Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez, 1656. Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.

Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez, 1656. Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.

Arts & Letters

Volume III, Number 2 | spring 2010

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Preamble

Lady in a Veil

By Lewis H. Lapham

Despite being told that art is somehow sacred, it’s better to take a naive delight in the thing itself.

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In the Gloom the Gold

By Jamie James

Consider the legacy of Ezra Pound—no poet has ever been so influential, so controversial, and so little read.

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Map

Telling Tales

The evolutions of four stories.

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c. 680 | North Yorkshire

Divine Inspiration

God gives man the art of song.More

1889 | London

Direct Impression

Henry James pens a letter on life, liberty, and the novel.More

c. 18 BC | Rome

How to Begin

Horace tells Homer to get to the point.More

Charts & Graphs

Sing to Me, O Muse

Inspirations for various works.

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Russian author Anton Chekhov.

Color mosaic of earl Church father St. John Chrysostom.

American author and journalist Jamie James.

Photograph of William Faulkner sitting in a chair.

German philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

—Aldous Huxley, 1926

Walter Benjamin & Andy Warhol

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