the will to change and other mutual hallucinations

"What does not change / is the will to change," Charles Olson wrote in his famous poem.

Another famous quotation that is not strictly true; for the will to change changes as much as anything else.

Change, despite our wishes to the contrary, is inevitable, even if, to quote Paul Simon in performance, "after changes upon changes, we are more or less the same."

The acceptance of the proffered buyout by the Atlanta Journal Constitution's longtime art writer portends yet another change in that institution's already conceptually altered reportage on the city's art scene. Far be it from me to speculate on what might come next in an institution with which I do not communicate any longer; I refer you to my earlier essay on the general topic of the crisis in regional art reviewing.

I refer you, also, because they would be of interest to readers of Counterforces, to my incipient review essays in the even more idiosyncratic blog joculum.livejournal.com. Although the putative topic is architecture and new books regarding it, the context is so strongly the one usually established on the joculum blog that it seemed more appropriate to post to that blog rather to this one, which typically essays a slightly less circuitous and comprehensive view of the human condition—even though the length and grammatical complexity of the sentences here sometimes rival those of Hermann Broch in The Death of Virgil. (Insert semicolons if you dare.)

Readers of joculum are accustomed to beginning with Darwin and ending up with how to find the front door, or vice versa, with stops at magazine cartoons en route.