Category: Art

A WRITER'S WIT: ANDY WARHOL

8/6/2026

I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say “figment.”
Andy Warhol, American Artist & Filmmaker
Director of Chelsea Girls
Born August 6, 1928

A. Warhol

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A WRITER'S WIT: LEONARDO DA VINCI

4/15/2026

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The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
Leonardo da Vinci, Artist & Scientist
Born April 15, 1452

L. da Vinci

Up Next:
THURS: A Writer's Wit | John Millington Synge
FRI: My Book World | Andrew Sean Greer, editor, Best American Short Stories 2022

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'HIGH AND DRY' 2024

12/16/2024

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Each year the International Cultural Center at Texas Tech University—located in the campus's museum district—hosts in its gallery a juried show of photographs taken in arid and semiarid locales throughout the world. I am pleased to say that of 50+ displayed photographs, I placed 10th as an honorable mention. You may view this photograph in several places:
1) By clicking here at my website www.richardjespers.com/photos.html
2) Clicking here to view an online display of all the winners: www.depts.ttu.edu/international/events/2025/high_and_dry/
3) If you live in West Texas you can see these photos in person at the ICC.
Enjoy viewing! RJ

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HOW ART IS MADE

9/20/2024

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A WRITER'S WIT
My kids have grown up knowing that their mom made a big investment in making sure there was art and language instruction in school and books in the library. Hopefully, they’ve internalized that.
Elise Broach
Author of The Miniature World of Marvin & James
Born September 20, 1963

E. Broach

MY BOOK WORLD

Moss, Adam. The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing. New York: Penguin, 2024.

I chose to read this book because I’ve always been interested in how creative people work, and because I heard author Adam Moss speak of his book on PBS’s Amanpour and Company. Moss, noted editor and journalist, over a period of many years, interviews forty-three artists, and he paints these portraits, so to speak, with a broad brush. He includes not only visual artists but writers, playwrights, poets, film directors, musician-composers, and some you wouldn’t consider artists at all. For example, he tells the story of two restaurateurs who create a new sandwich and a couple of men who build complex sand castles and photograph the final results.

The book is a visual delight. Moss includes an abundance of visual documentation: photographs, doodles, notebooks, and more. He recreates entire conversations with his subjects, notating who is speaking by way of a script-like presentation. He uses a red font for a sentence and a thin red line extending with an arrow to the example he wishes for you to view. He divides his text into bite-sized sections labeled in bold with a subtitle concerning the text to follow. Moreover, because he has known some of these people for so long, his narrative is a personal one. You feel as if you’ve been let in on some great secrets. Nearly half of the pages include footnotes in a teeny tiny font that challenges readers my age, but I read each one and they all seemed pertinent.

Moss’s subjects appear to have a master plan, whether it is a doodle on a napkin (such a cliché, but I can’t help it) to yards of paper outlining a project. Some projects take years, maybe decades, to come to fruition. The artist or writer abandons a project, then returns, a pattern repeated many times among Moss’s subjects. Or these people may produce many versions or drafts of the same work until it in some way pleases them as being “done.” Many feel that a particular piece is never done; it’s just time to quit and move on to something else.

Moss seems to be finishing this book during the pandemic. Many of the artists speak of how they deal with its chaos and isolation, how much is incorporated into their work or how hard they attempt to ignore the cataclysm and get on with their own work. Moss has selected a particularly apt title, because he demonstrates over and over again the sheer amount of labor—work—that goes into making art. A fine read for anyone but especially those looking for a handle on how art is made.

Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Alice Rossi
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Carlos Ruiz Zafon
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Scott Heim
FRI: My Book World | Paul Newman, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir

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A WRITER'S WIT: KEN DIXON

5/30/2024

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Darwin is my Jesus Christ.
Ken Dixon, Visual Artist
Born May 30, 1943

K. Dixon

Order/Disorder: Migration (2005)

Up Next:
FRI: My Book World | Daniel Fitzgerald , Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ruth Westheimer
WEDS: A Writer's Wit |Margaret Drabble
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Pierre Corneille

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A WRITER'S WIT: GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

11/15/2023

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I find that I have painted my life—things happening in my life—without knowing.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Artist
Artworks: Red Canna, Oriental Poppies, From the Lake
Born November 15, 1887

G. O'Keeffe

Coming Next:
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Chinua Achebe
FRI: My Book World | Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

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A Writer's Wit: David Wojnarowicz

9/14/2021

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Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.
David Wojnarowicz [voy-nah-ROH-vitch]
Creator of the film, A Fire in My Belly
Born September 14, 1954

D. Wojnarowicz

FRIDAY: My Book World | Reinaldo Arenas's The Doorman

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Tolstoy's War with Art

6/19/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.
Tobias Wolff,
Author of The Night in Question
Born June 19, 1945

T. Wolff

My Book World

Tolstoy, Leo N. What Is Art? Translated from the Russian by Almyer Maude [sic] with an introduction by Vincent Tomas. Indianapolis: Sams, 1960 (1896).

I was assigned to read this book for a half-credit, pass-fail humanities class in college. There is little indication that I actually did so (a few underlined passages in Chapter Two). It seems like a challenging read for eighteen-year-olds who’ve had little exposure to argumentation or (unless they have studied art as children) art. In general, to summarize an often unclear thesis, Tolstoy seems to believe that art is a feeling that the artist would like to infect the watcher, listener, reader with.

He believes that high art is so only because it is heralded by the upper classes. Tolstoy goes on and on about how bad Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is, in part because Beethoven was deaf, and how could the composer possibly compose if he couldn’t hear? And besides, Beethoven is attempting to combine two arts: music and chorus (based on another’s lyric). Tolstoy abhors contemporary opera, Wagner in particular, again because it combines visual art, drama, music, singing, and more. When he uses the invective “filthy” to describe it, it seems he has a prejudice he can’t explain. In fact, he leaves a lot unexplained by way of sometimes poor or faulty logic, and by using terms he has defined to his own satisfaction. He asserts that beauty is not art. He asserts that the basis of art must be religious, i.e. Christian (I think).

However, Tolstoy does make a prescient remark when he argues that art (music, drawing, creative writing and more) should be taught to all children so that they may create art for all their lives, in order to enrich their lives and the lives of the people they love. That seems to be the most positive assertion that he makes, and, because many American school districts have abandoned the teaching of art, the result being a certain poverty, I believe he is right. The rest of this work seems like a highly subjective opinion he took fifteen years to develop; if he’d tried hard he probably could have done it in four or less.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman

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Hyacinth Blue Is TimeLess

5/15/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
The mind and heart sometimes get another chance, but if anything happens to the poor old human frame, why, it’s just out of luck, that’s all.
Katherine Anne Porter
Born May 15, 1890

K. A. Porter

My Book World

Vreeland, Susan. Girl in Hyacinth Blue. New York: Penguin, 1999.

In contemporary times, a Philadelphia professor calls a colleague (who is an art scholar) into his locked study to reveal what he claims is an original work of the Dutch artist, Vermeer. The colleague argues against such a claim, but the man insists. He is in a bind because his father has confessed that he himself stole it from a Jewish home while he was working for the Nazis in WWII, but he cannot reveal such indicting provenance. Each succeeding chapter takes the reader farther back in history (à la the film The Red Violin) to reveal previous owners, right up to, the reader must assume, Vermeer himself. All owners are fascinated by the painting and yet must depend on its sale to save themselves or their family from financial disaster. The author explores the value of art. Is it entirely intrinsic, or is it monetary, or is it a bit of both? Vreeland manages to explore this unique idea in a poetic manner which is both compressed, yet expansive, a valuable topic for discussion. The novel is a timeless read, and I’m glad a friend recommended it to me long ago and that I finally took the time to read it.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Alison Smith's Name All the Animals

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Barcelona Photographs 1 — Fellow Travelers

1/5/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.
Brian Tracy
Born January 5, 1944

B. Tracy

Dear Fellow Travelers,

This first installment of my Barcelona Photographs—made during UMC's Seniors Are Special trip in November—is comprised of as many candid shots I could get of our group of thirty-two. In the coming days I'll also post photographs of the region's architecture and its colorful people. Stay tuned!

NEXT TIME: My World of Short Fiction 2018

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October, a Lovely Month

11/19/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.
Allen Tate
Born November 19, 1899

My book World

I'VE MADE IT MY GOAL to read the entire oeuvre of late British-American author, Christopher Isherwood, over a twelve-month period. This profile constitutes the twenty-third in a series of twenty-four.

Isherwood, Christopher, author, and Don Bachardy, artist. October. Los Angeles: Twelvetrees, 1981.

In October of 1979, these two men who were longtime companions produced material for this art book with pages of twelve by nine inches. Isherwood wrote text for each day of the month, and Bachardy produced thirty-two portraits of their friends or associates. The text is not coordinated in any way with the drawings, nor should it be. This is one of print run of 3,000 copies, and much of the text repeats or is a variation on material that Isherwood has already covered in either his diaries or other contemporary books, such as Kathleen and Frank, a memoir of his parents.

Nuggets:

“The beginning of October is a joyful, hopeful, inspiring time of the year for me—it always has been. For me, born so late in the summer, autumn is my spring. This is the season which I associate with fresh work-projects in their earliest, most creative phase—the phase of discovering what the project is really about, rather than how I can execute it” (8).

“Since 1973, I’ve been gradually reading through the Marchand edition of Byron’s Letters and Journals, volume by volume, as they are published. Now I’ve nearly finished volume nine, which covers October 1821 to September 1822” (15).

“There are students who are doing term-papers or these about my work or the work of my friends. They expect me to drop everything and answer pages of questions, instead of themselves looking for the answers in the library. All right, I sympathize with their laziness. But, too often, they make the crudest of all mistakes; they think they can flatter me into helping them by claiming, ‘I’ve read everything you’ve written’—a statement which could only be true of maybe twenty people in the Unites States” (17). And I’m now one of those twenty (surely more by now)! Frankly, I wouldn’t tell an author such a thing but would hope my questions or our discussion would reflect that I had read all his books.

October is a project the two men designed so that they might work together (although they did also collaborate on a number of scripts). Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading the book and look forward to viewing the drawings again and again.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016

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Vintage Cars on Parade

8/26/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
I formed a resolution to never write a word I did not want to write; to think only of my own tastes and ideals, without a thought of those of editors or publishers.
C. S. Forester
Born August 27, 1899

Reno, Nevada—August 3, 2014

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

Backyard Birdcam Returns

5/6/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
Archibald MacLeish
Born May 7, 1892

More Antics

The photos below are brought to you courtesy of our backyard birdcam by Wingscapes. You can set up the camera in a variety of ways. The most successful way for us has been to prop it up several feet from a small pool. The movement as well as the creature's heat trigger the camera. It has some faults. You can't control the exposure, getting some shots that are underexposed and some that are overexposed. The lens isn't the best. The smaller birds seem to evade its powers, but I think it's a matter of going into the bowels of the camera and changing the settings, which we plan to do soon . . . if we can figure out how. We believe the directions originated in Chinese and then were fed into Google Translate, and we all know how that works.

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

Grow Your Brain!

3/31/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
You first parents of the human race . . . who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you not have done for a truffled turkey?
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Born April 1, 1755

My Book World

Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. New York: Penguin, 2007.

I don’t often read “science” books, but I was tempted away from literature by my partner to read this one. Dr. Doidge, through years of research, proves that the human brain is capable of being rewired, even after being damaged, even in old age!

Neuro is for “neuron,” the nerve cells in our brains and nervous systems. Plastic is for “changeable, malleable, modifiable.” At first many of the scientists didn’t dare use the word “neuroplasticity” in their publications, and their peers belittled them for promoting a fanciful notion (xix).

One aspect that makes the book fascinating is the number of case studies that Doidge brings to the reader’s attention: people with brain injuries, people born with only the right side of their brain, people with extreme emotional problems resulting from childhood trauma. Doidge contends that with exercise, people can change their brain “maps,” can change their brains. He tells of Arrowsmith, a school that takes these kinds of exercises seriously.

The brain exercises are life-transforming. One American graduate told me that when he came to the school at thirteen, his math and reading skills were still at a third-grade level. He had been told after neuropsychological testing at Tufts University that he would never improve . . . after three years at Arrowsmith, he was reading and doing math at a tenth-grade level (41).

The concept of brain plasticity helps to explain or reexamine all sorts of problems or phenomena.

Language development, for instance, has a critical period that begins in infancy and ends between eight years and puberty. After this critical period closes, a person’s ability to learn a second language without an accent is limited. In fact, second languages learned after the critical period are not processed in the same part of the brain as in the native tongue (52).

One of the experts that Doidge studies, Michael Merzenich, continues the line of thinking:

If two languages are learned at the same time, during the critical period, both get a foothold. Brain scans . . . show that in a bilingual child all the sounds of its two languages share a single large map, a library of sounds from both languages (60).

Merzenich strongly believes that older persons should continue “intensive learning,” that such an activity strengthens our brains.

Merzenich thinks our neglect of intensive learning as we age leads the systems in the brain that modulate, regulate, and control plasticity to waste away. In response he has developed brain exercises for age-related cognitive decline—the common decline of memory, thinking, and processing speed (85).

Such activities as reading the newspaper, practicing a profession of many years, and speaking our own language are mostly the replay of mastered skills, not learning. By the time we hit our seventies, we may not have systematically engaged the systems in the brain that regulate plasticity for fifty years (87).

Wow! Doidge goes on to say that is why learning a new language in old age is so good for improving the memory generally (87).

To summarize the rest of the book, the author connects brain plasticity with love and personal relationships, imagination, rejuvenation, as well.

I concluded the reading of this book with great optimism. One’s brain does not have to wither and die with age. One can and should continue to learn. One may now approach the learning of things that he or she has always wanted to do but was afraid to try, with a totally new point of view, a renewed confidence. Doing so will increase the plasticity of the brain and thus strengthen it overall.

When I was young and would sometimes glance ahead, with fear and trepidation, to growing old, I often sought out older people for inspiration. The “seniors” I admired the most were the ones who continued to learn, continued to forge new pathways through life.

One woman in particular, Naomi, at age fifty-five—after finishing the rearing of her children and serving as caregiver to both her mother and mother-in-law—finished her BFA and moved to Taos, New Mexico. There she reinvented herself as a visual artist, who counted among her closest friends Agnes Martin, renowned abstract expressionist. Naomi lived well into her eighties, even outlived a daughter who died of cancer, before succumbing to the disease herself.

I still think of Naomi as a superb model for all of us. Whenever I’m tempted to feel sorry for myself, I think of Naomi and what she accomplished the last thirty years of her life. We must continue to learn, continue to forge for ourselves the lives that will most bring us satisfaction. By way of the Internet, by way of local schools and classes, we can learn almost anything we wish. It’s the least we can do for ourselves and for those who are to follow us. May they admire us as much as I’ve admired Naomi.

Related websites:
www.normandoidge.com
www.lumosity.com

WEDNESDAY: PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography 3/19/14

3/18/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.
Philip Roth
Born March 19, 1933

Yellow House Canyon

FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

Photography: Kayaks

3/11/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.
Edward Albee
Born March 12, 1928

Kolorful Kayaks

On this day in October 2008, Idaho's Red Fish Lake appeared like glass. Though Ken and I returned to the lake several times in the coming years, we never saw a day that the water was this calm. Moreover, upon one visit, we would see the kayaks piled on top of one another, their vivid colors faded by the elements. This photograph seems to have caught them at their best. Also the sky. The forest. A perfect day, a perfect peace.

FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

Photos

3/4/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
For years of faithfulness even as a child are not thrown away, but yield . . . a strength at last in times of trial.
Constance Fenimore Woolson
Born March 5, 1840

Route 66 Meets New Destiny

This past weekend Ken and I took yet another chance to flee West Texas. While the Panhandle suffered single-digit temperatures, we experienced, by comparison, much milder temperatures in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Laguna tribe has built a casino, The Route 66 Casino, on land that would otherwise be useless, and they seem to have turned it into a thriving business.

Unlike a number of other casinos we've been to, the Route 66 is kept clean from the busy carpet of old Route 66 icons, and an "asphalt" road making up all the major aisles of the casino and hotel to each and every machine. Employees work hard to keep ashtrays emptied and machines free of finger prints.

I find it easy to see how one can get hooked on gambling. The hum of the machines, each with its own two-speakered music coming at you, each with its own characteristic sounds. The thrumming reward you receive when you make fifty dollars on a Wheel of Fortune turn of the wheel. It spurns you to press the Max Bet a few more times. And then you win maybe two hundred dollars, and you think this will go on forever. And sometimes it does, all the way to four hundred dollars. Never mind that you've allowed the machine to suck you dry to the tune of a hundred dollars to win that much.

But then there are all the other machines. Penny machines. Dollar machines. Machines with almost every worldly motif: pyramids, TV shows, movies, myths, old and new. There's blackjack, if you're into that sort of thing. Real poker games, though video poker has its own rewards, if you're shrewd enough to outmaneuver the machine.

In addition, the place has three eating establishments, a pool, and a work-out area. It's not Vegas, but it's a nice weekend getaway! And it's only six hours from home.

FRIDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

Short Essay, Photograph

2/25/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
The malicious have a dark happiness.
Victor Hugo
Born February 26, 1802

Fort Ticonderoga, New York, 2003

I'm not sure why I love this photograph so much. Maybe it is the point of view—I was able to scoot down onto a series of steps, aiming my camera at calf level. Perhaps it is the wonderful contrast of dark navy and scarlet. Perhaps it is catching these eighteenth-century gents in a twenty-first century stance, cell phones vibrating in their pockets, their parallel shadows in the afternoon sun of an August day in 2003. Perhaps it is the patch of sky located below the stained drum, the turquoise cannon aged by time. The stone wall still standing after all these years. I could now go back eleven years later, and, though the young men would have spread to the far corners of the earth, this wall would remain essentially the same. I would just bet on it.

THURSDAY: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014

My Book World

2/24/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
America, on one level, is a great old-movie museum.
Anthony Burgess
Born February 25, 1917

Terms We Should Remember: Masscult and Midcult

Macdonald, Dwight. John Summers, editor. Louis Menand, introduction. Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain. New York Review Books. New York, 2011.

I became interested in this book when I saw it reviewed in The New Yorker. Then after I received my copy, I found that this blurb from the back cover gives the reader a great introduction to Macdonald, who published most of these essays prior to 1972:

“An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon ‘Midcult’ and he attacked it not only an aesthetic but political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free.” Wow!

Some Nuggets from a Book Filled with Them

On the Mags:

“This is a magazine-reading country. When one comes back from abroad, the two displays of American abundance that dazzle one are the supermarkets and the newsstands. There are no British equivalents of our Midcult magazines like The Atlantic and the Saturday Review, or of our mass magazines like Life and The Saturday Evening Post and Look, or of our betwixt-&-between magazines like Esquire and The New Yorker (which also encroach on the Little Magazine area). There are, however, several big-circulation women’s magazines, I suppose because the women’s magazine is such an ancient and essential form of journalism that even the English dig it” (59). 1960

“The nearest approach to a ‘center of consciousness’ in our magazines is in the Midcult ones like Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Reporter and the Saturday Review, and the trouble with these is that the editors consistently—one might almost say on principle—underestimate the intelligence of the readers” (62). 1960

On Speculative Thinking:

“Books that are speculative rather than informative, that present their authors’ own thinking and sensibility without any apparatus of scientific or journalistic research, sell badly in this country. There is a good market of the latest ‘Inside Russia’ reportage, but when Knopf published Czeslaw Milosz’ The Captive Mind, an original and brilliant analysis of the Communist mentality, it sold less than 3,000 copies. We want to know how what who, when, where, everything but why” (208). 1957

Middlebrow:

“The objection to middlebrow, or petty-bourgeois, culture is that it vitiates serious art and thought by reducing it to a democratic-philistine pabulum, dull and tasteless because it is manufactured for a hypothetical ‘common man’ who is assumed (I think wrongly) to be even dumber than the entrepreneurs who condescendingly ‘give the public what it wants.’ Compromise is the essence of midcult, and compromise is fatal to excellence in such matters” (269). 1972

I was fascinated with this man’s informed opinions because essentially little has changed since he made these assertions (when I was but a child or youth). If anything, such conditions have worsened. What can be more Masscult than People Magazine? And has even The New Yorker slipped a bit? Are we getting stupider as a culture, or was Macdonald too smart for his own good?

WEDNESDAY: SHORT ESSAY AND PHOTOGRAPH

Las Vegas: Misc. Signs

1/28/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
Germaine Greer
Born January 29, 1939

Las Vegas: Misc. Signs

THURSDAY: FOURTH AND LAST PART OF AN UNFINISHED STORY

Las Vegas Photos: Architecture

1/21/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.
Francis Bacon
Born January 22, 1561

Las Vegas: Architecture

THURSDAY: A STORY PART 3

Las Vegas: Landscape and Pattern

1/14/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I'm right.
Molière
Born January 15, 1622

Las Vegas: Landscape and Pattern

THURSDAY: PART 2 OF THE STORY

Along the Border

1/6/2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
Zora Neale Hurston
Born January 7, 1891

My Book World

To peruse my reading journal for 2013, click on 2013, or see Reading Journals above.

Bowden, Charles and Alice Leora Briggs. Dreamland: the Way Out of Juárez. Austin: University of Texas, 2010.

I read this book, illustrated by my friend Alice Briggs, in 2010, when it came out, but for some reason, I did not make a note of it in either my blog or my reading journals. Perhaps it is too disturbing. Perhaps I could not fully grasp what Bowden & Briggs have accomplished. Both Bowden and Briggs spent months, if not years, researching their book, exposing themselves to the same dangers that the residents of Juárez do every day. To get the story of the informant who murders a man while U.S. agents listen in and do nothing, to understand the dynamics of this and a thousand other stories, they both make themselves vulnerable to the ragged life on the border, where, because of a few political decisions made in the past, life is a constant battle between those who are selling drugs and those who would steal the contraband and/or the money it generates. It is a bloody war, one that the United States quietly participates in with its insatiable thirst for more and more illicit drugs. It is a war the U.S. ignores as well, for it is a war so deeply entrenched in the two countries’ economies, whose balance will be tipped if an “Immigration Policy” is ever brought to light. Bowden provides the illuminating prose, and Briggs the exquisite drawings that expand that which he cannot say with words.

The gist of Bowden’s entire narrative might be captured in the following passage:

“One of the early priests after the conquest of Mexico, Fray Durán, knew the old tongue and listened to the old men and wrote down their tales of what their world had been and what it had meant to them. They had been very rich and feared by other nations. They told the priest of the tribute once brought to their emperor: mantles of various designs and colors, gold, feathers, jewelry, cacao, every eighty days a million Indians trudged in bearing tribute and the list was so complete that even lice and fleas were brought and offered. The tribute collectors told the emperor, ‘O powerful lord, let not our arrival disturb your powerful heart and peaceful spirit, nor shall we be the cause of some sudden alarm that might provoke an illness for you. You well know that we are you vassals and in your presence we are nothing but rubbish and dirt.’ ¶ That was half a millennium ago and yet the rich still get tribute and the people who give them tribute feel as dirt and rubbish. ¶ For years and decades, for almost a century, people have looked at this system and sensed change or noticed hopes of change. And yet they all wait for change” (67).

Bowden is well aware that this journey the Mexican people make is one that started long ago and continues, for all we know, far into the future:

The combination of Bowden’s stunning and lyrical prose combined with Briggs’s dramatic but subtle sgraffito illustrations make a powerful statement of our problems on the border. No wonder some want to fortify the barriers that already exist there. It is an ugly world, and we certainly don’t want it spilling over into ours.

“In the Florentine Codex, a record of the Indians’ ways that Cortés crushed with his new empire, it is noted that men who die in war go to the house of the sun and then they become birds or butterflies and dance from flower to flower sucking honey. In the old tongue, flower is xochitl, death is miquiztli” (80).

Sáenz, Benjamin Alire. Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. El Paso: Cinco Puntos, 2012.

The Kentucky Club is a bar on Avenida Juárez in Juárez, the twin city to El Paso, Texas. Most of these seven stories reference a number of things in each one: The Kentucky Club itself, bourbon (or some other strong liquor), stout coffee, fathers who fail their sons in a variety of big ways, and mostly men who fail each other in love.

Sáenz’s style is deceptively simple, strong on declarative sentences and plenty of pages with a lot of white space because his dialog is, if not terse, then spare, lean. Most of the characters, gay men of various ages, live in Sunset Heights, a neighborhood in El Paso, but plenty of them cross the bridge between the two cities, the two countries as easily as most of them switch from Spanish to English—as if they are two forms of the same language. That’s life on the border: with its own lingo, its own culture, like many of the men in these stories, crossing easily from one life to another, but not without a price.

And one must not construe that this is a "narrow" book of gay men’s fiction, many of which made their way onto the shelves in the late eighties because gay men were hungry to read about themselves. It is not one of those books. Some of the protagonists are straight, some gay, some are bisexual. Each one is his own person, whether he is yet whole or not.

In the final story, “The Hunting Game,” the main character, a high school counselor, speaks of one of his students, who has been abused all his life by his father. Sáenz’s metaphors, like his prose, are deceptively simple:

“We grabbed a bite to eat. He ate as if he’d never tasted a burger before. God, that boy had a hunger in him. It almost hurt to watch. ‘I’ll be eighteen in three months. And I’m going away. And he’ll never be able to find me’” (209).

The image is so simple, yet so profound, the hamburger that symbolizes a future that might just satisfy the boy’s hunger to be loved. It has little to do with food; it has to do with hunger, the hunger of the human spirit to find meaning.

On the same page, Sáenz demonstrates through “dream” how the paths of these two males (one older, one very young) will cross one another by virtue of the pain both have suffered at the hands of their fathers:

“I wanted to tell him that his father would always own a piece of him, that he would have dreams of his father chasing him, dreams of a father catching him and shoving him in a car and driving him back home, dreams where he could see every angry wrinkle on his father’s face as he held up the belt like a whip. He would find out on his own. He would have to learn how to save himself from everything he’d been through. Salvation existed in his own broken heart and he’d have to find a way to get at it. It all sucked, it sucked like hell. I didn’t know what to tell him so I lied to him again. ‘He’ll just be a bad memory one day.’ He nodded I don’t think he really believed me, but he wasn’t about to call me a liar” (209).

This PEN/Faulkner award winner has written seven striking stories I believe I should read again and again because I sense there is much I may have missed the first time around. This book is one that my friend Alice Leora Briggs gave me. For me, it is a bookend to the one she illustrated, Dreamland, profiled above. This one gives the reader yet another view of life along the border between Mexico and Texas.

Men in power can easily change borders on maps with the quick exchange of currency, but borders that exist in people’s hearts are much more difficult to traverse.

WEDNESDAY: LAS VEGAS PHOTO ESSAY

Honors and Readings

11/17/2013

Ken Dixon at the Museum of South Texas

Dixon's Order & Disorder: "Maze"

For several decades Ken Dixon, visual artist, has provided exhibitions for the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, Texas. On Saturday, November 9, the museum honored all the artists who have contributed work to its permanent collection, an exhibition entitled "Forty Works for Forty Years." For more details click on the museum link. Look below to view a slideshow of snapshots from the evening (all iPhone pics).

Nighthawks Reading

Sporting My "Burroughs" Look

For over five years I've been part of a writing group that meets at the local Unitarian church. For a modest annual fee, we meet monthly to critique and celebrate each others' writing. Our approach is positive, even when the piece under consideration may have some difficulties. As a result of this nurturing approach, we've all grown, and so has our confidence. New works are constantly finding their way into print because of our sensitive efforts to help one another grow.

On Thursday, November 14, we staged a reading of our recent works-in-progress. Barbara Brannon read a series of sonnets that trace the life of her adult daughter. Michelle Kraft shared a prose piece about how her childhood home in North Texas later became home to an Army Corps of Engineers lake. Marilyn Westfall, poet and leader of our group, read a number of linked poems, among others, about a recent trip to the Isle of Wight off the coast of England. Actor and playwright Juanice Myers organized a troupe of players to present her monologues limning characters—from an old woman regretting how her looks have faded to one that looks back at the fun times the alcoholics in her family provided. I read excerpts from the first chapter of my memoir concerning my twenty-seven years of public school teaching. Thanks to everyone who came, and to the Unitarian leadership for providing us with a place to present our work to the public. Below find photos documenting our efforts. Ken Dixon, photographer.

Dixon Exhibition

10/27/2013

Dixon Minutes Before Exhibition Opens

My partner Ken Dixon recently produced an exhibition, which opened at William Campbell Contemporary Art Gallery in Fort Worth, Texas on October 19 and will remain through November 16. Titled 3 Short Stories & 12 Options, the collection is comprised of "fifteen large-scale, mixed media pieces completed over the past year and inspired by Dixon's decades-long fascination with the Texas Hill Country and northeastern United States. A visual convergence of art, science, and culture, the collection explores themes of order and disorder on both macro and micro levels within the environment. Additionally, Dixon addresses the role of technology in art and nature as he intermingles digital imaging with painting and collage." Needless to say, I couldn't be happier for his continued success.
Please click on the link to Campbell's gallery to find out more. I've also placed a link to the gallery in my sidebar, should one need to locate it later rather than sooner. If you will be in the DFW area in the next few weeks, stop in and take a look!
Below are photos from the opening festivities.

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