A few years back, I posted about an amazing find of a 1959 audio file of Flannery O'Connor giving a lecture on "Some Aspects of the Grotesque In Southern Literature," — taken mostly from her terrific essay in Mystery and Manners. I am very excited by another new discovery — this time a tape buried […]
Flannery O’Connor’s Voice: Part II Read More »
Marly Youmans' Thaliad offers a healing balm to the swath of nihilistic post-apocalyptic fiction for young adults. Told in free verse reminiscent of heroic epics (Homer meets Gerald Manley Hopkins), Thaliad recounts the aftermath of a fiery apocalypse and the perlious journey of a band of children led by a girl whose prophetic visions
Marly Youmans and Clive Hicks-Jenkins Collaboration: Thaliad Read More »
“To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.” Marcus Aurelias. I love this image of the dancing fool by Hans Sebald Beham (1549) and I am working to find a way to get him into Zizola’s novel. His body is so expressive — ears back, head turned toward the sky, the
Ursula Kirchner — like Lotte Reiniger Silhouette Films — did amazing work in black and white detailed paper cut illustrations. These beauties are from Märchen, edited by Karlhans Frank, published by the Goethe-Institute in 1985. I love this style — it’s so dramatic, so filled with energy. I also think the way it’s constructed from
Ursula Kirchner: Fairy Tale Paper Cuts Read More »
The internet has been very good to me lately. I think it’s an electronic version of Hades where in the ancient world the living, depressed and uncertain, could slip down to it’s muddy banks to search for help among the shades of their ancestors. Just so it seems in a personally difficult year, I have
Pierre Ménager: A Portfolio of Six Block Prints of Old New Orleans Characters Read More »
I was quite astonished to see this wonderful mythic and western art of Javier Pinon — the unusual combination of cowboys and Greek myths. This is a collage of Icarus Falling — and it struck me so much because it bears an eerie resemblance to a passage of transformation that I wrote years ago in
Falling From the Sky And The Art of Javier Pinon Read More »
"Do you have any books the faculty doesn't particularly recommend? Flannery O'Connor's commonsense advice on the practice of making writing a habit: "I'm a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and
Flannery O’Connor: Writing Habits Read More »
"6. After searching for entire nights without knowing it, beyond sleep, beyond exhaustion, having traveled forests of lucid insomnia, you will reach a great deserted clearing where, holding your breath, your ear against the ground, you can hear the very heartbeat of silence. Then, as you rise, you will realize that you are surrounded by
Fernand Dumont: Treaties on Fairies Read More »
Can you imagine the most mythical moment of your childhood? That moment when everything changes and you know that going forward you will be profoundly different, that your life as you once knew it would be over. My father Emile was born in Paris — his father an American ex-patriot and his mother a beautiful
Mythic Moments: The Arrival of the SS Excambion at New York Harbor, January, 1941 Read More »
“On the Trail of the Warsaw Basilisk” is the sort of unexpected article that gives answer to the age old question, “Where do you get your ideas?” A Smithsonian article provides a fascinating history of Basilisk sightings — from antiquity through the middle ages and Renaissance. The Basilisk is a peculiar hybrid, “a crested snake
Basilisk Hunting in the 16th Century Read More »
