The last major Caravaggio exhibit in Rome was in 2001; I was fortunate enough to attend that one and right now there’s another major Caravaggio exhibit in Rome at the Scuderie del Quirinale; next week I’ll be attending that one as well.  I never tire of looking at the paintings of Michaelangelo Merisi and it’s impossible not to see them through the vision of Peter Robb’s M., which brings to life not only MM and his circle but the artistic and criminal scene that flourished around Piazza Navona in the 16th century.  Totally fun to walk those cobblestone streets late at night and imagine…if you haven’t read M., I highly recommend it, and if you haven’t experienced canvas after canvas by Caravaggio, well then, andiamo a Roma, la citta’ piu bella. Until June 13th, 2010, which means I’ll be able to go at least a couple of more times.  Like I said, I can never get enough of Caravaggio…

There’s a major exhibition of the works of Modernist artist and author Wyndham Lewis at the Fundación Juan March in Madrid from 5 February to 16 May 2010.  Since I’m in Spain, I think I’ll hop the train to Madrid and check it out. Haven’t been this interested in attending an exhibit since the Samuel Beckett retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2007. Most of Lewis’s novels are out of print in the USA, and are just starting to be re-released in the UK. Check out Tarr and The Revenge For Love for starters. Used copies available on Alibri. Also, Lewis and Ezra Pound’s great magazine BLAST! has recently been republished by Gingko Press. Highly recommended. Long live the Vortex!

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a special section this week on the demise of Liberal Arts education.  What’s interesting about the debate is that the major premise of the value of a LA education has been proven false both by shifting values in education and the marketplace.  As this series of articles shows, English and other humanities profs, fighting for their jobs in this climate of cutbacks and global recession, are still dragging out the same old clichéd warhorse to justify their collective tenured existence.  Like the record companies and the publishing industry, they can’t see that the world has shifted; its not that their value is misperceived, its simply that they no longer hold the value they claim to have, if they ever did.

Their major argument is: “we teach students nuanced thinking and complex problem solving through the interpretation of literary texts.”   Unlike many humanities profs, I actually took a decade off from academia and worked in the corporate world, and I can tell you not once did I ever hear anyone attribute their success in management to skills learned from interpreting literature.  Managers are paid to do one thing: make decisions and take responsibility for those decisions.  They’re not paid to make the right decisions, as the Peter Principle continues to show, they’re paid to make decisions.  If someone can find an interview with some superstar CEO or entrepreneur who attributes their wealth and success in business to literary interpretation, well, your research skills are better than mine.  Sorry, but the ability to do a complex, nuanced reading of Sarah Orne Jewett does little, if anything, to prepare you for the daily corporate grind. If these LA skills really were that magical in the workplace, most humanities profs would have left academia long ago, cashed in on their supposed mastery of these skills, and retired to a life of helping the poor and downtrodden, instead of exploiting an underclass of grad students and adjuncts to keep their privileged, tenured positions from the budget ax.

The mainstream media often praise the current occupant of the Oval Office for his “complex and nuanced” thinking, but as we’ve witnessed over the last year, this is just code for an inability to make tough, difficult decisions.

You can read the whole series of (frankly dispiriting) articles at www.chronicle.com (subscription may be required).

March is a travel month for me: Valencia, Spain, Italy, Berlin, Italy (I like Italy), and then the States toward the end of the month: presentations, readings, and even a gallery performance.  Beyond March, really looking forward to May and 4.5 months of freedom.  After my last trip to Morocco I never thought I’d have a reason to return, but now there’s M’s birthday bash in Marrakech, so it’s back to the Djemaa el Fna one more time and then…hopefully, the Euro will reach parity with the dollar by the start of summer.

An homage to James Joyce’s “A Little Cloud…”

Chandler had knocked around Europe for nearly eight years.  With a Ph.D. in English and a couple of visiting assistant professorships at backwater state universities under his belt, he’d been able to scrape by teaching English and doing various odd consulting jobs in advertising and corporate management.  He’d taught in companies across the continent, at a Swiss Hotel school, a university on the Gianicolo in Rome, even at a German medical school for a couple of years.  Munich, Paris, Marseilles, Venice, Rome, Montreaux, Madrid, a winter’s downtime skiing in the Dolomites, a summer sunning on the red-tiled coast of Croatia, his itinerary read like the stickers plastered haphazardly on a 1920s Bright Young Things travel trunk.  He’d found academia too divorced from experience, too snug and safe, too cowardly to confront real life, and so he walked away to wed himself to an uncertain future of border crossings and experiments in living.  I want to become a chanter of personality, he’d said.

After all those years of walking the tightrope, he’d returned to where he started from.

I never understood or agreed with why he left, and now I wanted to understand why he’d come back to our little stubble-plain, high desert town.   Although Chandler saw himself as an outsider, the ironic truth is being an outsider is just one more route to becoming an insider.  Assume the radical stance, criticize the American Dream well enough, and eventually you’ll be rewarded with the American Dream.  In my view, why bother with all that posturing and party line rebellion, when in the end the destination is always the same?

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