Too Tired for Sunshine

Tara Wray

 

Resolution number 9

[new lyrics for old songs]

 

Burning The Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.

 Notes friends tied to the doorknob,

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,

lists of vegetables, partial poems.

Orange swirling flame of days,

so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,

only the things i didn’t do

crackle after the blazing dies.

  – Naomi Shihab Nye

 via

 

Pump it up

Start the year in style.

 

Neighbors

Jean-Luc Leroy-Rojek

 

Self-Portraits through Art History

  Yasumasa Morimura

 

Word on the Street

via

 

Personal Message

Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber (collaborations)

 

The Eerie, Automaton Sculptures of Jamie Winn

more

 

Highly Detailed Surreal Illustrations by Dzmitryi Kashtalyan.

Belarus-based artist Dzmitryi Kashtalyan creates highly detailed character illustrations that look like something from a dream.

 

Calvin and Hobbes

via

 

Shitty Watercolour ‏

via

 

Van Gogh Never

Aja Trier

 

No One

Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber

 

Napoleon’s English Lessons

Napoleon Bonaparte—exiled to the island of St. Helena for his crimes against Europe—got the full treatment, what some might even call a sweetheart deal. As the Public Domain Review notes, “the British had agreed to provide Le Petit Caporal with plentiful wine, meat, and musical instruments.” He was given his own comfortable lodgings, a spacious country house, though it’s said to have been draughty and full of rats. On the other hand, Napoleon had to foreswear “what he most craved—family, power, Europe,” for a condition of extreme isolation. The loss weighed heavily.
 After spending six years 1200 miles from shore, he died, some say of poisoning, but others say of boredom. Of his few amusements, conversing with Count Emmanuel de Las Cases—“historian and loyal supporter who had been allowed to voyage with him to Saint Helena”—proved most stimulating. Prevented from receiving newspapers in French, he longed to read the few he found in English. Las Cases endeavored to teach Napoleon the language of his jailers, and the former Emperor struggled mightily to learn it. Eight pages in Napoleon’s own hand remain from his time as a student of English on St. Helena in the first few months of 1816.
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Ask me what I'm thinking

Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber

 

Lili, 2013

Alain Laboile

 

A dream in Umbria

Fulvio Roiter