Solitaries. Madness. And now the fairies depart. I’ve always been fascinated by art that emerges from insanity, and what better example of same than Richard Dadd’s famous painting. Whether he was in communication with Osiris, as he claimed, or suffered from schizophrenia, is perhaps a question of culture and consensus reality.
Elizabeth Gumport knows her stuff. That’s obvious from her piece in n + 1, “Against Reviews.” But that’s not why I printed a copy (yes, I am a Luddite) and carried it around to think about. It’s because Gumport asks a brilliant and necessary question. Why must we read strangers? I seriously love this question […]
So I’m reading The Dream of the Rood. I don’t do it a lot. It’s the late seventh century. It’s possibly late enough to be the early eighth, but at this remove who knows? It’s also possibly somewhere in the Kingdom of Northumbria, near Dumfries. There’s a stone cross up there on which somebody carved […]
