arse poetica

Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

This level of observation and whimsy just makes me want to hug the whole world.

[via]

Sidewalk Psychiatry

Candy Chang - Public Art - Sidewalk Psychiatry.

A routine trip can prompt reflections on everything from future goals to last night’s dinner conversation. As people sacrifice personal time for hectic schedules, these casual occasions for reflection become all the more important.

Sidewalk Psychiatry encourages self-evaluation in transit by posing critical questions on the pavements of New York City. Now your daily ponderings and emotional problems can be prodded and treated on the go - and, best of all, it's free of charge!

[via Wooster Collective]

The Interwebs Are Making Me ADD

Just tooling around the interwebs finding way too much to read.

American Exceptionalism in a New Light: A Comparison of Intergenerational Earnings Mobility in the Nordic Countries, the United Kingdom and the United States.

A hunger for books: Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.

Tom Watson: Clearing the Smoke Around Obama.

Postdoc Survey Finds Gender Split on Family Issues.

Yale U. Puts Complete Courses Online.

From Oil Wars to Water Wars.

IKEA Naming Conventions.

Hillary's Cookies.

[photo: ae | wall at Kuba Kuba | Richmond, VA | 11.03.07]

Atrium, National Gallery

It's so pretty! I want to take all of my coffee breaks there.

Hopper at the National Gallery

Up in Richmond, VA, for a conference, and it's about time we got a closer glimpse of the city. We've flown by on I-95 at 70 mph about a bajillion times and neither of us have ever stopped in. No longer! While I was at my mtg this morning db walked along the canal and got the lay of the land. He promised me a guest post -- the pix are great.

I took the excuse of a trip to Richmond to plan my getaway to Washington, D.C., for the Edward Hopper exhibit.

Go, friends. It runs through mid-January, and it's worth the trip. Forget what you know from the now familiar postcards and parodies/tributes. We all know Hopper was interested in the play of light, and many of these paintings are now familiar, but there is nothing like seeing them up close. They're incredibly vibrant and deceptively simple in technique and material, but  you end up wondering less how he did it than how he saw it. How does an artist create an entire visual vernacular? I can't fathom.

How many times have we seen "Nighthawks" now? A trillion? Still, when you stand in front of it, you marvel. The colors, the scene, all that it does and says (and doesn't say). We stared at it for 5 minutes just drinking it in, and it's not near my favorite painting of his. Before seeing it yesterday, I was bored of it, frankly. Another familiar painting -- "Early Sunday" (below) -- was a highlight.

High on my list of favorites at the show were two of Hopper's notebooks in which he recorded sketches of and general notes about his paintings, including size, medium, materials, to whom he sold them and at what price (including his cut!). The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a nice interactive look at one of his notebooks here.

Theatre Notes from Jonathan Franzen

A Q&A in New York magazine w/ Jonathan Franzen, a wonderful writer whose public commentary I think vacillates between gleeful, often thoughtful, snark and pompous windbagery. Hey, you can't win 'em all, and he's a helluva writer, so maybe I should just stick to his books.

There are other interesting bits in the Q&A but Franzen's theatre recommendations got my attention.

Q&A With 'Spring Awakening: A Play' Translator Jonathan Franzen.

Is there anything you really loved recently in the theater?
I actually saw The Drowsy Chaperone twice. I love it. Twice I came out just bursting from laughter, really in physical pain.

Great! I've put that on my mental checklist of Plays To See.

Anything you’ve hated?
If you want an example of what I think theater should not be, Embedded is a good example. I practically came out of Embedded ready to join the Republican Party.

Dear God! What is this wretched mess that makes intelligent writers consider aligning w/ the forces of evil?? Ohhhh...I see. Well then.

Goodbye, Maestro

How can the human heart not respond to this? Kills me every time.

Luciano Pavarotti, Italian Tenor, Is Dead at 71.

Luciano Pavarotti, the Italian singer whose ringing, pristine sound set a standard for operatic tenors of the postwar era, died early this morning at his home in Modena, in northern Italy. He was 71.

[snip]

Mr. Pavarotti remained a darling of Met audiences until his retirement from that company’s roster in 2004, an occasion celebrated with a string of “Tosca” performances. At the last of them, on March 13, 2004, he received a 15-minute standing ovation and 10 curtain calls. All told, he sang 379 performances at the Met, of which 357 were in fully staged opera productions. In the late 1960s and 70s, when Mr. Pavarotti was at his best, he possessed a sound remarkable for its ability to penetrate large spaces easily. Yet he was able to encase that powerful sound in elegant, brilliant colors. His recordings of the Donizetti repertory are still models of natural grace and pristine sound. The clear Italian diction and his understanding of the emotional power of words in music were exemplary.

And he had such a sweet face. If the Maestro felt one millionth of the happiness he gave to others, he'll have lived well.

Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies

Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies.

Grace Paley, the celebrated writer and social activist whose short stories explored in precise, pungent and tragicomic style the struggles of ordinary women muddling through everyday lives, died on Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt. She was 84 and also had an apartment in Manhattan.

Ms. Paley had been ill with breast cancer for some time, her literary agent, Elaine Markson, said yesterday.

Ms. Paley’s output was modest, some four dozen stories in three volumes: “The Little Disturbances of Man” (Doubleday, 1959); “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974); and “Later the Same Day” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985). But she attracted a devoted following and was widely praised by critics for her pitch-perfect dialogue, which managed at once to be surgically spare and almost unimaginably rich.

Her “Collected Stories,” published by Farrar, Straus in 1994, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. (The collection was reissued by Farrar, Straus this year.) From 1986 to 1988, Ms. Paley was New York’s first official state author; she was also a past poet laureate of Vermont.

Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women — mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers — in all their dailiness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.

Thank you, Grace Paley.

Getting Through the Night

A. L. Kennedy, one of my favorite authors, has found something that gets her through the night: stand up comedy. 

Stand-up gets me through the night.

In everyday life, I feel very little (which is for the best), but 20 minutes in a club, an hour in a theatre with everybody happy - that means I'll get a decent sleep and I'll believe that words and individual actions have meaning. That's 20 minutes or an hour away from me. Even a duff gig makes me feel alive.

Now that I perform comedy regularly, I've realised the blindingly obvious fact that, actually, it is like writing.

Whatever your taste in comedy may be - and comedy is viciously subjective - it relies on rhythm and melody just as much as poetry might. (Even a pie in the face has to arrive at exactly the right moment.) One evening you'll sound like notes on the back of an envelope; weeks later, months later, you might suddenly hear the sound of your own voice, real voice.

All of the steps the writer takes - finding her voice, choosing her material, uncovering her nature and working with it, learning the craft - I've found myself visiting them again, and again. Which is never a bad thing. No matter what else happens, at least I can keep learning and working and telling stories.

Nice. Inspired by her description, I'd be compelled to do similar were it not for that whole public performance aspect of it all. And the being funny part. If it weren't for those two things, I'd go for it.

[via]

[Photo: a lovely picture by my pal JM of a leek from his garden gone to flower.]

Truth Will Out

Awesome.

Wooster Collective: Real Images From The War.

The Love Movement has embarked on a new series of street paintings which bring to light real images from the war that the government don't want you to see. This latest one was recently put up in Venice Beach, CA.