Essay / Art

Cramming for the French Test

Back in 1995, I found myself in a situation that is common for graduate students: needing to demonstrate basic reading knowledge of a modern language in case I should need it in my future research. The kind of knowledge required isn’t exactly what you’d call

Essay / Art

Medieval Gazing and Eating

A couple of weekends ago my wife and I took our kids up to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The opportunity to visit the Getty at will is certainly one of the perks of living in southern California. We were invited to go to

Essay / Art

Making Comics with Scott McCloud

Cartooning is an art form that communicates with great immediacy. We don’t rely on comics for the best literary writing of all, and we don’t look to cartoonists to be the greatest visual artists. Good as the writing and art may be in a comic,

Essay / Avant-Garde

Horsemobile

An enormous horse carries seven people in comfortable seats with cushy backs. He is led by a helpful cowboy (note the hat and spurs) whose expressive lasso guides the beast and covers the vehicle. The people inside have a range of emotional responses.

Essay / Art

Moby-Dick: Inscrutable Tides

(Spoiler alert: the whale is mean and the captain is crazy.) What a book is Melville’s Moby-Dick! Everyone knows that it’s a whopping leviathan of a novel. There are almost four hundred words just in the titles of the chapters. Melville, rarely subtle, spends more

Essay / Avant-Garde

Patriotic Picture

“It’s a grand old rag,” wrote Irving Berlin, but nobody wanted to sing it that way, so eventually he changed it to “grand old flag.” Freddy Age Seven provides a 9/11 patriotic montage with a giant Star Spangled Banner waving in the sky –okay, so

Essay / Avant-Garde

Covered Wagon

Moseyin’ along in the wild west, this stick-figure settler encourages his stick-figure horse to keep it movin’. The stick figure wheels keep turnin’ over, bumpin’ along on the long line of holes in the printer paper, I mean territory. The stick-figure sky is bright blue,

Essay / Art

On Great Artistic Ages (Like the Athens of Aeschylus)

How did Aeschylus do it? His plays are so powerful and engaging that he will never lose his place in the front ranks of dramatists. We only have seven of his plays extant —a tenth of what he produced— but even if we had only

Essay / Art

“Empowered Am I to Sing” This Translation Literal

In 1877, renowned poet Robert Browning published a translation of the play Agamemnon by Aeschylus. Or perhaps “translation” is not quite the right word for it –on the title page, Browning claimed credit not for translating, but transcribing. Since the transcription crossed the language barrier

Essay / Avant-Garde

Heavy Surf

As John Ruskin says in his 1857 work The Elements of Drawing, “Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colours variously shaded.” To the eye of a painter, everything

Essay / Avant-Garde

B.R.I.G.H.T.Y.

Freddy Age Seven turns his attention to the Brighty mythos, and decides that no straightforward illustration can capture it. Instead he approaches this epic with an entire suite of artistic approaches. His first attempt at communicating the power of Marguerite Henry’s Brighty of the Grand