I haven't paid any attention to this blog in a long time, since covid really. My spellcheck still suggests "Ovid". I wasn't sure i had anything much worth saying. I read a lot of psychiatry. I leaned more to the left. There was no shortage of pundits and people with the time to write anxious…

Film making made painting a flamboyant performance. Picasso draws on film with a flashlight in the dark. Some ferocious film star with a chiselled superhero jaw line dashes off a Van Gogh.  A guy in a trendy lumber-jacket knocks off a couple yards of lonesome pines and autumn splendour in a vigorous Canadian heritage moment.…

When I was in my thirties I saw a very good psychiatrist once weekly for a few years. He'd escaped the holocaust as a child. He wrote about prenatal psychology. He loved rabbits. He told me to read Freud when I was Jung and to read Jung as I grew old. This past year I've…

I'm not sure where I was when I cut cut and pasted the following into my mind map: "Acedia is an occupational hazard among men of learning that takes the form of a gradual withdrawal of motivation for research and an increasing alienation from science. During the Middle Ages acedia had only a religious meaning.…

On a Sunday morning I liked to put on my tan linen suit and take quietly to the French quarter. "That kind of suit, you can just pull it on and go,” Bert used to say. “You can toss it in the corner for a week and when you need it you just pull it…

Disaffection has nothing to do with my reclusion. There is no one "that I no longer love." Nor am I wounded, licking. Sometimes perhaps out of boredom. Perhaps what began as a subconscious drive, creativity, had become conscious, and its sense of imperative mystery, its glamour, and its magic seemed faded. Painting, the little deliberate…

  This past winter I still pined a bit for the south, for New Orleans in particular. But it is enough now, my knowing that a city existed suited to my temperament, to my solitary engagement with it. I was a better fit than I had been. I didn't feel so odd anywhere after having…

I have been devoted since Bert died to writing by Anita Brookner. My devotion became a joke to others and then a bore. Nobody I know reads her. People's eyes glaze over but mine track and focus. I discovered a few of her novels in the little library in town where I'd gone to get…

  The White Flaneur at the Main Intersection       [Haffenden:] What is your criterion for judging what is most valuable in a work of art? [Brookner:] That's very difficult to answer. I think it would be radiance, a power beyond the image: vision. The National Gallery has just bought a portrait by David called M. Blauw,…

So an English man and an Indian are sitting in a bar.  They were old enough to feel old verities calcify and enfeeble in their veins, old enough to cap and trade their vices, their happy hours. They deplored a moment the miserly, narrow lapels and trousers about the bar, the fashion calculated to save…

With a blog you read backward, through the archives, so there's a backward narrative. I try to be truthful but the farther back I read the more the writing seems fictive, self serving, the more my ignorance of time described embarrasses me; There isn't much more wisdom in hindsight than in hope I think sometimes.…