Apparently nothing is more simple than to paint a rag-picker, a beggar or any other kind of workman; but there are no subjects which are so difficult to paint as these everyday figures. I do not think there is a single academy where one can learn to draw or paint a man digging or sowing seed, a woman hanging a pot over the fire or doing needlework. But in every city, however insignificant it may be, there is an academy with a whole selection of models for historical, Arabian, and in short, all kinds of figures, which do not exist in the real everyday world of Europe.
From a letter Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother.
Brando’s Smile, a biography by Susan L. Mizruchi. Publisher’s blurb:
Susan Mizruchi presents the Marlon Brando you’ve never met.
When people think about Marlon Brando they think of the movie star; the hunk; the scandals. Susan L. Mizruchi finds the Brando others have missed: the man who collected four thousand books; the man who rewrote scripts, trimming his lines to make them sharper; the man who consciously used his body and employed the objects around him to create believable characters; the man who used his fame to foster Indian and civil rights. From Brando’s letters, audiotapes, and annotated screenplays and books—many never before available—Mizruchi gives us a complex person whose intelligence belies the high-school dropout. She shows how Brando’s embrace of foreign cultures and outsiders led to brilliant performances in unusual roles—a gay man, an Asian, and a German soldier—to foster empathy on a global scale and to test himself. In portraying a fuller Brando, Mizruchi portrays an even more fascinating man.
“Smoking as a Fine Art”
by
A. A. Milne
My first introduction to Lady Nicotine was at the innocent age of eight, when, finding a small piece of somebody else’s tobacco lying unclaimed on the ground, I decided to experiment with it. Numerous desert island stories had told me that the pangs of hunger could be allayed by chewing tobacco; it was thus that the hero staved off death before discovering the bread-fruit tree. Every right-minded boy of eight hopes to be shipwrecked one day, and it was proper that I should find out for myself whether my authorities could be trusted in this matter. So I chewed tobacco. In the sense that I certainly did not desire food for some time afterwards, my experience justified the authorities, but I felt at the time that it was not so much for staving off death as for reconciling oneself to it that tobacco-chewing was to be recommended. I have never practised it since.
At eighteen I went to Cambridge, and bought two pipes in a case. In those days Greek was compulsory, but not more so than two pipes in a case. One of the pipes had an amber stem and the other a vulcanite stem, and both of them had silver belts. That also was compulsory. Having bought them, one was free to smoke cigarettes. However, at the end of my first year I got to work seriously on a shilling briar, and I have smoked that, or something like it, ever since. Continue reading ““Smoking as a Fine Art” — A. A. Milne”
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