Reading
Books I'm Drawing On
In the far reaches: Calvino
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Posted here and at the 92nd Street Y as part of their 75th Anniversary celebration: http://92yondemand. org/Topic/75-at-75/ If I were trying to explain to someone what happens when you are reading Calvino and then sit down to write and find that, somehow inevitably, a strange derivation of Calvino has pervaded your own style, I would say that, first of all, you notice that your adjectives are different. Their purpose now is to distinguish types, genres, members of phyla, not to describe a person you would know on the street. Choosing names for [...] read more
Passages: Dewey
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Here are two passages I've been struck by recently in reading John Dewey's Art as Experience . (Perigree Trade Paperbacks, Berkeley Publishing Group, Penguin, originally published 1934, edition August 2005 p84, p98. ) Throughout the book, Dewey argues that esthetic experience is a heightening of every day experience, that all experience has, immanently, the possibilities of order and understanding that are reached in esthetic experience. This continuity used to be more commonly felt and understood when many people were engaged in crafts, and when the arts had not become specialized, cordoned-off areas. [...] read more
Some Pages Into August, 2013
Monday, August 12, 2013
Some books with which I'm underway: John Dewey, Art as Experience . Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877. Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers . John Rewald, A History of Impressionism. [...] read more