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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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Pogo, Redux

On the morning after the New York primary all that comes to mind is the distance between ourselves and Franklin’s promise of a Republic—if we could keep it. I woke up this morning to the stench of decline and fall. It is in the air, foul and nation-smothering. It is the stink of a banana republic, one that mimics that founding promise while it surrenders the ground of it to corrosive candidates for high office.   The phrase Walt Kelly put into the mouth of Pogo inverted the words of the great naval commander Oliver Hazard Perry: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” Continue Reading

Trump: Beau Ideal of Consumer Culture

Earlier in the primary circus, Roger Kimball observed that Donald Trump’s vulgarity was the only authentic thing about him. It was a good line. And the perfect prologue to last week’s gleeful report that the Donald’s stockpile of historic paintings is as genuine as the color of his hair: “Trump’s Vast Art Collection Isn’t What It Seems.” Richard Johnson, writing in Page Six, snickers:
The French Impressionist paintings that decorate his homes are likely—don’t call them fakes—reproductions.
So! His paintings are worth no more than their glittery gilt frames! Continue Reading

Friday Picture Show

Hi! I’m Maureen. And I’m a registered Democrat.
It is true. I really am. What else could I have been when I first registered to vote? At eighteen, I was still in the same working class Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhood I had been born into. None of us had ever seen a Republican. What did one look like? How did they dress? Did they have ducks on their ties? My neighbors played mah jongg, not golf. I played stoop ball and I-Declare-War-On. Continue Reading

Gutenberg Elegies: An Exhibition

I love books—the look, feel, smell, and weight of them. When I hold an old book,  I remember the story of an aged librarian who wandered his collections, stopping to stroke the books and muttering: “Don’t worry, my darlings. They’ll never turn you into microfiche.”   And I cherish old papers: letters, pages of diaries and ledgers, anything with the mark of a hand. Resonant with memory, these are the ephemeral stuffs of connection between generations. The beauty of typeface and patterned end-papers testifies to the elegiac aspects of typesetting and bookbinding in an electronic age. Continue Reading

Good Friday

 
O, my black soul, now thou art summoned By sickness, Death’s herald and champion ; Thou’rt like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done Treason, and durst not turn to whence he’s fled ; Or like a thief, which till death’s doom be read, Wisheth himself deliver’d from prison, But damn’d and haled to execution, Wisheth that still he might be imprisoned. Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack ; But who shall give thee that grace to begin ?
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