My admiration for Diane Ackerman dates from my first encounter with her unique blend of earthy spiritualism and a poetic sense of the material world. A Natural History of the Senses was published in 1993, and I have been shadowing her ever since. She lives in Ithaca, New York with her husband, writer Paul West. […]
God Gutters Down to Metaphor
Continuing on the theme of 19th century masters (an earlier post this week featured Paul Cézanne) here’s a poem by Irish poet Derek Mahon (whose work was featured previously here) about Vincent Van Gogh: A Portrait of the Artist (for Colin Middleton) Shivering in the darkness Of pits, slag-heaps, beetroot fields, I gasp for light […]
Earnings
My sister in Fairfax County, Virginia has 30 inches of snow outside her door. My son in Arlington hasn’t been to his office for a week. Maureen, blogger/poet extraordinaire who also lives in Arlington, has been basking in her snowboundedness, digging into the stacks of compelling books that are duly displayed on every floor of […]
Cézanne: A Multiplicity of Successively Probed Sensations
Apples and Oranges, by Paul Cézanne (Photo: Galerie du Jeu de Paume, Paris) Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer sat for several years on my bookshelf (the one that is, unfortunately, gravitationally challenged and is sagging precariously) waiting for its chance to get cracked open. That finally happened during those luxurious, divinely isolated hours […]
The Bottom Line on Happiness
Double happiness (Chinese). I like the concept, but where does it end—gazillion billion trillion? Maybe best not to get started on multiples… Amy Bloom is a terrific writer. Her latest book, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, was published last month. Therapist and storyteller, Bloom is in a unique position to write about our […]
- Children's Art
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1000 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Listen, Tell, Draw at Bergamot Station Another memorable exhibit seen while we were in LA: This one was at Bergamot Station (in Santa Monica) although not inside any of the many galleries at that location. Sponsored by the Santa Monica Museum, the installation featured the art of children responding to Wallace Stevens’ poem, 13 Ways […]
- Aesthetics
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Inner and Outer
The Crossing, video/sound installation by Bill Viola (Photo: Kira Perov) One of the added pleasures of the MOCA Los Angeles show (reference to this is in the blog below) was the quotes from artists that accompanied their works. Many are worth sharing and are compelling even without the specific context of the work on display. […]
- Aesthetics
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Reporting in on the Other Coast
View of the Pacific Ocean from Marin County, with the Farallon Islands in the distance How does it work, those mysterious tendrils that some part of us knows how to sprout, rooting us to the places that feel hospitable, that feel like our native habitat? I spent my childhood in California but expatriated to the […]
Twining the Text
Witness I saw that a star had broken its rope in the stables of heaven— This homeless one will find her home in the foothills of a green century. Who sleeps beside still waters, wakes. The terrestrial hands of the heaven clock comb out the comet’s tangled mane and twelve strands float free. In the […]
- Books
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New Media to Old
Two of my all time favorite blogs have now been transmogrified into a version of themselves as old media (i.e., books). The first was BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet, compiled by my friend and master archivist, the inimitable PK from his very popular site of the same name. Published at the end of […]