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 […]
Rethinking Koestler’s World
Arthur Koestler, 1905-1983 Anne Applebaum has written a superb review of the newly released biography, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, by Michael Scammell, in the New York Review of Books. Koestler’s writings, particularly Darkness at Noon and The Sleepwalkers, had an enormous influence on me during my adolescence. He seemed […]
Keeping The Edge On
Snow, and part of a shoe If we don’t offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don’t lift to the horizon; our ears don’t hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in […]
Experiencing the Experience
That the Science of Cartography Is Limited —and not simply by the fact that this shading of forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam, the gloom of cypresses is what I wish to prove. When you and I were first in love we drove to the borders of Connacht and entered a wood there. Look […]
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Peace is Only a Thought Away: Jill Bolte Taylor
Perhaps you’ve had this experience: You see a book on a friend’s bedstand. Even though there is big stack (just like your bedstand at home), that one book jumps out at you. Then a week later someone mentions that same book to you, out of the blue and with no prompting. Another few weeks pass […]
Gatz
Jim Fletcher as Jimmy Gatz, AKA Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island Try telling your friends there is this 7 hour, two-part play at the Loeb Theater in Cambridge that consists of nothing but the text from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby. Then try telling them it is one of the most […]
Images With No Handhold
Sam Anderson, book critic for New York Magazine, wrote a great piece called When Lit Blew Into Bits. He spins a cogent narrative about the evolution of literature in the aughts, a time of massively multi-platform, multi-text and content-riddled genres that “seem not only to siphon our attention but to change the way our brains […]
Wisdom Teacher
A few remembrances from the inimitable John Cage: “The sound experience I prefer to all others is silence,” he says in this short clip on You Tube. And for most of us on the planet, says Cage, the sound of silence is actually traffic. He rhapsodizes that the sound of traffic is constantly modulating and […]