Michael E. O'Reilly

About the source texts: In realist art we are provided with a nebulae of seemingly natural details and conventions. Because these details are unremarkable they are lost until we give them names.  In S/Z , Roland Barthes wants to analyze the artistic and cultural codifications shaping the hard-to-pin-down movement we call "realism."   In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues against the use and importance of the imitative arts, claiming they are destructive to the soul as well as the city.  In Ferdinan de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, we are provided with a way of looking at language, which also becomes a way of looking at cultural and societal structures.  Saussure challenges Plato by proposing language as the origin of concepts, or forms.  In doing so, Saussure highlights the major flaw in Plato’s interpretation of art.  I will argue that Plato was narrow-minded in his view of art as strictly mimetic.  When Barthes comes along with his own rev...

The concept of the sublime is intertwined with our opinions of God, our concept of eternity and the way in which we see ourselves in relation to nature.  For Kant, Humility, reverence, guilt, respect, awe and fear are all elements of the sublime alive within us.  Kant’s rhetoric has the feeling of conclusiveness, even if midway through we feel like we have been persuaded down a different path than we started out on.  He starts off saying the sublime cannot be found in nature, then proceeds to use nature as an example of how the sublime can be found within ourselves.    How the Sublime Differs from the Beautiful     In Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime, he begins by pointing out similarities and making distinctions between the sublime and the beautiful.  Neither require judgments of sense or logic, yet both belong to judgments of reflection.  While the beautiful deals with the form of an object, the sublime can be found in the formless. (98...

This piece first appeared in Skeptic magazine.  Full disclosure: Michael Shermer wrote the back page blurb for Greenspan’s book, but I didn’t know they knew each other, nor was I aware that Greenspan was the author of the Ponzi/Madoff cover story, also appearing in Skeptic .     The problem with expensive books is the instant heightening of one’s expectations to unrealistic proportions. I was lucky to find a copy on Amazon for a few bucks below the list price of $44.95 (not stamped anywhere on my copy), which is awful steep for only 185 pages of anything, even if the lady at Barnes and Noble told me it was a “textbook.”     To get the nasty part out of the way: I don’t understand why this book has such a boring title and ugly cover (evidence that it probably actually is marketed as a textbook), especially when it fits in so well among, and is ostensibly trying to compete with mainstream pop-psych books with punchy titles and cool covers, like Blink, Fr...

In his book, Night of a Thousand Blossoms , Frank X. Gaspar has done a great job of making poems out of complete sentences that vaguely resemble prose poems.  There is attention paid to line and language that makes them much more than little narratives clipped from the life of a stargazing, lotus-sitting California surfer.  These first-person musings achieve a stylistic beauty not through elevated, over-workshoped technique, but through more reliable phraseology.  The diction is poetic, the arrangement is musical, but above all, (and what really makes it poetry) Gaspar repeatedly asks the big questions of the universe that poets have historically asked: those of salvation, morality and the meaning of  human existence.  While always looking to the stars, he looks to Buddha, the Hindu gods, the Greek gods and various biblical figures for the answers.  Night of a Thousand Blossoms is indeed a work of the interrogative; a work that explores hunger and demands t...

This review of Morning of the Red Admirals was written and originally printed in a short-lived, gem-of-a-rag called the Review Revue, edited and published by my friend, Gerri LaFemina. I guess it was 2004.     When I saw Robert Dana read at the end of September he looked to be at least fifteen years younger than his actual seventy-five. Clearly, poetry has treated him well. The turnout for the reading atop the fourth floor of Salt Lake City’s futuristic library was shamefully low, but Dana delivered good stuff from his new book, The Morning of the Red Admirals, as well as a few unpublished pieces.     If Emily Dickinson’s business is circumference, then Dana’s business is light. In his latest book Dana doesn’t simply talk about light, he uses light to talk about weight, volume, color, viscosity, the voice of God and a handful of other things not often associated with illumination. He doesn’t, however, ignore the ear to impress the eye.  Red Admirals re...