Larry Rose photography tagged posts

How is a poem like a prayer like a peach? In this season when farmer’s markets (if we’re lucky enough to live by them) and our backyard trees (if we’re luckier still) lavish us with an almost guilt-inducing abundance of textured, fleshy, bursting-with-juicypleasure peaches, what can we glean about this world—and our inner worlds— from their continued bequeathal of life-giving goodness that so richly satisfies both body and soul?

I remember when futurists were predicting not only that we’d be zipping around in our own solo aircraft someday, but that we’d also get all the nutrients we need in a single pill. The first hasn’t yet come to pass and I don’t much care whether it ever does, but the second—wait wait, a world without peaches?

Not my world, not now, not ever.

And to come across the poem From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee, I think it is safe to surmise not his world, either.

This achingly ...

A Google world is a humbling world. One of the consolations, I suppose, is that the humbling can be nearly instantaneous, and after your conceit that you may be having something vaguely resembling an original thought is quickly dispatched (in 0.16 seconds!), you can get back to your dullard’s life of cliched thinking and self-delusion, no delay involved.

This line of thought (no doubt unoriginal, but I’m going to be defiant and not even Google it) occurred to me recently when staring again at the ever-intriguing “stairs photography” of Larry Rose (self-portrait to the left). “Stairs!” I found myself thinking. “I’ll never look at them the same way again. I wonder how much has been written about them.” Turns out, quite a lot.

One could start with The Staircase: History and Theories, by John Templer, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992. “Theories” of stairs—who knew?

What else mi...