Category: creative-process

The Real Fifty Shades of Gray
Loving Day by Mat Johnson. Spiegel & Grau. 287 pp $26.00 The issue of race is so fraught these days that I’m almost afraid to write about it. I am afraid to write about it. Anything I say will offend somebody. Of course, there’s something liberating about that. I know I can’t do it right, so ...
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In That Stillness is the Great Dynamic Activity
Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity by Edward Slingerland. Crown. 296 pp. $26.00. When he was a teenager, we all noticed that my nephew Charlie was surrounded by beautiful young women, though he seemed less accomplished than his older brothers (he wasn’t; he was just younger). You’d go over in the morning ...
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Was This the One with the High Voice?
Love & Mercy A film by Bill Pohland. “How did he die?” my wife said, as we were waiting for the opening of “Love & Mercy,” the new movie about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. “I don’t know. I think he drowned. But I think everyone drowned.” I had previously told her Audrey Hepburn drowned. I was ...
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Beer Sodden Part II (Professional Class): The Mystery of Charles Bukowski
Run with the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader by Charles Bukowski. HarperPerennial. 512 pp. $16.99. In the midst of making my way through the novels of Marilynne Robinson, heavy with the taint of Midwestern Protestantism (I enjoyed those books, I really did. Sometimes I wanted to throw them on the floor and stomp on them, but ...
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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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