If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the home, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. –Gaston Bachelard Whether a home or a studio, the calling to shelter daydreaming is a subtle and delicate vocation. A window in my […]
Month: July 2009
Spaciality and Other Human Failings
Two favorite themes are intertwined in Jonah Lerner’s review of Collin Ellard’s You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon But Get Lost in the Mall in today’s Times Book Review. One theme is the wide variations in human navigational skills. I know brilliant people who have no “map sense”—they get […]
Leaning with Comfort on the Mysteries
As is often the case, random walks through Webspace can put you face to face with surprises and unexpected treasures. I happened upon an ad for Eakins Press, and it piqued my interest. In a blurb for one of Eakins Press’ books, The Bitch-Goddess Success, edited by Leslie George Katz, three memorable quotes appeared: …the […]
Bishop/Lowell: Art, and Life
Courtesy of Vassar College Library A group of us are reading Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and their correspondence with each other. There are aspects of both of them—their sensibilities, quirks, proclivities, struggles, shared glimpses of the interior landscapes—that have taken on an ambience that feels like a permeating fragrance. The oddest details are […]
Pizza, Panoramas and Foreclosures
The curator Larissa Harris with the Panorama in a foreclosure exhibit at the Queens Museum (Ruth Fremson/The New York Times) In the early 1980s I worked for a start up that was developing presentation graphics software. Hard to believe, but there really was a time when no one had access to Power Point or Illustrator, […]
Leslie Harrison’s “Displacement”
One of the many unexpected gifts that has come to me from blogging these last three years is connecting with like-minded people who I would never have met with just my physical presence as a vehicle. One of the best networkers I know writes a blog called Virgin in the Volcano and it was through […]
Wallace Shawn’s Pugnacious Wisdom
Wallace Shawn has been a figure of admiration for me ever since I saw My Dinner with Andre, a movie that exemplifies Robert Benchley’s claim that the world is divided into two groups—those that divide the world into two groups, and those that don’t. My experience is that anyone who knows the film either loves […]
Over the Top, and Then Some
Some critics claim that everything is autobiographical. That’s a thought I keep at the back of my mind and try on for size when I’m reading, looking or listening. And as online sensibilities and trends keep moving the markers on the borderline between what is public and what is private, I’m advocating for permission to […]
Edith Wharton: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
While Edith Wharton had the good fortune to be born into a family of privilege, her native intelligence was another lucky card she drew from the pile that is a person’s intended lot in life. Rebecca Mead’s article about Wharton’s letters to her German governess, Anna Bahlmann, appeared in the June 29th issue of The […]
Sumptuous Failure
Sebastian Willnow/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Failure. Just writing the letters that make up that loaded term shifts my energy. We live in a culture that is fixated on success, on winning, on being the best. When an English friend of mine first moved to the United States, this is how he described his new […]