Fog
The Sanity Inspector
-- Shakespeare, _A Midsummer Night's Dream_
...the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes.
-- T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
...the yellow smoke that ... licked its tongue into the corners of
the evening.
-- ibid
...Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black
drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes -
gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
-- Charles Dickens, _Bleak House_
--
bruce
The dignified don't even enter in the game.
--The Jam
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
The Sanity Inspector
their chips this weekend...]
Daniel P. B. Smith
chollanam...@mindspring.com wrote:
> [Prised from the grip of deja.com--they've really flipped
> their chips this weekend...]
>
>
> ...drooping fog as black as Acheron
> -- Shakespeare, _A Midsummer Night's Dream_
>
> ...the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes.
> -- T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
>
> ...the yellow smoke that ... licked its tongue into the corners of
> the evening.
> -- ibid
Now for some REAL poetry:
It was a September evening, and not yet seven o'clock, but the day
had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the
great city. Mud-colored clouds drooped sadly over the muddy
streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of
diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy
pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into
the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance
across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something
eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which
flitted across these narrow bars of light,--sad faces and glad,
haggard and merry. Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom
into the light, and so back into the gloom once more. I am not
subject to impressions, but the dull, heavy evening, with the
strange business upon which we were engaged, combined to make me
nervous and depressed. I could see from Miss Morstan's manner that
she was suffering from the same feeling. Holmes alone could rise
superior to petty influences. He held his open note-book upon his
knee, and from time to time he jotted down figures and memoranda in
the light of his pocket-lantern.
--Arthur Conan Doyle, _The Sign of the Four_
--
Daniel P. B. Smith
Current email address: dpbs...@bellatlantic.net
"Lifetime forwarding" address: dpbs...@alum.mit.edu
Visit alt.books.jack-london!
The Sanity Inspector
<dpbs...@bellatlantic.net> shared with usenet this thought:
>Now for some REAL poetry:
Oh, yeah? >;^)
To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods
overthrown and his altars crumbling; but to the wolf and the wild dog
that have come in to crouch at man's feet, this grief has never come.
Unlike man, whose gods are of the unseen and the overguessed, vapours
and mists of fancy eluding the garmenture of reality, wandering
wraiths of desired goodness and power, intangible out-croppings of
self into the realm of spirit - unlike man, the wolf and the wild dog
that have come in to the fire find their gods in the living flesh,
solid to the touch, occupying earth-space and requiring time for the
accomplishment of their ends and their existence. No effort of faith
is necessary to believe in such a god; no effort of will can possibly
induce disbelief in such a god. There is no getting away from it.
There it stands, on its two hind-legs, club in hand, immensely
potential, passionate and wrathful and loving, god and mystery and
power all wrapped up and around by flesh that bleeds when it is torn
and that is good to eat like any flesh.
-- Jack London, _White Fang_
Though I'm sure you could come up with something more apt from
Mr. London, please.
Martin Julian DeMello
Thro' palsied streets the fatal shadows flow,
And in their sharp disastrous undertow
Suck in the morning sun, and all the sky.
-- Louise Imogene Guiney, 'Fog'
From 'London - Twelve Sonnets'
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
-- Carl Sandburg, 'Fog'
--
Martin DeMello
tmw
A mass of silver fog, a floating shroud,
Rolled slowly up the hillside to the crest
Like Silence going home into its cloud.
~ Furnley Maurice (Frank Leslie Thompson Wilmot )1881-1942, "The Gully"
tmw
****************************************************************************
****
Spuddie
latibulizes orthogonal, fedifragous telestiches on full moons in leap
years said authoritatively:
> It was a September evening, and not yet seven o'clock, but the day
> had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the
> great city. Mud-colored clouds drooped sadly over the muddy
> streets.
I bet George Carlin didn't like this passage. :-D
Cheryl
~~~Karaoke is Japanese for "tone deaf."~~~
Daniel P. B. Smith
chollanam...@mindspring.com wrote:
> Though I'm sure you could come up with something more apt from
> Mr. London, please.
Actually, Jack London isn't very quotable in the sense of having
memorable single sentences or short phrases... however...
Then we entered the fog. It was about us, veiling and hiding us in
its dense wet gauze.
The sudden transition was startling. The moment before we had been
leaping through the sunshine, the clear sky above us, the sea
breaking and rolling wide to the horizon, and a ship, vomiting smoke
and fire and iron missiles, rushing madly upon us. And at once, as
in an instant's leap, the sun was blotted out, there was no sky,
even our mastheads were lost to view, and our horizon was such as
tear-blinded eyes may see. The grey mist drove by us like a rain.
Every woollen filament of our garments, every hair of our heads and
faces, was jewelled with a crystal globule. The shrouds were wet
with moisture; it dripped from our rigging overhead; and on the
underside of our booms drops of water took shape in long swaying
lines, which were detached and flung to the deck in mimic showers at
each surge of the schooner. I was aware of a pent, stifled feeling.
As the sounds of the ship thrusting herself through the waves were
hurled back upon us by the fog, so were one's thoughts. The mind
recoiled from contemplation of a world beyond this wet veil which
wrapped us around. This was the world, the universe itself, its
bounds so near one felt impelled to reach out both arms and push
them back. It was impossible, that the rest could be beyond these
walls of grey. The rest was a dream, no more than the memory of a
dream.
--Jack London, _The Sea-Wolf_
The whole first chapter of _The Sea-Wolf_, which I think is wonderful,
is a description of nautical peril in the fog in San Francisco Bay.
In "Valley of the Moon," Billy and Saxon (his wife) are seeking a
farmsite where they can live a healthy life, far from the vile city;
part of the book is a sort of picaresque description of their travels in
search of this goal. As they list the desiderata, they agree that they
do NOT want a foggy location:
"But my dear child, you can't expect to find such a paradise on the
earth," Hall continued. "For instance, you can't have redwoods
without fog. They go together. The redwoods grow only in the fog
belt."
Saxon debated a while.
"Well, we could put up with a little fog," she conceded, "-- almost
anything to have redwoods.
--Jack London, _Valley of the Moon_
"John Barleycorn" is supposed to be _against_ alcohol, but I sometimes
wonder:
Wander with me through one mood of the myriad moods of sadness into
which one is plunged by John Barleycorn. I ride out over my
beautiful ranch. Between my legs is a beautiful horse. The air is
wine. The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn
flame. Across Sonoma Mountain wisps of sea fog are stealing. The
afternoon sun smoulders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to
make me glad I am alive. I am filled with dreams and mysteries. I
am all sun and air and sparkle. I am vitalised, organic. I move, I
have the power of movement, I command movement of the live thing I
bestride. I am possessed with the pomps of being, and know proud
passions and inspirations. I have ten thousand august connotations.
I am a king in the kingdom of sense, and trample the face of the
uncomplaining dust....
--Jack London, _John Barleycorn_
Frank Bohan
The Sanity Inspector <choll...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:3a21b4a...@news.mindspring.com...
> [Prised from the grip of deja.com--they've really flipped
> their chips this weekend...]
Mine eyes have seen the horror
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[Tune: Battle Hymn of the Republic]
Mine eyes have seen the horror
of the coming of the frogs.
They are sneaking through the swamps,
they are lurking under logs.
You can hear their mournful croaking
through the early morning fog.
The frogs keep hopping on.
Chorus:
Ribbit, ribbit, ribbit, croak, croak [Repeat 3x]
The frogs keep hopping on.
(origin unknown)
+++
Frank Bohan
SteveMR
Look here, you people who say, "Today or tomorrow we
are going to such and such a town, stay there a
year, and open up a profitable business." How do
you know what is going to happen tomorrow? For the
length of your lives is as uncertain as the morning
fog--now you see it; soon it is gone.
--The Bible, James 4:13-14 TLB
--
Steve
Daniel P. B. Smith
<Steve...@aol.com> wrote:
> Look here, you people who say, "Today or tomorrow we
> are going to such and such a town, stay there a
> year, and open up a profitable business." How do
> you know what is going to happen tomorrow? For the
> length of your lives is as uncertain as the morning
> fog--now you see it; soon it is gone.
> --The Bible, James 4:13-14 TLB
Oddly (to me), the word "fog" does not seem to appear anywhere in the
King James Version. According to a search at www.shakespeare.com it
appears six times in Shakespeare, who was reasonably contemporary with
the King James translation, notably in the scene with the three witches
singing "Fair is foul and foul is fair/Hover through the fog and filthy
air."
Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into
such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get
gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is
your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time,
and then vanisheth away. --KJV
J. B. Phillips calls it a "puff of smoke" and the New English bible
calls it "mist."
boo...@pacific.net
"Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the
mystery of all things strives for utterance."
ã Jack London,
"The White Silence"
Dan Barth, 'Barth's Unfamiliar Quotations'
Daniel P. B. Smith
boo...@pacific.net wrote:
Got any more?
Personally, I find Jack London not to be all that quotable... it's odd,
there are relatively few sentences that stick in my mind. There are
individual _paragraphs_ that are good... yet somehow what he's really
great at is the _accumulation_ of telling detail over several pages,
building up a picture--and it is those pictures, not the words, that
stick in my mind.
Which, come to think of it, is exactly what he is writing about in "The
Sun-Dog Trail."
Still... some of mine...
There is a woman in the state of Nevada to whom I once lied
continuously, consistently, and shamelessly, for the matter
of a couple of hours.
--Jack London, _The Road_
John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind,
cheek-bones wide apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks to
complete the perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy,
equidistant from the circumference, flattened against the
very centre of the face like a dough-ball upon the ceiling.
Perhaps that is why I hated him, for truly he had become an
offense to my eyes, and I believed the earth to be cumbered with his
presence.
--Jack London, "Moon-Face"
boo...@pacific.net
Smith" <dpbs...@bellatlantic.net> wrote:
> Got any more?
You know, I looked through my quotes collection thinking I did. But there
was only the one. I'm thinking there are some memorable lines in the
Hawaiian and South Seas stories, so I'll have to look at those, but for
the most part I think you are right that London builds in larger blocks of
words, rather than with one-liners. Faulkner, Wolfe, Henry Miller,
Kerouac, even Brautigan are all very "quotable," London and Hemingway much
less so.
db
Daniel P. B. Smith
boo...@pacific.net wrote:
Even where Jack London has a single line that is highly _memorable_ all
by itself, it isn't necessarily very _quotable._ For example,
"I only remember one part of the service," he said, "and that is,
'And the body shall be cast into the sea.' So cast it in."
--Jack London, _The Sea-Wolf_
Sensational! If you've ever read the book. Otherwise, it doesn't mean
very much... And there are very few contexts in which it would be
_apropos_.
The Sanity Inspector
politics who does not realize that this island of ours is and always
has been covered with a beautiful cloud. No one can be a good critic
of England who does not understand fogs. And no one can be a really
patriotic Englishman who does not like fogs. Of all national
histories the history of England must be the hardest to write, for the
English, with all their great epochs, not only did not know what they
were doing, but, so far as one can make out, did not want to know what
they were doing. They always did a thing in such a way that a hundred
years afterwards it could be maintained that they had done the precise
opposite. They always said a thing in such a way that it could mean
something different. This was not craft. It was their ingrained
poetry...The English law, for instance is is uncommonly like an
impressionist picture of a rainy day. The Code Napoleon is like a
coloured photograph of Rome.
--G. K. Chesterton, 'The English Way' _Daily News, 16 March
1905
Graham Weeks
chollanam...@mindspring.com wrote:
Since the passing of The Clean Air Act there have been none of the former
peasoup fogs for over 40 years.
If my memory is correct parliament got rid of the fog and then signed the
Treaty of Rome for England to be merged into Europe.
Chesterton seems to provide a link between the two :-)
ObQ
We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked but not comprised. We are
associated but not absorbed. And should European statesmen address us and
say, 'Shall we speak for thee?', we should reply, 'Nay Sir, for we dwell
among our own people'. --Winston Churchill - 1953
--
Graham J Weeks
http://www.weeks-g.dircon.co.uk/ My homepage of quotations
http://www.grace.org.uk/churches/ealing.html Our church
http://www.onelist.com/subscribe.cgi/Christiansquoting Daily quotes
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Rejoice, that the immortal God is born, so that mortal man may live in eternity. Jan Huss
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Frank Bohan
Graham Weeks <wee...@dircon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:weeks-g-0612...@bh-cw33-052.pool.dircon.co.uk...
> In article <3a2d8b7b...@news.mindspring.com>,
> chollanam...@mindspring.com wrote:
>
> > No one can understand the nature of England or of English
> > politics who does not realize that this island of ours is and always
> > has been covered with a beautiful cloud. No one can be a good critic
> > of England who does not understand fogs. And no one can be a really
> > patriotic Englishman who does not like fogs. Of all national
> > histories the history of England must be the hardest to write, for the
> > English, with all their great epochs, not only did not know what they
> > were doing, but, so far as one can make out, did not want to know what
> > they were doing. They always did a thing in such a way that a hundred
> > years afterwards it could be maintained that they had done the precise
> > opposite. They always said a thing in such a way that it could mean
> > something different. This was not craft. It was their ingrained
> > poetry...The English law, for instance is is uncommonly like an
> > impressionist picture of a rainy day. The Code Napoleon is like a
> > coloured photograph of Rome.
> > --G. K. Chesterton, 'The English Way' _Daily News, 16 March
> > 1905
>
> Since the passing of The Clean Air Act there have been none of the former
> peasoup fogs for over 40 years.
>
> If my memory is correct parliament got rid of the fog and then signed the
> Treaty of Rome for England to be merged into Europe.
Perhaps this was a belated attempt to introduce fog (or foggy thinking) into
European affairs. Something similar was suggested in an episode of "Yes
Minister" which was recently repeated. In this Humphrey Appleby explained
that the principal reason for the UK joining Europe was to cause dissension
between the constituent states; a policy which has worked well for 500
years, and would be better accomplished from within.
Ob(long) quote:
Euro Madness: Euro chiefs forked out 12,000 pounds (GBP) to put a
stone marker post at the exact geographical centre of the eleven
countries launching the Euro on 1/01/99. The 1ft. granite lump with
a small metal plaque cost a few hundred pounds. But Brussels
bureaucrats spent thousands more on a month-long study to tell them
where to put it. The marker was finally installed in the middle of a
farmer's field 100 miles south of Paris, near the village of Argent,
which ironically means Money. Farmer Paul Berbain 64, who will help
unveil it said, 'The thing is a nuisance. I was thinking of growing
corn in the field next year, but it could be in the way for
harvesting. If Britain joined the Euro it would shunt the new
currency's geographical centre to the English Channel, drowning the
thing under 100ft of water about 50 miles off Portsmouth. Right wing
French councillor Herve Legendre looked at the monument and said, '
I wish Britain had joined; the bottom of the sea is the right place
for it. That money should have been spent on school books, a sports
centre or a place for the elderly to go. If Sweden, Denmark and
Greece also joined it would site for the marker would be in
Switzerland, which is not even in the European Community.
-- The Week
===
Frank Bohan
SteveMR
> -- Shakespeare, _A Midsummer Night's Dream_
>
> ...the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes.
> -- T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
>
> ...the yellow smoke that ... licked its tongue into the corners of
>the evening.
> -- ibid
>
> ...Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black
>drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes -
>gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. --
>Charles Dickens, _Bleak House_
Truth is a torch that gleams through the fog without
dispelling it.
--Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771), _De l'Esprit_ [1758]
. . . the fog is rising.
--Last words of Emily Dickenson (1830-1886)
--
Steve
Pulsatrix
Advertising slogan of Oat Willie's, Austin, TX. Used to be a head shop, now sells T-shirts and other kitch.
"SteveMR" <Steve...@aol.com> wrote in message news:dhj54t0eu55loluqi...@4ax.com...
Martin Julian DeMello
'Last Answers'
I wrote a poem on the mist
And a woman asked me what I meant by it.
I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist,
how pearl and gray of it mix and reel,
And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at evening
into points of mystery quivering with color.
I answered:
The whole world was mist once long ago and some day
it will all go back to mist,
Our skulls and lungs are more water than bone and tissue
And all poets love dust and mist because all the last answers
Go running back to dust and mist.
-- Carl Sandburg
--
Martin DeMello