Note to self

Nabakov's memo to himself about a student.

So Cry All You Want

'The truth is you already know what it's like. You know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors.'

David Foster Wallace, Oblivion
Moon Model by Johann Schmidt, Chicago, 1898

It helps...

'It helps, if you are a brazen, fearless, mesmerising, confessional poet, to be called Frank.'
Marcel Schwob
Film of Frank O'Hara reading 'Having a Coke With You'.

Sometimes... writing's like this (1)

Andre Kertesz

Das Glasperlenspiel

'Beginners learned how to establish parallels, by means of the Game's symbols, between a piece of classical music and the formula for some law of nature. Experts and Masters of the Game freely wove the initial theme into unlimited combinations.'

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

A Girl I Knew

'The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in a pool of autumn twilight. She wasn't doing anything that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.'

J.D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew

The Portrait

 

 

 

'She could now distinguish the brush strokes that made up his moustache, the dabs of pigment that flushed his cheeks. She gingerly put a finger up to the holes in the canvas. How many bullet holes there had been!'

From The Wolf Princess

Portrait of Mikhail Yurysevich Lermontov

 

Tender and affectionate beast

My Tender and Affectionate Beast (also called A Hunting Drama) is a fim directed by Emil Lotyanu starring Galina Belyayeva and the wonderful Oleg Yankovsky. It was based on a Chekhov short story.

 

Everything is beautiful. 

 

Perfect.

 

 

Tragic.

Russian hair (1)

'Her hair, bright gold and pulled high off a smooth luminous forehead, was wound in a thick coil, heavy as a ship's rope.'
From The Wolf Princess

Image from 'Mirror' by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Papa don't preach

'I started out very quiet and beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendahl, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in the ring with Mr. Tolsoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.'

Ernest Hemingway

Photograph of Leo Tolstoy by Produkin-Gorsky

A call to arms

'There is the inner life, which is the world of inner reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence... There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it. That process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn...'

Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making (Faber).

The Polish Winged Hussars' battle tactic was the charge. Starting slowly, and in loose formation, the riders gathered pace, closing ranks, as they approached the enemy. And then they rode, at terrifying speed, directly at and through, the opposing army like a hammer smashing into soft wood.
Their 'wings' were made from feathers attached to a wooden frame.

Winter Palace

'It seemed ridiculous and yet marvellous at the same time, that anyone could have been brave enough and foolish enough to build such a palace here, in a world made out of winter.'
From The Wolf Princess

Palace from the film, My Tender and Affectionate Beast, directed by Emil Lotyanu, based on a short story by Anton Chekhov.

Produkin-Gorsky

A young Russian peasant girl photographed by Sergei Mikhaylovich Produkin-Gorsky in the early c20th. This is one of the images I had on my pinboard whilst writing The Wolf Princess.

James Salter