“Untitled, by Saburo Tamura,” a Topaz Story by Meri Mitsuyoshi

In her recent contribution to the Topaz Stories project that publishes narratives by survivors of the WWII concentration camp for Americans of Japanese descent, Meri Mitsuyoshi writes about an artwork by her maternal grandfather, Saburo Tamura (1899–1998), who studied painting with Chiura Obata (1885–1975) while unjustly incarcerated in a Utah desert in the years 1942–1945. […]

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Methuselah!

Tom Killion’s Giant Sequoias postcard slid through our mail slot today. It announces two upcoming opportunities to appreciate in person one of the Bay Area’s truly great artists. Tom is a consummate craftsperson whose work celebrates the abundant, overflowing, vibrant life that is the more-than-human world that makes us possible. Do you see how the sequoias here are […]

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Photomontage: Mark Gonnerman, Lushan Temple Entrance, and the Xiang River in Changsha, PRC

A photomontage showing Mark Gonnerman in front of the entrance to Lushan Temple on Yuelu Mountain behind Hunan University and on Orange Island in the Xiang River that runs through Changsha. Lushan Temple (麓山寺) was founded as the Hui Guangming Temple (慧光明寺) in 268 CE. I went there as a visiting professor to lecture and teach courses on the Beats […]

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Botanist Tim Hogan Reviews Eileen Crist’s Abundant Earth and Writes on “The Green World”

Tim Hogan, Zen Mountain Man and Collections Manager of Botany at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Museum of Natural History, just shared his review of Eileen Crist’s Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization (University of Chicago Press, 2019). After quoting Paul Shephard saying that “the ‘civilized mind’ attempts to simplify and level the world, whereas the […]

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