I’ve been in a deep relationship for months now with Lewis Hyde’s rich and fragrant book, Trickster Makes the World. Yes, fragrant. That’s how it feels to be enraptured by this amazing volume in all its lush, verdant and seductive power. While it can be approached with the traditional “start at the beginning and read […]
Closing on the Hunger
Definitely What is desire But the hard wire argument given To the mind’s unstoppable mouth. Inside the braincase, it’s I Want that fills every blank. And then the hand Reaches for the pleasure The plastic snake offers. Someone says, Yes, It will all be fine in some future soon. Definitely. I’ve conjured a body In […]
Mark McGurl’s “The Program Era”
Mark McGurl (Photo by Kevin Scanlon) Louis Menand has written a provocative piece in this week’s New Yorker magazine that asks the question, should creative writing be taught? And perhaps even more importantly, can it be taught? His discussion wraps itself around a new book by Mark McGurl called The Program Era which is definitely […]
Robinson Wins the Orange Prize
I was so pleased to hear that Marilynne Robinson won the Orange Prize for her latest novel, Home. I have been a fan since a friend lent me Housekeeping many years ago. What a writer, and what a book. Published in 1980, Housekeeping was Robinson’s sole novel (she did publish two books of essays which […]
Mass MoCA, You Rock
Here’s a well deserved shout out for Mass MoCA. One of my all time favorite museums, this innovative, expansive and lively space is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. That’s no small feat. (A piece about its inception is posted on Slow Painting, excerpted from an article by Geoff Edgers in the Boston Globe.) Here are […]
Leaky Margins
What Kafka had to be so clear and simple about was that nothing is clear and simple. On his death bed he said of a vase of flowers that they were like him: simultaneously alive and dead. All demarcations are shimmeringly blurred. Some powerful sets of opposites absolutely do not, as Heraclitus said, cooperate. They […]
The Politics of Nipples (We’re all Equal)
Breasts If I were French, I’d write about breasts, structuralist treatments of breasts, deconstructionist breasts, Gertrude Stein’s breasts in Père Lachaise under stately marble. Film noire breasts no larger than olives, Edith Piaf’s breasts shadowed under a song, mad breasts raving in the bird market on Sunday. Tanguy breasts softening the landscape, the politics of […]
Real + Imagined
And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the “real” world – rock, bone, wood, ice – and elements of the […]
The Spangles of Self to Burn
Big Song I have tried it. The brag, with permission of democracy. The royal we. The big words, like courage, excellence and power, brilliance. Have tried to supercede the bound- aries of skin, hair, scarred hands, the fatigue housed by the majority of my bones, to launch a spirit large as a whole group of […]
- Aesthetics
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Tracey, Say It Isn’t So
Tracy Emin at the White Cube Gallery (Oli Scarff/Getty Images) Tracey Emin has cordoned off sex and sexuality as a major trope of her oeuvre. She has been outrageous, flagrant, outspoken and nakedly raw in her expression of pure id-ness. So turning 50 changes all that? Come on Tracey, can’t you love ideas AND sex? […]