As I get older I find myself growing on the one hand much more flexible, more resilient, more inclined to take risks, and yet at the same time I can feel my interests and affections calcifying. My taste is turning pathological.
Another Summer (Make that Fall) Reading List Read More »
As opposed to wit, which is often just pedantic cruelty, more ingenious than funny, rarely instructive or heartening, aphorism is, historically, a manly form, laconic, from the Spartan polis of Laconia.
The Ego Is So OVERRATED Read More »
When Cage began experimenting with chance operations in the 1940s, he was looking for a means of stripping intention and taste from the process of creating art. In the Western world, our notion of “genius,” at least as it relates to artists and performers, is generally shaped by a psycho-historical method of decoding biography to discover the seed of ability.
Nothing Personal: Some Notes on Cage Read More »
If you believe the Times, and why not believe them, Google is developing everything from robot drones and driverless cars to a space elevator, which, so far as I can deduce, is a kind of hybrid, Wonkafied rocket-cum-slingshot.
In 1937, when Agee posted his list to the folks at Guggenheim, he was awe-struck, still a Southern boy in NYC , a writer entering maturity.
October’s the thick, sticky middle of my stuff season. I long to see the leaves flaming and falling on the Leelanau Peninsula; In the mornings I want sour cherry preserves on my toast and in the evening, after dinner and a walk in the brisk, fragrant airs, I want donuts from the Franklin Mill.
I say appearance, rather than reading, because the reading portion of the evening (voice and text and presence and performance) seemed if not beside the point then certainly a second-tier attraction. People came to gawk or moon, they came to get their galleys signed or to soak up the air conditioning.
Summer is a season of midnight. At least that’s how it feels to me. No matter how much sun I soak up it is night and night alone that gives Summer it’s special feeling of (sorry to the strict Lacanians) jouissance, a kind of pleasure-in-defiance.
In Praise of Exhaustion Read More »
In the arts, repetition put to smart use bears fruit almost instantly. Take a phrase of music or a line of poetry and read it, hum it, then repeat it. Again and again. Crack the circle open and you find a spiral, spinning, a single pattern among many.
Of Artichokes and Lightning Bolts Read More »
Tonight I will be home by ten. If I’m lucky I’ll finish this post and still have time to read another chapter, maybe two, before my mind begins to melt. I’m 25, unwed, no kids, and except for the meeting across town I’ll spend nearly the whole day in my neighborhood.
