Some calamities consist in real-life storms. Then there are metaphorical storms in our lives. Where do we seek shelter, find home, seek the helpers?
ARTS
NOMAD: BRUCE CHATWIN AND WERNER HERZOG
Perhaps it was inevitable that these two self-mythologizing figures would meet. Their paths intersected, not always at the same time, at many points throughout their respective travels.
I’M JUST GONNA KEEP POSTING THIS TILL THE WORKSHOP IS FULL!
HEATHER KING SPRING 2021 WRITING WORKSHOP!! 8 WEEKS, MARCH 6-APRIL 24, SATURDAYS 12-2 PST. Eight-person max. Four slots left. Get ‘em while they last!!!
COCKTAIL HOUR AT THE FRICK, COVID-STYLE
“Why these vegetables together? This is the artist, sending someone to the market and presenting everyday objects in a new light.” What’s wonderful is on the one hand “the simplicity of the depiction combined with the incredible beauty, the sort of poetic feeling. You can feel the texture, the surface of the porcelain, the fabric, the wood, the glass.”
MARCH-APRIL SPRING 2021 WRITING WORKSHOP!!
HEATHER KING, SPRING 2021, 8-WEEK WRITING WORKSHOP!!
MARCH 6-APRIL 24, 12-2 PST. $625.
MOVIES AND MORE MOVIES
WOMEN’S PRISON MOVIES: Caged (1950) Eleanor Parker, Agnes Moorehead. “She’ll be back.” Don’t miss the scene where butch sadistic prison matron steps out for her Saturday night date, lording it over and leaving the love-starved inmates to twist and turn. Turn the Key Softly (1953), dir. Jack Lee; British drama starring Yvonne Mitchell, Joan Collins (surprise) as a prostitute, Kathleen Harrison and Terence Morgan. Three women from different backgrounds are released from prison over the course of 24 hours each face a struggle to avoid returning to her criminal ways.
ROBERT MACFARLANE’S LOST WORDS
His capacity to conjure landscape is alone astounding. Add to that an astonishingly wide-ranging grasp of geography, geology, natural history, cartography, and literature. Throw in the fact that he’s no mere scholar or armchair philosopher: every book is grounded in his willingness to take on the physical hardship of mountain climbing, hiking, camping, sailing, and tramping. But what makes Macfarlane sublime is the aching longing for a lost Eden that sounds like a bass note beneath all his work.
RELIGION AROUND BILLIE HOLIDAY
Holiday was no poster child for political correctness. She frequently chose—in fact, sought out—men who abused her physically and emotionally. She was notoriously profligate with money, food, and space, sharing her apartment at times with pimps, prostitutes, addicts. Her fondest wish was to have kids, open a home for orphaned children, and have her own little supper club, maybe 200 seats, where she could feed people and sing.
Instead, she was “existentially correct”….
EPIPHANY: FROM MY BEDSIDE TABLE
“[S]omeone who has been truly wounded by the Gospel, and has personally verified that the Church preaches the Word and makes the death and resurrection of Jesus present through the paradox of agony and contempt, can never find a pretext to desert. The one who leaves the Church proves he has never entered.”
A PERPETUAL STIMULUS TO CHARACTER-CREATION
I found this quote in a book called C.S. Lewis’s List: The Ten Books That Influenced Him Most. It’s from the chapter on Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson. I instantly recognized myself and realized Oh, maybe that’s why I find human contact draining! “The older I grow, the more clearly I see that this […]
DESIRE PATHS: A GUEST POEM
“All conspiring without a plan,
unmapped siren channels
through a city at your feet. “
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SAINTS ALIVE!
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: Pasadena native Mary Lea Carroll has written two engaging books on saints. The first, Saint Everywhere: Travels in Search of the Lady Saints, came out in 2019. In it, she travels among other places to Siena (St. Catherine), Prague (Infant Jesus) and Medjugorje (Our Lady of […]
THE DESIRE LINES HALF-DAY WORKSHOP HAS ARRIVED!
THE FIRST DESIRE LINES HALF-DAY WORKSHOP HAS ARRIVED: SAT. DEC 5, 2020, 8:45 AM-1 PM PST!