How Peter Sacks Joined the Greats
“Paint seems more embedded in the cosmos than language.” The Poet Picked Up a Paintbrush You are about to witness a historic moment. A little more than twenty years ago, Peter Sacks, a successful poet and Harvard professor, decided to pick up a paintbrush for the first time. Today, hailed internationally, his work is…
Read MoreEvan Hunter/Ed McBain, “there is no frame in writing.”
Among the very rare group of writers whose books have sold over 100 million copies, the inventor of the police procedural with his dozens of 87th Precinct novels, the author of The Blackboard Jungle, and the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” Evan Hunter as the boy Salvatore Lombino was art editor of his school…
Read MoreLouise Glück, Nobel Poet and Sometime Painter.
“I couldn’t bear the endless forfeits [painting] involved.” In her youth, Glück painted which, in her essay “Education of the Poet,” she describes as “a small gift.” To this she adds, “Small but, like my other aptitudes, relentlessly developed. At some point in my late teens I realized I was at the end of what…
Read More“Unorthodox”: A Fantasy Based on a Fiction
We all know that when a movie opens with “based on” or “inspired by” true events that what we are about to see is only remotely connected with historic truth. But we want to believe we’re getting lived reality and not just writerly invention so we’re happy to accept the fiction that follows. “Unorthodox,” the…
Read MoreFreeman Dyson, Brilliant and Wrongheaded
Freeman Dyson, the legendary polymath of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, died a week and a half ago. He leaves behind prodigious contributions in mathematics and physics and, perhaps equally important, an iconoclastic philosophy and gadfly writings that challenged consensus thinking, particularly, and rather notoriously, in the sphere of climate change. He also promoted some…
Read More“Parasite” is not what you’re being told it is. A review with spoilers.
“Parasite” (Bong Joon-Ho 2019) “Parasite” is not what you’re being told it is. A review with spoilers. The New York Times this morning joins other media commentators in describing this movie as a “class-struggle thriller” and, in the same post-Oscar article, as a “comedy-thriller.” These are misleading descriptives. Parasite is not about class struggle, although…
Read MoreAmiri Baraka: “Politics is to protect truth and beauty”
“Politics is to protect truth and beauty.” Amiri Baraka, famed leader of the Black Arts Movement, was a poet, playwright, jazz critic, and actor. He was also a notorious political revolutionary who did not cease protesting despite arrests and beatings by the Newark police and struggling to install an honest government that would respond to…
Read MoreEnjoy the latest issue of INTERFACES
Voilá, the latest issue of INTERFACES, internationally renowned journal of text and image. This issue focuses on images and memories, with fascinating discussions ranging from fiction that uses photographs with its text, to Ken Burns’ recontextualizing photojournalism in his Vietnam War documentary and, as an added treat, my on-camera interview with Jules Feiffer, the brilliant…
Read MoreSusan Minot Paints Everything, Everywhere
“I like to say ‘I write,’ or ‘I paint,’ and not ‘I am an anything.” The award-winning writer of novels, short stories, screenplays, and poems, Susan Minot says she grew up in a family in which everyone always had something before them to do with their hands. It is a habit that has stayed with…
Read MoreLawrence Ferlinghetti is turning 100!
Legendary poet, artist, publisher and social activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti will celebrate his 100th birthday on March 24. My on-camera interview with him in 2001 has been edited into a four minute homage by Michelle Memran, producer and director of last year’s critically lauded film “The Rest I Make Up.” After producing no fewer than 30…
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