain importance. It reminds me of crying once when I was very little when my dad opened a present that had been labelled as coming from me, when in fact I hadn't done anything to help getting it. I didn't even know what it was. As a father now, I know that sort of response from my child would make me sad.
Today too, though I consider myself a wise, mature person much more culpable in his sins, I believe that I am still, in God's eyes, a child who "cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand".
I need to update this antiquated site to make it easier to share TikTok / Instagram / YouTube videos, but who has the time?
As a kid, I used to be much more interested in publicizing myself than creating any work worth publicizing (eg. in high school, my friend and I decided to make an independent film, and our first order of business was making film-branded t-shirts).
Getting older and looking back on it, I felt so embarrassed, I swung the other way and worked on things and never told anyone about them.
But now, I'm trying to land somewhere in the middle, and in the midst of a constantly shifting publishing-ecosystem, I figure its worth taking advantage of the egalitarian entry point of social media, so I've (cynically) started a series of mini-videos snarkily reviewing the first lines of novels.
Hopefully I can build up some kernel of literate followers that might make it easier to pitch myself to publishers.
You can check out the first entry in the series (Reviewing the opening lines of novels) at:
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@pgmccullough/video/7536000328789921054
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNEuSITRAp6/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/00ZtWDz94j8
Would appreciate any TikTok followers...
Really like the original, but this cover came on while I was working today and I was really moved by it: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=l5zuvs8EZDY&si=4YLWEVx1hSmS-WBV
I've been getting a kick out of these wizard memes on Instagram, but found this one quite touching.
It reminded me of the verse "It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness."
And arguably not really related but a line from The English Patient that often pops into my head: "Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again."
There are many wonderful aspects of having a fully remote job; working the hours that suit me, being able to do things around the house (apartment), et&... but there are also terrible hazards, namely the accessibility of my couch and bed where I can lie and pass literal hours scrolling through Instagram Reels for an IV drip of dopamine.
There is also the illusion of connection; which raises the other hazard of remote work, which is that it's not unusual for me to spend a day or two or five without any meaningful human, in-person interaction. Having a long for that sated by watching a story of a former student vacationing in Croatia likely isn't healthy.
So I deleted the app from my phone (though not the account, for now). I'd prefer to post things here anyway, in spite of the fact that Google Analytics informs me that it gets all of 3-4 visitors per day. It's nicer being able to see things all in one place, with the blasts-from-the-past that I always enjoyed about Facebook (eg. today I see is the one year anniversary of Cafe Maud's soft launch, which is wild because it's since become such a regular haunt--we did Father's Day brunch there yesterday.).
Bought a WeWork day pass yesterday and worked at the space on Irving and it was great. So signed up for a membership. Good to get out of the apartment and have unlimited "free" coffee and kombucha.
These days I get up on Saturday morning and drive to pick up the boys in Callicoon and turn around and drive back to Manhattan, then Sunday evening drive them back upstate and turn around and come home. But until a couple of years ago I kept an apartment in Cochecton and I would take the train up Fridays after work, and we would spend our weekends upstate mostly, and I would take the train back Sunday night.
I remember YouTube Music randomly playing this song one of those Sunday nights when I was on the platform at Secaucus just before midnight, and it struck me and I listened to it regularly for weeks.
Just a few days ago I thought of it and tried and failed to remember and find it. I could only summon some snippet about a last cigarette, and it wasn't enough for Google to help.
Then just tonight it magically popped up in my YouTube Music recommendations. Funny how these things work sometimes.
View from the inevitable Hampton Inn in Monticello. Fun contrast to an Instagram post a couple of weeks ago at the Four Seasons in Casablanca as though that were real life.
I've wanted to write about the past couple of months. Fasting through a Lent that encompassed my fortieth birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of my dad's death and concluded with falling in love and finding myself alone again in the cave Mary Magdalene lived in somewhere outside Marseilles. But you flip through Netflix and feel so overwhelmed with the sheer volume of stories; of what value is ones own? I think Ayn Rand had a quote that was something like "Just because it happened to you does not make it interesting."
On the flight back from Morocco I sat next to a girl who journals then throws them away. I always felt like those were the real writers. It might represent a larger flaw of mine, that if no one reads it and loves it, it (and by extension I) has no worth.
Lent has been wild and wonderful and unexpected with no shortage of opportunities to be (like C.S. Lewis) Surprised by Joy. In the midst of all that's gone on and all that remains in the final days of Holy Week, it's amazing to finish Nicky Gumbel's one-year devotional read-through of the Bible (which I think I've been working on through fits and spells for 2.5-3 years... ๐ณ). This is the third read-through I've done and it's always a strange feeling to come to the end.
Helped stuff Easter eggs after church last Sunday. What a wholesome guy! Wildly impatient to be clean shaven again in just a few more days...
Wandering outside on a reasonably warm day and didn't want to go home. Eventually went on a walk-through of the Merchant House Museum.
Nail-biter win for our first game of the season and made it on the TV, Ma!
#BooksOf2025
3. Mary Magdalene: Women, the Church, and the Great Deception
6/10
GOOD: Brief, accessible, and interesting points
BAD: Feels a bit cursory; an assemblage of proofs of a point that doesn't need much proof
Not thrilled to be sharing only my third book of the year well into March! In fact, February was dominated by The Thin Red Line, with which I was nearly finished when Lent arrived and I decided to only read explicitly Christian literature until Easter.
At any rate, this little volume had caught my eye in The Strand a while back, so I picked it up.
At its heart, the book critiques the denial of authority of women in the Church, pointing to Mary Magdalene as the first Apostle; having been the first to proclaim the news of Christ's resurrection. Interwoven is an examination of the conflation of unnamed women in the Gospel with her, making her, in church tradition, a prostitute though this is not a Biblical view.
That's really about it, but the point is illustrated by various gnostic texts and apocrypha (new to me was the x-rated Greater Questions of Mary.)
Quick and interesting read, but probably not especially memorable.
No idea why this stupid, inane thing had me laughing until I cried.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=FwRRt-LpJoA
Walked into the Harry Potter Store amid a light drizzle and somehow emerged to find a blizzard.
Rewarded myself after a long visit to the dentist yesterday with a trip to the Strand. Mostly to look for a copy of Strong's Concordance, which they didn't have, but in the section where it would have been, this little book on Mary Magdalene caught my eye (my interest kindled from the recent read of HOLY BLOOD HOLY GRAIL). Then I had the idea to buy a French novel to see if throwing myself into the deep end might bear any fruit. It's interesting to slowly crawl over a sentence as one might when one is four years old.
Had a birthday dinner with a thirteen-year-old at the River Cafe last night.
#BooksOf2025
2. Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln
6/10
GOOD: Fascinating history from a number of discrete periods
BAD: Since debunked; Silly logical contortions to align with the desired conclusion
I'm going to be in Paris in May for meetings and wanted to take advantage of being on the continent by squeezing in some culture. Somehow I heard of a basilica in the South of France where Mary Magdalene's purported skull is displayed inside of a golden body. Evidently, there's a monastery with spartan accommodations to host pilgrims who then have to hike through the woods to access it. It seemed interesting, like something the characters in an Italian neorealist movie would do.
I mentioned it to a friend who referenced this book and some complex conspiracy about Mary Magdalene having been married to Christ and borne his children and carried the Holy bloodline to France. Popularly known more recently as the underlying conspiracy of The Da Vinci Code. So I bought the book and dove in.
It begins with the story of a priest in the late 1800s having been assigned to a tiny parish in the South of France. He eventually refuses the Church's order to be moved to another parish, seems to exhibit a sudden great wealth, behaves strangely, and finds hidden ancient parchments left by a Knight of the Crusades.
From there we try to establish that the famous Knights Templar were patronized by a secret society later connected to a particular Frankish royal family which lost power but seemed to have many prominent descendants in later centuries behind many major historical events.
SPOILER ALERT: This royal line was sired by Jesus, who was just a man, and if it is ever restored, it will unite Jews, Christians, and Muslims as the human view of Jesus is acceptable to all.
It's a pretty dense book, and they work through each step of this methodically. Much of their source material has, in the forty-plus years since publication, been debunked as fraudulent, but while they contort and connect and make spurious leaps, they do it all over a background of well-researched and interesting history. I learned a lot about the Knights Templar, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the history of Franks and France and Visigoths. I also learned a lot about the Holy Grail (for instance that the word 'grail' has no other meaning than to refer to the Holy Grail...) and the literature around it.
But the part of it I enjoyed the most was the Biblical criticism. I consider myself a Christian Fundamentalist, and genuinely hold the admittedly absurd and indefensible view that the Bible is literally true and inerrant. But if you really believe in something you should be comfortable with it being assailed.
Reading about the Roman Emperor Diocletian's role in destroying much of the Christian Canon was fascinating, and I find arguments that the established Gospel was molded to be acceptable to Roman authorities compelling. There are also some compelling arguments that Jesus was not a humble carpenter but a well-to-do and well-connected member of an established Messianic line. Even relatively minor arguments that, for instance, the beloved disciple of the Gospel of John was not John, but Lazarus, were fascinating.
So on the whole, I don't ascribe a lot of value to the book, but it proved as fun a way as any to learn about topics I might not otherwise have been exposed to. And I admire a peripheral stated goal which is to united discrete scientific disciplines in the pursuit of truth. There's an aside about that I found thought-provoking:
"Why, then, had the fragments of the puzzle not hitherto been assembled into a coherent whole? [...] Since the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the orientation of Western culture and consciousness has been toward analysis rather than synthesis. As a result our age is one of ever-increasing specialization... In consequence the diverse spheres covered by our inquiry have traditionally been segmented into quite separate compartments... [F]ew experts on the Grail romances have been historians... Similarly historians of the Templars and the Crusades have, like all historians, adhered closely to "factual" records and documents... To suggest to such a historian that the Grail romances might contain a kernel of historical truth would be tantamount to heresy, even though Schliemann, more than a century ago, discovered the site of Troy by dint of careful reading of Homer."
I love this as a defense of "fiction" as often being a greater aid of truth than "non-fiction" and as an exploration of what truth is generally.
Fauna
#BooksOf2025
1. Less by Andrew Sean Greer
5.5/10
GOOD: Funny, engaging, well-written
BAD: Blow-by-blow from a single perspective, self-indulgent
Finished my first novel of 2025 last night (though I read the majority of it in 2024). Less by Andrew Sean Greer. It was fine. Engaging and fun and a few very funny lines, eg:
His first response to Peter was to ask: "How did they even know I was gay?" He asked this from his front porch, wearing a kimono.
The fact that it's not dissimilar from stuff I've written and gotten nowhere with, and that it won the Pulitzer probably played no small part in engendering some bitterness... But it also does the thing that I used to love and can't stand anymore, which is to paint as realistic a world in which literary novelists have any sort of recognition or relevance.
The protagonist, Arthur Less, is an aging novelist, and a minor one by all accounts, who finds fans among the working class he encounters in different countries. It's writer porn. By writers and for writers.
There's also an under-developed thread that turns out, in the end, to be the big pay-off, which felt a bit pat and uninteresting.
I'm also a bit squeamish with male physical intimacy, and there's that throughout the book, though it's perfectly tasteful, but it probably didn't help its chances of winning me over.
When I first moved into my little studio on E. 9th Street in November of 2021, I kept things pretty spartan for quite awhile. Slowly started populating the space with Facebook Marketplace deals, and things like this that I encountered on the sidewalk on evening walks through the neighborhood.
This little table fit my space perfectly and became my desk. Then, when I bought my younger son a fancy PC for his birthday, I sawed out the crossbeam and moved it back to fit the tower.
I even moved the thing to my new apartment and put it in my son's bedroom closet. But after Christmas, he got other furniture for the closet and there was really no place for it, so today, it went back to the street from whence it came.
I hope it gets another chapter.
For something like 15 years now, I've kept a daily diary, using Leather Gallery's Desk Weekly Leather Planner (Open Format) - 8" x 5.5". Last night, I stuck 2024's on a pile in a cabinet and set pen to 2025's for the first time, starting the January first entry: The scene opens.
I went on to detail where the night found me, broadly, which painted a pretty positive picture in terms of all the metrics generally regarded as meaningful. I could write endlessly about God's endless indulgence and providence towards me; I've been hurling myself off increasingly tall cliffs and landing in the beds of increasingly luxuriant marshmallow-and-goose-down trucks for a long time. I'm very lucky and increasingly focused on being happy with my luck rather than fearful.
If I took any particular lesson from 2024 (other than constant reminders that I am of more value than many sparrows and will never get stones in lieu of bread), it is that many of the foundational attributes I ascribed to myself -- anxiety, sadness, laziness -- were either misattributed or not-particularly-relevant derivatives of my real core quality: cowardice.
Which is a promising diagnosis, as I think it has more ready remedies than the others. Namely, patience and gratitude (or patience, experience, and hope).
I'm always grateful for fatherhood as it provides such great illustrations of God's perspective. It annoys me when my sons worry about things that are far beyond them and really only my concern. The affordability of something, managing certain details, etc... And it saddens me to see how it can dampen what should be a purely positive experience I've afforded them.
It's been a mad rush since Christmas Eve, so this is quite belated, and many clever-er men than me have made the observation better than I can, but it really struck me at the candlelight service, in this grand ornate sanctuary on Broadway, wealthy and homeless alike singing praises to a savior born two millennia ago to peasants.
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