The Second Stone (blog)

William Carrick and Irving Penn - Kindred Souls

2015-05-01 10:48:00 UTC
No one who sees William Carrick’s photographs of “Russian Types”, who also knows Irving Penn’s “Small Trades”, can miss the uncanny resemblance. Appearances lead us to ask the obvious historical question: whether Penn knew the work of Carrick and was thus inspired in his own portraits. As an admirer of…

Moi aussi - a tribute to Charlie Hebdo

2015-01-11 20:54:06 UTC
The mass murder carried out by extremists against Charlie Hebdo seems exceeded in its vileness perhaps only by the stupidity and ignorance of the protagonists. What, exactly, did they think they were attacking? Charlie Hebdo spared no one its barbs – they gave it to the Israeli government as well…

Scout’s Honor - Baden-Powell, Regimentation, Art, and Sexuality

2014-10-10 13:01:20 UTC
This essay relates mainly to Baden-Powell and scouting, while bringing in regimentation, indoctrination, civic and personal virtue, as well as sexuality, ideas about our bodies, recent historical and cultural tendencies, a lot about the the German art of the Nazi period, and other themes and tangents as well. The first…

Stick It Back - An Anti-Advertising Campaign

2014-10-05 18:24:18 UTC
Advertising gives me a pain. I think we have to fight back however we can. If advertisers are going to stick it to us, we have to stick it back to them. I propose to put adhesive stickers on advertisements, or near the offending institutions, to counteract this perniciousness, to…

U.S. Public Health - An Expatriate’s Perspective

2014-07-15 19:23:00 UTC
As an American living in Europe, for me it was bitter amusement to observe, in the public debate over the Affordable Care Act, the contortions of the American Establishment to avoid, if possible, any form of public health care. Many would have preferred to go on forever as we have…

Arms Control and Terrorism

2014-07-15 14:34:12 UTC
An appeal to common sense and decency, to curb civil war and terrorism, by controlling all phases of design, manufacture, and trade in weapons and the materials needed to produce explosives, addressed to Barack Obama, who has, I should think, sympathy for such a cause. The political resistance to measures…

Columbia, Spring 1968 - 40 Years Later

2014-07-14 19:14:00 UTC
Columbia College Today, the alumni magazine of Columbia College, did a 40th-anniversary feature on the 1968 strike. The issues that followed printed many of the letters that came in response. I wasn’t there at the time, but I was a year or so later, when the reverberations were still strong…

Environmentalism: The Aesthetic Argument

2014-07-14 16:08:44 UTC
On Oil Dependency, Global Warming, and the Environment, with a plea that aesthetics be a bigger part of the dialogue, for Columbia Magazine Last year there were a few articles in Columbia Magazine, the alumni magazine of Columbia University, that provoked many strong responses. They were “States of Dependence”, by…

Global Warming: The Scientific Approach

2014-07-14 14:48:36 UTC
Global Warming, for the New York Review of Books This letter (unpublished) is in response to an article in the New York Review of Books by Freeman Dyson, who was reviewing a book by William Nordhaus, “A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies”, and one by…

Population Growth and Global Warming

2014-07-11 20:16:03 UTC
An exchange between Bill McKibben and Allen Schill, with a letter from Paul and Anne Ehrlich, from the New York Review of Books of late 2007 and early 2008 Population Growth and Global Warming I’ve read with pleasure and great interest several of Bill McKibben’s articles over the years in…

Thomas Pynchon’s Science

2014-07-10 13:09:00 UTC
Thomas Pynchon’s Science – a call for a scientific Baedeker, and diverse observations (plus a tangent about Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão and his airship La Passarola) This is a letter I sent to a reviewer who often writes about books with scientific or technological subjects. It was not for publication…

Marcel Proust’s Stimulants

2014-07-07 16:53:00 UTC
Marcel Proust and Mind-Altering Substances (and Proust’s deathbed photographs by Man Ray) Speculations about the role of drugs in Proust’s creative process, and observations about the last photographs of Marcel Proust. A response to Graham Robb’s review of Richard Davenport-Hines’s book Proust at The Majestic in the New York Review…

Andy Warhol: A Revisionist Critique

2014-07-07 09:55:56 UTC
Andy Warhol: A Revisionist Critique, by Allen Schill The following is my response to an article by Richard Dorment about the work of Andy Warhol, published in the New York Review of Books of Oct. 1, 2009. It consists of a story (true) of mine followed by a brief polemic.…

Lord Buckley - An Appreciation

2014-07-06 15:10:00 UTC
For those who aren’t acquainted with the work of Richard “Lord” Buckley (1906-1960), he was a unique figure in American culture of the 40’s and 50’s, one who left a profound legacy to the generations that followed. A nightclub performer with a background in vaudeville, he was associated with many…

The Realism of Jacob Collins

2014-07-02 20:43:00 UTC
The following is an unpublished letter to Columbia Magazine on the subject of an article (“Natural Light”, by Margaret Moorman, Spring 2007) they ran about Jacob Collins, an artist who paints in a distinctly traditional, academic-realist style, and a series of responses by readers. One reader found the cover, part…

Fred Schwartz - An Appreciation

2014-07-02 13:14:51 UTC
A couple of years ago I set myself to do something I’d thought about off and on for years, to write my story of an old friend from my college days. The only venues I had in mind for any eventual publishing were the alumni magazines where such a thing…

The Second Stone

2014-07-01 20:05:00 UTC
Just what the world needs - another blog. (Are we talking to each other yet?) This one is like a seed you plant without knowing exactly what’s going to grow from it. Maybe it’ll be less like a fruit tree than a Christmas tree - something for me to hang…

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