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Art
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by Donald Kuspit
Pure abstract painting invites—demands--rapt attention, and is most convincing when it is a visual joy to behold, affording pleasure for the mind and body, cognitive as well as sensuous pleasure, and, following Ruskin’s lead, what might be called existential pleasure, that is, the pleasurable feeling of being alive, the feeling that life is worthwhile and good, however bad society may make one feel. One might say that pure abstract painting is a source of pleasure in a painful world, a sensuous refuge for the senses in a world that has seemed to have lost its senses, a sort of visual manna in the modern desert.
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Book Reviews
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by
Wadzanai Mhute
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s third novel Americanah is an ambitious novel with big themes.
In Americanah we meet Ifemelu and Obinze, high school sweethearts who are separated because of the lack of “choice and certainty” in their home country of Nigeria. Ifemelu immigrates to the United States to study while Obinze goes to England where he lives an invisible life as an illegal immigrant. The two lose contact because of separate trials in their new lives.
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by
Valerie Fox
David R. Slavitt's novel, Overture, is told from a novelist's point of view. The first part chronicles his reflections as he waits for the results of a test that could reveal that he has colon cancer. As he waits, he remembers and explores the significance of early memories, including those surrounding a hearing deficiency that resulted from an early ear infection. The onset of the hearing loss is associated, for the narrator, with a traumatic journey to California. The trip represented for his mother a trial separation from his father. This vignette introduces the important theme of how we deal with loss, especially the loss of loved ones. He goes on to explore the aging of his body, the often distanced and business-like quality of our medical establishment, the relationship between body and mind, the relationship between reader and writer, the presence within the adult of the child's "small, remote, but not entirely forgotten self."
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by
Therése Halscheid
Elaine Terranova’s fifth poetry collection Dames Rocket, opens with a frontispiece titled “A Street” (2). The author must cross this street for a bus on the other side. The moment feels grounded in reality, especially coming from a Philadelphia poet such as Terranova. But then it takes on a haunting quality, as she and those who cross with her are ragged, hesitant. None appear to speak. In fact they no longer seem alive. Even the bus driver knows nothing of counting change. It is a street that divides the past from the present. It will be a ride that takes the writer, and her readers, on a short course of her life.
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by
Nicole Kline
In Nathan Leslie’s The Tall Tale of Tommy Twice, our titular character, Tommy, goes through a most unusual childhood. Orphaned at a young age, Tommy is first taken in by his grandmother, and then is moved around from relative to relative (and even, at one point, to a woman who pretends to be his mother). His formative years are rife with bizarre circumstances, an erratic education, and vast hyperbole. But Leslie has a unique moral to his story: that the strange world of Tommy Twice exists somewhere within us all.
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From Per Contra Issue 10
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by
Paul D. Green
First named by Sir Thomas More in the sixteenth century, a utopia is the dream of an ideal world, or at least of a better world than we know. Its antithesis, a dystopia, or anti-utopia, is a depressing world in which negative social and political trends are exaggerated to the point of being far worse than anything we have yet encountered.
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by
M. G. Piety
Ah conversation. There’s nothing I love more, not food, not drink, not even sex. It’s a kind of love making, actually, when it’s done properly, when it’s genuine. It’s a constant call and response, a repeated demonstration of the value we place on others, on their thoughts, desires, opinions. Nothing is so satisfying, so edifying as a good conversation. Nothing can so effectively make one glad to be alive, to be part of the human community.
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