Sorority rip The Poetry and Life
of Allen Ginsberg:
a narrative poem
by Edward Sanders
Overlook, 2000, 2009

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Ed Sanders was a follower of Allen Ginsberg, and later a close friend, and he’s in a nice position to sketch what amounts to a fast-reading highlight-reel of the poet’s “blizzard fame,” The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg. Sanders has done a number of histories and biographies in verse, and this one follows their form: his crooked lines wind democratically down the center of the page (as with speed readers, who track their eyes down the center of the page alone). It makes for a fleet, often eerily contemporary story. The problems of Allen’s world are also ours:

Over his shoulder the bard heard the iron clacks
of Reagan’s stern-wheel’d chariot.

Reagan showed the kind of robotic persistence
that democrats often lack:

He tried in ‘68, ping!
He tried in ‘72, ping!
He tried in ‘76, ping!
and then in 1980, he won the nomination!

Carter swung to the right on domestic issues
He refused to support Senator Edward Kennedy’s

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This is harder to do than it looks; Sanders is strict with himself. And after reading so many poets who demand the reader suborn and second-guess himself, I found it a pleasure to spend a few hours with an ex-beatnik, still living the dream, who wants to communicate surely and unpretentiously. Sanders makes his verse with a mind to light his subject and not his style (but style is there — that “swung” keeps the lines dancing).

Ginsberg’s grandfather fled the pogroms for Newark in the 1880s, and there gave birth to the well-regarded poet Louis. Louis later married Naomi Livergant, a revolutionary and a lunatic who looms as large in her son Allen’s life as any figure, real or poetical. As Naomi moved into and out of sanatoriums, her son “The slender & nervous sixteen-year-old / took the ferry from Hoboken to Manhattan,” where he met, “young Republican Jack Kerouac,” and down “by th’ / west side docks, / they caressed one another.” Burroughs shambles onto the scene, but those mythic post-Columbia, pre-San Francisco years pass in a few pages and Ginsberg writes Howl and finds fame (”He was interested in experimenting in W.C. Williams’ / triadic line / or indented tercets / combined with Jack Kerouac’s long-breathed lines”), and by now we are only up to page 31. Though Ginsberg would continue to write interesting stuff — and though he didn’t lack for talent — the literary man becomes fast entangled with the political activist/celebrity/publicist (There he is with the Dalai Lama! Now he’s purring on John Lennon’s lap! Now he’s founding a Buddhist University! Bob Dylan’s his hero, they’re touring together!)

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To Ginsburg’s credit, he used his platform almost entirely for good, and he always helped his friends — getting their books published, finding them grants, cooking them dinner — and if some of the causes he embraced late in life were not thought-out, at least he was honest about what mattered, even at the end.

He was lucky in Sanders’ friendship, and while this long poem is far from a definitive biography (or poetical analysis), it’s a thoughtful, fun, and admirably loving book.

– John Cotter

Our June photograph (the eerie womb of a hotel room on our main page) came to us from Chris Marstall, creator of Tourfilter.com and friend of Open Letters. We had some questions about his photographic work and he was kind enough to share his thoughts.

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OL: How often do you take pictures, Chris? Is it a part of your daily life, or something you save for unique occasions and excursions? and what kind of equipment are you swinging around?

Chris: These days, very occasionally. What is the point? I sometimes ask myself. So many pictures have already been taken of anything i might want to photograph. If I am dating someone, I will take a thousand pictures of her in every kind of place.

I don’t have a film camera now. I have a slim Sony Cybershot T7 digital camera but I lost the charger; so if i take photos these days, and it’s rare, i will buy a disposable camera. Sometimes the results are amazing. I bought one on a recent trip to South America and it malfunctioned, leaving all of the photos looking instantly ancient, and not in a good way.

OL:Where was the hotel room picture taken? What’s the story there?

Chris: Cairo. it was my first night of a 6 week trip to the Middle East in 2003. I was scared of what might happen to me, an American, in the Middle East, so I gave my worrying mind an unusual luxury and reserved a room at the Nile Hilton for the first three nights of my stay. It’s the grandest, coolest, old-schoolest hotel in Cairo, right on the river. I thought my room was beautiful so i took a picture of it.

OL: What drew you to the Middle East? What did you see?

Chris: I went to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel for 6 weeks in 2003. I wanted to see this place which I was suddenly being told was our enemy, a new USSR. I also had visions of classic North African romance from movies like Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia. As it turns out those classic places are rare in Cairo and have become tourist museums, for the most part. There are a lot of new rebar concrete towers, etc. However it was still a dense, multilayered place and there were lots of beautiful things to look at and peer into. Everything was new to me. I tried to capture some cultural things and photograph people I encountered. Like the young men who invited me into their home (which was scary at first) and smoked me out. Or the clueless Italian tourist in a short skirt who fell asleep at the port and flashed her panties at 200 Palestinians on a religious pilgrimage.

OL:For a time you were keeping a sort of photo journal online. Do you think it changed you as a photographer? What kind of feedback did you generate? How did you decide which pictures to post?

Chris: A few years ago I got this amazing camera, a Sony Cybershot U30. It was about the size of half a pack of cigarettes and charged through its USB port. I could carry it everywhere and it was a minimal hassle to get photos onto my PC. I told myself I would take a photo every day and have an evening ritual where I chose one and uploaded it to my photoblog. I kept it up for a year or two and at one point about 80 people were viewing each photo. It was an exciting time in my life because my best friend and his family were living with me and I had a new girlfriend and a new job, so there was lots to take pictures of. i would love to have that camera back and get back into the habit. I really appreciate your featuring my photo and it inspires me.

I used to make personal videos — much in the same way i described my photography process: taking a compact video camera with me everywhere and becoming known as someone who would and could whip out a video camera in any unexpected occasion. I edited together several 5-20 minute short diary films. i was living in San Francisco and everything around me was so exotic and beautiful. At that time i developed a brutal approach to choosing what clips to keep and what clips to toss. Basically, i kept only clips that worked on every level. technical, visual, emotional, etc. if i caught myself saying “oh but that was such an amazing night i have to put something from that in there” i would say no, only good stuff goes in. I use the same approach with photos; nothing matters except whether it’s a good photo.

I enjoy writing captions for photos and I think they can add a lot. i was inspired by Bill Owen’s Suburbia and Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, among others. I admire their neutral, minimal, yet piercingly personal approach to caption writing. They focus on the reportorial four W’s, yet in a way that makes you love, understand and admire the people in the photo. I think the best photography takes you inside.

OL:The hotel room shot is an exception, since the balance of your best shots frame your subject off-center. The way you do it often conveys motion — these things were seen in passing — but you’re also interested in depth: there is usually either a brightness or a darkness that the image plunges into (the doorway of the bookshop, the street beyond the arch, the darkness around the wall). What catches your eye when you’re out with your camera?

Chris: My ideas about composition are pretty basic and instinctive. Get close to the subject, but not so close that you don’t get a sense of their setting. Look for strong lighting. Hunt around in the frame for visual balance. Take pictures of beautiful, interesting things.

I try to take myself out of the moment and ask if someone would find an image interesting, not knowing any of the context, or knowing only minimal information, like what you would put into a caption.

OL: What kind of shots do you throw away?

Chris: I throw away almost everything I shoot. If a photo is bad, or if it makes the subject appear unattractive, there’s no reason to keep it, even if it’s a picture of someone or something you love.

Now is a good time to recommend Margo Jefferson’s nonpareil On Michael Jackson

. She does what the past two afternoons of blog posts have been trying, she puts her finger on it:

Think of Michael Jackson’s mind as a funhouse, and look at some of the exhibits on display: P. T. Barnum, maestro of wonders and humbuggery; Walt Disney, who invented the world’s mightiest fantasy technology complex; Peter Pan (”He escaped from being human when he was seven days old”); a haggard Edgar Allan Poe (he was the only character besides Peter Pan that Michael Jackson planned to play in a movie); the romping, ever-combustible Three Stooges; a friendly chimpanzee named Bubbles who has his own wardrobe of clothes; and a python lying coiled between white llamas.

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Jefferson recalls watching the pre-teen Jackson thrust and roll on the Motown stage at exactly the point in his life (as in any boy’s life) when he was half man and child, half androgyne. He was also a high-pitched, non-threatening sex symbol for women, many of them white women. Because he was a charming boy, he was an innocent (think “I’ll Be There“). Because he grew up on the Motown stage, surrounded by screaming girls in the front of the house and burlesque acts in the back, he was never innocent. Made for Each Other movie

So he was a beautiful freak, a dangerous innocent, an aggressively masculine drag act. He was wonderful. And, of course, we’re free to remember him that way, now.

For the past few years, fans of his music have felt a little ashamed. I’ve been one of them. I jog to “Billy Jean.” I always play “Bad” on the Jukebox. But it had that rare whiff of the verboten that didn’t make it feel extra fun or extra good. It felt a little awful. I felt a little awful for enjoying it.

Andrew Sullivan wrote that Michael Jackson “died years ago.” It’s a good line but it’s hardly half true. I was shocked to hear the news, like everybody was, and I came home and found some of the dance scenes from The Wiz

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on You Tube and thought about his trademark breathlessness—his moves were nervous. I thought, like we always do, about phenomenal success, and how “the rich don’t have friends, they only have butlers.” Elvis also had a posse that kept him hopped up, and let him keep acting like an asshole.

A Perfect Murder Afro Samurai: Resurrection video But they’re playing “Smooth Criminal” and “Blood on the Dance Floor” today—which I always want them to do and which they never do—and of course both the songs and the videos are really good. (You know what else is good? “We’ve Had Enough” from The Ultimate Collection

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. Really.) Oh and “P.Y.T.” too.  And “This Place Hotel.” And “Dirty Diana.” Am I missing any?

We can go back over it all now. We can remember him (ironically? with relief?) at his best.

— John Cotter

Survey Says!

Nathan Austin
Black Maze Books, 2009

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Survey Says is a short book of white margins and large type, considering solely of answers provided on The Family Feud (in 2005 and 2008):

I soak my dishes. Bambi. Hamburger. Hamburgers. Camel. Camera. James Bond.

The answers are complete — the author says he didn’t skip any, and we’ll just have to trust him — arranged in alphabetical order by the second letter of each phrase: Sing, Singer, Lingerie, Fingernails. What emerges is something like rhyme, and it carries the sound of the long poem well. Sometimes Austin lucks into the first letter, too “A bra. Abraham Lincoln.” I didn’t notice the pattern being disrupted, though I might have missed it. I didn’t even notice the pattern itself at first because the phrase combinations can be a lot of fun. Hillary and Bill Clinton still manage to wind up next to one another (can nothing sunder their love?), pigs is preceded by nightsticks.

They brush their teeth. They buy groceries. They cash their check. They change their jobs. They change their underwear. They cheat on their spouse. They chew gum. They comb it over. They develop more hair. They don’t like to look pretty. They don’t put on their seatbelt. They don’t take care of their bedroom. They dry flowers — like dried flowers. They dye it. They eat. They fall out of love. They gargle. They go out to dinner. They go to see a Woody Allen Movie. They have kids.

Reading this, I occasionally worry about taking part in a cruel mocking of Middle-America, and middle-of-the-afternoon America. And then, I think, well why shouldn’t I have a laugh at boobs on game shows? They’re not an endangered species or anything. “I’m going to have to go with Ashley Simpson.” Yeah.

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And if you’re a word artist looking for non-academic and non-specialized language to manipulate, look no further than game show answers. Quite quickly, I quit reading the poem as a social critique and settled in for the flipping-channels. A nice Robert Ashley-like rhythm develops. The voices almost never come off as individual; a single soul is trying to communicate. Stories emerge:

A nice, comfortable mattress. Knives. In line. Only tell one person your secret. Enquirer. Insomnia. Insult them. Insurance.

O mercy! America’s dark heart. A mirage?

— John Cotter Bend It Like Beckham download

Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits
Barney Hoskyns
Broadway Books, 2009

In a ‘98 New Yorker article, Richard Ford wrote:

Everyone knows the story of the good man who works like a demon, never stints, stays true to a calling, suffers setbacks, endures wounds that would demoralize others, eventually hits bottom. And yet he pulls his socks up, turns the page, recovers himself, finds new resolve, after which his luck changes, all his schemes work out, strangers love and praise him, everything he touches goes platinum, whereupon he turns into a fearsome asshole, ignores his old friends, begins hanging out with movie stars, and everybody who ever knew him feels sorry they did.

The above well describes the Tom Waits who emerges from Barney Hoskyns new biography, Lowside of the Road. Hoskyns is a big fan and goes on at great length about the inspiration and construction of the songs and albums. For those with an interest in how the aural sausage is made, every ingredient is examined with microscopic care. What’s troubling about the book (in a sense, no fault of Hoskyns’) is the man himself.

Biographies of the non-dead are a tricky business, and Waits has only made this one trickier by forbidding his family and close associates from engaging in any communication with Hoskyns. As a result, much of our day-to-day picture of Waits is formed by bitter ex-collegues (ex-producer Bones Howe, ex-saxophonist Ralph Carney) who can’t get their calls returned. Thus, the surly, secretive, ungrateful side of Waits is the most exposed.

This lack of access leaves a number of questions unanswered, foremost of which is what the hell happened to Tom Waits in 1981? Prior to Swordfishtrombones, the San Diego born singer produced jazzy lounge music; after the release (and a record label swap, and a marriage) Waits’ music turned exotic: Latin beats appeared, tracks became dissonant, Brechtian, calamitous. Obviously, his new wife and co-writer Kathleen Brennan made a huge difference to his art, but because she and her kin and kith are so tight-lipped, Hoskyns isn’t able to tell us much about her, the way she and her husband collaborate; just name, rank, and serial number (we don’t even know what she looks like … we have one blurry snap).

Some of the stories in Lowside of the Road are fun to read (mostly the carousing stuff in late ’70s LA with boozeaholic scenester Chuck E. Weiss), but much of the information here would have been better served in a coffee table book (with a page or two, say, for each album). Hoskyns is obviously an enthusiastic and frustrated fan, but to write a biography lite or unreliable on the real life of its subject is to write no biography at all.

– John Cotter

Greg’s talents have propelled him up the Open Letters’ masthead, enlisting as a writer in 2007, he was commissioned Politics Editor in 2008, and is now visiting the front lines of both web design and cover photography. He answers a few of our questions about this month’s cover image, the postcard rack, below:

OL: What a fun pic, Greg–Where did you snap it? and with what kind of camera?

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Greg: August film Thanks! I took it on the Seine in Paris, about two years ago, with a Canon digital SLR that is now, unfortunately, broken. There are dozens of mini-bazaars along the river’s walls, and they sell everything from used books to sculpture to postcards; they’re perfect fodder for photographers. Paris in general is a street photographer’s dream.

OL: I love the way the color photos own that lower corner. Did you snap a lot of different photos before you found that color scheme, or did you luck into a fortuitous arrangement?

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I took only two. The first was your typical touristy snapshot: bad angle, wrong lens and wrong shutter speed. Afterward, as I was perusing the postcards, I thought the display had more potential. So switched to a wide-angle lens, set the aperture wide open, and took another shot. The image you see is about a 75% crop, which I made for a few reasons: so the shot would be more symmetrical; so I’d get the color pattern you noticed; and to cut out all the pornographic postcards that made up half the right side of the picture! In fact, if you look at the postcard in the top right…

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OL: There’s both a found art and a collage aspect to the picture … you seem to have a love for images that comment on reality as they capture it, that foreground the artificial or intellectual aspect of photography, rather than “reality as mirror.” Do you think that emphasis is reflected in the sort of art you care for in your non-snapping life?

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Greg: I agree with you about my preferences, and you put it more succinctly than I ever could! People overestimate photography’s connection to reality. I think it’s a very personal art. It’s strange, but in my non-snapping life, my tastes run the opposite way. In painting, my favorites are what you might call generic: Rembrandt, Titian, Botticelli, the impressionists and their offshoots. I dislike atonal music, and I’ve had a tough time warming up to postmodern poetry. But I must say that your wonderful essay on appreciating modern art

has led me to reconsider, and I try to keep an open mind!

OL: When do you like to take pictures? What are your favorite things to take pictures of? Or do you refuse to define yourself in such terms?

Greg: In general, I like to set out on a trip or just a walk with the intention of taking pictures. It’s a “getting into the zone” sort of thing. Still, you never know when you’ll happen upon something, so it always helps to have a camera with you at all times. My kit is rather bulky and my budget doesn’t allow for a more compact carry-around, so I bring it along whenever I can. Street photography suits me best and landscapes are fun, too. I’d like to try my hand at more portraiture. I just need to get my camera fixed!

A Mercy
Toni Morrison
Knopf, 2008

One of the great lies about America is that it was ever homogeneous, a white city on a hill, or that it could be. In fact, the Pilgrims were late to the game; a whole miniseries worth of tribulation befell the French, Dutch, Africans, and Spanish before the first huge-buckled shoe plashed ashore. And of the separate waves of overland Asians arriving 13,000 years ahead of the new invaders, a large number of very different survivors continued to shape and be shaped by the mixed society being born.

That world was governed by different moral ideas of humanity — and ownership — than we enjoy today, and Toni Morrison paints that world vividly in her latest and best novel, A Mercy: a lyrical and impossibly condensed vision of the eerily familiar — and darkly strange — East Coast of the late 1600s.

Here we encounter Florens, a young girl conceived in Africa by a slave-trader father (himself African), sold once to a decadent Spanish planter, then traded to relieve a debt, as much currency as the coin her name recalls.

On the farm where Florens is enslaved we also meet Lina, a Native American woman, rescued from a plague-stricken village as a small girl and raised by stern Presbyterians, named Messilina for the luxurious Roman, another heathen, on the strong chance she’s been chosen for damnation. Lina would not likely know the European name for her tribe, if there ever was one, and cobbles together her own spiritual beliefs from half-remembered stories (new-age philosophy being not very new). Also at work on the farm are Sorrow, foundling daughter of a privateer, and Rebekka, sold by her English father to a Dutch planter as a mail-order bride. Like Scully and Willard, a pair of indentured servants from the neighboring farm, these people are all without full rights, fraternal but unequal, slaves of one sort or another. This doesn’t mean their lives are wholly joyless, but it does mean their wellbeing is limited, precarious, and thickly interwoven with that of their possessors.

Interestingly, the farm’s owner, Jacob Vaark, is not an evil man; ownership of souls is the way of this world. Morrison gives each of these characters one chapter to tell a part of their story (except for Florens, who, adventuring, gets a few), and as jagged bits of their lives come to light, the vast interconnectedness of this frontier society becomes more clear. Vaark, powerful on his small farm, is himself humbled by the wealthy planter with whom he does business. When that planter defaults on a loan, Vaark knows it would be worthless to take him to court — the wealthy man outranks the poor one and that is that.

Relative to his society, Vaark is a good man; but he wants to get rich. How else but though the surefire bet of his day, the rum trade? Not that he’s free of misgivings — he questions an expert, Downes, at a tavern: Doesn’t the trade eat up lives? Aren’t slaves lucky to survive for a year in Barbados?

“Not at all,” Downes smiled. “They ship in more. Like firewood, what burns to ash is refueled. And don’t forget, there are births. The place is a stew of mulattoes, creoles, zambos, mestizos, lobos, chinos, coyotes.” He touched his fingers with his thumb as he listed the types being produced in Barbados.

“Still the risk is high,” countered Jacob. “I’ve heard of whole estates cut down by disease. What will happen when labor dwindles and there is less and less to transport?”

“Why would it dwindle?” Downes spread his hands as if carrying the hull of a ship. “Africans are as interested in selling slaves to the Dutch as an English planter is in buying them. Rum rules, no matter who does the trading. Laws? What laws? Look,” he went on, “Massachusetts has already tried laws against rum selling and failed to stop one dram. The sale of molasses to northern colonies is brisker than ever. More steady profit in it than fur, tobacco, lumber, anything — except gold, I reckon. As long as the fuel is replenished, vats simmer and money heaps. Kill-devil, sugar — there will never by enough. A trade for lifetimes to come.”

Morrison is wonderful at evoking the danger and darkness of pre-industrial America, woods full of “boneless bears,” the constant risk that a knock on your door might be the devil’s knock: “The glittering eyes of an elk could easily be a demon, just as the howls of tortured souls might be the call of happy wolves.”

The Nobel committee has done something right. A Mercy packs more into 160 pages than most writers can pack in a shelf. If the Norton Anthology weren’t so averse to historical fiction, I’d expect to see it there whole; but a complementary supplement will do.

– John Cotter

… please join Open Letters on Monday, November 24th at 7pm at the Brookline Booksmith to celebrate the wonderful books we’ve had a chance to explore this year and the poets and essayists we’ve had the privilege of publishing. Join us to hear:

Nicolás Wey Gómez read from Tropics of Empire, his controversial re-examination of the myth of Christopher Columbus. Open Letters‘ Bartolomeo Piccolomini reviewed the MIT Press book earlier this year, calling it “a highly detailed, joyously intellectual examination of how world-views occur and change gradually over time, but it is also a thrilling account of a world in upheaval, and a man determined, for whatever reason, to exploit that upheaval.”

Boston native Matthew Klane will read from his first full-length collection B___Meditations, a long poem-in-specimens, which “boomerangs beyond Darwin, beats around Bush, then heads back to Whitman.” Open Letters published selections from Matt Klane’s Che earlier this year, and Derek Henderson reviewed his anthology A Sing Economy, which will be on sale along with the new book.

And finally, curator of the litblog Stevereads and Open Letters Nonfiction Editor, Steve Donoghue will read from his recent exhumation of the father of get-well advice, Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654), “Absent Friends: O True Apothecary!” Culpeper was right about tobacco and chestnuts, though, as Donoghue writes, “St. John’s Wort will do you none of the good it’s advertised in the case of snakebite, any more than the powdered head of a viper, applied to the bite site, will draw the venom. The juice of the Cuckow-Point may ease an earache or it may not, but gout will be unaffected by the application of those crushed berries …”

Please join us at 7pm on Monday, November 24th for a dose of alternative medicine to cure what Dr. Culpeper called the “pensive, grieving, vexing, pining, sighing, sobbing, fearful, careful spirits” winter calls in. And come meet Open Letters‘ editors and contributors at the …

brookline booksmith
279 Harvard Street
Brookline, MA 02446-2908
617-566-6660

at 7pm

on Monday, November 24th

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Painter Michela Emeson (cover artist for this month’s Open Letters), lives half in America and half in the “perfectly clear light” of Mexico. We asked four questions of the mysterious artist we’re pleased to share her generous replies:

OL: You’ve lived in both Mexico and Europe. Do you think this has influenced your work away from the American grain?

Michela: Even though I have strong European influences, I am American with a range of work that encompasses its history from Jazz to 9/11. When I was a child I remember seeing old black and white photos of people at the beach. They must have been European. The beaches were vast. So were the women. Some were nude. The men wore slits as suits. I could feel the heat, the movement of those bodies, a community of breasts, legs, bellies. This was not New Hampshire where I was raised. I distinctly remember my mother’s 1950’s bathing suit: Playtex-like, a girdle with a stiff pointy bra. I belonged on that vast beach with its looseness and camaraderie. The seeds are planted early. OL: Robert Hughes famously said that America had produced no great erotic art. Though you’re not exclusively an erotic painter, do you think your own work places you outside of the ‘American tradition’?

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Michela: I agree with Robert Hughes. Even though our society is sexualized, there is an absence of the erotic, passionate, and sensual in American painting. On occasion I have seen replicas of those beautiful Attic Greek vases in American homes sometimes sitting on a doily.

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The nude is provocative and makes us conscious of our vulnerabilities.

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Michela: The painters that influenced me, that indeed taught me to paint, were European. I started to find my voice by lying in the bath. The tiles were large squares of marble with delicate streaks of gray running through them. I saw a line in those streaks that I was able to internalize.

For years I looked at Schiele, Kokoschka, Kirshner, Otto Dix, all the German Expressionists.

Quite recently while living in Europe and traveling I saw this Schiele line in many artists’ work. I learned this line was taught in the art schools of the time. Schiele went further than all of them and to this day I am moved. He keeps me honest.

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I visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. I was there last when I was 19 years old and had begged my parents to let me stay in Europe. They didn’t.

Before I entered the galleries I sat in the musmuseumffee shop alone. I ordered coffee and a Viennese something wonderful pastry. It was quiet. I was served with a cloth napkin in a very old museum. It was gray black marble with white and gray streaks running through it. The Alte Museum. I was at last home. It took all my energy to leave and enter the galleries. I saw Schiele, but I had also come to see Ruben’s Nude in a Fur Coat, Flight of the Navigator ipod purportedly the first erotic painting. The date, 1630. In reproduction, the colors are strong. In person they are soft. The painting is astonishingly soft and so very sensual.

OL: In his a book about poetry, Nick Halpern described how a balance between “The Everyday and the Prophetic,” has defined most American poetry this century. I notice that tension in your own work: “Everyday,” because you refuse to artificially beautify many of your subjects (clawing hands, smudged faces), and “Prophetic,” because so you’re clearly not a “realist,” in that many of your subjects seem half-metaphorical, or spiritual, and your canvases seem always to be in motion. You seem to be both painting spiritual essences and to simultaneously be making a social comment. Do you find the intensity of each varies with your mood, or are you constantly in search of both? Or do you (as I’d suspect) recognize no demarcation?

Michela: No. There is no demarcation. I can not add anything more to what you have so generously and beautifully said.

It is no mean skill to write a gripping thriller. Comedy is easy, as Michael Frayn famously snarled, suspense is hard. Michael Crichton was the sparest of stylists: poor with character but terrific on plot. Plenty of readers shot thorough his books in one sitting and the best of those books—Sphere

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, Next, Eaters of the Dead, and of course Jurassic Park

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Crichton was the rarest of characters: an open-minded skeptic (notoriously, in the case of global warming, to our detriment). He learned and lived enough for several lives in the space of sixty-six years. Those who sample his impressively readable memoir, Travels The Magdalene Sisters full movie , will saw through cadavers at Harvard, leap across train cars with Sean Connery, scale Kilimanjaro, fumble their way through the swinging Hollywood 70s, and learn to see auras and feel chakras and self-exorcise and travel along the astral plane.

Michael Crichton published fifteen thrillers under his own name and at least ten under pseudonyms. The racy John Lange books were wound of plots that hit the ground running and sprinted without letting up toward enormously satisfying finishes. Some of these are coming back into print, and about time too. Of the seven films directed by Crichton, one, Westworld, is a minor classic. And The 13th Warrior

is as exciting a movie as Jurassic Park.

Michael Crichton’s thrillers have brought chills and pleasure to millions of readers. For that and for a life (mostly) well-lived, we will warmly remember him as we mourn his passing.