For the window is experienced as simultaneously transparent and opaque. As a transparent vehicle, the window is that which admits light - or spirit - into the initial darkness of the room. But if glass transmits, it also reflects. And so the window is experienced by the symbolist as a mirror as well - something that freezes and locks the self into the space of its own reduplicated being. - Krauss

Victor Burgin’s screenprint on paper for his fiction films based on a book entitled ‘Nadja’ piqued interests. ’Nadja’, is published in 1928 by André Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement. It tells the true story of Breton’s brief but passionate affair with a mysterious woman whom he first met on a Paris street. He found Nadja the spontaneous and unaffected embodiment of those attitudes to the world which the Surrealists were self-consciously cultivating. Much of the book is set on the streets of Paris. Burgin has stated: ‘I wanted a sense of the repetitious street-walking in all this finding, losing, pursuing and refinding of Nadja, as she herself wanders aimlessly the streets of Paris’. The prints are conceived as though they were remnants of a lost film of ‘Nadja’. 

Text Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/burgin-no-title-p77515/text-display-caption

And John Waite’s ‘Missing You’ will always be a treasure chest - my 80’s nostalgia. Kudo’s to Chris Hudgins for doing such an awesome cover. 

"But now, O Lord, these things are past and time has healed my wound. Let me learn from thee, who art Truth, and put the ear of my heart to thy mouth, that thou mayest tell me why weeping should be so sweet to the unhappy. Hast thou — though omnipresent — dismissed our miseries from thy concern? Thou abidest in thyself while we are disquieted with trial after trial. Yet unless we wept in thy ears, there would be no hope for us remaining. How does it happen that such sweet fruit is plucked from the bitterness of life, from groans, tears, sighs, and lamentations? Is it the hope that thou wilt hear us that sweetens it? This is true in the case of prayer, for in a prayer there is a desire to approach thee. But is it also the case in grief for a lost love, and in the kind of sorrow that had then overwhelmed me? For I had neither a hope of his coming back to life, nor in all my tears did I seek this. I simply grieved and wept, for I was miserable and had lost my joy. Or is weeping a bitter thing that gives us pleasure because of our aversion to the things we once enjoyed and this only as long as we loathe them?"

Confessions of St.Augustine - Book Four (Chapter 5)

"How ardent was I then, my God, how ardent to fly from earthly things to thee! Nor did I know how thou wast even then dealing with me. For with thee is wisdom. In Greek the love of wisdom is called “philosophy,” and it was with this love that that book inflamed me. There are some who seduce through philosophy, under a great, alluring, and honorable name, using it to color and adorn their own errors. And almost all who did this, in Cicero’s own time and earlier, are censored and pointed out in his book. In it there is also manifest that most salutary admonition of thy Spirit, spoken by thy good and pious servant: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ: for in him all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily.”[63] Since at that time, as thou knowest, O Light of my heart, the words of the apostle were unknown to me, I was delighted with Cicero’s exhortation, at least enough so that I was stimulated by it, and enkindled and inflamed to love, to seek, to obtain, to hold, and to embrace, not this or that sect, but wisdom itself, wherever it might be. Only this checked my ardor: that the name of Christ was not in it. For this name, by thy mercy, O Lord, this name of my Saviour thy Son, my tender heart had piously drunk in, deeply treasured even with my mother’s milk. And whatsoever was lacking that name, no matter how erudite, polished, and truthful, did not quite take complete hold of me. "

Confessions of St.Augustine - Book Three (Chapter 4)

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And so here it goes. Soul bared, heart examined, final thesis submitted… 2012, threading afresh.

"An intellectual is neither a pacifier nor a consensus builder but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense - a sense of unwilling to accept easy formulas or ready made cliches or the smooth ever so accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or convention have to say and what they do. Not just passively unwilling but actively willing to say so in public. This is not always a matter of being a critic of government policies but rather of thinking the intellectual vocation as maintaining a state of constant alertness; of perpetual willingness not to allow half truths or received ideas steer run along. This involves a steady realism, an almost athletic rational energy and a complicated struggle to balance the problem of ones own self-hood against the demands of publishing and speaking out in the public sphere, is what makes it an everlasting effort, constitutively unfinished and necessarily imperfect. Yet its invigorations and complexities are for me at least the richer for it even if it does not make one particularly popular."

Edward Said, Palestinian American academic, political activist, and literary critic

Discovering Kubrik’s stills, a marvel. More here.

This makes staying in on a rainy day alright.

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