Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it and the imagination to improvise.

Sylvia Plath, Journals

painting of the month

Autumn Leaves -- John Everett Millais, 1855-56

the october city

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring. -- Nelson Algren

(Painting by Thomas Moran -- Chicago World's Fair, 1894)

the random page

Facade.com is a website that offers free on-line Tarot card readings from a variety of decks, along with rune readings, I Ching and other features. One of those other interesting features is their Stichomancy option, which spotlights an old form of divination wherein a person flips open to a random page of a book and tries to gain insight from wherever he or she happens to turn to. There are categories like Biblical, classical or historical texts, along with passages from mysteries, plays or poems – or you can just allow a computer-generated extra-random choice.

A random whirl of the pages today brought up this excerpt from Honore de Balzac's Juana:

Montefiore forgot the pillage, and heard, for the moment, neither the cries, nor the musketry, nor the growling of the artillery. The profile of that Spanish girl was the most divinely delicious thing which he, an Italian libertine, weary of Italian beauty, and dreaming of an impossible woman because he was tired of all women, had ever seen.

I don't know that this particularly divined anything in my life but the story sounds intriguing, what with the jaded libertine and all. It also brought to mind the featured 1855 painting Portrait of a Spanish Lady by Gustave Courbet, who was something of a libertine himself.

vegetable loves

My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires, and more slow. (Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress")

Pictured: Vegetable Still-Life -- Frans Snyders, ca. 1600

oak park moments

This quote (sort of) etched in stone by Italian poet and writer Cesare Pavese was glimpsed at Oak Park's Eastgate Cafe, which even seems like a place where you might have once found Cesare Pavese drinking coffee and contemplating life. His first name is off by one small letter but otherwise those are definitely his words. Oak Park is well-known for former citizens Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway, but another Oak Parker worth noting is Philander Barclay. Philander rode his bicycle around the town back in the early 20th century and left behind a cultural and historical legacy of close to a thousand photographs of Oak Park as it was then. Click here  to read more about Philander, and here  to see some of his photographs.