Daily Diversion #46: My Smokin’ Hot Heart

My love, enjoying his own diversion.

“A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”-William Butler Yeats

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 16th-22nd September

Anne Bradstreet died on 9/16/1672. “Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.”
William Carlos Williams was born on 9/17/1883. “Life is valuable–when completed by the imagination. And then only.”
Upton Sinclair was born on 9/20/1878. “All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.”
Stevie Smith was born on 9/20/1902. “My Muse sits forlorn/She wishes she had not been born/She sits in the cold/No word she says is ever told.”
Babette Deutsch was born on 9/22/1895. She graduated from Barnard College in 1917.
Mary Roberts Rinehart died on 9/22/1958. “Men deceive themselves; they look back on the children who were once themselves, and attempt to reconstruct them. But they can no longer think like the child…”

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[All images are in the Public Domain and are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

An interview with E. M. Forster, 1958.

“There is another world, but it is in this one.”-William Butler Yeats

Clouds and myths and faerie stories?

Title: The White Blackbird A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter
Author: Honor Moore
Year Published: 1996 (Penguin Books)
Year Purchased: 2004/2005
Source: A bookstore in Buffalo, New York
About: I love stumbling across books about people whose names and faces don’t register. It is fair to say that I am obsessed with the obscure and the odd and the oddly obscure, especially when the subjects in question are creative and rebellious women. Anyone determined to live a life of artistry has to break some barriers. Deterrents come in many forms, but we all have expectations that we must push past in order to have the freedom to create. Continue reading →

No commentary is necessary.

I would spend every waking moment doing this…

Winslow Homer, The New Novel (1877).

if only I could.

Title: Leading Ladies
Author: Don Macpherson
Year Published: 1986/This edition: 1989 (Conran Octopus Limited/Crescent Books)
Year Purchased: 1990s
Source: It was a Christmas gift from my Aunt Lauree.
About: This is a coffee table book, not a scholarly work. The text is nice, but not genre-shattering; it’s the standard drill for this kind of product. The images are from The Kobal Collection, so the writing stands no chance of taking first place, anyway. The whole gang is here, from Theda Bara to Doris Day, Jean Harlow to Jean Seberg, Anna Magnani to Debra Winger, represented by an array of unusually stunning photographs. Since that is the dominant reason for buying a book like this, you’ll walk away happy.
Motivation: I’ve been fond of old movies since I was a child.
Times Read: Multiple
Random Excerpt/Page 22: “By the time she was twenty-five, Colleen Moore was earning a weekly salary of $12,500, a reflection of her value to a studio for whom she was a highly profitable jazz baby. With her bobbed hair, cheeky face and alert eyes, she resembles to modern eyes an uncanny combination of the better remembered Clara Bow and Louise Brooks. But in the 1920s, it was Moore who was the incarnation of the twenties flapper girl.”
Happiness Scale: 10++
Publicity photo of Colleen Moore for Argentinean Magazine. (Printed in USA) (Photo credit: Wikipedia). Here, in her post-Flapper days.