the ugly earring

“The girl wore a thin old checked cotton shirt with pearl-colored snaps with the long sleeves down and always smelled very good and clean, like someone you could trust and care about even if you weren’t in love.”

( good people by david foster wallace)

***

(title from david foster wallace’s memorial)

(from here)

“To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.”

~confucious

(from diane, a shaded view of fashion)

(from the facehunter)

a day for collecting snail shells.

and climbing rocky ledges.

my first love gave me a bottle of hermes perfume.

i think it was because i was four years older than him.

(photo found here. Photo Reuters / Gonzalo Fuentes)

(photo from here)

“I am not feeling any better because I cannot stay in bed, having constant cause for walking. They say I leave at night by the window of my tower, hanging from a red umbrella with which I set fire to the forest.”

~Camille Claudel

An elusive figure inhabits the sundrenched rooms of Modigliani’s Montparnasse studio in Rue de la Grande Chaumière. She sits quietly in a corner sketching, paces the corridor with a heavy step, waits at the window, looking down at skeletal trees in an empty courtyard. From Modigliani’s many portraits of her, we recognize the otherworldly gaze, the coppery hair coiled like a geisha’s, the unflattering hint of double chin: It is Jeanne Hébuterne, Modigliani’s last mistress, only friend, and the mother of his daughter, Jeanne Modigliani.

…She was a promising young artist, fourteen years Modigliani’s junior. She came from a conservative bourgeois background and was renounced by her family, devout Catholics, for her liaison with the painter, who in their eyes was nothing but a debauched derelict. Much too early in their love affair, Jeanne became pregnant with their first child. She was approaching the end of her second pregnancy when, destitute, abandoned by all but Jeanne, Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis on January 24, 1920.
Unable to face life without him, she walked backwards out a Paris window twenty-four hours later, and at the age of twenty-one, exited a world she had but little known.

Eighty years of silence have passed since Jeanne Hébuterne’s last act of protest. Upon her death, her daughter of fourteen months was whisked away to Italy where she was adopted by Modigliani’s sister, Margherita, who refused to recognize her brother’s stature as an artist, or to condone his illicit relationship with Jeanne.

(good sleepless night reading: more here)

and maybe the jacket too.

(from the facehunter)

***

Audrey Hepburn succumbed to the smoking habit herself. Ignoring her mother’s ‘beauty tip’ to: “keep to six cigarettes a day only,” Hepburn managed two or three packs at her worst times – even smoking in her nun’s habit on the set of ‘The Nun’s Story’ and chain smoking her way through ‘My Fair Lady’.

one of those you wish you found first.

(from here by way of minirobot)