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… but is it Art?
Thursday, February 12th, 2009definitely art- unless it’s a computer printout, in which case only decoration
I put on the sidebar that the blog is about art, as well as other things, and haven’t said anything more since. This is because I care about, make and love art. But it isn’t very easy to discuss. For one thing, what does [...]
Wordsworth- positive psychology genius
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008There’s something ironic about the way scientists are now proving that being in nature calms your brain-waves and deliberately recalling happy memories induces a state of inner peace: these are wellbeing strategies that used to be well known in other areas of life before positive psychology was invented (religion, literature, art). Last night I was [...]
The Mighty Boosh on creativity
Friday, December 5th, 2008It took me quite a long time to “get” these people and if you’re not British already, you probably have better things to do with the next few months. However, it was worth it in the end; they’re genius poets as well as cult hits, in my view (do all poets have to be Shakespeare? [...]
on poetry
Friday, October 24th, 2008I often have a strange desire to Rehabilitate Poetry, in my own world as well as the bigger one (or some corner of it). Read what you will into the mental health aspects of that; as Graves said, poetry is an attitude, not a group of words arranged just so on a page, signed, published [...]
why intellectuals get depressed
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008A danger of academic life we don’t think about much? But you don’t have to be in a university to make these mistakes:
The real shock therapy Wallace needed, in other words, was to get the hell off campus. The university, with its obsessive reflection upon authentic and inauthentic modes of existence, put his hyper-analytical mind [...]
Gopnik #2: the meaning of art
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008This is about art historian Kirk Varnedoe, and it is a way of thinking about all art (and literary) criticism of which I very much approve:
He was, he said, going to speak without a text, just with a slide list. This was partly a bravura performer’s desire to do one last bravura performance. It was [...]
Gopnik #1: on the middle classes
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008There are 11 little post-it bookmarks in my copy of Through The Children’s Gate, which I mentioned here, which makes for 11 different short blog posts, or until I get sick of them, whichever is first. It’s a beautifully written book, essentially a collection of essays about life in New York, some of that life [...]
blogging as writing- unfinished voices
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008Most blogs I’ve read for years and years have maintained exactly the same voice throughout, because the person writing is the same person. Sometimes voices develop because people change and grow increasingly into themselves as they get a bit older. Some of us don’t stop morphing and growing up till we are quite old, others [...]
Welsh poets talk about how to write poems
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008I was checking out what’s to see in South Wales, and started reading about Merthyr Tydfil, and discovered a poet I had (embarrassingly) never heard of, Leslie Norris, who was born there. Here is an interview where he describes the way he writes poems:
… he waits for the poem to come, like the flu. “If [...]
money first, then art?
Friday, October 17th, 2008Seth Godin’s post, maybe you can’t make money doing what you love, adds to a longstanding cultural debate about whether you can or should try to do “what you love” for a job. There is a Boomer idea that yes you can and should, sometimes that success can be defined by so doing, which Penelope [...]
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