Dear Tumblr, I cannot possibly hope to catch up with you, so I won’t try. Instead, here’s an illustration done on sheet music (lots more here!).
notify a priest (by wackystuff)
Santa Teresa of Avila, 1750
Francisco Salzillo y Alcaraz
A map of Marseilles by Piri Reis, 16th century Ottoman cartographer (more here, also beautiful).
Minor life goal fulfilled: now that my purchases from the winter sale have arrived I finally have enough NYRB Classics to arrange them chromatically. It’s only semi-successful and needs some readjustment; also, some transitions are bound to be rocky due to simple lack of properly coloured books. Clearly I should choose my next purchases based on spine colour alone.
A collection of odd books, pictures, movies, music, &c. that have fallen into the public domain. Could be my new favourite website.
The Inseparables (by wackystuff)
“Japanese matchbox label - circa 1900”
“What we see and hear comes to be similar and even the same as what we didn’t see or hear, it’s just a question of time, of our own disappearance. And, despite that, we cannot stop focusing our lives on hearing and seeing and witnessing and knowing, in the belief that these lives of ours depend on our spending a day together or answering a phone call or daring to do something or committing a crime or causing a death and knowing that that was how it was. Sometimes I have the feeling that nothing that happens happens, because nothing happens without interruption, nothing lasts or endures or is ceaselessly remembered, and even the most monotonous and routine of existences, by its apparent repetitiveness, gradually cancels itself out, negates itself, until nothing is anything and no one is anyone they were before, and the weak wheel of the world is pushed along by forgetful beings who hear and see and know what is not said, never happens, is unknowable and unverifiable. What takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us is identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be told. We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven’t already been, and that’s why we’re so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost. Or perhaps there never was anything.” — A Heart So White, Javier Marias (I spent a long time today writing about this book. It’s still in my head.)
Walt Whitman’s manuscript for “O You Whom I Often and Silently Come”
(via fuckyeahmanuscripts)
In other news, I am so excited to read Geoff Dyer’s Zona. It’s a booklong consideration of Tarkovsky’s Stalker!! In case the reason for anticipation is not clear: that’s one of my favourite essayists on one of my favourite movies. I would have bought it already but I still have not purchased a copy of the film for myself and obviously I must watch it again before I read about it, or perhaps watch it while I read about it, keep the film playing in an endless loop for however long it takes me to get through the book (knowing Dyer: not long). But then I am reminded that I still haven’t read the story, or is it a novella, that it’s based on and I’ve always intended to do that… so I have a lot of steps between myself and Zona. At least there are things like this interview with Dyer to sate me in the interim.
BF: I have one last, utterly pointless question. In Out of Sheer Rage there’s a wonderful passage about how much you hate seafood. Do you really hate seafood?
GD: Oh yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of stuff in the books that isn’t true, but nothing is more to the heart than that. I really think that if I’ve said anything wise in the book it’s that line where I say that seafood is a delicacy in the sense that you’ve got to cook it just right or you’ll be shitting squid ink for a week.
BF: Good, because I justify my hatred of seafood by saying that Geoff Dyer hates it too.
GD: My name is Geoff Dyer and I endorse this.
For some time now I’ve been kicking around the idea of attempting the laborious & unnatural activity of shifting my voluminous writing and thinking about books from my private notebooks (and, to a certain extent, this space—it has been spilling over) to a Proper Old Blog. I know, internet, I know: my trajectory is exactly the opposite of everyone else’s, I am so late to everything. I am a luddite—everyone knows. I have no idea yet if it will last, but if anyone is interested in bookish rambling there may or may not be more of it taking place in that space.
Albany Bulb, California
Two things: 1. I miss the Bulb so much; & 2. What is that houselike structure I do not remember this!? In my memory she has a clear view of the water. I’m not sure how I feel about that development.