IMG_7361The novel Clio’s Mobile Home is a facet of my creative work. Several characters in my novel write poems; I am serious about writing poetry. I also work on short shorts, and short stories. They are all modes of thinking about identity, transcendence and beauty in contemporary life. Art keeps us aloft, but it is more than decoration. Its force can be astounding. The artist becomes an instrument, and art lives to tell the tale.

Posted on May 17, 2014 by jillbpearlman | 50 Comments

Joseph Cornell Scavenges Marseille

Posted on October 9, 2026 by jillbpearlman

Joseph Cornell would have adored Marseille.  New York was the site of his scavenging in the 1930s, a place of poignant forgotten everyday junk that he assembled into twilight-inflected collaged boxes.  But imagine how he could have dreamed in Marseille! 

Places like Marseille, repositories of the fevers and fever-dreams of immigrants, bohemians and other marginals, keep absorbing the layers of time.  It hasn’t quite become an image of itself, it is still restlessly heaving.  The boat keeps shifting, layering, throwing its detritus back and forth.  It backwashes into the beautiful trenches of the Old Old world.  

Politics across the world have gotten ugly; people treat it with dark humor, as a game – a dangerous game, but game nonetheless.  Windows shine with blue light, pink light, like a stage set. The sea is its own phosphourescent stage. The game, night and day, cosmic and human, plays out on the stage of the everyday.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Airbnb Shape-Shifting

Posted on October 5, 2026 by jillbpearlman

The strange emanations of the self.  When we travel and enter the rooms of someone else’s secret imagination.  

The room is painted seafoam blue, the walls have paintings of elephants and seals, and the furniture is ’60s vintage.  A painting glows from the kitchen – lustrous green sardines with life still clinging to them.  Rising at the end of the ancient street, a half-moon, unsure streetlights. 

A woman exactly like me – or rather, momentarily in rented rooms on the same floor in the open windows – stares insistently into my open windows.  Who, the stranger demands, who.…the mirror in my room will not commit, retaining images of its true owner.  I catch sight of my self in its new setting. Like a film strip where images gleam for an instant before motion replaces that with another. 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Blowing the Jazz Shofar

Posted on September 11, 2026 by jillbpearlman

The trumpet I heard wail last night seemed to me like the shofar manquée, the missing shofar. Because Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, we don’t blow shofar. Thankfully Brandon Woody, the Blue Note jazz musician from Baltimore, stepped into the Courtland Club with his squalling, rasping, yearning cries. His head tipped back, horn raised upward like a player questing on a desert hillside.

It now seems only too obvious that whenever a ba’al tekiah steps up to blow the shofar, a jazz band will pop up behind them – the drummer clicking a rhythm on the skins, the bass player coaxing out a deep walking rhythm, the keyboardist leaning into a warm melody. Everyone is a part of it – the man in the front seat with his smooth throaty yeah… (immortalized in a classic recording by Herbie Hancock– so be it if it was a different band and different man).

It’s the yearning, sighing, lisping, cracking of the horn that wrests us from banality. It’s wrapped up in the central Jewish inquiry of what it is to be human and the artistic quest of what it is to be human, which is why I see our spiritual and poetic quest constantly intertwining, dizzying and inspired. L’Shanah Tova to all!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Blowing the Jazz Shofar

Crickets’ Whisper

Posted on September 7, 2026 by jillbpearlman

So lush, green, lost –light falling, late summer.

Who hears the belt of sound on summer’s waist?
And who holds her grief in her own tight belt?

Who knows if it’s the gods’ unitary song
Or gods of gravity holding us to this spinning globe?

Do you blast an Italian aria not to join the cosmic 
Shriek?  Or thrash to feel less alone or more bruised? 

Crickets – traffic rushing homeward.  Can we agree
the song is fading, and sing a lullaby of dusk?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Crickets’ Whisper

The Ughs of August

Posted on August 30, 2026 by jillbpearlman

I am not a friend of August.  It’s not for the usual fussy reasons – that I can’t stand sand between my toes, or dread oceans of red tide, or feel sad at once-bright green lawns now tough and rusty.  No, though it feels strange, I admit my emotions are complicated by the name….August.  The word really dogs me.  I feel under its sticky spell of an unfortunate conglomeration of letters.  The name is slow, lugubrious, it moves like the outside air outside — unsure of itself, stuck, confounded, congested.  

More specifically it’s the vowels. The “u”– two of them, on either side of the “g” – oppress me.  They drag, are phlegmatic.  The first syllable – Aug – isn’t beautiful, but for it, you can work up sufficient energy.  By the time you get to the second “u,” it stays stuck in your throat. There simply is no gust.  A kind of disgust goes with it.  It is mugginess itself.  

I know there were great emperors – Augustus,“the revered” – with the same kind of name, same problem. Too heavy, oppressive, daunting. 

You always portent this, August.  But you are on your last shaky dog’s legs.  Adieu! On to September!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Ughs of August

The Vagaries of Rain

Posted on August 24, 2026 by jillbpearlman

Rain, that thing that ruins summer weekends at the beach – but only weekends. That falls on unprotected heads, that makes soggy the books we leave in the grass and turns grains of sand to clumpy mud. It conspires to help breed new mosquito populations; we wonder where the squirrels hide.

Then the rain passes. Quietly, it slinks away. How refreshed the exhausted, August green. Flush, drunk with new life.

It comes to mind, from the deep recesses, that our ancestors prayed for it. They prayed, they danced, implored the god who threatened to withhold, should they act brazenly. It seemed so archaic. It seemed absurd. It seemed worthy of a Jeopardy question.

The absurd is now.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Vagaries of Rain

Doomsday meets the Passion of our Endeavors

Posted on August 17, 2026 by jillbpearlman

Is it summer, or are we learning to be with the crooked floors in our creaky house (White House, America)?  Somehow, I heard very little political talk during my travels this season.  In the States, in Europe, people weren’t avoiding conversation, it just seemed too obvious, too much said, even irrelevant.  Instead of doomsday desperation, I heard people bursting with the passion of their endeavors — poets whom they were rediscovering, spiritual space they were inhabiting, art residencies they were establishing. 

Summer exuberance, maybe, or a collective decision to retire the word “resistance” for why we engage in the arts.  It is always uncomfortable, in political crisis, to be defending against a firing squad (presumed, internal, external) about why we do what we do.  Artistic conviction is becoming more ingrained and internal; it is enmeshed with complex realities, instead of part of a binary. The idea that “we” don’t need to give “them” more power is part of our daily bread.  An internal compass has pointed us and draws us in the right direction.

We may not save civilization, or avert other disasters. We could be laying traces for future generations to nurture humanity.  We might be like Hansel and Gretel dropping bread in the forest – like the Irish monks in the darker times, copying out texts for those who come after.  Or we are simply making art, day in, day out. 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Doomsday meets the Passion of our Endeavors

Song of Apparent Innocence

Posted on August 9, 2026 by jillbpearlman

This late in the game, in our jade consciousness,
there is still innocence. 

It peels the leather back, 
it floods with exuberance the most open spaces

watches the way an old port glimmers
as do beaches, boardwalks, plazas 

kids still thrill over the spinning of cotton candy,
(Marseille trades sailors’ pleasures for barbe à papa?)

amazed at the magic of things — so outrageously
simple –

and at night they walk back and forth along the water
talking, talking, among the oldest of pleasures

as if they have to, they have to walk, it calms the planet’s nerves 
frayed as the old ship rope that is on its last skin

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Song of Apparent Innocence

Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

Posted on July 26, 2026 by jillbpearlman

Coming from the US to France: out of the frying pan, into the fire.  Heat wave –
canicule, in French – refers to dog days, which even Homer wrote about in The Iliad: 

Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars
Orion’s Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.

The landscape is tinder-dry; pine needles are so emaciated, thin, dropping their long sharp nails to soften paths.  Rings of fires rage now along the Atlantic coast, the Mediterranean whistles through its teeth, biding its time. France is facing its fourth canicule. 

You could say that the image of France as a place of alluring summer is done.  (In domino effect, myths of the US is done, Israel is done.)  But France is stubborn.  A town like Aix-en-Provence will get sultry and suffocating. But under the classically elegant platane trees, nothing could look quite so French as those shaded, effortless drinkers. Aix’s golden-hued limestone buildings are centuries old; the cool blue shutters on their windows older than the ages of most friends added together, and taller than four standing on each other’s shoulders.  What are people doing? Eating, drinking and talking.  Eternal stuff. 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

La Tomate

Posted on July 13, 2026 by jillbpearlman

The French vendeur who hands me the tomato in its perfect flesh— he knows.  Some worlds haven’t been destroyed. It is a globe of seeds, juice and pulp that asserts itself, a repository of what we were given in the love garden of origin.  What a miracle that it has not been trampled on by industry and pragmatism!  To touch its smooth skin with tender fingertips is to touch origins. To eat it, a burst of elation, then a river of melancholy: eternal values in such a fleeting package!  Says France: humans can revere things and earth and nature, even the self.

While revering in reverie, I was close to elements.  Fires in southwestern France were raging, but that’s not what shook me.  It was the popup window when I clicked on a video of those fires.  It was the human-sized robot prancing idiotically.  A robot cut off from human roots but embodying the highest hubris of its maker.  He promises to help me with everything, bopping around the virtual space.  He would do my chores but amplify my melancholy. He has me raging at my helplessness, tossing me against the rocks in the little skiff I’m navigating. 

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on La Tomate