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I love this, good rec Megan

"l'homme qui médite est un animal dépravé" -Rousseau lol

Came recommended, but I hate it so far. Boring people doing stupid things.

I purchased this book for some reason!!

Wow these stories are sometimes so depressing and sour that I have to skim parts bc they are too much. I loved "Marigold's Christmas" though in spite of it

This book is looong, but fascinating. One of the Irénées fervently believed that it would one day be possible to create ideal workers/consumers by injecting people with "compounds." Also lots of info on the horrors of Deepwater, where poison gas drove workers insane (Joker-style, grinning and gritting teeth, hallucinating, raving) before killing them.

"'You sort of underestimate the human being when you say that every least thing that is an abstract experience is spiritual. It isn't. It's just your real self. You can be capable of fantastic abstract experiences, right in this life.'" -Agnes Martin (105)

"More than in any other organized athletic pursuit, swimmers, even when part of a team, are profoundly alone when they practice and compete." (28) So why am I not a world-renowned Minimalist painter

"I know these with-it young married women. They have some vague kind of a job; they claim to use their minds, to go in for sport, dress well, run their houses faultlessly, bring up their children perfectly, carry on a social life--in short, succeed on every level. And they don't really care deeply about anything at all. They make my blood run cold." Yikes.

"I suppose that is what bothered me most about New York, aside from the actual fate of all of us. Whom you had to sleep with, be nice to, eat lunch with, in order to stay in the race, struggling blindly for unknown ends." (38)

"Men like being listened to. They like it more than money, women, good food, and wine." (34)

LIVIN ON A PRAYER

"Dickens had had glimpses of 'low life'…and he was also a popular novelist and able to write about ordinary people…whereas a writer nowadays is so hopelessly isolated that the typical modern novel is a novel about a novelist." (37) sick burn

It could happen that if we were really honest with ourselves, if we allowed space for ourselves, we automatically would know that the subtlety of self-hypocrisy is always there, without fail…There still will be a very faint but very sharp, very delicate and penetrating understanding that something is not quite right. That is basic sanity, which continues all the time, without fail. (13)

Orwell reminds me of the main character in Office Space.

73: 'This means I must fly in confidence that the void itself will bear me up, that is to say a leap without wings, a leap into nothingness, into an unloved life, into guilt by omission, into emptiness as the only reality which belongs to me, which can bear me up...'

From page 146:
"Charity inquired about sending one of their nieces to America's first women's college, Mount Holyoke Academy, in 1837, the year that it was founded...When Mount Holyoke opened, Sylvia Louisa was twenty-seven and single, a good candidate for college." Moho :O

Using up my audible credits by listening to books I had to give back to the library. This one benefits from the author narrating it herself.

There is something demoralizing about being 6 hours into this audio book and noting that there are a good 13 hours left.

HIGHLY recommended Susan Sontag/Philip Johnson interview, excerpted in this book: http://formsofinquiry.com/inquiry/phi...

Poetry: "One night there was an opulent dinner on the beach, and the bankers showed up in pirate regalia. Toward the end of the evening, storm winds started to gust and the ocean grew choppy...As the partygoers scurried for shelter, a happy Bezos surveyed the scene, his laugh cutting through the Mexican night." (60)

"Bezos thought analytically about everything, including social situations. Single at the time, he started taking ballroom-dance classes, calculating that it would increase his exposure to what he called 'n+' women. He later famously admitted to thinking about how to increase his 'women flow,' a Wall Street corollary to 'deal flow,' the number of new opportunities a banker can access." (21) yeahhh

As the book progresses you get a sense that the biographer has begun to be disgusted by Balthus. He compares "The Turkish Room" to "a decoration on a package of halvah." Sick burn, Weber.