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Thursday, December 1, 2016

Everything is in this sheet of paper

Just as a piece of paper is the fruit, the combination of many elements that can be called non-paper elements, the individual is made of non-individual elements. If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud there will be no water; without water, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, you cannot make paper. So the cloud is in here. The existence of this page is dependent on the existence of a cloud. Paper and cloud are so close. Let us think of other things, like sunshine. Sunshine is very important because the forest cannot grow without sunshine, and we humans cannot grow without sunshine. So the logger needs sunshine in order to cut the tree, and the tree needs sunshine in order to be a tree. Therefore you can see sunshine in this sheet of paper. And if you look more deeply, with the eyes of a bodhisattva, with the eyes of those who are awake, you see not only the cloud and the sunshine in it, but that everything is here: the wheat that became the bread for the logger to eat, the logger’s father - everything is in this sheet of paper. - Thich Nhat Hanh

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Between the Clock and the Bed - Edvard Munch and Jasper Johns





The art history legend is that a friend of Johns saw the Munch painting in Norway, and sent him a postcard because he spotted the similarity between the bedspread and John’s trademark cross-hatched paint strokes. In fact, Ravenal – now director of the deCordova Museum near Boston – believes that Johns had already seen the painting in an exhibition in 1950, and had been interested in Munch’s work for many decades.

Ravenal asked Johns about the clock and the bed, and the artist, famously reticent to reveal any psychological insight into his work, said he was interested in painting objects positioned between other objects. Asked once about knives and forks and other kitchen implements in some of his work – they also appear in another grim Munch self-portrait of the artist about to tackle an entire cod’s head – Johns said helpfully: “My associations, if you want them, are cutting, measuring, mixing, blending, consuming – creation and destruction moderated by ritualised manners.”

Ravenal thinks both artists’ paintings are about sexuality and mortality, subjects much on the minds of both men – explicit in the Munch work, with the painting of the nude girl hanging by the bed, and the coffin-like clock measuring the remaining time, but also lurking in the shadows of the Johns.

“If the story of the postcard is true at all, it certainly came late in the process,” Ravenal said. “The connection was already there. Sex and death.” 

- Maev Kennedy

Monday, October 3, 2016

A poem about death that's a celebration of life

Death 

Death calls my dog by the wrong name. 
A little man when I was small, Death grew 
Beside me, always taller, but always 
Confused as I have almost never been. 
Confusion, like the heart, gets left behind 
Early by a boy, abandoned the very moment 
Futurity with her bare arms comes a-waltzing 
Down the fire escapes to take his hand. 

"Death," I said, "if your eyes were green 
I would eat them."    

For what are days but the furnace of an eye? 
If I could strip a sunflower bare to its bare soul, 
I would rebuild it: 
Green inside of green, ringed round by green. 
There'd be nothing but new flowers anymore. 
Absolute Christmas. 

"Death," I said, "I know someone, a woman, 
Who sank her teeth into the moon." 

For what are space and time but the inventions 
Of sorrowing men? The soul goes faster than light. 
Eating the moon alive, it leaves space and time behind. 
The soul is forgiveness because it knows forgiveness. 
And the knowledge is whirligig. 
Whirligig taught me to live outwardly. 
Shoe shop. . . pizza parlor. . . surgical appliances. . . 
All left behind me with the hooey. 
My soul is my home. 
An old star hounded by old starlight. 

"Death, I ask you, whose only story 
Is the end of the story, right from the start, 
How is it I remember everything 
That never happened and almost nothing that did? 
Was I ever born?" 

I think of the suicides, all of them thriving, 
Many of them painting beautiful pictures. 
I think of boys and girls murdered 
In their first beauty, now with children of their own. 
And I have a church in my mind, set cruelly ablaze, 
And then the explosion of happy souls 
Into the greeny, frozen Christmas Eve air: 
Another good Christmas, a white choir. 

Beside each other still, 
My Death and I are a magical hermit. 
Dear Mother, I miss you. 
Dear reader, your eyes are now green, 
Green as they used to be, before I was born.

- Donald Revell


Donald Revell has mastered a poetic genre few poets even attempt: the happy poem. That’s not to say that his poetry doesn’t grapple with darkness—it does, and deeply. This poem is called “Death,” after all, and Revell tries as hard as he can in this small space to meet mortality head-on. One of Revell’s possible goals is to engender a sense of awe: in his poems, life is fundamentally amazing, even though—even because—it has an ending. Poets write poems for many reasons, chief among them to express feelings, to articulate the vagaries and fine points of an emotional state. Poets also write to create emotional states in readers, and this Revell poem invites readers to accept death. Without ever forgetting the mortal stakes of every moment, Revell manages to sing joyfully, no matter his subject. He knows deeply what the words have always been telling him: that all our terrors, such as “space and time,” are “inventions / Of sorrowing men”; in this poem, he chooses not to be one.

As a celebratory poet, Revell is in good company: Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Herbert, Dickinson, and Whitman come to mind as voices playing in the background of “Death.” All these poets revel—a pun on Revell’s name that he seems to have taken seriously—in details and in the capacity of the imagination to elevate them toward a kind of holiness. Of course, many of these poets also had a particular kind of holiness in mind, as does Revell; when he (or the others) uses the word soul, he means it in the Christian sense: the immortal soul that will live eternally in heaven. Revell is one of the leading Christian poets now at work, though—like Whitman and Dickinson—in his work, he also seeks heaven on Earth. In poetry at least, the “soul is my home.” Revell sees heaven everywhere. He has crafted a poetry that lets him “live outwardly,” embrace the unfolding, enjoy even its darkest surprises, and let go of what is “left behind. …”

Finally, Revell is also an experimental poet—this poem’s quick jump cuts and seeming non sequiturs are a big part of what make it so satisfying—and so meaningful. The idea of death is perhaps too confusing and terrifying to be described in a poem using plain logic, direct cause and effect, and straightforward narration. They are perhaps less than helpful when grappling with something as seemingly unreasonable as death. Revell has used these techniques for many years, even before his later poetry’s religious focus. The truth of the language is ever unfolding, is itself unfolding. It is “whirligig”—meaning “constantly changing”—one of the poem’s most fitting words and an unlikely bit of linguistic archeology.

How does a celebratory, religious, experimental poet describe and prepare for death? With this cheerful, chatty, transcendent poem. Of all the death-poems I know, this is the least fearful, yet it appropriately accords death its massive power.

The poem’s overall rhetorical structure is that of a conversation. The speaker is talking to his readers, occasionally quoting from another conversation (“‘Death,’ I said …”) with the personified figure of death itself. Revell alternates between the longer stanzas, which meditate in florid language about what Death did and how Death is, and the couplets (and one five-line stanza) addressed to Death. It’s a kind of call and response but a sideways one: Revell interrogates the nature of life and mortality from a bird’s-eye view: “For what are days but the furnace of an eye?”; “For what are space and time. …”

Revell ribs his old friend Death, almost flirts with him, teasing with seemingly silly statements—“‘Death,’ I said, ‘if your eyes were green / I would eat them,’” and “‘I know someone, a woman, / Who sank her teeth into the moon’”—and rhetorical questions: “How is it I remember everything / That never happened and almost nothing that did? / Was I ever born?” But though these lines may at first seem silly, the stakes here are as high as they can be. All of this figurative language about eating eyes and the moon is a fun way of calling for something such as carpe diem, exuberance, living life fully. Revell continues in this leaping, metaphorical manner, nodding, perhaps, to Blake’s “The Tyger” (“In what distant deeps or skies. / Burnt the fire of thine eyes?”) and Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” which itself alludes to Blake. Revell melds Blake’s awe and terror (what is the Tyger but looming death) with Ginsberg’s exuberance and ends with a celebratory turn that is all his own:

For what are days but the furnace of an eye?
If I could strip a sunflower bare to its bare soul,
I would rebuild it:
Green inside of green, ringed round by green.
There’d be nothing but new flowers anymore.
Absolute Christmas.

This stanza is extraordinary for its lucidity and simple but deeply penetrating archetypal imagery, and it shows how Revell operates at his best. We can’t read his description of the “days” literally, but it may conjure the bright afterimages of the world projected on our eyelids when we close our eyes—a gorgeous and strange vision like that but with the eyes open. This is a prescriptive poem, a poem about how to look. Revell wants us to see the world as magical and strange and charged in that way: a kind of visual miracle, the familiar made strange.

Revell then breaks down one of these everyday visions to make it miraculous and strange. Lots of poets have seized on sunflowers as powerful emblems (Ginsberg calls the sunflower “a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon”) and Revell’s sunflower is an ecstasy atomized, its basic elements laid out to reveal “its bare soul,” which, rebuilt, is composed of “Green inside of green, ringed round by green.” This “green” is an old archetype, nature’s generative power, the same green that makes someone with a green thumb a great gardener. The redundancy of the line—three greens in one sentence—suggests nature’s lush, irreducible creativity—living things grow, and when they die, new ones grow, leaving “nothing but new flowers anymore.” And then there is that lovely, surprising flourish, a nod to God: “Absolute Christmas”—it’s Christianity’s annual celebration of birth, death, and rebirth that is made general, accessible, almost secular. Revell doesn’t seem to want to alienate non-Christians here; instead, we readers can find our own divinity in nature, our own place in the cycles of life and death.

This is what I come to poetry for, what, I believe, we all seek in poems: language that can show us a life unbound by time. It’s hard won, demanding absolute faith in the intelligence of the words themselves. Hence Revell’s huge associative leaps, his trust in simple, indelible symbols—green for youth, the moon for distance, hope, and desire—and all the fun the poems are having as they “remember everything / That never happened. …”

For Revell, death is personal, right-sized; it accompanies each of us like a shadow, a version of one’s self, growing “beside me, always taller. …” Though shadows often have darker valences, this one is of the friendly, rather than the corner-lurking, sort, a kind of Peter Pan shadow, egging on the one who casts it or beckoning him to keep up, depending on the angle of the sun or perhaps how close he is to death.

It requires a special poetic sensibility not to take the typical grim aspects of death. The speaker of this poem is exaggerating: he has been confused plenty, like everyone, but not, now, about death “whose only story / Is the end of the story, right from the start. …” Perhaps death is the confused one here because of how surprising it is that this particular voice is so accepting, so open-hearted about what death usually means. Death is not expecting a friend but finds one in this poem. 

Of course, as Revell says in the poem’s most extraordinary and visionary stanza, “boys and girls murdered / In their first beauty” are “now with children of their own.” It’s what we want for them, what they deserve, and we invented language or were beckoned to discover it forever ago and again every day of every life, to hold that wish for us, to uphold it, to keep it safe from the withholding of our fear. Revell finds real consolation in envisioning these injustices righted in the afterlife, which is a religious word for the lifeblood of poetry: the imagination, the realm where wishes can be fulfilled, where pain can be healed, where death can be transcended. Yes, the poem presents a vision of Christian heaven: “the explosion of happy souls / Into the greeny, frozen Christmas Eve air: / Another good Christmas, a white choir,” but it’s one we can all relate to.

At its close, the poem returns to the boy and his shadow “Beside each other still. …” When Revell reaches out to his lost mother, saying “I miss you,” he is speaking to her in the afterlife of the poem, in the imagination, where we his “Dear reader[s]” also reside at this very moment, beside his mother, with his shadow. The poem’s capacity to converse with the dead is the same as its capacity to reach out and converse with us, Revell’s imaginary readers, who, like the “you” Whitman addresses when he says “what I assume you shall assume” at the opening of “Song of Myself,” are ever present in the room of the poem, whether alive, dead, known, unknown, whether or not we ever read Revell’s words.

The poem proposes a mighty act of communion, a gathering together of readers and writers, speakers and listeners, living and dead. This is a poem of deep empathy, of comforting and keeping company. Revell wants us to feel less alone and less afraid to die, whatever we believe. Revell’s poem can help us: so that when we think of death, we can remember we are blessed with life.

- Craig Morgan Teicher

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Emily Dickinson on her Calling

The Province of the Saved
Should be the Art – To save –
Through Skill obtained in Themselves –
The Science of the Grave

No Man can understand
But He that has endured
The Dissolution – in Himself –
That Man – be qualified

To qualify Despair
To Those who failing new –
Mistake Defeat for Death – Each time –
Till acclimated – to –

To me, this poem describes the poet who has suffered trauma, found "salvation" in writing, and then recognized her calling as the writing of poems, the giving of testimony that will help others to cope with trauma. She and her poems are proof that people can survive extreme physical and psychological states. Her poems help the sufferer to make the crucial distinction between suffering as setback and suffering as utter annihilation. Dickinson may claim, as she does in a letter of consolation to a bereaved friend, Mrs. J. G. Holland, that “there are depths in every Consciousness, from which we cannot rescue ourselves – to which none can go with us – which represent to us Mortally – the Adventure of Death” (L555), but in fact, many of her poems do just that: they accompany us to depths within us that we could not bear alone, and they invite us to ascend to heights with her, through her poems, that we could not dare alone. - Gregory Orr

Monday, August 1, 2016

“In a House Besieged” by Lydia Davis

In a house besieged lived a man and a woman. From where they cowered in the kitchen the man and woman heard small explosions. “The wind,” said the woman. “Hunters,” said the man. “The rain,” said the woman. “The army,” said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged.

Friday, July 1, 2016

Walt Whitman the interrelated energy-changing Buddhist

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;  
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he.  
  
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.  
  
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,  
A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say, Whose?
  
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.  
  
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic;  
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,  
Growing among black folks as among white;
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
  
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.  
  
Tenderly will I use you, curling grass;  
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men;  
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people, and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps;  
And here you are the mothers’ laps.  
  
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers;  
Darker than the colorless beards of old men;  
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
  
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!  
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.  
  
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,  
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.  
  
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?  
  
They are alive and well somewhere;  
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death;  
And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,  
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
  
All goes onward and outward - nothing collapses;  
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

- from section 6 of "Leaves of Grass"

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Dante in the Divine Comedy: Everyman and a specific man, full of complex feelings


Dante in the Divine Comedy may be Everyman, but he is also credibly a specific man, full of complex feelings. In the course of the poem, we see him experience not only love and joy but also fear, pity, hesitation, anger, remorse, curiosity, and bewilderment.

For example, at the end of Canto 17 of the Inferno, Virgil commands Dante to ride with him on the back of the monster Geryon. In just eight lines Dante describes the terror he felt at this prospect, then his shame at the thought that Virgil would consider him a coward, then his request to Virgil that the poet hold him tight as they ride—but, as in a nightmare, he is so afraid he cannot even really get these words out. Once on the back of the monster, he is momentarily reassured, only to feel even greater fright as the beast plunges into the abyss.

Botticelli beautifully captures the intensity of Dante’s response by drawing this sequence as a series of four scenes arranged in a continuous narrative. First we see Dante, hesitant and afraid, with his head down, eyes closed, and hands crossed guardedly on his chest, as Virgil beckons to him from the beast. Next we see Geryon take off with Virgil clasping Dante, whose shoulders are hunched high in fearful self-protection. Then as the beast plummets we see Dante staring in nauseous horror; and finally as Virgil and Dante disappear below the rim of the seventh circle of Hell, almost all we can make out of Dante’s face is one eye glaring further into the frightful depths. I do not know of any other early Renaissance work of art that so convincingly portrays the experience of sickening terror.

Following Dante’s lead, Botticelli depicts many other states of thought and feeling as well. For instance, Dante repeatedly describes how on his journey he had to pause in confusion as he reached his limit of understanding before, with the help of Virgil or Beatrice, he learned to perceive more clearly and to pass on to a higher level of wisdom. We can see how Botticelli illustrates such a scene in his drawing for Canto 2 of the Paradiso. Here the painter shows Dante floating with Beatrice inside the sphere of the moon as she begins to explain to him the nature of the heavens. Lost in concentration, Dante’s head is back, with his mouth open, and his eyes peering far into the distance. Although Botticelli has drawn his face with just a few quick strokes, instantly you can recognize the great effort the poet is making to comprehend what Beatrice is telling him. In Botticelli’s picture, thinking is an action, a movement of the mind and soul, made visible by pose and expression.


The Divine Comedy is a love story, most famously of the love that moves the heavens, and the love of Dante and Beatrice. But it also recounts the love between Dante and Virgil. The relationship of a mentor and a protégé is a unique one in the drama of human life: a teacher and pupil are bound together with close ties of affection, but this affiliation is fundamentally different from those between lovers, family members, or friends. As perhaps no earlier writer, Dante celebrates such a relationship in the Divine Comedy. He calls Virgil not only master, guide, and teacher, but also “dearest father,” and at least once compares Virgil’s concern for him to that of a mother for her child.

Botticelli responded powerfully to this portrayal and depicts the affection of the two men with great imagination and sensitivity. In sheet after sheet, we see Virgil exhorting, encouraging, instructing, and correcting Dante; the Roman poet points out to him where to look and tells him what lesson to learn from what he sees. Their bond is especially visible in the way they gracefully move together across the drawings, almost like two dancers on a stage. Botticelli illustrates Virgil’s care and Dante’s trust with such authority that they seem drawn from life, not just literature, as if the artist were calling upon his own experiences as a pupil and teacher. - Andrew Butterfield

Monday, May 2, 2016

Still Life by Pierre Tal-Coat / Comment by Wallace Stevens


The picture came this morning in perfect condition. I had feared that it was going to be low in tone, having in mind your drawing and color indications. And I was happy therefore, to find that it is so much cooler, and richer, and fresher, than I had expected. It is young and new and full of vitality. The form and the arrangement of the objects are both full of contrariness, and sophistication. It is a fascinating picture. For all it's indoor light on indoor objects, the picture refreshes one, with an outdoor sense of things. The strong blue lines and the high blue point of the black line in the central foreground collect the group. The line in the glass on the righthand edge, warms without complicating the many cool blues and greens. This is going to give me a great deal of pleasure, and I am most grateful to you. - from a letter to Paule Vidal, September 30, 1949

Now that I have had the picture at home for a few days, it seems almost domesticated. Tal-Coat is supposed to be a man of violence, but one soon becomes accustomed to the present picture. I have even given it a title of my own: "Angel Surrounded by Peasants". The angel is the Venetian glass bowl on the left, with the little spray of leaves in it. The peasants are the terrines, bottles and the glasses that surround it. This title alone tames it, as a lump of sugar might tame a lion. - from a letter to Paule Vidal, October 5, 1949

Friday, April 1, 2016

Story About a Young Couple

A husband who had to go off to war, and he left his wife behind, pregnant. Three years later, when he was released from the army, he returned home. His wife came to the village gate to welcome him, and she brought along their little boy. When husband and wife saw each other, they could not hold back their tears of joy. They were so thankful to their ancestors for protecting them that the young man asked his wife to go to the marketplace to buy some fruit, flowers, and other offerings to place on the ancestors’ altar.

While she was shopping, the young father asked his son to call him “daddy,” but the little boy refused. “Sir, you are not my daddy! My daddy used to come every night, and my mother would talk to him and cry. When mother sat down, daddy also sat down. When mother lay down, he also lay down.” Hearing these words, the young father’s heart turned to stone.

When his wife came home, he couldn’t even look at her. The young man offered fruit, flowers, and incense to the ancestors, made prostrations, and then rolled up the bowing mat and did not allow his wife to do the same. He believed that she was not worthy to present herself in front of the ancestors. His wife was deeply hurt. She could not understand why he was acting like that. He did not stay home. He spent his days at the liquor shop in the village and did not come back until very late at night. Finally, after three days, she could no longer bear it, and she jumped into the river and drowned herself.

That evening after the funeral, when the young father lit the kerosene lamp, his little boy shouted, “There is my daddy.” He pointed to his father’s shadow projected on the wall and said, “My daddy used to come every night like that and my mother would talk to him and cry a lot. When my mother sat down, he sat down. When my mother lay down, he lay down.” “Darling, you have been away for too long. How can I raise our child alone?” She cried to her shadow. One night the child asked her who and where his father was. She pointed to her shadow on the wall and said, “This is your father.” She missed him so much. - Thich Nhat Hanh

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Rembrandt looking for a way out of the darkness

The critic must understand the terms of the antagonism. Every exceptional work was the result of a prolonged successful struggle. Innumerable works involved no struggle. There were also prolonged yet unsuccessful struggles.

To be an exception, a painter whose vision had been formed by this tradition, and who has probably studied as an apprentice or student from the age of sixteen, needed to recognize his vision for what it was, and then to separate it from the usage for which it has been developed. Single-handed he had to contest himself as a painter in a way that denied the seeing of a painter. This meant that he saw himself doing something that nobody else could foresee. The degree of effort required is suggested in two self-portraits by Rembrandt.


The first was painted in 1634, when he was twenty-eight; the second thirty years later. But the difference between them amounts to something more than the fact that age has changed the painter’s appearance and character.

The first painting occupies a special place in, as it were, the film of Rembrandt’s life. He painted it in the first year of his marriage. In it he is showing off Saskia, his bride. Within six years she will be dead. The painting is cited to sum up the so-called happy period of the artist’s life. Yet if one approaches it now without sentimentality, one sees that it employs the traditional methods for their traditional purposes. His individual style may be becoming recognizable. But it is no more than the style of a new performer playing a traditional role. The painting as a whole remains an advertisement for this sitter’s good fortune, prestige, and wealth. (In this case Rembrandt’s own.) And like all such advertisements it is heartless.


In the later painting he has turned the tradition against itself. He has wrested its language away from it. He is an old man. All has gone except a sense of the question of existence, of existence as a question. And the painter in him who is both more and less than the old man has found the means to express just that, using a medium which has been traditionally developed to exclude any such question.

At the age of sixty-three he died, looking, even by the standards of his time, very old. Drink, debts, and the death through the Plague of those nearest to him are amongst the explanations of the ravages done. But the self-portraits hint at something more. He grew old in a climate of economic fanaticism and indifference—not dissimilar to the climate of the period we are living through. The human could no longer simply be copied (as in the Renaissance), the human was no longer self-evident: it had to be found in the darkness. Rembrandt himself was obstinate, dogmatic, cunning, capable of a kind of brutality. Do not let us turn him into a saint. Yet he was looking for a way out of the darkness.
- John Berger

Monday, February 1, 2016

Haiku, Zen & Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson has the self in her poetry dissolve in the paradoxes she creates beyond which she seeks enlightenment. The haiku, which often relies on the teachings of Zen-Buddhism, lives on contradicting the laws of logic. Logical rules limit the scope of human understanding. Breaking those rules allows the mind to penetrate further into the mysteries of the universe. In Zen-Buddhism this is most often achieved by means of the koan, a riddle that must be solved beyond the boundaries of logic. Dickinson takes similar steps into the spheres of contradiction, as for example in the poems “I’m Nobody” or “Much Madness is Divinest Sense.” By transcending dualistic logic, the self advances to a higher level of understanding him/herself and the world. It also succeeds in empathizing with other beings and in grasping the mystery of existence as such. Transcending its own sense of limited self it expands itself into a sense of oneness with the universe. In this context the I is not transcendental in the sense that it constitutes the world. Rather, the world is internalized by the I or, vice versa, the I is absorbed by the world. There is no more dualism between the subject and the object, between the I and the world. - Gudrun Grabher

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

David Bowie and “What if?”

What I found that I was good at doing, and what I really enjoyed the most, was the game of “What if?” What if you combined Brecht-Weill musical drama with rhythm and blues? What happens if you transplant the French chanson with the Philly sound? Will Schoenberg lie comfortably with Little Richard? Can you put haggis and snails on the same plate? Well, no, but some of the ideas did work out very well. - David Bowie

Monday, January 4, 2016

"The Happy Accidents of the Swing" by Jean-Honoré Fragonard / Comment by Robert Walser


A rococo beauty is being swung to and fro in a tastefully coiffed, as it were, charmingly frilly park, while her admirer occupies himself with gazing at her. After all, nothing can be more delightful to one who knows how to live than the pleasure enjoyed by a woman he finds beautiful.