Category: art

  • 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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