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 […]
Daily Muses
From the wry mind of Andrei Codrescu in The Poetry Lesson: The Ten Muses of Poetry 1. Mishearing 2. Misunderstanding 3. Mistranslating 4. Mismanaging 5. Mislaying 6. Misreading 7. Misappropriating cliches 8. Misplacing objects belonging to roommates or lovers 9. Misguided thoughts at inappropriate times, funerals, etc. 10. Mississippi (the river) I have found that […]
- Aesthetics
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Witnessing
“Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one,” is saying that one witness is everybody else giving you their feedback and opinions (which is worth listening to, there’s some truth in what people say) but the principal witness is yourself. You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep […]
Judy Pfaff: Five Decades
Judy Pfaff’s work has inspired me for a long time. Her new show at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe called Five Decades, includes work from various times as well as formats. Seeing artifacts made by her always thrills something in me, particularly her 2D creations. But this show has playfulness and delight on exhibit in […]
Where Words Gathered
Words The simple contact with a wooden spoon and the word recovered itself, began to spread as grass, forced as it lay sprawling to consider the monument where patience looked at grief, where warfare ceased eyes curled outside themes to search the paper now gleaming and potent, wise and resilient, word entered its continent eager […]
Counter-Spirits
In search of the “flashes of identity between subject and object”……the world that exists outside language The following provocation closely aligns with my own views. This passage is by a forceful voice, Barbara Guest, from a book of her writings, Forces of Imagination: There is no substitute for imagination. Words deprived of their stability—that is […]
Eternally Artful
Some images never grow old, never fade in color on that screen of our life that lives at the back of the mind. Some of the images that live on for me were created 18,000 years ago, in southern France. I remember the first time I saw ever saw cave painting art. I was a […]
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 […]
Edging Beyond the Edge
Mystical metaphysics meets science: The Economist has reviewed the new book, The Grand Design, written by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. This passage is full of possibility: The main novelty in “The Grand Design” is the authors’ application of a way of interpreting quantum mechanics, derived from the ideas of the late Richard Feynman, to […]
Mining Dickinsonian Gold
Emily Dickinson: “The best mind to appear among Western poets in nearly four centuries” Book alert: The coming together of two greats—Emily Dickinson and Helen Vendler. Vendler has just released a new book, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. And although there are many collections of Dickinson’s work currently available, I can’t think of anyone I […]