Deepak loses his cool

Fascinating it is to see Deepak Chopra lose his cool in this debate with some of his harshest critics, aired recently on ABC.  Plenty at stake here...lots of ego on the line.    The coverage may well have been slanted, but with that ugly display of ego, his claim that he "demolished his opponents" rings grandiosely false. This dovetails strangely well with my own review, written some five years back, of one of his tomes, that I called "Sage of Insincerity?"  My response... well, it figures.

The Largest Last Supper

According to this study, food portion sizes grew by some 69% in paintings of the Last Supper over the centuries. It seems that super-sizing is not a recent phenomenon, but a trend over millenia.

Of course, as I just wrote the author of the study, the growth in portion sizes depicted in those paintings could be as reflective of changes in aesthetics of those painters over the centuries, as in portion size per se (although doubtless portion sizes did grow). Medieval painters like Duccio above produced stylized expressions of austere ascenticism, whereas Renaissance painters like Titian were worldly, out-and-out sensualists. Paralleling this evolution, the mastery of visual perspective enabled more accurate depictions of the sheer physicality of things.

Interesting that as portion sizes grew over the centuries, halo sizes shrank. In the Medieval paintings, the halos look like huge plates you could eat out of.

I'll be appearing on CKUT's Tuesday Morning After show tomorrow morning.  Jeff Mackie will be interviewing me about "Passenger Flight" and other matters poetic, starting at 8:30 am.

Hmmm... how many tune in to literary programs on university radio as the sun rises over breakfast?  How many tune in online?  Hello out there, whoever you are!

Thomas James, Letters to a Stranger: Risky Experiments, Rich Rewards

Have been ridiculously busy the last couple of weeks -- making and marking exams, doing an extensive translation, and helping my mother move into a new condo.  I also wrote this review, which appeared this weekend in The Rover.   It looks like, though, I've freed up some time at least for the time being (non-being?)... so expect a run of more frequent posts. 


Risky Experiments, Rich Rewards

Letters to a Stranger, by Thomas James, Graywolf Press

by Brian Campbell
21.03.2010

In January, 1974, Tomas Edward Bojeski, aka Thomas James, put an end to his life by shooting himself in the head with a handgun. He was only twenty-seven, and had just published his first book, Letters to a Stranger, which would receive one disdainful review describing him as a “pale Plath.” But Letters would acquire [...]
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