I'm reading Jed Perl's "Antoine's Alphabet," a book about the French painter Antoine Watteau. Perl makes an alphabetical attempt at putting Watteau at the center of modern Western painting. Every letter of the alphabet has entries that range from informative to descriptive to tangential. Under "F," for example, Perl writes about Fans, Flaubert, Flirtation, Fragments, and Friendship. Some of the entries are just anecdotes from Perl's life that have to do with Watteau's themes; others are stories about people indebted to Watteau or concerned about his influence. And what is Watteau all about? This paragraph struck me as an enticement:
The human mind is artless, elegant, clumsy, penetrating, chaotic, obscure, a hopeless mix of serenity and hysteria, the lofty and the low-down, clarity and murk, and Watteau pulls his drawings and paintings straight out of this messy material, these moment-to-moment shifts in perception, apprehension, and feeling. His paintings suggest a mind that is, like all our minds, at once self-indulgent, unreliable, relentless, lucid, obtuse, unruly. And like the rest of us he allow his thoughts to drift, his moods to shit, his focus to go out of focus. We've all woken up in the morning feeling blue and then, an hour later, unaccountably, felt cheerful. Or vice versa. We know what it means to be confounded by our own emotions. Watteau's working methods, so far as we can see, mingled long periods of meditation and periods of frantic labor. He was willing to fuss over small things and do big things quickly, and by utilizing this erratic approach, he somehow managed to transcribe the vagaries of the human mind onto canvas, giving the painting a psychological texture like nothing else in the history of art. We accept Watteau's opacitites and obscurities becase we know what it is like to find ourselves, in the midst of even the simplest task, thinking about something entirely different.
I just finished reading Guy Davenport's A Balthus Notebook. Lots of instigation in this book, and I thought I'd share one bit, if only because it speaks to my newfound love of cave painting:
Centuries before Plato beauty was a kind of good, and the appreciation of it a pleasure. Beauty has also traditionally been an outward sign of the soul's beauty. Balthus integrates this ancient tradition with Darwinian naturalism (beauty as sexual attraction). Darwin suspected that there was always "something left over" after sexual attractiveness has done its work, and that this something was what we call beauty, and that it may have given rise to art. The grace of line in a Lascaux horse is not the horse, but something that has been abstracted from it.
I just finished Ross Feld's wonderful book "Guston in Time." Feld belongs to that line of poets like Baudelaire and Frank O'Hara that were deeply involved in visual art. He brings an incredible eye and descriptive power to Philip Guston's work and also a great asset: he was one of Guston's closest friends in the later years.
This book lays open the minds of two artists struggling to get at something in their work and arguing over what it means to create. The book is quite short, and much of it consists of letters between Guston and Feld. Guston had given up abstract painting and was considered a traitor by many in the art world. He said he could no longer spend his life just measuring whether a dab of red would suffice on the picture plane. Abstraction and "pure" picture-making held no more allure for him. He had to paint recognizable forms and figures.
Guston tells Feld about teaching at Boston University and watching a student trying to paint a mural with a clock in it. The student fussed over how to paint the clock, working a long time and re-working it over and over. In the end, says Guston, he went over to the mural and grabbed the student's brush. "You want a clock? Here's a clock!" he said, and painted in a crude clock.
I was quite taken by the following paragraph written by Guston. The underlining is all by the artist. At issue is why paint one thing over another. Why fuss over how to paint a particular form? Why paint at all? Guston says this:
Ross--what is creating--this forming anyway?!! A treadmill? Try to stay on it--throw off the dross--make the architecture and content impossible to take apart--not even 1/8 of an inch padded. Lean. Yet, working with images as I am attempting, makes all so unmanageable, chaotic, as well as baffling. And so unpredictable, which is why that 1/8 of an inch change of forms & spaces, transforms the meaning. I know I'm going in circles talking to you this way. (Musa [Guston's wife], in the next room, just said "Did I hear a big sigh?")
Well--perhaps one should remain satisfied just to stay on the treadmill--to remain on it--maybe that is all that is truly given to us. My God! A lifetime spent--to have a few innocent moments. To baffle oneself--to come in the studio next day and feel--"I did that?" Is this me--To catch oneself off-guard?
"You want a clock? Here's a clock!" Oh, if it were only as direct and simple as that!
While in the library a couple weeks ago, I came across Gregory Curtis's book "The Cave Painters." It's a slim volume that is an excellent introduction to the art produced in the caves of western Europe from 30,000 to 10,000 years ago. By the time I finished it, my mind was awash in ideas about my own painting and what it means to put paint to a surface. The strangest thing about the study of cave painting is that it's almost a forensic science. Anthropologists gather evidence, chart history, where things appear and how often. But there's an elephant in the room: why?
Why did people go to the caves to produce art? No one knows. And there is a stigma on the people who seriously study cave painting to actually create coherent theories as to why. The dominant thinking now is that we'll never understand why these paintings were created. I sympathize with this point of view. There's just not a lot of evidence. My regret is that I can't listen in to the lunchtime conversations of the people who study this stuff. There have to be interesting and provocative ideas out there that will never be published, just talked about.
The most fascinating thing to me is the evidence around how sophisticated the cave painters were. When you think about someone 30,000 years ago painting an animal the size of a Jackson Pollock painting 15 feet off the ground, it gets bewildering. They had to build scaffolding. There are still rope impressions from where the painters would jam would into rock crevasses. They had to pull in pigment. They had to create brushes. They had no light, and so needed illumination. And how did they learn to draw like that? A lot of recent research has proven the most impressive compositions weren't haphazard. They were planned and painted in to create the stunning overall effect we still get today. It's not an accident that we feel things upon seeing these paintings.
Towards the end of the book, after he narrates his visits to several caves, Curtis explains why anthropologists still copy art from the caves, even though photographic technology has never been better. It made me think of all my art classes where I had to copy work from other artists and all my surprise discoveries whenever I did it:
The art needs to be copied as well [as be inventoried]. Making copies is a long, often tedious process. In that way it is very much like an archaeological dig. And, like a dig, it is absolutely essential because, strange as it sounds, it is impossible to see the art merely by looking at the wall. The intense concentration copying requires reveals signs and images that were invisible before. Michel Lorblanchet, a distinguished prehistorian with considerable artistic talent, made copies in a cave named Pergouset. He had visited the cave more than twenty times, often with colleagues, and thought he knew it well. But when he began to make his copies, he discovered numerous animals and signs that hadn't been seen before, including a vulva some eighteen inches across that, once seen, becomes the first thing anyone notices on the wall. Lorblanchet worked in the cave for three years making copies. His copies show twelve horses, three reindeer, three mountain goats, one stag, a bison, an auroch, four undetermined animals, sixteen signs, the vulva mentioned above, and twelve undetermined traces. Years earlier, when Leroi-Gourhan visited the cave, he saw only an isolated mountain goat, a horse, and a bison. What Lorblanchet was able to see compared to what Leroi-Gourhan saw is the difference between copying and merely looking.
Below are a couple renderings by Henri Breuil, a new hero of mine. While he was working, the dominant theory about dating work from the caves was that there was a linear progression of art history. According to anthropologists at the time, so-called "primitive" work had to be done before more sophisticated work, since human beings get more and more cultured over time. Breuil, a religious man who took on the dominant Marxist-atheist anthropologist at the time, thought that life doesn't progress so cleanly. That certain people would choose a cruder, more raw style of painting. Over time, Breuil was vindicated and proven correct.
I've included just these images because I was charmed by them.
Another reason why later Cezanne is better than early
I read this passage from Annie's Dillard's Living By Fiction , her exploration of what makes writing meaningful, and thought it could be applied to painting just as well:
We judge a work on its integrity. Often we examine a work's integrity (or at least I do) by asking what it makes for itself and what it attempts to borrow from the world. Sentimental art, for instance, attempts to force preexistent emotions upon us. Instead of creating characters and events which will elicit special feelings unique to the text, sentimental art merely gestures towards stock characters and events whose accompanying emotions come on tap. Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls. An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given. That is why scenes of high drama--suicide, rape, murder, incest--or scenes of great beauty are so difficult to do well in genuine literature. We already have strong feelings about these things, and literature does not operate on borrowed feelings.
I stumbled across a hilarious interview between Allen Ginsberg and conservative columnist John Lofton from 1990. Lofton begins the interview aggressively asking if Ginsberg is crazy. Ginsberg talks about seeing a shrink and Lofton is mystified why the poet doesn't know his psychiatrist's religious beliefs.
GINSBERG: I know some, through body language and the response to the
immediate situation in front of me, which is what I am really
interested in, rather than, say, this conversation. I'm dealing with
you in terms of how you display yourself here, not the history of your
thoughts. I'm trying to deal with the evidence or manifestation of how
you present yourself here--your harshness, aggression, and insistency
and--
LOFTON: Why not call it my perseverance? Isn't that a nicer word? Or guts? Or tenacity?
GINSBERG: I would say there is a little element of S&M in your approach. Power.
LOFTON: No. I would say this is more like the kind of sex you like.
GINSBERG: And I would say this is the kind of power relationship you like, judging from your behavior.
LOFTON: Well, that's certainly what S&M is all about--power..
GINSBERG: And you seem to like that don't you? Have your sexual fantasies ever involved that kind of power relationship?
LOFTON: No, not to my knowledge, I'm a Christian. So I don't fantasize..
GINSBERG: Do you ever have sexual fantasies?
LOFTON: No.
GINSBERG: None at all?
LOFTON: No, I said I am a Christian.
GINSBERG: You've never had any sexual fantasies!
LOFTON: Before I was a Christian, I had them, absolutely.
GINSBERG: And since you're a Christian you don't?
LOFTON: No.
GINSBERG: And when you had them, did they involve any dominance/submission fantasies!
LOFTON: Mine were pretty orthodox heterosexual kinds of fantasies. But
there's no doubt they were bad. And I am so glad that Jesus Christ
delivered me from them.
GINSBERG: You have no erotic dreams now, at all, that you remember!
LOFTON: None that don't feature my wife, no.
GINSBERG: Yeah.
LOFTON: It's an amazing thing what Jesus can do for a person.
GINSBERG: Uh-huh.
The conversation turns towards Ginsberg's affection for young boys, which Lofton calls rotten and sinful.
GINSBERG: I should say my sexual preference is not just for boys, but also for middle-aged men, straight men, and women. I've occasionally had fantasies about making out with trucks as well as beasts. And maybe I'll be making out with you, before it's all over. [laughs]
LOFTON: Well. maybe I could drive that truck while you make out with it, perhaps an eighteen wheeler, with the pedal to the metal.
GINSBERG: Now there's your fantasy. [laughs]
LOFTON: Excuse me. but you raised the idea of having sex with a truck.
GINSBERG: You extended it.
LOFTON: I'm just trying to accommodate you. I even offered to drive the truck. And you attacked me. But to hell with you. I won't drive the truck. Get your own truck.
The conversation moves to the nature of the mind. Lofton doesn't believe Ginsberg has any qualification to talk about "the mind" when his experience is only with his own mind (and to Lofton, Ginsberg's mind is sinful and deranged).
GINSBERG: I'm observing my own mind and consciousness and reporting on that and trying to be candid. Walt Whitman, who was a very great poet and, incidentally, gay, said he thought that for poets and orators of the future the great quality would be candor, frankness, truthfulness.
LOFTON: Well, Walt Whitman suffered from, if I may say so, what might be called terminal candor--not unlike yourself.
GINSBERG: You don't like Whitman?
LOFTON: No.
GINSBERG: Have you read Whitman?
LOFTON: Some.
GINSBERG. Do you remember the name of the poem you read?
LOFTON: Yes, one that says something like: "So I make mistakes. I contradict myself. So what? I contain all things," This is absurd. Talk about arrogance.
GINSBERG: Dig this.
LOFTON: I'm diggin' it.
GINSBERG: He says: "Do I contradict myself? Very well. I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes," Do you know what he meant by that?
LOFTON: Probably nothing good. And I doubt if he knew what he meant.
GINSBERG: Yeah, he did. I know what he meant.
LOFTON: How do you know what he meant?
GINSBERG: [laughs] Because I am large. I contain multitudes.
LOFTON. But you might contradict yourself.
GINSBERG: Yes. And I certainly will contradict myself.
LOFTON: This will be one of your multitudes the ability to contradict yourself.
GINSBERG: That's what Whitman is saying.
LOFTON: It's gibberish.
GINSBERG: That our own minds are so vast that we can wind up contradicting ourselves without having to freak out about it. It's very similar to what the poet John Keats said about negative capability. He said the quality of a very great poet like Shakespeare was his ability to contain opposite ideas in the mind without an irritable reaching out after fact and reason. Meaning that that part of the mind which judges, and irritably insists on either black or white, is only a small part of the mind. The larger mind observes the contradiction, and contains those contradictions. The mind that notices that it contradicts itself is bigger than the smaller mind that is taking one side or the other.
LOFTON: You speak very confidently about this. Where do you get your ideas about what the mind is?
GINSBERG: By direct observation through meditation practice.
LOFTON: But at most this would tell you only about your mind, wouldn't it? You were making statements about the mind.
GINSBERG: I should say I noticed this about my mind and John Keats noticed it about his mind. Sure, you might want to check our which side is right but when you get irritable about it and insist on one or the other, black or white, it's likely you'll eliminate some information from both sides.
LOFTON: Is nothing black-and-white?
GINSBERG: Nothing is completely black-and-white. Nothing.
Ginsberg's point dovetails nicely with a recent article about how babies see the world. For a long time, we've thought of newborns as being blank slates that get filled up by experience.
Now, however, scientists have begun to dramatically revise their concept of a baby's mind. By using new research techniques and tools, they've revealed that the baby brain is abuzz with activity, capable of learning astonishing amounts of information in a relatively short time. Unlike the adult mind, which restricts itself to a narrow slice of reality, babies can take in a much wider spectrum of sensation - they are, in an important sense, more aware of the world than we are.
The article goes on to talk about how artists' and musicians' minds physically work more like children's, keeping an openness to life without preconceptions. It even compares a baby's mind to the Zen idea of beginner's mind, which is something Ginsburg was very interested in.
And just to add more to the mix, here's Kool Keith's crazysexy ode to Mack trucks:
There's been a lull in my posting recently since the sweetest thing came into my life: Iris Ellington Swartz Turfle, my baby girl, born February 12. For all the cute pics of baby drooling, and adults drooling over a baby, check out my Flickr account. I'm sure loyal DG readers will understand why art blogging was one of the last things on my mind.
That doesn't mean making art has gone to the back burner, however, as I've entered an extremely productive phase and have been very busy in the studio lately. I'll post pics soon of what's bubbling out in this very green time.
And, as life with a newborn becomes more manageable, look forward to more regular posts here.
In the meantime, I thought I'd share a great quote I found from an interview with Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman that relates to a lot of my past year in the studio.
As the religious aspect of my existence was wiped out, life became much easier to live. Sartre said how inhibited he used to be as an artist and author, how he suffered because what he was doing wasn't good enough. By a slow intellectual process he came to realize that his anxieties about not making anything of value were an atavistic relic from the religious notion that something exists which can be called Supreme Good, or that anything is perfect. When he'd dug up this secret idea, this relic, had seen through it and amputated it, he lost his artistic inhibitions too.
The fine folks at TSG have posted Jack Kerouac's Navy file from 1943, which details his honorable discharge for psychiatric reasons.
Without any particular training or back ground, this patient, just prior to his enlistment, enthusiastically embarked upon the writing of novels. He sees nothing unusual about this activity. Physical and neurological examinations are negative and mental examination reveals no gross evidence of psychosis.
Yes, I am aware that this is my THIRD Guardian post of the day, but since it's Hemingway's birthday today, I thought I had to post this article about two bars in Miami fighting (and suing!) over which was Hemingway's favorite (from yesterday, and via Bookslut, of course).
Your DG editors are big fans of Seth, born Gregory Gallant*, the Canadian indie comics artist (or "graphic novelist," in the parlance of our times). In fact, we like him so much that we bought an original drawing a few years ago at a signing at Million Year Picnic in Cambridge, Mass.
Interviews with Seth are fairly rare, so we were thrilled to see this one in Bookslut, in which he discusses, among other things, his notorious nostalgia:
The modern world is very ugly… and the pop culture is so mind-numbingly dumb that you have to make a conscious effort to shut it out. That’s why I’m considered a “nostalgia guy.” I just like things from the past better. I don’t want to live in 1932, but I sure wish some of the elements of that time had survived into this time. Though obviously, their fascination with “progress” is the worm in the apple that created this shitty culture we inhabit. It’s a complicated question. And believe me, no one is more confused about his feelings about the past and the present than I am. I find, as each year passes, my understanding, and feelings about the 20th century are more muddled. The only thing I can say with real certainty is: The mass culture of our current age makes me feel like I need a shower.
Other great Drawn and Quarterly artists we love include Chester Brown, Chris Ware, Julie Doucet, Joe Matt, Adrian Tomine, and R. Crumb (hey, that's two references in one day).
*Coolest name in the world for a comic book artist.
The New Yorker's Louis Menand takes to task Lynne Truss's grammar manifesto Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation for the (apparently copious) punctuation errors in her book. After cataloguing the book's lapses in commas and parentheses, Menand laments the publisher's decision not to amend the American version of the book to account for differences between American and British usage (this really does make no sense). A money quote:
The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces.
The article then uses Truss's book to launch a discussion of the "voice" in the written word:
The uncertainty about what it means for writing to have a voice arises from the metaphor itself. Writers often claim that they never write something that they would not say. It is hard to know how this could be literally true. Speech is somatic, a bodily function, and it is accompanied by physical inflections—tone of voice, winks, smiles, raised eyebrows, hand gestures—that are not reproducible in writing. Spoken language is repetitive, fragmentary, contradictory, limited in vocabulary, loaded down with space holders (“like,” “um,” “you know”)—all the things writing teachers tell students not to do. And yet people can generally make themselves understood right away. As a medium, writing is a million times weaker than speech. It’s a hieroglyph competing with a symphony.
I won't spoil the rest, but it's a great read for any (other) grammar or writing nerds out there.
Like Billy Collins in his poem "Marginalia," I find notes in the margins of books fascinating. While they often can be distracting, other times they are sufficiently strange to arouse more than a passing curiosity about the person who wrote them. For instance, I have a used copy of A Confederacy of Dunces with the scrawl, "Go to E.R. and ask for sedative. You're upset." then the big letters "EMERGENCY ROOM," with an arrow to "E.R." Was someone upset by the book, so much so that he or she needed to be immediately medicated, or was the 1982 First Revised Black Cat Edition the only paper nearby in an apparently dire situation?
I'm currently reading a library copy of Iris Murdoch's The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, which has a number of curious inscriptions. As I've read, I've begun to feel I know the inscriber, who is kind of like a sweet but slow-witted friend who explains the jokes on Seinfeld. ("That's funny because George's mom caught him masturbating!")
I've taken the liberty of snapping a few photographs of some of my favorite notes. I hope you're not offended wherever you are, random feminist stating-the-obvious woman.
I'm late to this one, but when I read that one of my favorite authors Mary Gaitskill had written an essay for the Washington Post magazine, I knew I had to find it. Although she's been somewhat of a literary recluse since her 1998 collection of short stories, Because They Wanted To, I count her first book of short stories, Bad Behavior, among my favorite collections.
The WaPo essay "Love Lessons," the story of Gaitskill and her husband's experience taking in two urban kids in a summer program, is thoughtful and poignant without being condescending. And as in her fiction, Gaitskill has an uncanny ability to articulate complex emotions. This one's definitely worth a read.
Rachel Cohen was Lisa Simpson's imaginary Jewish friend
She's also a real-life writer who just wrote an intellectual history inspired by a very, very long roadtrip around America. Her book A Chance Meeting is a compilation of non-fiction encounters between artistic giants:
Much of the book's delight is in the detail. Charlie Chaplin turns up, unannounced, at Hart Crane's flat at two in the morning. The photographer Richard Avedon tapes a negative of his sister's portrait on to his shoulder until it creates a kind of tanned tattoo. Norman Mailer bids farewell to James Baldwin beside the Playboy mansion pool while recovering from a 36-hour bender. The book opens with the young Henry James's visit to the New York studio of Matthew Brady to have his portrait taken by daguerreotype. It ends with Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell marching on the Pentagon during the Vietnam war.
I spent this first weekend of glorious spring weather very productively — I read Plum Sykes's novel Bergdorf Blondes. I couldn't put the idiotic thing down, it completely took over my life for about 36 hours. I have to say I'm glad to be rid of "Moi" the nameless fashion magazine writer and her department store heiress best friend, Julie Bergdorf, but I found our time together illuminating in a few ways. Things I need now to be a real New York girl, apparently: a Bellini at Chip's (that Cipriani's to you mere mortals), a ride in a private jet and a pair of $325 Chloé jeans.
Actually, my big problem with this book is not the excess of just-this-moment fashion references and rampant consumerism, that's what I would expect from Plum Sykes. After all one time in the pages of Vogue, she taught me how to order a custom-made Burberry trench coat. No, its the utterly unlike-ability of the main character that you find all over the chick lit genre and is particularly bad in Bergdorf Blondes which raised my ire. Why am I supposed to identify with "Moi" or even smile at her as I stand behind her in line for a Magnolia cupcake? Like me, she's a New York girl but her actions are consequence-free. She makes dumb mistake after another in terms of men, with zero ramifications. She doesn't really have to work at her job, yet she's not fired. She lives in a West Village apartment where sometimes she doesn't pay the rent in favor of a new pair of Manolos. She's not torn about these hypocrisies, she doesn't question her charmed existence. That's not even the dramatic focus of the novel's plot. Not that I'm asking my chick lit to try to save the world here, I just want even a smidge of Bridget Jones attempting to be a good, productive person, even though the impulse still remains to stay home with a box of Milk Tray. Novels like Bergdorf Blondes can be entertaining in a way (a "sure saketinis nourish" way), but the idea that living so selfishly could be as desirable in the real world as Sykes makes it, is particularly icky to me.
The best part of the book for me though was the critic quotes on the back, in particular the one from Sykes's boss and fashion publishing icon Anna Wintour, Vogue's editor-in-chief. She declares, "Perfectly pitched — playful, funny, satirical, and sweet. I laughed out loud many times." Upon reading this, I conjured up the image of Anna sitting in her perfectly appointed room, while wearing a flower print Prada skirt and those huge sunglasses, reading the white volume and laughing out loud. Many times. Thinking about the silence of that glamorous room punctuated by Anna laughing audibly, not just once, but many times, made the 312 pages well worth that vitamin D I have forgone over the past few days.
Of course as always, Choire Sicha of eponymous Gawker fame, got there first and he published his thoughts on the book in the New York Times yesterday. The number of exclamation points Choire found necessary to explicate the plot made me laugh out loud. Many times.
Nothing exceeds like excess. 21-year-old author Marty Beckerman already has two books under his belt. In an interview with Bookslut, the writer of "Generation S.L.U.T." says without irony that
Most (young writers) kind of suck. There are certain authors who are getting contracts when they're 14 years old, for a quarter million dollars, to write their memoirs. A 14-year-old has no perspective on his or her life. I mean, I wrote a book in high school, and it's good for the bitter rantings of a 16-year-old virgin, but it has no real perspective.
Clearly when MTV publishes fiction about teen sex written by a 21-year-old they're exploiting the same public fetish that fueled Christina and Britney's videos. I haven't read either of his books yet, so I wonder whether Beckerman's an exception to his own rule about young writers kind of sucking. But when Beckerman, who's barely old enough to drink, slams someone who's not old enough to drive for lacking "perspective," it doesn't bode well.
This week's New Yorker features a profile (not available online) of author Madeleine L'Engle. In the profile, the author Cynthia Zarin writes: "When I was in college, I remember a friend saying to me, 'There are really two kinds of girls. Those who read Madeleine L'Engle when they were small, and those who didn't.'"
I was the kind of girl who read Madeleine L'Engle. Although I wasn't crazy about the Austin series, I read all of the Murray series -- A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet (perhaps an odd choice as my childhood favorite), Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time -- as well as several of her other books. The O'Keefe series novel A House Like a Lotus was my introduction to the very concept of lesbianism (it was the repressive '80s, and my father was an evangelical minister, so I beg for a slight break on this one).
Zarin points out in the New Yorker profile that L'Engle refuses to distinguish between literature for children and adults, and this may be the key to what endears her to children -- she refuses to talk down or pander. In fact, I largely credit A Wrinkle in Time for teaching me to think philosophically. Not only did the book casually introduce me to physics (an introduction which, sadly, my education didn't much build upon), my nine-year old brain nearly burst when Meg comes to the realization that, "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!” about the creepy dystopian Camazotz.
Zarin's profile devotes much time to the disconnect between fact and fiction in L'Engle's own life, which has clearly distressed L'Engle's family but probably won't make much difference to her fiction readers. Perhaps L'Engle puts it best when Zarin asks her "[I]s there a difference between fiction and nonfiction?" to which L'Engle replies, "Not much."
For the die-hard L'Engle fan, ABC will show a made-for-TV movie of A Wrinkle in Time on May 15. I may have to skip this one, however, because I prefer to keep my mental images of Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin intact (not to mention that it's also Disney-produced. Yecch.)
Your DG editors are big fans of 
The New Yorker's Louis Menand 
Like Billy Collins in his poem 
I spent this first weekend of glorious spring weather very productively — I read Plum Sykes's novel 
Nothing exceeds like excess. 21-year-old author Marty Beckerman already has two books under his belt. In an 
This week's 