How To Write Better: Borrowing From Chemistry
Better Writing Through Chemistry In 1935, Dupont promised they’d bring us better living through chemistry. Today, the phrase is used ironically for movie and album titles and most especially to describe recreational drug use. Acknowledging that chemistry has improved our lives is bromidic. Less well known is that the chemical lexicon, demonstrably miscible with our…
Read MoreDawg blawg
Although I had tried to make The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers as comprehensive as possible, as I acknowledged in the preface, I knew that with new writer-artists appearing every day that it would be out of date as soon as it was published. Omissions were partially rectified with two large exhibitions…
Read MoreWriter-Artists
We’ve all had those head-thumping moments—coming up with the crushing argument when our adversary is long gone, remembering the ingredient left out of the casserole, the part that should have been done or installed before the part just finished with. Many such omissions are fixable, even if at some cost or inconvenience. But imagine writing…
Read MoreDRAWING TRUTH TO POWER: MY LATEST INTERFACES ESSAY
In the current copy of the now Open Edition INTERFACES, I write about the brilliant, popular originator of what Der Spiegel magazine dubbed “art-journalism,” Molly Crabapple, and using multiple examples, demonstrate how combining image and text enables her to convey truths with an immediacy and accessibility that neither can do alone. You will learn how…
Read MoreJules Feiffer: In Memoriam
Brilliant and creative to the last of his 95 years (January 26, 1929-January 17, 2025), author of 35-plus books, plays, and screenplays, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award, all of Feiffer’s work was infused with social and political satire of the highest order. In this interview he acknowledges that his goal was…
Read MoreThe Chip on Molly Crabapple’s Shoulder
In this July 2024 interview, the brilliant, popular originator of what Der Spiegel magazine dubbed “art-journalism,” Molly Crabapple explained that if she carried a chip on her shoulder it was not anger at some past injustice she suffered, but for other people. Seeking to give a voice to victimized, stigmatized, and oppressed, Crabapple, has sympathetically…
Read MoreMy latest INTERFACES essay–a new art form
Voilá, the latest issue of INTERFACES, internationally renowned journal of text and image and my contribution to it–an extended essay on Frederic Tuten along with an on-camera interview with him. Note this is not the brief commentary previously posted but an expanded discussion of the prolific author Tuten, and his art, including a first-of-its-kind art in…
Read MoreAN EDITOR’S PICK
I am happy to report that Book Life selected Still Phyllis as an Editor’s Pick, saying: “Incisive, moving, and stripped of sentimentality…scrupulous prose… Scenes of brother and sister still managing to understand each other despite the fraying of Phyllis’s capacity for language have rich power… That commitment to rigorous thinking and writing about life…
Read MoreSTILL PHYLLIS: A CAREGIVER’S MEMOIR
“Donald Friedman brings his considerable literary gift to this memoir of despair, and with that gift fills the pages with the flickering light of the spirit.”
– William Kotzwinkle author of ET the Extraterrestrial and Felonious Monk
My sister Phyllis was a vital, single woman, a photographer and writer, who was enjoying life in the city when she was suddenly stricken by Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a disease rarer than a lightning strike that spreads, incredibly, via a non-living molecule called a prion. Terrified to realize …
Read MoreFREDERIC TUTEN FOUND A NEW JOY
“At this time of my life–someone would say, the winter of my life, although I don’t feel cold,” Frederic Tuten, novelist, essayist, short story writer, and art critic, tells of finding a new joy in painting. “Practically no day passes where I’m not either writing and painting or painting and writing, whichever comes first in…
Read MoreWHY IS THIS NIGHT DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHER NIGHTS? PASSOVER 2023
Why is this night of Passover,2023, different from all other nights? Because this celebration of the Exodus, a symbol to peoples everywhere—Jews and Christians alike–who’ve won the hard fight for freedom, is being overshadowed in Israel itself by a group of democracy-suppressing, racist, and violent Jews. Because, after centuries of Seders, of praying for return…
Read MoreRALPH STEADMAN: “GENIUSES ARE REALLY LOSERS WHO TRY HARDER.”
The genius of Ralph Steadman can be found in the more than 50 books he’s written or illustrated (or both written and illustrated), in his famous partnership with Hunter Thompson and the creation of Gonzo journalism—the two not just covering a story but becoming it. “Bats over Barstow,” reproduced here, is one of his drawings…
Read MoreZELDA’S LEGACY
On March 10, 1948, at 48, Zelda Fitzgerald, widow of F. Scott, died in a fire in a locked hospital room during the last of her many confinements for chronic mental illness. Variously diagnosed as schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, at least one biographer asserts that a major objective of her treatment was to restore her…
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