Journal BlackHat's Journal: And I never thought of thinking for myself at all 5
Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform?
Quote:
Going down once towards Italy I saw a young man in the train whom I recognised, only he seemed to have got younger. He was with a friend, and his face was in continual play, but for some little time I puzzled in vain to recollect where it was that I had seen him before. All of a sudden I remembered he was King Francis I. of France.
I had hitherto thought the face of this king impossible, but when I saw it in play I understood it. His great contemporary Henry VIII. keeps a restaurant in Oxford Street. Falstaff drove one of the St. Gothard diligences for many years, and only retired when the railway was opened. Titian once made me a pair of boots at Vicenza, and not very good ones.
At Modena I had my hair cut by a young man whom I perceived to be Raffaelle. The model who sat to him for his celebrated Madonnas is first lady in a confectionery establishment at Montreal. She has a little motherly pimple on the left side of her nose that is misleading at first, but on examination she is readily recognised; probably Raffaelle's model had the pimple too, but Raffaelle left it out--as he would.
Handel, of course, is Madame Patey. Give Madame Patey Handel's wig and clothes, and there would be no telling her from Handel. It is not only that the features and the shape of the head are the same, but there is a certain imperiousness of expression and attitude about Handel which he hardly attempts to conceal in Madame Patey. It is a curious coincidence that he should continue to be such an incomparable renderer of his own music. Pope Julius II. was the late Mr. Darwin.
Rameses II. is a blind woman now, and stands in Holborn, holding a tin mug. I never could understand why I always found myself humming "They oppressed them with burthens" when I passed her, till one day I was looking in Mr. Spooner's window in the Strand, and saw a photograph of Rameses II. Mary Queen of Scots wears surgical boots and is subject to fits, near the Horse Shoe in Tottenham Court Road.
Michael Angelo is a commissionaire; I saw him on board the Glen Rosa, which used to run every day from London to Clacton-on-Sea and back. It gave me quite a turn when I saw him coming down the stairs from the upper deck, with his bronzed face, flattened nose, and with the familiar bar upon his forehead.
I never liked Michael Angelo, and never shall, but I am afraid of him, and was near trying to hide when I saw him coming towards me. He had not got his commissionaire's uniform on, and I did not know he was one till I met him a month or so later in the Strand. When we got to Blackwall the music struck up and people began to dance. I never saw a man dance so much in my life. He did not miss a dance all the way to Clacton, nor all the way back again, and when not dancing he was flirting and cracking jokes. I could hardly believe my eyes when I reflected that this man had painted the famous "Last Judgment," and had made all those statues.
Dante is, or was a year or two ago, a waiter at Brissago on the Lago Maggiore, only he is better-tempered-looking, and has a more intellectual expression. He gave me his ideas upon beauty: "Tutto ch' e vero e bello," he exclaimed, with all his old self-confidence. I am not afraid of Dante. I know people by their friends, and he went about with Virgil, so I said with some severity, "No, Dante, il naso della Signora Robinson e vero, ma non e bello"; and he admitted I was right. Beatrice's name is Towler; she is waitress at a small inn in German Switzerland.
I used to sit at my window and hear people call "Towler, Towler, Towler," fifty times in a forenoon. She was the exact antithesis to Abra; Abra, if I remember, used to come before they called her name, but no matter how often they called Towler, every one came before she did. I suppose they spelt her name Taula, but to me it sounded Towler; I never, however, met any one else with this name. She was a sweet, artless little hussy, who made me play the piano to her, and she said it was lovely. Of course I only played my own compositions; so I believed her, and it all went off very nicely. I thought it might save trouble if I did not tell her who she really was, so I said nothing about it.
I met Socrates once. He was my muleteer on an excursion which I will not name, for fear it should identify the man. The moment I saw my guide I knew he was somebody, but for the life of me I could not remember who. All of a sudden it flashed across me that he was Socrates. He talked enough for six, but it was all in dialetto, so I could not understand him, nor, when I had discovered who he was, did I much try to do so. He was a good creature, a trifle given to stealing fruit and vegetables, but an amiable man enough. He had had a long day with his mule and me, and he only asked me five francs. I gave him ten, for I pitied his poor old patched boots, and there was a meekness about him that touched me. "And now, Socrates," said I at parting, "we go on our several ways, you to steal tomatoes, I to filch ideas from other people; for the rest-- which of these two roads will be the better going, our father which is in heaven knows, but we know not."
I have never seen Mendelssohn, but there is a fresco of him on the terrace, or open-air dining-room, of an inn at Chiavenna. He is not called Mendelssohn, but I knew him by his legs. He is in the costume of a dandy of some five-and-forty years ago, is smoking a cigar, and appears to be making an offer of marriage to his cook. Beethoven both my friend Mr. H. Festing Jones and I have had the good fortune to meet; he is an engineer now, and does not know one note from another; he has quite lost his deafness, is married, and is, of course, a little squat man with the same refractory hair that he always had. It was very interesting to watch him, and Jones remarked that before the end of dinner he had become positively posthumous.
One morning I was told the Beethovens were going away, and before long I met their two heavy boxes being carried down the stairs. The boxes were so squab and like their owners, that I half thought for a moment that they were inside, and should hardly have been surprised to see them spring up like a couple of Jacks-in-the- box. "Sono indentro?" said I, with a frown of wonder, pointing to the boxes. The porters knew what I meant, and laughed. But there is no end to the list of people whom I have been able to recognise, and before I had got through it myself, I found I had walked some distance, and had involuntarily paused in front of a second-hand bookstall.
I do not like books. I believe I have the smallest library of any literary man in London, and I have no wish to increase it. I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudie's, and it makes me very angry if any one gives me one for my private library.
I once heard two ladies disputing in a railway carriage as to whether one of them had or had not been wasting money. "I spent it in books," said the accused, "and it's not wasting money to buy books." "Indeed, my dear, I think it is," was the rejoinder, and in practice I agree with it.
Webster's Dictionary, Whitaker's Almanack, and Bradshaw's Railway Guide should be sufficient for any ordinary library; it will be time enough to go beyond these when the mass of useful and entertaining matter which they provide has been mastered.
Nevertheless, I admit that sometimes, if not particularly busy, I stop at a second-hand bookstall and turn over a book or two from mere force of habit. --Samuel Butler
News stacked in a stall:
China's crack down on Falun Gong in the news again. A State Councilor and former Minister of Education who utilized the Chinese education system to indoctrinate teachers and students against Falun Gong - inciting untold violence - has been sued for torture and extra judicial killing in a Tanzanian court. The heavy hand draws helpers. Why. Hello there Uncle Sam. Where's the poodle? I see that the dingo-mount is out in the yard. Oh, there he is. Out savaging the prisoners again. It's amazing that he can work that forklift with those tiny paws.
The United Nations Security Council has unanimously voted to extend the UN mission in Iraq for a year. The resolution says the UN should play a key role in assisting Iraq "in the formation of institutions for representative government". But the secretary general highlighted the risk of attacks on UN personnel, indicating that staff would be limited. Key Roll(3): A hollow dome like shell of dried wheat and powdered milk. Served with a small blue paper flag.
Ready yet? Hail no! Mr Rumsfeld, on a one-day trip to the country, said in Kabul that the Afghan people were winning their battle to rebuild the nation.
The Tiger is still being stimulated to eat its own? Tamil Tiger rebels in Sri Lanka have killed at least three supporters of the breakaway leader Colonel Karuna in the east of the country.
Spanish bomb news. The Spanish government has given residence permits to nearly 700 immigrants who were either victims or related to victims of the Madrid bombs.
Three BBC journalists were held at gunpoint for four hours by Israeli troops in the West Bank on Thursday. The television crew was accompanying a Palestinian doctor as he visited an elderly patient in the city of Nablus. Free Press!!!
OYAITJ: 42186-- I look back even further... "Most Americans don't realise that each PlayStation unit contains a 32-bit CPU - every bit as powerful as the processor found in most desktop and laptop computers," one unnamed military intelligence source told WND. "Beyond that, the graphics capabilities of a PlayStation are staggering - five times more powerful than that of a typical graphics workstation, and roughly 15 times more powerful than the graphics cards found in most PCs."
Texttoon:
Fumetti: Stock photo of John Kerry with a microphone. Overlayed speech bubble has him singing; "I'm your yankee doodle dandy in a gold rolls royce/I wanna be elected/Kids want a savior/Don't need a fake/I wanna be elected/We're gonna rock to the rules that I make/I wanna be elected/Elected/Elected/I never lied to you/I've always been cool/I wanna be elected..." Small oval in the lower right corner with Pete Townshend saying; "Is that my cue?"
Hypnotized (Score:2)
Here comes...
Re:Hypnotized (Score:2)
From a thousand wounds/
Faults of civilization/
Burning the private paradise of dreams/
Minus hands of the electric clock/
Bit of a jump to the other direction, yes. But
Some days I just pray to the God of Sex and Drums and Rock-N-Roll [/;-)
You get OBSCURE (Score:2)
There are tins/There was pork
There are legs/There are sharks
There was john/There are cliffs
There was mother/There's a poker
Then there was you.
There are scenes/There are blues
There are boots/There are shoes
There are turks/There are fools
They're in lockers/They're in schools
They're in you
Then there was you.
Burn my fingers/Burn my toes
Burn my uncle/Burn his books
Burn his shoes/Cook the leather
Put it on me/Does it fit me
Or you?
It looks ti
Re:You get OBSCURE (Score:2)
Yeah, obscure, a three step. Mick Ronson is the key... after all... this is bat country you know!
Which your Eno ref, delightfully, adds a fourth to the third link. That of the thin white duke [inkblotmagazine.com].
J. G. Ballard (Score:2)
I take it on the road...
Those kilometers
and the red lights
I was always looking left and right
Oh, but I'm always crashing,
In the same car...