Blue Room

I have been inspired. By two people. My friend Jen is moving into her first house and has been busy painting and prepping for the big move-in day. My other friend Tina just moved into another apartment and set up her own office in one of the spare bedrooms. I, as of two days ago, did not have an office. My books and things sat on the coffee table until I had to move them for some reason.

Upstairs was an empty room. It was blue because it was so lonely. Once painted and decorated, it is going to be my new office.

Some spackling had to be done first. Our house was built in the 1920s, so some of the wall and ceiling surfaces are less than perfect.

Yesterday most of the spackling had dried so I was able to prime the whole room. This is me at the beginning. I did not look this cheery at the end. There were a lot of surfaces to paint.

Now the whole room is a ghostly white.

Today I paint the ceiling. It sounds somewhat daunting. Then tomorrow I can finally put color on the walls. I chose Martha Stewart Chinchilla for the color.

I thought chinchillas were somewhat brown. Martha obviously knows best. I have been dying to paint something grey so I hope this turns out well.

Literary Destinations

Five Books to Help You Escape via NPR

Gatsby is so emo. Who cries about his girlfriend while eating breakfast . . . IN THE POOL?

Twitterature

Oh my. No words.

Penguin's Ten Essential Books

(1) The Divine Comedy

(2) Walden

(3) Oedipus Rex

(4) Metamorphosis

(5) Moby Dick

(6) Hamlet

(7) The Odyssey

(8) Pride and Prejudice

(9) Jane Eyre

(10) Of Mice and Men

Penguin suggests that reading these ten books are an invaluable part of cultural literacy. They produced a short film showing how knowledge of these books helps you avoid sounding like an ignoramus at cocktail parties.

What other book would you have included? What do you disagree with?

I have read, or at least perused, 9 out of 10. I have not yet gotten to Jane Eyre.

Other People's Things

I've been reading some Proust at night before bed. A slender volume that is nice to hold when lying down.

The length of his sentences and the interceding commas make for a literary lullaby. I find his descriptions of the art of reading and of the spaces of reading to be especially thoughtful and prosaic. For instance, he describes how remembering the books of one's childhood brings back not images of the story but rather of the spaces and events that comprise the reading environment.

Of particular note is his description of reading in an unfamiliar bedroom...

"I leave it to people of taste to make of their bedrooms the very image of their taste and to fill them only with those objects of which it can approve. For myself, I only feel myself live and think in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives profoundly different from my own, of a taste the opposite of mine, where I can rediscover nothing of my conscious thought, where my imagination is exhilarated by feeling itself plunged into the heart of the non-self;

...that you are everywhere touching the bareness of this life in the intention of disturbing yourself by your own familiarity, as you put your things down in this place or that, playing proprietor in a room filled to overflowing with the souls of others and which preserves the imprint of their dreams in the very shape of the firedogs or the pattern on the curtains, or as you walk barefoot over its unknown carpet..."

Marcel Proust, Days of Reading

Foreign objects, serving no purpose exterior to their own existence as things, reinforce the imaginative life of the self by signifying what is non-self. For Proust, the vial of orange flower essence on his nightstand with no relevance to his life signifies the act of reading and immersing himself in what is completely alien to the self.

Book Cover Archive

Book Cover Archive is my new favorite addiction. I have to admit that I frequently judge books by their covers, and perhaps even judge you by yours.

My propensity for all things beautiful, haunting, evocative, and composed succumbs to aesthetic stupor when faced with a book cover, piece of clothing, or plate of food. Call me epicurean or vain, but why settle for ordinary when extra-ordinary is within reach?

The Penguin Great Ideas series is a fine example of clean, precise book cover art. If I had the wherewithal, I would buy the whole series, now in its fourth series.

Ode to a Moleskine

From where I sit I can see

Some five or six relaxing books.

With sleak, black skins they wait for me.

I reach for one and take a look

At notes, scribbles, and jots.

Page smooth and thick, pen dark and deep.

Unbind the tie, begin a line,

A swirling language marks the spot

Where once some words were wont to seep.

A book is just a book unless it's Moleskine.