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I know I have posted for ... literally years, but recently I've been experimenting with making YouTube videos on subjects adjacent to those I covered on this blog (literature, film, the arts in general).

I feel like it's a little gauche to promote my own work on here, especially after being gone for so long, but, oh well, here's a video I made dissecting my favorite scene from Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Mirror.

It's the one with the ghostly woman and the ring of condensation.

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Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1968, Acrylic on paper

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I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

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What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.

T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

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At the first turning of the second stair I turned and saw below The same shape twisted on the banister Under the vapour in the fetid air Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears The deceitful face of hope and of despair.

T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”

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Let these words answer For what is done, not to be done again May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”

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Because I cannot drink / There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”

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Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign?

T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”

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Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1969

signed, numbered 2042.69 and variously inscribed on the reverse acrylic on paper mounted on canvas 78 ½ by 58 ½ in. 199.4 by 148.6 cm.

© Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/ARS 

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Hopeless.

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God, the new year. Is there anything more demoralizing than the chasm that exists between the symbolic promise of rebirth and renewal and the stark fucking reality that time continues with complete indifference to dates or narratives or human life?

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…Cause you’ve been here before, and you’ve been here before

then a word washed to shore then a word washed to shore…“

- Andrew Bird//2005

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Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care. My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

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My car is limping, Dolores Haze, And the last long lap is the hardest, And I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

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The Ghost of the dance by Alfred Kubin (1877-1959)