Generally: snapshot
Loxias
capital
studium
23 July 2002
St. Someone, Kathedrale, Dresden
29.08.2002
VW, rain, Dresden
Found Objects
England, 12 November, 7:24 a.m. When I remember something I would rather forget, or when some unpleasant action or unwitting stupidity of mine forces its way forward into the present from the past, I think I don’t feel well. Oh happy past, which can so disorder the present. A people that grows accustomed to sloppy […]
Hall
Entrance, chair, sun, shadow.
Curio (1)
Ivories, Ashmolean. …What makes the man and what The man within that makes: Ask whom he serves or not Serves and what side he takes…. – Gerard Manley Hopkins (‘(On a Piece of Music)’)
gallery
Olympia.
Republican letters
Ciceronis Epistulae ad Atticum, edidit D.R. Shackleton Bailey, Cambridge University Press.
Writ in water
Goethe, ‘Am Flusse’ – Ihr wart ins Wasser eingeschrieben; So fließt denn auch mit ihm davon. You were engraved upon the water; and flow, too, with the water away. Keats’s epitaph, in the Protestant cemetery, at Rome:1 Here lies one whose name was writ in water. Keats died 23 February 1821. Goethe’s son, Julius, who […]
It’s Academic
Reflections on orientalism. And, unrelated: ‘They’re hopelessly vulgar,’ said Mrs. Costello. ‘Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being ‘bad’ is a question for the metaphysicians. They’re bad enough to blush for, at any rate; and for this short life that’s quite enough.’ – Henry James, Daisy Miller
Sunday
Not quite, Constantine.
Lavatory
Palace of Nestor, Pylos, July 2001
the false dichotomy
der Brand
Something I’ve been thinking about lately, in pictures:1 Frauenkirche, Dresden, early 1945. Frauenkirche, Dresden, February 1945. Frauenkirche, Dresden, 12 September 2002 Amusingly, from the Library of Congress rather than the Sächsische Landesbibliothek. [↩]
another untruth
of Vices and Virtues
Library, sunlight, nine a.m. Our breach of hospitality went to my conscience a little: but I quickly silenced that monitor by two or three specious reasons, which served to satisfy and reconcile me to myself. The pain which conscience gives the man who has already done wrong, is soon got over. Conscience is a coward, […]
Poor, obscure, plain & little
Spring, 8:39 a.m. May 16 [1962]: Thinking of modern education (such as Lake Erie) which is to instruct a person how to be unable to survive alone—exact opposite of original purpose. How to get along with the community; how to mask your differences and to whittle off your superior gifts to level down with the […]
febrility
about 3 o’clock.
afoot
The night of the hottest day ever.
stroll
Church Way, Iffley.
ex-libris
hopefully, time won’t tell.
fructus
…eritis sicut diis scientes bonum et malum… malum punicum vel punica fides?
constitutional
Swan, Cherwell, fog.
in haste
nostalgia (again)
mire
Canal.
cornered
birds, for the
fulica atra ‘blissfully easy to identify’
nêpioi
There are people who do not love their lives, for they ride bicycles on ice-covered pavement without a helmet.
invidia
The ‘Genius’
unfinished
obscure
plain and little.
red
Geryon.
Vittoria Corombona
Img. 3
Img. 4
to the dogs
Artemis.
continuity
respite
clouds
sunk
Beirette BL, Agfa Ultra 100, f2.8/60 14 April 2004
markedly
Agfa Silette. Agfa Ultra 100, 3.4/30 8 May 2004 locus ille animi nostri stomachus ubi habitabat olim concalluit. privata modo et domestica nos delectent, miram securitatem videbis; cuius plurimae mehercule partes sunt in tuo reditu. nemo enim in terris est mihi tam consentientibus sensibus.1 – Cicero, ad Atticum, iv.18.2.15ff. (emphasis mine) Incidentally, does it worry […]
scrapes
‘As is’ he she we they you you you I her so pronouns begin the dance called washing whose name derives from an alchemical fact that after a small stillness there is a small stir after great stillness a great stir – Anne Carson
west
midnight oil
not ashes yet, or cinders.
Interstices
falsa lectio
Martha’s Vineyard. The rough brick wall bore in chalk the legend: ‘PROPERTY IS THEFT’; heedless, I read ‘PROPERTIUS IS DEFT’, which seemed a strange idea. Also, apropos of nothing: He is a small, broad-shouldered man, with the thin, dead-looking fair hair, mild eyes, and bulging, over-heavy forehead of the German vegetarian intellectual. He wears sandals […]
court
Over a year
houseplants
knees on a train
footprints
A view (18)
A view (19)
evening
aridity
Under the window-seat in the back parlor, where wasps die and desiccate, the memories are kept, unlocked, unbidden, and inaccessible – mint-green florilegium, pallor bred under the western sun. The thought makes me sleepy.
teatime
Life is too short for this book which smells of potpourri and afternoons misspent in faded floretry. I cannot tell whether it is the cloying stink or the dullness of the matter (promising to tend where I do not care to follow: to gossip and muddle and the human failing of overestimated importance) that caused […]
through the glass
It’s windy and cold and it gets dark out early – and I am too lazy to read.
another day
moments of lethargy
We move slowly in the fading shadows of the morning, with a lazy, ritual weight of action.
emptied nest
Ain’t nobody here.
first fruits
Offerings to the deity in the University of PennsylvaniaMuseum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
at a loss
There is something outrageous in a person’s misdirecting a traveller who has lost his way and then leaving him to himself in error, yet what is that compared with causing someone to go astray in himself? The lost traveller, after all, has a consolation that the country around him is constantly changing, and with every […]
them apples
This people lives on the smell of wild apples that grow there; and if they go far from home, they take some of these apples with them, for as soon as they lose the smell of them they die. – Travels of Sir John Mandeville (p. 181)
horticultural
callings
And a fog settled over the village.
looking out
PF took this picture looking out over Goris. The test included an essay question: ‘write about your fall holidays.’. Although I correctly translated ‘vacation’ into ‘holiday’, I forgot to change ‘fall’ into ‘autumn’. One of the students asked about it. Made me think about what a ‘fall holiday’ would be: bungee-jumping – or Halloween.
city of stone
Birds of dark omen wait for you in the city of stone.
still snowing
The passes are probably closed.
springtime
View from Tatev Village
a glance from Solomon
The hoopoe. At this stage, full of fervour, leapt forward the Hoopoe […] she had on her bosom the crest symbolizing her spiritual knowledge and on her head shone the crown of faith. […] She had the gift of divining underground sources of water and had directed the genii to them by pecking the earth. […]
transient
the heart of the matter
tandz
pears before նոր տարի These pears were remarkable both for their color and their flavor, and the pigs had already been slaughtered.
fresh your feeling
visibility zero
A little light reading when the fog outside is so thick I can’t see the building opposite.
stupid snow
woke up to rain, which turned to snow, which I had to walk through to get to work
frost
The changing patterns of frost on the window are always interesting to me.
desertification
‘ a bitterly cold wind which drove the dust and tiny pebbles against our faces like a continual storm of hail’
regression analysis
Around the neighborhood. One of the more interesting stylistic problems during the Hellenistic period was the problem of quotation. The forms of direct, half-hidden and completely hidden quoting were endlessly varied, as were the forms for framing quotations by a context, forms of intonational quotation marks, varying degrees of alienation or assimilation of another’s quoted […]