Australis

Everything, occasionally.

[plzpityshatov]

[plzpityshatov]

Endre Nemes, painter.

[plzpityshatov]

[weltinnenraum-blog]

[invisiblestories]

Manuscript page from Thomas Bernhard’s Auslöschung (Extinction), 1986 (via weltinnenraum)

[condalmo]

I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive. And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape.

from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Book One

(via)

[rosebiar]

Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps 1846 “The Bookworm”

http://pinterest.com/pin/119556565078434824/

[kshshu]

Mongolian vertical script poem with drawing of Chinggis Khan in background.

[kshshu]

“The Mongolian writing system dates to the beginning of the 13th century when Chinggis Khan adopted the alphabet used by the Uighurs, who assisted the Mongols with civil administration. In turn, the Uighur alphabet came from the Sogdian script used by central Asian traders and can ultimately be traced back to Syriac, a writing system developed in the Fertile Crescent around the second century BC from the Aramaic alphabet.”

_

[Happy 850th Chinggis}

[plzpityshatov]

Roberto Calasso, profiled.  Please read Calasso.

[nordanvinden2]

[plzpityshatov]

Vsevolod Mikailovich Garshin, by Ilia Repin.

[plzpityshatov]

...[I]f I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.

-Wittgenstein, as reported in Recollections of Wittgenstein.

[plzpityshatov]

[plzpityshatov]

Marie Redonnet, who writes books.  Please read Redonnet.

[plzpityshatov]

When I was barely adolescent, the prospect of death flung me into trances; to escape them, I rushed to the brothel, where I invoked the angels. But with age, you become used to your own terrors, you undertake nothing more in order to be disengaged from them, you become quite bourgeois in the Abyss. --And although there was a time when I envied those Egyptian monks who dug their own graves in order to shed tears within them, if I were to dig mine now, all I would drop in there would be cigarette butts.

- E.M. Cioran

[plzpityshatov]

To read means to borrow; to create out of one's readings is paying off one's debts.

-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.

[plzpityshatov]

Zeus and Io (1531) and Danae (1531).  Antonio da Correggio.

[worldpaintings]

Viktor Vasnetsov

The Flying Carpet (with detail), 1880, oil on canvas, 165 x 297 cm, Art Museum of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.

Viktor Vasnetsov was a Russian painter who specialized in mythological and historical subjects. He was described as co-founder of folklorist/romantic modernism in the Russian painting and a key figure of the revivalist movement in Russian art.

A flying carpet, also called a magic carpet, is a legendary carpet that can be used to transport people who are on it. In Russian folk tales, Baba Yaga can supply Ivan the Fool or Ivan Tsarevich with a flying carpet or some other magical gifts. Such gifts help the hero to find his way “beyond thrice-nine lands, in the thrice-ten kingdom”. This painting represents Ivan returning home after capturing the Firebird, which he keeps in a cage. This work was Vasnetsov’s first attempt at illustrating Russian folk tales and started a famous series of paintings on the themes drawn from Russian folklore.