by Virgina Konchan
What is the most perfect metaphor for synthetic happiness, which Gilbert argues is virtually indistinguishable from natural happiness, both as it is felt (internalized) and shared? Fake bacon? 3-D movies? Any form of cultural simulacra, in the Baudrillardian sense of the term?
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by Marshall Walker Lee
When Cage began experimenting with chance operations in the 40s, he was looking for a means of stripping intention and taste from the process of creating art. In the Western world, our notion of “genius,” at least as it relates to artists and performers, is generally shaped by a psycho-historical method of decoding biography to discover the seed of ability. In the pre-modern world, it was taken for granted than an artist in full possession of his facilities, having taken care to hone his craft, could be compelled by divine will or religious mania to make a work of lasting value. After Freud and Nietzsche, we began to see our manias and urges as beginning and ending in the self. If the artist used to be Jacob wrestling with angel, now he is at best a lesser Hercules, laboring to exorcise the demons of his parentage, or at worst a nebbish with one foot in the analyst’s door.
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by Ann Marie Thornburg
Recently, I had the pleasure of listening to and spending a little time with the writer and teacher Naomi Shihab Nye. I learned of her open-hearted work years ago, when I was first becoming interested in contemporary poetry. It stuck with me—indeed, followed me—ever since. It is the kind of work that reveals much about its creator and vessel in the most generous way. I was not at all surprised, in other words, to find in Naomi a welcoming speaker and reader, and an effervescent person whose interest in listening to others and making them feel at home in the world is abundantly evident. This way of being in the world seems like one of the most rewarding, important things. It is something we all can do if we open ourselves to it.
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by Preeta Samarasan
In December, on my way back to France from Malaysia, I stopped in Paris to get a visitor’s visa at the Canadian Embassy. Twelve years ago, I didn’t need a visa to enter Canada on a Malaysian passport, but all that changed after September 11th, because Malaysia is a Muslim country. This I found out the hard way, landing in Toronto one afternoon en route to London from Rochester in 2003, being told that I could not leave the Immigration area because I had no transit visa.
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by Nicholas Johnson
Pareidolia refers to the tendency of human perception to discover meaning in random structures where meaning does not exist. It is the perception of an image in a cloud or a pattern on the surface of the moon. It can also refer to an experience of the spiritual. London based artist Saskia Olde Wolbers’ film Pareidolia explores this phenomena through fantastical imagery and a fable that tells of a miscommunication between a professor and a Zen master.
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