John Rosenthal

Wood Sculptures

There is a border between intention (the conscious effect of each curve or bend) and the more powerful energy that is just beyond direct reach of consciousness.

Insisting On Love

Oh you modest-living professional little bastards, giving in to all that mortgaged decency, all those inner rules of silence, as if the spirit of youth was an aberration to be got over and not the event itself, the event of your life, the adventure you ended up betraying for a house in Twit Acres and 2.3 kids you won’t ever understand.

Selected Poems

Photographs By John Rosenthal

The photographs in this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

Love’s Fool

One Hundred Years Of Solitude — An Appreciation

We forget, until a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude reminds us, that a metaphor can be a glimpse into the interconnectedness of things, and as such, a large new breath of possibility to our pallid imaginings of self.

Mailer And Me

This is what comes to mind when I think of Norman Mailer: that boredom is a logjam in a river which needs to flow; that a good heavyweight faces death every time he steps into the ring and that Hemingway may have faced it every day; television can give you cancer, along with rancor and fear and too much courtesy. . . .

Apocalypse Later

Turning The Vietnam War Into A Cartoon Lets Everyone Off The Hook

Years ago I read an essay by Hannah Arendt in which she said that the Nuremburg trials were necessary because they assigned responsibility for crimes to people who, in fact, had the responsibility not to commit them. Her concept was that if one declared everybody in Germany guilty, then no one was guilty — guilt became a condition of being, or something connected to the stars, a notion antipathetic to anyone interested in establishing a little decency on earth.

Photographs: Circles, Corners, Grand Central

The photographs in this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

The Arts: The Politics Of Filmmaking

In the course of reading a book we have time to change our mind about things, or anyway, the author has time to change our minds. But seeing a film is different. Not only the brevity of the event, but the limited intellectual possibilities of the medium itself make it almost impossible for a filmmaker to challenge (uproot, enlighten, deepen?) the filmgoer’s attitude about the way things are.