Edward R. Murrow with Marilyn Monroe during an interview for the TV series ‘Person to Person’ at the Ambassador Hotel, April 1st, 1955.

Begonia flowers + leaves and kalanchoe leaves in vase.

— Rachel McKibbens, from “outhouse,” published in Vinyl

Jenny George, from "The Artist"

— Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H., trans. Idra Novey (via proustitute)

Day Dress

c. 1885

Probably American

Kent State University Museum

girls I found the answer: pour all your feelings into what you create. Make bad art, be sincere in it, you don’t have to do anything perfectly but what matters is that it helps you partake in that old tradition humans have been engaging in ever since we painted the outlines of our hands on cave walls - create for sake of creating. We do it because we are here, we are alive, but only for a split second, so let art be something you leave in this world after you’re gone. Someone might find it and treasure it thousands of years later, but even if they don’t, what matters is that you put your soul into your creation. What matters is that something inside you that would be inexplicable without art finds a way to be externalized. Allow whatever lives inside your heart to become. Allow it to be art.

abnormally large trees please lend me some of your centuries worth of wisdom

Marilyn Monroe photographed by Ed Feingersh at the Ambassador Hotel in New York City, March 1955

Frank Stanford

There’s something about today’s poem — and all of Stanford’s work — that reminds me that the work of poetry is partly the work of figuring out how to access a weird little doorway to one’s soul, and then to figure out — harder, still — how to allow someone else to access that same doorway, too. It is the work of wondering why you are spellbound by the sight of a light on in a field across the way, and then figuring out the language of that wonder, so that someone else can wonder alongside you. One beauty of poetry — of many — is this invitation to wonder together, a kind of gathering-up of everyone alongside a railing where, on the other side, is everything you don’t know. It shines with light. It shimmers. It goes dark and then shines again. You say ooo. You say ahh. You say holy shit. You say I never knew. You say I still don’t. And you say it all together.

from Devin Kelly’s Ordinary Plots: Meditations on Poems + Verse

Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry featured in The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

3 11 AM

• Mother-of-Bride Ensemble: Dress, Jacket and Hat.

Date: 1910

Designer/Maker: Whitney, Chicago.

Medium: Embroidered silk chiffon, satin, soutache braid.

Thomas Annan. Glasgow. 1868

Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry featured in “The Selected Diaries of Virginia Woolf,”