Paris, 1970 Photo by Elliott Erwitt Maybe it happens to you like this: unexpected events and encounters often come in multiples. It’s as if random events are actually traveling through our lives in a wad. How many times has someone come to mind who I haven’t seen in years and then they suddenly appear at […]
Books
Choosing Earth
The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It’s the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation. I left […]
Charles Baxter: Against Epiphanies
A moment of light revelry in the Dale Chihuly exhibit at the MFA, Boston This following is an excerpt from an old (1997) Atlantic interview with Charles Baxter whose recently released collection of short stories is called Gryphon: Atlantic: In your essay “Against Epiphanies” you argue that a “character’s experiences in a story [don’t] have […]
Going with Unexplained
A view from The Donkey Show (Midsummer Night’s Dream meets 80’s disco) ____ Nature does not stop to grieve, an observation that since time began has either appalled or inspired the human beings who have made it. Poppies sprout in bloody battlefields, and birds sing outside death-room windows. On one hand, the big thing that […]
- Books
- ...
We’re All Bozos on This Bus*
I live with the nonchalance of the witless, clutching at unsupported convictions on matters political, religious, and social, about which we can know nothing except what we interpret from our impaired position behind the curtain, everything mediated by the brain, everything adrift in the cosmos. This dark edged sentence appeared in a recent email from […]
The Island Becoming the World
Robinson Crusoe Island Has it happened to you yet? Have the plethora of responses to David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, worn your interest thin? If yes, then this isn’t for you. I am not yet finished observing and partaking of the phenom that is DFW, of the increasingly long shadow that has […]
Tracking the (American) Self
Brace’s Rock, by Fitz Henry Lane (1863) Barbara Novak begins her book, Voyages of the Self: Pairs, Parallels and Patterns in American Art and Literature, with an exploration of the problematic concept of self: The idea of self is…an artificial construct…Yet the word is common enough even in everyday usage for a cultural community to […]
- Aesthetics
- ...
Deep Attention
The publishing of David Foster Wallace’s last novel, The Pale King, unfinished at the time of his death, has brought on yet another torrent of writing about DFW. I can’t think of another writer whose legacy is shaped quite like his. His writing is brilliant and penetrating, and the cadence of his style is infectious […]
- Books
- ...
Sontagism
Susan Sontag Claims and concerns that we are creating an increasingly voyeuristic culture are heard frequently these days. The deeply disturbing (but essential viewing IMHO) film, Catfish, is just one of a number of movies, books and articles delving more deeply into how we are constructing relationships with others and how we construct our sense […]
- Books
- ...
Simplicity, Complexity and Elegance
Close up of Jackson Pollock’s August Rhythm at the Met Museum ____ When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said generations ago that “I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life fro simplicity on the other side of complexity,” he meant that to […]