Ex Libris Kirkland is my entirely self-centered way to keep track of what I read, what I enjoy, and what I want to remember.
📓 Recent Notes 📓
Picked this up bc of its reputation, although I think other Chatwin travel books might be more up my alley. I meh'd all the way through this.
a note about The Songlines
Louise Nevelson was in high school in 1918?? I thought she was much younger, like a generation or two younger.
a note about Making Art and Making a Living
I think the blurb I had read on this led me to think it would be more of a survey of artists working today. The history is interesting but I'd be much more curious if there was a 2026 artist edition!
a note about Making Art and Making a Living
A pop history that surveys (mostly) 20th century artists, and talks about how they actually funded their lives. Did they have other jobs? family money? allowances? inheritances? working spouses? patrons? Or you know, actually sell their work?
a note about Making Art and Making a Living
A first person, present-tense narrative of an older French guy walking the silk road, all on foot. This is book 2 of 3, and this one starts at the edge of Turkey and travels through Iran. It doesn't have much of an overall plot but the details and slice-of-life in a pre 9/11 Middle East are pretty compelling.
a note about Walking to Samarkand
📖 Recent Quotes 📖
[ But oh man, the classic origin story for marketing moleskins, right here in Chatwin:]
'Do you mind if I use my notebook?' I asked.
'Go ahead.'
I pulled from my pocket a black, oilcloth-covered notebook, its pages held in place with an elastic band.
'Nice notebook,' he said.
T used to get them in Paris,' I said. But now they don't make them any more.'an excerpt from The Songlines
She [Louis Nevelson] exhibited her work for twenty-five years without making a single sale, didn't have her first solo exhibition until she was forty-two years old, and didn't get her big break until her work was included in a 1958 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, when Nevelson was almost sixty.
an excerpt from Making Art and Making a Living
But still,—still it is so poor a thing to miss your plum because you do not dare to shake the tree! It is especially so, if you are known as a professional stealer of plums!
an excerpt from Is He Popenjoy?
When such a man as he appears suddenly with a foreign woman and a foreign child, and announces one as his wife and the other as his heir, having never reported the existence of one or of the other, it is time that some enquiry should be made.
an excerpt from Is He Popenjoy?
"There is no need to be rude."
"I say what I think," said the woman. "My people don't hide behind masks."
"You certainly do," said Awt equably. "Your mask is rudeness and offensively plain speech. We only see how you wish to appear, not your true self. Mask or not, Watchman Inarakhat has been more honest than you."an excerpt from Lake of Souls