Distortions

André Kertész, Underwater Swimming, August 31, 1917

David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1971

See yourself for who you are.

Rafa Jenn, Portrait of the Viewer

I feel certain that I am going mad again.

Virginia Woolf committed suicide on this day in 1941. The note she left her husband:

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ‘til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.

If that looking glass gets broke . . .

As God poured the Light into the vessels, they catastrophically shattered,

Minamisanriku, Japan, March 2011

Vija Celmins: Night Sky #10

Georges Perec died 29 years ago today.

Georges Perec:

My ambition, as Author, my point, I would go so far as to say my fixation, my constant fixation, was primarily to concoct an artifact as original as it was illuminating, an artifact that would, or just possibly might, act as a stimulant on notions of construction, of narration, of plotting, of action, a stimulant, in a word, on fiction-writing today.