I’m still pawing through a summer’s worth of half read New Yorker magazines. (My friend Lesli calls this perpetual battle with The Stack as the “tyranny of the unread”.) And to follow on yesterday’s posting that included an excerpt from an interview with poet/essayist Dan Chiasson, I found a June issue with an effervescent and […]
Art/Language
Green Valleys
Sweet stars, I’ll ask a softer question: Moon attend me to the end. I’m here alone. The feeling that one is on the edge of many things: that there are many worlds from which we are separated by only a film; that a flick of the wrist, a turn of the body another way will […]
Right Angles
Books, a constant source of solace for whatever ails the soul…I am just now getting through Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, and I was compelled by hope expressed in a review of Denis Johnson’s new novel, Tree of Smoke. The review is written by Jim Lewis (whose work I have not read unfortunately) but […]
Mabou Mines
Yet another reason to be in New York sometime in the next week, more specifically Miller’s Launch, a forgotten corner of Staten Island. Mabou Mines, a theatre company that has been thrilling my sensibilities for 30 years, has done it again and stepped way outside the expected. This time it is a new production from […]
Beyond Liturgy
My friend Stephen overlooking Frog Lake I’m back in my life online after a three week hiatus. Some of those days away were deeply satisfying. Roaming the Farmer’s Market in San Francisco (held every Saturday at the Ferry Building) is a pleasure I feel so deeply at every level that having that stroll through the […]
Married to Amazement, with the World in Her Arms
When Death Comes When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps his purse shut; when death comes like the measle pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the […]
Grateful for Whoever Comes
The Guesthouse This being human is a guesthouse. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may […]
Discourses and Artifacts
I’ve pulled down a few books from my library about primitive art. I am looking for some clues or insights into a personal question that has been lingering for some time: Why are non-Western, non-contextualized images increasingly compelling to me? Perhaps this can’t be parsed into logic and language–that’s a conclusion I’ve come to many […]
A Thousand Brilliant Lies
I’m now in the last lap of preparing for my show that opens in Provincetown on July 20th. The last few weeks have been a kind of silence retreat, intensity without a spoken language component. And something does shift for me when visual language becomes the dominant modality for an extended period of time. When […]
Joe Felso: Ruminations, on Roger Kimball’s Jeremiad
Every once in a while a comment made on this blog is so good it needs to be called out, front and center. That’s true of a comment made by one of my favorite bloggers, the author of Joe Felso: Ruminations, in response to the posting about Roger Kimball’s article in The New Criterion, directly […]