Spinozablue

An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Douglas Pinson

A New Year’s Gallery Collection

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It’s 2023, and like a few of you, I’ve repeated a rather futile pattern/habit/shot in the dark. Made some resolutions, hoping for the best. Hoping for beautiful discoveries, and if they shock me, so much the better.

Reading more is key. I read quite a few good to excellent books last year, but know that I can do more, choose more wisely, more selectively, connect with more great minds, and be far more productive, etc. So there’s that.

I also hope to improve and expand my own art, my own writing, and do something I haven’t done in a few  moons: seek other publishing venues.…

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Fall Additions to Spinozablue, and More Paintings

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Fawn at Noon, by Douglas Pinson. Digital painting, 2022.

Spinozablue welcomes new poetry from James Croal Jackson, Mitch Corber, and Howie Good, plus new fiction by David M. Rubin.

If you’d like to submit your own work, please go to the Submissions Page, and fill out the contact form as per instructions. You can bypass that form once we’ve made First Contact . . .

I recently experimented with horizontal usage of the Waterpaint Soft Edges brush from Krita. Had been using it primarily in a vertical way. I like the results. As before, using the brush(es) freehand, trying to incorporate more color selections and different textures to augment the background.…

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Fall Poetics and New Paintings

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I’m many, many years away from attempting a decent expression of personal poetics, and I feel regrets regarding this, now and then. That it should already have been set down for posterity. Someone’s posterity, anyway. Thirty, forty years ago, in print, in book form, or at least in those Little Magazines of yore. I spoke it, of course, often, back in the day, leaning against walls (as mentioned in recent posts), and in other venues. In and out of class, in and out of special seminars, parties, walks along the strand with lovers and friends. Or just inside me own head.…

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Person, place, or thing

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Mirage II

Perception is a trap door in the sky
So they said
As they dragged
And crawled

O’er burning deserts
And rain-soaked fields
On their way into the black
Into night as day as night

For gold and roses were there
Just over there
Just over
The blue horizon

Twice blessed, they believed
But my songs differed
Twice blessed! they cried
But my paintings were oblique

Jazz
Crooned
Swing
Shimmied

Blues found
Wooden kimonos
For five
Then six

No art for them
Because the moment never came
For backward looks
Or epiphanies

No chorus featured
Wise apocrypha
The moment when —
The space between

 

—by Douglas Pinson

Feeling productive as of late.…

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New Year Paintings and Poetry

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So, another year, another variant, and we trudge on across the tundra. Courage, creativity, and, yes, peace, love, and understanding are needed now more than . . . Well, they’re needed. In that spirit of hopeful trudging, Spinozablue offers new literature, literary criticism, and home-brewed paintings.

Robert Mueller brings us his unique take on Petrarch, and David Groulx gets obliquely iambic. It looks like we’re off to a solid start.

I had a stretch there with at least two kinds of artistic blockage: writing and imaging. A dearth of imagination, perhaps, inhibiting both. But recent days have seen the breaking up of the dam — at least this is how I choose to see it.…

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The Marketeer’s Lament

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Labyrinths are not your friends, by Douglas Pinson Digital painting, 2021.

The lies

The lies they spread
Have become their truth

     I know the pain of such things
As I once stood among them

Bleeding out
Spiraling out

     Trying to fathom
What once was mine

Failing to grow back
To the center

     Yes — the center of all things

Too much to handle so I’m gone
For now and always

Unless

     Unless the last tree
Stands against the last wind

And there is more time
For Sapiens to merge

With their good fictions
Against their bad confabs

With their bright legends
Against their terminal myths

     I know the pain of that fight too

Yesterday
     Before I died
I wrote the book on it all
Propaganda pays for a while

Until it doesn’t

 

— by Douglas Pinson…

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Maxwell’s Demon and More New Poetry

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We’ve added three new poems by Robert Mueller this month. Please feel free to leave comments on the Contact Us page.

I’m almost finished reading a good novel by Steven Hall, Maxwell’s Demon (2021). Postmodern, and very Meta. Some fun facts about Entropy, angels, oxen, bees, Jewish gods and mysticism, and the Apocrypha along the way, which Hall integrates well throughout the narrative. I can hear echoes from Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds too, but this is really Hall’s show and his alone. 

Boiled down, it’s a book about a writer’s search for a book, or two, or three.…

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The Shaman and Time’s Arrow

SpinozablueArt, Blog, Philosophy, , , , ,
Night Moves, by Douglas Pinson. Digital painting, 2021.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I played Daniel-san to the Shaman’s Mr. Miyagi. He had me wash his car, weed and seed his lawn, and take his clothes to the dry-cleaner’s, among other chores. All of this struck me as a waste of time, of course, which was likely the point. Either that, or a lesson in Entropy, a word the Shaman had left out of his lessons so far.

But things changed dramatically soon enough. Archery lessons! This was something I knew I could use, especially given my youthful admiration of Robin Hood, and my hatred toward Paris, the coward of The Iliad.…

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