Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Incurable Romantic Seeks Dirty Filthy Whore



The other day, I was searching online for an image that might go well with the phrase “incurable romantic.” This is because I was working on a speech—well, more like a riff, really—about curable romantics. 

What is a curable romantic?  Somebody who only catches yearning like the flu?  Somebody who wants to believe that love conquers less than all--like maybe Poland but not the rest of Europe?  Somebody who wades into the idea of love, but only up to the knees, because sharks? And is there a vaccine for this?  How exactly do you cure a curable  romantic—besides forcing a man to watch Jennifer Aniston movies, and a woman to watch a man watching American football?  (After which you become an incurable cynic.)  (So what’s a curable cynic then?  Besides maybe Scrooge before he’s visited by the ghosts.  Or is Scrooge a curable misanthrope?) 

(You get the idea—I’m an incurable monologist.) 
 
So I go to Google Images and I type in the phrase "incurable romantic," and I get a screen that looks like this
 




—where 9 out of 20 images refer back to the same phrase:  






ME:  Now THAT’S something you don’t see every day.
MY LIBIDO:  File under S for sadly.


And when I click on the image, I start reading about this artist called Harland Miller, who creates paintings like old Penguin book covers, with the craziest titles ever.  Which sent me to his website, which I scrolled through while I opened up another window and started searching for all the Penguin paintings of his that I could find. 

There are a ton of them out there.  Some of my favorites are below.  And if you want to read about Miller, here’s his website:
 
 
Harland Miller website


(I especially like the Hemingway and the Mailer titles. Not just because I’d pay cash money to read them, but because, when I think about it, I kind of already have.)
 
 

 
 



 



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