Continuing to Slice

I was not in an energetic frame of mind on New Year's Eve, nor were certain of my "known associates," so my mother persuaded me that we should take a look at some of our slides, those things we were planning to scan except that the slide scanner we ordered never arrived.
I was all for looking at slides, but for some reason we got into a box that was mostly pictures from my first four months of life. While my parents thought these were pretty exciting, I cannot say that baby pictures are really of great interest to me, even if I am the subject. Unfortunately my birth seems to have diverted my parents from photographing their rabbit, who was much handsomer, and there were only two pictures of him in the whole batch. C'est la vie...
And, life being what it is, I have continued chopping my dissertation into smaller and more manageable chunks. It has lost at least 20 pages in the past few days, and (more important) become better organized. I'm not sure that we should think of this as any kind of bonsai operation, however.
The pruning process does cause me to pay close attention to quotations. For example, from today's chapter:

"They [Ivan Goll's group] define surrealism wholly in the Apollinairean sense as the transposition of reality to the sphere of poetry, the direct suspension of reality without ideology and abstract logic, without parasitic naturalism." (Teige)

"[The Surrealists] exalt masturbation, pederasty, fetishism, exhibitionism and, finally, bestiality." (Ilya Ehrenburg)

"Psychoanalysis confirms that art is a regression to infantile experience." (Nezval)

"Art today is harakiri on reality." (Nezval)

"They will all rise, the man-letter, the gnawed bone, the full stop, comma, altar, crutch, staircase, claw, stuffing, the man-coffin, whistle, shoelace, pebble, luggage, cubes of mist and man-sediment. There will rise liquid beings made of cotton wool, snake skins, feathered trees, in fragments, beings withering at the hip, stuck together from words, borne by the wind, full of pustules, nourished by ice, in outline, hollow beings, modelled in snow, in raw meat and in sand.” (Štyrský)

I don't plan to cut any of these.