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“At the age of ten, Julian announced that he wanted to be a painter, like Velazquez. He dreamed of embarking on canvases that the great master had been unable to paint during his life because, Julian argued, he'd been obliged to paint so many time-consuming portraits of mentally retarded royals.”
―
―
“Picasso and Modigliani’s ‘Venuses’ represent a sort of iconoclasm in their self-conscious rejection of the cold, perfectly-finished, stuffy beauty of the Western tradition of art. For the contemporary viewer they have become a reassuring confirmation of left-of-centre politics, of anti-establishment positions and of an intellectual kudos that doesn’t need art to look classical to be meaningful. And the frankness of the male artist’s unflinchingly libidinal vision is taken as evidence of the separation from restrictive bourgeois respectability and taste.”
― Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies
― Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies
“The problem is not that erotically charged images
can’t also be seen as culturally valuable expressions (they
can), but that woman’s highest cultural expression has been
as a passive sex object, and not as an artist or creator of
culture herself. This has limited what women have been able
to achieve in a patriarchal society that cannot separate
women’s value and worth from a very fixed idea of their
sexuality.”
― Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies
can’t also be seen as culturally valuable expressions (they
can), but that woman’s highest cultural expression has been
as a passive sex object, and not as an artist or creator of
culture herself. This has limited what women have been able
to achieve in a patriarchal society that cannot separate
women’s value and worth from a very fixed idea of their
sexuality.”
― Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies
“He delivered a blistering statement regarding the readiness of the general public to recognize psychosomatic illness, while failing to recognize the reverse: that illness of the body was often the cause of seeming illness of the mind. “Now what would you say,” he proposed as an instance, “if you were my
internist, God forbid, and I told you I had headaches, recurring nightmares, nausea, insomnia and blurring of the vision; and also that I generally felt unglued and was worried to death about my job? Would you say I was neurotic?...Those symptoms I gave you are the same as for brain tumor. Check the body. That’s first.”
― The Exorcist
internist, God forbid, and I told you I had headaches, recurring nightmares, nausea, insomnia and blurring of the vision; and also that I generally felt unglued and was worried to death about my job? Would you say I was neurotic?...Those symptoms I gave you are the same as for brain tumor. Check the body. That’s first.”
― The Exorcist
“It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero. The wonderful, poisonous story of Botulism. The killer story. It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe. The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the
life story.”
― The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
life story.”
― The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
Cristiana’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Cristiana’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
680 books
|
55 friends
39 books
|
3 friends
82 books
|
10 friends
355 books
|
3 friends
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