Today in Paris: sunny cool day and a Metro ride to the Musée d’art Moderne da la Ville de Paris, where we were stunned by the beauty of the courtyard, notwithstanding some construction underway in the building. We saw a number of works of Etienne-Martin including a fabulous wire drawing...
Today we walked across the Seine to the Musse d’Orsay and saw the magnificent collection of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, including a number of painting I had never seen. The Renoirs I can do without. But there were some Cezannes and Monets that blew me away. I spent some time watching...
We spent some hours at the Pompidou Center, and then took a long walk into the Left Bank and ended up in Luxembourg Gardens before walking back.
We walk around Manhattan every December 25th—this year in preparation for our dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Here are some photos from our walkaround. We were surprised at how much was going on, mostly for tourists, in Little Italy. It was hopping, especially at the Cannoli King.
Looking east a little after sunrise on Christmas morning, from our Greenwich Village apartment. The first photo is the same view as the second—but seen through the fisheye lens.
Some years back, Ken Krug painted a series of small diptych portrait/still lives: each with a book (favorites of Ken’s—usually his own beat-up paperback copies) and an object. I loved the intended and (mostly) accidental juxtapositions, which struck me as both literary and quotidian. I’ve had one of these (Spiegelman’s...
My tiny urban garden—here along an alley between 46th/47th, Osage, and Larchwood—is producing lots of beautiful herbs and veggies. It’s south-facing and so gets tons of sun (and the worst heat) but it drains well and we’ve had a good deal of rain. Here are some mid-August wonders.
Another early July weekend in Cornwall with Liz and Ken. And the luck of the weather. It broke, and we are taking in the slant of Sunday morning sun on the old deck. The heavy contrast of sun and shade made my reach for my Nikon.
I took a walk at dusk around the neighborhood and took in some verdant scenes. Here is a selection of photos:
During a meeting in which I and architect Jeff Goldstein (of the DIGSAU firm) presented on our plan to renovate and expand the Arts Cafe at KWH, Laurie Olin, the eminent architect, sketched the south-facing end of the plan for the space & sketched me too.
Al Filreis is Kelly Professor, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center
for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Co-Director of PennSound, and Publisher of Jacket2—all at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Secretaries of the Moon;
Wallace Stevens & the Actual World; Modernism from Left to Right, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60; 1960: When Art & Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II & Remade the Modern (2021); and The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems. His new book is The Classroom & the Crowd: Poetry & the Promise of Digital Community (2025). He has taught a massive open online course, "ModPo," to 315,000 participants in 192 countries since 2012.
Founder/Faculty Director, Kelly Writers House—intro video ][ events calendar
Convener/teacher, “ModPo.” an open online course on modern & contemporary U.S. poetry—overview of the course ][ intro video
Publisher of Jacket2 magazine—my Jacket2 commentary series ][ "First Readings"
Producer/host, PoemTalk podcast series—co-sponsored by Kelly Writers House & the Poetry Foundation
Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing—Creative Writing ][ RealArts internships ]
Co-founder & co-director of PennSound—50,000 files ][ 15 million downloads annually
Teacher & host, "Kelly Writers House Fellows"—since 1999 ][ Susan Sontag, John Ashbery, Jamaica Kincaid, Laurie Anderson, Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion, John Edgar Wideman & more
Teacher, "Representations of the Holocaust"—a course on survivor testimony ][ my holocaust site
Click on the image for information about the book.