Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

An ongoing digital archive of 1,399 items (and counting) proving that I read, I saw, and I actually paid attention.

Category is

Book

  • Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

    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.”

  • 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.

  • “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

    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

    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

    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

    The Fran Lebowitz Reader

    by Fran Lebowitz

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

  • Happy Hour

    Happy Hour

    by Marlowe Granados

    “I realize now, the older you get, the harder it is to be impressed because people make you feel ashamed of ever being impressed by anything at all. I kept many glowing remarks to myself because of this.”

  • “Kiki’s never sure if she’ll perform, until she does. Sometimes she’s not in the mood, says she’s too drunk. It’s different now that people come here to watch her, now that she stands in front instead of among them. They clang their cutlery and chant her name until she takes her place in the light and starts her slow-motion dance, no distance to lend her mystery, no stage to make her majestic, everyone sharing the same heat and smelling the same sweat.”

  • “As the Queen’s grandmother Queen Mary once said to a relative, ‘You are a member of the British royal family. We are never tired and we all love hospitals.’”

  • When Brooklyn Was Queer

    When Brooklyn Was Queer

    by Hugh Ryan

    “But nothing lasts forever, even silence.”

  • “Is there anyone in the civilized world whose eyes do not light up and face does not smile when he hears the word champagne?”

  • “It is always assumed that Venice is the ideal place for a honeymoon. This is a grave error. To live in Venice or even to visit it means that you fall in love with the city itself. There is nothing left over in your heart for anyone else.”

  • “Let’s see, what else? Don’t go into debt over clothes. Hug your dogs while you have them. Know that you can skip most anything. You will fall in love eventually. Remember that. Also, the things you like aren’t weird. Don’t worry about being normal. It’s an awful thing to aspire to.”

  • Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

    Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

    by Jeremy Atherton Lin

    “I found myself taking more risks, because failure had a second life—it could spin a yarn. There was an agency in the retelling, in the self-deprecation and of course self-mythologizing. Memoir is how you groom yourself. Memoir is drag.”

  • Rules of Civility

    Rules of Civility

    by Amor Towles

    “For better or worse, there are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense.”

  • On Booze

    On Booze

    by F. Scott Fitzgerald

    “I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy—why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.”

  • In Cold Blood

    In Cold Blood

    by Truman Capote

    “There is considerable hypocrisy in conventionalism. Any thinking person is aware of this paradox; but in dealing with conventional people it is advantageous to treat them as though they were not hypocrites. It isn’t a question of faithfulness to your own concepts; it is a matter of compromise so that you can remain an individual without the constant threat of conventional pressures.”

  • The House of Bernarda Alba

    The House of Bernarda Alba

    by Federico García Lorca

    “I want no weeping. We must look death in the face. Silence! Be quiet, I said! Tears, when you’re alone. We will all drown ourselves in a sea of mourning. The youngest daughter of Bernarda Alba has died a virgin. Did you hear me? Silence! Silence, I said! Silence!”

  • Rebecca

    Rebecca

    by Daphne du Maurier

    “The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.”