Modern art often seems as if it's just going out of its way to bug you.
It was with some trepidation that I visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last weekend. I knew I'd get to see some of my favorite pieces: Things like a whole room full of Paul Klee's playful drawings, or Matisse's wrong-on-purpose color choices, or surprises like a face-to-face encounter wi...
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This is a little drawing (about six inches square) given to me by Verna Smith, an artist who works in hand-made paper. She must have made it around 1975, but gave it to me thirty years later. Photos don't quite capture the delicacy and suggestiveness of the paper: we're so used to thinking of paper as a neutral ground that we find it hard to pay attention to it when, as in t...
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Recent Converts!
Are You Confused?
Does your inquiring mind raise questions the authoritarian church just can't answer?
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*** ASK MANI! ***
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He Can Explain True Christianity To You!
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Cartooning is fun, and anybody who'd like to try their hand at it should probably go buy Scott McCloud's excellent book on it. But if you don't want to spend the money on McCloud's far-reaching description of comics technique, here's a fun free intro: Barnacle Press has a "Pocket Cartoon Course" from the 1940s available in their archive.
If you learn to cartoon using this ...
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Here's a song, here's a gift
for the day after Christmas
When the presents have been opened
And your spirit has crashed.
When all the colored lights are turned off
And the yule log is an ember
And you've returned that crap to K-Mart
And the tree is in the trash.
You've got to hold on, hold on
To the season's inspiration:
More than a sweet memory,
More than yul...
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Last month was the fiftieth anniversary of the obscenity trial for Allen Ginsberg's beat poem Howl. The verdict back in 1957 was that there was plenty of artistic and social justification for the poem to be as nasty as it was. There's no denying the vigor and appeal of the poem, and in finding his voice Ginsberg turned out to be speaking for the counter-cultural wing of the n...
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the greatest minds ever to write in English. But aside from the justly famous Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he didn't manage to finish very many extended poems. That mind should have produced an English epic, but instead he produced Wordsworth --no small contribution to English letters. And aside from helping Wordsworth find his voice, Cole...
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Back in 1995, I found myself in a situation that is common for graduate students: needing to demonstrate basic reading knowledge of a modern language in case I should need it in my future research. The kind of knowledge required isn't exactly what you'd call learning the language, certainly not with any fluency. But it does equip a young scholar with the ability to read footn...
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A couple of weekends ago my wife and I took our kids up to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The opportunity to visit the Getty at will is certainly one of the perks of living in southern California. We were invited to go to the Getty with one of my students and her significant other. It was a good time and it gave us an opportunity to expose our kids to some great art. Acco...
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Cartooning is an art form that communicates with great immediacy. We don't rely on comics for the best literary writing of all, and we don't look to cartoonists to be the greatest visual artists. Good as the writing and art may be in a comic, we usually look for the highest achievements of word and image in other media.
But if you want word and image bundled together and ...
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(Spoiler alert: the whale is mean and the captain is crazy.)
What a book is Melville's Moby-Dick! Everyone knows that it's a whopping leviathan of a novel. There are almost four hundred words just in the titles of the chapters. Melville, rarely subtle, spends more than enough pages making sure you know that it's a good idea to compare books to whales, and some of them ar...
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How did Aeschylus do it? His plays are so powerful and engaging that he will never lose his place in the front ranks of dramatists. We only have seven of his plays extant --a tenth of what he produced-- but even if we had only one, we would recognize in it the hand of a master. When you stoop to examine his workmanship to see how he constructed these plays, you can hardly ...
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