Alternatywy 4

imdb helping me out with my TV watching -

"The beginning of 1980s was a difficult time for Polish people. This series tries to show it. While it is a comedy and some things can be exaggerated, it has the spirit of these times. The action takes place for few months in some building (with the title address "4 Alternative Street") of Warsaw's newly built district. Everyone has his/her own life and fights socialism problems. So, you have a house-master, who believes to be the most important person in the building. He does nothing and make people, whom he should be about to serve, do all the work for him. There is also a minister, who lives in the building with his lover. He says privately different things than he does in TV. Everyone had to wait for one's flat for years (true in Poland), but there is a man, who has lots of flats. There is a man, who was shown in TV that he got a flat, but he had not and no officer wants to help him. There are two families with similar names, who were given the same one flat, so they have to live together, having no understanding in bureaucracy. And so on. Not everything is true, but I say -- the main idea of socialism is shown. The people are treated like animals, with no respect, only the top of the iceberg has lots of privileges. The success of the series was reached because everyone in Poland could identify with the characters of the movie and everyone could say 'it's an absurd, but could also happen to me'.

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Angelus Novus

Last night I spent, oh, let's say, more than 5 minutes trying to post a beautiful photograph of an aubergine on unhemmed. To no avail. The software consistently bailed out at the crucial moment. Shame! Could have been the start of something big. A new departure. I was even going to append a brief comic dialogue on the subject of said vegetable, spoken by two unnamed - but unforgettable - characters.

My new tack this Tuesday lunchtime involved a painting by Paul Klee called 'Angelus Novus'. You can see here the very image I was going to cheekily paste across - it would have looked lovely nestled between this paragraph and the last. Sadly, the same technical problem that first reared its ugly head last night rears yet. This minor hiccup triggered that most uncommon of events: a blog staff meeting. (And some mild confusion of tenses.) So, after a good deal of deliberation and a bit of voting, it is my very great pleasure to announce, that, for a trial period of unspecified length, unhemmed is going textual. So look out.

no one serves coffee, no one gets up

żabki

bigbitowiec

A HANDY INSTRUMENT

"The article illustrated today (did you guess?) is a snow-gauge. There are very few of them in Ireland at present. It is made of copper, and consists of a funnel or catch-pipe for the snow, which widens inwardly, then drops eighteen inches, allowing the snow to fall into a pan beneath. A casing which can be heated with hot water surrounds the gauge and is used to melt the snow. By this arrangement the snow cannot escape; it melts and runs into the buccket beneath, where it is accurately gauged.

So what, you say. I will tell you what. There is one great advantage in having a snow-gauge on your premises. Supposing some moon-faced young man who reads Proust happens to be loitering about your house, blathering out of him about art, life, love, and so on. He is sure to have a few cant French phrases, which he will produce carefully at suitable intervals as one produces coins from a purse. Inevitably the day will come (even if you have to wait for it many years) when he will sigh and murmur:

'Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?'

Here is your chance. This is where you go to town. Seize the nitwit by the scruff of the neck, march him out to the snow gauge, and shout:

'Right in that bucket, you fool!'

I'll bet you'll feel pretty good after that."

(from the 'Research Bureau' of Flann O'Brien, reprinted in The Best of Miles)

party like it's 1538

Here's Death playing the bagpipes and about to get deathly on some poor old codger. (You can see all of Hans Holbein's Dance of Death here.)

where the Corporal don't live

sortes Virgilianae

Praise be to the OED -

"In phrases sortes Virgilianae, Homericae, Biblicae: divination, or the seeking of guidance, by chance selection of a passage in Virgil, Homer, or the Bible. Also ellipt. and transf.

a1586 SIDNEY Apol. Poet. (1595) sig. B4, Whereupon grew the worde of Sortes Virgilianæ, when by suddaine opening Virgils booke, they lighted vpon any verse of hys making. 1646 T. BROWNE Pseud. Ep. V. xxi. 272 The first an imitation of sortes Homericæ, or Virgilianæ, drawing determinations from verses casually occurring. 1700 J. WELWOOD Memoirs 100 Lord Falkland, to divert the king, would have his Majesty make a trial of his fortune by the Sortes Virgilianæ, which..was an usual kind of augury some ages past. 1740 H. WALPOLE Let. 25 Sept. (1974) XXXVII. 79 In three words I will give you her picture as we drew it in the Sortes VirgilianæInsanam vatem aspicies. I give you my honour, we did not choose it. 1801 M. EDGEWORTH Belinda II. xiii. 25 Several volumes of French plays and novels were lying there, and Clarence Hervey raking up one of them, cried: ‘Come, let us try our fate by the sortes Virgilianæ.’ 1845 G. E. JEWSBURY in A. Ireland Sel. Lett. G. E. Jewsbury to J. Welsh Carlyle (1892) 179, I send it you by way of a ‘sortes’, and the Bible has as much virtuethat wayas Virgil! 1886 D. C. MURRAY Cynic Fortune xv. 183 In the practice of the sortes (which was a favourite occupation of his) [he] was elevated or depressed by the text he fell upon. 1897 A. C. BENSON Diary June in D. Newsome On Edge of Paradise (1980) ii. 63, I took a Sortes Biblicae before refusing. 1947 H. NICOLSON Diary 11 Dec. (1968) 118, I consult sortes Biblicas. My Bible opens at Ezekiel XL 22. 1969 G. GREENE Travels with my Aunt I. xvi. 170 The Sortes Virgilianaea game my mother considered a little blasphemous unless it was played with the Bible. 1975 V. CANNING Kingsford Mark vi. 105 He acknowledged the encouragement of the sortes. All the omens were right."

In The Star Factory, Ciaran Carson advocates the sortes Ashberyae (although without my inelegant cod-Latin). Paul Muldoon I rather suspect of having committed, perhaps even more than once, the sortes OEDae. When in the direst of straits I have considered a sortes Unhemmedae. (Actually, that's not true.)

saltimbanco?

The First Lady of Hollywood

Hullo!

That might be the first greeting ever on unhemmed & if so allow me to apologise for being a little behindhand.

In the second verse of Bob Dylan's wonderfully wordy number "Desolation Row", Cinderella 'puts her hands in her back pockets / Bette Davis style'. If anyone can send me a photo of Bette Davis herself doing this, I would be most grateful.

Yours,

Jon

tempus fugit

Ballack?

feel like i'm always looking this word up

It's an illusion, though, isn't it?

INSPISSATE

"1. trans. To thicken, condense.

[...] fig. 1732 Historia Litteraria III. 249 When the Subject is limpid of it self, he frequently inspissates it, by throwing in a heap of Circumstances not Essential to it. 1884 E. E. HALE Xmas in Narrag. v. 117 No method..by which you can inspissate entertainingness into a dull article.

2. intr. To become thick or dense, to thicken.

[...] 1836 MACGILLIVRAY tr. Humboldt's Trav. xvii. 225 Until the yolk..has time to inspissate."

help!

Last night:

On Donnington Bridge, two milk floats in quick succession, at about 11-30pm. And huge quantities of horsedung.

This afternoon:

A young cyclist executing a perfect arm signal, his left arm fully - almost flamboyantly - horizontal. And right behind him, an older man, donnish in appearance, his bike helmet on bassackwards.

What's going on?

whelks

nomoclastic

I was reading an essay by Frank Kermode today, called 'Can We Say Absolutely Anything We Like?' It was originally an MLA paper in 1974 but first published in a 1977 book of essays dedicated to Lionel Trilling, who had died 2 years previously (he was 70). Kermode talks about Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), the Hungarian-British physical chemist and philosopher - who reads Polanyi anymore? - and uses the word 'anamorphosis' quite a bit, and the opposition 'proximal' and 'distal'. This is what the OED gives as the primary definition of 'anamorphosis':

"A distorted projection or drawing of anything, so made that when viewed from a particular point, or by reflection from a suitable mirror, it appears regular and properly proportioned; a deformation."

(The other two definitions: one is botanical, the other rare.)

In passing, Kermode calls Roland Barthes 'nomoclastic', by which I think he means, that Barthes messes with the names of things, or even destroys the names of things (by analogy with 'iconoclastic'). The OED has nothing to say about 'nomoclastic' and nor, amazingly, does Google.

ich bin

somewhere near Cumnor

maybe even Cumnor itself

satori

Zen Buddhism. 'A sudden indescribable and uncommunicable inner experience of enlightenment.' (OED)