In the dim gallery a single bulb walks the floor.Three sculptures lean together, elbows of stone touching,a private parliament on a shared plinth. Bronze clears its throat — a small metallic scrape —and speaks first, hands like oars pointing outward:“Borders are wounds,” it says. “We stitch them with paperand call the stitch a treaty. It … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Statue Gallery Negotiations” – Discussion #1, v.4
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Art Lab for Kids: 52 Creative Adventures in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media by Susan Schwake
Susan Schwake’s approach in this compact manual is quietly ambitious: deliver fine-art experiences in short, repeatable labs so that a parent, teacher, or small-group leader can run a semester’s worth of explorations with minimal prep and maximum creative payoff. The book is organized as six units (Drawing; Painting; Printmaking; Paper; Mixed Media; plus usage/how-to material) … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Art Lab for Kids: 52 Creative Adventures in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media by Susan Schwake
Revisionist Poetry – “Silent Council” – Discussion #1, v.3
Three statues lean into a private parliament of stone.A single bulb makes slow decisions across their knees;bronze knuckles etch coastlines into the gallery's base,marble eyes hold the names they dare not say aloud.They quarrel with the language of the body —a cracked thumb points east, a jaw tightens like a border,a fractured nose becomes the … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Silent Council” – Discussion #1, v.3
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – American Surreal by Todd Schorr
The lavish monograph published by Last Gasp and issued as the catalogue to a mid-career retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art is more than a handsome picture book: it stages a sustained argument about how “low” imagery—cartoons, B-movies, advertising—can be retooled into a repository for moral satire, visual allegory, and painterly virtuosity. The … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – American Surreal by Todd Schorr
Revisionist Poetry – “Plinth Politics” – Discussion #1, v.2
In the dim gallery a hush leans close.Three sculptures arc into a conspiratorial semicircle —a bronze hand scratches a map across the plinth,marble brows furrow where battles once were scored.They do not speak; they point with chipped fingers,name cities like lit matches and toss them down.One bears a child's palm impressed into its flank —a … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Plinth Politics” – Discussion #1, v.2
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Dreamland by Todd Schorr
In Dreamland by Todd Schorr, the picture-book monograph performs a small, wicked miracle: it translates the tactile spectacle of Schorr’s paintings into a narrative argument about American visual fantasy — one in which commercial icons, childhood cartoons, and Old-Master technique collide and breed. The book is both a career statement and a provocation: sumptuous, obscene, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Dreamland by Todd Schorr
Revisionist Poetry – “Coin of Light” – Inner Contemplation, v.3
Her thought is a coin of light flipping in the air;I see it tumble and settle on the curve of her face.She sits—knee scabbed, thumb inked with blue—and the ordinary becomes a small cathedral. In that quiet the child returns:a comet of laughter, a paper boat on the kitchen sink,eyes like glass where new mornings … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Coin of Light” – Inner Contemplation, v.3
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J. D. Salinger
J. D. Salinger’s paired novellas arrive—delicately, maddeningly—at a place where private grief and public performance meet. In this compact book the apparently casual voice of a younger sibling steadies two very different attempts to account for Seymour Glass: one an anecdotal, gallant rescue of reputation and social scene, the other a long, digressive attempt at … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J. D. Salinger
Revisionist Poetry – “Holding This Moment” – Inner Contemplation, v.2
Outside the hush behind my eyes,I catch her paused, a small held breath—a bright mote of thought rising, tentative. Then the child appears: candid, careless,chin freckled, hands still bearing clay,a photograph taken in the bright of ordinary. My chest floods with a love that wants to hold her—not to bind but to shelter: hands cupped … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Holding This Moment” – Inner Contemplation, v.2
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
J. D. Salinger’s novel is, in the simplest terms, a virtuoso performance of voice. What makes the book persistently alive — and perpetually debated — is not a complex plot so much as the sustained intimacy and friction of a single consciousness: a teenager whose vernacular, contradictions, and hurts carve out an unmistakable aesthetic. Reading … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
The New Renaissance Mindset 