tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76405212012-05-20T06:18:45.204-05:00Arranging, deepening, enchanting the blogosphere. Commentary on film, art, music, books, and the ideas they inspire.John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.comBlogger1186125http://www.feedburner.com/fb/images/pub/fb_pwrd.gifThis is an XML content feed. It is intended to be viewed in a newsreader or syndicated to another site.tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-79023070221116836852012-05-15T20:40:00.000-05:002012-05-16T06:02:47.017-05:00

Fuentes, standing in front of the Aztec Sun Calendar at the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City. Image found here. Carlos Fuentes died today in his home town of Mexico City. He was 83. Here is a brief obituary in today's Los Angeles Times. His passing means that of that generation of Latin American writers of the "Boom" years of the '60s and '70s, only Colombia's Gabriel García

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com3http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/05/carlos-fuentes-1928-2012.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-15908162928054057822012-05-15T06:27:00.000-05:002012-05-15T06:28:10.713-05:00

The controversy over the claim that Vermeer used a camera obscura when painting now, with the recent discovery of this image, seems like pretty small potatoes. (Image found here.) Grades are in (though some stragglers are still out there), my office is tidier than it's been for, well, a while, and the summer stretches ahead. Aside from some work for my school's Online Writing Lab, a trip

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com2http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/05/self-image-self-image.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-1265455432501099082012-05-06T08:35:00.001-05:002012-05-07T17:09:24.710-05:00

Terence Malick and Christian Bale, Austin, Texas, September 2011. Image found here. Dear Mr. Malick, I'm under no illusions here. You almost certainly will never read this. For one thing, who the heck am I to you? For another, you don't strike me as the sort of guy who has a publicist who Googles for mentions of you. Finally, and most important, you are pretty busy right now, it appears

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com5http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/05/and-its-beauty-was-not-lost-on-him-open.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-5858587702954838342012-04-26T05:51:00.000-05:002012-04-26T05:52:21.723-05:00

. . . it's okay if it passed without your knowing. No fireworks, no mass rallies, not even a mention on the cable news chyrons. It was pretty quiet even for the person whose century's midpoint was passed. He marked it by doing some teaching, eating a delicious ribeye grilled by the Mrs., going to choir rehearsal, and (second night in a row) dozing off towards the end of The Colbert Report (

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com7http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/04/at-mid-point-of-meridian-century.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-23702642157268956662012-04-22T07:55:00.000-05:002012-04-22T07:56:27.312-05:00

Your correspondent's arrival to last Tuesday's department meeting? Naah--it's really Tompkins H. Matteson's Rip Van Winkle's Return (1860). Image found here. Apparently, part of turning 50 (which for me will occur next week) is that one feels the uncontrollable impulse to begin lots of sentences with "In my day . . ." or "I remember when"--not to mention, in my particular instance, a certain

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com6http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/04/just-start-calling-me-rip-van-meridian.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-51977840852835453572012-04-20T16:54:00.002-05:002012-04-20T16:56:17.766-05:00

Lee's caption: "Mary Alice and Fluffles, the morning they pulled the big bank job." Tumblr accounts, you may have heard, are the Hot New Thing on the Interwebs. I'm drawing your attention to The Odd Sandwich because its host, Lee Ingalls, is a friend and he's drumming up eyeballs for his place. And because I like his wry captions for these vintage pictures, some of them quite odd, from

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com0http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/04/people-to-visit-odd-sandwich.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-61013470155397333992012-04-14T08:46:00.002-05:002012-04-14T08:52:33.757-05:00

Room for the Sky, taken somewhere in Chase County, Kansas, by Dave Leiker. Click on image to enlarge. Image found here.As mentioned in my most recent post, I've begun reading William Least-Heat Moon's PrairyErth. What follows is a particularly compelling snippet of writing from it. It'd be quite easy to create post after post consisting of such snippets--Least-Heat Moon has this way of

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com3http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/04/full-of-many-things-except-boundaries.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-37794914100715621322012-04-10T07:16:00.003-05:002012-04-14T09:55:47.726-05:00

Skyline of Cottonwood Falls, the county seat of Chase County, Kansas. Click on image to enlarge. The courthouse is the oldest government building in continuous use in Kansas. Image found here.The origin myths of ancient cultures, including our own Judeo-Christian one, are as much about the land as they are about anything else. This is also true of that new-ish, caterwauling, still-naïve

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com2http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/04/some-old-compass-in-blood-on-prairyerth.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-31667113675832273652012-04-07T08:57:00.005-05:002012-04-07T14:47:28.622-05:00

Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew, 1599-1600. Click on image to enlarge. Image (and a lengthy discussion of the painting) found here.With Good Friday being last night and Easter to come tomorrow and a gloomy sky accompanying Scruffy and me this morning, I found myself thinking about Lent's demand of us that we take its questions as serious, inevitable ones. Just before Ash Wednesday this

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com2http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/04/caravaggio-and-lent.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-54226637850853230012012-04-01T19:37:00.000-05:002012-04-01T19:40:21.177-05:00

Marion Cotillard (left) and Owen Wilson in a typical shot from Midnight in Paris. Image found here.Midnight in Paris (2011; dir. Woody Allen).Thanks to my colleague (and film buff) Larry the Movie Guy, the Mrs. and I watched Midnight in Paris this past Friday night. The Mrs.' quickie review: "That wasn't as terrible as I had expected." (She had said earlier that she has had trouble

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com7http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/04/midnight-in-paris-and-nostalgia.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-87370131181681685832012-03-22T17:49:00.002-05:002012-03-23T09:19:34.838-05:00

Image found here.Well, we gave it a go. I can take some comfort in the knowledge that very, very few people picked Missouri to lose to Norfolk State; I'm pleased that I picked Lehigh to beat Duke and that, as I had originally picked, Ohio U. is in the Sweet Sixteen. But the upshot is that only half of my Sweet Sixteen selections are actually going to play tonight and tomorrow. This saddens me,

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com4http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/03/obligatory-picking-through-ashes-of.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-52326747056900552672012-03-22T10:56:00.001-05:002012-03-22T11:02:46.319-05:00

"To my astonishment, I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation!--why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it." --Thoreau, Walden.Thoreau's feigned dismissiveness of the value of formal education notwithstanding (he himself was a Harvard man), he does have a point: There indeed do exist any number of human activities which can be learned

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com3http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/03/on-snobbishness-and-higher-education.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-80956023842504655632012-03-13T07:53:00.004-05:002012-03-13T12:59:37.259-05:00

An ad that appeared in this morning's Washington Post. Despite the ad's immodesty, Virginia Commonwealth just might be able to back it up. Image found here.I've had nothing to say this season about college basketball, but (thanks/curses to cable in the Meridian household) I've seen a lot of it. It's been a strange season, in my mind, and this bracket--actually, the saner of my two brackets--is

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com2http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/03/obligatory-march-madness-post.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-57079565770163238432012-03-09T08:09:00.002-06:002012-03-10T07:12:10.815-06:00

Hello, reader(s). All is well here; just busy and lacking in things worthy of troubling you to consider reading.By some fluke, over the course of the fall and winter the Mrs. and I ended up seeing four of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture. While I'm glad that one of them, The Artist, won, the post below is about the most interesting and challenging and demanding of the lot.A still from The

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com5http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/03/some-comments-on-tree-of-life.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-81914380410064575522012-02-11T11:38:00.002-06:002012-02-11T11:39:32.172-06:00

Edward Hopper, Sunlight on Brownstones (1956). Image found here.Joseph Lorusso, Red Brick and Shadow (ca. 2000). Biography. Image found here.In yesterday's post, I mentioned that the WAM's selections from the permanent collection "look a little different these days." That's due to the fact that the museum has hung the pieces (or, in a few cases, has arranged sculptures and other objects

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com0http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/02/adventures-at-wichita-art-museum-8-part.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-76998610266244224922012-02-10T17:25:00.003-06:002012-02-11T07:34:00.218-06:00

An unidentified man looks at a jacquard tapestry of a Chuck Close self-portrait at the Austin exhibition in August of 2009. The original is a large image, so be sure to click to enlarge. Here is the exhibition in book form. Image found here.I will confess: I visited the WAM last Saturday because I didn't want to start my morning off by doing laundry. A quick perusal of the website, and the

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com0http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/02/adventures-at-wichita-art-museum-8.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-80143235778873951602012-02-05T15:30:00.001-06:002012-02-05T15:30:27.041-06:00

Sunset, Wichita, Kansas, January 20, 2012, by the Mrs. Click image to enlarge.It's pretty simple: Take a picture of the sunset each day of the year. This is the task that the Mrs. has set for herself, and you can see all the results that she's so far posted here. If you'd prefer not to click a whole lot, here is a slideshow of the sunsets she has taken thus far this year (that she has posted).

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com2http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/02/sunset-project.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-27978202846998511962012-01-28T10:16:00.002-06:002012-01-28T10:26:58.439-06:00

The famous caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks on the floor of the House of Representatives, May 22, 1856. The misplaced apostrophe aside, the caption (though quietly sympathizing with Sumner) is pretty accurate. Image found here.People don't hurl invective like they used to. Partly because it's the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and partly because it comes so highly recommended by

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com2http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/01/bleeding-kansas-bleeding-congressmen.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-19044037182832528632012-01-22T15:33:00.003-06:002012-01-23T09:06:49.720-06:00

Christopher Moore. Official website. Image found here.Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.This is the first Christopher Moore novel I've read. It comes recommended to me by two people: the Mrs., who is a long-time fan; and my pastor. Talking with them both about both Joseph's absence from the Gospels after the scene with the boy Jesus in the Temple and about the Infancy

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com7http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/01/you-are-scrawny-brown-guy-no-you-are.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-81412174239924345482012-01-10T19:42:00.001-06:002012-01-10T19:42:53.148-06:00

Thanks, FailBlogIt's back to back-to-school meetings this week. The chief activity has been to coin yet another phrase for what we need to be doing that means "assessment" and yet sound different enough that our various constituencies will believe that we're doing something different. Anyway: I have syllabi to write, so I hope to have something of substance next week.

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com6http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/01/back-to-school.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-53114495867376353922012-01-07T09:51:00.005-06:002012-01-07T09:55:50.552-06:00

For she was the maker of the song she sang.The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured seaWas merely a place by which she walked to sing.Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knewIt was the spirit that we sought and knewThat we should ask this often as she sang.If it was only the dark voice of the seaThat rose, or even colored by many waves;If it was only the outer voice of skyAnd cloud, of the sunken

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com2http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/01/idea-of-order-at-key-west-and-some.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-34109242068665067932012-01-06T08:58:00.004-06:002012-01-07T13:06:17.501-06:00

New Year, newish-to-us neighborhood: Your correspondent and Scruffy take a brief pause from exploring the headwaters of Gypsum Creek in the wilds of east Wichita, January 1, 2012. That's the western edge of our neighborhood in the background. Image by the Mrs.As I noted in my first post on our newish neighborhood, we now live in a neighborhood that might as well be a cul-de-sac: three streets

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com3http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2012/01/i-was-just-in-neighborhood-iii.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-35705651651266997922011-12-30T11:02:00.003-06:002011-12-31T06:00:55.923-06:00

Factoid from Although Of Course: The bandanna was not an affectation; Wallace was as prodigious a perspirer as he was a writer. Image found here.Um, I am probably not the smartest writer going. But I also--and I know, OK, this is gonna fit right into the persona [of the falsely-modest wunderkind writer]--I work really really hard. I'm really--you give me twenty-four hours? If we'd done this

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com0http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2011/12/david-foster-wallace-all-around-good.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-62607298529825204622011-12-27T11:21:00.002-06:002012-01-07T13:07:27.124-06:00

(Earlier post here. Belated best wishes to all during this season of wonder and hope.)A stack of banana leaves at a vendor's stall at La Merced, Mexico City. Banana leaves are used as wrappers for steaming/holding together food, especially in the southern regions of Mexico. In person, these were various beautiful shades of dark green, but that quality didn't show up so well in the color

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com2http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2011/12/pictures-from-mexico-city-la-merced.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7640521.post-71543270360731962842011-12-23T18:39:00.005-06:002012-01-07T13:08:31.138-06:00

A market stall for a vendor of Christmas lights in La Merced, Mexico City's enormous downtown market for foodstuffs and household items. Yes, those are the real colors. Yes, they were all flashing in various ways. Yes, the display was potentially seizure-inducing. And yes, it's things like this that make me so fond of this basket-case of a city. Click on this and the following images to

John B.http://www.blogger.com/profile/06358811061653958120noreply@blogger.com3http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2011/12/pictures-from-mexico-city-basilica-and.html