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November 7th, 2009
06:12 pm - The New Ashmolean
So. As you may/may not know, the great, grand Father of Museums, the Asmolean, which lounges majestically on the edge of Oxford's heart, recently had a makeover.
In all, this took some ten years of planning, wondering, small changes, big changes, eyeing, designing, redesigning and the myriad worries and niggles that come with something like this. It was all capped off by a year-long closure, that was to end today, rain or shine, done or not. As it happens, it was a good day. The early winter sun burned off any clouds that remained from the rains of the past week, and the overall weather was crisp, without sharpening to a cutting cold. Being that this was a Thing To See, and all the circumstances were right, down I went.
The result is gorgeous.
The outside, an old, Neo-Classical vision in white and gold stone has been seared, sanded and cleansed to a pristine finish, fresh as the day it was put up. Passing up the steps and across the courtyard, one moves through the grand doors (of which previously only a small section opened) into the thing itself. At first, little has changed. To the right is the grand staircase, lifting off into the art galleries. To the left is the avenue of Roman sculpture, effectively unchanged, though all the better for the addition of some discreet captions, leading onward into the quartet of Egyptian rooms, which await their own renovations. Beyond this, the frontage, all is different.
The reforging has stripped away everything beyond the front and entirely replaced it with something new, weird and fresh. One word that springs immediately to mind afterwards is “fluid.” Rooms pass into one another with minimal intervention. Corridors pass between cultures, crossroads go in entirely different cultural directions. Stairs rise like crashing waves, while everywhere, there is glass that allows one to peer down or through into other galleries or areas. On a busy day like today, the open spaces are as much for movement as they are for just leaning and watching through or across glass, seeing people pass up and down.
After a while, the sheer volume and mixture of places, styles and things turns the whole trip into a game, where directional combos yield strange and exciting results.
Forward! Forward! Up! Left! Left! Forward! Forward! Right!
MIDDLE EASTERN DAGGER WITH CHRYSANTHEMUM PATTERNING.
Right! Up! Up! Right! Forward! Forward! Down!
A SMALL VERSION OF RODIN'S THINKER.
Downdowndown! Left! Forward! Right! Forward!
GUY FAWKES' LANTERN.
Everywhere you turn, there is something new and unknown, from a small hut for Japanese tea ceremonies, to a deep case packed with small Roman/Greek amphorae, all made for pouring libations of oil for the dead, to a jade elephant the size of a teapot. At one point, turning through the rehung art galleries (passing by a striking painting off a resting dog in a room full of religious work), one emerges into a room packed with still lifes, every inch of wall space packed with flowers, fruits, lobsters, cups, plates and other objects. The overall impression is that one has just walked into one of those paintings of densely hung galleries, and that if you turn round, you'll see an Elizabethan gentleman regarding you curiously.
If there's a negative impression that arises from all this, it is that it is Unfinished. Dotting almost every room, floor and area, there are empty cases, objects woefully uncaptioned, captions that point at objects not present, and even cases not yet fully unwrapped. Depending on the circumstances, this can either tantalise or infuriate, weighted towards the latter, though presumably this will reward return visits. As it is, however, these are but off notes in a swelling chorus.
If any of you are passing through, go there.
(Oh, and possibly my favourite and strangest item in the old rooms, the Dick Head Plate, is still in residence, so all is well.)
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/ankhappyg.gif) chipper
Current Music: Ry Cooder - Three Chords and the Truth
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November 4th, 2009
11:05 pm - Gratuitous Video Of Joy and Pop Culture
Current Location: Home
Current Mood: jubilant
Current Music: I am not a number, I am a free man!
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October 14th, 2009
12:49 pm - Thought For The Day From Eastside.
The construction industry is perhaps the only sector where you can speed up a project by adding hundreds of laggers.
Current Location: Ilford
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/niaha/kitty/ankwinkg.gif) silly
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June 20th, 2009
02:15 am - A Hundred Days: 2
"Incontinence?"
"Tears."
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June 17th, 2009
11:43 pm - A Hundred Days: 1
Peccavi.
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May 2nd, 2009
08:06 pm - Duelling Again: Whorehouses
The Peterseliebuurt district wasn't one of the city's hotspots. Built as a quick adjunct to the City in response to an influx of immigrants, largely Dutch, it clung to maps of the city like a scarred, oil-stained limpet. Centuries had passed since then, and the immigrants had slowly moved out and up, taking with them any chance of gentrification. The region seemed to be cursed as a dark blot on the city's maps, attracting the worst of the city's inhabitants, and its worst ideas. A supposedly forward-thinking major had razed the last of the charming old housing, and replaced them with endless rows of unfortunately phallic tower blocks that had resulted in the district's current name, “The Peters.”
Now a fresh major had ridden into office on the back of a wave of promises of renovation, of cleansing the limpet and bringing a fresh, new populace to The Peters. This had struck a chord that resounded through the bullet-specked and arson-charred corridors of the Peterseliebuurt,which now watched and waited for this promised resurrection. Unfortunately, the man was a newcomer, a silver spoon from Jordan Heights, for whom the Peters was an urban bogeyman he was threatened with at night, a place his nanny, pulled from the district, would weep at the mention of. Now, the bogeyman was real and marking his every step, an acrid taste at the end of every press conference, his own steel-clad Gordian Knot.
For months, he wracked his brains for a means to solve this maddening problem, consulting with architects, advertisers, publicists, demolition firms, sociologists, urban planners and all manner of thinkers. With each, it was the same; the slight start at the beginning at the mention of The Peters, then the slow, solemn shake of the head at the end.
Just as he was coming to the end of his tether, a letter of resignation and the look on his father's face half-formed in his mind, an idea was brought to him. It was somewhat repulsive, relying on expulsion, demolition, bribery, trickery, and a swathe of underhand tactics, with no certainty of success. The underlying idea was simple: if the problem is that The Peters are hideous and unattractive, change that. Immediately, work began, developers picking out the best building in the district's nicest possible setting and tarting it up as fiercely as humanly possible. The surrounding towers were razed to make way for parkland, their inhabitants and the inhabitants of the chosen tower discreetly paid off to live elsewhere, while it was stripped down and fully renovated. Nice-looking families were brought in and paid to live happy lives in the towers, while prospective buyers from other cities were shown how beautiful this fresh new “Parsley District” was.
While the press was full of scorn, screaming about “tarting up”, “urban sleaze”, “stopgap measures” and long editorials about corruption and the whoring out of cities, it was to everyone's surprise that the project began to take effect. Slowly, life and money returned to the area, as the project expanded, momentum and a grand, subtle police operation excising the worst parts of the old Peters from the new stretches of Parsley, leaving the first tower as a monument to Renovation. Even as the old towers were themselves removed and replaced, it remained, the old, proud whore in a neighbourhood of gents.
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February 21st, 2009
07:19 pm - Further Book-related Memetechs.
The BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish, strikethrough the ones you didn't like.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare Read some, watched some, completely missed others.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert I think.
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons Not sure, but I'm pretty sure I finished it.
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - Heh. This one was known as the Never-ending Book in my house, because my mother tried to read it, but even though she took years, never finished it
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - Ya rly.
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - Another I'm not sure I finished.
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
...I need to read more.
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February 14th, 2009
03:00 am - Oral History Comission
( NSFW and Long )
Happy Valentine's Day
Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: Ali Farka Toure & Toumane Diabate - Mamadou Boutiquer
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February 8th, 2009
03:13 am - Sand and Starscapes
No sleep, no rest, no food, just the path. That, and that alone was the rule. While he walked, he had no name and no home. Any man who sheltered would be struck until he bled from every pore, any child who fed would have its hand broken, and any woman who smiled at him would be stoned for one half of an hour. As it was inevitable that any of these would occur, and as he had no wish to harm, he travelled by night, between stars and sand as, it seemed to him, the trial should play out.
Behind him followed figures observing his gait, and enforcing the rule. He rarely saw them, but as forms clad in flowing grey, only ever seen retreating from sight, or at the edge of vision atop a distant dune, like ghosts of a vengeful past. In the first days, he would call out to them, wave to them, whistle sharp, high notes of greeting, but that sent them fleeing all the quicker. By break of day, he'd find the caches of water had been neatly but viciously destroyed. He soon learned not to wave at the ghosts.
So he walked, paying attention to nothing but the ground and the sky and the occasional camel turd in his way. Having little else to do, he looked and thought. He watched as his tread changed, paring away inefficiency until he walked across dunes and the finest of sands as if on stone. He looked to the sky and wiped their configurations from his memory, drawing fresh lines across his imagination and shaping fresh beasts in the air. Around him, his senses drew out details from the unchanging, ever-shifting sand, revealing everything from tiny landslides caused by the bouncing kangaroo rats, to gaping cracks in the earth, thoughts on which he tried to push from his mind.
Eventually, he began to tire. His feet slowed and dragged, his mind dulled, and not even the icy water pulled from the chill of the sand and splashed recklessly in his face could bring his eyes back into focus. Seven long weeks after the start of his journey, many miles across the blind sands, his legs buckled and he collapsed face first onto the sands. The dregs of his energy pressed one shoulder down and rolled him onto his back, where he lay, gazing at the stars and waiting for death.
Death was slow coming that evening, so he scooped up a handful of sand and let it pour onto his face. Suddenly his breath halted in his throat at what he saw, as through some illusion, the sand pouring down mixed with the stars above. He could no longer tell if stars fell from his hands or sand shimmered in the sky. Everything around him whirled through his sleepless mind and came together in one shimmering, connected mass. So struck was he by this revelation, that he scarcely noticed the grey man bending over him until his body was forcibly pulled upright. Brown eyes behind a mask of grey cloth looked into his unfocussed green spheres, searching for something. Within moments, it was found, and the corners of the visible eyelids creased in a smile. A voice emerged from behind the robe, and whispered with the sound of wind on the high dunes. “Welcome.”
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December 25th, 2008
11:30 am
Christmas is this: the sound of bells from up the road, calling in the Anglicans, the scent of a big roast, seasoned, stuffed and baconed to glory, rising up the stairs, the sight of clear, empty cobbles in the heart of town, the feel of paper sliding away from smooth, untouched surfaces of long-anticipated gifts, and the sweetening, sugary taste of brandy butter across the rough darkness of christmas pudding.
No matter your beliefs, at home, on holiday or in hell, whether it's passed or just beginning, have a Merry Christmas and a wonderfull day.
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December 17th, 2008
01:31 pm - HELL YES!
I have Officially Not Wasted the last year of my life! (Dissertation was a touch crap, but woo nonetheless!)
-Yrs Sincerely, Thomas Stanbury, M.A.
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December 1st, 2008
12:08 am - One Mile from Here (Strictly it's two, but.)
Every year, people flood to the place. They come to study, to work, to see the golden walls, to see Wren's dome, to peer at the Dodo's foot, or Cromwell's death mask, or Fawkes' lantern. To these, Oxford is the quintessentially charming, inoffensive English town, if somewhat bereft of tea rooms. Most, however, will pass by or glance with bemusement at the cobblestone cross set incongruously into the speckled tarmac at the head of Broad Street. The whole road surface is redone every few decades as society demands, but the cross remains like an indelible scar. The message it represents, though old, is simple. It is this: Oxford burns Bishops. Three men, Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer were dragged or led to the spot as the twisting stream of monarchic favour pulled their positions out from under them, and set alight in the street, three more martyrs to a cause practically newborn.
The modern wanderers passing through on foot and bus might also pass fleeting thoughts on the parades. In the far north, between two forks, each named after the town they aim for, lies South Parade, while some way south of it, closer to the town's heart, lies North Parade. Here, a good century after men burned by Balliol on Broad, others marching under the banners of King and Parliament faced each other across a mile of open ground.
Everywhere, the old town simmers gently with the stuff of old conflicts, carefully preserved in words and names and plaques and reality, from the lingering bookbound echoes of old, friendly academic arguments, practically instilled into the stones of the older colleges, to the raging debate between Huxley and Wilberforce, on whether their common origin was Natural or Divine, right out to the fire-bombs flung by the modern protesters against the walls of unbuilt laboratories.
And yet. This is the place people perceive it to be. An uncomplicated town on the Thames,where the rivers fill with slow punters in summer and soft ice in winter. This is the Third University, with such a tradition of gentle protogeekery that a stretch of island between two branches of the same river can be called, quite officially, Mesopotamia. This is the town of the Dreaming Spires, of the roofshark, of the dreamworlds of JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Brian Aldiss and Phillip Pullman, rarely offensive to anyone but the anti-elitists. Oxford, like so many of its brothers across the length and breadth, rewards those who keep to it, from the brief amusements, to the long explorations, from the stony core of Carfax out to Jericho on the weirder edge, it is home.
Even so, when the sky's a full, deep blue, all clouds seared away by the height of summer or the first chill of winter, a reminder occurs. The setting sun strikes the bright yellow stone that makes up the older city dead on, illuminating every inch with a strange incandescence. Throughout the year, Oxford burns.
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November 12th, 2008
04:31 am - Midnight Special. (More like four AM special, but there you go)
It was never going to be Nighthawks. For one, the glass panes that made up the long windows were small and frequently shattered by stones thrown by passing children. Outside, the varicoloured neon of the neighbourhood flanked it on all sides while the flickering streetlights blazed down, stripping the joint of any pretension of being an island of light in a world of darkness. Nevertheless, it did its best, and, after a fashion, it gained a kind of respect in the neighbourhood, raising it above the other greasy spoons of the area. The owner, idiosyncratic at the best of times and mildly deranged at the worst made a point of paying his dishwashers especially well, so that the spoons would always be spotless and free of grease as a mark of pride. Outside the battered door and clean glass, no whores kept their strutting patrols, and not even in the depths of desperation would any man peer through and guess at his chances of robbing the place.
Business boomed as best it could in the depths of the labyrinth of steel and stone, mostly for one reason: the tradition, which the owner had never really named, but which came to be known as the Midnight Special. Every day, when the tides of work had drawn in the pre- and post-work floods and sent them forth with filled and warmed bellies, the place seemed to close for the day. The shutters were pulled down, the door was locked, and the front looked for all the world like so many of its neighbours, closed and dead to the world.
Behind the walls, though, the building seemed to truly come to life. Legions of chefs, sleeping or working other jobs for most of the day, poured down the stairs from the upper reaches of the building into the kitchen (whose size would have surprised most of its regulars). Messengers and gatherers swarmed over rooftops and walls, spreading outward from their home's back door to certain specific doors, miles away across the city, where a few brief words and a thin stack of bills would be exchanged for a bulging bag of anything from unskinned, unboned haunches of cows to certain delicate spices, which were hauled back to their home ground, where they were hungrily hauled in and tossed around the kitchen, dissipating into a whirl of knives, colanders and boiling water.
Outside, a curious mix began to develop. In the early days, before word leaked out to the guides and the gabs, the street would be divided between the locals, in loose hoodies and sweats or old shirts and worn shoes, and the neat, creased finery of the connoisseurs, the two groups divided by the road, eyeing each other in awkward silence. Finally, at precisely half past eleven, the rotund, cast-eyed owner would swagger up to the door and lift the blinds with one delicate, sweat-caked finger and peer out across the street. Moments later, he'd spin round to murmur at high speed to a small circle of sous-chefs, who dove back into the kitchen to scream at the messengers, now decked out as perfect waiters. The kitchen reached a crescendo of activity, whole rows of cooks fainting away in the heat and the stress, dragged up into the depths in wait for the next day.
Precisely at midnight, the lone door to the corner spot creaked open, locals and strangers alike trying hard to get in quickly without being seen to shove. Within, a literal banquet coated every surface, every glance perfection, every taste worth a lifetime's wait. In silence, the guests sat and served themselves, thoughts of cost forgotten. In a dark, dingy corner of the city, the Midnight Special shone through the night.
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November 5th, 2008
03:18 pm - Once more, without irony.
o/' AMERICA! FUCK YEAH! o/'
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October 23rd, 2008
04:03 am - One Moment In Time (The Duel Returns!)
Simplicity is, as ever, best. Great things have been drawn from the long and the enduring, great thoughts with razor edges of the finest distinction, a new chapter in which can take a year to drawn from the faintest of lingering glimmers in the dark, swirling pools of the hindbrain. Other, greater things are slower. Countries draw themselves from the darkness of the past, rooting around in the dank mists of history to find semi-fictional tails and half-related legs to stand on and trail behind, like grand, conceptual anti-lizards. For true brilliance and greatness, though, the moment is king. The grand, flaring revelation, the assembling of a thousand years of previous thought and experience, the divine epiphany, the opening of a door, the lifting of a newborn, the fall of an axe blade, all but the briefest slivers of seconds, pins dropping in the hushed halls of time that nevertheless resound like thunderclaps. (If time is anything, then it is the shell of a giant spiralling mollusc, of which we can see the opening and someway back, and with special tools investigate the deeper reaches, but most of which is invisible to us.)
A moment, then.
The twenty-eighth of August, 1995, quarter past nine in the eve on the Greenwich Meridian. Some way to the lower left side of that Illustriously Imaginary Line, trawlers yank in the thinning catch of the day, bound for the Valhallan tables and stomachs of the western world. In one of the endless Eastern elsewheres, a body among thousands finally gives in to the war with its stomach and collapses. Even further east, so far that it gets confused, turns west and becomes tomorrow, a flotilla of islands births. A popular destination late in the next century for its precise straddling of the dateline, it breaks the surface as molten rock piles up and solidifies far below
And in a small town in small place, thousands of miles back, an idea sets its seeds in the head of one woman. Though the place is long miles from anywhere, caught between the plenty of one and the emptiness of the other, with little to look forward to but a long life of drudgery and servitude, or short one of pain at the hands of some militia, this is one of those ideas that grows. Given proper root in prose and paper, armoured as such and sent forth, it might shift the world's mind on its axis and set it on the course towards the clean, bright future that fills the dreams of children, optimists and idealists.
Unfortunately, this is not one of those ideas.
All moments, however great and illustrious, are always defined by the other moments that surround them on all sides, droplets in a river. Here, the moment of epiphany is defined by the hands of a man some kilometres away, who carefully loads a tapering cylinder into the tube in front of him and smiles to himself as it flies off into the high distance. As she leans back to consider the thought blossoming in her mind and burning out all else, the frowning customer across the stall forgotten, she has a moment to hear the whistling of the object in freefall.
The next moments are ones of fire.
Current Music: Tim Van Eyken - Fair Ellen of Ratcliffe
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September 28th, 2008
11:23 pm - SCIENCE!
While the winding streets of the Old Town and their charming shops and stalls are easily capable of providing many an hour's distraction, most visitors to Somerilstad will go directly to the town's main attraction, which seems to rise for miles above surrounding houses.
Built by Ioann Someril, great-grandson of the town's namesake and founder, in 1794, the HALL OF SCIENCE was built to be a monument to the dawning age of Rationalism and the gifts that Science would bestow upon the world and mankind. Ioann, who historians have, in recent studies of his correspondence, diagnosed with OCD and mild Schizophrenia, was an avid follower of scientific development and wrote many letters to the Royal Society of London, England, the Academie Francaise of Paris, France and the Sodalitas Litterarum Vistulana of nearby Poland, though the return letters show a remarkable amount of exasperation with the efforts of this upstart Burgomaser from the darker regions of Europe, and his “unending, infernal persistence”
Nevertheless, shortly after his investiture as Burgomaster, Ioann became obsessed with building a structure that unified all of the Sciences, from Chemistry, through Astronomy, Physics, Mathematics, even Alchemy. “It shall,” he wrote in a 1773 letter to Isaac Newton (who had by then been dead for 46 years, which Ioann appears not to have cared or known about), “provide a beacon to guide the spirits of Mankind, even those of the dull and lumpen peasantry, into the glorious future, brilliantly illuminated by Reason.”
For decades, Ioann pumped untold millions into his folly, forcing the population of his town to work for days without sleep to build the vast anti-cathedral. In the process, dozens of houses were destroyed, their inhabitants driven out of the city to seek shelter with relatives in the agricultural heartland or in the labyrinth of shanty towns that surrounds Someriltown to this day. Visitors advised to avoid this area, unless they are in search of some of the more dubious pleasures in life, or are interested in losing their possessions, their limbs, their organs, their virginity, and/or their life, not necessarily in that order.
While the Hall rose under the increasingly crazed orders of its architect, strange occurrences were with its construction. Men would be seen lifting loads of many tons, apparently unaware of their weight, while beer served to the thirsty workers became notoriously changeable, frequently turning to air, acid, lead or stranger substances in the drinker's stomach. Much of this can be put down to hearsay and rumour, but nevertheless, Ioann complained in one of his lengthy letters to Paracelsus (the renowned Swiss alchemist who died in 1541) that his grand monument to the Sciences was becoming “an Altar to Unreason, disobeying every Law laid down by Man as a Certainty of the Universe!!!”
On the day of the structure's completion, 29th of August, 1794, the Hall was opened to great celebration and relief. As its patron and architect, the now severely deranged Ioann was led through the towering main doors, which closed behind him. When he emerged a week later, the young Burgomaster took one look at the sky, bought a knife from a roadside stall, and slit his own throat, causing the discolouration that can still be seen on the corner of Eisenhandsstrasse. Witnesses of his body, which was later exhibited across America and Europe, reported it as appearing deliriously happy, if a little green.
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September 16th, 2008
11:17 am - Hoezee!
Right.
Levelling up to age 22: COMPLETE
Finally completing, editing (interspersed with severe swearing at OpenOffice's image anchoring system), printing, binding and handing in the Big Damn Dissertation: COMPLETE
Finishing my academic life: COMPLETE
Heading off to Crete for Sun, Sea and Structure-based Awesomeness: GO GO GOOOOOOOO!!!!!
(See y'buggers in a week or two.)
Current Location: Not here
Current Mood: SCIENCE!
Current Music: This and that
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August 25th, 2008
11:20 pm - Mahmoth's Music 11: A return of sorts.
Once more, I delve into the depths of the Pit that is my (comparatively small) music collection and dig out weird and cool stuffs for your delectation and potential enjoyment...
( Strings, drums, brass, and skeevy Cubans. What more could you ask for? )
Current Location: London, abed
Current Music: Glen Campbell - Wichita Linesman
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August 21st, 2008
12:43 am - Wayfaring Stranger (Another song-inspired one)
First, Talon (my opponent) is a hor. All may read this and know it to be true.
Second, the inspiration. Here.
Third, the thing itself:
One foot in front of the other. Swing the leg, raise the heel, lift the toe, bring it down, push off, swing, raise, lift, lower, push and repeat ad infinitum, nauseum, ridiculum and any other of a range of ums you could care to think of. It had seemed like such a simple idea, at first. “Just walk,” they'd said. “Doesn't matter how, doesn't matter where, doesn't matter for how long, just keep doing it.” He'd asked how he'd know when to stop. There'd been an overly long pause and one had laughed, showing entirely too many teeth to fit in his (or was it her? so long ago now...) mouth and said they'd be in touch.
He wasn't sure how long ago that was, now, nor was he entirely sure whether or not he was indeed a he. The walk had changed him, certainly. His legs were, as far as he could make out as they moved, perfectly efficient, making not one single purposeless motion. On the other hand, whatever had once slid or swung between them was no longer there, which was a loss, but not one that mattered any longer. His feet no longer felt pain, his muscles no longer had the capacity to ache or sprain and absorbed the shock of walking on rocks like the softest down pillows. When he thought about this, he considered it some small comfort. In the meantime, he no longer needed to sleep, eat, drink or defecate, which worried him immensely when he thought about it.
Mostly, though, he didn't think, and his mind was empty as the road ahead. When there was a road, at least. So far, he'd found that keeping to the wilderness worked much better. You got the occasional attack by wolves, lions and panthers, but they tended to get confused when their pray neither fell nor stopped moving when they bit it and went off to find better prey after a mile or twenty. If he moved through civilisation, people tended to notice a man who didn't stop moving and either followed him until he had to walk them over a mountain or through a river, which stopped most of them. If they got too persistent, he'd found he could walk across the ocean floor, but he'd never liked walking blind, and the implications of what he was doing gave him the shakes for weeks afterwards, not to mention the way seaweed and shellfish managed to creep into every crevice.
On the hard days, when there was an unexpected mountain in his path, or a building site had smothered one of his favourite glades, he wondered at the reasons behind all this. Why, after untold thousands of years, did he still have to keep walking, untouched by the ravages of time and friction? Why couldn't he just stop? Who the hell'd stuck him on this course in the first place? Most of the time, though, such thoughts were quickly swept from his mind, as he crested the next hill, or the valley's rim, and the world flooded his mind. Left foot, right foot, left leg, right leg, he moved and the earth moved with him.
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August 14th, 2008
12:27 am - Transient.
It is ever the nature of humanity to aim for permanence. However much men who study the ways of rocks, stars and gods may try to drive home the briefness and insignificance of a human life, it is always the case that this is rejected. Lives so important, so clearly significant, cannot possibly nothing but a brief, seconds-to-midnight fluke of biology and genetics. Thus, each and every one aims for immortality, some means of stamping his or her existence hard into the soil and the rock beyond, that every man who lives, walks and sees might know of their passing. Towers rise, mines and dungeons delve, palaces sparkle and shine and great hordes of minor, less permanent men fall in the service of these great erections. Surely, such majestic acts cannot help but show the work of a man immortal.
And yet. Stone falls, the earth shifts. The tower collapses or is wrecked by other men of newer permanence, palaces and temples are stripped to the bone, their names and acts recalled only by rote in dank classes, while men and women wander, wonder, love and carve their names. The world progresses, new ideas come to form. Impermanence gains the appearance of an ideal, whole civilisations working towards marking the earth forever. Metal replaces stone as the means of breaking through to eternity, ideas come to place to scar the earth in new and innovative ways, tattooing its skin with hard roads and sending probes ever deeper into skin and sky, tearing apart every object in sight to prove that they have inherited this scrap of land as owners in perpetuity and are free to do with it as they will. The concept shifts. Immortality is no longer one man's endeavour, but the work of whole nations, aiming to leave their mark on the world and its newly uncovered surrounds.
And yet. True endlessness is the only thing that survives. The rumbling roll of the spinning earth brushes aside the spider's web of roads, wind and winding plants tear through concrete and metal. Within the blink of a galactic eye, every sign that this place held anything that stood and thought is wiped into its constituent part, the whole planet shrugging off a hundred thousand years of dreams in mere moments, healing over the wounds like nothing, sliding through dance of continents and atoms as if nothing had happened, which was as close to accurate as made no difference.
And yet. Everything falls apart. The brief, shimmying shudder of atoms fades into nothingness. Stars dim and collapse, galaxies burst as the mass holding them fails. Infinity dims and slides into nothingness, becoming at the end as it was at the start, not waiting, just being.
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