This is a rather fascinating site, where - if you click through the map - you can observe the shipping around British ports.
Dirty British steamer with a salt-stained coal stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days....
Dirty British steamer with a salt-stained coal stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days....
Distracting myself.
Oct. 6th, 2008 12:48 pmHum. Having been unable to get the wifi to work in the Bod - except it does now, God have mercy on me - I ought to have been productive.
Well I have, sort of, only of rather bad poetry, rather than of, say, dissertation, or research pertaining thereto. IT'S ALL MEISTER ECKHART'S FAULT.
All speech is a stammer, each word
Misses its meaning, I can write or tell,
Picture the library which surrounds me,
But you'll not see it; you'll only recreate
What I said from your own word-hoard.
My words and words of words float above
Their objects, un-tethered tethered balloons,
Trailing their meaningless cables.
There is no truth in words, at most a likeness.
And yet we long for truth, thirst for it,
Starve for meaning, stutter and try to speak
The right word at the right moment
Re-twist the knot of meaning,
Say all we mean to one another, moor us fast.
But we cannot. The only Word with power to do so
Speaks itself, speaks us, but how shall we take
The Word in our mouths and speak our speaker?
A very rough draft, and probably not that good anyway; still, I suppose writing something is better than spending an hour looking at lolcats (or whatever), right?
Well I have, sort of, only of rather bad poetry, rather than of, say, dissertation, or research pertaining thereto. IT'S ALL MEISTER ECKHART'S FAULT.
All speech is a stammer, each word
Misses its meaning, I can write or tell,
Picture the library which surrounds me,
But you'll not see it; you'll only recreate
What I said from your own word-hoard.
My words and words of words float above
Their objects, un-tethered tethered balloons,
Trailing their meaningless cables.
There is no truth in words, at most a likeness.
And yet we long for truth, thirst for it,
Starve for meaning, stutter and try to speak
The right word at the right moment
Re-twist the knot of meaning,
Say all we mean to one another, moor us fast.
But we cannot. The only Word with power to do so
Speaks itself, speaks us, but how shall we take
The Word in our mouths and speak our speaker?
A very rough draft, and probably not that good anyway; still, I suppose writing something is better than spending an hour looking at lolcats (or whatever), right?
On the other hand...
May. 27th, 2008 05:02 pmI may have no motivation today, and I may be spamming lj with peculiar content - but on the upside, a fellow student I did a small translation for (really small: proof reading two abstracts!) has given me a large and exciting looking box of Swiss pralines.† The day is rescued!
† Who was it said that he had never been so miserable that he would never have been cheered, to a small but nonetheless significant degree, by the offer of a chocolate cream?
† Who was it said that he had never been so miserable that he would never have been cheered, to a small but nonetheless significant degree, by the offer of a chocolate cream?
Amazingly, and despite my belief that it was a rather improbably broad satire on the shortsightedness of earnest teenage girls, there really was an organisation called S.P.E.W.
It stood for 'The Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women', and was founded by a group of Victorian feminists (the Langham Place group) in the 1880s.
It stood for 'The Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women', and was founded by a group of Victorian feminists (the Langham Place group) in the 1880s.