Archive for October, 2009
The Art of de Mentia
Man, check out the human brain. I just read Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan’s biography of the artist Willem de Kooning; it is a lovingly and intelligently written book through and through, but what haunts me is what the authors write about near the end. Unlike that of his great rival Jackson Pollock, who died [...]
The Two Als
The other day, bleary-eyed but happy, my eleven-year-old returned home from a sleepover — a misnomer if ever there was one — and announced that she had a new favorite movie: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. She pronounced Grace Kelly to be “awesome,” and she said that at the truly frightening moment when the killer played [...]
Cliff’s List of Unfinished Books
In my reading life I have made it through some long, tough books (modesty forbids a list); with some other books, I fared about as well as Michael Spinks the night he stepped into the ring with Iron Mike Tyson. I’m not sure the book exists that should be read by every person, and I [...]
