commonplace book – autumn 2022

‘beyond realistic description’

“His experiments in watercolour and rapid adoption of the new, glaring pigments of chrome yellow, chrome orange and pale lemon chrome had brightened his palette. He had already given ordinary subjects a sense of the sublime through dramatic lighting — the fishermen cleaning and selling fish in the National Gallery’s ‘Sun Rising Through Vapour’, for example. But from the 1820s, his high key colour and transparent, luminous effects began to push beyond realistic description.”

— Jackie Wullschläger
reviewing an exhibition of J. M.W. Turner  in the Financial Times

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‘in a tête-à-tête there is no shuffling’ 

— from The Charles Lamb Day Book 

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David R. Godine in mid-tale, at a celebration of the publisher and his fabulous memoir, Godine at Fifty, in NYC 26 October.

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“What is the Midwest, after all, but a long, straight superhighway to the past, a place where suicidal farmers and homicidal cops and polite fanatics in dad pants are phantasms of the frontier’s original settlers?”

— Caroline Fraser,
on My Three Dads by Jessa Crispin in the New York Review of Books

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“neat, nasty, and natural as breath. They come from all over the country and they write all over the universe, just as if it was their own private subway and the guards had all gone home.”

— Chip Delany
from the jacket copy for the Mirrorshades anthology, 1986

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L’émotion dont je me sentais saisi en apercevant la fille d’un marchand de vins à sa caisse ou une blanchisseuse causant dans la rue était l’émotion qu’on a à reconnaître des Déesses. Depuis que l’Olympe n’existe plus, ses habitants vivent sur la terre.

— Marcel Proust

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“. . . and some things you can only think of in the dark”

— F. & E. Brett Young, Undergrowth

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Workers lose out