“I call monster every original inexhaustible beauty.” Alfred Jarry Absurdities, grotesques, obscenities and diatribes of revolutionary guerilla theatre; Alfred Jarry’s bizarre performances forged an art of protest and inspired some of the most glorious and subversive art the world has ever known. A wellspring of Absurdism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and among the greatest of … Continue reading Alfred Jarry, on his birthday September 8
Sounds, silences, and their structure in time; John Cage hit the reset button at the historical apex of musical theory, inverting its organizing principles to create randomness, composition by chance, and a chaos of sounds. A disciple of Schoenberg with the iconoclastic vision of Picasso, he sought to hear in a new way; his music … Continue reading John Cage, on his birthday September 5
Antonin Artaud takes us with him on his quest to see beyond the Illusion of the world, to transcend appearances. We his readers are born along on his adventures like a saints medal around his neck, surely a saint of misfits and lost causes, seeking dreams and true visions. Our faith is that of readers, … Continue reading Antonin Artaud, on his birthday September 4
Here is the lived experience of humanity, as observed and described by a seer whose great power is to fully inhabit the lives of others, with the profound empathy of a secret twin. Eduardo Galeano has made of us an icon of human being, meaning, and value; his writing sacralizes the everyman. His social histories … Continue reading Eduardo Galeano, on his birthday September 3
Lyrical, haunting, operatic works of archetypal vision and power; Robertson Davies has given us the songs of Orpheus from his descent into the underworld. His brilliant, evocative novels can be read as texts of Jungian analysis, meditations on the meaning of life, celebrations of our human interconnectedness. Also, his writing can be wonderfully funny … Continue reading Robertson Davies, on his birthday August 28
Gender and sexuality, love and desire, and the differences between them; history as a shadow prison we may free ourselves from to become fully human in whatever way we choose, the struggle for self determination and the ownership of identity between self and others, and seizures of power as an act of creative revolt against … Continue reading Jeanette Winterson, on her birthday August 27
The original is unfaithful to the translation.” Jorge Borges Like a magician, Jorge Borges abandoned fictions in which invented characters are realized as believable figments and instead created stories in which his readers become fictional. Opening a door between personal psychology and universal myths, his poetic incantations made us larger than we were, connected … Continue reading Jorge Borges, on his birthday August 24
Myth and history, truth and illusion, love and desire, identity and the stories from which we construct it; A.S Byatt has charted a dialectics of form and substance in her wonderful and wise novels. Heiress to the literary tradition of Neo-Platonism and British Romantic Idealism, she has given us two works of world-historical significance, … Continue reading A.S. Byatt, on her birthday August 24
Our monsters, ourselves; genius, madness, inspiration, the quest to become as gods; who among us has not longed to steal the divine fire, to look beyond ourselves, to defy all limits and laws? To be, even for a moment, the unconquered Victor Frankenstein? Yet as Prospero said of Caliban, we must also say of … Continue reading Mary Shelley, on her birthday August 20
Phantasms, grotesques, narratives of oblique intent, the capering of monstrosities; the novels of John Hawkes are experiments in transgression, of cruelties and impossible eroticism. Here we have the delights of that most American of diversions, the carnival freak show, as the metaphor for the whole world, and our distorted images are repeated endlessly in the … Continue reading John Hawkes, on his birthday August 17
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 