I Am in Need of Music I am in need of music that would flow Over my fretful, feeling fingertips, Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips, With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow. Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low, Of some song sung to rest the tired dead, A song to fall like water on […]
Month: December 2008
- Aesthetics
- ...
Winnicottisms
In a remembrance of the writer Harold Pinter that appeared in the Los Angeles Times (and posted on Slow Painting), Charles McNulty included a memorable quote by D. W. Winnicott: But for all his vehemence and posturing, Pinter was too gifted with words and too astute a critic to be dismissed as an ideological crank. […]
No Other Way
so you want to be a writer? if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or […]
One for the Record Book
I’m still recovering. Yesterday was probably the most memorable Christmas of my life. I take it back, all those bad things I’ve been saying about the holiday season. This was fabulous, utterly. For the last 28 years I’ve been the Christmas engine in this house, overseeing the gifting and feasting for the five of us. […]
Epicuriousity
Clate flexing some serious cooking guns They’re home, my three children. And all of them are seriously gastronomicized. They spent the last two days coming up with the 9 course menu for our Christmas feast which will include three styles of oysters from Island Creek, home made ravioli filled with butternut squash, seared scallops on […]
The Quiet Joy of Breathing and Living
A Body Was Given To Me A body was given to me – what to do with it, So unique and so much my own? For the quiet joy of breathing and living, Who is it, tell me, that I must thank? I am the gardener, I am the flower as well, In the dungeon […]
Nothing but Wows
Kellin at the Certosa Monastery (with a light and tonality that reminds me of a Giotto fresco) I’m back from Italy, and the intoxicating colors of that landscape are still projected on the back wall of my mind. That palette has been commented on ad infinitum, ad nauseam, but for good reason. No one can […]
Rite of Passage
Kellin at Galgano I will be off line (off blog?) for a week. We are in Italy celebrating our daughter Kellin’s completion of her Master’s Degree in Art History. On Friday she’ll put down her umbrella and will shoehorn all that wild passion into presenting her paper at a Symposium, The Speaking Hand: Gesture in […]
What’s Sound Got to Do With It?
More wisdom from Elliott Carter (see posting below for more). This is from an article in the Wall Street Journal and came to me by way of friend and artist George Wingate (thanks George): If the public doesn’t respond, it matters very little. Think of other complex works that had difficulty finding an audience, he […]
The Picasso Problem: V. S. Naipaul
Interest in the new biography of literary lion V. S. Naipaul continues. Patrick French’s The World Is What It Is was written with full cooperation from Naipaul, and that fact makes the horrific (and, we are led to believe, honest) accounts of his abusive personal relationships even more unsettling. At one level I am not […]