Still Life With Movement
A look at a still life painting and a haiku at the beginning of another year.
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Arts & Culture
Benjamin Duke: A River Without Banks
Duke intertwines lives to remind us that the multi-sensory experience can be a terribly beautiful and disastrous experience. His constructs are reflective illusions where spaces are about the body’s existence in the world, the body’s activity in the world. It is important that these are worlds that have been lived in so that pondering them we don’t feel external to them. He organizes and gives structure to different grounds through which he is positioning us. When these grounds intersect a vortex blossoms. The amplification denotes specific, important changes that occur in the physical process of creation where, in the exaggeration, lies deep significance.
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Sentimental Value
* Lillian Li *
After my grandmother died, my mother was given all of her possessions. There was a lifetime of sentimental trinkets, of furniture that had never gone a day without its dust-protecting plastic jacket, and of strange redundancies. My grandmother left her with four refrigerators, three televisions, and twelve swatches of fox fur. My mother complained to a friend that she had no idea what to give up, what to throw away, what to burn. There was no talk of keeping.
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Moby-Dick, or, The Pop-Up Whale
Moby-Dick does not belong to Melville—not anymore. Like any popular or important book, the idea of Moby Dick has long resided at least partially in the public consciousness. But when the text itself is owned by all of us, it becomes as malleable as its wide readership. A recent tour of Moby-Dick editions, many of them from the Rare Books collection at my university library, revealed to me just how varied the textual experience of such a book can be. In the space of a morning, with a book cart in front of you, it is possible to encounter many Ishmaels.
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Grammar of Touch
Could we walk into a dark gallery and by feeling objects on a wall encounter something akin to a story or a narrative? Can we adapt a symphony or a short story for the somatic perception, the way we adapt a novel to a film?
Move Somewhere Flat. Find Yourself Somewhere Tall.
* by Elizabeth Dickey *
… little did I know the north half of Ann Arbor would be entirely at my optical disposal. Think Rear Window, but on a larger scale.
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What We Know Now
When we encounter images of the dead, how does looking proceed? It might begin with mourning, a mourning that clouds the image the way the oils on human skin cloud glass, because we know what comes after the image.
Body and Soul: Damien Chazelle’s “Whiplash”
We thought Whiplash would be a fun movie to catch before dinner the night of our anniversary.
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Bend Me, Shape Me
This essay discusses contemporary genre-bending texts on the occasion of Miranda July’s new book The First Bad Man, which includes an online auction of objects mentioned in the book.
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Inside the Goat
So I agreed to wear the goat. First I was fitted with a yellow hardhat to protect my delicate scalp as the goat was lowered over my head. The goat was massive. In truth, it was (mostly) just a papier-mâché goat head, but it covered the entire top of my body, resting warily on the hard hat, steadied by my hands. As with most of the charming but hastily made Honey from the Heart puppets, I had to wear its imperfections as well. Staples stuck, pointy end out, from where its joints came together. It was lopsided and difficult to balance. And I couldn’t see anything except my feet.