Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

An ongoing digital archive of 1,364 items (and counting) proving that I read, I saw, and I actually paid attention.

Category is

Book

  • Answered Prayers

    by Truman Capote

    “Most secrets should never be told, but especially those that are more menacing to the listener than to the teller.”

  • Watermark: An Essay on Venice

    by Joseph Brodsky

    “Aesthetic sense is the twin of one’s instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics.”

  • Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances

    by Lisa Morton

    “The unusual name was supplied by [Elijah] Bond’s sister-in-law, medium Helen Peters, who asked the board for a name and watched as it spelled O-U-I-J-A (although there’s also been speculation that the name is a combination of the French and German words for ‘yes’).”

  • Affinities: On Art and Fascination

    by Brian Dillon

    “Stared at as closely or keenly as possible, even the most elegant, precise, or selfsame forms are revealed as monsters.”

  • Hotel Splendide

    by Ludwig Bemelmans

    “It’s always wonderful when something altogether wrong ends right, without the help of either religion or the police.”

  • The Woman in Me

    by Britney Spears

    “In that moment, I made peace with my family—by which I mean that I realized I never wanted to see them again, and I was at peace with that.”

  • Where All Good Flappers Go: Essential Stories of the Jazz Age

    by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Anita Loos, Dorothy Parker, and more

    “He wondered idly whether she was a poor conversationalist because she got no attention or got no attention because she was a poor conversationalist.”

  • The Fawn

    by Magda Szabó (translated by Len Rix)

    “I have always distrusted good people. I never believed as a child that goodness came naturally. I always suspected that beneath it lay some sort of payment for services past or still to come.”

  • The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World

    by Paul Fisher

    “A portrait is a picture with something wrong with the mouth.”

  • The New York Subway Map Debate

    by Gary Hustwit

    “This is Mr. Vignelli’s map, which everyone can see is an aesthetically pleasing map. And it’s made some lovely T-shirts for us at the MTA. But there is no relationship between the subway routes on this map and the city above. I’m a native New Yorker and I know what New York looks like, and it doesn’t look like this.”

  • And the Category Is…: Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community

    by Ricky Tucker

    “…this idea of how we can individually and collectively reenact or instead metabolize and recover from trauma in our bodies is most intriguing. How being a trans woman successfully walking body after your transition, finally being heralded for your femininity by your peers after being physically threatened, endangered, and brutalized by the outside world for not blending in might just be a type of bodily recovery from a lifetime of such trauma.”

  • Kurt Weill: On Stage: From Berlin to Broadway

    by Foster Hirsch

    “I write for today. I don’t give a damn about writing for posterity.”

  • Quant by Quant: The Autobiography of Mary Quant

    by Mary Quant

    “One of the things I’ve learned is never to hoard ideas, because either they are not so relevant or they’ve gone stale. Whatever it is, pour it out.”

  • Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

    by Dana Thomas

    “Real luxurious people hate status. You don’t look rich because you have a rich dress. When you look at a person, do you see the spirit or the sexiness or the creativity? Just to see a big diamond, what does it mean? It’s all about satisfaction. I think it’s horrible, this judgment based on money. It’s all an illusion that you look better because you have a symbol of luxury. Really, it doesn’t bring you anything. It’s so banal.”

  • Living Museums: Conversations with Leading Museum Directors

    Edited by Donatien Grau

    For this ambitious inquiry, Grau traveled to Williamstown, New York City, Vienna, Oxford, Ampthill, Moscow, Berlin and London to speak to the people working behind the scenes in the Western world’s greatest museums. Focusing on the 1960s to the 2000s, Grau details the stories of these cultural institutions from the perspectives of those who know them.

  • What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art

    by Will Gompertz

    “An artist’s job was not to give aesthetic pleasure—designers could do that; it was to step back from the world and attempt to make sense or comment on it through the presentation of ideas that had no functional purpose other than themselves.”

  • Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict

    by Peggy Guggenheim

    “When the nuns came to be blessed by the Patriarch, who on special holy days, went by my house in a motorboat, I detached the phallus of the horseman and hid it in a drawer. I also did this on certain days when I had to receive stuffy visitors, but occasionally I forgot, and when confronted with this phallus found myself in great embarrassment. The only thing to do in such cases was to ignore it. In Venice a legend spread that I had several phalluses of different sizes, like spare parts, which I used on different occasions.”

  • The Sleeping Car Porter

    by Suzette Mayr

    “Even when he stands still, he moves. Baxter flickers everywhere and nowhere. A blink in a shuddering train window.”

  • Paris to the Moon

    by Adam Gopnik

    “Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed—mysterious, uninviting.”

  • The Fran Lebowitz Reader

    by Fran Lebowitz

    “All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.”