It is easy to understand why an artist would have become an Abstract Expressionist, why she would look up, down, and all around; look at the fact that people willfully pursue the means to destroy all people; and attempt to capture and own the destruction of meaning via works that painfully (and at times gleefully) explode or ignore concrete representation of what we are and what we do. It got to where the most abject and eloquent of meaning-deniers and significance-exploders were revered and elevated using the most ridiculous . . .
New York City, 1888, a June evening. The two sisters had traveled to the Standard Theatre on West Thirty-Third Street to see a play, His Lordship, by Edwin Atwell, and this they did, leaving the theater at approximately nine o’clock. They were accompanied by the younger sister’s friend, a Miss Markham, and the friend’s betrothed, a Mr. Drummond, who furnished most of the extant account. Firstly to two constables, and then to a reporter from the Brooklyn Eagle, Mr. Drummond recounted that, due to the balminess of the night, it had been . . .
Arthur Miller
Moments before my mother died—her face suddenly angelic and bright—she spoke to me about my work, told me she was proud of it, and then her voice grew soft, just a brush of air over her lips, barely audible as I leaned close, tilting my head and looking out the window at the sky, which at that time of morning was a dull blue you see only in the Midwest, tapering off into a flat horizon, and she was whispering the title of my newest book, but it wasn’t the right title, it was the . . .
Long Island was a loss, though Amity arranged a safe retreat for her Sweetie and his boys, ordering a spirit (it was clever Sitri) to make a heavy fog upon the Hudson and hide them from the British. At White Plains, Amity lost again. “Now I’ve got your Mr. Washington wrapped up in a pudding bag,” Charity said, too good a Tory ever to call him General; and for a week, she danced not-quite-solitary rigadoons in their cave, partnered in a mostly imaginary way with her own Beloved George, to whom Amity always politely accorded his King of Great Britain . . .