Peanuts and Puccini

Oh. My. I can't believe I hadn't found this sooner : 

Yes, that is Peppermint Patty. Skating to Puccini. Whistled by Woodstock. Charles Schultz, je t'adore.

If you haven't heard the Maria Callas version, do indulge (or the Kiri Te Kanawa, which is also exceptional [I can't say better, might be blasphemy, but it's close]). It is my very favorite aria and, of course, Callas performs it brilliantly (that face!). Never fails to make me nostalgic for Florence (and my tortured loves). ♥

Oh, and life updates... Christmas was fab. Probably won't eat for the next week or so (stuffing and potatoes and pie... never-ending deliciousness). Photos coming soon.

Holiday Cheers

Sending a little holiday love out into the world... I hope that everyone enjoys their festivities and has a lovely time with family and friends.  Me, I've spent my Christmas Eve enjoying entirely too much coffee and tea, wandering around the city centre, and then going to the cinema. I saw Body of Lies... very holiday of me, I know. Nothing brings out the Christmas spirit like terrorism and anti-war Hollywood propaganda. My kind of holiday, to be sure.

Tomorrow I am off to Larissa and Zara's, my two very favorite Canadians, for a lovely international Christmas soiree. Ought to be lovely fun, with too much mulled wine, Baileys, champagne... I can't wait! Until then, just preparing a few dishes, wrapping some presents, and snuggling up with a warm blanket and watching trusty Bing and Rosemary in White Christmas. Always puts me in the mood, always.

José Parlá Hackney Canal - Rio Don Diego

(I can't get over how much I love this guy. He's like Pollock gone street. My gift to your eyes.)

Happy Holidays, m'loves.

*a cheery wave*

I am a cleaning queen today. Usually the impulse to clean comes about when I have an excessive amount of studying or essay writing to do... however, today it just arose out of a need to find a place for all of my Christmas cards. There's something very nostalgic about receiving letters in the post... despite the radical liberal in me that sees Christmas cards as a waste of tree and a piece of sparkly holiday religious propaganda (is that extreme? I think that's extreme) I still can't help but smile when I get one. Le sigh... I'm getting soft in my old age.  Moral of the story: Christmas cards make me clean. Or something. 

Speaking of sparkling happy things...I'm reminded of a passage from Proust (not surprisingly, as I live, eat and breath him these days):

'I enjoyed watching the glass jars which the village boys used to lower into the Vivonne to catch minnows, and which, filled by the stream, in which they in their turn were enclosed, at once "containers" whose transparent sides were like solidified water and "contents" plunged into a still larger container of liquid, flowing crystal, conjured up an image of coolness more delicious and more provoking than they would have done standing upon a table laid for dinner, by showing it as perpetually in flight between the impalpable water in which my hands could not grasp it and the insoluble glass in which my palate could not enjoy it.'

-Proust, Combray (201/2)

Klimt Water Nymphs (Silverfish) 1899

This is one of my favorite images from Proust (and also a lovely Klimt that fits in ever-so nicely). He translates the visual so well into text, with his obscenely long sentences, rich with possibilities of meaning. The image of the translucent minnow, a visual blur between water and glass, and glass and fish... form becomes content, content becomes form (eat your heart out, Haydn White [Eat your heart out? Seriously?]). It's a gorgeous image, and one of many examples why reading Proust isn't as torturous as it may at first seem. One gains a rich visual (as well as aural, but we'll save that for another day...) pleasure from Proust.

PS. "...The ancient Greeks had an expression (quoted by Plutarch as a 'Parable of Pythagoras') that translates as 'Eat not the heart.' It meant not to consume oneself with troubles or worries, which could be almost as devastating as eating one's heart." 

--James Rogers Dictionary of Cliches

***

John William Waterhouse Hylas and the Nymphs 1894

The Pre-Raphaelites are brilliant. When mixed with the epicly entertaining literary phenomenon that is Greek myth... unbeatable. It's such an erotic piece, delicately executed, brilliantly colored... the ultimate in visual pleasure. I would never leave the Manchester Art Gallery if I had the choice. I wish I could put Hylas in my pocket and take it home with me. I'd probably be deported. Le sigh.

Waterhouse rock my socks off. Gorgeous.

the death projects

Christian Boltanski, Réserves: Lac des Morts

I think I am a masochistic person. 

I've two essays to write for this term, both offering a fair amount of freedom in topic choice. Still, I've decided to write both on different representations of death in a variety of artistic mediums. 12,000 words... 50 pages... x amount of photographs, images, texts, representations... all dedicated to my academic ponderings on a subject that literally nauseates me due to my completely (ir?)rational fear of it.

Is there pleasure in self-torture? I'll let you know when I've finished my little projects of doom. If not in their creation, I am sure there will be pleasure in purging them from my life, flinging them at my professors and running for dear life. Oh. Dear. Life.

never become emotionally attached to man, woman, beast or child

Sally Mann Picnic 1992

As there is a geometry in space, so there is a psychology in time, in which the calculations of a plane psychology would no longer be accurate because we should not be taking account of Time and one of the forms that it assumes, forgetting—forgetting, the force of which I was beginning to feel and which is so powerful an instrument of adaptation to reality because it gradually destroys in us the surviving past which is in perpetual contradiction with it. (Proust, The Fugitive, 637)

When it comes down to forgetting versus a surviving past, I would take forgetting any day. I want to exist in a perpetual state of amnesia. 

Blogging with apathy

I have a love / hate relationship with blogs, as with most things in life. I will blog with vigor, then something will happen in my life of some mild significance, and I will then delete said blog because it has been made obsolete by this event. Then, the effects of this happening slowly fade, and I am left blog-less and alone. I could blame my fickleness, or a momentary shame in my posts' lack of substance, personal embarrassments, hopes unfulfilled, etc etc.  The feeling one is left with is akin to destroying an ex-lover's letters or the photographs of a friend-turned-enemy. It didn't leave me with the euphoric void that I sought... there is no pleasure in destruction.

I've been pondering death quite a bit lately. Not because I'm morbid (questionable) or suicidal, but because I am writing an essay for a course concerning the subject in terms of photography. (There is an irony in this choice, as I've never encountered a person more terrified of death than I. The personal crises are constant.) Roland Barthes claimed that the photograph testifies to both the existence of a thing at a particular past moment, but also exposes its pastness in absolute terms. Photograph becomes both witness and memorial, evidence to a past life and an eternal death.

I wonder what Barthes would say about the blog. More immediate than a memoir, more transient than an op-ed... Perhaps not a death, as the photograph, but certainly a witness. And when the witness is destroyed? 

"Thus, History consists of tiny explosions of life, of deaths without relays. Our human impotence with regard to transition, to any science of degrees... (Death, real death, is when the witness himself dies)."

Barthes, The Rustle of Language, 362

Despite the implications, its uses are more simply explained, at least in my case... blog as the ultimate tool for procrastination. I really don't want to write this essay.