x

The Swan

…now Cycnus out of Troy, the son of Neptune, cut his thousand down, and now Achilles in his chariot pressed on relentlessly against his foe, flattening ranks of Trojans with each thrust of his great spear, fashioned out of wood from a tree harvested on Pelion; and as he searched for Hector or for Cycnus… […]

Read More

Piano Player

In the cleared space in the middle of the room, a tired-looking man in a worn tuxedo was beating the life out of an exhausted grand piano. All of the furniture, including the piano, was enameled a garish orange. A sequence of orange-haired nudes romped and languished along the walls under a glaze of grime. […]

Read More

Keats on the Intellect of Places

We afterwards moved away a space, and saw the whole (waterfall) more mild, streaming silverly through the trees. What astonished me more than any thing is the tone, the coloring, the slate, the stone, the moss, the rock-weed; or, if I may so say, the intellect, the countenance of such places. The space, the magnitude […]

Read More

Avant Garde & the Widowed Image

What’s left of the avant-garde–there isn’t much because anything can be packaged and made mainstream in this county–continues to insist on the (highly problematical) concepts of innovation and marginality. The old is relegated to the dustbin of history, and the new is briefly given its moment, usually by an outsider. This set of ideas replicates […]

Read More

The Law Isn’t Justice

The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be. – Raymond Chandler. The Long Goodbye. Page 53.

Read More

Conversations with Andre Dubus

To experience a story like that, you can’t be looking for connections with Dante. You can’t be thinking. You have to be drawn into it. You have to come away from your story and say, “Boy, that story made me hungry. It was hot where I was. And it was isolated, and the wind blew […]

Read More

Schiller on How to Survive As an Artist in the Age of Social Media

In the modest stillness of your heart you must cherish victorious truth, display it from within yourself in Beauty, so that not merely thought may pay homage to it, but sense too may lay loving hold on its appearance. And lest by any chance you may receive the pattern you are to give it from […]

Read More

Alan Jacobs on Auden’s “Local Culture”

…[A]rt, while it cannot of its own power enforce any alteration of consciousness or morality, can help those who would be joined together to find their desired unity. Artists can never become the legislators of the world, acknowledged or unacknowledged, but they can become after a fashion public servants. Yet even this they can do successfully only […]

Read More

Stegner on Regionalism & Art

“Regionalism, cultural regionalism, is not an antiquarian fad like the cult of the hillbilly. It is contemporary, and it deals by preference with the usual rather than with the unusual, with the essentially normal rather than the picturesque, with cultures which are continuous and vital rather than with the isolated and the moribund. It is […]

Read More

Rhyming Reminder

Don’t forget: In “Listen to Her Heart,” Tom Petty rhymes: Behind her and my girl. Don’t take it all too seriously. Language is fun.

Read More
← Earlier Work