Today is Frederic Tuten’s 80th birthday and so I want to use this post to celebrate my friend and the brilliance of his fiction. Tuten’s work reflects the beauty of life and art, like sunlight on a rippling surface, with a humanism and pathos that we need in these dark times. Only Tuten could have […]
In an earlier Minus Plato post I created a brief photo-essay on Sara VanDerBeek’s Roman Woman series as it appeared in the pages of The Thing Quarterly project The Thing – The Book , which I discovered while browsing in the Tate Modern bookshop. In the conversation with Roxana Marcoci from the recent book Sara […]
Today is the last day of Blueprints for a Past Future – an exhibition that brings together the work and ideas of Faculty and Students from this semester’s classes at Ohio State that engage with the radical educational and artistic experiment of Black Mountain College (during the run of the Wexner Center for the Arts […]
What a difference a day makes! Since moving to the US and becoming a baseball fan, I haven’t stopped being obsessed with cricket and amid all the other differences between the two sports, the way that time works is especially significant. For baseball, of course a game can go into extra innings, as we saw […]
Just before leaving Columbus in summer 2014 to spend a sabbatical year in Madrid, along with my partner, Rebeka, and our son, Eneko, I discovered that the french filmmaker Chris Marker contributed photographs to a little book on Homer, published in 1958 by Paris-based Éditions du Seuil (where Marker worked between 1954-8), as part of […]
As winter creeps upon us here in Ohio, with its cold and dark, and leaves litter the ground, my newly invigorated daily bogging on Minus Plato may appear like a longing for spring. As such, it has brought to mind Philip Larkin’s poem The Trees: The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The […]
Waking up to the news of Fidel Castro’s death means that the promised post on Petra Cortright’s Hell_Tree will have to wait until tomorrow. Today I want to write about some other news from Cuba. Late last month it was announced that the most prestigious honour in Cuban art – the National Art Award (El […]
You may have noticed that Minus Plato has not been itself of late. This year of upheavals has manifested itself in long gaps between posts, leading to months without any updates. But all of that is about to change. Today I had a revelation. Between checking Facebook, posting on Instagram, organizing action and groping […]
In about an hour I am going to deliver a brief presentation as part of our monthly Classics Faculty and Graduate Student Coffee Hour, here at Ohio State. Since I have this hour at my disposal, I thought it would make the most sense to spend it writing a Minus Plato post. The topic for […]
I have just returned from Lawrence, Kansas, where I delivered the keynote address at the Oliver Phillips Latin Colloquium at the University of Kansas. (I am grateful to all the faculty, teachers and students who attended and for making it a memorable visit). My talk was called ‘The Latin Lessons of Contemporary Artists’ and I […]