Sontag: “There are spiritual resources beyond effort, which appear only when effort is stilled.”
Porno: passivity; easy [lack of] gratification. Sexual excitement accentuates vitality; an end in itself.
One does not know, and it is an agony, whether to fill the head or empty it.
“The ideal is neutrality, transparence.” Sontag
The object of my life is to avoid suffering.
I rejected the content of my father’s life, but not its form: compulsion and unrest.
The person with uncertain identity readily projects himself into other roles. In watching spectacles of violence, he will become the
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Written in the 70s, 70s-8a. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
EthicalDative 
“Lurchingly?
I’ve read and admired Peter Schjedahl’s writings about art in the New Yorker for years. His recent article is entitled “The Lurchingly Uneven Portraits of Paul Cezanne” (New Yorker, April 9, 2018).
The piece is unhelpful to me as an amateur engaged in people painting. Schejedahl lingers at the level of pronouncements that hover above practice. In “Self-Portrait With Bowler Hat,” I’m interested in how Cezanne handles the beard with its glimpses of underlying flesh, and the peekaboo lips with their highlight. In “Madame Cezanne In a Red Dress” I’m interested in the sketchiness of her facial features and her severe hairdo.
Schejedahl has a formidable eye and range. I would welcome more brush-to-canvas observations from him now and then. How precisely did Cezanne fall short, from a painterly standpoint, in specific instances, according to this eminent, highly readable critic?
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)