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Critic and New Yorker staff writer, Joan Acocella has a newly published collection of essays: Twenty-Eight Artists And Two Saints.
Kathryn Harrison, elegantly reviewing the book for the New York Times, writes:
“Acocella is interested in artistic careers that include break and recovery, and how the work changes in the wake of trauma, including the chronic, compounding trauma of rejection.”
What got my attention - and verifies my own experience of a life devoted to painting - was Acocella’s observation, “What allows genius to flower is not neurosis but its opposite ... ordinary Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.”
Lest you think I’m putting myself in presumptuous company with the word genius, consider this: “genius” is an anagram for “genus I” - the unique species of one’s self.
Posted by mark at February 19, 2007 11:12 PM