A bizarre and hilarious absurdism, full of original ideas and strange insights, vivid oddball characters filling wonderful stories, Bruce Sterling’s fiction is as great as we might expect from the cofounder of cyberpunk, but it is great because it is built of technological, historical, and economic facts of our real world, disciplines of which he … Continue reading Bruce Sterling, on his birthday April 14
I too once bore the icon of Saint Beatrice of the Absurd as did he, following the tracks of Dante through a blighted and ravaged series of otherworlds, bereft of dictums, of referents, a journey in which all the signs had been switched so that self-referential language led outward to realms unknown and the places … Continue reading Samuel Beckett, on his birthday April 13
“It’s important to ask yourself, How am I useful to others? What do people want from me? That may very well reveal what you are here for. “James Hillman Everything James Hillman has written is wonderful and more important, will help you navigate through life. You could make his work a field of study; … Continue reading James Hillman, on his birthday April 12
“Only poets are innocent enough to invent such monstrosities,” everything seems possible!” –Charles Baudelaire A visionary aesthetics and poetry of beauty, fragile and exquisite, crafted with delicacy and imagination, a Romantic who saw himself as aligned with Byron and who pioneered Symbolism; such was Charles Baudelaire the poet, novelist, and critical essayist . … Continue reading Charles Baudelaire, on his birthday April 9
“Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It’s more like conversation, raising new questions and moving you to answer them for yourself.” — Barbara Kingsolver Her work an explicitly Socratic project, a narrative activism exploring themes … Continue reading Barbara Kingsolver, on her birthday April 8
Absurd and surreal free-associative stories, playful, odd, and totally uninterested in comprehensibility, full of references to literature and philosophy, art and music, but also to pop culture and ephemera, Donald Barthelme’s works are comprised of found texts, collages of words, lists, theatrical declamations, bizarre dislocations and nonsequitors. He used the methods invented by … Continue reading Donald Barthelme, on his birthday April 7
A poet of raptures, of visions, and of the language of dreams as described by Gaston Bachelard, Homero Aridjis charts the action of a dream navigator’s theory of aesthetic value and historical poetics, immerses us in sounds which are the shells of speech, and gives us this praxis as a lever with which to change … Continue reading Homero Aridjis, on his birthday April 6
Sad that her birthday falls on a day of mourning, the assassination of Martin Luther King, a memorial I observe in accord with my own understanding; yet also we must honor their lives, now linked together for eternity, with action as well as with reflection. Let us each perform, as we are able, an Act … Continue reading Maya Angelou, on her birthday April 4
A transgressive humor and wit, a concern for the ideological and philosophical underpinnings of things, and an exuberant desire for life; Milan Kundera evokes a compelling sense of kinship in the reader, regardless of his subject. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a masterpiece of world literature, and The Festival of Insignificance is … Continue reading Milan Kundera, on his birthday April 1
Superbly written stories crafted with a language of beautiful delicacy and wit, with ideological vendettas and rants thereof; the works of John Fowles explore themes of identity and meaning, truth and beauty, stopping just short of the polemical. They include the beautiful film The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a reimagination of the story of Caliban … Continue reading John Fowles, on his birthday March 31
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 