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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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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 ?
Continue Reading

The Holy Spirit is Not a Fixer

Every so often someone writes to tender an oblique suggestion that I am not a true Catholic. A lapsed one maybe, a Jack Catholic, but hardly a staunch card-carrier like themselves. How else could I not bang saucepans for this pontificate? How else harbor unsmiling thoughts about Papa Francis? The correspondence goes something like this: • Are you Catholic? [Yes.] • Are you a practicing Catholic? [Yes.] • Do you believe the Holy Ghost guides the Church? [Yes.] • Well then, don’t you believe the Holy Ghost chose Francis? Continue Reading
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