Hope has become a term that can be used like ketchup: With everything. Unless of course you are dining with a hoity-toity foodie friend. Or someone French. But behind its increasingly common usage for everything from the personal to the political, hope has a lot more layers than most words being bandied about in the […]
Bless The Mess
“I’m very uncomfortable with a clean, empty studio…usually, I only clean whatever area I need for a project.” –Bruce Nauman I feel you, Bruce. And your space looks fabulous compared to mine. I have to climb in these days, the rat’s nest having grown to larger than life dimensions. Maybe someday I’ll get back to […]
Meditation on Pockets
Pockets Are generally over or around Erogenous zones, they seem to dive In the direction of those Dark places, and indeed It is their nature to be dark Themselves, keeping a kind Of thieves’ kitchen for the things Sequestered from the world For long or little while, The keys, the handkerchiefs, The sad and vagrant […]
Smart and Thoughtful, and Better Than Donuts
Now this is a great title for a book: What Are Intellectuals Good For? And the first thing that came to mind is the now legendary episode of the Simpsons where an oversized donut falls from the shop’s marquee, lands on the fleeing villain and saves the day to which Homer responds with his signatory […]
The Washed Colors of the Afterlife
A Single Autumn The year my parents died one that summer one that fall three months and three days apart I moved into the house where they had lived their last years it had never been theirs and was still theirs in that way for a while echoes in every room without a sound all […]
Claiming the Poem
I’m running a few weeks behind on my Times Book Review reading, but here’s a piece by Jim Holt from the April 5th edition that rang true. Holt does a compelling job of advocating for memorizing poetry. Imagine that. At a time when so many poems can be accessed online, Holt makes the claim—and I […]
Clear in Hindsight
In the past, when I began to study Zen, it was all a mistake. Wandering through numberless mountains and rivers, I wanted to find something to know. It’s all clear in hindsight. Having learned this, what do I have? Release a crow into the night and it flies flecked with snow. – Dayang Jingxuan Dayang […]
Homage to Sedgwick and the Evolution of Queer Theory
I was so sorry to learn of the passing of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. If you are not familiar with her work, this piece by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times puts her work and contribution into perspective. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who died last week at 58, co-founded the influential scholarly field known as queer […]
What Breaks Will Break
Homestead in Dakota Territory Wintering Dakota Territory, 1884 Already, winter makes a corpse of things. Snow reshapes what ice has taken. You’ve lost interest in letters. So let sunrise come. Let smoke grow darker by the light of day— what I could spare of you I’ve burned already. The fencepost needs repair. Let sunrise come. […]
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Gong Sounding
A few more thoughts gleaned from the Guggenheim show, The Third Mind. This show was as closely aligned to my view of artmaking as any other exhibit I’ve ever seen. The experience is still reverberating for me several days later. Here are some provocative words from two giants, John Cage and Philip Guston. We learned […]