Will I? Won't I?

You might be most familiar with this image of James Franco if you've seen Spiderman 3.........

but these days he looks more like this.....

ok yes, this is another film where he plays Allen Ginsberg, but the point is that the Spiderman star has turned his artistic talents to literature. His collection of short stories 'Palo Alto' has just been released. it's received some bad press, but as i always say...it's ok to judge a book by its cover, and in this case i like it.

Will  I read it though? Well that's another question. Will I? Won't I?

Reading

is a private, not a collective activity. The writer speaks only to individuals, sitting by themselves in a state of normal sobriety.

Aldous Huxley. Brave New World Revisited (1958)

Even after all this time

the sun never says 

to the earth

"you owe me."

look what happens

with a love like that,

it lights

the whole sky.

Hafiz.

Photo from here

Fonte Branda I saw with Charles Norton

under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I enetered Siena three days beofre, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the open golden sky calm behind the gate of Siena's heart, with its still golden words, Cor magis tibi Sena pandit, and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightening, and more intense than stars.


John Ruskin. Praeterita.


Photo here

Howard Man Booker

'He was a man who saw things coming.' 


The Finkler Question. Howard Jacobson. Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010.


...wonder if he saw this one coming...
p.s. yes, he is from my hometown!

a nobel prize

"deep down what I really wanted was to become a writer someday"


Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Mario Vargas Llosa. 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature.

post-it crazy

there's no such thing as too many post-its