It is common knowledge that there’s a great divide in our society, and the meaning of guns is at the crux of the different realities that American’s inhabit. Each of us lives in the world that we and others have jointly fashioned, or put differently the mind organizes reality in terms of the relationships…
A full measure of the tragic, the catastrophic, the dystopian dimensions of our life together on this planet is served to us, a concatenation of streaming media, Fox, CNN, ABC, NPR, to name a few. It’s easy to understand why this is so. Life’s extremities, danger, stimulates our fight/flight reaction. Nothing is a more…
All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If greatness are in conjunction in a man or a woman It is enough… The fact will prevail through the universe… But the gaggery of gilt of a million years Will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This…
As Walt Whitmangazed down the democratic vistas of culture,he tried to see beyond the difference between beauty and ugliness,importance and triviality. It seemed to him servile or snobbishto make any discrimination of value, except the most generous one. All facts, even the mean ones are incandescent in Whitman’s America.p. 27 Much of modern artis…
This has been written about Mother’s Day: [A mother’s work is] a job that is ever-changing and frequently exasperating. Moms don’t get days off, nor do they receive handsome salaries or generous pensions. Instead, their rewards come in the form of sticky kisses, necklaces made of elbow macaroni, and the satisfaction of seeing their…
Photographs …a way of giving information to people who do not take easily to reading. In a world ruled by photographic images, all borders (“framing”) seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated, can be made discontinuous, from everything else: all that is necessary is to frame the subject differently. Photography reinforces a nominalist view of…
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still recycling, it’s age-old habit, in mere images of truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then about everything…
II There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing, No end to the withering of withered flowers, To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless, To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage, The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable Prayer of the one…
Two weeks traveling with a friend to the west, – from Illinois, to Missouri, to Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. The occasion for the trip was a book which my friend plans to write, a definitive book about the history and importance of carousel animals for American culture. I felt lucky to…
At last I have seen Beverly Hills. Visiting was not on my bucket list of places, but I have been aware for much of my life that movie stars and other entertainers live in Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills is storied for it’s luxurious shopping, for the glitz and glamor cultivated by those who are…
