On Pretty Fruit Bowls The first time I ran into Francisco de Goya was at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. When I saw the large bronze statue of him outside the entrance, I figured the bean company must have sent a big donation. It was my only awareness of the name. I had no […]
Two months ago, Circus Book asked a slew of artists what they were up to. Today marks the beginning of the resultant essay series, A Living Artist. Notice the word ‘today’ in the previous sentence. It’s relevant for two reasons. First, art cuts across time. And this is exactly the sort of detail we want […]
The wild light of dusk laid everywhere, permeating the gaps between buildings and forcing itself high across the bowl of the sky so that one felt weighted down with all the colors, filled in with the sun’s last stand on this face of the earth. He’d left his uncle in his office closing down […]
Nothing ever works out how you plan. That’s an old trick that ticks and trickles relevance to the point we hate it deep down for proving true. Because that chaos is an integral part of being we also harbor elaborate dreams and plan lofty ends for ourselves, acting them out even while knowing they will […]
As he neared the wharf dock, he could tell his uncle would be free. He didn’t know what time it was, but he guessed he’d got up sometime past noon and the market had by now wound down completely. He hoped his uncle was still there, as the only people who usually stuck around were […]
Hip hop can deal with emotions sort of but it’s not a strength. Nas’s song about dancing with his dead mother made me cry but that is neither here nor there. Moms make me cry in general. Whatever. It’s an exception. Hip hop is style and virtuosity. Bach’s counterpoint produces linearity by complicating the relations […]
I The boy woke up to the bread man’s song, blaring distorted from the loudspeaker’s funnel haphazardly attached to the roof rack by cut up and twisted coat hangers. He was sweaty, caught in the rays of sun broken only by the window bars which cast patterned shadows on the wall behind his head. […]
(thanks, Josh Keiter) “Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination” is a good post about the difference between expressive and communicative language. It sums up the day’s dominant theory of the place, not just of poetry, but, one might argue, of human understanding in general: “Poetry evokes a special kind of thinking — where we interpret ordinary […]
