Susan Sontag Claims and concerns that we are creating an increasingly voyeuristic culture are heard frequently these days. The deeply disturbing (but essential viewing IMHO) film, Catfish, is just one of a number of movies, books and articles delving more deeply into how we are constructing relationships with others and how we construct our sense […]
Books
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Simplicity, Complexity and Elegance
Close up of Jackson Pollock’s August Rhythm at the Met Museum ____ When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said generations ago that “I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life fro simplicity on the other side of complexity,” he meant that to […]
The Best is Next
Grand master for a lifetime: Henri Matisse, photographed by Man Ray The nature of art making over the lifetime has been a recurring theme for me these last few months. Spurred in many ways by the publication of Lastingness: The Art of Old Age, by Nicholas Delbanco (which wasn’t as satisfying as I had hoped), […]
Memoiramania
Memoirist extraordinaire Mary Karr (Photo: Todd Plitt, USA TODAY) TMI. It’s like drinking: Some can handle a lot, and some are flattened after just one glass. Meanwhile we are living in an age of rampant confessionalism, memoiring gone viral, with more blogs than there are humans and way too much information being flung at us […]
Tucking In for the Winter
East First Street in South Boston on Monday morning (my studio is on the right) Ice lace on my studio wall The highlight of that infamous genre, The Christmas Letter (which is, let’s face it, a mixed bag) for me is the yearly book recommendations that arrive from my long time friends Mary Pat and […]
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A Second Helping of Montaigne
This is an additional serving of Montaigne and an addendum to yesterday’s post regarding the book, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Bakewell. A few more passages and thoughts from the book… On the relevance of Montaigne to our age and time: Some […]
Incomplete is Not a Dirty Word
Assembling reality is mostly patchwork (from Anna Hepler’s exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art) More on the theme of being right and the cost of that fixation (referenced earlier in this post): An article appeared in the Sunday New York Times Book review last week that speaks to our proclivity to put blinders on […]
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 […]
Being Scared, The Cultural Commons and the Fate of Fish
Bluefin tuna, one of many ocean fish at risk Book updates: Dorothea Lasky‘s most recent book, Black Life, is reviewed in the Boston Globe today. I just recently discovered Lasky and am a fan of both Poetry is Not a Project and Awe. In this review Michael Brodeur speaks to the contrasts at play in […]