Good Old Charlie

Simic Says:

Don’t forget sausages sautéed with potatoes and onions! It’s also highly advisable to have a philosopher or two on hand. A few pages of Plato while working on a baked ham. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus over a bowl of spaghetti with littleneck clams. We think best when we bring opposites together, when we realize that all these realities, one inside the other, are somehow connected. That’s how the wonder and amazement that are so necessary to both poetry and philosophy come about. A “truth” detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course.

--Paris Review interview, spring 2005

two new old ones

Here are two painters I've recently discovered. The first is Joseph Solman, who only recently died, and was part of the school that came up around Jackson Pollack et all (though he was much less well known), and the second is Elliott Daingerfeild, who worked in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. The first two pieces are called "Studio Interior," and "Easel and Mirror." The Daingefeild is called "Moon Rising over Fog Clouds."

a song for me?

you shouldn't have

Viva

here's a portrait by Diane Arbus of Warhol factory star Viva, who was a writer/film star/personality of the seventies, and was actually totally crazy. She lives in Florida now, painting landscapes, I guess, but this picture is still awesome.

wow

choices

More than two dozen vandals
who hosted a party inside Robert Frost's former home were
ordered to take a class on his poetry, taught by Frost's
biographer. "This is where Frost is relevant," Jay Parini
said to the class, speaking about Frost's poem "The Road
Not Taken." "You come to a path in the woods where you can
say, 'Shall I go to this party and get drunk out of my
mind?' Everything in life is choices."
--Harper's

wow

Tropic of Cancer was great but this is a-ma-zing