De Wain Valentine’s Diamond Column 1978

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I went to San Diego Museum of Modern Art yesterday to see the Phenomenal show, part of the current stupendous Pacific Standard Time concurrent exhibitions around Southern California.    The show Phenomenal is about how California artists used California light, space, and new materials in their constructions.  Works by James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and others are there.   But the work that stopped me dead in my tracks was a 1978 sculpture by De Wain Valentine, Diamond Column.   Read More →

I Saw Samuel Beckett

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I was a literature major in college, also a French major, so I could read Samuel Beckett’s novels and plays in both French and English.  His plays used a literary device called “stichomythia”, which had characters speaking short lines back and forth, so it was easy to read in French.  Beckett, like Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov, wrote in another language than his mother tongue;  Beckett was Irish even though he’s more associated with French literature.  After all,  his 1953 play En Attendant Godot –Waiting for Godot–catapulted him to French fame. Read More →