Song of a Reformed Headhunter

We were in Italy for GH's 60th birthday for two weeks, from August 3-17. Venice was definitely the highlight of the trip: the magical canals and floating palazzi; the modern museum Punto Della Dogana restored from an old custom house by Tadao Ando; the moving works of Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis on show at the Prada Foundation; the dramatic works of Tintoretto decorating the Scuola Grande di San Rocco; the first-time visit to the Biennale. Unplanned were pleasant meetings with Filipino servers at one Italian restaurant and a Bangladeshi server at another,  beyond San Marco Square. Our hotel Pensione Accademia was perfect. Florence was too crowded with tourists. Returning 29 years after my first undergrad visit, I explored the Basilica di Santa Croce (E. M. Forster!), with its tombs and memorials for Michelangelo, Dante, Galileo, Machiavelli, and Rossini, and its perfect chapter house designed by Brunelleschi. The Bargello Museum was less impressive than I had thought. The...

Blake’s Influence  the cities where he didn’t make love, the kind of woman he despised, the way he was influenced by Blake.      Belkis Cuza Malé, “Poet’s Biography” He didn’t make love in the city where he studied Blake. He didn’t study Blake but saying that he did in the city where he didn’t make love impresses his biographers. He didn’t despise any women either—he was too mild for vitriol—but said he did, tutors with pinched faces, ministers’ wives in sundresses, girls strapped to babies. He despised all women who made their lives negligible. His biographers look up admiringly. One is skeptical, so he repeats he didn’t make love in the city, for that is true, and the skeptic sees the parallel to Jerusalem .

TLS October 24 from William J. R. Curtis's review of The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical writings on architecture , edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer: In another suggestive passage, from "In the Cause of Architecture IV: The meaning of materials--stone" (1928), Wright underlines his obsession with strata of rock as an inspiration for horizontal stratification in buildings, and reiterates the larger theme of "Nature" as a model for architecture. Read the grammar of the Earth in a particle of stone! . . . For in the stony bonework of the Earth, the principles that shaped stone as it lies, or as it rises and remains to be sculptured by winds and tide--there sleep forms and styles enough for all the ages, for all of Man.  We might bear this in mind when looking at Wright's later masterpiece, Fallingwater (1936), with its cantilevered concrete ledges, rusticated stone walls and natural boulders. Not that one should expect simple linkages in either direction...