M. Allen Cunningham's Blog, page 26

Prime Passage: Art as Experience by John Dewey

"Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reenforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is.

To grasp the sources of aesthetic experience it is, therefore, necessary to have recourse to animal life below the human scale. The activities of the fox, the dog, and the thrush may at least stand as reminders and symbols of that unity of experience which we so fractionize when work is labor, and thought withdraws us from the world. The live anim...

Open Letter to The New York Times

My letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review appears in this Sunday's edition (May 3, 2009). They've elided my text in places (most tellingly in the opening achtung), tweaked it in others. Still, I think they're dignified to print it at all.

Here's the letter (with links added). Text omitted by the Gray Lady is restored in brackets. Bold text signifies Gray Lady additions or changes.

[ Earth to New York: ]

Michael Meyer's essay [piece:] "About That [Book:] Advance…" (Sunday...

Prime Passage: Rabbit, Run by John Updike

"He hates all the people on the street in dirty everyday clothes, advertising their belief that the world arches over a pit, that death is final, that the wandering thread of his feelings leads nowhere. Correspondingly, he loves the ones dressed for church: the pressed business suits of portly men give substance and respectability to his furtive sensations of the invisible; the flowers in the hats of their wives seem to begin to make it visible; and their daughters are themselves whole flower...

Prime Passage: At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches by Susan Sontag

From the book's title piece, "At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning," the Nadine Gordimer Lecture delivered by Sontag in South Africa in 2004:

"... And one of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives, and make choices, and propose and accept standards for ourselves, is our experience of singular authoritative voices, not our own, which make up that great body of work that educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us to be in the world, that embodies an...

My Kid Could Paint That

-- Creativity and commerce collide in the form of a four-year-old genius --

"The American malady is a spiritual one, the commercialization of spiritual goods on an enormous scale, in the same way as material goods are commercialized. Everything which sells has to sell on advertised merits which are not its true quality, everything which is made, is made to satisfy a demand artificially stimulated by sales propaganda."

The English poet Stephen Spender wrote these words in 1949 following a...