Roberto Juarez -- "Will Will Border" (detail)

Corridor #9, Ellis Island by Stephen Wilkes

David Newsom Thistle #1

Lee Bontecou's studio

Le repos des pensionnaires by Annette Messager

The First Chapter of Lolita

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

The Town of Secota by Theodore de Bry, 1590

Polygonatum Biflorum

Polygonatum Biflorum; Small Solomon's Seal, 1914

Edwin Hale Lincoln (1848-1938)

Platnum Print

Emily Fest '07 -- tickets still available

The career of flowers differs from ours
only in inaudibleness.

Dining Room, Havana by Michael Eastman

"Psychidae No. 2" by Darren Waterston

Antonio Girbes Photograph

(bonus quote from John Lennon)

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.
-- John Lennon

Emily Fest '07 Continues...

There is no first, or last, in Forever -
It is Centre, there, all the time -

From Emily Dickinson

No Rose, yet felt myself a'bloom
No Bird - yet rode in Ether.

ArtNews Cover, June 2004

"Eagle with Butterflies" by Peter van Sambeek

A Photograph by Paul Buchanan

From The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

It is said also that Sisyphus, being near death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of ths world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth.

Thomas French, Engineering Drawing

Amaretti di Lazzaroni Wrapers

Some Dialogue from They Might Be Giants

Dr. Mildred Watson: You're just like Don Quixote. You think that everything is always something else.
Justin Playfair: Well, he had a point. 'Course he carried it a bit too far. He thought that every windmill was a giant. That's insane. But, thinking that they might be, well... All the best minds used to think that the world was flat. But what if it isn't? It might be round. And bread mold might be medicine. If we never looked at things and thought of what might be, why we'd all still be out there in the tall grass with the apes.

A Line from Emily Dickinson

What indeed is Earth but a Nest,
from whose rim we are all falling?

J.E. Markham Peach Patent

A Passage from The Catcher in the Rye

The thing was, I couldn’t think of a room or a house or anything to describe the way Stradlater said he had to have. I’m not too crazy about describing rooms or houses anyway. So what I did, I wrote about my brother Allie’s baseball mitt. It was a very descriptive subject. It really was. My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder’s mitt. He was left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he’s have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He’s dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You’d have liked him. He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was to have a boy like Allie in their class. And they weren’t just shooting the crap. They really meant it. But it wasn’t just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair. I’ll tell you what kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all, and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a sudden, I’d see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence – there was this fence that went all around the course – and he was sitting there, about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That’s the kind of red hair he had. God, he was a nice kid, though. He used to laugh so hard at something he though of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair. I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don’t blame them. I really don’t. I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn’t do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it, and you didn’t know Allie. My hand still hurts me once in a while, when it rains and all, and I can’t make a real fist any more – not a tight one, I mean – but outside of that I don’t care much. I mean I’m not going to be a goddam surgeon or a violinist or anything anyway.
-- J.D. Salinger

Seed of Change Chocolate Bar Wrappers

A Photo by Kurokawa Suizan

A Poem from Emily Dickinson

To lose what we
never owned
might seem an
eccentric Bereavement
but Presumption
has its' Affliction
as actually as
Claim -

Emily
(mid-1870's)