I saw what’s beautiful in my life – the simple, ordinary, lovely things I have that have sustained me through this year’s ups and downs.
Fine art is a recent category midwifed by the Renaissance humanists, reared by Enlightenment philosophers, and now, in the 21st century, it has grown old beyond its years and has forgotten its own nature.
From the Wall Street Journal: The Death of the Slush Pile. Getting plucked from the slush pile was always a long shot—in large part, editors and Hollywood development executives say, because most unsolicited material has gone unsolicited for good reason. But it did happen for some: Philip Roth, Anne Frank, Judith Guest. And so to [...]
From the New York Times: Our Boredom, Ourselves. And yet boredom is woven into the very fabric of the literary enterprise. We read, and write, in large part to avoid it. At the same time, few experiences carry more risk of active boredom than picking up a book. Boring people can, paradoxically, prove interesting. As [...]
From the Telegraph: Those who pillage rich traditions for contemporary tastes take the easy but shallow route to happiness. This may sound paradoxical. All things being equal, it is good to be happy, and it’s certainly awful to be severely depressed. But what worries me is that our pursuit of happiness is leading us to [...]
From the New York Times: Called Far and Wide to Touch Minds (a brief interview with Cornel West). I’ve never spent a weekend in Princeton. I would like to be at home, but my calling beckons me. I’ve got places to go, from schools to community centers to prisons to churches to mosques to universities [...]
Sweetgrass approaches objectivity as gracefully as Ansel Adams, making the cowboy myth reality.
Confession: I’ve recently found myself to be a knitter.
Photographs of our possessions and domestic patterns can be portraits, just like the photographs of our faces.