If you came back as the deep sea I would come back as the salt.

Give me their album, quickly.

Animaux d(h)om(me)estiques

Lacan

It's just because I've spent a lot of time "with" him recently, trying to write a paper about his "aesthetics" if you can call it that. I've just found this video of him lecturing, on youtube. He seems even more mad and even more french in real time. A tad shocking, that!




But, facetiousness aside, he does have a point, I think. Several, in fact. On the other hand - the points might be mine, and I might be reading them into every opaque string of words that crosses my path. I might be a little bit in love with the notion that everything (or everyone) is dominated primarily by a feeling of a lack, and that all we do is motivated by the desire to fill this emptiness, though this can, by definition, never be done. Also it reminds me of something Adam Roberts, a much valued professor back in Royal Holloway who also wrote an excellent essay about "Byron's vagina" - google it! -, once said in his course, and I believe he was quoting some philosophical pop star or the other way around: "The glass is neither half full nor half empty, it's twice as large as it needs to be."

That noted, I can only end upon a soppy note, saying that for whatever undetectable reasons - it might or might not be related to the apocalyptic rain falls of the last few days - my glass is positively overflowing at the moment, and I think if I wait a little longer it might become enough to fill a bathtub or a small paddling pool.
But, apologies, apologies, apologies! The above paragraph is exactly the reason why you never get to read books written by happy people: They'd be crap!

Heaven.

In the face of the gaping blogging void of the last two-ish weeks, one could argue that I have nothing more to say.



But of course that's not true, yeah? I've just not found much time for geschwurbel recently.



Bear with me.

Per aspera ad astra ...

Let's say this picture is about storing away assorted beginnings and endings and the emergence of a friendly summer sky.

I ♥ Vienna: Schlösselgasse

It's always amazing how I still haven't seen all the streets and alleys in the district I live in, even though it's the smallest in Vienna. And it always takes little accidents like getting on the wrong tram or getting off one stop earlier to make me go exploring. I didn't have much time for taking pictures today, because I had a library to go to before closing time, but here's two, and there's more at flickr, actually.

Later I met Theodora to see 4 homosexual-love-themed short films via the identities queer film festival, which turned out to be really rather depressing and shattered our rose-tinted illusions of sweet gay college boy love with the cast iron meat mallet of bleak human reality, or real humanity, whichever you prefer.
We were indeed so devastated that we had to have pizza and ice cream and talk a lot about romance and neuroses. I have to conclude that my idea of romance is problematic, and that the existence of neuroses is therefore not surprising.

A life-long love affair.

I find this rather beautiful:

On the one hand, I believe that all of literature is implicit in language and that literature itself is merely the permutation of a finite set of elements and functions. But surely literature is constantly straining to escape from the bonds of this finite quantity, surely literature is constantly struggling to say something it does not know how to say, something that cannot be said, something it does not know, something that cannot be known? One can say of something that it cannot be known as long as the words and the concepts for saying and thinking it have not yet been used in that particular juxtaposition, as long as they have not yet been arranged in that particular order, in that particular sense. The whole struggle of literature is in fact an effort to escape from the confines of language. Literature reaches forth from the extreme edge of the effable. It is the demand made by that which no dictionary contains which stimulates literature.
(Italo Calvino, "Myth in the Narrative")

I feel a personal paradigm shift coming on.
I want an infinite collection of awesome.