If you have been living in the Southern California area for a while, you’ll surely remember the Big Rock. It was a media frenzy in its day. News cameras greedily recorded every hiccup in the perilous journey of this massive, 430-ton granite boulder from somewhere in the desert to its destination at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
MASCULINISM
I have been reading about the rise of feminism, particularly in the art world but also in the culture at large in the late 1960s and early 1970s. More about that when I’m finished reading. In the meantime, though, I’m reminded how much I regret the absence of a corresponding rise in masculinism.
LEGENDS: A Book Review
This is one of those books I wanted to like more than I did. Evison is at his best in his evocation of the wild mountain landscapes of the North Cascades in Washington State. The winter winds will chill your bones, you sink into the muddy surface of the meadows in the spring thaw, you hear the rush of streams, the call of birds… Such scenes transport you. All good.
HARLEM SHUFFLE: A Book Review
I guess I’m just about as white as you can get. I still recall the trepidation I felt in anticipation of my first visit to Harlem, back in the late 1970s, on an art research project. It’s a good thing I had not read Colson Whitehead’s “Harlem Shuffle” before going there; if I had, I might never have dared set foot in that fabled quarter of New York City… Joking? Not entirely. (I was actually warmly welcomed; never felt a moment of anxiety. My fear was the product of pure prejudice).
SHADOW
I spent a while the other morning sitting with my shadow. It’s a familiar concept. We all have our light side and our dark, our yin and yang, our animus and anima. Our masculine and feminine. Our polar opposites. We like to hide the shadow. It’s not something we’re proud of or want to share with other people.
TO MY CRITIC
I am always grateful for those kind enough to take the time to follow my meanderings online, whether here, on Facebook, or elsewhere. I ‘m especially fond of those who enjoy what they read—I am as susceptible to praise as any other human being and certainly it pleases me to know that I have written something that resonates with other people.
PRAYER: SOME THOUGHTS
It’s Sunday today, the day when every week as a child I would go to church. I would sit on one side of my mother in the Rector’s pew, my sister Flora on the other, with all around us my father’s congregation; and my father himself up by the altar, leading the service, or standing […]
Grief
I realize I have been living in a state of grief. Grief for the loss of the lad that I once was, and for the green countryside of rural England where I grew up; grief for the insults to the body proffered by old age; grief for opportunities squandered along the way; grief for the […]
MY COUNTRY: REFLECTIONS OF A LONG-TIME EXILE
For reasons known only to my unconscious mind the line from that patriotic hymn popped up in my head this morning as I sat in meditation: “My country ‘tis of thee.” And then the question followed naturally from my conscious mind: Where is my country? Where do I belong? I have been living in America […]
Prejudice: A Reflection
I have been going through a box of family memorabilia — photographs, invoices, paid and unpaid, documents, certificates… and letters. Lots of letters. Some insignificant, many illegible, many whose relevance has been lost in the intervening years. And here and there I find letters that startle or shock, that move me for their sincerity, urgency, […]