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Whispering Along a Thin Trembling Thread
Wednesday May 16, 2012
Most of us are vulnerable to the solipsistic notion that our sufferings and joys are exquisite. My ex-wife once attended a seminar, a Christian women’s retreat, in which the keynote speaker opined about the peace of God. “Most of you have never truly known the peace of God,” the speaker told her audience. “You may think you’ve known the peace of God, but you haven’t.” The speaker had ....
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Charming Demoiselles
Tuesday May 15, 2012
It’s good to see the return of writer/director Whit Stillman. I missed his refreshing take on the world, peopled with earnest, decent, often forlorn characters who parody the culture by way of urbane, stylized discussions. In Damsels in Distress, Stillman again features the upper classes, those most maligned by the yawn-inducing “independent” film establishment that applauds its own supposed bravery by....
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Beads of Memory
Monday May 14, 2012
The hairbrush is cheap black plastic, and vented at the back. It is the humblest kind of quintessentially American consumer item, though today it was doubtlessly made in China. It’s so basic, so echt, that it’s not hard for me, looking at it, to imagine it blown up to giant size in an Andy Warhol painting, or radiating flames in a Keith Haring. I bought the hairbrush in the gift shop of Inova Fairfax Hospital....
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Finding Something to Worship
Friday May 11, 2012
The New York Times obituaries from Sunday, March 11, 2012 include an article about William Hamilton, the man at the center of the “Death of God” controversy in April of 1966. The controversy was sparked when Time published a cover article about his ideas, with the famous cover: on a simple black background, the question, “Is God Dead?” The Times had already run a headline in January....
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Late Bloomers
Thursday May 10, 2012
My husband and I are going through a time of marital restlessness. Not with each other, but with our life together of twenty-two years––the midlife of our marriage, maybe. The last time we felt this way was at the ten-year point. The result of that restlessness, in combination with opportunity and, we felt, calling, was a move from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. Two years, we thought. A whim, an experiment, a chance to....
Artist of the Month
Jean Hollander
Layering up images that are at once soaring and intimate, capacious and humble, Jean Hollander somehow makes transcendent realities recognizably human....
Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
Good Letters: The Image Blog
