Resonant Thoughts
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Resonant Thoughts: John Ashbery’s “A Wave” (1984)
“The truth is discovered, a patch of it, dried, glazed by the sun, It will just hang on, in its own infamy, humility. No one Will be better for it, but things can’t get any worse. Just keep playing, mastering as you do the stepInto disorder this one meant. Don’t you see It’s all we… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Daniel Poppick’s “The Copywriter” (2026)
“No art, no melody, no time that is not bound up in some dark labor” (24). “Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is” (28). “The time we have at our disposal every day is elastic, the passions we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it, and habit fills… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: C. Thi Nguyen, The Score (2026)
“The pursuit of fish creates an attentional focal point. It structures the way I look at the river—it gives me a goal, tells me what to look for, what to see” (29). “The real point is something larger, stranger, more mystical. You spend time on a river trying to catch fish, and you start noticing… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Martin Gayford’s “Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy” (2021)
“Each time I do a still life, I get very excited and realize that there are a thousand things here I can see! Which of them shall I choose? The more I look and think about it, the more I see. These simple little things are unbelievably rich. A lot of people have forgotten that.… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: “The World According to David Hockney” (2024)
“New ideas often seem to go against common sense” (57). “You can’t have art without play. Even a scientist has a sense of play. And that allows for surprises, the unexpected” (69). “Painters must, to a certain extent, analyze their work afterwards. I’m sure the Cubists didn’t plan it, they didn’t down and say, ‘Well,… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: James Wood’s “Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997–2019” (2020)
“…his essay ‘Music Discomposed’, the philosopher Stanley Cavell says that the critic’s first gesture is: ‘You have to hear it.’ Why, he asks, do you have to hear it? Because, he says, with a deliberate risk of tautology, ‘if I don’t hear it, I don’t know it’, and works of art are ‘objects of the… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Molly Bang’s “Picture This” (1991/2016)
“Pictures are two-dimensional, whereas we live in a three-dimensional space, with many more dimensions added by our passions and intelligence. When we translate or reform our multifaceted experience into this flat, rectangular format, we play with space” (100). “Space implies time” (108). “…cut paper makes us concentrate on structure, emotional clarity, gesture, and overall cohesion… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Stuart Jeffries’ “Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern (2021)
“The Postmodern Condition was the result of a commission [Jean-François] Lyotard had accepted to write a report on the condition of knowledge for the Conseil des Universités of the government of Quebec, and his immediate worry was that universities were becoming corrupted by the unfettering of capitalism and the consequent reduction in the status of… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Matthew H. Birkhold’s “Metronome” (2025)
“…psychologists like Carl Seashore and Edward Wheeler Scripture considered performers’ discrepancies from the metronomic beat an ‘artistic deviation’ and held the ‘successful player’ to be the musician with the fewest rhythmical variations from the precise metronomic tempo. They wrote books and authored studies advocating for this new type of musician” (45). “The internal pulse upon… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: W. David Marx’s “Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century” (2025)
“The term paradigm, despite rampant overuse in marketing copy and mocked as meaningless jargon by The Simpsons, describes a specific phenomenon in social science: the macro-values that set the logic of our choices and aesthetics. When a new paradigm emerges, the previous established styles lose all their value” (123). “The logic of ultrapoptimism ultimately blessed… Continue reading
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