You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old impo...rtant reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I turned into a parent, I experienced a real and total personality change that slowly shifted back to the "normal" me, yet ha...s not completely vanished. I believe the two levels are now superimposed, with an additional sprinkling of mortality intimations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While enclosed shopping malls suspended space, time, and weather, Disneyland went one step further and suspended reality. Any geog...raphic, cultural, or mythical location, whether supplied by fictional texts (Tom Sawyer's Island), historical locations (New Orleans Square), or futuristic projections (Space Mountain), could be reconfigured as a setting for entertainment. Shopping malls easily adapted this appropriation of "place" in the creation of a specialized theme environment. In Scottsdale, the Borgata, an open-air shopping mall set down in the flat Arizona desert, reinterprets the medieval Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano with piazza and scaled-down towers (made of real Italian bricks).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know, it must have been my imagination, but it makes me realize how desperately alone the Earth is. Hanging in space like a spec...k of food floating in the ocean. Sooner or later to be swallowed up by some creature floating by.... Time will tell, Dr. Mason. We can only wait and wonder. Wonder how, wonder when.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Impressionists dissolved forms. They painted blurry "impressions" of objects modified by changing light and atmospheric condit...ions--drifts of fog, shimmering forest shadows, the glow of gas lamps on rainy streets. Cubists cracked the mirror of art. In their paintings objects open into surrounding space and none has an uninterrupted outline. Parts are broken off, colors bleed into neighboring objects, and translucent facets of space with multiple light sources cut shadows across bounding surfaces. They removed sections of faces and reassembled what remained to create grotesque open forms in defiance of natural appearance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings ...... And while with silent lifting mind I've trod The high, untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand and touched the face of God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both art and physics are unique forms of language. Each has a specialized lexicon of symbols that is used in a distinctive syntax.... Their very different and specific contexts obscure their connection to everyday language as well as to each other. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy just how often the terms of one can be applied to the concepts of the other. "Volume," "space," "mass," "force," "light," "color," "tension," "relationship," and "density" are descriptive words that are heard repeatedly if you trail along with a museum docent. They also appear on the blackboards of freshman college physics lectures. The proponents of these two diverse endeavors wax poetic about elegance, symmetry, beauty, and aesthetics. While physicists demonstrate that A equals B or that X is the same as Y, artists often choose signs, symbols, and allegories to equate a painterly image with a feature of experience. Both of these techniques reveal previously hidden relationships.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »