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