It is accompanied by a thick, essay-filled catalog and a separate publication of "Emergences/ Resurgences" in its first English translation, by Richard Sieburth, professor of French and comparative literature at New York University.
(I have in hand, as tinder for such derision, "Robert Ryman: Critical Texts Since 1967," a thick volume of often gruellingly dense essays).
The thick stack of essay questions that arrived in the mail would have been enough to make me feel isolated.
The show originated at the San Jose Museum of Art and is traveling in what seems to be injudiciously truncated form: it looks better in the thick catalog, whose main essay, by the art historian and museum curator Peter Selz, is a very readable mix of postwar American art history, biography, formal analysis and hyperbole.
But Baldwin's final book was "The Price of the Ticket," a thick volume of his collected essays, summing up nearly forty years, in which his faith in human possibility burns like a candle in the historical dark.
The digital version of this set is cheaper, but then you won't get the stickers, the temporary tattoos, the DIY ornament, or the thick liner notes that include an essay by Mr. Stevens called "An Examination of the Christmas Tree Fetish".
The essay collections alone are physically thick and weighty; their literary and scholarly range is equal to libraries of doctoral dissertations.
Goldberg also uncovered illustrated short stories, school reading lists and essays on baseball in a thick folder labeled "very early DFW", and "warmed to his humanity, apparent in the smiley faces he scribbled in every margin he ever met".
"I'm not just cleaning the desk," he says, noting that, in addition to the essay collection, he is preparing to publish an impressively thick collection of his poetry this year.
Made on two conjoined canvases measuring 8 ½ by 12 feet over all, its surface is almost entirely given over to bright yellow, acrylic paint — "Naugahyde thick," as the critic Robert Storr puts it in the exhibition's catalog essay.
Peering through thick-rimmed glasses, Dr. Mitchel kneeled down to read a boy's essay as he continued to write.
