Daniel A. Rabuzzi's Blog, page 11
March 18, 2012
Peering in the Mere of Mimesis
Two quotes struck the lobster and canary this week:
"As museums continue building mobile devices into more exhibits--the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston now offers multmedia tours on 750 rentable iPod Touches--staffers are debating how to incorporate the technology without turning their visitors into what some in the business call 'gallery zombies,' guests who stand inches from a masterpiece while glued to their screens. [//] London-based art collector and art adviser Lauren Prakke says digital gadgets already fill art events. 'Sometimes you think, wow, you've got some of the most incredible art in the world in the room and someone's staring at the telephone,' she says. 'I'm like, "Am I the only one looking at the art?" ' "
---Ellen Gamerman," The Art of the Tablet," The Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2012, pg. D2.
"...curators in this city...need to pay a lot more attention to exhibition design, on- and offline. [//] The performance section of the show [the Whitney Biennial] ... is a sad example. It's left without any sort of livestreaming or video documentation...Surely, if we've learned anything from Marina Abramovic's blockbuster 2010 performance The Artist is Present, it's that more online documentation, not less, draws visitors."
---Paddy Johnson, "Witless Biennial," The L Magazine, March 14-27, 2012, pg. 46.
Puts us in mind of Goethe engaging with Aristotelian aesthetics in "On Truth and Verisimilitude in Works of Art" (published in the first issue of his Propylaen in 1798). Conducting a dialogue within a fictional theater about illusion and the imitation of nature, Goethe pronounces on the value of artful deception and the de-layering of reality. Which matters more: the appearance (Schein) of truth, or truth itself? What is the "thing itself" (die Sache selbst), and how would we know it if we came upon it, as it sleeps, dines, walks and soars within a carved frame or the flicker of pixels? Art imitating nature...
...and imitating itself in auto-mimetic gazings...
...representing a representation...
...imaging images of a truth whose origin may or may not surge from the thing itself?
As Wallace Stevens has it:
"When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles."
Further readings:
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936).
William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930).
Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (2002).
Robert Motherwell, "The Modern Painter's World" (1944).
Erwin Panofsky, "The Problem of Style in the Visual Arts" (1915).
Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (1998).
Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1917).Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
"As museums continue building mobile devices into more exhibits--the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston now offers multmedia tours on 750 rentable iPod Touches--staffers are debating how to incorporate the technology without turning their visitors into what some in the business call 'gallery zombies,' guests who stand inches from a masterpiece while glued to their screens. [//] London-based art collector and art adviser Lauren Prakke says digital gadgets already fill art events. 'Sometimes you think, wow, you've got some of the most incredible art in the world in the room and someone's staring at the telephone,' she says. 'I'm like, "Am I the only one looking at the art?" ' "
---Ellen Gamerman," The Art of the Tablet," The Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2012, pg. D2.
"...curators in this city...need to pay a lot more attention to exhibition design, on- and offline. [//] The performance section of the show [the Whitney Biennial] ... is a sad example. It's left without any sort of livestreaming or video documentation...Surely, if we've learned anything from Marina Abramovic's blockbuster 2010 performance The Artist is Present, it's that more online documentation, not less, draws visitors."
---Paddy Johnson, "Witless Biennial," The L Magazine, March 14-27, 2012, pg. 46.
Puts us in mind of Goethe engaging with Aristotelian aesthetics in "On Truth and Verisimilitude in Works of Art" (published in the first issue of his Propylaen in 1798). Conducting a dialogue within a fictional theater about illusion and the imitation of nature, Goethe pronounces on the value of artful deception and the de-layering of reality. Which matters more: the appearance (Schein) of truth, or truth itself? What is the "thing itself" (die Sache selbst), and how would we know it if we came upon it, as it sleeps, dines, walks and soars within a carved frame or the flicker of pixels? Art imitating nature...
...and imitating itself in auto-mimetic gazings...
...representing a representation...
...imaging images of a truth whose origin may or may not surge from the thing itself?
As Wallace Stevens has it:
"When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles."
Further readings:
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936).
William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930).
Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (2002).
Robert Motherwell, "The Modern Painter's World" (1944).
Erwin Panofsky, "The Problem of Style in the Visual Arts" (1915).
Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (1998).
Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1917).Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
March 4, 2012
The Founder's Tale: How Arts Entrepreneurs Will Save The Economy
"When I look back at the history of Hauser & Wirth over the past 17 years, I notice a pattern—we have almost always opened our galleries in difficult economic moments..."
-- NYC gallerist Iwan Wirth, quoted in Miriam Kreinin Souccar, "Chelsea Galleries Hold Up During Downturn; Though 25 Galleries Have Shuttered In The Past Year, At Least 10 Have Opened" (Crain's New York Business, May 22, 2009).
Unsung heroes? By nature entrepreneurial, artists-- and the curators, gallery owners, small-press publishers and editors who travel in their van-- have (disproportionately?) propelled the American economy through the Great Recession and its grouchy, spasmodic recovery. As banking, manufacturing and other traditional mainstays have blown up, the arts have adapted quickly and become a hotbed of start-ups and innovative change. In the accelerating shift within American business to individualized design and making, where work crosses disciplinary boundaries and creates wholly new product and service categories at the click of a mouse, the arts are (to paraphrase Marie Ponsot's description of Philip Lopate's poetry) the new economy's "ungovernable alchemic hope."
Here in New York City, the arts drive commerce as much they are driven by it, and they shape the very lay-out of our shared, urban space-- and they are doing so at a greater scale and speed, despite the recession that began in 2008. "Between 2003 and 2005, 94 cultural building projects were completed in the city, according to an Alliance for the Arts study on the economic impact of construction at New York's cultural nonprofits. Now there are more than 400 design, construction and equipment projects in the works at 197 nonprofit cultural organizations..." (Miriam Kreinin Souccar, "Arts Institutions In Midst Of Major Restoration Period," Crain's New York Business, February 13-19, 2012).
Examples abound: the re-openings of the Islamic (November, 2011) and American (January, 2012) arts wings at the Metropolitan, the coming move of the Whitney to the Meatpacking District (broke ground in 2011 for a new 200,000 square foot building), the Park Avenue Armory restoring its 19th-century facades (to be completed this fall) and expanding its programming, the ongoing renovations to El Museo del Barrio, the High Line promenade/outdoor artspace opened on Chelsea's far west side in 2009, the Museum for African Art opening its new 90,000 square-foot building this fall at 110th and Fifth, the Poets House moving in 2009 to its airy new 11,000 square-foot space in Battery Park City...Big Culture never sleeps in the Big Apple.
An even more impressive story is the continuing expansion of Little Culture, thousands of islets in an archipelago spreading throughout all five boroughs (and next door in Hoboken, Jersey City, Yonkers), creating a lushly fervent ecology that is the real secret to the arts' increasingly central position in a modern economy. Thousands of hard-nosed dreamers are starting new festivals, galleries and journals, competitively scrambling to create the new Bauhaus, to emulate and then transcend the workshop of Aldus Manutius or the kharkana of Ustad Mansur, to blend the atelier with the caravanserai.
A handful of examples chosen from among many:
*The Observatory: Founded by Pam Grossman and six colleagues in February 2009 (just a few months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered the downturn!) in Gowanus, Brooklyn-- a deliciously eccentric hybrid exhibition and lecture space, a vision of what future work will look like, presenting (in its own words) "programming inspired by the 18th century notion of 'rational amusement' and is especially interested in topics residing at the interstices of art and science, history and curiosity, magic and nature."
*The Greenlight Bookstore: Rebecca Fittig and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo opened this impressively curated space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn in 2009, into the riptide of the recession--it has become one of the literary hotspots in an intensely literary city, with a readings calendar second to none (disclosure: I am a "community lender" to the Greenlight).
*The Festival of the New Black Imagination: In 2011 Rob Fields founded this groundbreaking event (reminiscent of TED, PopTech and SXSW--Fields has twice been a panelist at the latter)-- a celebration of cross-genre innovation, with a focus on alt music, digital performance and narrative. The 2012 edition is in downtown Brooklyn this September.
*571 Projects: Named after its square footage, 571 (founded in Chelsea in 2009 by Sophie Brechu-West) packs a great aesthetic punch in its small space-- a space where the art interacts with the glories of light coming over the Hudson.
*A Public Space: Brigid Hughes founded APS in Brooklyn in 2006, as "an independent magazine of art and argument, fact and fiction—was founded in 2006 to give voice to the twenty-first century." In just six years APS has become an indispensable part of the cultural landscape--it feels like APS has been with us for decades at least.
*BUREAU: A tiny storefront gallery on Henry Street in the Lower East Side, founded in 2010 by Gabrielle Giattino, BUREAU is a jewelbox of surprises: suitcase poetry, painted bones, sculptures of concrete atop medical walkers.
*Slice Magazine: Maria Gagliano and Celia Johnson founded this Brooklyn-based literary journal in 2007-- its warm-hearted, exuberant approach to the literary life is very welcome--it does "serious" without being pretentious or heavy-handed. The interviews are especially good, on par with those in the Paris Review.
*DODGE Gallery: Kristen Dodge opened on the Lower East Side in 2010, and has garnered strong reviews from the beginning. The space is gorgeous (long ago a sausage factory--such is the power of arts entrepreneurs to recycle the defunct, creating afresh). We are partial to last year's Sheila Gallagher and Lorna Williams shows.
*La Casa Azul: Aurora Anaya-Cerda started her bookstore online three years ago, and opens its physical presence in East Harlem this year.
*BronxArtSpace: In 2009 Linda Cunningham and Mitsuharu Hadeishi opened this in the South Bronx, providing a home for a thoughtful and eclectic mix of visual artists, performers, and educators.
*3rd Ward: The epicenter of the DIY arts & crafts movement, 3rd Ward was founded by Jason Goodman and Jeremy Lovitt on the border of Williamsburg and Bushwick in May, 2006-- and has grown rapidly since (it will soon open a satellite in Philadelphia). A 20,000 square-foot space, 3rd Ward is a teaching site for wood and metal arts, photography and jewelry making (disclosure: my wife teaches a class there).
*The Brooklyn Book Festival: Begun in 2006, the BBF has grown to a four-day extravaganza in downtown Brooklyn, featuring a record 260+ panelists in 2011-- it is already a fixture on the literary circuit.
*Brian Girley, Faith project, album recorded at Mercy Studio in the East Village, and released in summer 2011, with Linda Oh, Gilad Hekselman, Julian Shore, and Ross Pederson: Saxophonist Brian Girley epitomizes the courage of the entrepreneur-- as he notes in the video below, he and his wife left Florida in 2010 for NYC, with three bags and a pair of one-way tickets, no jobs, no apartment, just faith that they would make it. How Girley creates music (as he explains and demonstrates in the video here) is how much work outside of the arts will be conducted in the future--as fluid project-based collaborations, with a leader setting the frame and the goal, and self-directed teammates contributing and creating with and for.
Girley and the other founders/projectors/makers listed above are cousins of the digital technology entrepreneurs who have revived "Silicon Alley" in NYC, which has boomed in the past several years to become one of the country's leading centers for tech start-ups (think Tumblr and Foursquare, for instance):
"New York City had a break out year in 2011, riding a wave of tech enthusiasm to heights it's never seen before. Right now, New York .....is home to one company with a billion dollar valuation — Gilt Groupe — and 28 others with valuations of $100 million or over. Despite a weakening stock market, and deep fundamental problems with the economy, this time next year we expect more billion dollar companies in New York." ( Business Insider , October 13, 2011).
(New York Tech Meetup started in late 2004 and today boasts over 22,000 members; its monthly meetings are thronged. Google opened a large site in 2008 in lower Chelsea, just north of the Meatpacking District; Facebook will open a major engineering center in NYC this spring.)
Not two worlds but two (or three or some other number of) continents--flanked and extended by islands, shoals and atolls-- all interconnected by accessible seas. The commercial new media are all about creativity and the arts long since embraced and then took into new directions the possibilities of digital technologies. The arts entrepreneurs (soon we will have to drop the adjective and just acknowledge that "artist" and "entrepreneur" are identical, or at least symbiotic) lead the way into the new economy.
Further reading:
Karen Rosenberg, "Rising and Regrouping on the Lower East Side" (New York Times, April 21, 2011).
Alliance for the Arts
Americans for the Arts
CPANDA--Cultural Policy & The Arts (Princeton University in partnership with the NEA)Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
-- NYC gallerist Iwan Wirth, quoted in Miriam Kreinin Souccar, "Chelsea Galleries Hold Up During Downturn; Though 25 Galleries Have Shuttered In The Past Year, At Least 10 Have Opened" (Crain's New York Business, May 22, 2009).
Unsung heroes? By nature entrepreneurial, artists-- and the curators, gallery owners, small-press publishers and editors who travel in their van-- have (disproportionately?) propelled the American economy through the Great Recession and its grouchy, spasmodic recovery. As banking, manufacturing and other traditional mainstays have blown up, the arts have adapted quickly and become a hotbed of start-ups and innovative change. In the accelerating shift within American business to individualized design and making, where work crosses disciplinary boundaries and creates wholly new product and service categories at the click of a mouse, the arts are (to paraphrase Marie Ponsot's description of Philip Lopate's poetry) the new economy's "ungovernable alchemic hope."
Here in New York City, the arts drive commerce as much they are driven by it, and they shape the very lay-out of our shared, urban space-- and they are doing so at a greater scale and speed, despite the recession that began in 2008. "Between 2003 and 2005, 94 cultural building projects were completed in the city, according to an Alliance for the Arts study on the economic impact of construction at New York's cultural nonprofits. Now there are more than 400 design, construction and equipment projects in the works at 197 nonprofit cultural organizations..." (Miriam Kreinin Souccar, "Arts Institutions In Midst Of Major Restoration Period," Crain's New York Business, February 13-19, 2012).
Examples abound: the re-openings of the Islamic (November, 2011) and American (January, 2012) arts wings at the Metropolitan, the coming move of the Whitney to the Meatpacking District (broke ground in 2011 for a new 200,000 square foot building), the Park Avenue Armory restoring its 19th-century facades (to be completed this fall) and expanding its programming, the ongoing renovations to El Museo del Barrio, the High Line promenade/outdoor artspace opened on Chelsea's far west side in 2009, the Museum for African Art opening its new 90,000 square-foot building this fall at 110th and Fifth, the Poets House moving in 2009 to its airy new 11,000 square-foot space in Battery Park City...Big Culture never sleeps in the Big Apple.
An even more impressive story is the continuing expansion of Little Culture, thousands of islets in an archipelago spreading throughout all five boroughs (and next door in Hoboken, Jersey City, Yonkers), creating a lushly fervent ecology that is the real secret to the arts' increasingly central position in a modern economy. Thousands of hard-nosed dreamers are starting new festivals, galleries and journals, competitively scrambling to create the new Bauhaus, to emulate and then transcend the workshop of Aldus Manutius or the kharkana of Ustad Mansur, to blend the atelier with the caravanserai.
A handful of examples chosen from among many:
*The Observatory: Founded by Pam Grossman and six colleagues in February 2009 (just a few months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered the downturn!) in Gowanus, Brooklyn-- a deliciously eccentric hybrid exhibition and lecture space, a vision of what future work will look like, presenting (in its own words) "programming inspired by the 18th century notion of 'rational amusement' and is especially interested in topics residing at the interstices of art and science, history and curiosity, magic and nature."
*The Greenlight Bookstore: Rebecca Fittig and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo opened this impressively curated space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn in 2009, into the riptide of the recession--it has become one of the literary hotspots in an intensely literary city, with a readings calendar second to none (disclosure: I am a "community lender" to the Greenlight).
*The Festival of the New Black Imagination: In 2011 Rob Fields founded this groundbreaking event (reminiscent of TED, PopTech and SXSW--Fields has twice been a panelist at the latter)-- a celebration of cross-genre innovation, with a focus on alt music, digital performance and narrative. The 2012 edition is in downtown Brooklyn this September.
*571 Projects: Named after its square footage, 571 (founded in Chelsea in 2009 by Sophie Brechu-West) packs a great aesthetic punch in its small space-- a space where the art interacts with the glories of light coming over the Hudson.
*A Public Space: Brigid Hughes founded APS in Brooklyn in 2006, as "an independent magazine of art and argument, fact and fiction—was founded in 2006 to give voice to the twenty-first century." In just six years APS has become an indispensable part of the cultural landscape--it feels like APS has been with us for decades at least.
*BUREAU: A tiny storefront gallery on Henry Street in the Lower East Side, founded in 2010 by Gabrielle Giattino, BUREAU is a jewelbox of surprises: suitcase poetry, painted bones, sculptures of concrete atop medical walkers.
*Slice Magazine: Maria Gagliano and Celia Johnson founded this Brooklyn-based literary journal in 2007-- its warm-hearted, exuberant approach to the literary life is very welcome--it does "serious" without being pretentious or heavy-handed. The interviews are especially good, on par with those in the Paris Review.
*DODGE Gallery: Kristen Dodge opened on the Lower East Side in 2010, and has garnered strong reviews from the beginning. The space is gorgeous (long ago a sausage factory--such is the power of arts entrepreneurs to recycle the defunct, creating afresh). We are partial to last year's Sheila Gallagher and Lorna Williams shows.
*La Casa Azul: Aurora Anaya-Cerda started her bookstore online three years ago, and opens its physical presence in East Harlem this year.
*BronxArtSpace: In 2009 Linda Cunningham and Mitsuharu Hadeishi opened this in the South Bronx, providing a home for a thoughtful and eclectic mix of visual artists, performers, and educators.
*3rd Ward: The epicenter of the DIY arts & crafts movement, 3rd Ward was founded by Jason Goodman and Jeremy Lovitt on the border of Williamsburg and Bushwick in May, 2006-- and has grown rapidly since (it will soon open a satellite in Philadelphia). A 20,000 square-foot space, 3rd Ward is a teaching site for wood and metal arts, photography and jewelry making (disclosure: my wife teaches a class there).
*The Brooklyn Book Festival: Begun in 2006, the BBF has grown to a four-day extravaganza in downtown Brooklyn, featuring a record 260+ panelists in 2011-- it is already a fixture on the literary circuit.
*Brian Girley, Faith project, album recorded at Mercy Studio in the East Village, and released in summer 2011, with Linda Oh, Gilad Hekselman, Julian Shore, and Ross Pederson: Saxophonist Brian Girley epitomizes the courage of the entrepreneur-- as he notes in the video below, he and his wife left Florida in 2010 for NYC, with three bags and a pair of one-way tickets, no jobs, no apartment, just faith that they would make it. How Girley creates music (as he explains and demonstrates in the video here) is how much work outside of the arts will be conducted in the future--as fluid project-based collaborations, with a leader setting the frame and the goal, and self-directed teammates contributing and creating with and for.
Girley and the other founders/projectors/makers listed above are cousins of the digital technology entrepreneurs who have revived "Silicon Alley" in NYC, which has boomed in the past several years to become one of the country's leading centers for tech start-ups (think Tumblr and Foursquare, for instance):
"New York City had a break out year in 2011, riding a wave of tech enthusiasm to heights it's never seen before. Right now, New York .....is home to one company with a billion dollar valuation — Gilt Groupe — and 28 others with valuations of $100 million or over. Despite a weakening stock market, and deep fundamental problems with the economy, this time next year we expect more billion dollar companies in New York." ( Business Insider , October 13, 2011).
(New York Tech Meetup started in late 2004 and today boasts over 22,000 members; its monthly meetings are thronged. Google opened a large site in 2008 in lower Chelsea, just north of the Meatpacking District; Facebook will open a major engineering center in NYC this spring.)
Not two worlds but two (or three or some other number of) continents--flanked and extended by islands, shoals and atolls-- all interconnected by accessible seas. The commercial new media are all about creativity and the arts long since embraced and then took into new directions the possibilities of digital technologies. The arts entrepreneurs (soon we will have to drop the adjective and just acknowledge that "artist" and "entrepreneur" are identical, or at least symbiotic) lead the way into the new economy.
Further reading:
Karen Rosenberg, "Rising and Regrouping on the Lower East Side" (New York Times, April 21, 2011).
Alliance for the Arts
Americans for the Arts
CPANDA--Cultural Policy & The Arts (Princeton University in partnership with the NEA)Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
February 26, 2012
The Flesh of the Gods, or, Pan in Cyberspace
---Carnival revelers in Lucerne, Switzerland, February 16th of this year.
So another Mardi Gras has come and gone.
---Carnival celebrants in Belgium last week.
Another Shrove Tuesday...
--Carnival in Ulm, Germany.
Another end to Fasching....
---Carnival somewhere (Venice?) in Italy last week.
As we contemplate a cybernetic future, enthralled within our digital scrim, shadow selves and avatars leading fleshless lives in a Hadoopian world of zettabyte data streams, we nevertheless continue to congregate corporeally, to celebrate mysteries that go back to our beginnings.
Carnevale both refutes and prefigures this future.
Refutes because we still crave the visceral connection of one another; we desire the pulse of music and the smell of smoke, sweat and cooked meats embracing us without an electronic intermediary. Welcome, welcome, step right up to the carny...
Prefigures because in our pageants, rites and masques we have forever been imagining ourselves transcendent and hybridized. The trail is not so long from the ships in the rituals of Isis and the mysteries of Eleusis to multi-player online role-playing games and endless self-fashionings on Facebook.Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
February 12, 2012
Irish Ghost Towns, Fairy Gold, and the Diaspora
John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in "My Debt to Ireland" (in this morning's New York Times Sunday Magazine) about searching for his roots, about thwarted hopes and the elegiac nature of life on the Emerald Isle.
Among other things, he comments on the great many houses half-built, never occupied, now abandoned and falling into decay across Ireland, the result of the unprecedented real estate boom during the 1990s that lasted until the global recession starting in 2008. Americans are familiar with this sort of boom-and-bust cycle, with tracts and developments that are still born, that move from blueprint directly to ghost town without ever being inhabited (all those empty streets in the exurbs of Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tampa, Houston and so on). We grimace, file law suits, and move on to some other city or state, building anew to meet the needs of our ever-growing population.
For the Irish, however, this has been a new experience; they are grappling with both the phenomenon and how best to frame it.
As Sullivan writes:
"It had been a dream, like something in a Celtic Revival play: faeries built thousands and thousands of houses in the night. In the morning everybody was poor again.
It was hard to see why the government would allow the ruination of so much open land, which is one of Ireland's principal commodities, namely the 'unspoiled' landscape. People go to Ireland for all sorts of reasons, but they mainly go there because it's pretty, because it's 'not all built up.'
From the point of view of the rural Irish themselves, however, this may look very different. The greenness of Ireland is a false greenness, after all. Not that it isn't green — the place can still make you have to pull off and swallow one of your heart pills. It's that the greenness doesn't mean what it seems. It doesn't encode a pastoral past, much less a timeless vale where wee folk trip the demesne. The countryside is not supposed to look like that, to be that empty. Ireland was at one time one of the most densely populated places in Europe. In the 1830s, there were more people living there than today. What you see in the open spaces the island is famous for are hundreds and hundreds of years of Irish dying and fleeing in large numbers. Famines, wars, epidemics and a wretched postcolonial poverty drove them through the ports by the millions. It's perhaps not so strange that such a people, experiencing their first flush of disposable income, would undergo a mania of home building and land development. Perhaps in a way, the houses were meant for returning immigrants even before they became ghost estates. They were built for the diaspora."Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
Among other things, he comments on the great many houses half-built, never occupied, now abandoned and falling into decay across Ireland, the result of the unprecedented real estate boom during the 1990s that lasted until the global recession starting in 2008. Americans are familiar with this sort of boom-and-bust cycle, with tracts and developments that are still born, that move from blueprint directly to ghost town without ever being inhabited (all those empty streets in the exurbs of Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tampa, Houston and so on). We grimace, file law suits, and move on to some other city or state, building anew to meet the needs of our ever-growing population.
For the Irish, however, this has been a new experience; they are grappling with both the phenomenon and how best to frame it.
As Sullivan writes:
"It had been a dream, like something in a Celtic Revival play: faeries built thousands and thousands of houses in the night. In the morning everybody was poor again.
It was hard to see why the government would allow the ruination of so much open land, which is one of Ireland's principal commodities, namely the 'unspoiled' landscape. People go to Ireland for all sorts of reasons, but they mainly go there because it's pretty, because it's 'not all built up.'
From the point of view of the rural Irish themselves, however, this may look very different. The greenness of Ireland is a false greenness, after all. Not that it isn't green — the place can still make you have to pull off and swallow one of your heart pills. It's that the greenness doesn't mean what it seems. It doesn't encode a pastoral past, much less a timeless vale where wee folk trip the demesne. The countryside is not supposed to look like that, to be that empty. Ireland was at one time one of the most densely populated places in Europe. In the 1830s, there were more people living there than today. What you see in the open spaces the island is famous for are hundreds and hundreds of years of Irish dying and fleeing in large numbers. Famines, wars, epidemics and a wretched postcolonial poverty drove them through the ports by the millions. It's perhaps not so strange that such a people, experiencing their first flush of disposable income, would undergo a mania of home building and land development. Perhaps in a way, the houses were meant for returning immigrants even before they became ghost estates. They were built for the diaspora."Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
February 5, 2012
Three Alchemists: Beachy-Quick, Kornher-Stace, Taaffe
Dan Beachy-Quick...Nicole Kornher-Stace...Sonya Taaffe...
Three writers, ranging in age from 29 to 39, who have moved beyond the "emerging" stage and are now among our best. Though hardly unknowns, each deserves to be far more widely and profoundly recognized than he or she is. (I have noted the work of each in earlier entries of Lobster & Canary). Each showed early promise that she or he is now confirming and extending.
Beachy-Quick, Kornher-Stace, and Taaffe have much in common: a deep and learned appreciation for language that produces darkly glittering gems; a jackdavian inquisitiveness, omnivorous yet discerning; meta-cognitive glosses on the importance of history; and an ability to approach central mysteries with masterful subtlety and nuance. Erudite delvers through layers, finders of clues in the ores and the air.
I have no idea if they read each other's work, let alone if they know one another. I do sense a kinship in their own reading tastes. I would place them in the workshop that includes Dickinson and Moore, Montale and Rilke, in the laboratory of language occupied by Swinburne, Hopkins, Shelley and Dryden. Novalis and Droste-Huelshoff. Back to Gongora, to Ronsard. And-- in another vein--I would situate them in the amphitheater for encyclopedic musings and polymathic hybridization, where Eco demonstrates and Benjamin strolls, where the walls are inscribed with the wisdom of Goethe and of Wordsworth.
I cannot do justice to my claims in a short blog entry, so will add "write critical essay on Beachy-Quick, Kornher-Stace, Taaffe" to my dauntingly but deliciously endless list of "deliverables before I die." For those of you who want a taste of evidence a bit more substantial, here are some choice ingredients from the alembics of the three alchemists:
Taaffe's most recent effort is a chapbook, A Mayse-Bikhl (hand-bound from Papaveria Press, 2011), collecting some of her best poems of the past decade. The cover photograph is by her grandfather, Alfred Glixman, of the Czech Memorial Scrolls at Westminster Synagogue. A Mayse-Bikhl's poems all wind powerfully and tellingly from that central image, leading us through memory and the hope of the future. Here is a "Kaddish for a Dybbuk," and "Mermaids at Tashlikh." Her opening lines for "Seder Yetzirah": "Every lover's letter is a golem,/ silence stirring at the cut of a name." In "Lilim, After Dark," we see "All the demons that hide/ in the rafters of your dreams..." In "Etz Chayim," we behold The Tree as it must have been: "This tree grew in no mortal garden, ran/ its roots deep into promise and liturgy...angels burning like sunlight/ in its branches, each leaf inscribed/ name upon name of the children/ born beneath the echoes of its bitter,/ hungering fruit..."
Kornher-Stace's novel Desideria (Prime Books, 2008) opens with one of the most eloquently and powerfully enigmatic scenes I have read in many years. An unnamed young woman, dressed in finery, shatters a mirror and sets her room and herself on fire: "At first she does not know just how or why the lamp is in her hand, its glass and brass and fern-curled fire..." She looks out her window at an unnamed city, smells it: "woodsmoke, lampblack and filth, scorched ginger, rotting quays, snow-sogged broadsides, hothouse violets on the far bank of the river." She plunges from the fiery tower ("burning like a plummeting angel"), dashing herself on the street below, to the cries of the gathering crowd. She is taken for dead. She clutches a book. She is, in fact, alive, but mute (her lips have been sewn shut) and unconscious. "But the looters lean in and discern an auburn book. Like saints' hearts, it has not burnt." She is taken to a nunnery for succour.
Tupelo Press published Circle's Apprentice by Beachy-Quick in 2011. He is openly engaging here with Emerson and Hoelderlin (as he was with Melville in A Whaler's Dictionary). The poems in this collection are dense, cryptic, intelligent, delivered in odd (but not artificial) language, full of what he calls "little riddles in the ruins," with "a small god chanting in the synapses." The work loops, aphoristic lines that return to their beginnings, elusive threads in the old maze. From "Poem": "Comet tails/ Darkly flowing back as the horse leaps/ Forward, straining against the catafalque...Vague/ Repetitions haunt the circumference." From "Catalog": "Glowing with stories they have no mouth to tell...Every poem contains a blessing it keeps hidden." From the first of five poems each titled "Tomb Figurine": "My eye was a little sun__working/ In reverse."Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
Three writers, ranging in age from 29 to 39, who have moved beyond the "emerging" stage and are now among our best. Though hardly unknowns, each deserves to be far more widely and profoundly recognized than he or she is. (I have noted the work of each in earlier entries of Lobster & Canary). Each showed early promise that she or he is now confirming and extending.
Beachy-Quick, Kornher-Stace, and Taaffe have much in common: a deep and learned appreciation for language that produces darkly glittering gems; a jackdavian inquisitiveness, omnivorous yet discerning; meta-cognitive glosses on the importance of history; and an ability to approach central mysteries with masterful subtlety and nuance. Erudite delvers through layers, finders of clues in the ores and the air.
I have no idea if they read each other's work, let alone if they know one another. I do sense a kinship in their own reading tastes. I would place them in the workshop that includes Dickinson and Moore, Montale and Rilke, in the laboratory of language occupied by Swinburne, Hopkins, Shelley and Dryden. Novalis and Droste-Huelshoff. Back to Gongora, to Ronsard. And-- in another vein--I would situate them in the amphitheater for encyclopedic musings and polymathic hybridization, where Eco demonstrates and Benjamin strolls, where the walls are inscribed with the wisdom of Goethe and of Wordsworth.
I cannot do justice to my claims in a short blog entry, so will add "write critical essay on Beachy-Quick, Kornher-Stace, Taaffe" to my dauntingly but deliciously endless list of "deliverables before I die." For those of you who want a taste of evidence a bit more substantial, here are some choice ingredients from the alembics of the three alchemists:
Taaffe's most recent effort is a chapbook, A Mayse-Bikhl (hand-bound from Papaveria Press, 2011), collecting some of her best poems of the past decade. The cover photograph is by her grandfather, Alfred Glixman, of the Czech Memorial Scrolls at Westminster Synagogue. A Mayse-Bikhl's poems all wind powerfully and tellingly from that central image, leading us through memory and the hope of the future. Here is a "Kaddish for a Dybbuk," and "Mermaids at Tashlikh." Her opening lines for "Seder Yetzirah": "Every lover's letter is a golem,/ silence stirring at the cut of a name." In "Lilim, After Dark," we see "All the demons that hide/ in the rafters of your dreams..." In "Etz Chayim," we behold The Tree as it must have been: "This tree grew in no mortal garden, ran/ its roots deep into promise and liturgy...angels burning like sunlight/ in its branches, each leaf inscribed/ name upon name of the children/ born beneath the echoes of its bitter,/ hungering fruit..."
Kornher-Stace's novel Desideria (Prime Books, 2008) opens with one of the most eloquently and powerfully enigmatic scenes I have read in many years. An unnamed young woman, dressed in finery, shatters a mirror and sets her room and herself on fire: "At first she does not know just how or why the lamp is in her hand, its glass and brass and fern-curled fire..." She looks out her window at an unnamed city, smells it: "woodsmoke, lampblack and filth, scorched ginger, rotting quays, snow-sogged broadsides, hothouse violets on the far bank of the river." She plunges from the fiery tower ("burning like a plummeting angel"), dashing herself on the street below, to the cries of the gathering crowd. She is taken for dead. She clutches a book. She is, in fact, alive, but mute (her lips have been sewn shut) and unconscious. "But the looters lean in and discern an auburn book. Like saints' hearts, it has not burnt." She is taken to a nunnery for succour.
Tupelo Press published Circle's Apprentice by Beachy-Quick in 2011. He is openly engaging here with Emerson and Hoelderlin (as he was with Melville in A Whaler's Dictionary). The poems in this collection are dense, cryptic, intelligent, delivered in odd (but not artificial) language, full of what he calls "little riddles in the ruins," with "a small god chanting in the synapses." The work loops, aphoristic lines that return to their beginnings, elusive threads in the old maze. From "Poem": "Comet tails/ Darkly flowing back as the horse leaps/ Forward, straining against the catafalque...Vague/ Repetitions haunt the circumference." From "Catalog": "Glowing with stories they have no mouth to tell...Every poem contains a blessing it keeps hidden." From the first of five poems each titled "Tomb Figurine": "My eye was a little sun__working/ In reverse."Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
January 29, 2012
Word and Image: The Hobbit
A passage in The Hobbit that I have been musing over, the one describing Bilbo's reaction at first seeing Smaug slumbering atop the treasure-hoard within the Lonely Mountain:
"To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. Bilbo had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before, but the splendour, the lust, the glory of such treasure had never yet come home to him. His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment..." (pg. 206).
First and last, words-- language-- create and carry the tale in Tolkien's work. Tolkien the philologist was very clear on that, always and fiercely siding with "Lang" in what he saw as an endless contest with "Lit."
My own enthrallment with Tolkien's world began with and continues to be sustained by his use of Language (meaning more than just his creation of languages for the inhabitants of Middle-Earth and beyond, though that was surely among his most lasting and innovative achievements).
Which is why I find myself re-reading The Hobbit, The LOTR, The Silmarillion, "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" in the wake of the Peter Jackson LOTR movies -- and in preparation for Jackson's first Hobbit film later this year. I love the LOTR movies, having watched them many times--they are brilliant cinematic conceptions.
Which is precisely why my affection and admiration for the movies is tinged with uneasy melancholy, akin perhaps to what Galadriel and Elrond-- and the other High Elves who linger in Middle-Earth-- feel, that is, a sense of something valuable overlaid, buried, lost when a new regime takes over.
The images Jackson and his team created on film are so powerful that I must now struggle to regain my own, the images I created directly and through many readings over many years from Tolkien's un-intermediated language. Now however when I read them on the page, Galadriel for me looks and sounds much like Cate Blanchett, Aragorn like Viggo Mortensen, Gandalf like Ian McKellen, Frodo and Sam like Elijah Wood and Sean Astin...all of whom are so exactly perfect in those roles that they threaten to erase my own, long-preexisting versions, and to monopolize forever the characters they play.
More fundamentally, the medium of film inherently privileges given and monolithic image over the multi-valenced, individualized and organic word. Hence the logic of the extended battle scenes in the films, to take that one example.
But at its core, Tolkien's work is about language as a living force speaking through the individuals who wear the words, the grammar, the syntax for our brief time, before we hand those clothes (sometimes a little worse for wear and in need of repair, sometimes refurbished, with new pockets and buttons) over to the next generation.
So, while I will be among the first to see The Hobbit movies when they are released, I am also keen to reclaim and nurture for myself the elements of Middle-Earth that no film can capture (I know Jackson & Co. are far too wise to believe their movies can do so; I am sure they agree that we judge a fish by how well it breathes underwater, and do not compare it to a bird that flies through the air).
I want to be on my own, left to my own courage and devices, as Bilbo was when he crept down that long, dark passage into the belly of the mountain...when he first crept into the dragon's lair, with its "worm-stench" and the ruddy glare of Smaug's banked fires illuminating the acres of stolen gold and glittering jewels...
...to share then Bilbo's "staggerment" in a place where our modern words fall short of describing the Essence of Things as they were in the World That Was, where film is but a sketch of the surface, below which lurk wild and wonderful things.Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
"To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. Bilbo had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before, but the splendour, the lust, the glory of such treasure had never yet come home to him. His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment..." (pg. 206).
First and last, words-- language-- create and carry the tale in Tolkien's work. Tolkien the philologist was very clear on that, always and fiercely siding with "Lang" in what he saw as an endless contest with "Lit."
My own enthrallment with Tolkien's world began with and continues to be sustained by his use of Language (meaning more than just his creation of languages for the inhabitants of Middle-Earth and beyond, though that was surely among his most lasting and innovative achievements).
Which is why I find myself re-reading The Hobbit, The LOTR, The Silmarillion, "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" in the wake of the Peter Jackson LOTR movies -- and in preparation for Jackson's first Hobbit film later this year. I love the LOTR movies, having watched them many times--they are brilliant cinematic conceptions.
Which is precisely why my affection and admiration for the movies is tinged with uneasy melancholy, akin perhaps to what Galadriel and Elrond-- and the other High Elves who linger in Middle-Earth-- feel, that is, a sense of something valuable overlaid, buried, lost when a new regime takes over.
The images Jackson and his team created on film are so powerful that I must now struggle to regain my own, the images I created directly and through many readings over many years from Tolkien's un-intermediated language. Now however when I read them on the page, Galadriel for me looks and sounds much like Cate Blanchett, Aragorn like Viggo Mortensen, Gandalf like Ian McKellen, Frodo and Sam like Elijah Wood and Sean Astin...all of whom are so exactly perfect in those roles that they threaten to erase my own, long-preexisting versions, and to monopolize forever the characters they play.
More fundamentally, the medium of film inherently privileges given and monolithic image over the multi-valenced, individualized and organic word. Hence the logic of the extended battle scenes in the films, to take that one example.
But at its core, Tolkien's work is about language as a living force speaking through the individuals who wear the words, the grammar, the syntax for our brief time, before we hand those clothes (sometimes a little worse for wear and in need of repair, sometimes refurbished, with new pockets and buttons) over to the next generation.
So, while I will be among the first to see The Hobbit movies when they are released, I am also keen to reclaim and nurture for myself the elements of Middle-Earth that no film can capture (I know Jackson & Co. are far too wise to believe their movies can do so; I am sure they agree that we judge a fish by how well it breathes underwater, and do not compare it to a bird that flies through the air).
I want to be on my own, left to my own courage and devices, as Bilbo was when he crept down that long, dark passage into the belly of the mountain...when he first crept into the dragon's lair, with its "worm-stench" and the ruddy glare of Smaug's banked fires illuminating the acres of stolen gold and glittering jewels...
...to share then Bilbo's "staggerment" in a place where our modern words fall short of describing the Essence of Things as they were in the World That Was, where film is but a sketch of the surface, below which lurk wild and wonderful things.Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
January 7, 2012
Seven Songs To Celebrate The Full Moon On Monday
The lobster and the canary share with you seven new (or at least new-ish) songs that we find ourselves listening to frequently at the moment-- songs that help bring us to a vibrant yet contemplative place when we need such a refuge or niche. Enjoy.
---Regina Carter, "Artistya" (2010).
---Marcus Miller and Alex Han, "Claptrap" (2010).
--- Karsh Kale, with Gaurav Raina (from Midival Punditz) and others, "Milan" (live, 2006).
---Yoshida Brothers, "Rising" (2008)
---Thomas Pridgen, drum solo (2008)
---Medeski, Scofield, Martin & Wood, "A Go Go" (2007)
---Anoushka Shankar, with Javier Limon and Sandra Carrasco, "Inside Me" (2011)Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
---Regina Carter, "Artistya" (2010).
---Marcus Miller and Alex Han, "Claptrap" (2010).
--- Karsh Kale, with Gaurav Raina (from Midival Punditz) and others, "Milan" (live, 2006).
---Yoshida Brothers, "Rising" (2008)
---Thomas Pridgen, drum solo (2008)
---Medeski, Scofield, Martin & Wood, "A Go Go" (2007)
---Anoushka Shankar, with Javier Limon and Sandra Carrasco, "Inside Me" (2011)Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
January 1, 2012
Remembering Helen Frankenthaler
Lobster & Canary welcomes the new year by celebrating the work of Helen Frankenthaler, who died December 27th at age 83. For an especially insightful obituary, click here for Lance Esplund's "Frankenthaler Bridged Genres, Created Worlds of Burning Color"; and click here for the write-up, with slide show, in the New York Times.
May her visionary use of color and her inspired wanderings with form continue to nurture our spirits in the new year.Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
December 11, 2011
Melora Griffis at 571 Projects
--Melora Griffis, empty room (2010; acrylic, gouache, pastel on paper).
--Griffis, blue sun (2010; acrylic, gouache, pastel on paper).
In mid-November, the Lobster & Canary made our first visit to 571 Projects, a beautiful small art gallery in NYC's Chelsea founded by Sophie Brechu-West two years ago ("571" refers to the gallery's square footage). We were rewarded with a gem of a show: wings and murmurs, paintings by New York artist Melora Griffis.
Griffis's work has great narrative power, stories emerging from depths below the carefully muted surfaces, and spurred by the enigmatic shapes and figures (many half-rendered, or veiled) the painter places on the canvas. The overall effects are of restraint and solemnity, possibly remonstrance and mourning, overlaid with spectral uncertainty and a sense of things perceived rather than formally witnessed (fittingly, one of Griffis's paintings is titled unsichtbar, which is German for "invisible, unseen, hidden"). Griffis works small wonders with her chalky/milky backgrounds supporting flares of subtle, slightly slurred color. She calls to mind Pousette-Dart's mostly white paintings, the pale mysterious abstractions of Adele Sypesteyn, the finely calibrated gestures on corrugated white done by Saul Fletcher. Her eerie personages recall those of Ensor, and --while her style differs often substantially from each of the following--the tone is similar to those suffusing Marsden Hartley, Johns, Bonnard, Rauschenberg, Gorky, Tamayo, and O'Keefe.
--Griffis, schlossgespenst (2010; oil on linen)
571 Projects is an arts space to watch, a welcome newcomer to the Chelsea scene. The warmly dynamic Brechu-West has a sharp eye, and a strong sense of how the space interacts with and supports the artwork, how the space becomes a part of the overall aesthetic experience. She chose the locale for-- among other things-- its large windows with their unobstructed views of Chelsea Piers, so that the rays of the afternoon sun and of the sunset play a role in how viewers see the art.
Brechu-West is also willing to cross disciplinary boundaries. As an example of the latter drive, 571 Projects hosted a talk last week by Griffis along with three poets-- Betty Harmon, Alystyre Julian, and Shelly Stenhouse--reading poetry inspired by Griffis's displayed work. Alas, the Lobster & Canary could not attend the event, but we love the concept and look forward to more such salons at 571 Projects.
Visit 571 Projects. For more information, click here .Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
November 27, 2011
The Freedom Maze, by Delia Sherman
Lobster & Canary was at the November 22nd book launch party at The Center for Fiction (NYC) for Delia Sherman's The Freedom Maze (published by Small Beer Press's Big Mouth House imprint).
We have not yet finished the book, but it promises to be one of the best for 2011. (Don't just take our word on that: Kirkus Reviews has already selected The Freedom Maze as a best children's book of the year, and strongly positive advance reviews are in from--among others-- Alaya Dawn Johnson, Gregory Maguire, Cory Doctorow, Holly Black, N.K. Jemisin, Jane Yolen, Nisi Shawl and Terri Windling).
It's a time-travel story with some great twists. It provides us with a set of powerful lenses through which to explore, imagine and think about race and gender-- in the antebellum South and as that period continues to impact the present day.
Here's the synopsis Small Beer supplies (you can download the first chapter at the Small Beer site by clicking here ):
"Set against the burgeoning Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and then just before the outbreak of the Civil War, The Freedom Maze explores both political and personal liberation, and how the two intertwine.
In 1960, thirteen-year-old Sophie isn't happy about spending summer at her grandmother's old house in the Bayou. But the house has a maze Sophie can't resist exploring once she finds it has a secretive and playful inhabitant.
When Sophie, bored and lonely, makes an impulsive wish inspired by her reading, hoping for a fantasy adventure of her own, she slips one hundred years into the past, to the year 1860. On her arrival she makes her way, bedraggled and tanned, to what will one day be her grandmother's house, where she is at once mistaken for a slave."
You can read more about Delia at her site by clicking here .Daniel A. Rabuzzi is author of the fantasy novel "The Choir Boats," available from ChiZine Publications in September 2009.
"The Choir Boats" explores issues of race, gender, sin, and salvation, and includes a mysterious letter, knuckledogs, carkodrillos, smilax root,
goat stew, and one very fierce golden cat.
(www.danielarabuzzi.com). Daniel blogs at Lobster & Canary about speculative fiction, poetry, history and the arts.
