June, 2013 - The Seventh Sphinx

I have so many bikinis, one has to justify owning them somehow. Pairing a bandeau with a high-waisted skirt (or pants, or shorts) makes it so much friendlier, so much more wearable. There is still a fair amount of skin on display yet the effect is, to me at least, conservative. Well, let’s call it summer conservative, compared to a full abdominal display.

I sometimes enjoy when a photo turns out blurry as the image then really comes down to the silhouette, which is a preoccupation of mine. Whether or not I like a look often comes down to the overall silhouette, which it is in a way easier to see from a distance (literal or figurative), without the distraction of the details. This shot has the ideal amount of blurriness. Probably there is a technical term for that?

[UPDATE (one option): bokeh, n. a Japanese term for the subjective aesthetic quality of out-of-focus areas of a photographic image. Thanks, Chris.]

Goorin Bros. hat, marimekko for anthropologie bikini top, American Apparel pencil skirt, gladiator sandals from Italian eBay boutique*, vintage Timex watch, Scotch & Soda wrap bracelet, Spektre sunglasses.

*I was looking for gladiator sandals in a very specific style (leather straps of a certain width, arranged with a certain degree of complexity–not more, not less–with ankle straps, not shoddy, affordable…) for about four or five years before I found these, and they meet all of my criteria.

Came across these recordings and found them both, each in their own way, so intelligent and funny. Both writers I admire tremendously.

The Nabokov interview I find fantastically eloquent, almost unbelievably eloquent. His pronunciation is resonant, with a peculiar cadence that gives the sense of savoring his own words.

“When about to fall asleep after a good deal of writing or reading, I often enjoy, if that is the right word, what some drug addicts experience — a continuous series of extraordinary bright, fluidly changing pictures. Their type is different nightly, but on a given night it remains the same: one night it may be a banal kaleidoscope of endlessly recombined and reshaped stained-window designs; next time comes a subhuman or superhuman face with a formidably growing blue eye; or — and this is the most striking type — I see in realistic detail a long-dead friend turning toward me and melting into another remembered figure against the black velvet of my eyelids’ inner side. As to voices, I have described in Speak, Memory the snatches of telephone talk which now and then vibrate in my pillowed ear. Reports on those enigmatic phenomena can be found in the case histories collected by psychiatrists but no satisfying interpretation has come my way. Freudians, keep out, please!”

And Virginia Woolf’s voice, her deep, sonorous vowels, I love.

“It is not a word indeed until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great writer knows that the word “incarnadine” belongs to “multitudinous seas.”

Month: June 2013

I’m with the bandeau

weekend distraction: recordings of Woolf and Nabokov