Friedrich Nietzsche Bodies. Language. Expression. Metaphors. Meaning. That’s a list of issues that most people who make things think about. A lot. A recent article from the Boston Globe written by Drake Bennett touches on a lot of these themes, particularly how metaphor both comes from and impacts the way we think. Here’s a sampling: […]
Language
Spaciality and Language
Aboriginal rock painting, Kakadu, Aust. Credit: Thomas Schoch As a follow on to my earlier post on human spaciality, Stanford assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems Lera Boroditsky has written a piece on Edge that explores how individual languages shape the way speakers think about space, time, colors and objects. She demonstrates that […]
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Enough With the Words!
This short piece by Jonathan Jones (in The Guardian) captures rather succinctly many of the frustrations I have written about here in earlier posts. We are currently living through a period of inappropriate dependence on language to extol and explain what is often beyond language in the visual arts. Enough words! My voice joins others […]
Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten
Ho Xuan Huong (written here without the diacritical marks, so my apologies to any Vietnamese readers) was an 18th century Vietnamese poet whose works were recently translated into English by the poet John Balaban. Ho Xuan Huong was well educated, but due to family circumstances including her father’s early death, her options were limited. She […]
Mast Sleeping
The Unbeliever He sleeps on the top of a mast. – Bunyan He sleeps on the top of a mast with his eyes fast closed. The sails fall away below him like the sheets of his bed, leaving out in the air of the night the sleeper’s head. Asleep he was transported there, asleep he […]
The History of “History”
As a follow up to my posting on March 9th regarding this last outbreak of false memoirizing, here are a few more bubbles under that tablecloth that can move around but never disappear. Jill Lepore, a prof at Harvard, has written yet another of her fascinating articles for the New Yorker magazine. She’s so damn […]
A Landscape I Know
Distance From up here, the insomniac river turning in its bed looks like a line somebody painted so many years ago it’s hard to believe it was ever liquid; a motorboat winks in the sun and leaves a wake that seals itself in an instant, like the crack in a hardly broken heart. And the […]
Freedom, History, Loss: Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll
What is it that Tom Stoppard does that moves me so deeply? Rock ‘n’ Roll was as intoxicating an experience as Coast of Utopia had been the year before. In many ways it is a continuation of many of the same themes, just brought forward 100 years and closer to home. (The play takes place […]
The Constant Flicker of Different and Self-Cancelling Perceptions
J. M. Coetzee. I am in awe of his work, even though its textures, angles and palettes are so different from my own creative matrix. In a very readable New Yorker review by James Wood of Coetzee’s new book Diary of a Bad Year, I found a few passages that are just too good to […]
The Shape of Her Soul is a Square
She Considers the Dimensions of Her Soul (Mrs. Morninghouse, after a Sermon Entitled, “What the Spirit Teaches Us through Grief”) The shape of her soul is a square. She knows this to be the case because she sometimes feels its corners pressing sharp against the bone just under her shoulder blades and across the wings […]