notanotherbookreview

T.M. Givens, like his favorite poet Rilke, enjoys experiencing nature directly and making art from his impressions. Rilke's query; how do humans reconcile existence--beauty, suffering, life and death was answered in lyrical poems that begin in nature. Below, he  deals with the end of summer. (The last part reverberated with me, a city-dweller.) Day In Autumn--Rainer Maria Rilke After the summer's yield, Lord it is time to let your shadow lengthen on the sundial and in the pastures let the rough winds fly. As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness Direct on them two days of winter light to hale them golden toward their term, and harry the last few drops of sweetness through the wine. Whoever's homeless now, will build no shelter who lives alone will live infinitely so, waking up to read a little, draft long letters, and, along the city's avenues, fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen. I paint in my spare time and was fortunate this summer...

The Cold War was first an earsplitting siren, my first grade teacher urging us to crawl under our worktables and cover our heads. Hiding from "Nukes" was only a drill but real to me. Our teacher standing tall was very brave, as she waited--for what? The end of the world, wasn't a concept but many of us had seen mushroom clouds on TV, unsure what the images meant. We learned the BOMB brought peace, that our government protected us. But it was scary, threatening, a weird weapon in some global Western--bad guys behave or else?   Ideas are powerful after the unthinkable. COLD WARRIORS: Writers Who Waged The Literary Cold War by Duncan White (Aug. 27, 2019, Custom House/William Morrow) is an  exciting read of huge scope, showing how literature was  weaponized by both sides in an ideological conflict (western capitalist vs.eastern communist). Establishing "spheres of influence" meant survival for competing systems of government. The information battlefield: ...

I read that Ta-Nehisi Coates was once a student of both Tony Morrison and E.L. Doctorow. These two as influences make sense in Coates' THE WATER DANCER, a novel that weaves African spiritual tradition with the cultural annhilation that was the slave economy in Virginia and the rest of the South. The darkness of this infamy has an unexpected light in this mythic "coming of age" novel, a kind of awe for the mystery of life. THE WATER DANCER is a lyrical first-hand narrative of  plantation life in Virginia in the 1800s, when slave families were destroyed on whim or the business interests of owners.  As loved ones were sold down "Natchez Way" in Texas and other destinations west, those born to the "task" suffered husbands, wives, children disappearing often with no warning or forwarding address. The threat was enough to quell outer rebellion, while those so bereaved took comfort where it could be found--knowing it was transient.. The narrator, Hiri...

In Flannery O'Coonor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find , a criminal called The Misfit, a caricature of a good ol' boy gone bad, and his atavistic cohorts randomly capture a typical southern family. In this darkly satirical story, the criminals' shockingly casual killings are indelibly linked with the family's hypocritical values--illusions about class and virtue, racial prejudice, religious pretensions. This story, like Karin Slaughter's thriller, is about America's underbelly, where mainstream values have gone to seed, as the disaffected revel in demented revenge. Karin Slaughter's THE LAST WIDOW (August 2019, HarperLuxe) begins in our time, July 7th, 2019 with the odd "random" kidnapping of a scientist from the Centers for Disease Control.  It's but a prologue to a bombing in Atlanta near Emory University; two major hospitals, the FBI headquarters, and CDC. The two actions are no coincidence and only the beginning. Sara, a medical exami...

The Archbishop's Ceiling by Arthur Miller, presented by Regeneration Theatre, is a play rarely done and this was the first New York production.  I thought I knew Miller's work but never heard of this  play set in the 1970's in an unnamed Eastern European country, where government controls  information and the freedom of writers.  In this behind the "Iron Curtain" drama, Miller, who lived through the McCarthy era, had insights into the clash between governments' need to control information and writers' need for free speech. This reverberates in 2019's chaotic "fake news" environment. Our former Cold War enemy's divide and conquer tactics, that influenced our 2016 elections, is a propaganda model used in the former soviet bloc and now imported abroad. History does repeat itself, though never in the same form. Miller's play opens with Adrian and Maya having drinks in an elegant high ceilinged room in a bygone Imperial style. Maya ...

"When you're an artist you're searching for freedom; you never find it,'cause there ain't any freedom. But at least you search for it. In fact, art could be called the search." "Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom. You know all these things in life keep crawling over you all the time, so it's very hard to feel free." -- Alice Neel I met Alice Neel at her Whitney retrospective in 1974. A year out of art school, I was working for a  San Francisco paper actually called Art News. She offered to take me through the exhibition and made the point she wanted NO review about her work that ignored the life that made it. ( At this time, art criticism "deconstructed" art as separate from the artist). Alice pointed to a portrait of a guitar player and explained how she ran off with him to Spanish Harlem. He left her but she stayed because it was cheap and she had kids.  Alice liked  painting neighbors, who worke...

WHERE DO ALL THE GHOSTS GO ?  Theater for the New City  ( Written and directed by Barbara Kahn , ) opens with a rapier thrust by Sarah Bernhardt ( Steph Van Vlack ). a ghost in   Napoleonic drag. She thinks herself condemned to solitude in the derelict hotel, until Marcel Duchamp with his transparent chessboard shows up. Played with droll astringency by David Leeper, his verbal provocations are interrupted by fellow ghouls Elizabeth Keckley, a   demure companion to Mary Todd Lincoln ( Chloe Simone Crawford ). Then Buffalo Bill Cody ( Christopher Lowe) crashes into the room. When Duchamp purposes chess, you get that he and Cody may have been playing an infinite game. When the Baroness ( Sarah Teed ) floats through the room and Duchamp dramatically calls her a thief, it's but a ripple in her trajectory through time with a bright scarf. It is a scarf, ostensibly lost, that brings Jos ( Ashley Versher ) and her wife, Frankie ( Fleur Voorn ) to return to the de...