Essays, Articles, Observations & Images – Through the Lens of the Salish Sea
Neri Oxman, head of the Mediated Matter research group; Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, curator of the MIT Solve Arts and Culture Mentorship Prize; and MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle speak at the 2017 Concordia Annual Summit in New York City on September 18, 2017. https://www.media.mit.edu/videos/mm-grand-central-neri-2017-09-18/
I do not recall if Abbey studied zen. It appears to me that inherent in his craft is the idea that what he does not say is as important as what he does. Each sentence zigs and zags around, over and under so many norms of American society, and he does so with nary a …
This piece was written by Wallace for the 2007 issue of "The Best American Essays" by Houghton Mifflin publishers. For anyone who reads that publication and or is interested in essays this piece reads as fresh today as it did then. I think it’s unlikely that anyone is reading this as an introduction. Most of …
Continue reading "David Foster Wallace – Deciderization 2007 – A Special Report"
photos: PHILIPPE MERLE/AFP/GETTYIMAGES The Atlantic Magazine Interview Writers Can Do Anything William T. Vollmann, author of Last Stories and Other Stories, explains why he works by an assassin's credo: "Nothing is true; all is permissible." 1.0k 225 JOE FASSLER JUL 16, 2014 By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite …
Continue reading "William T. Vollmann – “Nothing is true; all is permissible.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/books/review/McCulloch.t.html?_r=0 Susan Sontag - A Biography Daniel Schreiber Translated from the German by David Dollenmayer Daniel Schreiber has created a wonderfully written, well organized short biography on Susan Sontag. The book is fluid in pace and provides an ample well of historical context to enable the reader to see the many connections and subtleties of …
It is not a surprise that literature aids all countries in showing a human face in the midst of hard-edge politics and ideology.This piece is from The New York Times. Follwing the NYT piece is aninterview with Putin and Tolstoy concerning the culture policy document. RLW CreditJames Hill for The New York Times By RACHEL …
Continue reading "In Putin’s Nationalist Russia, a Tolstoy as Cultural Diplomat"
This is a short interview of Christopher Hitchen's wife, Carol Blue, shortly after he passed away in 2011. She is a very gracious and talented woman who shows what a muse she must have been. http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2012/s3619164.htm
photo - towards point omega - rlw This book is a meditation held together by the flow of time; time says that one thing must come after another, we do not will this, it is. We can will to erect things, language, to look as though we have arrested the flow but it is a …
Continue reading "Point Omega – DeLillo’s Literary Masterpiece"
I find that Robert Bringhurst brings to the world a unique perspective of humans and their role in nature. He argues the idea that humans are merely part of nature and the idea that we are here to rule nature and to separate it from our lives will not only remove us from reality but …
Continue reading "Robert Bringhurst – Language, Myth and Poetry"
A very serious loss to our culture. Two articles on Hoffman - Open Letters Monthly and The New Yorker. Philip Seymour Hoffman By Open Letters Monthly In one of those wonderful old theater stories Laurence Olivier is said to have asked another Hoffman, Dustin, as the younger man voluntarily underwent physical abuse in order to …
The link below is an interview that the Huffington Post did with Morris about his film " The Unknown Known". Morris's balance and insight are striking; one feels in the presence of an explorer of human nature itself. http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/errol-morris-donald-rumsefeld-documentary-the-unkown-known/527972ff02a7601ab2000177 http://www.errolmorris.com
The Quiet American - Gaby Wood - The Observer, Saturday 9 September 2006 It's a magazine that runs 10,000-word articles on African states and the pension system, has almost no pictures and is published in black and white. So how does the New Yorker sell more than a million copies a week? Gaby Wood meets David Remnick, its …
I have reposted two items: 1) a fragment from an interview of Robinson where she describes the process of how American colleges evolved in the Midwest. 2) the complete essay Imagination & Community from her book of Essays When I Was a Child I Read Books. The imaginative makeup of a writer is established by …
Continue reading "Marilynne Robinson – Community vs Tribalism"
Looking at the Greeks at sunrise and the Japanese at sunset. The birds are.
I hold still for the light as it plays on the horizon before the earth turns and shows its treasures to the sun and then the moon. Sea animals roam at my feet and I see what they do. It is change that we see.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT When I began working with glass in 1982, I had no idea that I'd be so connected to the material in the way that I am. It was only when I began to experiment with using designs from my Tlingit cultural heritage that my work began to take on a new purpose and …
"Beyond good and evil, beyond reason and social-ethical accountability, rages the drive to create, to engender form." Grammars of Creations George Steiner Jackson Pollock - Untitled (Figure Composition), 1938-41. Colored pencils and graphite on paper
A literary man of immense importance in the twentieth century. Many consider his address to Harvard graduates to be his masterpiece. The speech surprised many in the West since it took aim at Western culture's fundamental problems. Reading this speech today, it remains a dramatic probe into the West's psyche, both conscious and unconscious, and …
Continue reading "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – Artist & Advocate"
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/28702290">Rocks Remember</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user8389075">Yuko Takebe</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
photo : Katherine Wolkoff What Gluck learned from Williams, and from George Oppen, is Pound's sense that " the natural object is always the adequate symbol". She marries William's objectivism, that "moral commitment to the actual, which meant the visible, " with an Eliotic sense of the hidden. She has written that Eliot, of the great …
This video gives a good sense for some of Annie's makeup: we see her naturalness and her ability to express herself verbally is slower than the speed of her thoughts. There is also a unique story she tells about John & Yoko.- rlw
Solnit is a San Francisco native and has written about the town from many perspectives including art, photography and geography. This article appears in "Tom Dispatch" and is part of a dark take on the current explosion of revelations on government spying and recently the FBI's admission that it is using drones domestically. From both …
Continue reading "The Underside of Silicon Valley – Rebecca Solnit"
Paul is a poet and a tireless advocate for Cascadia. He has written a description of what he calls "Organic" poetry and shows its refractions and its heritage in a poetic flow of references. Paul's focus is on the west coast and talks about how it is influenced more by the east than the west, …
Continue reading "Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies – Paul E Nelson"
PHOTO - IRVING PENN THE CREATIVE ACT by Marcel Duchamp Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity. To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth …
LETTER FROM LONDON July 2013 America the Marvelous At any liberal-establishment dinner table in London, say, or Paris, the U.S. will figure as a big, fat, dumb child. Enough, says the author, in an adaptation from his new book: America is Europe’s finest invention—and ultimate aspiration. By A. A. GillIllustration by Barry Blitt KING OF THE WORLD The …
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Excellent writing about a master of fiction and American life. Saul Bellow: Letters In the newly published collected correspondence of Saul Bellow... BY LEO ROBSON PUBLISHED 11 NOVEMBER 2010 Letters Saul Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor Penguin, 571pp, £30 "Of course I am not a Freudian," Saul Bellow wrote to Philip Roth in 1974. "For one fierce …
My life as a concert pianist can be frustrating, lonely, demoralising and exhausting. But is it worth it? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt. 'Isn't it worth fighting back in some small way?' Pianist James Rhodes. Photograph: Dave Brown 2012 After the inevitable "How many hours a day do you practice?" and "Show me …
Continue reading "James Rhodes: ‘Find what you love and let it kill you’"
An excellent introduction to the man. This is a slide show presentation with Henri narrating. His poetic personality comes through clearly. He has a very unique sense of what photography is to him.
heavy wind in sun in the trees wind moving living trees each against the other in their reach upwards just at the end of their tolerance swaying with the form they had built, not yet crafted by the wind but the sun.
" Have you learned my song? Have you guessed its intent ? Well then, you higher men, sing me now my round. Now you yourselves sing me the song whose name is “Once More” and whose meaning is ” into all eternity” - sing, you higher men, Zarathustra’s round! O man, take care! What does the …
The Stranger by Albert Camus - Impressions 1942 Prose that is crisp and spare and precise. Fragments of humanity that are turned this way and that to develop a character in time and place. Meursault is detached and self-sufficient. His social needs are minimal. He is authentic and sure of his senses and is comfortable …
These photographs are of the Taylor Shellfish Oyster operation in Bow, WA and surrounding area just a few miles south of Bellingham on Chuckanut Drive.- rlw
Barry Lopez has lived in the foothills of the Oregon Cascade mountains for 40 years. As a younger man he was a landscape photographer. He is unsurpassed as a western naturalist, scientist and philosopher. He is of course a journalist. His grasp of humanity is deep and highly spiritual. He sees the human situation as …
Continue reading "Bill Moyers Interviews Oregon’s Barry Lopez"
West Pacific Review 