The subtlest smirk closes in on an untold joke; the heavy eyelids weighed down by ponderous thoughts; the broad nose a bridge to the mind; the fragile inverse window of tiny spectacles. William Butler Yeats and David Foster Wallace don’t have much in common, except to say that the latter did perhaps the far opposite of rhyming, his work mired in syntactical and phonetic difficulty. Notice what looks to be a faint scar on WBY’s cheek, and its uncanny reflection in DFW’s deep crease at the same place. But only one is wearing a bandana, so we know who the gangsta is. That it is white, a soft surrender.

Behind the violence of Grand Theft Auto [left], light which has been most challenging to convey since the inception of painting is unconsciously rendered, almost inadvertent, unknowing of its beauty. The television and monitor offer us emanant light, not mere reflected; its brightness comes from within. Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot [right] lived with his parents until he was fifty; he painted twice a day — in the hours preceding dusk and following dawn, when the light was most tentative and transparent. In the 150 years between our cited landscapes, a lot has happened. What took months, even years to paint, is now addressed as a backdrop; its light perfect and eerily humanist. In both, look at the faint haze of sunrise in the distance, the tickle of leaves. Computer nerds now make bank writing code for games, seducing the newest generation of nerds.

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