If we are the world, as we say we are, how is it possible to have a foreign face in America?
Not all immigrants come by this question the hard way. If you come
from Northern Europe or Slavic Europe, you may grasp the question in your head but not your gut, because the chances are [...]
I dislike the term flash in the pan because if what looks like gold for a second happens to flash in someone’s pan I’m content to admire it that one time. If the sun glorifies green bottle glass I’m content that it’s not emerald. I like mica schist and fool’s gold as much as [...]
Read More...Do you remember The Gates (inset) in Central Park in 2005, that hydrology of orange banners installed by Christos and Jeanne-Claude? I don’t think anybody mentioned it at the time but it had a precedent among the Arabs. They used to hold great poetry competitions in which the poems were painted on vast banners. [...]
Read More...I live in a house surrounded by its weed yards. Each spring I look forward to the happy dandelions so despised by the many. I even like the myriad puff balls they turn into. Periodically the farmer who cuts our grass rakes the thatch and spreads lime, but I use no chemicals or fertilizer.
Something is [...]
It’s always the ones we overlook who are changing the world in concert with angels. It’s the ones who want our attention for it we should distrust.
If we want men with fire in the belly who never flip-flop, we’ll get what we deserve, and we’ll deserve it in poverty, ill health and miserable dupedom.
A leader [...]
This is the key to the figures in this famous painting, The Declaration of Independence, by John Trumbull.
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The relatedness of things has always fascinated me, perhaps because where others collect objects I collect images. When my wife, Marilyn, and I lived in Arlington, Virginia, some of the recent immigrants who worked in our [...]
This is far too specialized country for me to explore, but I would like to suggest that it might be worth exploring. We in the West are inheritors of the Greek ideal of physical beauty. But Middle Eastern thought is haunted by the idea of veiled beauty. We in the West are inheritors of [...]
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