Robert Irwin The books stacked by my bed may appear to be pliantly passive, but don’t be fooled: the daily jostling that rotates one to the top spot is a highly competitive challenge. Feelings have been hurt, I can sense it, when that slim volume of finely chiseled poetry gets usurped by, dare I say […]
Ideas
- Ideas
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Luce Irigaray: Letting Be Transcendence
I am blessed with thoughtful, provocative and intelligent friends. And because this blog deals with the inchoate world where creativity occurs, I am particularly grateful for the ongoing inflow of ideas, insights, parallelisms, wisdom. Martin Dickinson, the poet whose poem about Sugimoto’s Sea of Japan photographs I posted here on June 25, also writes book […]
- Ideas
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Cathedral of the Mind, Take 2
A rich trove of wisdom arrived in the form of comments to my posting on June 11 about the Nicholas Carr article in the Atlantic (See below.) The issues raised by that piece are an ongoing concern for anyone who lives a rich life both online and in the flesh version. Rick Mobbs, a visual […]
J. K. Rowling On Failure and Imagination (Part 1)
Maybe it is because Harvard has planetary status in the Boston/Cambridge area, but it seems everyone is still talking about J. K. Rowling’s commencement address last week. Her topic–“The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination” is delicious just in its titular power. But the speech (which you can read or watch at […]
Cathedrals of the Mind
I just returned from a few days in New York City. I only did about half of what I had intended. When it is over 100 degrees, the walkability of that city drops into negative numbers. Is it just me or do mental functions slow down for all humans in that kind of heat? And […]
- Environments
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Cities and Ambition: Paul Graham
Paul Graham is a 21st century Renaissance man. A brilliant technologist (he has a long list of Web-based inventions,) he also studied painting at RISD and Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. Last night I was at a party—in Cambridge, for the record—where his name was spoken with such reverence I came home and immediately […]
Fractalontology
I fell into an exquisite indentation—no, a cavern—in the landscape of the blogosphere this morning. These anomolies are scattered everywhere in this limitless expanse we call cyberspace, but each time I slide unexpectedly into one of these subrealities (or hyper-realities?) I feel like a lottery winner—random-driven lucky. I’m feeling that way now. My latest adventure […]
In Extremis
I’m back from a weekend in New York. Within a 48 hour period I wept with grief as we gathered on a pier jutting out into the Hudson River to to pay our last respects to Morris, then wept with joy at the wedding of my life long friend Melissa who, as one speaker noted, […]
Feelings and Ideas
Tom Stoppard and Conor McPherson each hold pole positions in their respective areas of expertise—Stoppard is the master of idea-driven theater and McPherson is the feelings first guy. In the production of Shining City currently playing in Boston, McPherson’s characters carve out a reality driven by the way it feels inside rather than some rational, […]
Gabriele Basilico: The Space of Flows
An unforgettable exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Photos of Silicon Valley by Milan-based architect and photographer Gabriele Basilico. Having grown up in the Bay Area, I remember well when the Valley was mostly apricot orchards and vegetable farms. But Basilico’s images do not sentimentalize the past or assault the viewer with […]