Nadja

I was reading Andre Breton s novel Nadja on the train today. It is a vaguely autobiographical account of his encounter with a beautiful and fascinating stranger who has in effect lost her mind. The descriptions of their wandering around in 1920 s Paris is quite vivid. Interested that he was in all things circumstancial and the nature of reality as a lived-in dream Breton finds his match in this woman who seem to have develloped an extra sensory capacity for dealing with a world that does not make sense any more. Surrealism was originaly concerned with the transformation of everyday reality (the revolution) through the encovering of the veneer that calls itself normal reality. The novel was considered scandalous at the time, mainly for the intimation that he had had a relationship with a mad woman for the sake of her madness or something along those lines.
One can think of the distance travelled since then by considering how surrealism has merely turned into an advertising technique in visual puns.
Today I recorded the sound of Paddington and the beautiful snowy landscape outside. Hopefully the images will load up on the blog otherwise I will have to go onto plan B for the images and sound to be accessible.