A Perfect Day For Bananafish

I've been reading For Esme - With Love and Squalor, and to be honest I must have been insane to not do so before now. Catcher in the Rye is probably my favourite book of all time, and this collection of short stories hasn't disappointed so far. I don't always like reading short story collections, because I sort of enjoy the small sense of achievement and fufillment that comes with finishing a novel. When you finish a short story you immediately have to throw yourself into another, which can be tiring and irksome; not always of course, and certainly not in this case.

I just found A Perfect Day For Bananafish, which I urge you to read. It's probably best to just get hold of a copy of the story collection, but if Bananafish is online then there are probably quite a few others kicking around somewhere.

More colour field today. Here you can find the poet Frank O'Hara interviewing the colour field painter Barnett Newman; I didn't watch all of it, it's a little out of my depth in terms of intellectualism, but here's a couple of Newman's paintings:

Barnett Newman - Adam (1951-2):



Eve (1950):



Rather than try and explain these paintings, which of course I can't do accurately or even coherently, it's probably best to watch the afformentioned interview; however, I did find a quote from Newman which is very interesting in relation to these paintings:

"What is the explanation of the seemingly insane drive of man to be painter and poet if it is not an act of defiance against man's fall and an assertion that he return to the Garden of Eden? For the artists are the first men."

So there you go.