In 1978, Christopher Makos photographed Andy Warhol kissing Salvador Dalí. For Warhol, it must have been a heartfelt moment of homage, since he was the only artist who ever approached Dalí’s mastery of publicity.
I emerged from my mother’s exhausted womb after a dilatory gestation of eleven months and fifteen days to begin my stroll toward Iberia, with an heir presumptive’s wave, a whistler’s insouciant greeting in the key of Db where I was destined to linger in later years, and a bow to acknowledge the mid-wife’s applause.
Think of the great American surrealist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) and consider the following description of a mysterious object – a wooden structure with glass in front, through which one looks upon a dream world of celestial bodies, La Belle Époque, the Romantic Ballet, the Grand Hotels of Europe and all the visual wonders from the seven seas.
Sometimes he smiled a different sort of smile—his whole face looked as if it were laughing and his eyes as well. But that was very rarely. Once, when he was having breakfast with a good many people one of his letters said that two very important people were coming to see his last big picture before it left the house. He looked round the table and said, “That will mean quite an expenditure on red...
So many facets to Dalí. I’m always writing haiku about Dalí. Different thoughts come to me about Dalí, and one thought came to me, that Dalí used to be very pretty, very good-looking. Garcia Lorca fell in love with him. When pretty-boy Dalí outgrew his pretty-boy looks he became “clown Dalí.”
M. J. We are both what our country landladies call “great readers,” and have often talked over other people’s books during this long quarter of a century between two wars, but never your books.
I. C. B. It seems an omission, as I am sure we have talked of yours. So let us remedy it.
I strove with none; for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
The clerihew was invented in 1890 by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who was a schoolboy of 16 at St. Paul's in London when the divine numen of Orpheus struck him. His best one seems to me:
With the end in 1989 of the forty-five year Communist regime in Bulgaria, the lives of ordinary Bulgarians were up-ended by the change of the economic system, and many found themselves impoverished for the first time in their lives.
“Most heads are routine,” he says. “Set the attachment at one of eight lengths, then slide the clipper up the back stretch, cruising from base to crown. The trick to it is there’s no trick to it.
It is in no spirit of detraction that I string together a number of descriptive anecdotes of this great painter's eccentricity of character and manner. They afford another illustration of the world-old truth, that the life of the highest and the best of us is woven of a mingled yarn of good and evil.
I was wrestling with despair, and I couldn’t imagine why anyone needed to download a movie to a cell phone in no time. Who watches a movie on a cell phone—and when?
On the first aerial toll-house, the soul is questioned about the sins of the tongue
The first year I moved to Brooklyn, before I'd begun to obsess about money, I'd lain convalescent all winter on my new sofa (my first sofa) reading, filling spiral notebooks, scouring the texts like a medieval scribe to burn them into my brain.
