“Maureen” via myparentswereawesome

Is there anything sexier than a blonde and a book?

Cartoonists + models in bathing suits = happy plewds.

(via THE BEAT)

Another Eve Arnold shot of Marilyn reading Ulysses

His drawings from his seventies often contrast himself as a buffoonish, wizened dwarf opposite a beautiful young woman.

Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers said it best:

Well some people try to pick up girls
And get called assholes
This never happened to Pablo Picasso
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare and
So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole

(…)

Well he was only 5’3”
But girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole

“Marilyn Monroe reading ULYSSES” by Eve Arnold, Long Island, 1954

In Joyce and Popular Culture, R.B. Kershner quotes a letter from Arnold about the day she took the shot:

We worked on a beach on Long Island…I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time). She she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it–but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively. When we stopped at a local playground to photograph she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her.

Jeanette Winterson on the photo:

“This is so sexy, precisely because it’s Marilyn reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. She doesn’t have to pose, we don’t even need to see her face, what comes off the photo is absolute concentration, and nothing is sexier than absolute concentration. There she is, the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book. The vulnerability is there, but also something we don’t often see in the blonde bombshell; a sense of belonging to herself. It’s not some playboy combination of brains and boobs that is so perfect about this picture; it is that reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover’s talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it’s true, but what we’re spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we’re not being asked to look at Marilyn, we’re being given a chance to look inside her.”

(via)