An Eclectic Journal of the Arts
Riffing on my previous post: The Arts have the potential to get us to stop for a moment, cool our jets, focus. Great art does that and more. It gives us license to think in entirely new ways about old and new things, and if we let it, pushes us to stop thinking in self-destructive […]
Anyone who has spent any time online, trying to be understood, knows that we’re well past the Rush to Judgment phase in this round of evolutionary upheavals. And by that I don’t mean we’ve somehow figured it all out, learned to listen, to chill, to take deep breaths before we respond. We’re in a post-Rush […]
There’s “live,” and then there’s hearing things a bit later, via modern technologies, or reaching way back, generations ago, with crowded memories of what parents and grandparents once said, raved about, remembered fondly. There are visions, still, of the departed dancing, coming alive at the sounds in our kitchens, living rooms, and houses of friends […]
In C Pam Zhang’s second novel, the focus is on food, but that focus is a bit hazy at times due to a plague of smog and its effects. In the not so distant future, most of the world is lost in smog, and it’s decimated humans, and wiped out most flora and fauna. Cli-Fi, […]
Spinozablue welcomes a poetry review by Hilary Sideris, and poems by John Grey, Dominik Slusarczyk, and Philip Jason. In Clare Carlisle’s excellent biography of George Eliot (1819-1880), marriage and the work of a lifetime, the novels and her relationships, take center stage, with a unique philosophy of life undergirding both. Gossip followed the novelist most […]
Back in the late 1970s, I auditioned for lead singer of a local Rock band. I sang the Kinks and a couple of Led Zeppelin songs, and had a lot of fun in the process. No preparation. No practice. I just sang the songs the band members wanted to hear. To this day, though, whenever […]
. . . Norway’s Jon Fosse. I’ve read just one of his novels, Aliss at the Fire, and loved it. Deceptively simple, beautiful prose, striking images, with much lying under the surface. But the Nobel goes for a lifetime of work, not a single book, so there’s much more for me to dig into. His […]
I was recently reminded of the importance of grounding the reader in the poem, of setting the stage with variations of specificity, so he or she can lock onto a certain place and time. To see, hear, taste, touch, and smell the landscape in question. This, I agree, is useful, even necessary in some cases, […]
Spinozablue welcomes new poetry from Glen Armstrong, and an essay about Bloomsday by Sylvie Jane Lewis. Writers tend to write about things they know. People they know. Places they’ve seen, or imagined, or dreamed up. There’s a “knowing” of sorts in the imagined as well. Typically, however (with exceptions), they don’t invent characters based on […]
“Whatever happened to . . . ?” That’s a question we sometimes ask about an artist who seemingly disappears. Of course, if they haven’t actually left this earth, they haven’t really disappeared at all. They’ve just chosen another path, another way to spend the remainder of their days on this planet we call home. They’ve […]