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Sorrowing at the death of her beloved servant; Hera took Argus’ 100 bright eyes and fixed them onto the tail of a very dull, dowdy old fowl; transforming it into what we know today as the peacock - which is how the now proud, colorful; and haughty bird came forever to be associated with the goddess. (Painters and sculptors often depicted Hera on a chariot drawn by peacocks).

Prometheus, mankind's chief creator, advocate, and friend, taught us, stole for us, and sacrificed himself for us. We all possess our share of Promethean fire, without it we would not be human. It is right to pity and admire him but, unlike the jealous and selfish gods, he would never ask to be worshipped, praised, and adored.

Fr out of the ground where Pyrrha's stones had landed sprang girls &women, healthy &fully formed. Fr the earth where Deucalion's stones had fallen boys &men grew up. So the old Pelasgians drowned in the Great Deluge, &the Mediterranean world was repopulated by a new race descended thru Deucalion &Pyrrha fr Prometheus, Epimetheus, Pandora, &fr Gaia, a compound of foresight &impulse, of all gifts &of the earth

Hestia: hearth and home. Kadia; oikos: economics. Latin word: focus. Out of words for a fireplace we have spin “cardiologist”, “Deep focus”, and “eco-warrior”. The essential meaning of centrality that connects them also reveals the great significance of the hearth to the Greeks and Romans, and consequently the importance of Hestia, its presiding deity.

The enlightenment ideal of a universal culture was abandoned for the national way. “Let us Russians be Russians, not copies of the French.” Karamzin renounced “humanity” for “nationality”. Before the French Revolution, he held the view that “the main thing is to be not Slavs, but Men. What is good for Men, can’t be bad for the Russians. By 1802 he was calling his fellow writers to embrace Russian

What’s the best thing about life after bleeding?
A joy to be unseen, but it was a bit a journey letting it go. Boy I wish I could tell other women struggling with the fade of their blooms, how great life is once you let go of the flowers.

What?…it’s because our periods stopped?
It’s more that we are not cycling anymore. Of course in a patriarchy your body is not technically your own until you passed your reproduction age.

What’s the best thing about post-menopausal women
Best?…
A woman’s mental health post menopause is usually better than it’s being at any other time of the life of that particular woman, other than maybe childhood.

How the vaginal canal squeeze the water out of the baby’s lung…The trauma itself prepares them for the next phase - life on earth.

Painting for Frida was, after all, a form of psychological surgery; she cut and probed into her very spirit. When her brush dipped into the palette of her heart, it came out red.

the relationship b/w human emotions & line, form,&color. The 12 pairs of drawings that resulted reveal Frida&Diego's spontaneous pictorial responses to the idea of pain, love, joy, hate, laughter, jealousy, anger, fear, anguish, panic, worry, &peace. Composed of numerous lines, Frida's drawings show her fascination w/intricate webs&root-like forms. Diego's capture his reactions to the emotions in broad, swift strokes

It is this blend of directness and artifice, of integrity and self-invention, Sthat gives her self-portraits their peculiar urgency, their immediately recognizable steely strength.

The primary influence is clearly that of Italian Renaissance painting. There r traces of the linear elegance of the English Pre-Raphaelites, & of the sensuous elongated figures of Modigliani. Highly stylized motifs like spindly trees & scalloped clouds suggest medieval manuscript illumination or Art Nouveau illustrations; the spiral pattern that transforms the sea in the 1st Self-Portrait recalls Japanese woodcuts

In this pocket universe the world seemed to molt its civilized plumage, which it wore to hide the blood&shit, to pretend it had an essence beyond carnage./maybe it’s just cathartic to microdose trauma, w/o the protective salt circle of fiction. Does it make sense to feel kinship w/content? The kind that shouldn't exist, but whose very monstrosity makes it ineradicable magnetized to hard drives seared into amygdalas

Faced with competing opinions from two Southeast Asians of roughly similar (if not similarly rough) backgrounds enabled the white people in the room to condemn me without appearing to do so because of my race. They'd side with whoever was most congenial to them, the one who didn't require them to rearrange their opinions, allowing them to acknowledge injustice without ceding power.

Essentially formed in the jocular idiom, George is traditionally rendered in the manner of companionable third husbands.
While not the fizz of any party, he is a welcome guest, an enduring accessory to Kitty's ever more callous temperament.
Like a sterling silver knife rest, he serves as a decorative prop to support an increasingly sharp slicing instrument.

"While a garniture is lovely and certainly appropriate in many a sitting room, porcelain is always most desirable in pairs. Only a true masterpiece can stand alone."
Bitsy Plimpton, in her lecture "Decorating for You" delivered at the Colony Club, 1945

Kitty's what you'd call an acquired taste. Ur mother made us buy that crazy painting in Paris. We walked into this place &Every painting was a mess, all these muddy shapes, we bought one & u hung it over the fireplace &that will be that. not worth the canvas it's painted on. ur mother is desperate for a Mayflower connection-so u married her &we put her in the apartment &that will be that. That's your verisimilitude

"for Kitty tried, but she could be nothing but American," Romaine recalled to Lady Troubridge.
"She reminds me of those dreadful English vases covered in swags and gilding 'in the French taste,'" Lady Troubridge replied.
"What a curious contradiction to steal every detail from the French and somehow achieve an effect that is completely foreign to France," Romaine continued. "I also think she took my pocket watch."

A member of Kitty's original garniture, Sissy engages in the unfamiliar work of standing as accessory to Kitty's centerpiece. She has long considered Kitty of inferior provenance despite their equally balanced proportions &related manufacture. Their formal relationship is one of obligation, ornamented w/competition &a hint of unsettled history.

The Surrealist movement takes hold in Europe, &Kitty considers her own dreams. She imagines herself running, tumbling, moving faster &forward fr sth-fr herself, on her shelf-spilling into some boundless void All her fantasies involve freedom, all her desires spin fr the seduction of compositional instability, a fierce longing to be distinctly un-decorative in the tradition of Artemisia Gentileschi's heroic femininity

A monument to classical rigor, Minty Whitaker improbably personifies the stylistic imperatives of discipline and desire. Eschewing standard modes of adornment, she is purely Mayflower made -all guile, no gilding-making her cash-hungry pairing w/Whit Whitaker a predictable coupling of pedigree &prosperity

It feels like two different books, first 3/4 and the rest have drastic different vibes. I somehow prefer the first part better. Joan is more interesting there, tho maybe less “human”, when she became more “Chinese” she became more a stereotype that she could not break from.

In the Gift economy, wealth is understood by how much to share!

When you fall in love w/one person above all others, that love makes special claims on you. In that mysterious way of love, Cézanne singles me out. Cézanne's last 3 great Bather pictures excite me more than any other art except Kafka's 3 novels. Both of these trios were left unfinished/finished at the death of their makers. Cézanne's lessons appear endless to me, encyclopedic like, Shakespeare or Beethoven

They r all there in one square centimeter/another. Picasso &Braque, Matisse &Modigliani, Kandinsky &Klee, Giacometti &Morandi, Johns &Kelly, De Kooning &Lichtenstein, Gorky &Kossoff, Marsden &Kitaj, Freud &Auerbach, Strand &Wall. The sublime little grimalkin is large. He contains multitudes. According to Klee, he is the teacher par excellence. According to Peter Handke, he is the teacher of mankind in the here &now

Cezanne has 3 blue pigments: cobalt blue, ultramarine, &Prussian blue. Asked why he was so fond of blue, “b/c the sky is blue, the sky is blue before it is sky.” Prussian blue is found only in his oils and indigo only in his watercolors. It’s said that he used at least 16 shades of blue. Titian is supposed to have said that a painter needed only three colors: white, black, and red. Cezanne needed blue.

Contemporary art also makes audiences work harder. Museum&gallery-goers can't just walk in &expect to "get"
Artists&critics, would argue that art should require more than a cursory glance. The current mode of art instruction nourishes creativity &promotes artistic freedom. Artists fill an important social role w/taboo-pushing conceptual works—they expose our prejudices &expand our narrow-minded patterns of thinking

the pressure that the demand for originality places on artists. When the new and novel is so highly valued, novelty becomes an end in itself. Desire for genuine confrontation can turn into the pursuit of shock for shock's sake. Individualism can become the new conformity.

the "cult of the individual." The danger is that the
"artist of the present is urged to cultivate that originality which is only the prerogative of the great." reflecting a common academic attitude about individuality and creativity. In 1908, academic artist William Ordway Partridge declared "Originality is the bane of art. Art is a matter of evolution; a new note is not struck more than once in a thousand years