- Flann O’Brien
- Mark Twain
- Daniel Defoe
- Iceberg Slim
- Edith Van Dyne
- Acton Bell
- Victoria Lucas
- Æ
- H.D.
- S.E. Hinton
- George Eliot
- George Sand
- George Orwell
- Toni Morrison
- Anne Rice
- Ford Madox Ford
- Robert Galbraith
- Paul Celan
- Boz
- Saki
- Stendahl
- Novalis
- Voltaire
- Lewis Carroll
- Franklin W. Dixon
- Lemony Snickett
- O. Henry
- Richard Bachman
- John le Carré
- Italo Svevo
Author: Biblioklept
Spring in Zimme — Emil Nolde
Silver Surfer — Dan Adkins
“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”
“The Sea” — Roberto Bolaño
Americana — Charles Scheeler
To paint a rag-picker (Van Gogh)
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.
Interior, John’s Cafe, Sandy, Bedfordshire — Paul Graham
The Ruling Class (Full Film)
Water — Charles Sheeler
Brando’s Smile (Book Acquired, 6.02.2014)
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.
Snoopy — Moebius
Three Girls — Egon Schiele
“Smoking as a Fine Art” — A. A. Milne
“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”
Woman Reading — Dana Levin
As Goethe said, theory is gray, but the golden tree of life is green (Donald Barthelme)
Charles and Jacques were still talking to Hector Guimard, the former trombone player.
— Yours is not a modern problem, Jacques said. The problem today is not angst but lack of angst.
— Wait a minute, Jacques. Although I myself believe that there is nothing wrong with being a trombone player, I can understand Hector’s feeling. I know a painter who feels the same way about being a painter. Every morning he gets up, brushes his teeth, and stands before the empty canvas. A terrible feeling of being de trop comes over him. So he goes to the corner and buys the Times, at the corner newsstand. He comes back home and reads the Times. During the period in which he’s coupled with the Times he is all right. But soon the Times is exhausted. The empty canvas remains. So (usually) he makes a mark on it, some kind of mark that is not what he means. That is, any old mark, just to have something on the canvas. Then he is profoundly depressed because what is there is not what he meant. And it’s time for lunch. He goes out and buys a pastrami sandwich at the deli. He comes back and eats the sandwich meanwhile regarding the canvas with the wrong mark on it out of the corner of his eye. During the afternoon, he paints out the mark of the morning. This affords him a measure of satisfaction. The balance of the the afternoon is spent in deciding whether or not to venture another mark. The new mark, if one is ventured, will also, inevitably, be misconceived. He ventures it. It is misconceived. It is, in fact, the worst kind of vulgarity. He paints out the second mark. Anxiety accumulates. However, the canvas is now, in and of itself, because of the wrong moves and painting out, becoming rather interesting looking. He goes to the A&P and buys a TV Mexican dinner and many bottles of Carta Blanca. He comes back to his loft and eats the Mexican dinner and drinks a couple of Carta Blancas, sitting in front of his canvas. The canvas is, for one thing, no longer empty. Friends drop in and congratulate him on having a not-empty canvas. He begins feeling better. A something has been wrested from the nothing. The quality of the something is still at issue–he is by no means home free. And of course all of painting– the whole art– has moved on somewhere else, it’s not where his head is, and he knows that, but nevertheless he–
— How does this apply to trombone playing? Hector asked.
— I had the connection in my mind when I began, Charles said.
— As Goethe said, theory is gray, but the golden tree of life is green.
From Donald Barthelme’s short story “City Life.”
Figures (Scene after Goya) — Salvador Dali
Biblioklept 