Category: art

Becoming the True Self
The Blake Project: Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake by Leo Damrosch. Yale University Press. 332 pp. In my last post in the Blake project, I spoke of a book that my wife was reading but that I had avoided because I wanted to explore my own reading of Blake’s work. That strategy worked ...
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He’s the Best Friend I’ve Ever Had. He Does Fart a Lot. He’s Also Dead.
Swiss Army Man. A film by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. With Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe. People say this about movies all the time, but in this case I feel fully confident: you’ve never seen anything like Swiss Army Man. Hank (Paul Dano) has somehow gotten stranded on the proverbial desert island. He has all the ...
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Mommy and I Are So Damn Brilliant
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. New Directions. 484 pp. $18.95 I can’t remember when I’ve had such mixed feelings about a novel. There is an assumption behind this book that people with higher IQ’s, or people who have more knowledge, are superior individuals, who don’t have to deal with the rest of us. There is ...
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All Religions Are One
The Blake Project: All Religions Are One; There Is No Natural Religion; The Book of Thel; Songs of Innocence and Experience; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell I first studied William Blake in my survey of English literature course at Duke University. To say that I was excited would be a vast understatement: I had a ...
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Hammerin’ Henry
The Master by Colm Toibin. Scribner. 338 pp. $14.00. I bought this book because I saw it in a used bookstore where I had a lot of credit, so it was free. Some months back I started and couldn’t get into it. But my reading buddy Sally Sexton recommended it highly, along with Toibin’s Brooklyn—so I ...
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Fearful Symmetry
Blake by Peter Ackroyd. Knopf. 399 pp. My re-kindled interest in Blake began, weirdly enough, when I ordered some copies of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior for some inmates and noticed that the most perceptive Amazon review was written by a woman named Laurie from New Zealand. I clicked to see the rest of ...
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Stop Me Before I See More Movies!
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2016 Thursday The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith *** Forever, Chinatown **1/2 The 100 Years Show **** The Many Sad Faces of Mr. Toledano **** By Sydney Lumet ***1/2 Weiner **1/2 Friday The Black Belt *** Trapped **** Dancing for You ***** Dixieland ** Tarikat ***** Horizons **** Two Trains Runnin’ **** Saturday Following Seas ***** Life, Animated **** Raising Bertie ** Hours spent standing in line, sometimes ...
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I Used to Think I Wanted to Be Promiscuous
A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch. Penguin. 205 pp. $15.00 Everything about my reading of Iris Murdoch has changed since I read Dwight Garner’s review of her new volume of letters and A.N. Wilson’s marvelous memoir. Wilson was right in his introduction; I had perhaps unconsciously reduced her in my mind to the dotty old woman ...
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The Bitter Face of a Marriage
45 Years A Film by Andrew Haigh In the same weekend, a friend e-mailed to tell me that 45 Years was a great film—he had just seen it with his wife to celebrate his 63rd birthday—and I heard another friend say, to someone who asked, “Don’t bother. The whole damn thing is too depressing.” I don’t think ...
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You Didn’t Know You Had It Until It Was Gone
Youth A Film by Paolo Sorrentino “Two seniors for youth.” It was a funny remark that I didn’t realize I was making until I said it. But then, apparently, it was adopted all the way down the ticket line. If that Saturday afternoon showing in Asheville was any indication, the people who are seeing this movie ...
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The True Art Is Your Life
Dharma Art by Chogyam Trungpa. The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa Volume Seven. pp. 3-162. Shamblala. 2004. Zen and Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life by John Daido Loori. Ballantine Books. 248 pp. $25.95. I look back with great fondness on the days when I wrote my first novel. It was 1973, and I had just turned 25. ...
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Things Are Not as They Seem, Nor Are They Otherwise
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem. Doubleday. 467 pp. $34.00 Chronic City is a book about all those little New York people who live in the city but you don’t know what they do. You see them having coffee and a Danish at a diner at 3:00 in the afternoon (or the morning for that matter); you ...
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Portrait of the Artist as a Bulldog
Mr. Turner. A film by Mike Leigh. There’s a lot not to like in Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s biopic of the British artist J.M. W. Turner (Timothy Spall). The man is often gruff and uncommunicative. He is especially so with his housekeeper, Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson), who obviously worships him and would do anything for him, ...
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The Utopian Theology of Guy Davenport
The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, The Bicycle Rider, Wo es war, woll Ich warden, The Ringdove Sign. Stories by Guy Davenport from The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing. Shoemaker & Hoard. 379 pp. $16.00. When I was a student at Duke University in the late Sixties, we sometimes got together to argue about who ...
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