Wednesday 18 August 2010

A summer seasoun—meditation on a squirell—spectral terror

Woe and distortion, tis the season of summer, and all trees bend about in breezes. Watch youre humblest walkyng higgeldy-piggeldy through Bloomsbury where he taketh in hooverwise the sights of Town.

Ever-seeking and never-finding, Nashe, I sighd to me, pausing on a bench in the RUSSELL square. A squirell insensately collected a Nut in front of me. What violent pangs redounded too, when I saw it, that microsentient thing like to a Mechanism, laying up with good sense his store for the winter and I, a tissue of divinity transfix'd in humble flesh, pissing away the morning on fanglings of the news-paper crossworde. And an apt name I thought, struggling with the clew and feelyng my temper increase. I bit the pencil in half and stormed to'ard a park cafeteria where I demanded that black Liquid which makyth a man incapable of lassitude.

—Coffee please
—With sugar?
—No
—AND WHY NOT, askd a voix behind me. Aghast I revolvd to face mine interlocutor. Looking the mighty figure up and down I apprehended violence in's eye, physical force in the jaw, and a bald head. Then I staggered back'ard into a three-tier scone display, knocking it to the floor. The figure bore itself toward me without footstep or sound, bobbyng on its heavy skirts.
—Nashe! bellowed the form, the devil in human format pelting me with organick snackes
—Why dost thou persecute me so? I cryd protecting myself with my handes
—I wish a bargain
—Stop, stop, I shouted, drawing my newspaper
—Bargain!
—What wishest thou, sire?
—A commission.
—Alas I have no wit left in me

Tuesday 17 August 2010

Fiesta—on the necessity of enemies—a scrap of mitigation

The lamps grew brighter and the musick more palpable as I came to my senses, standing in torment at the edge of a publick party resembling a seventy-foot jellyfish in the process of electrocution.

"Heap the voltaick pile high", I murmurd, "and wheel out the wet-cell—the night is on its knees begging for a beating". Lights plash'd and slash'd the sky o'er our heads and the cobbl'd square rang with the bullying of "synthesizer". At moments some maiden would sashay out to'ard me, waving high her flouncèd Ra-Ra and bopping con vigore to the straines of popular protestant melodies.

Yet—I was in Popish Spaine! A meal of dead bull and a glimpse of the red-and-yellow heraldry assured me of that. And what could be the import of the import of these Danish straines, these Bjorns and 'Whig-Fields', that set athrobb the very foundations of San Lorenzo's gilded monastery (for I was there in San Lorenzo, sweete reader, and athwart the continent had I travelled on the most post-human and steeliest railes, for youre Nashe is no slouche internationally nor behindhand in locomotion) and made the caryatids jiggle to the atavist rhythms of LUTHERAN music.

I almost—I confess it, I do not shrink from confession—almost desir'd to hear some more catholickal melody, for however the spread of Protestant values and minimalist approach to personal comfort gain footholds in Europe, I do have a high tolerance for Emnity and perhaps even a constitutional Requirement for that commodity from predictable sources. To visit a foreign place and be confronted with the insipid, with the o'er-familiar, the self-made yellow meal open on the plate instead of the mysteriose seal'd Croquette with G— knows what inside is no prescription for Adventure.

However these Spanish have a way of Gyration.

Thursday 5 August 2010

Meditation on the Sun — the Multiculture — a cowardly assault

At Evening today, as the Sunne roistered his way down the Sky keening in a high voix the folksongs of outer space and I tuck'd in on three rashers of this century's bacon seal'd between two squares of artificial Loaf, I mus'd on the prospect visible from my Window, viz., the Utopia of Tower Hamlets, wherein every manner of childe may playe with or be abus'd by his Peers according to his Genetick Predisposition.

HOW VERY LIKE THE SUN, I thought loudly, to shyne so INDISCRIMINATELY on all, and as a partickularly generous Beame slotted into my Eye-ball I wonder'd how the children outside would regard its Jamming-in-a-Sack and subsequent Snuffing, and if they had to live their days by the light of the Moone, would they be so merry nowe eh? Wereupon I drove my knife through all three storeys of sandwich'd meat and stood to my full height, declaring that the SUN was friend to man.

The Sunne hath got his hatte on
And is coming oute to pleye

This pretty poesie I had heard in passyng a local infirmary for the Insane and I now humm'd it inward where it found full accordance with my Mentality. As I stood thus infested wyth Satisfacioun a bottle shot through my window at Velocity, tinkling litel my glass pane into hard and lethal rags, one fallyng into the meat leaving me quite incompetent of Speech.

Tuesday 3 August 2010

A Dispatch from the Office

Chain'd at my deske I beg your lordships for a more Stimulous worlde.

How has youre Nashe come to this appalling pass? To laye it out flatly: tempted in by the GOOGLE-medusa with her hair of Links - and Nashe intangled, petrified, the sword of Witt nowhere to slice it...

No power shall containe me long—if life giveth sour grapes, Ile make sour wine.