Love The truth about Klimt is: when he painted “The Kiss,” he was also beating his beautiful wife. He beat her with one hand and painted with the other. He got two sad blisters on his right palm from this. His wife sometimes slowly pulled up the roots to his favorite willows and cut them, […]
Jones on Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst Gotta love Jonathan Jones at the Guardian. He’s calling it as he sees it. Bad art is ugly art, in the end. Whatever language we might prefer to use, it all comes down to beauty and ugliness. Hirst’s ideas seemed to me once to possess an intellectual and emotional beauty – and their […]
I’d Pick This One Not Once But Many Times
Ganesh, Southern India, 2008 Homage to Goa The ceiling fans in the house go round and round as if to whisk us off to a different sky. I squirt Deet at a thin mosquito whine; gods chuckle softly from a garden shrine, fruit ripen in the gloaming without a sound. Shiva, Parvati and Ganesh the […]
One is Cool, and One is Overheated
Sharon Olds and Elizabeth Bishop Due to my ongoing interest in any and all times Bishopian… This excerpt is from a review by Moira Richards at Rattle of Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic by Alicia Suskin Ostriker: In another essay, about the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Sharon […]
Breath Me, Light
Behind Perfume, Only Solitude Ink will come. Lamp lung breathes light at the edge of an idea. The edge an idea, also the door of the room that silence opens. The pen sighs, a lens for the shut-in light. Breathe me, light. Have the idea to have me. –Liz Waldner I was introduced to Waldner’s […]
Somewhere a Nation Moves
Rehearsals for the New Order The courthouse is empty now ablaze with holly, wreathed and ribboned for the season, standing firm against a thrill of breezes, the grinding arcs of stars, grackles crazed and dizzying the turret, the drunken hair of winter gardens at its feet, while inside great mahogany walls, no judge presides, no […]
In the Hive, and Out
Human beings are in some ways like bees. We evolved to live in intensely social groups, and we don’t do as well when freed from hives. Nicholas Kristof included this quote from Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis in his recent column in the New York Times. Entitled “Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex […]
Poetry Tracking
How much can you know about a movie, a book, a poem from a snippet, be it a trailer, the first page, the first few lines? Joan Houlihan in Contemporary Poetry Review makes the case that the quality of a poet’s work can be determined with some accuracy by “previewing” a poem’s first few lines. […]
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 […]
Warming Up to the Hum
John Markoff, technology journalist at the New York Times, invited Gary Snyder to write about technology, in this case his Macintosh computer. Says Markoff, “Mr. Snyder might not seem the best person to ask to reflect on the milestones of the digital age. He is 79 and lives in the Sierra foothills in Northern California…Word […]