Greenpoint, October, 2015

Monday, November 14, 2016

Red Truck Coming

Can a painting go viral, especially one from 1935? One of the pleasures of Michiko Kakutani's (the NYT book reviewer's) Twitter feed is that she often posts reproductions of paintings or photographs with no accompanying message. Yesterday, she tweeted Grant Wood's "Death on the Ridge Road." Joyce Carol Oates promptly retweeted that the painting had been used on the cover of her book, Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers.
Is the painting telling a story? Or is it an allegory for what's about to happen to our domestic order as a big red T comes piling over the ridge? All I know is that America's most prolific writer and most prolific reader both have time to tweet a lot.

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