What a week it’s been. Here’s what will be keeping me sane in between various work projects.

The Francis Bacon exhibition will be arriving at Tate Modern 11 September. I will be immersing into a Bacon world and coming out of the other side only after doing the following:

• Love Is The Devil John Maybury’s film charting Bacon’s relationship with artist George Dyer. Very powerful, according to reviews.
• Interviews With Francis Bacon Author David Sylvester’s account of his conversations with the artist.
• Francis Bacon Published by Phaidon, this was made on the occasion of Bacon’s major retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1985.
• And I’m sure there’s another book by Steidl. Must remember to check in on the site again.

Necklaces inspired by myths, fairy tales and birds at adorapop. A favourite is The Judgement Of Paris charm necklace.

Propelled by my obsession with stationery, I discovered The Regional Assembly of Text on a wander for paper, pens and pencils on the internet. Its store in Vancouver is a stationery paradise.

From quilted letters, journals made from found paper, and there’s even a monthly letter writing club.

Originally taken by poppytalk

Reminds me of Labour And Wait in London’s Brick Lane. It’s been a while since my last trip. Time for a visit, I think!

Don’t you just love looking into other people’s homes? Search deeply and you will find there is an interiors voyeur in every one of us.

The fantastically compulsive The Selby In Your Place is by photographer Todd Selby. He manages to sweet talk his circle of friends, who all seem to be of an artistic bent, to welcome him into their homes to take intimate pictures of their living rooms, bedrooms and various intimate nooks and crannies.

Just take a look at the home of model/photographer Grace and her partner Kenyan, a prop master. (What on earth is a prop master? Is it short form for property master? – it’s not important for the purposes of this post anyway.)

For more of Grace and Kenyan, go here.

There’s enough quirk in The Selby to keep you glued to the site into the small hours of the night.

Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence—especially if it occurs toward the end—or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation. Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence.

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Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

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At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can’t forget it—it will haunt you till it’s written.

……

– Truman Capote interviewed by Pati Hill of The Paris Review (Issue 16, Spring/Summer 1957)

A great article titled Lost For Words in The Guardian’s G2 about Briton’s declining reading habit. One quarter of Britons say they have not read a book in the past year. We also tend to buy “challenging literature” that we don’t read, like Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In my case, Heloise and Abelard and Simone de Beauvoir sit on my bookshelf collecting dust, staring down at me mocking my reading aspirations.

Stretches of time have also gone by without me picking up a book. To kickstart a reading habit in trouble, I know now to always give Martin Amis a wide berth, and there is nothing like a spot of chick lit. Fashion Babylon most recently came to my rescue.

National Literacy Trust director Jonathan Douglas shares with The Guardian tips to overcome reader’s block:

1. Be in charge To read for pleasure you have got to be in charge of your reading and that means knowing that it’s OK to stop reading if it gets boring. Lots of books drop off halfway through. For me, that includes Brideshead Revisited and Wuthering Heights.

2. Get recommendations Talk about books and ask friends for recommendations but avoid getting trapped in a tyrannical reading group for literary point-scorers. Life is too short to read books you do not like.

3. Have a varied reading diet After a satisfying course of Philip Pullman, cleanse your palate with a sorbet of Heat or Grazia.

4. Make sure that the book you have got fits the time you have got to read If your life is a frantic race and you only get to read on five-minute tube journeys or among the suds in the bath, do not start War and Peace. Grab one of the fantastic Quick Reads series that celebrity authors are now penning, or try a poetry anthology.

5. Read aloud Importantly, 76% of mothers and 42% of fathers read bedtime stories to their children, but sharing a book is a wonderful way for anyone to spend time.

6. Go for alternative ways of reading Try listening to a good book on tape or eavesdrop on Book at Bedtime on Radio 4.