Mutability and Mortality
Perhaps my favorite in this set of personal homages is “Ode to the Arts and Humanities Staff” which sings the praises of the otherwise unseen and unsung heroes, the clerical and support staffs that keep universities and academic departments running.
Translating the Chinese Diaspora
For many of the characters in Yan’s stories, particularly those who find themselves alone in a foreign land, the feeling of always wishing to be elsewhere captures a state of longing that appears to be the most permanent fixture of their interrupted lives.
A Trans-Atlantic Migration
Bois and his colleagues at October changed, for a few decades, the way that art historians dealing with modernism in America worked.
The Apples of Cézanne
If you’re to understand Cezanne’s marginal artworld status, which remained important through most of his lifetime, then it’s important to consider a claim that will surprise most present day viewers. To most early critics and even to many fellow late nineteenth-century artists, he seemed simply to be an incompetent painter. And, in context, that judgment wasn’t crazy.
God’s Friends
Sigrid Undset, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928, is without question one of Norway’s most famous and influential novelists.
A State of Speechless Wonder and Awe
For Adams, beauty is “a synonym for coherence and structure underlying life… beauty is the overriding demonstration of pattern that one observes.”
A Love For All Humanity
Hildegard Bechtler’s minimalist sets, centered around a revolving circular platform and high, unadorned walls, never distracted from the importance of the text and provided the opportunity for the nuns to be the center of attention. Her postmodern, industrial design felt vacant and made the cloistered nature of the convent palpable.
Two Great Frenchmen in Seventeenth-Century Rome
Genre fantasies, which were popular in the seventeenth century, played a significant role in the process by which two French-born men who worked in Rome became identified as French painters.
A Journey on the Way of Bach
Moller situates Bachian counterpoint between the Renaissance, with its emphasis on harmony (who listens to Palestrina for the tunes?), and the modern popular musical era, with its apotheosis of melody (who listens to Elvis for the harmony?).
Not Furnishing Factual Answers
Robert Trammell is an avatar of the Dallas underground.
Revelation Without Resolution
What is most appealing about O’Connor’s work is that, in it, she is not afraid to look into the unknown and let it remain unknown—to give it revelation without resolution.
The Power of Place and Time
What could be more of a California archetype, a California life, perhaps even a California cliché, Haven argues, than a mid-century émigré coming to a place that is held up as a place, a state of mind, of constant reinvention?
Climate of Violence
Our intelligence is multiple, fractured, and spread across billions of people and thousands of institutions.
What a Nation Isn’t
Recognizing the distinction between unity and uniformity—between, on the one hand, a national unity made up of divergent traditions and, on the other, an unrealistic national uniformity that is rarely manifested except during brief, unsustainable periods of patriotic enthusiasm—is an elementary prerequisite for cultural history and analysis.
The Land, the People, and the Law
Coke and Selden understood that law is also to be understood as part of a nation’s history.
A Sketch by God the Painter?
When in the fourteenth century a French knight displayed to pilgrims what he claimed was the blood-stained shroud of Christ, naturally that discovery attracted a great deal of interest.
Bringing the history of Naples back to life in a great public art museum
With over 150 opera costumes from the San Carlo opera house, many of them on mannequins, and more than 300 porcelain objects from the Royal Factory of Capodimonte, this was a very Neapolitan exercise in its overstimulation.
