Like Ali is an Alps Slut, I am an Art Nouveau Slut, which means I spent our short time in Prague (Praha) with my head craned upward and mouth dangling open in rapture. The city looks as though it was designed by Alfons Mucha, in part because it was.
The streets are clusters of buildings [...]
Was a time when visits precipitated calling cards, a hand fan pressed to the lips spoke: You may kiss me, and there was a taxidermist in every hamlet, no matter how small. I’m speaking of course of the Victorian era.
Besides well-mannered guests, the well-appointed Victorian parlour would likely be stuffed with all manner of natural [...]
Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing never happened, it is still conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never. Franz Kafka, 1917
I had learned through the little research I did before leaving [...]
“…the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup, but in myself.”
~ Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
guest artist: Selena Kimball.
I am of the opinion that the path to ecstasy is generally paved with something less than ecstatic, much of which is memory-based. In my world view, memory is a key to essential truths and transcendent [...]
The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it,
can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the Universe to do.
~Galileo Galilei (Heliocentric extraordinaire)
Florence is known as a city of art–as well it should be–but the underpainting of the city is science, specifically the Medici science [...]
I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine.
I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes.
I lived on honeycomb.
~Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
I have been writing a character I call My Neptuna. The work is going slowly this week, lots of resistance, and so today I thought, if my mind [...]
In the museum of Mr. John Tradescant are the following things: the hand of a mermaid…a number of things changed into stone…a picture wrought in feathers…a cup of an east indian Alcedo, which is a kind of unicorn…the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone…a hat band of snake bones.~ Georg Christoph Stirn, [...]
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. ~Franz Kafka
At first impression Vienna is [...]
The soothing German voice of the navigation system of Christian’s Porsche layered over the angst-ridden oh-so-American yowling of The White Stripes as we roared through our personal mountain range, the Jura. The morning’s snow looked lovely balancing on the pine branches as we whizzed past.
We were heading to Lausanne, but the truth is we would [...]