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By Vick Mickunas
| Tuesday, October 7, 2008, 07:13 PM
This press release just came in from the Antioch Review:
Antioch Review, Springfield Museum of Art Announce Original Cover Art Exhibit
Yellow Springs, Ohio—The Antioch Review and the Springfield Museum of Art have collaborated to create a dynamic exhibit of original cover art by David Battle, long-time art director for the Review. The exhibit runs from October 4 to November 15. It shows the evolution of the artist’s creative process from rough sketches to finished magazine covers.
According to Robert Fogarty, Antioch Review Editor, the cover art is as much a part of the creative heritage of the Antioch Review as the notable literary works they have published over their 67 year history.
“We wanted to call attention to the magnificent work David had done on behalf of the Antioch Review over the past several decades. This is our way of honoring him and his wonderful contribution,” says Fogarty.
On October 23 beginning at 6:00 p.m. Robert Fogarty and David Battle will team up to provide a Guided Gallery Talk. The event is open to the public and free of charge.
Visitors can see the free exhibit at the Springfield Museum of Art, 107 Cliff Park Road, Springfield, Ohio 45501. Museum hours are Tuesday-Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. The museum is open until 9 p.m. on Thursdays and closed on Mondays. Call 937-325-4673 for more information.
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looks good on paper
By Vick Mickunas
| Monday, October 6, 2008, 04:18 PM
Are you worried about the economy yet? It is getting rather difficult to ignore the 700 trillion ton elephant in the room.
The 700 billion dollar bailout that Congress passed last week was supposed to restore our confidence? Today on Wall Street the stock market was dropping faster than you can say BOTTOMLESS.
So, is this a RECESSION yet? Are we allowed to say that word yet? The economy has revealed itself to be a bottomless pit. For those Americans who are sinking fast beneath this fiscal quicksand there is no more there there. We cannot ask how deep the hole is because nobody seems to know that answer.
Continue reading "nobody dares to call it a RECESSION…."...
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booms and busts
By Vick Mickunas
| Sunday, October 5, 2008, 08:27 PM
“When Will There Be Good News?” by Kate Atkinson, (Little, Brown, 388 pages, $25).
Books can remind me of food. Some are fast food - quick, predictable, nothing special. Some books are like fine meals, readers become immersed in wonderful flavors and textures. We don’t want these books to end, but when they do we feel very good.
Kate Atkinson’s “When Will There Be Good News?” is one such delicious book. Atkinson is a British writer who lives in Scotland. This latest novel is set mostly in Edinburgh. Atkinson has cooked up a medley of crime fiction, mystery, and thriller here that left this reviewer’s literary palate intrigued.
This is her third book that features private detective Jackson Brodie. As the story begins a sickening crime is about to occur. A young mother and her children are taking a stroll in the countryside with their dog. They encounter a homicidal maniac. One child manages to escape the attack.
Then we move forward thirty years. The sole survivor of the attack has become a doctor. She is married and has a new baby. The infant is being cared for by a sixteen year-old au-pair named Reggie Chase. Word has just reached the family that the killer is about to be released from prison after serving his thirty year term.
Atkinson introduces a number of narrators and story lines right away. Jackson Brodie is hanging around a playground looking for a young boy who he believes could be his son. Reggie, the young au-pair, is dealing with the tragic death of her mother and the criminal behavior of her brother.
Then there’s Louise, an Edinburgh cop who has had a major crush on Brodie from the days when he was a police officer. Atkinson keeps casting out seemingly unrelated plotlines then brings many of them crashing together in a train wreck that leaves Brodie clinging to life. Reggie just happens to be there to give Brodie the CPR that saves his life.
I’m reluctant to give away much more of Atkinson’s tricky plotting. Suffice it to say that she comes up with some twists and turns that will have readers teetering on the edges of their chairs. Okay, I will reveal this: right after the killer is released from prison Doctor Hunter and her baby vanish into thin air.
Reggie thinks of Doctor Hunter as a surrogate mother and she adores the baby. She suspects foul play. The doctor’s husband is acting very suspicious and the doctor’s dog seems upset. Reggie does everything that she can to bring this matter to the attention of the police.
Atkinson ratchets up the tension with lines like; ” Reggie’s heart wasn’t even in her chest anymore. it was too big and too loud to fit anymore, it was filling the whole of the bedroom. Boom, boom, boom.”
“When Will There Be Good News ? ” surges to a finale so clever and shocking that you will surely be amazed. Atkinson spins a flawless web of intrigue crafted with spider like precision. And that is good news.
Vick Mickunas
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confessions of a galley slave
By Vick Mickunas
| Saturday, October 4, 2008, 02:34 PM
Like many Americans, I was appalled by the recent vice-presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. The bar was set so low for Palin that she actually was having difficulty appearing simple enough to squirm beneath it.
I know, some people believe that she performed very well. They must ignore the fact that she could not respond to issues that she hadn’t been prepped to answer. She kept ignoring direct questions and responding to things that she suggested, often things that had nothing do to with the question whatsoever. Don’t get me started.
This situation made me think however. I thought that we could all be much better off if we would each try to improve ourselves. We need to be smarter. We need to make better informed decisions. In one month we have a very important decision to make.
Continue reading "battling stupidity"...
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secret passions
By Vick Mickunas
| Friday, October 3, 2008, 03:37 PM
That bad smell is wafting in from Wrigley Field where the Cubbies have squandered yet another chance to break a century old jinx. The Cubbies rolled through the National League this year. Cub fans were sure that this would be the year that the curse would be lifted.
Not so fast. The Cubs imploded. Last night they blew their second chance to secure a victory in the Friendly Confines.
I would probably be a Cubs fan myself but I know better. My dad grew up in Chicago and he loved the Cubs even though he was a South Sider who one might expect to root for the White Sox. Dad was born in 1923, 15 years after the Cubs’ last World Series victory. He died in 1993. That was 70 years that he spent on this planet. 70 years that the Cubs choked.
Continue reading "the Cubbies are cursed"...
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booms and busts
By Vick Mickunas
| Thursday, October 2, 2008, 03:33 PM
I knew Mary Doyle. Her death was reported yesterday in the Dayton Daily News.
I didn’t know Mary very well but over the years we had many conversations and I did find out some things about her.
First of all, Mary was highly intelligent. I met Mary a dozen years ago when I was working for WYSO Public Radio in Yellow Springs. Mary loved WYSO and she supported it financially. You could always count on Mary Doyle.
WYSO used to have fund drives every spring and autumn and like clockwork Mary would arrive at the station to answer telephone calls from WYSO listeners who called in their pledges during my afternoon program.
And that’s not all. Mary would come in frequently and spend a number of days helping us out with the membership campaigns. And she gave WYSO a lot of money. Big donations. Several hundred dollars in the spring and in the fall.
Mary loved music and she had eclectic tastes. I was WYSO’s music director and Mary would always ask me to put together an esoteric collection of CD’s as her premiums for her financial support. We talked a lot about music.
Mary was also a big fan of my interviews and she would frequently make comments about things that she had heard on my program. Did I say that Mary Doyle was really smart? She was. Smart-engaged-involved.
Continue reading "remembering Mary Doyle"...
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we remember
By Vick Mickunas
| Wednesday, October 1, 2008, 02:26 PM
The poet and critic Hayden Carruth has died. Here’s an obit from the New York Times:
Hayden Carruth, Poet and Critic, Dies at 87
By WILLIAM GRIMES
“Hayden Carruth, whose spare, precise, impassioned verse took myriad forms and stamped him as one of the most wide-ranging and intellectually ambitious poets of his generation, died Monday at his home in Munnsville, N.Y. He was 87.
The cause was complications of a series of strokes, said Brooks Haxton, a poet and friend.
Although known primarily as a critic, reviewer and editor, Mr. Carruth (pronounced cuh-ROOTH) produced some 30 books of poetry that addressed, in charged, taut language, subjects like madness, loneliness, death and the fragility of the natural world.
“He had a greater variety of poems than almost anybody,” said the poet Galway Kinnell, a longtime friend. “He was interested — superinterested — in everything and he could write about anything.”
The tension between the chaos of the human heart and the sublime order of nature imbued his best work with a sense of momentous struggle, “a Lear-like words-against-the-storm quality,” as the critic Geoffrey Gardner put it. Mr. Carruth wrote: “My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity.”
Mr. Carruth was born in Waterbury, Conn., and grew up in Woodbury, where his father was a journalist and newspaper editor. He began reading and writing poetry as a child and early on developed a love for jazz, whose improvisations, played out against a structured meter, became central to his notion of poetry.
In high school, he reported on sports for a local weekly newspaper. At the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1943, he wrote for student publications and helped edit The Tar Heel, the campus daily. He also discovered the poetry of William Butler Yeats, which sent the encouraging message, he later wrote, that “it’s possible to be crazy and a poet.”
After serving in Italy for two years with the Army Air Forces in World War II, he enrolled in the University of Chicago under the G.I. Bill, earning a master’s degree in 1948. After graduation he edited Poetry magazine for a year and worked at the University of Chicago Press.
In 1953, after suffering a nervous breakdown and struggling with alcoholism, he underwent electroshock treatment at Bloomingdale, a private psychiatric hospital in White Plains, N.Y. On his release, tormented by a fear of people and open spaces, he spent years on the margins, living in the attic of his parent’s house and working out a personal philosophy that dovetailed with European existentialists like Albert Camus, a profound influence and the subject of his book “After ‘The Stranger’: Imaginary Dialogues With Camus” (1964).
In a tentative step toward the wider world, Mr. Carruth moved into a cottage on an estate in Norfolk, Conn., owned by James Laughlin, the founder and director of New Directions Press, where he did filing work.
After marrying Rose Marie Dorn, his third wife, he moved to a small house on a brook near Johnson, Vt. The marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his fourth wife, Joe-Anne McLaughlin Carruth; a son, David, of Munnsville; and three grandchildren.
While patching together a living doing freelance editing, reviewing, typing and farm chores, Mr. Carruth wrote poetry, which began appearing in publications like The New Yorker and Partisan Review. From 1971 until his death he was an advisory editor for The Hudson Review, and from 1977 to 1983 he was the poetry editor of Harper’s.
His first collection, “The Crow and the Heart,” published in 1959, captured the attention of James Dickey, who found many of the poems mannered and academic but approvingly noted “a kind of frenzied eloquence, a near-hysteria,” in poems like “The Asylum.”
Mr. Carruth solidified his reputation in books like “Journey to a Known Place” (1961), “The Norfolk Poems” (1962), “North Winter” (1964), “From Snow and Rock, From Chaos” (1973) and “Brothers, I Loved You All” (1978). His trials as a mental patient provided the raw material for “The Bloomingdale Papers” (1975). He also wrote a novel, “Appendix A” (1963).
The poetry poured forth. After leaving Vermont to take a teaching post at Syracuse University in 1979, he published “The Sleeping Beauty’( 1982), a long poem consisting of 124 sonnetlike stanzas of his own invention that he called paragraphs. In “Asphalt Georgics” (1985) he incorporated colloquial speech into poems that inveighed against what one reviewer called “the universal plastic nothingness of mallsville.” His collection “Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey” won the National Book Award for poetry in 1996.
Over time, the elegiac note became dominant in Mr. Carruth’s poetry. Sorrow for human loss, unthinking brutality and ecological catastrophe became his dominant themes.
“Regret, acknowledged or not, is the inevitable and in some sense necessary context — the bedrock — of all human thought and activity,” he wrote in 2003. “Intellectually speaking, it is the ground we stand on.”
Correction: An earlier version this article misstated a word in a quotation by Mr. Carruth. The quotation should have been, “My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity.”
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