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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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Christmas Quiz

The National Association of Scholars, the good guys in academia, have conjured up a quiz to conjoin final exam time and Christmastime. Try it. CHRISTMAS POP CULTURE 1. All of the following British actors have portrayed perennial sourpuss and miser Ebenezer Scrooge. Which one also had a distinguished academic career? A. Reginald Owen B. Patrick Stewart C. Albert Finney D. Alistair Sim 2. Which of the following jazz pianists composed the theme and incidental music for the 1965 TV classic, A Charlie Brown Christmas? Continue Reading

Sleeping at Sermons

When Soul-melting Sermons are Preached about Christ the Saviour, about the pardon of sin, about the glory of Heaven, there are some that would sleep under them . . . . Yea, some will sit and sleep under the best Preaching in the World . . . . Some woeful Creatures, have been so wicked as to profess they have gone to hear Sermons on purpose, so that they might sleep . . . (Increase Mather, Sleeping at Sermons)
A dozing congregant in a small New England meeting house would be hard to miss—a finger in the clerical eye. Continue Reading

Pilgrim Art

Mortals that would follow me, Love Virtue, she alone is free; She can teach ye how to clime Higher than the Spheary chime. John Milton, “Lydidas” What do you mean, “Pilgrim art”? There wasn’t any. Precisely. There was none as we moderns understand it: a product of leisure and affluence enjoyed largely by spectators. The concept had no hold on their attention. They did not conceive of culture as we do, as a kind of sauce spread like Bechamel over the nexus of values that animate a civilization. Continue Reading

A Gladsome Thanksgiving

Glory be to God for dappled things For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings; Landscape plotted and piecedfold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty Continue Reading

Art in the Mantle of Science

The trouble is that modern art in various ways abandoned imitation, representation, naturalism, and it now has to make out a case for its products’ still being truth. This is where science certain aspects of science are seized upon, assimilated, or sometimes simply plagiarized in decorative words, so as to bolster up art’s claim to cognitive value. One such use, and it is a curious reversal of Aristotle, is the boast of factuality: the work of the artist is said to be research; his creations are findings.
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