Motley Kamuka

I googled "who was the guy who slept with his daughters in the Bible." I found this amazing painting: That got me interested in the painter Jan Massijs or Jan Matsys  and that painting isn't even on his page. I put the various versions of his name into Amazon and there were no books about him. What? There is a book in Dutch , but they don't even carry the author on Amazon.us. Wikipedia does have quite a trove of photos of his paintings and closeups of various details. "He also gained a reputation as a painter of the female nude, which he painted with a sensuality reminiscent of the school of Fontainebleau ." The local museum only has one painting of him. Maybe more, it's confusing. It's in gallery 521. The Louvre in Paris has one; The Moneylender and his wife . Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna has The Merry Company and the above painting. And one more. Susanna and the Elders is at Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California Pala...

When I was younger I would read writing style books because I didn't have opinions about style. But I was reading a friend's book and I remembered one style element from when I was editing writers work as a supervisor in a child welfare program. My friend wrote that a church was "very modest". I feel that "very" is distracting, maybe even histrionic. Modest will do all the work you need. What is the difference between a modest church and a very modest church? So I would just cross out every "very" in my workers writing because it seemed hysterical. Mind you I don't mind hysteria, I was called emotionally reactive myself, though I had decided to let my emotions out, model emotional awareness, not panic that they need a lid put on them. The other thing about hysteria is the horrible history of men using the medical setting to try to put a lid on women. T. S. Eliot putting his wife in an institution because she was difficult. Actually I don...

I started reading Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality Volume 1 . I got it through my library. There are references to many books: Marquis de Sade 120 Days of Sodom My Secret Life by "Walter" . The PDF is 1173 pages, not sure how much of it this is. It was published in 11 volumes, over 4K pages. Not going to read that, wouldn't mind reading a version that was edited highlights. The Indiscreet Toys by Denis Diderot . I started reading this one because a guy has a magical ring that can make women's vaginas talk. But they don't say much beyond they feel abused. Toy=vagina. Reading the above, I read that it was a kind of copy of The Sofa . Where a sofa tells the story of all the sex people have on it. Well, I have a lot of things to read.

Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 in Columbia and died in 2014 in Mexico City. One Hundred Years Of Solitude was published in 1967. It is the story of 7 generations of starting with José Arcadio Buendía. I can really feel the influence of Don Quixote, but Marquez has his own brand of existential absurdity, solitude and the labyrinths of confusion. There's something about the way he describes families over time that doesn't feel too abstract or remote. Every once in a while I think he slips in something impossible to make sure you are awake, like fish swimming in humid air during rain. I think that is where the "magical realism" comes in, though genera labels are notoriously vague. I feel like this might be the kind of book I read every year for a while until I get tired of it. Links: Vanity Fair article . The Atlantic has an interesting article entitled "How One Hundred Years of Solitude Became a Classic" Lecture by Ian Johnson