Dostoevsky, Mandelstam and Nabokov all said they couldn’t write without their wives nearby.
Jess Crispin on The Wives: The Women behind Russia’s Literary Giants(Source: jujutsu-with-zizek, via aboulie)
Your library is your portrait.
Holbrook Jackson (via bookshavepores)(via vernish)
FILE UNDER: imagery, narrative, magic
Rabbit - Run Wrake, dir. (2005)
Just found out that Run Wrake died on Sunday. He was only 47.
Watch this if you haven’t seen it, it’s guaranteed to shake you up.
1965-2012
(via billa)
So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that.
William Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (via mythologyofblue)(via super-valu)
Katie Wynkoop’s thesis work is a reflection and a celebration of the impact that literature, and fairy tales in particular, have made on our culture. It looks at the ways in which certain stories have become a part of the collective consciousness, to the point where they can be recognized at a glance.
Well-known themes from fairy tales are created as sculptures constructed of books and then brought to life using stop-motion animation, creating a short movie that visually presents the intangible images normally held within the words on a book’s page.
Music: ‘Veloma’ from Fabrizio Paterlini’s 2009 album ‘Viandanze’.
(via sina-santi2)
Some years ago I copied into my notebook an aphorism from a Russian writer called V V Rozanov:
‘All religions will pass, but this will remain:
simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance.’I would like to adapt Rozanov’s saying and suggest that religion is a consequence of sitting in a chair and looking in the distance.
Richard Holloway; “Doubts and loves” p.3 and on-line here (via stillcuriosity)
Le temps retrouvé: Proust’s manuscript pages (for more images)
(Source: proustitute, via tracemarks)
La peinture est pour moi le moyen d’oublier la vie.
Georges Rouault (via globalartnews)(via l-ll-lll)
The inspiration you seek is already within you. Be silent and listen.
Rumi (via cosmofilius)(Source: tobiji, via neutralnotes)
“A Childish and Surely Baseless Fear of Being Buried Alive” by Joyce Carol Oates, BOMB 31, 1990.
All painting, but also all literature, is merely a process of going round and round something inexpressible.
Anselm Kiefer (via mianoti)(via bookron)
On February 7th of 1909, a 30-year-old mother of two by the name of Emma Hauck was admitted to the psychiatric hospital of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, having recently been diagnosed with dementia praecox. The outlook improved briefly and a month later she was discharged, only to be readmitted within weeks as her condition deteriorated further. Sadly, the downturn continued and in August of that year, with her illness deemed “terminal” and rehabilitation no longer an option, Emma was transferred to Wiesloch asylum, the facility in which she would pass away eleven years later. It was around this time that a heartbreaking collection of letters, one of which is above, were discovered in the archives of the Heidelberg hospital; all written obsessively in Emma’s hand during her second stay at the clinic in 1909, at a time when reports indicate she was relentlessly speaking of her family. Each desperate letter is directed at her absent husband, Mark, and every page is thick with overlapping text. Some are so condensed as to be illegible; some read “Herzensschatzi komm” (“Sweetheart come”) over and over; others simply repeat the plea, “komm komm komm,” (“come come come”) thousands of times. None were sent. (via illsortitouttomorrow)
It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.
Kenzaburo Oe, Japanese novelist, at a symposium of Nobel Laureates in Atlanta, as quoted by Mary Ruefle in Madness, Rack, and Honey (via mythologyofblue)(via coldgreentea)
