"Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure that of being Salvador Dalí. And I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí." - Salvador Dalí.

Kind of full of it if you ask me.

Last week in Spanish, Ms. Roller assigned me a project dealing with Hispanic artists and she allowed me to go to the library to research for the class period. The library was crowded and boisterous. Mr. B had his class spread out across the room working on various projects and spare desktops were difficult to find. When I asked Ms. Nolan for a laptop she told me that all of Cart A was in use. So I went to the circulation desk to use of of those computers.

The new library interns do not understand my status in the library. Last semester I spent much of my third period doing intern-like things: checking in and out books, helping people find things, loading the empty printers with papers. I obviously knew the drill, but the interns didn't want to screw up on the first full week of the job. So as they told me to get off the computer I closed my Wikipedia page and opened Alexandria so that I might find a book that would help me. And I did.

The Essential Salvador Dalí by Robert Goff, which was helpful for me in two ways:

1. It posessed 112 pages of text and beautiful pictures for me to marvel at for my research.

2. It's nonfiction.

So I killed two birds with one stone. I researched for my Spanish project, while reading a nonfiction book that I could blog about now.

The Essential Salvador Dalí is a read that is definitely straight and to the point, though Dalí himself is not. He was very well off as a kid and adult, at least economically. But he's very confused and his paintings obviously reflect that he's a deep thinker. He was part of both of the surrealism and cubism movements, following Pablo Picasso.

My favorite thing about this book though wasn't the contents, but how they were displayed and layed out. It was kind of like a history text book. Pretty pictures, the main bits, but little side bars as well which were very interesting to see not only how Dalí was influenced by other artist, but by ideologies as well. Like Freud, who woulda know? Not I. I really like getting those extra bits.

Overall it's a good, fast read.