Henri Matisse, Large Grey Seascape 1896 (via 1910-again)
“Voyage of the Pequod” map (1956) (via laphamsquarterly)
His biographers recount that when the poet Paul Celan was four years old, he took a notion to make up his own fairy tales. He went about telling these new versions to everyone in the house until his father advised him to cut it out. ‘If you need stories the Old Testament is full of them.’ To make up new stories, Celan’s father thought, is a waste of words… Perhaps poets are ones who waste what their fathers would save.Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost
Christopher Pratt, Ice, 1972 (via arcticanstars)
They tried to prove,From Joshua Edwards’ Imperial Nostalgias (via vispoetica)
through enterprise and art,
that a journey’s end exists
at the outset, as a darkened lamp
that tumbles back through
all the stages of its building
into a dream of light.
For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone dead messages like wooden rosary beads.Bruno Schulz on The Book (via)
The “I haven’t seen you in two days” (you’re not going anywhere) nap position.
Santa Maria De Nieva, 14 October 1979
Seen from the air, the jungle below looked like kinky hair, seemingly peaceful, but that is deceptive, because in its inner being nature is never peaceful. Even when it is denatured, when it is tamed, it strikes back at its tamers and reduces them to pets, rosy pigs, which then melt like fat in a skillet. This brings to mind the image, the great metaphor, of the pig in Palermo, which I heard had fallen into a sewer shaft: it lived down there for two years and continued to grow, surviving on the garbage that people threw down the shaft, and when they hauled the pig out, after it had completely blocked the drain, it was almost white, enormously fat, and had taken on the form of the shaft. It had turned into a kind of monumental, whitish grub, rectangular, cubic, and wobbly, an immense hunk of fat that could move only its mouth to eat, while its legs had shrunk and retracted into the body fat.
Adolf Wölfli (via)
(Source: mercedes)
Gary Snyder, in Poetry (via poetrysince1912)
[Humpback whales suspend themselves upside down and perpendicular to the direction of sea currents before they begin to sing.]David Seymour, from For Display Purposes Only (via)
A vanishing horizon, as found in Samuel Pepys, View of Tangier by Hendrick Danckerts, 1669, as found inThe Illlustrated Pepys: Extracts from the Diary (selected and edited by Robert Latham) (via mythologyofblue)
The Academy of Modern Ruins is repurposing this abandoned gas station on Route 66 as The Philosopher’s Library. Submit a book that’s changed your life
