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 Weird, Unique Lushness
You don’t have to believe anything spiritual to find yourself bewitched by El Greco’s acidic palette, fantastic settings, and writhing, soaring saints.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Leonardo
The popular picture of Leonardo as an inventor of machines (and the many science-museum exhibitions that have followed) and as a scholar of anatomy was essentially formed in the twentieth century as his manuscripts and drawings were widely published for the first time.
Immortal and Beloved: Beethoven and Bildung
What distinguishes Beethoven is his insistence that the performer and listener engage in Bildung of their own through his music. Having performed a great deal of Beethoven’s music, I am often in awe not at what he wrote on the page, but what he left off it; that is to say what he forces the performer to interpret, discover and create themselves.
A Classic, Done Classically
The Royal Ballet’s production, with Oliver Messel’s original 1946 designs, is the crème de la crème of British ballet.
Reason and Follies, Majas and Bulls
Making appearances are flying dogs, people traveling in weird conveyances, all sorts of raging lunatics, defecating monks, acrobats, gluttons, murderers in the act, and phantoms dancing.
The Fruits of Augustine’s Confessions
“Augustine,” Constantine explains, “is the first autobiographer to achieve a warm and intimate bond with his audience.”
Resilience in the Absence of Hope
Despite Braun’s sense of hope- and aimlessness, he keeps on writing, and a new poetic role opens up in the process through the very act of writing: he becomes a seismograph of the aftershocks of the great earthquake.
Retouching Lubitsch
The great French director Jean Renoir once said that Lubitsch was the man who invented Hollywood, and what he meant was that Lubitsch was chiefly responsible for inventing the classic Hollywood technique of “invisible” editing.
The Best Books in Rastafari Studies
From Senegalese Muslim Rasta making pilgrimage to the Mouride holy city of Touba to Rasta-identifying Maori nationalists in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and from Israeli Dreads fostering philo-Zionism in Tel Aviv to Kyoto-based Zen Rastas looking to reclaim the Japanese environment, Rastas are everywhere.
“A Plot to Which There Isn’t More Than Meets the Eye, But Then There Is”
Moon is saying it’s really important for you to decide what kind of writing to pursue; there are entertainers and there are writers of literature.
The Exchange of Image and Meaning: A Conversation
Marking the hours is an archetypal human occupation, and there are many religious and folkloric associations with the hour of daybreak, the threshold between darkness and light, between being in a dream and being awake.
Restoring Coherency to Byron
Peattie suggests that “Dieting for Byron represented a heroic endeavour, to free the spirit from the body, a battle for independence that paralleled (if it did not also reflect) his enthusiasm for other struggles for independence.”
Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and The Uncertain Future of French Secularism
Bruckner comes to this debate with the same ideas he has always had—Enlightenment anti-religious, libertarian, liberationist.
A Language For the Body
Dorothy Hood worked on a heroic scale, with large expanses of color fields juxtaposed with black zones and strange, intermittent areas where the painting is patterned, echoing natural forms like canyons and oceans.
Envy and Imitative Desire
Education, once a promise of a better future for all, now seems a desperate tournament by which some escape the miserable fate that awaits many others.
