Rain performs its nightly dutysliding past the lamppostto christen my white canvas shoes—still white, technically. Genesis plays in my earphones,trying very hard to be important,vibrating with ancient promisesthat absolutely do not apply to me. People pass me by, professionally,on their efficient commutesto places they will later complain about. She says she still can’t love me—which … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Don’t Fall in Love, v.5
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Ideals of the East: The Spirit of Japanese Art by Kakuzō Okakura
Kakuzō Okakura’s Ideals of the East is less a museum catalogue than an historical perspective of the Japanese personality: a compact, ardent defence of Japanese (and broadly East Asian) aesthetic sensibility written for an age when the West still presumed to be the arbiter of modern taste. The book reads simultaneously as cultural criticism, philosophical … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Ideals of the East: The Spirit of Japanese Art by Kakuzō Okakura
Revisionist Poetry – Don’t Fall in Love, v.4
Rain on the lamppost.White canvas shoes, damp. Genesis in my ear—noise that keeps me still. People pass.She says she can’t love me.Maybe.Why don’t I know?
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls is a small book with a temperament too large for its pages: concise in language, volcanic in feeling. At its barest level it is the narrative of Conor O’Malley, a boy living in the daily suspense of his mother’s terminal illness, who is visited one night by a monstrous yew … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
Revisionist Poetry – Don’t Fall in Love, v.3
Rain slices past the lamppost at nightand chills the toes of my white canvas shoes. Genesis moans from the earphones—an origin-song that only shows me my silence. Faces drift past—their small lamps bobbing toward nothing— She says she cannot love me.Perhaps I am already alone. Why was I never warned?
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns by Gilles Néret
Gilles Néret’s compact monograph—published in Taschen’s widely circulated Basic Art series under the title Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns—functions less as a revisionist manifesto than as a lucid, image-forward argument for a familiar claim: that Manet inaugurates modern painting by refusing the consolations of academic narrative and classical imitation. The central … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns by Gilles Néret
Revisionist Poetry – Don’t Fall in Love, v.2
Rain runs past the lamppost at nightand lands, apologetic, on my white canvas shoes. Genesis hums in my earphones—a low machine-thrum that vibrates my skulland does nothing for my mood. People pass me by, one after another,on their busy errands to nowhere that matters. She says she still can’t love me.Maybe she’s lying.Maybe life will … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Don’t Fall in Love, v.2
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Earth Fire Soul – The Masterpieces of Korean Ceramics from the National Museum of Korea
Earth Fire Soul is less a conventional catalogue and more a sustained meditation on making. The book stages Korean ceramics as a living conversation among three inevitable forces — the clay (earth), the kiln (fire), and the human presence that lends works their inward breath (soul). Organized around the masterpieces held by the National Museum … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Earth Fire Soul – The Masterpieces of Korean Ceramics from the National Museum of Korea
Revisionist Poetry – The Cookie in the Icebox, v.3 (a.k.a. My Relationship with a Cookie, v.6)
I hold the chocolate-chip as if a coin from some dead altar, its crust a thin, papery epidermis scored with fossil chips. They glitter like teeth, embers trapped in crystallized sugar; beneath that shell a warm cavity yawns, brown sugar and molasses conspiring there in clandestine whisper, a soft counsel of heat. I might rend … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – The Cookie in the Icebox, v.3 (a.k.a. My Relationship with a Cookie, v.6)
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Night of the Tiki: The Art of Shag, Schmaltz, and Selected Primitive Oceanic Carvings by Douglas A. Nason, Doug Harvey, Jeff Fox
Night of the Tiki arrives as a small, smartly produced argument in the idiom of the coffee-table book: it stakes a curatorial claim with images, short essays, and selection rather than a long, linear history. What it proposes—clearly, and with a kind of tasteful provocation—is that postwar American “Tiki” is neither mere kitsch nor purely … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Night of the Tiki: The Art of Shag, Schmaltz, and Selected Primitive Oceanic Carvings by Douglas A. Nason, Doug Harvey, Jeff Fox
The New Renaissance Mindset 