25 April 2008

Namesday

According to the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar for April, today, the 25th, is the Feast of Mark the Evangelist. Thus it is my Namesday. This fellow Mark is reckoned as the author of the eponymous Gospel, and is revered by Orthodox sects as the first Pope of Alexandria, and thus their Founder, akin to the role of Peter in the Western Church. The image of St. Mark below is by Fra Angelico and dates from the 15th century. He looks like quite the party animal, eh? When my parents were kids, growing up in Irish Catholic Boston, babies were named for saints. In fact, priests would refuse to baptize infants unless they had acceptable saints' names. Michaels and Margarets were everywhere. Nowadays we've got Jareds and Travises and Colbys and Morgans and Chelseas--you're an oddball if you've got a name like Mark. It is a family story, apocryphal perhaps, that your man here, M.C., was almost C.M. My mother wanted to name me Christopher Mark instead of Mark Christopher, but was swayed by the annoying Irish custom of "-y" diminutives. My father, James Michael O'Connor, was "Jimmy" until the day he died. His brothers John, Patrick, and Thomas, were always Johnny, Patty, and Tommy. In Ireland, "Christy" is a common nickname for men named Christopher. Mom was too American to have a boy named Christy. Good call, Mom.

HAPPY NAMESDAY TO ALL THE MARKS!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Well, Happy Saint's Day, Web Publisher/Author -- may it be as auspicious as it sounds. After much ado, I finally received the OOTG #4, to which I had long ago subscribed, so got to read, "Lonnie's Ride'. A nicely grim and scary tale, with a quintessentialy scuzzy creature in Carlton, who will never recover from one of literature's truly GREAT, memorable descriptions: 'Carlton
looked like the Thalidomide spawn of an elephant seal.' You must be pleased to step up to a longer well-done, coherent short story. Congratulations on being published again!
Incidentally, I think the Matt Cadd paragraphs are genuinely brilliant; I can see them together in a small elite volume. For discriminating readers. Anyway -- bravo on another growth spurt.

M.C. O'Connor said...

The editor at OOTG described LONNIE'S RIDE as "too creepy and disgusting to look away from--perfect for us."

I am planning to make a chapbook of the Matt Cadd stories once I finish the cycle, i.e., 50 of them. Only a dozen more to go!