The Cathedral at Monreale, built between 1170 and 1189, in a hilltown above Palermo, Sicily, is a masterpiece of Arab-Norman Byzantine mosaics created by craftspeople from Constantinople.
Tag: Dante Alighieri
Death By Misadventure: Malcolm Lowry’s Gin-Sopped Volcano
Malcolm Lowry’s 1947 masterpiece “Under the Volcano,” about the fervid last hours of an alcoholic ex-diplomat in Mexico, is set to the drumbeat of coming internal and external conflict. Autobiographical and reflective of the expatriated trust-funder in a futile search for an artistic home, the perpetually inebriated master got lost along the road toward his own abyss, and died under suspicious circumstances, out-of-print.
Henry Miller’s Free Association into the Surreal
In 1934, Henry Miller, then aged forty-two and living in Paris, published his first book. In 1961, finally distributed in his native land the book promptly became a best-seller and a cause célèbre. By now, the “controversies” dominate his legacy, including issues of censorship, obscenity, misogyny and anti-Semitism, clouding the import of Henry Miller’s words. “Tropic of Cancer” broke literary ground, mixing novelistic forms with autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, and surrealist free association.