Heron on the beach at Small Point, Maine _____ Note to my readers: As I head back up to Small Point, I reread this post from two years ago. That beach, that heron, that quiet—they are all still there, waiting to encompass any and all. I’ll be back Slow Musing at the end of next […]
Month: August 2014
Staying in the Fluid
Reflections of Commonwealth Avenue on a Boston University poster with a life of its own Discovering the selfless nature doesn’t have a monumental “Eureka!” quality. It is more like being continually perplexed, the way we feel when we’re looking for the car keys we’re so sure are in our pocket, or when the supermarket’s being […]
- Art Making
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The Periphery, Whole Fragments and Ruminations
Nigrassa, one of the pieces included in the show at Chautauqua Institution this summer, “On the Surface: Outward Appearances,” that has been sold and taken up residence elsewhere. Ann Lauterbach, poet and educator, is the author of The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience. As is usually the case, her insights about poetry […]
Doing Neverland
J. M. Barrie How does it happen, that a something—an image, a story, a meme—secures a spot in the cultural collective, that shared image/idea database full of entities everyone in our cultural milieu recognizes? Some are ancient, like the stories from the Greeks (Aphrodite, Apollo, Zeus) and the Bible (Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham), and […]
Useless Beauty
Who needs a peacock’s tail when you can build this for your lady love? The bower created by a male bowerbird. David Rothenberg is a jazz musician and a professor of philosophy. He has written a number of books, several of them focused on the interface between natural sounds (like the songs of birds and […]
Lessons from Bonnard
In his essay on Pierre Bonnard, The Art of Making a World (included in his book, Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa), Michael Kimmelman relates a conversation he once had with the photographer Cartier-Bresson. While viewing a self-portrait by Bonnard, Cartier-Bresson said, “You know, Picasso didn’t like Bonnard and I can […]
A Week Away
Titian’s Danaë from the Capodimonte Museum, Naples, on display at the National Museum in Washington DC I’m in DC for the week. There is always so much to see at the National Gallery, especially when accompanied by two engaging Renaissance art historians (AKA my daughter Kellin and her husband Sean, visiting from Florence.) I’ll be […]