meanderings

bygoneamericana:

Tennessee Williams, 1948.

By W. Eugene Smith

(Source: magnumphotos.com)

inneroptics:

Ernest Hemingway

wordsarefornerds:

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

- Kurt Vonnegut

kamasitra:

“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”

- Ernest Hemingway

(via ziegfeldgirl)

fragmenta-charta:

the girl of the cafe

A girl came in the café and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
    I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.
    The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.
    I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
    Then I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in it. I was writing it now and it was not writing itself and I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was nor order any more rum St. James. I was tired of rum St. James without thinking about it. Then the story was finished and I was very tired. I read the last paragraph and then I looked up and looked for the girl and she had gone. I hope she’s gone with a good man, I thought. But I felt sad.

From A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway.

(via journalofanobody)

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller

i12bent:

Lewis Carroll was also a keen photographer and produced quality portraits of many prominent persons in his day. He is, however, chiefly remembered for his photos of young girls, which to some indicate a less than savoury interest in young children on Carroll’s part.

Other scholars contend that these images are typical of the Victorian cult of childhood and innocence…

Carroll’s favorite subject was young Alice who also inspired the Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass tales…

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”

Above: Alice Liddell by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), spring 1860 - wet collodion glass plate negative (NPG, London)

expressionism - Mark Twain,Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King, by Robert Staley

i12bent:

F. Scott Fitzgerald whoring for a bit of money - judging the Woodbury Soap Beauty Contest, 1930…

“Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald

i12bent:

Muckraking American radical novelist, Upton Sinclair - Sep. 20, 1878 - 1968…

His perhaps best known work is the novel The Jungle (1906) which exposes the conditions in the meatpacking industry in Chicago at the time…

“One could not stand and watch very long without being philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe…. Each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart’s desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him, and a horrid Fate in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, all his protests, his screams were nothing to it. It did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life.” ― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Photo of young Upton…