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He pursued the most banal life possible, freeing his essence from the confines of his body and distributing it among a community of the shiftless. He believed this the surest way to immortality. You cannot die when your life is lived a million times (this is a fucking keyring).

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...when Wilhelm Fleiss was reading the proofs of The Interpretation of Dreams in the autumn of 1899, he complained that the dreams were too full of jokes.

James Strachey's introduction to "Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious"

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A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare. Sometimes I read one which was written while the world went round, while grass grew and water ran.

Thoreau's Journal, 10 January 1841

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Puzzled reading this William Carlos Williams poem (making reference to E.E. Cummings) why it made me think of John Cage:

on getting a card long delayed from a poet whom I love but

with whom I differ touching the modern poetic technique

I was much moved to hear from him if as yet he does not

concede the point nor is he indeed conscious of it no matter

his style has other outstanding virtues which delight me

I learnt later WCW had doubts about the poem, prevaricating on its publication because of "its total lack of image."

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Nay it is enough merely to hearken to the Pythian god when he enjoins these two precepts, "Know thyself," and "Falsify the common currency."

Julian the Apostate, "To the Uneducated Cynics"

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John Singer Sargent, Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife, 1885

Ran round the Sargent show at the Tate again, still awful, the walls and the gallery filled with red-faced cunts. Among all the admirals leaning carelessly on the mantle and and their haughty wives decked in shimmery satin, the ones that stand out (not necessarily the best) are the drab, unglamorous picture of Woodrow Wilson looking like a Second Assistant Secretary at the Department of Public Works (that's what democracy gets you), and two unusually small portraits of Vernon Lee and Robert Louis Stevenson. Lee is blotchily moon-faced and alarmingly tinged with green like she might be sick at any moment, and Stevenson stalks creepily towards a void, fingering his moustache while his wife expires beneath hastily-thrown tinsel. This is how Sargent sees artists, spooky wraiths lingering on the fringes of polite society, seconds away from vomiting on the carpet.

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"No prose interpretation of poetry can have complete finality, can be difficult enough."

Robert Graves and Laura Riding, "William Shakespeare and E.E. Cummings: A Study in Original Punctuation and Spelling"

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Piet Mondrian, Lozenge Composition with Four Yellow Lines, 1933

The Piet Mondrian/Hilma af Klint show at the Tate is too busy and too hot and too tiring. af Klint's diagrammatic insistence on Something Beyond is tiring, and besides them Mondrian's pastelly cubist trees are tiring, and the way in an early room there are pictures by each called Evolution and that's meant to prove they had lots in common is tiring, and there'a s room full of drawings and notebooks and vitrines which is tiring and you wish there was a bench and a toilet and a bed. But then as you leave you see, hung high, Mondrian's Lozenge, and you feel faintly through your tiredness a faint glimmer of recognition, as you realise that Mondrian, like af Klimt, is asking you to believe in, no, he is demonstrating the existence of Something Beyond the Visible, and the thing that is Beyond the Visible is God, and it is Mondrian's version of God, which is to say, it is the Right Angle.

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Philip IV of Spain, Velazquez, c. 1656

When all you are doing in front of a painting is confirming your view of it, it’s time to take a rest.

T.J. Clark, “If These Apples Should Fall”

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Walter Sickert, Brighton Pierrots, 1915

"With Sickert ... even when his pictures are not so good there is an underlying drawing there that keeps them at a certain level." --Lucian Freud (in "Man with a Blue Scarf")

"Sickert sees like a draughtsman, and then builds a painting round his drawing.... Seeing comes first, paint comes after.... Sickert, for all his French training, painted as Legros accused all English artists of painting, by making a drawing and filling it in." --David Sylvester

Sylvester refers to this picture as "The Rehearsal, Brighton", but the Tate (which bought it in 1996) calls it "Brighton Pierrots" and gives it a wall text suggesting the empty deckchairs could be a symbol for the missing of the First World War. If it depicts a rehearsal then the empty chairs are meaningless, just a visual fact. Is the picture’s new name so it can have a more poignant meaning attached to it?

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Bacon, Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, 1983

Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx, c. 1826

Mainly clear enough, but where is this Fury coming from? Is it the meeting of Ingres’ rocks? And, after all, what a strange meeting it is...

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1888

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Felix Vallotton, Gertrude Stein, 1907 Ingres, Portrait of Monsieur Bertin, 1832

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Lucian Freud, Large Interior, Notting Hill, 1998

"... the background originally held the figure of the model Jerry Hall breastfeeding her baby. She sat thus for several months, until one day she called in sick. When, a couple of days later, she was still unfit to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the baby had not caused offence, so was not painted out, with the result that a naked and strangely breasted Dawson is now seen feeding the child."

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“Liking to find, to write beginnings, he tends to multiply this pleasure: that is why he writes fragments: so many fragments, so many beginnings, so many pleasures (but he doesn’t like the ends...)”