Willing

Simplicity and complexity: A piece hanging on the wall at sculptor Paula Castillo’s studio in Santa Fe. The two entries below, a poem by Moramarco and a quote by Tom Robbins, were included in two separate posts on my favorite random access wisdom source, Whiskey River. But when I landed on the site this morning […]

Boredom and Bliss

The essay on the last page of the Sunday Times Book Review by Jennifer Schuessler this week is provocative. Her topic: Boredom. Ah, that dreaded word. Full of moral implications. Antithetical to everything I learned (and probably inherited through epigenetics) from my pioneer heritage. You never left yourself get bored, and you never admit if […]

Wisdom Teacher

A few remembrances from the inimitable John Cage: “The sound experience I prefer to all others is silence,” he says in this short clip on You Tube. And for most of us on the planet, says Cage, the sound of silence is actually traffic. He rhapsodizes that the sound of traffic is constantly modulating and […]

Sontag on Interpretation

Since posting the quote from the Roiphe review of David Reiff’s memoir of his mother Susan Sontag, Swimming in a Sea of Death, I have been more conscious of the ambient energy that continues to emanate from Sontag’s thoughts and writings. Here’s a sampling: Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded […]

Forever Susan

Susan Sontag has been a life long beacon for me. Brilliant, articulate, quixotic, complicated, relentless, tenacious, long-suffering, wise—her work and her life have informed so many of my views. In a New York Times review of Sontag’s son David Rieff’s book, Swimming in a Sea of Death, Katie Roiphe captured a quicksilver and bittersweet vision […]

Condimenting

Malcolm Gladwell is a phenom to be sure. His books always end up on the best seller list (there are two of them on now, Outliers and What the Dog Saw) and he is a popular inspirational keynote speaker. I admit, I imbibe. I read his New Yorker pieces religiously. I’ve read all his books. […]

The Darker Side of Genius

Paul Klee, mystery man Some highlights the Sunday Times Book Review: A new biography about Arthur Koestler, The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, by Michael Scammell made the cover. Koestler’s work, The Sleepwalkers, was one of the books that launched me during adolescence into a lifelong interest in the philosophy and history […]

Responses to Jung’s Red Book

Rubin Museum of Art chief curator, Martin Brauen, left, and Felix Walder, great-grandson to Carl Jung, inspect Carl Jung’s “The Red Book” (Photo: Rubin Museum) The Rubin Museum exhibit (and accompanying lecture series) that features The Red Book by Carl Jung has been on my mind since I first saw the show a few months […]