Tag Archives: personal

Fossil Breath

Posted on November 28, 2021 by JMN

This gallery contains 1 photo.

(c) 2021 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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‘Carmen Mola’ Is Three Men

Posted on November 21, 2021 by JMN

¡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 →

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Poetic Researches

Posted on November 14, 2021 by JMN

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 →

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‘mee-HIGH CHEEK-sent-me-HIGH-ee

Posted on November 4, 2021 by JMN

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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‘A Way of Understanding Who You Are’

Posted on September 2, 2021 by JMN

“Human beings have always been storytellers and you use that as a way of understanding who you are, and who the people around you are, and what’s going on,” he says. “If I look back, which I don’t very often, … Continue reading →

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Jane Kaufman

Posted on July 16, 2021 by JMN

The savory quotation that leaps from this obituary of artist Jane Kaufman (1938 – 2021) is from Holland Cotter’s review of a 2008 retrospective at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, N.Y. “It’s funky, funny, fussy, perverse, obsessive, riotous, accumulative, … Continue reading →

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Pausing to Remark

Posted on July 16, 2021 by JMN

A former associate stumbled upon this blog recently and wrote to me. She had read some older posts in which I challenged certain language practice encountered in published articles. It’s true I experimented for a time with adopting the persona … Continue reading →

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‘Art Has Many Mansions’

Posted on July 12, 2021 by JMN

The NYTimes, as well, has sumptuous reportage on this exhibit of Medici-sponsored artworks. The portraits have a preternatural technical brilliance that’s otherworldly. “Laura Battiferri,” fingering her legible volume of Petrarch, is a creature contrived from mannerist lunacy. An interesting wrinkle … Continue reading →

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‘This Is a Rooster’

Posted on July 6, 2021 by JMN

Don Quijote’s reference to Orbaneja the Painter stuck with me fondly over the years. It’s as savory now on second reading as it was on first. … Orbaneja el pintor de Úbeda, al cual preguntándole qué pintaba, respondió: <<Lo que … Continue reading →

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Corn Fusion

Posted on July 4, 2021 by JMN

“Poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress and only with the hope / that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.”(Czeslaw Milosz) I get Ian McEwan and EwanMcGregor mixedup why I askmyself is … Continue reading →

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