Monthly Archives May 2017

If only we would all just get off his back and let him govern, we are told. The poor man is besieged on every side, the jackals of the press circling and sniping, relentless in their bare-teethed aggression. Behind them, 68 million aggrieved and unyielding Clinton voters, unwilling to accept the verdict of the electoral college, criticizing his every breath and utterance.

Unfair and unprecedented, we are told, the president himself shaping the narrative of his terrible victimization.

This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2017

Poor fellow! Why won’t we just give him a chance?

Well!

I wish I could. But I’m a victim myself, suffering the ravages of an awful disease.

I’m Andrew, and I have Trump Derangement Syndrome.

***

It’s hardly just liberals who have despaired of Trump ever being other than an undisciplined, unprin...

How much time might you have spent in the past, oh, month, looking for items you misplaced?

The keys, the glasses, the purse, the shirt, the notes, the credit card you removed from the wallet to make a purchase, online or in the store, suddenly gone. (Lucky for you if the checker or bagger chased you out to the parking lot, smiling, bless their heart, your card held aloft in their hands in the kindest possible reproach.)

With your misplacements at home, you begin flipping over the dish towels, the junk mail, the pillows and post-its and papers and gadgets.

Minutes of wandering and purse-lipped memory-searching pass, and you begin muttering, the plaintive question emerging almost involuntarily, rhetorically, in increasing desperation, “Where could it be? Where the hell could it be?”

You resolve to stay calm.

***

Studies of such matters (who resolves to study such matters anyway? bless them, too!) re...

Sculpture, like all other art forms, has always ridden along on historical waves of style and sensibility. It both joins in with and helps to direct the prevailing currents unique to any given era.

Not much cottoning to the hottest new trends in painting, sculpture, literature, music or film? Just give it 20 minutes and, as in springtime, the clouds will probably shift again and the light may manifest in ways more to your liking.

But as we look through the long-running project of humanity trying, with a considerable assist from its artists, to define itself within and against the world, we can recognize certain enduring, classical currents that manage to keep percolating, however sparely, through every era. Probably foremost among those is depiction of the human body in a way that at least dignifies—if not exalts—the remarkable, uniquely self-conscious life form that it is.

This humanistic sensibility...