Modi.

On what grounds did Modigliani deserve his place of honor? Little, in the eyes of leading art historians of the period. Modigliani is absent from Meyer Shapiro’s authoritative survey, Modern Art. Kenneth Clark’s classic study The Nude ignores him. The Visual Arts: A History, by the eminent Hugh Honour and John Fleming, makes no mention of him. Collective silence testifies to the formulaic monotony of an artist who never equaled his sources: Cézanne, Picasso, and Brancusi. Secrest notes the omissions but rushes to attribute them to the prodigious number of forgeries on the market. The politics of fakes distracts from the issue of Modigliani’s status as a minor modernist. Yes, Modigliani is one of the most counterfeited modern artists. Like Willie Sutton, forgers go where the money is. (“Nude Sitting on a Sofa” sold at Sotheby’s last November for $68.9 million.) The huge number of fraudulent Modiglianis has held up publication of the catalogue raisonné for nearly a decade. But that bears on the market, not the life. (The single plum in this book is Gary Tinterow’s admission that the Metropolitan Museum has never risked having its Modiglianis subjected to forensic analysis.) The high-stakes minefield of attribution is outside a biographer’s domain, but Secrest plays referee, eager to discredit Jeanne Modigliani (her drinking, her bad haircut) and Restellini’s rivals in judgment. Her presumption of tubercular intrigue is less plausible than Carol Mann’s insight into her subject’s slow suicide: “There must have been a moment when Modigliani saw with great clarity the dead-end his art was heading for, and it must have terrified him.”

Read the rest here.

Secrest's book is here, but, do yourself a favor ... look no further than here.

Mozart, "Exsultate Jubilate"

Olga Peretyatko performs.

Allegro.



Andante.



Allegro "Alleluia"



Sing along.

Order.

Ault, Bright Light at Russell's Corners, 1944


The Smithsonian Institute's American Art Museum is hosting an exhibition entitled, To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America.

"To Make a World" brings viewers back into the world of the American 1940s, drawing them in through the least likely of places and spaces: not grand actions, not cataclysmic events, not epoch-making personalities, posters, and headlines, but silent regions where some mystery seems always on the verge of being disclosed.


Video streaming by Ustream

Read the rest here.

Don't miss this.

Happy Birthday, Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson was born on this date in 1743.

Charles Willson Peale, Thomas Jefferson, 1791


I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage, with my books, my family, and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post which any human power can give.
- Thomas Jefferson

Don't miss this.

Head in the clouds.

Rothko.

Sunrise.


Sunset.

Serenity.

The love of learning,
The sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Rejoice.

'Tis spring ...


Shine with light, o Heavens, flower again, o meadows! Breezes, rejoice!
The small birds singing, the rivers murmuring, now let them be glad!
Those verdant grasses, those whispering waves, now let them be consoled!
Now that, fortunate, from the ashes of Troy, has risen my phoenix!

Sara Mingardo sings "Illustratevi, O Cieli", from Monteverdi's opera, Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria

Wonderful.

O'Keeffe, Canyon Country White and Brown Cliffs, 1965


There is something wonderful about the bigness, the loneliness and windiness of it all.
- Georgia O'Keeffe

Process.

Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1919


Georgia O’Keeffe led an aesthetic life of precise and specific preferences that informed her daily life as well as her artistic practice. She was discriminating about the views that became the subject of her artwork, as well as the materials and tools she used to create her extraordinary body of work. “O’Keeffiana: Art and Art Materials” offers a view of her artistic practice in a rich selection of artworks in various media – watercolor, charcoal, graphite, pastels, oil, and sculpture – along with a sampling of the pastels, watercolors, oil paints and brushes, she used. The exhibition will also include photographs of O’Keeffe at work and in the landscape that inspired her, and a selection of the stones and bones she collected and represented in paint and sculpture.

Read the rest here.

Simplicity.

Karr, Step Into A Pool -- Fall Into The Sky, 2011


There there is nothing like a wilderness journey for rekindling the fires of life. Simplicity is part of it. Cutting the cackle. Transportation reduced to leg – or arm – power. Such simplicity, together with sweat and silence, amplify the rhythms of any long journey, especially through unknown, untattered territory. And in the end such a journey can restore an understanding of how insignificant you are — and thereby set you free.
- Colin Fletcher, The River

Karr, Takin' The Dirt Roads Home, 2011


Thanks, Jessica.

Magic.

Seven Wonders of the World were known in Classical Antiquity, but today the UNESCO has counted more than 900 World Heritage Sites which are masterpieces of human architecture and huge monuments of nature.

For the first time in an exhibition, “Magic Places” is showing the wonders of nature and culture together - as equally significant creations of our planet. “Magic Places” leads us to the unique monuments in which the history of our Earth comes to life in all its wonderful variety. “Magic Places”, that is our world heritage in its wondrous diversity to which the yearning and the joy of discovery of every generation is repeatedly orientated anew.

In Oberhausen’s Gasometer, Europe’s tallest exhibition hall, the 40 metre-high sculpture of a rain forest tree is currently being produced. The crown of the artistically recreated primeval forest giant alone has a diameter of 25 metres and weighs almost two and a half tons. It has now been completed as the first section and raised. The tree sculpture is the artistic climax of the forthcoming exhibition “Magic Places” which leads its visitors to the Earth’s great natural and cultural heritage sites and makes their creative forces come alive.

“The sculpture of this “Tree of Life” stands at the centre of the industrial monument and likewise stands for the greatness and sublimity of nature – as well as for its vulnerability ", says its creator, the internationally well-known artist and photographer Wolfgang Volz. As a curator, Volz has already handled several projects in the Oberhausen Gasometer, including the "biggest moon on Earth" within the scope of the exhibition "Out of this World " in 2009/10 as well as in 1999 "The Wall" for Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The sculpture of the rain forest tree will, as part of the “Magic Places” exhibition, be framed by a sound and light installation. The setting-up of the tree is a challenge from the logistic and also construction points of view and will probably take until the end of February.

Read the rest here.

Laura Marling, Mumford & Sons, and Dharohar Project, "Meheni Rachi"

Perhaps I’ll be a bird one day, if I’m good enough
And I’ll get up and fly away and give up all this stuff

Open the windows and TURN IT UP!!!

Awake.

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
- Frederick Buechner

Happy Birthday, Livingston.

Neville O'Riley Livingston (Bunny Wailer), who along with Bob Marley and Peter Tosh comprised The Wailers, was born on this date in 1947.

We'll get our breakfast from the tree
We'll get our honey from the bees
We'll take a ride on the waterfalls
And all the glories, we'll have them all

Smile.

Drew Firchau, Self Portrait, 2011


The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heart-felt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Thanks, Drewbie!

Discover.

ParkeHarrison, The Passage, 2002


"As the cheering continued, Rhyme leaned forward and touched Milo gently on the shoulder.
"They're cheering for you," she said with a smile.
"But I could never have done it," he objected, "without everyone else's help."
"That may be true," said Reason gravely, "but you had the courage to try; and what you can do is often simply a matter of what you *will* do."
"That's why," said Azaz, "there was one very important thing about your quest that we couldn't discuss until you returned.
"I remember," said Milo eagerly. "Tell me now."
"It was impossible," said the king, looking at the Mathemagician.
"Completely impossible," said the Mathemagician, looking at the king.
"Do you mean----" said the bug, who suddenly felt a bit faint.
"Yes, indeed," they repeated together; "but if we'd told you then, you might not have gone---and, as you've discovered, so many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible."
And for the remainder of the ride Milo didn't utter a sound."
— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

Dream.

ParkeHarrison, The Flying Lesson, 1996


Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
— Oscar Wilde

Explore.

ParkeHarrison, The Navigator, 2002


We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.
- Thoreau

Alive.

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.
- Frederick Buechner

Robbie Robertson, "Unbound"

Today

... is a good day.

Andrew Peterson, "Many Roads"

Happy Birthday, Holiday.

Billie Holiday was born on this date in 1915.


Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough.
- Billie and Blake

Billie peforming "I Wished On The Moon" with the Benny Goodman Orchestra, 1935

Intended.

The exhibit, which opens Apr. 8, reunites a Monet triptych, whose panels have long since been acquired by three museums, for the first time in three decades. The 14-feet wide, 6-feet-tall paintings are hung together, in a panorama, as Monet intended, not separated by space and not surrounded by other paintings -- similarly, as I recall, to the way another water lillies series is hung at l'Orangerie in Paris (and, maybe an old installation at the Museum of Modern Art?).

Read the rest here.

Monet, Reflections of Clouds on the Water Lily Pond (left panel), 1920

Position.

Raphael, Fedra Inghirami, 1516


The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
- W.H. Auden, from Musee des Beaux Arts

Happy Birthday, Haggard.

Merle Haggard was born on this date in 1937.

If I could only fly, if I could only fly
I'd bid this place goodbye, to come and be with you

Merle Haggard, "If I Could Only Fly"

Starry.

Look up.



Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, "The Story of a Starry Night"

Head in the clouds.

Sunrise.


Sunset.

Light.

Lips (attributed to), after Jean Huber, Portrait of Voltaire, year unknown


Over dinner on a bitterly cold January night in Beijing, I asked Cordula Bischoff, the Dresden-based curator of “The Art of the Enlightenment”, which object in the exhibition best represents its message. Without hesitating, she pointed to a silhouette print in the advance catalogue. The work, attributed to Johann Heinrich Lips, depicts Voltaire, the French philosopher, holding a lantern that shines a light outward beyond the picture frame. “He is carrying the light and leading the visitor out of the exhibition,” she said. “It tells everything.” Bischoff’s counterpart, Chen Yu, a curator at the National Museum, nodded in agreement. “This picture is a metaphor of the Enlightenment,” he said. “The European Enlightenment is still influencing people everywhere in the world. Chinese people are still enjoying its fruits.”

True enough, there is more to China and the Enlightenment than meets the eye.

Fine art—itself something of an Enlightenment creation—reflected in full the shifting panorama of 18th-century Europe: the opulence of the monarchic courts; the rise of the public sphere; scientific advances; fascination with history, nature, and faraway places; the worldly questioning of religion and superstition; the emergence of a more individualistic sense of self, along with the darker psychic residue of disenchantment and aimlessness that modern life would bring in its tow. The Age of Reason offered art not only fresh subject matter, but also a new purpose and organisation. It celebrated the artist as an autonomous visionary and witnessed the rise of new public institutions—the exhibition gallery, the concert hall, art criticism—all of which continue to frame the terms of engagement between art and its audience today.

Read the rest here.

The exhibition's site is here.

Little.

Leonardo, Mona Lisa, 1519


Italian researchers said Tuesday they will dig up bones in a Florence convent to try to identify the remains of a Renaissance woman long believed to be the model for the "Mona Lisa."

The project falls within a current trend of employing CSI-like methods in art history, for example to find out about an artist's technique, discover details hidden in a painting or even learn about an artist's life or death. The group led by Vinceti has already reconstructed the faces of some Italian artists on the basis of their skulls, and last year it said it had identified the bones of Caravaggio and discovered a possible cause of death, 400 years after the artist died in mysterious circumstances.

Such researches have drawn criticism, with some experts expressing doubt that analyses on centuries-old bones can be conclusive. Other scholars say such scientific techniques have little to add when it comes to appreciating or understanding a work of art.

Read the rest here.

Perfect.

Doisneau, The Cellist, 1957


The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.
- Pablo Casals

Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin perform the Andante from Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Mandolins in G, RV532



Cultural Offering offers more enjoyment here. Thanks!

David Bowie, "Heroes"

Completed.

Chatham, Fishing The Evening Rise, 2006


Not everything in life can or should be explained. Part of every painting should be incomplete, to be completed in the mind of the viewer.
– Russell Chatham

Life.

When I am in a painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.
- Jackson Pollock

Starry.

van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889


For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
- Vincent van Gogh

The Infamous Stringdusters, "Starry Night"

Dream.

IDEAS: So in conscious life, can dreaming be helpful?

HOBSON: What I expect to learn a lot from is dreaming, not the dream....The more common dreams are anxious dreams. What does that mean? It means anxiety is more important to survive. Elation is something you do at a party. You do to attract other people. But you better be sure you’re going to get through the jungle before you have the party. You’ve got to survive in order to be happy. What dreams are telling us, I think, is that this is the nature of the beast. It’s not that anxiety is symptomatic. It is that anxiety is.

Read the rest here.

Joyous.

Carr, Among The Firs, 1931


What do these forests make you feel? Their weight and density, their crowded orderliness. There is scarcely room for another tree and yet there is space around each. They are profoundly solemn yet upliftingly joyous; like the Bible, you can find strength in them that you look for. How absolutely full of truth they are, how full of reality. The juice and essence of life are in them; they teem with life, growth and expansion. They are a refuge for myriads of living things. As the breezes blow among them, they quiver, yet how still they stand developing with the universe. God is among them. He has breathed with them the breath of life, might and patience. They stand developing, springing from tiny seeds, pushing close to Mother Earth. Fluffy baby things first, sheltering beneath their parents, mounting higher, spreading brave braches, pushing with mighty strength not to be denied skywards. Tossing in the breezes, glowing in the sunshine, bathing in the showers, bending below the snow piled on their branches, drinking the dew, rejoicing in creation, bracing each other, sheltering the birds and beasts, the myriad insects.
- Emily Carr

Ray Wylie Hubbard, "The Messenger"

Now I have a mission and a small code of honor
To stand and deliver by whatever measures
And the message I give you is from this old poet Rilke
He said, "Our fears are like dragons guarding our most precious treasures"

Free.

I see, at intervals, the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of the cage; a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.
— Charlotte Brontë

Over The Rhine, "Soon"




Soon
The near parade will find us
Soon
The fall-by-the-way may bind us

Tongue and groove, body and fender
The weight of your world is splendor
Soon

Soon
The troubled past will leave us
Soon
The bird of fear won't need us

The blood of our veins will guide us
A map of the train inside us
Soon

Soon

The howl of the angels will mark out time
The gift of your heart frees me from mine

Soon
The night that we call forever
Burns like a lost love letter

Soon
Soon
Soon

++++++++HELP!!!++++++++

I lost my phone contacts! Please text me with your name. Thank you!

Behold.

Homer, West Point, Prout's Neck, 1900


The Waterboys, "This Is The Sea"

Happy Birthday, Haydn.

Franz Joseph Haydn was born on this date in 1732.



A song to learn and sing ...

Te Deum laudamus:
te Dominum confitemur.
Te aeternum Patrem
omnis terra veneratur.
Tibi omnes Angeli;
tibi caeli et universae Potestates;
Tibi Cherubim et Seraphim
incessabili voce proclamant:
Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus,
Dominus Deus Sabaoth.
Pleni sunt caeli et terra
maiestatis gloriae tuae.
Te gloriosus Apostolorum chorus,
Te Prophetarum laudabilis numerus,
Te Martyrum candidatus laudat exercitus.
Te per orbem terrarum
sancta confitetur Ecclesia,
Patrem immensae maiestatis:
Venerandum tuum verum et unicum Filium;
Sanctum quoque Paraclitum Spiritum.
Tu Rex gloriae, Christe.
Tu Patris sempiternus es Filius.
Tu ad liberandum suscepturus hominem,
non horruisti Virginis uterum.
Tu, devicto mortis aculeo,
aperuisti credentibus regna caelorum.
Tu ad dexteram Dei sedes, in gloria Patris.
Iudex crederis esse venturus.
Te ergo quaesumus, tuis famulis subveni:
quos pretioso sanguine redemisti.
Aeterna fac cum sanctis tuis in gloria numerari.

Salvum fac populum tuum,
Domine, et benedic hereditati tuae.
Et rege eos, et extolle illos usque in aeternum.
Per singulos dies benedicimus te;
Et laudamus Nomen tuum in saeculum, et in saeculum saeculi.
Dignare, Domine, die isto sine peccato nos custodire.
Miserere nostri Domine, miserere nostri.
Fiat misericordia tua,
Domine, super nos, quemadmodum speravimus in te.
In te, Domine, speravi:
non confundar in aeternum.

Softly.

Beckett, Evening Light, Beaumaris, 1925


Softly the evening came
The sun from the western horizon
Like a magician extended his golden want o'er the landscape
Trinkling vapors arose; and sky and water and forest 
Seemed all on fire at the touch, and melted and mingled together.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Tim O'Brien & Sam Bush, "Soldier's Joy"

Opening.

For lo, the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone;
the flowers appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
- Song of Solomon, recited each inaugural spring training broadcast by long-time Tigers' play-by-play man, Ernie Harwell

I love baseball.

My Dad introduced me to the game and taught me to appreciate the poetry of the game. During the season, we threw every night. The poetry of persistence. That sound of the ball smacking the pocket of the glove. "Hit the belt." Organized or pick-up, I loved to play. Grass, dirt, chalk, fences, sky, wood, leather, and gum ... ingredients for true slendor.

Like hockey, nothing even comes close to being there ... unless you have a radio ... and work to do.

Growing up in central Michigan, some of my fondest memeories are of sunny Saturday afternoons, Dad's radio in the garage tuned to WJR (The Great Voice of The Great Lakes), and Ernie Harwell's magical voice doing the play-by-play. To this day Dad will mimmick Ernie's trademarks ...

... on a called strike three, "... and he stood like like a house by the side of the road," ...

... on the pitcher's delivery, "Fidrych kicks and deals,"

... or the random naming of the catcher of a foul ball, "... and a second grader from Saginaw caught that one."

Ed Werstein remembers Ernie ...

Ernie

Five minutes after tuning in late
you knew all the important stuff:

score, inning, situation, pitchers,
key plays, game summary,
(the Tiges [like tikes with a hard g]
scored first on Kaline’s
sacrifice fly in the third,
but the Bosox took the lead in
their half of the inning
with a two run blast by Malzone
after a one out walk to Runnels.)

If the Tigers were on the road,
you got some additional info.
Maybe a description of Comiskey Park,
right down to those beautiful arches,
or the dimensions of Fenway’s
green monster.

But the stats were just the stitching
in the patchwork of beautiful pictures
he pieced together.

Moms from Midland, lads from Lansing,
and those gentlemen from Ypsilanti
will still manage to snag foul balls.

Watching called third strikes sail by,
hitters will still just stand there
like the house by the side of the road.

Double plays will still be two for the price of one,
homers will still be loooong gone,
and fans will still be holding onto their beers
during those tense ninth innings.

But, like a ground-rule double
he hopped the fence and left the park.
Ernie Harwell is gone,
and no one will ever tell us that way again.

Today is Opening Day and my Tigers are in The Bronx, Justin Verlander taking the mound against the Yankees. Plug in the radio, tune in your team, and light the grill ... PLAY BALL!

The Bleacher Report "kicks and deals" here.

Don't miss Spitball, The Literary Baseball Magazine.

Dream.

...that memory or dream thing I do that for me comes nearer reality than my objective kind of work. I see no reason for painting anything that can be put into any other form as well
- Georgia O'Keeffe

O'Keeffe, Untitled Drawing (study for Black Place), 1944


O'Keeffe, Black Place I, 1944


O'Keeffe, Black Place I, 1945


… the black hills—black and grey and silver with arroyos of white sand curving around them—pink and white strata running through them. They flow downward, one below the next. Incredible stillness!
- Georgia O’Keeffe

Snow.

Herbin, Roofs of Paris in the Snow, 1902

Good.

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
- John Ruskin

Still.

A Psalm of Life, What the heart of the man said to the Psalmist

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream ! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real ! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal ;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way ;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle !
Be a hero in the strife !

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant !
Let the dead Past bury its dead !
Act,— act in the living Present !
Heart within, and God o'erhead !

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time ;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate ;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

- Longfellow

Happy Birthday, Clapton.

Eric Clapton was born on this date in 1945.

Here he is discussing Robert Johnson and playing "Stones In My Passway" ...



Robert Johnson's original ...



Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment ... full effort is full victory.
- Ghandi

Read.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure. We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find. We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.
- Harold Bloom, How To Read And Why



"The absence of answers or determinate meanings" is exactly the set of "qualities that make a passage or a work literary." Literary works have no single meaning, whatever the author intended. Indeed, Garber points out, "one of the key features of what might be called the literary unconscious is a tendency on the part of the text to outwit or to confound the activity of closing or ending."

This is not relativism. This is not deconstruction. People have been saying things like this about literature since Horace - and indeed, Horace's ancient dictum (that literature should both teach and delight) is, I believe, one of the underlying themes of Garber's book. It's just that what Garber thinks literature teaches is not a set of univocal moral truths but rather a habit of mind: a way of questioning the world, a way of understanding just how hard it is to make decisions, fall in love, express desire, worship, rule and serve.

We read books often to learn how others do these things - and often to learn how others failed to do them. We read books to be pleasured, too, into an admiration for a writer's choice of words or for an author's command of our emotions. One of the most vivid points that Garber makes is that "scenes of reading in literature are often sites of seduction."

Read the rest here.

Garber's site is here.

Cultural Offering adds value here.

Happy Birthday, van Gogh.

Vincent van Gogh was born on this date in 1853.

Below is a letter Vincent wrote to his friend, Paul Gauguin, on October 17 (my birthday!), 1888.


My dear Gauguin,

Thanks for your letter, and thanks most of all for your promise to come as early as the twentieth. Agreed, this reason that you give won’t help to make a pleasure trip of the train journey, and it’s only right that you should put off your journey until you can do it without it being a bloody nuisance. But that apart, I almost envy you this trip, which will show you, en passant, miles and miles of countryside of different kinds with autumn splendours.

I still have in my memory the feelings that the journey from Paris to Arles gave me this past winter. How I watched out to see ‘if it was like Japan yet’! Childish, isn’t it?

Look here, I wrote to you the other day that my vision was strangely tired.4 Well, I rested for two and a half days, and then I got back to work. But not yet daring to go outside, I did, for my decoration once again, a canvas of my bedroom with the whitewood furniture that you know. Ah, well, it amused me enormously doing this bare interior.

With a simplicity à la Seurat.

In flat tints, but coarsely brushed in full impasto, the walls pale lilac, the floor in a broken and faded red, the chairs and the bed chrome yellow, the pillows and the sheet very pale lemon green, the bedspread blood-red, the dressing-table orange, the washbasin blue, the window green. I had wished to express utter repose with all these very different tones, you see, among which the only white is the little note given by the mirror with a black frame (to cram in the fourth pair of complementaries as well).

Anyway, you’ll see it with the others, and we’ll talk about it. Because I often don’t know what I’m doing, working almost like a sleepwalker.

It’s beginning to get cold, especially on the days when the mistral blows.

I’ve had gas put in the studio, so that we’ll have good light in winter.

Perhaps you’ll be disillusioned with Arles if you come at a time when the mistral’s blowing, but wait... It’s in the long term that the poetry down here soaks in.

You won’t find the house as comfortable yet as we’ll gradually try to make it. There are so many expenses, and it can’t be done in one go. Anyway, I believe that once here, like me, you’ll be seized with a fury to paint the autumn effects, in between spells of the mistral. And that you’ll understand that I’ve insisted that you come now that there are some very beautiful days. Au revoir, then.

Ever yours,
Vincent

van Gogh, The Arles Bedchamber, 1889


Read more on The Arles Bedchamber here.


If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all. I don't know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream. I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?
- Vincent van Gogh