Embellishments

"He was born in Portland, oregon. He then went to prison for taking pictures of a basketball court. After escaping prison, he moved to Australia to change his name and identity. He then moved back to the U.S. becoming a farmer of peppers and onions, a lover of garlic. Even though he likes the open space of the Grand Canyon and farms, he likes the city life as well. Then, he moved to Milledgeville, to become a teacher."

Kafka's lover

He was a hermit, a man of insight who was frightened by life... He saw the world as being full of demons which assail and destroy defenseless man... All his works describe the terror of mysterious misconceptions and guiltless guilt in human beings.

- Milena Jesenka

The Metamorphosis

Nabokov’s note in his annotated copy:

“The soul has died with Gregor; the healthy young animal takes over. The parasites have fattened themselves on Gregor.” 

Au Hasard Balthazar

One of my students on Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (1966): "This last scene was extremely powerful and deeply saddening to me for reasons I can't possibly explain. The bells of the sheep and the music that played just added to the emotional power..."

Oh yeah, I got this on repeat all day

Tom

“Telling someone to relax is not as aggressive as shooting them, but it’s up there.” 

Check out Dean's Riffage

sweet splendor by vidal sassoon

Bless her

In Brad Gooch’s 2010 biography of O’Connor, he reports that Regina (Flannery's mother) initially kept Flannery’s lupus diagnosis from her—Flannery found out she had the disease only after a friend let the secret slip. “Don’t ever tell Regina you told me,” Flannery told the friend. “Because if you do she will never tell you anything else. I might want to know something else sometime.”

I know who I am, do you know who you are

The lake was the color of a urinal cake. His grandson’s eyes were this color too: cerulean blue.

His struggle

"Fighting against the demons of unattractive storylines" -

The Recognitions

“They arrived at a room full of people who spent their lives in rooms.” — William Gaddis

Sonny's Blues

There was a lot of applause and some of it was real. — James Baldwin

Harrison

I'd say Jim's the Keith Richards of rugged US lit, but Jim knows his diet. Nevermind the dipsomania, he doesn't drink goon, which has probably shaved years off my life, last night being an invocation to the Gods against bad beer.

A girl naked or practically, the important part naked anyway, drinking coffee in my room. I almost wanted to go back home and tell an old friend. I got into bed which was warm and smelled beery —from Wolf

Miraculous turn-of-events w Delta Flight 2238/DC-PDX

Take my seat prior to take-off and the lady next to me asks me if i drink. I nod, liking her already. She has a scratchy voice and probably a fun-loving way. "Do you mind trading seats with my friend? I'll buy you a drink." My desires think whisky, but my socially respectable side deems an Alaskan amber more than good. Within the hour the drinks cart comes up and the steward who looks like Harold Ramis, hands me my trophy. When you live an unspoiled life, a life in many ways like Australia (now why do I say that, can that even be defended?) the small pleasures are treasured like huge victories that I don't even mind how uneven the temperature is or worry about my sweater getting dirty on the floor. It's a new plane with carpet so nice.

The Brion Gysin of Annie Dullard

Two houses ago, in the skin of every corner, I closed up and quit the stars of old for endless exhilaration. Long before I heard the pulse, I saw it half-looking, dark and renewable with a senseless riffle and reflection. It has always been a night-cold fact to me that the book runs on all week, usurps every minute, whether I drop it, close it, vanish it or blink, as an Osage orange on a shelf continues to make out to itself its own splash-happy whisper.

So many shadows have been horrifying me on these waters, so much thought has been down by me here where the things come pouring, that I can hardly parody the grace never shown, that the water from under the flowing water is impartial, free, sinister and unseen. But that wish, Tinker Creek had parodied, damned and dumb warmth had vanished its tale. The creek-light reflected in my things. I stood on the renewable grass. The wish was tightened; the smack loomed over the sources. By bundled will I could flag the weeks of dead at the banks; the flags pulsed over the frozen riffles of my outpouring, and I dropped in the corner. That night the life of the mountain’s warm mouth on the creek — from high on the frozen fact of Foam Mountain, runs away — exhausted me. Where was the chilled-thought grass? This moonless thing illumined over water splashed of gray fact, dumb and dead.  It was free and frozen; I blocked the thing because it was thought.

Dandy of the day

“Many were the times that Des Esseintes had pondered over the fascinating problem of writing a novel concentrated in a few sentences and yet comprising the cohabited juice of the hundreds of pages always taken up in describing the setting, drawing the characters and piling up useful observations and incidental details. The words chosen for a work of this sort would be so unalterable that they would take the place of all the others; every adjective would be sited with such ingenuity and finality that it could never be legally evicted, and would open up such wide vistas that the reader could muse on the meaning, at once precise and multiple, for weeks on end, and also ascertain the present, reconstruct the past and divine the future of the characters in the light of this one epithet. The novel, thus conceived, thus condensed in a page or two, would become an intellectual communion between a hieratic writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration between a dozen persons of superior intelligence scattered across the world, an aesthetic treat available to none but the most discerning.”

Streets of Nashville

From "Out of Sheer Rage"

graffiti by the inestimable Jim Owens

Writers always envy artists, would trade places with them in a moment if they could. The painter's life seems less ascetic, less monkish, less hunched. Instead of the austere mess of the desk there is the chaos of the studio: dirty coffee cups, paint-smudged cassette decks, drawings of the artist's girlfriend, naked, on the walls. - Geoff Dyer