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The Picasso of Golf Course Designers, and Other News
By
Dan Piepenbring
April 10, 2015
On the Shelf
Juan Gris,
Portrait of Pablo Picasso
, 1912.
On James Merrill, whose work “
exists in part to reverse our bias against trivia
”: “His work is replete with the transfigured commonplace, bits of the world reclaimed in his daily imaginative raids: an ‘Atari dragonfly’ on the Connecticut River, a joint smoked on a courthouse lawn, a trip to the gym, a Tyvek windbreaker … And Ouija boards: Merrill made the most ambitious American poem of the past fifty years, seventeen thousand lines long, in consultation with one.”
“I am writing to you because I noticed that you did exceptionally well last semester … and I would encourage you to consider English as a major (or a second major) … flexible enough to fit in easily with your other academic pursuits.”
Giving the hard sell to prospective students of literature
.
“
A busting of the bucolic, a puncturing of the pastoral
”: young writers are reckoning with the English landscape in unconventional ways, seeking its absences, its eeriness, “the terror in the
terroir.
”
We’ve been Photoshopping images for twenty-five years. How did we dupe and retouch before that? Double exposure, montage, stage-setting;
we’ve been manipulating photographs since nearly the moment they were invented
.
Picasso, in his posthumous life, is more than a mere painter—
he’s a barometer of unassailable excellence
in any and every field. Thus, I present to you “The Picasso of LEGO Bricks,” “The Picasso of Low-temperature Geochemistry,” and “The Picasso of Anal-Pleasuring Toys.”
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