“Surrealism and Painting” Max Ernst (1942)
I celebrated Scatter birthday by revisiting the Menil Collection in Houston, the source for my posts last year on the extraordinary art collection amassed by two Europeans, John and Dominique de Menil, who brought their oil business and modern art collection to America at the beginning of World War [...]
Cousin Rick, a far-flung Scatter-friend, writes from Paris. Writes! On writing paper, with hand-formed, fully-formed letters and elegant sentences. Like tooled leather, it seems to me.
Cousin Rick works for a large international “software solutions” firm, recently merged with a larger firm. “With a merger of this size,” Rick tells us, “it can take months [...]
You are just a thought that someone
Somewhere somehow feels you should be here
Arthur Lee, “A House Is Not A Motel”
“We change what we remember, then it changes us, and so on, until we both fade together, our memories and ourselves. Something like that.” This is Salman Rushdie on the way our lives intertwine with [...]
“I’m a stranger here myself.”
Odd this should be the last thing I hear from Aurelio Zen. I’ve just read Zen’s parting shot in Dead Lagoon, the Michael Dibdin mystery novel I’ve saved unread for several months. Didbin wrote eleven novels featuring Zen, the solitary, dark-hearted Italian police inspector. The first, Ratking, was published [...]
“Not much ever happened to him but weather.”
– Willa Cather, A Lost Lady
I think of love stories in winter weather. Perhaps it’s my own small town South Dakota youth calling, remembering my own 60s romance with the love of my life, cold winter nights parking at a turn-out on the gravel road out past the [...]
Gary Snyder , Lincoln High and Reed College graduate, made a return appearance in Portland Friday. In the Oregonian Jeff Baker reports the discovery of a tape of Gary Snyder reading at Reed College on February 14, 1956. Rather, it is a cassette copy a Reed student made twenty-five years ago from the original reel-to-reel [...]
Starting with A Mask for Janus, which W.H. Auden picked for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1952, W. S. Merwin’s first poems were written in a traditional mode, many on themes drawn from classical mythology. In the 1960s, Merwin opened up his forms, abandoned formal lines and punctuation, and infused his poems with [...]
The last couple weeks in the political season anything said on behalf of a candidate is artful lie; anything about the opposition is out-and-out lie. The crude lesson of Modernism is that we are, one and all, unreliable narrators slouching toward the polls bearing a fragmented, mythologized tale. It is a commonplace that hagiography, of [...]
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks while we’re tryin’ to be so quiet?/We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it.
Bob Dylan, Visions of Johanna
After what’s happened the last couple weeks, I wonder if we don’t need to take a deep breath, or hold our breath and count [...]
Walter Benjamin is the prophet of Scrounge Scatter. The German critic of things broken, Benjamin embodies the true spirit of Modernism. Susan Sontag quipped that his essays end just before they self-destruct. But not before I’m lulled to sleep, usually. He’s the philosopher in search of an interpreter who will synthesize his scattered observations. In [...]