The Cliffs of Moher, in County Clare, Ireland.

It’s that day again. Another year, another Guinness or two or three. I wonder sometimes what old Saint Patty would make of his holiday being used for fun and frivolity, and more than a little bit of liquid spirits. Did he drink in his monastery, or out and about in his walks across Ireland? Possibly so. He may have needed more than a little help, chasing away all of those snakes and demons. And it may have helped him explain to the Irish how the concept of the Trinity was like the Irish Shamrock, as he did on occasion.

Regardless, drink a toast for me and you and all our brothers and sisters in this life, at least.

The official site of the St…

1. Tabhair ‘om póg, is Éireannach mé
2. Bloomsday 2009
3. The Ginger Man

Agnes Varda

Agnes Varda lives inside Cinema. Literally. Her brilliant cinematic autobiography, “The Beaches of Agnes”, captures the melancholy and memorable life of perhaps the first New Wave filmmaker — though she is not always included when talk turns to Godard, Resnais, Rivette, Rohmer and Truffaut.

In this documentary, Varda uses mirrors within mirrors, and film within film, walking backwards as she goes back in time to collect memories and update them with the children of old friends and child actors grown old. Varda is also a brilliant photographer, and inserts photos inside the film within the film, giving us a glimpse of life in France, in Cuba, in California, stretching across several decades, and touching many lives both humble and renown. We see Jim Morrison, Harrison Ford, Catherine Deneuve, Jane Birkin,…

1. The Double Life of a Mystic
2. The Survivor
3. Strings in the Dark

Which makes me think about all of the drama when it comes to discussing art. Once it’s all been categorized, compartmentalized, according to “schools”, the battle is lost and we all too easily lose the sense of the music itself. The battle becomes the battle over competing interpretations, instead of…

1. Brandi Carlile’s The Story
2. Corinne Bailey Rae of Sunlight
3. Polly Jean, Punk Noir Princess

Jane Campion’s Bright Star. 2009

“Bright Star” is that rare combination: a film beautiful, brave, magical and idyllic, without being saccharine. The story of John Keats’ all too brief love affair with the girl next door, Fanny Brawne, moves at a pace organic, like a soft breeze across the heath, following the young lovers, sometimes pushing them gently on, but never overwhelming them to fit some static formula. The pace of the film never overwhelms the story, the actors, the scenery or the music of their romance, though there is plenty of darkness inside the light. Ominous signs converge with the Romantic setting, without commentary, without a filmmaker’s agenda.

Abbie Cornish plays Fanny Brawne, and she is dressed to suit the time and somewhat hide her very modern, nearly uncontainable wry sensuality.…

1. New Poetry and a Short Film
2. Echoes in Exile
3. Deep Will Call Unto Deep

Magdalen With the Smoking Flame, by Georges de La Tour. 1640

William Barrett, in his Irrational Man, introduces us to Existentialism and summarizes the development of Western Thought in the process. The book came out in 1958, but can be read fruitfully and applied productively to the problems we face today.

In the section on Heidegger, whom I haven’t read in years but should return to, Barrett discusses Heidegger’s Field Theory of Being, and places it in historical context.

The Greeks were the first to remove objects from their surroundings, their background, their context, so they could study them in isolation. In a sense, atomize them. This was necessary for the creation of Science. But the Greeks still lived in Nature, not in opposition to it, so this process wasn’t truly disruptive, much less fatal. Fast forward…

1. Practical Ecstasy
2. The Divine Invention
3. The Enlightenment Strikes Back

School of Athens, by Raphael. 1510

Have been away, in limbo, on leave, out of sight and out of mind, for ages now. As you can see, the gears of Spinozablue have ground to a halt, and whispers fill the corridors. There may still be time for a renaissance of sorts, but it’s looking more unlikely by the hour. Though we will make that attempt and give it the old college try tonight and perhaps again very soon.

The reason for the painting is simple. It’s similar to the reason for my absence here. It reminds me of the disconnect between what we see and what remains hidden. Greeks have a beautiful word for truth, “aletheia,” which can be literally translated as the state of not being hidden. What is no longer hidden is the…

1. More Questions
2. Abelard and Heloise

The Headless Woman, 2008. Directed by Lucretia Martel.

“La Mujer Sin Cabeza” is a brilliant film, with subtle social commentary that never hits one over the head. Like the mystery in the film itself, it’s something the audience must pieces together. The director, Lucretia Martel, presents the evidence, but no editorials. Class and race are paramount, but they remain as unspoken, perhaps even ghostly components of the film. Amnesia, real and feigned, are a part of the mix as well.

Maria Onetto plays Verónica, a bourgeoisie dentist, living in comfort in Northwestern Argentina. Surrounded by a close-knit extended family, in a house where many Indigenista servants appear and disappear, her life takes a sudden turn when she runs over something on the highway. She hits her head and becomes disoriented, but goes on, not looking…

1. The Survivor
2. Appaloosa: Time Constraints and Film
3. Dislocation at Noon at Midnight

Monastery burial-ground under snow, by Casper David Friedrich. 1818.

(Destroyed WWII)

Millions of people drive during the holidays. To and from. Rarely just to. I drove through ice and torrents of rain south, then through a cloudy day north and into white mist and fog. The drive, something about the drive, and the time, and the strangeness of endlessly moving forward in relative terms, led to the poem below, and a work in progress:

The Trip

The vanishing point teases us
Tempts us with the power
Of horizons

So I tried
I really tried to outrun it

What exists beyond the V?
What exists?

How does it stay just beyond our reach
As we hurtle forward like a car?

Can we go beyond…

1. Homage To Anna
2. The Wanderings of Aly
3. The Choice

Hamlet and Horatio, by Eugène Delacroix. 1839

Below, we have some new poetry from Robert Mueller, one of our frequent contributors. Robert has a great sense of the potential for soundful poetry, for the music of language, its aural qualities. His poems should be read aloud, listened to carefully, chewed on a bit.

.…

Reading a bit of Harold Bloom on Genius makes me ponder the difference between talent and genius. As was his intention. An early quote:

Though Shakespeare is the largest consciousness studied in this book, all the rest of these exemplary creative minds have contributed to the consciousness of their readers and auditors. The question we must put to any writer must be: does she or he augment our consciousness, and how is it done? I find this a rough but

…

1. Dimensions: More Than Spatiality
2. Again With the Yevgeny
3. New Poetry Anthology

Community Still

What can the Lords of Everything
about dull eccentricity complain?
A fine shill, which is to see kirtle
cock-eyed and expect its rounding up,
would cheer, would meet the sun.
And then at sacred hoops the banners
stream, and yet no historian
writes with finish the broken
horizon, and these Prodigals replay
their Herculean task unnoticed,
while grownups pass and joggle,
sniff and blow and jo, and shuffle, prattling feet.
Witness, at cost, the skipping girl:
She finds in a book honors
of wet cheeks and high ploys to relief
in bouncing from flue to pratfall; silvers
schooldays yet in stern lessons, polymath craze.
Or coal-boy, rougher than the dirty feathers
of his temperatures, dreams a leaf…

1. Robert Mueller: Bubble or Tripod Which
2. In the Shadow of Yevgeny
3. Three Poems by Tony Jones