27 November, 2013

Touch and go




London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

 Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth. On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting her — as here he is — with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be — as here they are — mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be — as are they not? — ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give — who does not often give — the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!” […]’

 (Charles Dickens, Bleak House, March 1852- September 1853)


Charles Dickens creates an image of a filthy and dirty London. Concern and pressure.
He gives strength to fog. Just as you do.

And yet it does float.

24 November, 2013

The Song of the Earth

Late night woops.



http://mountainmoonvolcano.com/




The loss of his clothes hardly mattered, because
He had seven coats on when he came,
With three pair of boots--but the worst of it was,
He had wholly forgotten his name. 
He would answer to "Hi!" or to any loud cry,
Such as "Fry me!" or "Fritter my wig!"
"What-you-may-call-um!" or "What-was-his-name!"
But especially "Thing-um-a-jig!" 
(Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark)


El horrible plan de planear.
Suave.

18 November, 2013

Dreams and dreamers



I

'He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.


He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby grey;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.

[...]'

(Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of the Reading Gaol)

12 November, 2013

W.A.S.P.

Just because I like to wonder about silly things, playing with words and some other stuff. I have been rambling in the WASP acronym. I find it curious and appealingly paradoxical. Recently to broad my mind to another people and maybe cultures seems to be more rewarding than the mere fact of interacting with other people just for the sake of doing it.
Well, there it goes:

WASP(s)

White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
White Anglo-Saxon People
Wireless Application Service Provider
Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome Protein
(and more technical acronyms)

There's the music band WASP, as well...

And then there’s the old, presumably Jewish joke: WASPs leave and don’t say goodbye, Jews say goodbye and don’t leave. Speaking of what I found this very interesting article about ghosting.




And... I dunno...

We Are Sex Perverts?


Just Ghost.

An Apple's Core





 '-What are you thinking so earnestly?' said he, as they walked back to the ball-room; -'not of your partner, I hope, for, by that shake of the head your meditations are not satisfactory.'
Catherine coloured, and said 'I was not thinking of anything'
'That is artful and deep, to be sure; but I had rather be told at once that you will not tell me'
'Well then, I will not.'
'Thank you; for now we shall soon be acquainted, as I am authorized to cease you on this subject whenever we meet, and nothing in the world advances intimacy so much.'

(Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey)