I hate the use of the words vulnerable  and honest to describe art works, characters or people. It's  just really irritating, pretentious and often miss used.

Just to illustrate that paragraph I wrote yesterday ...  
                                                                                                                                                                                                                

                                  

Shakespeare and co Café ...
I thought this was going to be a kitschy touristy shop, but I was surprised to find that it's actually pretty nice, the food is good and it gives a pretty convincing illusion of authenticity. I highly advise it, but like the bookshop I just wish it was a little less popular.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

J D Salinger artistic equivalent ...

I always associate J D Salinger to Edward Hopper. His paintings always invite to us to make them our own,  we can create our own stories behind them. Likewise , Salinger, lets the reader analyze the characters with him, with no definite answer on who they are after finishing his stories, which in a sense reflects how we all try to understand people around us in the real world. Ambiguity and melancholy characterise both artist's work. Just before the war with the eskimos is my favourite of  his work, short story or novel, its the most ambiguous and intriguing, you can interpret whichever way you like. These are some of my favourite Hopper paintings:
      
Windows are an important metaphor in any artwork: illusion, dream etc. like in the Looking out  , the painting in the center. But the way that Hopper paints windows is similar to how Salinger writes stories. Its as though we are looking through a peep hole into their life. Illusion is a recurring theme in both of their work,like in the painting on the left New York Movies, there is a coalition between her thoughts, her worries, the world inside her head and that of the movie , two different worlds of imagination.

The ambiguity, the melancholy, the voyeurisme, our futile desire to analyze and  understand people  around us , is what makes both artist's work so captivating and similar.  

This is beautiful poem by Baudelaire:

Windows

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

Across the ocean of roofs, I can see a middle-aged woman, her face already lined, who is forever bending over something and who never goes out. Out of her face, her dress, and her gestures, out of practically nothing at all, I have made up this woman’s story, or rather legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself and weep.

If it had been an old man I could have made up his just as well.

And I go to bed proud to have lived and to have suffered in some one besides myself.

Perhaps you will say “Are you sure that your story is the real one?” But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?

- Charles Baudelaire 

Just writing ( no one is going to read this anyway)

Down in Vestal valley, on a cold winter’s morning, lays a child in the snow. He squashes the sleeping weeds on his back, and their spring. A melancholic, sickening sun seeps through the oppressive pale sky. The lonely white hills surrounding him defuse and rise into the wandering clouds. His lips shiver and quiver, the frosty wind whirls into his mouth, crystallising his tonsils turning them into icicles as in a grotto. His neck bathes in a glacial pool of resurrected mud and skeletons from last autumn leaves. Snug in his white duvet, snowflakes veil his face, he sleeps. At his feet, auriferous daffodils surge through, out of the depths, fluttering into the air, up to the billows of clouds. He sleeps, grinning like a child who grins after having pulled a trick. He is cold. He does not hear the children crying and shouting, neither does he hear the howling cars on the highway below, his resting face shimmers in the daylight’s froth. His hand lies on his chest. An inflamed red, Kool- aid like aqueous circles his skull. He is peaceful. He is silent.         

                                                                                                                                                                                                   

                   I know this painting has nothing to do with the text but its one of my favorites. 

Music...

I have never been really into music, but recently I have been discovering some new stuff. Here's a list of artists and songs, because who doesn't like a list ?

• Talking Heads. I particularly enjoy Psycho killer and Road to nowhere. They are out of this world weird.

                                                                    

• James Bay,I was so impressed by  Hold back the water I thought it was a cover from Bruce Springsteen. The song is great, his voice could be better.

                                                            

• Well I'm specifically obsessed with Come on Eileen by Dexy's midnight Runners 

•      Valentina by The Hunts is pretty good ...

• Who doesn't like Simone and Garfunkel ? So long Frank Lloyd Wright is a personal favourite

                               .                               

 

• And the Lumineers are back with their single Ophelia  !!!! All time favourite band.                                                          

                                                      

This image is so beautiful, so melancholic and absurd. One can imagine their own story based on this. It is a poem on its own ...

Reading books at the perfect time in your life and Sylvia Plath's fig metaphor

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and,  one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar 

One of the most beautiful metaphors on growing up, which is why this is such a wonderful novel, I couldn't recommend it more. This paragraphe meant nothing to me when I read it, but now I  finally understand what she meant. I also see the figs above me. I loved The bell jar,but I simply didn't relate or quite understand what Esther Greenwood/Sylvia Plath was going through. When I was a kid, I sneered at adults who said " Teenagers are trying to find their place in the world", but only now do I know how true this statement it . I didn't understand what being anyone meant. This is the same case with The catcher in the rye, I was amused by it, but it was only few months after reading it that I felt what Holden Caulfield felt, when he questioned that taxi driver on what happened to the ducks in the winter. This brings up a few questions,( Do we read books to young ? Do these books influence the way we feel as teenagers?)

I'm glad that I read these two books, and there is nothing wrong with not connecting to a book while you are reading it. But I certainly  want to revisite The Bell Jar. There are three books that came at the right time: I capture the castle by Dodie Smith, I was expecting it to be a sweet children's story but I was surprised by how dark and complex it actually was. This novel is the diary of a teenage girl, Cassandra living in a abandoned castle and struggling with poverty,  the reader is able to witness Cassandra growing up mentally and also see her writing develop. I have never believed more in a character then in Cassandra. The next novel is Zooey and Franny by J D Salinger. I prefer this novel to The catcher in the rye , I had a strong connection to Zooey and the last page is just beautiful. They are not very nice  siblings and are quite obnoxious,  but Salinger makes us care for both of them, forgive them and understand them. I will write another post on Salinger. Finally The Virgin Suicide by Jeffrey Eugenides, this novel is all I ask.The writing style, the themes and the metaphors are perfect. Eugenides doesn't overdo the metaphors either, and also have a purpose instead of being there for the sake of a beautiful image  . It walks a thin line between a news paper investigation and an allegory. I will also write a post about this novel for there is so much discuss.