Surrealism, eroticisms and terrors, rapture and despair, Philip Lamantia’s poetry was inspired by the art of Dali and Miro and mentored by his friends Andre Breton and Max Ernst, and in turn directly inspired Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. As the American champion of French Surrealism and Joycean stream of consciousness writing, Philip Lamantia influenced the Beat … Continue reading Philip Lamantia, on his birthday October 23
So, the Id, the Ego, and the Superego take a stroll across America, and the guy they’re all riding around in writes it all down. This is John Berryman’s The Dreamsongs, a three-part stream of consciousness dialog about the stray bric-a-brac in the gutters of our culture, erratum, trivialities, nameless bestial urges without cause but … Continue reading John Berryman , on his birthday October 25
A visionary poetry of ethereal, strange, impassioned glorias of nature and the Infinite, vivid and strange reimaginations of fairytales and myths (her poem An Embroidery about Rose Red will haunt my dreams forever), and of the values immanent in nature and of the struggle for meaning in a fallen world; Denise Levertov forged a dialectics … Continue reading Denise Levertov, on her birthday October 24
Songs of survival, transformation, and rebirth which describe the malaise of disconnectedness and the authorized power of the state which poisons and unleashes the self-destruction of our civilization in the Second World War, and also of the recreation of civilization through our common humanity; Gunter Grass has forged a national character for modern Germany, but … Continue reading Gunter Grass, on his birthday October 16
Poet-philosopher, NeoPlatonic Idealist, religious scholar, and key figure of the Romantic Tradition, Samuel Taylor Coleridge has given the world some of our greatest literature, including the monumental Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. His densely-constructed poetry is a meticulously designed, mutually reinforcing system of signs, images, motifs, symbols, allegories and myths and unifying themes, as he … Continue reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on his birthday October 21
A visionary poetry achieved through systematic derangement of the senses; absinthe, opium, and sexuality, hallucinogenic and transgressive, but also informed by a rigorous scholarship of classical Latin literature and inspired by Baudelaire; Arthur Rimbaud set out on a heroic quest to transcend himself, a magician on a shamanic journey to the Infinite and the transhuman, … Continue reading Arthur Rimbaud, on his birthday October 20
Dreams and fantasies of a Surrealist-Magical Realist inclination, with the language play and bizarre devices of Calvino and Perec; Milorad Pavic has given us immortal classics of literature, brilliantly conceived and gorgeously written. His works achieve an apex of narrative beauty, as unique as it is stunning, and also recapitulates and transforms our civilization’s history … Continue reading Milorad Pavic, on his birthday October 15
As with all culture, architecture is a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of connectivity and growth. It mirrors the myriad ways in which individuals relate to their social contexts, gives form to intention and to will, expresses our hopes and fears for our relations with others and … Continue reading The Art of Inhabited Spaces
via Ambiguities of meaning, experiments of form, fantasies and reimaginations of what it means to be human; our histories, political and cultural contexts, allegories and fables; Italo Calvino changes the structural elements of ourselves and our civilization to renew and reawaken us. Few of our liberators have transgressed and shifted our boundaries as rigorously as … Continue reading Italo Calvino , on his birthday October 15
Susan Sontag, on her birthday January 16 “The point is not to teach us something in particular. The point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached. And to give pleasure.” Susan Sontag An inescapable force of protean genius, her subversion of critical theory and practice cast a looming shadow over our culture for … Continue reading Susan Sontag, on her birthday January 16
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 