No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
Anne isn’t listening. She doesn’t have time. She’s left already, half-way down the street, her back to me, her hair bobbing. Her shoulders are thin, her sweater threadbare. Her knees are knobby, her hem uneven. One shoe buckle beats against the asphalt. She carries a diary.
Now, he didn’t feel alone in this frenetic crowd thanks to Beth’s presence. Yet he experienced a kind of pre-aloneness, pre-grief at their soon-to-come separation. He’d tried to intellectualize himself beyond it. He’d tried to articulate the absurdity of the situation: the absurdity of falling in love with her, of having fallen in love in the space of only a few hours.
Those are overt examples of Mary Shelley’s influence, but I know she and her creations seep into my narratives in all kinds of strange ways. Only recently have I recognized that even my current novel in progress, “The Isolation of Conspiracy,” from which “The Artist Spoke” is excerpted, owes a great deal to her.
Seven deer stand knee-deep in the blooming water, ears pivoting forward and back, mouths dripping duckweed, they reap the summer harvest.
"MoMA Now" includes the works of over four hundred artists. I got seasick at first when I realized that Picasso and Matisse each are represented only a couple of times by my recollection, and Leger and other touchstones once among over four hundred creatives. That means the MoMA curators have blown up the canon.
We were in a tiny cottage filled with witchy things: crystals, voodoo dolls, dream catchers, Ganesha, Mother Mary, chakra charts, black magic signs, happy buddhas, laughing buddhas, fat buddhas, skinny buddhas, buddhas with no hands, buddhas with one hand in prayer.