Every human should be required to read Letters to a Young Poet

Turn therefore from the common themes to those which your own everyday life affords; depict your sorrows and desires, your passing thoughts and belief in some kind of beauty– depict all that with heartfelt, quiet, humble sincerity and use to express yourself the things that surround you, the images of your dreams and the objects of your memory. If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I'm still here

I know... it's been a while. I needed to drop off for a little while, 'specially during October. Life's just been busier than ever, but things are beginning to calm down now. And so.

I haven't yet scanned any photographs that I've made this semester, but I like what I've been doing and I think you will too. Later today I'm heading to northeastern CT for a wedding at a manor house, an old family friend. I packed three cameras.

In other internet news, here's what you should know:

- pick up this book if you haven't yet!
- lend an ear to this album if you haven't yet!
- watch this trailer if you haven't yet!
- these ceramics
- these photographs
- this [new and brilliant] literary mag
- oh, and this genius blog.

I'm still on a lady singers kick!

Aristotle

"This is why, when we enjoy something a great deal, we do not really do anything else, and when we are only mildly pleased by something, we do other things; people who eat sweets in the theatre, for example, do it most when the acting is bad."

He really knew his stuff.

So I'm finally reading Pride & Prejudice

after years of watching the movies and discussing it with family and friends. I enjoy how truly frank and ballsy Lizzy is in the book. My plan is to rewatch the BBC mini-series when I'm finished with the book, as I haven't seen it since I was quite young and watched it with my mom.

I'm reading the little red Collector's Library edition, and in it are these wonderful drawings by victorian illustrator Hugh Thompson. There's a shocking lack of good quality images online of his work, but here's what I could find.

'And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.' 

'And yours,' he replied with a smile, 

'is wilfully to misunderstand them.'

tit-for-tat. tête-à-tête. witty banter. j'adore l'époque victorienne.

So I'm actually reading Eat Pray Love...

And I realllllly like it! For a bestseller, Elizabeth Gilbert is a great wordsmith. I thoroughly enjoy the amount of thought and research that she puts into her writing and speaking. This one in particular is quite enlightening.

Wishful Thinking

I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We treat the night like failed daylight"

I can't remember where I found this article.
It's so beautiful and interesting that I just have to share it.

Why I Adore The Night by Janet Winterson

Paris is a moveable feast and all that jazz

He would go to Europe. That's what he would do. Spend some time in Fort Dodge then take off for a tour of Europe. He would learn French. Learn French, then take off for Paris, and when he got there he would drink red wine in Cacciato's honor. Visit all the museums and the monuments, learn the history, sit in the cafés along the river and smile at the pretty girls. Take a flat in Montmartre. Rise early and walk to the open market for breakfast. He would eat very slowly, crossing his legs and maybe reading a paper, letting things pass by, then maybe he'd walk about the city and learn the names of places, not as a tourist but as a man who comes to learn and understand. He would study the details. He would look for the things Cacciato would have looked for. It could be done. That was the crazy thing about it – for all the difficulties, for all the hard times and stupidity, for all that, it could truly be done.

– Tim O'Brien

Going After Cacciato

More words from a master

It is claimed that there is such a moment of stooping, 

of summoning our strength, holding our breath, 

a moment of outward silence above the greatest internal
tension that exists between two human beings. 

There is no way of saying what takes place in that moment. 

It is, so to speak, the shadow that passion casts ahead of itself. 

An organic shadow; a relaxation of all earlier tensions 

and at the same time a new and sudden state of bondage
which contains the whole of the future; 

an incubation concentrated on the point of a needle . . . 

And on the other hand it is a nothing, 

a dull, vague feeling, a weakness, an anxiety . . .

Robert Musil

The Confusions of Young Törless

At this point I meet Me face to face.

This is the most interesting research I've ever done.

At this point I meet Me face to face.
I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and
dearly and damnably important to Me.
Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair and with
great intentness.
I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the flaming
trivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus:
I am rare— I am in some ways exquisite.
I am pagan within and without.
I am vain and shallow and false.

I am a specialized being, deeply myself.
I am of woman-sex and most things that go with that, with some other

pointes.
I am dynamic but devastated, laid waste in spirit.
I'm like a leopard and I'm like a poet and I'm like a religieuse and
I'm like an outlaw.
I have a potent weird sense of humor— a saving and a demoralizing
grace.
I have brain, cerebration— not powerful but fine and of a remarkable
quality.
I am scornful-tempered and I am brave.
I am slender in body and someway fragile and firm-fleshed and sweet.
I am oddly a fool and a strange complex liar and a spiritual vagabond.
I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint, fanciful in my
truth.
I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it.
I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous.
I am young, but not very young.
I am wistful— I am infamous.
In brief, I am a human being.
I am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting dead-feeling
genius.
And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad.

Mary MacLane, in her journal. Butte, Montana. Early 20th century.

Marie Bashkirtseff

I am attempting to read her journals, which are compiled into one volume titled I Am the Most Interesting Book of All. She was born in Russia, lived in France, and died at age 25 from tuberculosis. She was an artist and avid academic.

Saturday, April 24, 1875

 I had a dream in which I saw an enormous bouquet of yellow heads of wheat, as big as my bedroom, hanging from the ceiling. It was hanging above a table all covered with flowers and magnificent fruits. This dream put me in a good mood all day. I was so happy that it was a pity to be that way for nothing. I put on the white silk skirt, and, for a blouse, the top of the white Jewish dress in light wool embroidered in white. I wore not even one plain gold bracelet and no gloves. There was nothing on my head, either, except two long curls tied together. Oh, yes— two diamond earrings.


my favorite.

Lately on my mind

 

 

• Charles Burchfield sunflower wallpaper
• Mrs. Warren's Profession on Broadway
• the new Iron & Wine (!!!!)
• Kate Winslet in Little Children 
• knitting with beautiful yarn
• Brian Ferry, photographer, and his amazing site the blue hour
• the fact that my life revolves around picking which French book/ book about France to read next
• "Racing Like a Pro", the fact that The National is a great band to listen to while in transit, and the apparent youtube trend to make videos on this theme.
• a dream I had a few nights ago. I was hiding from a sudden rain storm under a massive elephant ear/ banana leaf. I felt so safe and childish, like when you hide under the dinner table or in the rack of clothing while shopping with your mom. When I woke up, I tried to pull the sheets over my head to recreate the feeling of being under that leaf, but it didn't work. THEN I googled images of the plant, because this is what google is for, and found the most adorable picture of a dog possibly ever.
• estimating the amount of snearing glances I would get wearing this shirt in Paris.
• and updating my flickr. how I held out on having one for this long, I do not know.

A Balzacian run-on for the ages

If the artist does not throw himself into his work like Curtius into the gulf, like a soldier into the breach, unreflectingly; and if, in that crater, he does not dig like a miner buried under a fall of rock; if, in fact, he thinks about the difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one, like those mortals favored by the fairies, who, in order to win their princesses, fight a whole series of combats against successive enchantments, the work will never be completed; it will perish in the studio, where production becomes impossible, and the artist looks on at the suicide of his own talent.

Cousin Bette

I'm not looking for anything supernatural, 

it's the natural that I'm looking for — 

do you understand? 

Nothing outside of myself — 

I'm looking for something . . . within myself! 

Something natural! 

But something I still don't understand!

Robert Musil

The Confusions of Young Törless