Chemical Imbalance of the Natural World

Ronald Walker is an artist living in the Sacramento area of California. He works in a style I call "Suburban Primitive". This style combines his interest in the origins and functions of art along with life in the suburbs. the work is less about depicting this experience from a realistic visual sense but rather from a psychological, emotional and intellectual one. Walker has had more than 50 solo exhibits over the years and he holds both a MFA (University of Kansas) and a MA (University of Central Missouri) in drawing and painting.

Dans Le Labyrinth

by Peter J. Grieco

“These conventions may be seen as strategies 
for humanizing writing and making 
personality the focal point of the text.”

George Eliot intended her novels to be 
“faithful accounts of men and things 
as they mirrored themselves in the mind.”
Readers will accept this, and take for 
granted an adequate relationship 
between reality and the knowing 
mind, and trust the ability of a competent 
novelist to transcribe it. As a result
readers may treat “anything anomalous” 
as due to the author’s angle of vision, 
her “cast of mind,” her idiosyncrasies, 
suspicions, obsessions, memory 
lapses, feverish hallucinations.

So on the one hand, we have evidence 
(Eliot’s testimony and readers’ expectations) 
supporting the view that the writing 
of a novel will, at least idiosyncratically, 
“mirror” aspects of the world that the living 
novelist will have experienced. On 
the other hand, we have the possibility 
that this “mirroring” operation and these 
expectations are “conventions.” For obviously
there is no physical narrator present 
no audible “voice,” no there. There
are only conventions, and the best “intentions” 
of an author are no match for the random
misconceptions of a reader. 

Author's Bio:

Peter J. Grieco is a retired English professor and former school bus driver. His poems have been widely published in small magazines online and in print. His book length series of poems include At the Musarium, a collection of semi-procedural verse based on word frequency lists;Misinterpretations of Dreams, a series which interrogates Freud’s seminal study of dream life; Structuralist Poetics, which attempts to come to terms with post-structuralism; and A Week on the Concord and Merrimac, celebrating Thoreau. His collection of ekphrastic verse,The Blind Man’s Meal is available from Finishing Line Press.