Explication/Confusion of Pacific Rim in Ten Images
“Skull” — David Markson
(Via).
Hindering the Artist is a Crime, It is Murdering Life in the Bud — Egon Schiele
“I’ve always been a monster guy” — Guillermo del Toro on Godzilla
Mother Daughter Me (Book Acquired, 7.08.2013)
Mother Daughter Me is Katie Hafner’s memoir, new in hardback from Random House. Their blurb:
The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner’s remarkable memoir, an exploration of the year she and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions.
Dreaming of a “year in Provence” with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoë, Katie’s teenage daughter. Katie and Zoë had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a seventy-seven-year-old woman set in her ways.
Filled with fairy-tale hope that she and her mother would become friends, and that Helen would grow close to her exceptional granddaughter, Katie embarked on an experiment in intergenerational living that she would soon discover was filled with land mines: memories of her parents’ painful divorce, of her mother’s drinking, of dislocating moves back and forth across the country, and of Katie’s own widowhood and bumpy recovery. Helen, for her part, was also holding difficult issues at bay.
How these three women from such different generations learn to navigate their challenging, turbulent, and ultimately healing journey together makes for riveting reading. By turns heartbreaking and funny—and always insightful—Katie Hafner’s brave and loving book answers questions about the universal truths of family that are central to the lives of so many.
Bell Jar Malady — Ruby Osorio
“Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain” — Dana Gioia
“Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain” by Dana Gioia—
“Poetry must lead somewhere,” declared Breton.
He carried a rose inside his coat each day
to give a beautiful stranger—“Better to die of love
than love without regret.” And those who loved him
soon learned regret. “The simplest surreal act
is running through the street with a revolver
firing at random.” Old and famous, he seemed démodé.
There is always a skeleton on the buffet.Wounded Apollinaire wore a small steel plate
inserted in his skull. “I so loved art,” he smiled,
“I joined the artillery.” His friends were asked to wait
while his widow laid a crucifix across his chest.
Picasso hated death. The funeral left him so distressed
he painted a self-portrait. “It’s always other people,”
remarked Duchamp, “who do the dying.”
I came. I sat down. I went away.Dali dreamed of Hitler as a white-skinned girl—
impossibly pale, luminous and lifeless as the moon.
Wealthy Roussel taught his poodle to smoke a pipe.
“When I write, I am surrounded by radiance.
My glory is like a great bomb waiting to explode.”
When his valet refused to slash his wrists,
the bankrupt writer took an overdose of pills.
There is always a skeleton on the buffet.Breton considered suicide the truest art,
though life seemed hardly worth the trouble to discard.
The German colonels strolled the Île de la Cité—
some to the Louvre, some to the Place Pigalle.
“The loneliness of poets has been erased,” cried Éluard,
in praise of Stalin. “Burn all the books,” said dying Hugo Ball.
There is always a skeleton on the buffet.
I came. I sat down. I went away.
Young Girl Reading — Henri Martin
Portrait of H.P. Lovecraft — Mike Mignola
(Via).
Plagiarism
It was an icy day.
Pierre Pinoncelli damaged two of the eight copies of Fountain by Marcel Duchamp with a hammer.
The attacks were separated by 13 years: The latest on January 4, 2006 at Centre Pompidou in Paris.
And in Nîmes in 1993.
Where he also urinated into it before using the hammer.
Accordingly, in our Mongolian age all change has been only reformatory or ameliorative, not destructive or consuming and annihilating.
The substance, the object, remains.
All our assiduity was only the activity of ants and the hopping of fleas, jugglers’ tricks on the immovable tight-rope of the objective, corvée -service under the leadership of the unchangeable or “eternal.”
I have seen
The old gods go
And the new gods come.
The Stone Breakers (French: Les Casseurs de pierres) was an 1849–50 painting by the French painter Gustave Courbet.
It was a work of social realism, depicting two peasants, a young man and an old man, breaking rocks.
The painting was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1850. It was destroyed during World War II, along with 154 other pictures, when a transport vehicle moving the pictures to the castle of Königstein, near Dresden, was bombed by Allied forces in February 1945.
Day by day
And year by year
The idols fall
And the idols rise.
Damage then recovery, damage then recovery.
We buried the cat,
then took her box
and set fire to it
in the back yard.
Even to his death, Duchamp retained a sense of humor.
The evening of 1 October 1968 had been a pleasant one, dinning at home with his friends Man Ray and Robert Lebel. Shortly after his guests had left, it happened suddenly and peacefully. Just before retiring at 1:05 A.M. his heart simply stopped beating.
Those fleas that escaped
earth and fire
died by the cold.
Courbet died, age 58, in La Tour-de-Peilz,Switzerland, of a liver disease aggravated by heavy drinking.
But he hammered his poor heart to death, Lord, Lord,
He hammered his poor heart to death.
“D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent;” or “Besides, it’s always the others who die”.
Today
I worship the hammer.
Another Trailer for Wong Kar Wai’s New Film The Grandmasters
Not too different from the one that came out last fall…except some English intertitles. Excited for this one. Maybe this actioner moves Wong Kar Wai one step closer to directing the new Star Wars films?
Handwritten Fragment of James Joyce’s Ulysses
A fragment from the “Circe” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Via/more.
Illustration from A Week of Kindness — Max Ernst
Nine Notes from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Note-Books
- The elephant is not particularly sagacious in the wild state, but becomes so when tamed. The fox directly the contrary, and likewise the wolf.
- A modern Jewish adage,–“Let a man clothe himself beneath his ability, his children according to his ability, and his wife above his ability.”
- It is said of the eagle, that, in however long a flight, he is never seen to clap his wings to his sides. He seems to govern his movements by the inclination of his wings and tail to the wind, as a ship is propelled by the action of the wind on her sails.
- In old country-houses in England, instead of glass for windows, they used wicker, or fine strips of oak disposed checkerwise. Horn was also used. The windows of princes and great noblemen were of crystal; those of Studley Castle, Holinshed says, of beryl. There were seldom chimneys; and they cooked their meats by a fire made against an iron back in the great hall. Houses, often of gentry, were built of a heavy timber frame, filled up with lath and plaster. People slept on rough mats or straw pallets, with a round log for a pillow; seldom better beds than a mattress, with a sack of chaff for a pillow.
- In this dismal chamber FAME was won. (Salem, Union Street.)
- Those who are very difficult in choosing wives seem as if they would take none of Nature’s ready-made works, but want a woman manufactured particularly to their order.
- A council of the passengers in a street: called by somebody to decide upon some points important to him.
- Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important, in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not.
- Merry, “in merry England,” does not mean mirthful; but is corrupted from an old Teutonic word signifying famous or renowned.
Notations from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Note-Books
Madame Monet Reading — Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Saturn Devouring One of His Sons (After Goya) — Vik Muniz
Biblioklept 