The weather has held New Englanders in its thrall for weeks now, dominating conversations in real life as well as updates on Twitter and Facebook. Weather has become a persona, one that willfully went rogue and is keeping the whole neighborhood up with an endless rant and rave. Please, just go home and go to […]
Jonathan Franzen
- Art Making
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Where it Works
A shelf of visual stimulants in my studio The artistic value of hermiting and the need for isolation has been an ongoing theme on this blog, so of course I was intrigued reading Tony Perrottet‘s essay in the Sunday New York Times Book Review about writers, isolation—self-inflicted and otherwise—and the discipline needed to work. (Curiously, […]
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 […]
- Art Making
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A Deep, Quiet Place
A recent shot of my studio table Some periods are creatively fecund, and some are not. After many years of being an artist, I have come to expect both the ups and the downs of a life in the studio. As I have observed many times on this blog, the nature of the work that […]
Social Instruction
Blake Morrison has published his review of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, in the Guardian. Reading a Brit’s view of this very American novel is refreshing. Plus Morrison is an insightful reader. Here’s an excerpt: Like most writers, Franzen is a mass of contradictions. His fiction is generous and expansive, but it’s achieved through monastic […]
Franzen and Freedom
I just finished reading Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Even though yet another blog post about the literary sensation of the moment is not contributing much to the collective forward motion of our cultural understanding, I can’t NOT spend just a little time talking about the book. The reviews have been unabashedly glowing, so much so that […]