Emily Dickinson

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,

One need not be a house;

The brain has corridors surpassing

Material place.

.......

Far safer through an Abbey gallop,

The stones achase,

Than, moonless, one's own self encounter

In lonesome place.

Jayme is an out and proud Jewish porn star who often wears the Star of David in her films. Not certain why I found this so bizarre and intriguing but I did.

The Red Shoes

I stand in the ring

in the dead city

and tie on the red shoes...

They are not mine.

They are my mother's.

Her mother's before.

Handed down like an heirloom

but hidden like shameful letters.

The house and the street where they belong

are hidden and all the women too,

are hidden...

Anne Sexton

"The practice of collecting is not equivalent to a sexual practice, in that it does not seek to still a desire ( as does fetishism). None the less, it ca bring about a reactive satisfaction that is every bit as intense. In which case, the obhect in question should undoubtedly be seen as a 'loved object'....for the collector the object is a sort of docile dog which recieves caresses and returns them in its own way; or rather, reflects them like a mirror constructed in such a way as to throw back images not of the real but of the desirable."

Jean Baudrillard

Garance Dore

Nepenthe

nepenthe \ni-PEN-thee\, noun:

1. A drug or drink, or the plant yielding it, mentioned by ancient writers as having the power to bring forgetfulness of sorrow or trouble.
2. Anything inducing a pleasurable sensation of forgetfulness, esp. of sorrow or trouble.

Nepenthe is comprised of the Greek roots ne-, "not," and penthos, "grief."

Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die

Malachy McCourt

Sleeping Beauty

Only when he was with a girl who had been put to sleep could he feel himself alive.

Yasunari Kawabata, Nemururu Bijo

(House of the Sleeping Beauties)

That's the best thing that a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Toyko Hostess

Gradually I became embroiled in a drama that I created through my various customers and the other girls. The world of the club was both safe and thrilling. It was addictive. The better I became at my job, however, the more I lost touch with myself, and while my sham 'loves' with my customers deepened into something like real affection and compassion, the 'real' relationship in my life floundered.

I didn't do it solely for the money .I wish I had. I did it for reasons far more dangerous: I needed adoration and approval and I, like so many victims of typically arid American upbringings, was addicted to the rush of adrenaline that love and praise, however insincere and deluded, can bring. After a few slow months in Japan's floating world, real life was, for a while, too slow for me.

From Tokyo Hostess, Claire Campbell

Insect Love

imago \ih-MAH-goh\, noun:

1. An idealized concept of a loved one, formed in childhood and retained unaltered in adult life.
2. Entomology. An adult insect.

Hong Kong Neon

Style and the 1920's

Gone is the flapper. In her place has come the young woman with poise, of soft-toned and correct speech, soberly dressed, and without closely cropped hair. Such, at all events, are the specifications of Miss 1928 as portrayed in the current number, of the “Junior League Magazine,” which is the national organ of the younger social sets of some thirty of the principal American cities.

According to an investigation which has been conducted by members of the Junior League throughout the country it has been revealed that the flapper has sung her swan song in north, south, east, and, west. “Those hard-boiled little things with shaved necks have gone completely out of’ style,” says one active Chicago member of the Junior League.

“This year’s style in young girls is to be quiet, conversational, and terribly in earnest about careers.”

Another article in the magazine, written by four members of the Junior League in different parts of the country, says that the flapper was a post-war creation. Her hair overnight resembled that of a Hottentot; her skirts ended about her knees; she sneaked her brother’s cigarettes, and swore like a trooper. She chewed gum—great wads of it—vigorously and incessantly. Her make-up was as crude as a clown’s.

MISS 1928.

Miss 1928 on the other hand, is much more subtle and polished, and she wears black satin instead of cerise. She blends rouge evenly and inhales cigarettes gracefully without puffing furiously and, unlike her predecessor, she drinks her liquor from a teacup rather than from a flask.

One Connecticut damsel gives the following recipe for the flapper:—”Take two bare knees, two rolled stockings, two flapping goloshes, one short skirt, one lipstick, one powder puff, 33 cigarettes, and a boy friend with flask. Season with a pinch of salt and dash of pep, and cover all with some spicy sauce, and you have the old-time flapper.

“Then you have me real modern American flapper: Two bare knees, two thinner stockings, one shorter skirt, two lipsticks, three powder puffs, 132 cigarettes, and three boy friends, with eight flasks between them”

Coup de foudre

French [koo duh fudr]

(i) flash of lightening; (ii) thunderbolt; (iii) unexpected event or disaster, bolt from the blue; love at first sight

Klimt

Isabella

The Latin word for war, bellum, comes from the same route as bellus, or beautiful.

Time Travel

Here they are again, the people whom I have never known, and whom I cannot imagine. here they are again, waves of loss, beating against the mind's shore. Loss of what I did not know. The past ambushing me again with its metaphysics of absence. I strain to make the brothers more real, to give loss a context. But there are limits to what the imagination can do....

One cannot undo the past, redo it, heal it, cure it. And yet I am consoled by this near touching, this near meeting of parallel lines that, after all these years, seem to be bending towards each other.

Eva Hoffman, After such Knowledge

Eve after the Fall, Rodin

Confession

From Harpers sept 2010 issue

Anais Nin

"I am constantly reconstructing the pattern of something lost which I cannot forget"

Modern Melancholia

"The archetypal fashion photo conveys a certain coldness, froideur, disappointment,a profound reluctance to embrace domesticity and a preference for some undisclosed state of otherness...these endless stagings of femininity conjure psychic landscapes and scenarios of loss, melancholia and illegible rage....How does feminine melancholia come to feature as a condition of young womanhood today? What does it mean to be constrained, or stuck, or immobilised by a loss that must remain unspeakable?"

Angela McRobbie - Illegible Rage Pg112

The Silence of Sirens

"Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing never happened, it is still conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never."

Franz Kafka

The Sirens

John William Waterhouse

Two sisters of Persephone

Two girls there are: within the house

One sits; the other, without,

Daylong a duet of shade and light

Plays between these.

Sylvia Plath

Bright Young Things

Brassai

Battle in the Heavens

From Vogue Nippon

Irving Penn

The Black Panther has the ability to stalk its prey entirely silently...

Garance Dore

Jean Cocteau by Cecil Beaton

"Trying to find fate is like being swung round several times in a hall of mirrors"

Liz Greene

Fate

"We meet the feminine face of fate also in the humble fairy tale of childhood. The word 'fairy' comes from the Latin fata or factum, which in French eventually translated into fee, enchantment.So fate not only avenges the transgression of natural law; she also enchants. She spins a spell, weaves a web like the spider who is one of her most ancient symbols, transforms a prince into a frog and send Briar-Rose into a hundred-year sleep."

From The Astrology of Fate, Liz Greene pg 22

The Eclipse

Cecil Beaton

Cecil Beaton

Japanese Paper Blossom - Cecil Beaton

Fron Garance Dore

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ROMANTIC IDEOLOGY

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Dear Lisa,

Burn in hell you bitch.

I love you.

Merril.

From"The Crypto -Amnesia Club" by Michael Bracewell

Fever Ray

Camille Seaman

Tim Walker

Tim Walker

Tim Walker

In Plaster

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:

The new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,

And the white person is certainly the superior one...

Without me she wouldn't exist, so of course she was grateful.

I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose..

I'm collecting my strength, one day I shall manage without her,

And she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.

Sylvia Plath.