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To Run and Not Grow Weary, Part Two
Friday May 18, 2012
Maybe it was instinct that sent me back to relive the 1924 Olympic Games. In Part One of this reflection, you found me despairing, feeling a sudden collapse of my lifelong will to write. Slumped on the couch, I was watching, of all things, Chariots of Fire. As a child, I loved this movie. But it wasn’t until college that I saw how it stands in stark contrast to so much evangelical entertainment, how it avoids....
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To Run and Not Grow Weary – Part One
Thursday May 17, 2012
So, why Chariots of Fire? Why is that what I chose for tonight’s movie? Netflix is recommending all kinds of recent, highly rated titles. Why revisit this old DVD? It happened like this: Two hours earlier, I’d taken the car, planning to drive north to a waterfront park to work on my novel. I planned to walk along the beach and watch the sun’s long surrender while ideas filled my head. Then I’d veer into the nearest café....
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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....
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
