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Here’s a postscript to Matthew Battles’ terrific meditation on doodling. In this scene, Gary Cooper gives us all permission to doodle and otherwise be “pixillated” — another word that features importantly in Mr. Deeds Goes […]
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Preliterate, primordial, the doodle is at once the most common and the most ignored art form. And yet for all its primitivity, and despite its surely universal occurrence among the literate peoples of the world, […]
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JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899–1986). The gaucho stood over the dead man, smeared the blade of his facón across his poncho, and slid it away somewhere within the folds of cloth. The smell of blood already […]
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In today’s New York Times Week in Review section, Mary Jo Murphy uses the 40th anniversary of Woodstock as a peg/excuse to air a few half-thoughts about a generational cohort born, she claims, between 1955 […]
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The most widely known American anthropologist since Margaret Mead, CLIFFORD GEERTZ (1926-2006) was instrumental in turning anthropology into the respectable and (more importantly) theory-poachable discipline it became in the 1970s and ’80s. How? Though he […]
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Despite her reputation as the witty gal of the Algonquin Round Table, DOROTHY PARKER (1893-1967) dismissed the clique as “just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were.” They […]
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The thing about KIM CATTRALL (born 1956) is that when she was young she was middle-aged, and in middle age found her youth — that is, she was playing Samantha Jones in lowbrow movies years […]
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“The domestic beast has been bred to special purpose; the tame animal is a wild thing brought to heel. The feral creature, by contrast, is a domesticated animal living without the intercession of man, beyond […]
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The 1874-83 cohort travel far and wide in search of new visions.
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OGDEN NASH (1902-71) was the American master of light verse, an art that has fallen on hard times, since it requires both gentle jokes that everyone can find amusing and barnstorming verbal agility of the […]
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The life and films of ROMAN POLANSKI (born 1933) in turn foreshadow, stalk and haunt each other. His films seem apolitical, but the claustrophobia of his childhood — in the Kraków Ghetto, surrounded by barbed […]
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This was the view out my back window in New York City for more than ten years. That time (1979-1990) was the heyday of Wild Style, when graffiti truly became an artform, as is documented […]
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The very public tragedies in the life of TED HUGHES (1930-98) sometimes overshadow his work. He’s been blamed him for the murder/suicide of his second wife and daughter, and most famously for the suicide of […]
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Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire (2001), The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), and In Defense of Food (2008), is a highbrow. I say so not because he’s a graduate of Bennington, Oxford, and Columbia […]
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