C A M E L I A E L I A S

i12bent:

Arty type… No principles…

Photo - Bryon Gysin: William Burroughs near the Beat Hotel (Naked Lunch Launch series, Paris, October 1959)

“What’s with the serum?”
I don’t know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man’s not to be trusted. Might do almost anything…Turn a massacre into a sex orgy…”
Or a joke.”
Precisely. Arty type…No principles…”

   ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

i12bent:

“You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative” ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

lumpy-pudding:

From Inger Christensen’s Det [It], translated by Susanna Nied, w. an introduction by Anne Carson, publ. by New Directions.

i12bent:

James Joyce’s masterpiece is of course Ulysses, the great book of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom and his associates…

We all know how that one ends, with Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness:

“…Yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.” ― James Joyce, Ulysses

Above: Front-page of the subscription form for Joyce’s Ulysses, published by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in Paris, 1922

i12bent:

Many of the great Modernist, Surrealist and Dadaist artists did Gertrude Stein’s portrait - many of them seeing her as the female Buddha of Modernism - here is Francis Picabia’s version…

“Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates.” ― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, her most sage-like work

i12bent:

Young Mailer burned brightly with his debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, 1948…

“You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that’s the highest effectiveness man has achieved.” ― Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

i12bent:

Edward Abbey’s 1975 Cadillac in its natural habitat…

“Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.” - Abbey’s Road (1979)

i12bent:

Osip Mandelstam,  Jewish-Russian poet: January 15, 1891 - 1938 (murdered in Stalin’s death camp in Vladivostok)…

—

Alone I stare into the frost’s white face.
It’s going nowhere, and I—from nowhere.
Everything ironed flat, pleated without a wrinkle:
Miraculous, the breathing plain.

Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty—
The squint itself consoled, at ease …
The ten-fold forest almost the same …
And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread.

                                                             — January 16, 1937

(Translated by John High and Matvei Yankelevich)

(Source: lumpy-pudding)

i12bent:

Haruki Murakami, Japanese novelist known for his extensive use of Western pop culture references which spin off into a crazy form of postmodern pastiche, turns 63 today…

A film based on his novel Norwegian Wood is in cinemas here right now…

“But who can say what’s best? That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.” ― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Photo: Marco Garcia