“Camerado, this is no book, who touches this, touches a man, (Is it night? Are we here alone?) It is I you hold, and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms…” Walt Whitman, So Long! In William Covino’s book, The Art of Wondering (1988), he advances Plato’s definition of rhetoric that he develops […]
“My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.” Mark Z. Danielewski In an interview with Google, Mark Z. Danielewski comments on the didactic way he writes his novels. This might come as a surprise if you […]
“To be creative a person must exist and have a feeling of existing, not in conscious awareness, but as a basic place to operate from. Creativity is then the doing that arises out of being. It indicates that he who is, is alive.” D. W. Winnicott, Living Creatively I was invited to present at a […]
On January 12, Haruki Murakami turns 70, and we are going to celebrate now because it’s already his birthday in Japan. Murakami’s been writing novels, short stories, and essays for the last 40 years. He’s translated more than 100 novels and short stories into Japanese, including authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, and Raymond […]
When you think of Neverland, you probably think of adventure and fantasy and infinite play, but there is a dark, irredeemable side of Neverland that we rarely confront. Wendy and her brothers leave their comfortable and familiar home in London for the adventures that await with Peter Pan and the Lost Boys in Neverland. So […]
“We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.” ~Carl G. […]
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” Carl Jung Using Greg Ulmer’s concept of electracy, Jan Holmevik explores the tension between absence and presence in his 2012 work, Inter/vention: Free Play in the […]
“Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you.” ~Saint Augustine Americans celebrate Thanksgiving this week, a holiday Abraham Lincoln designated in the midst of the American Civil War to pause and […]
“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.” Albert Camus In an insightful early collection of essays, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus recognizes that when a person confronts the absurd circumstances of life, they can react in one of two ways. Either they fall into despair, which most of us […]
“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.” ~Albert Camus In a 2009 interview with Reuters Magazine, Kanye West says, “I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life,” which he ironically shares while on a tour promoting his own […]