Here is an excerpt of The Soul is not a Smithy, which can be found in the book Oblivion: Stories.

All of the school building’s windows had a reticulate wire mesh built directly into the glass in order to make the window harder to break with an errant dodgeball or vandal’s hurled stone. Also, the pupil to my immediate left in the next row in the ersatz arrangement was Sanjay Rabindranath, who studied maniacally at
all times, and also had exemplary cursive, and was perhaps the single best pupil to sit next to during tests in all of R. B. Hayes. 

David Foster Wallace......

  ¨ The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.¨

 

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest,  which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list (covering the period 1923–2006). Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years.

Meet Richard Serra.......for further info read the article below :)

Richard Serra´s work impressed me deeply, as I was doing my internship at Dia: Beacon museum. Perceiving an art piece not only with the eyes, but also with your body, as you move in and around the pieces is pure ecstasy.

"What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are." - Richard Serra 

Serra was born in San Francisco and he went on to study English literature at the University of California, Berkeley and later at the University of California, Santa Barbara between 1957 and 1961. He then studied fine art  at Yale University between 1961 and 1964. While on the West Coast, he helped support himself by working in steel mills, which was to have a strong influence on his later work.

There´s one word that comes to my mind when I look at his work, harmony. Please, enjoy this short trip and meet Jack the Dripper´s art work.

It seems that the Yellow Kid wasn´t the first comic ever published in U.S. :D

Proto-comic books and the Platinum Age

The development of the modern American comic book happened in stages. Publishers had collected comic strips in hardcover book form as early as 1833, with The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, which appeared in New York in 1842, as the first example published in English.The G. W. Dillingham Company published the first known proto-comic-book magazine in the U.S., The Yellow Kid in McFadden's Flats, in 1897. It reprinted material – primarily the October 18, 1896 to January 10, 1897 sequence titled "McFadden's Row of Flats" – from cartoonist Richard F. Outcault's newspaper  comic strip Hogan's Alley, starring a character called the Yellow Kid. The 196-page, square-bound, black-and-white publication, which also includes introductory text by E. W. Townsend, measured 5x7 inches and sold for 50 cents. The neologism "comic book" appears on the back cover. 

History of Jazz -Part I. There´s so much material that I'll try to divide it in three parts. :)

Jazz is a music genre that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th century American popular music.  Its West African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note. However, Art Blakey has been quoted as saying, "No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa".  The word "jazz" began as a West Coast slang term of uncertain derivation and was first used to refer to music in Chicago in about 1915. 

Here is the history of jazz in brief. Check the video up to the very end and you will find out who the great performers are.

Jazz!!!!!! I found this great online radio. Just click on the link below the picture, click again on any style and enjoy

http://www.jazzradio.com/

Do you remember the first time you saw Tarzan? but have you ever read the novel? Let's start with Chapter 5.

Tenderly Kala nursed her little waif, wondering silently why it did not gain strength and agility as did the little apes of other mothers. It was nearly a year from the time the little fellow came into her possession before he would walk alone, and as for climbing--my, but how stupid he was! Kala sometimes talked with the older females about her young hopeful, but none of them could understand how a child could be so slow and backward in learning to care for itself. Why, it could not even find food alone, and more than twelve moons had passed since Kala had come upon it.

What do Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko,Tom Waits, Madonna and Ridley Scott have in common? Well all of them were influenced by Edward Hopper.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d31MM6P_U-g

Dune was written by Frank Herbert, and was published in 1965. Here is an excerpt.

In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul. It was a warm night at Castle Caladan, and the ancient pile of stone that had served the Atreides family as home for twenty-six generations bore that cooled-sweat feeling it acquired before a change in the weather.

Do you like science fiction? Well I remember watching Dune on TV before reading the book hehehe!. Can you recognize Sting?

Bukowski amazes me every time I read and reread any of his books. He makes the ordinary look extraordinary, or has it always been that way?. His writing is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. Try reading Pulp, to star with.

 luck from a kitchen

what matters is still being here in
this kitchen with my small radio, this
rolled cigarette and
with a two-foot stack of fresh blue
laundry.
I’m sure I’ve sprayed
the last of the roaches and
what matters is that this tabletop
is littered with new poems.
two drunks fight in the apartment
to the rear, the cats walk
up and down the courtyard
and around the corner
girls sit in massage parlor
doorways
dreaming of love.

The Call of Cthulhu, performed by Metallica!.....awesome !!!!!!

H. P. Lovecraft is one of the best writers of horror fiction and has influenced many other writers such as Stephen King.

The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for, although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even hint at its remotest affiliations.
      Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.

Did I mention I love Dan Flavin's work......check this brief analysis that for sure will enlighten your way.

Outside painting and sculpture, few artists are more identified with a particular medium than Dan Flavin. After 1963, and except for his drawings and prints, Flavin's work was composed almost entirely of light, in the form of commercially available fluorescent tubes in ten colors (blue, green, pink, red, yellow, ultraviolet, and four whites) and five shapes (one circular and four straight fixtures of different lengths).

It was in 1962 that Flavin introduced his first experiments with electric light art: square monochrome paintings with attached fixtures and bulbs, which he deemed "icons." He used the term ironically in relation to its traditional religious context, explaining,