Reflet de Robert

Saturday, 9th Mar, 2024 by Krilling for Company in Literature, Psychology, Quotations, Robert de Montesquiou and tagged 19th-century French literature, 19th-century literature, biography, Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac, decadence, decadent, France, French literature, Julian Barnes, nineteenth-century France, Robert de Montesquiou, The Man in the Red Coat | Leave a comment

[I]t was hard to pierce Robert de Montesquiou’s carapace — and he wouldn’t have wanted you to. He was perhaps at heart a melancholic: he liked to say that his mother had “given me the sad present of life”. His restlessness and furious inquisitiveness might have been a response to this. He was vain without being especially self-reflective, one of those who, rather than look inside to discover who they are, prefer to see themselves in the reflections that come back from others. — Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat (2019), pp. 192-3

Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

• Portait of a Peacock — Cornelia Otis Skinner’s essay on Montesquiou
• Le Paon dans les Pyrénées — review of Barnes’ The Man in the Red Coat

Chevaleurs Oniriques

Monday, 19th Feb, 2024 by Krilling for Company in French, Language, Literature, Quotations, Translation and tagged André Breton, cheval sur une tomate, dreams, horse galloping on a tomato, oneiric values, qutotes about surrealism, surrealism, surrealist, visualization | Leave a comment

« Les valeurs oniriques l’ont définitivement emporté sur les autres et je demande à ce qu’on tienne pour un crétin celui qui se refuserait encore, par exemple, à voir un cheval galoper sur une tomate. » André Breton (1896-1966)
• “Oneiric values have definitely won out over the others, and I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot.” — André Breton, viâ Soluble Fish by Incunabula Media

Renoir et la Reine Noire

Wednesday, 7th Feb, 2024 by Krilling for Company in Art, Color, French, Language, Quotations and tagged Auguste Renoir, black, French painter, la reine des couleurs, le noir, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, quotations about black, quotations about color, quotes about black, Renoir | Leave a comment

« Le noir, une non-couleur ? Où avez-vous encore pris cela ? Le noir, mais c’est la reine des couleurs ! » — Renoir (1841-1919)
• “Black, a non-color? Where did you get that idea? Black, why, it’s the queen of colors!”

Gorge the Gaze on God’s Gift

Monday, 29th Jan, 2024 by Krilling for Company in Aesthetics, Color, Literature, Quotations and tagged Color, God's gifts, John Ruskin, quotations about color, quotes on color, The Stones of Venice | 3 Comments

“The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.” — John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Vol. 2 (1853)

Bored Bard

Friday, 19th Jan, 2024 by Krilling for Company in Boredom, Language, Literature, Psychology, Quotations and tagged early modern English, Elizabethan England, Elizabethan English, Hamlet, Shakespeare, Shakespeare play, Shakespeare quotes, William Shakespeare, words | Leave a comment

Pol. How say you by that? Still harping on my daughter: yet he knew me not at first; he said I was a Fishmonger: he is farre gone, farre gone: and truly in my youth, I suffred much extreamity for loue: very neere this. Ile speake to him againe. What do you read my Lord?

Ham. Words, words, words. — Hamlet (c. 1600), Act 2, Scene 2

Hamble On

Thursday, 11th Jan, 2024 by Krilling for Company in Aviation, Language, Linguistics, Literature, Quotations and tagged Douglas Adams, England, Hambledon, John Lloyd, planes flying by, sense of silence, silence, space, summer, summer field, The Meaning of Liff, timelessness, words | Leave a comment

HAMBLEDON (n.)

The sound of a single-engined aircraft flying by, heard whilst lying in a summer field in England, which somehow concentrates the silence and sense of space and timelessness and leaves one with a profound feeling of something or other. — The Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983)

Elsewhere Other-Accessible

• The Meaning of Liff — full text
• The Meaning of Liff — at Wikipedia

Alt-Writer

Friday, 5th Jan, 2024 by Krilling for Company in Literature, Quotations and tagged churchyard, Cotswolds, Down in the Valley: A Writer's Landscape, drinking, eternity, Laurie Lee, pubs, Slad Valley, the spiritual, the temporal | Leave a comment

“I’ve found a place halfway up the churchyard, near enough to the church to be aware of, in a spiritual sense, matins on Sunday morning, but also to be within reach of, in a temporal way, orgies on Saturday nights in The Woolpack. And alternating between the temporal and the spiritual is the way I wish to spend what eternity is left to me.” — Laurie Lee, Down in the Valley: A Writer’s Landscape (2019)

Glowing Troppo

Sunday, 31st Dec, 2023 by Krilling for Company in Fantasy fiction, Language, Linguistics, Quotations and tagged cocuyo, cocuyos niños, Diccionario esencial de la lengua española, duendes, Español, insectos, insectos coleópteros, lengua española, luz azulada, pájaros, pombero | Leave a comment

pombero, M. Á guar. En la tradición popular, duende imaginario de quien se dice que protege a los pájaros y a los cocuyos y rapta a niños que persiguen.

cocuyo, M. Insecto coleóptero de la América tropical, de unos tres centimétros de longitud, oblongo, pardo y con dos manchas amarillentas a los lados de tórax, por las cuales despide de noche una luz azulada bastante viva. — Diccionario esencial de la lengua española (2006)

Ghost Coast

Monday, 23rd Oct, 2023 by Krilling for Company in Literature, Poetry, Quotations, Swinburne, The Sea and tagged "A Forsaken Garden", A.C. Swinburne, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Algernon Swinburne, death, Flowers, foam, poems about death, poems about the sea, Victorian poetry, waves | Leave a comment

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
       At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
       The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
       The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
               Now lie dead.

• “A Forsaken Garden” (1876), Swinburne

Bristol Ditties

Wednesday, 2nd Aug, 2023 by Krilling for Company in Music, Quotations and tagged breasts, empathy, folk music, folkie, Jeremy Clarke, music of Nick Drake, Nick Drake, no testosterone, testosterone, testosterone suppression | Leave a comment

“Having no testosterone altered me physically and mentally. I grew breasts, became more empathetic and enjoyed the music of Nick Drake.” — Jeremy Clarke, The Daily Mail, 25ii20