Can a poem hurt the reader into glimpsing its cargo? The poem discussed is ‘From “Banana [ ],”’ Poetry, December 2021, by Paul Hlava Ceballos. I encounter poetry I perceive to be all kinds of icky: cryptic, elliptic, hierophantic, delphic, … Continue reading
In 1970, David Godine started a small publishing company in an abandoned cow barn in Brookline, Massachusetts. After a distinguished history of publishing select titles in well crafted editions, he has sold the company. I enjoyed reading what he did … Continue reading
¡Me cachis en diez! Nadie está en su sitio. “Hell and damn! No one is in his place”; that was my father-in-law’s take on the hanky panky of a popular soap opera in late-Franco Spain. In post-Franco Spain what’s to … Continue reading
Is the soul our dark matter — pervasive but undetectable by any instrument we possess? If there’s a part of me that isn’t glia, neurons, and enzymes, it has found a modicum of rest in the revelation that John Ashbery’s … Continue reading
This article gives a stimulating sample of Marlene Dumas’ painting. Here’s a whiff of its curatorial patter: “She is a master, in the classical sense: she makes masterpieces”… Dumas [takes] us somewhere beyond prosaic materiality… “[Faces and portraits by Dumas … Continue reading
My title is how the NYTimes represents the pronunciation of the name of Hungarian-born psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who died recently in Claremont, California. He coined and popularized the term “flow” to describe a state of focused contentment in which time … Continue reading
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If you’re like me, you think you know what “facet” means, and you like its associations because it reminds you of “fecit,” which means somebody “made” something in Latin; but you Google it anyway and fall in love with the … Continue reading
Here’s a vibrant pulverization of Smith-song around the paintings of Beauford Delaney (1901-1979): Robust impasto surfaces… startling colors… visionary buzz… new kind of painterly fabulousness… sturdy realism overloaded with color… something of an Egyptian immobility… crisis-crossing strokes [sic: Is “criss-crossing” … Continue reading
Jenny Saville speaks in all the quotes here. Italy is a country of figuration, so I feel very at home here — but it was intimidating. I got through by really looking at Michelangelo… I started to do direct studies … Continue reading
EthicalDative 
Kafka’s Drawing Isn’t Kafkaesque!
A trove of drawings by Franz Kafka was brought to light in 2019. They share, says Philip Oltermann, features with paintings Kafka describes in his fiction: “… men riding flying buckets, singing mice and creatures made of household detritus… dream-like … Continue reading →