GLIS
Art Neuendorffer
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/vwoolf.htm
<<After final attack of mental illness WOOLF loaded her pockets with
stones & drowned herself in the River OUSE near her Sussex home on
[Friday] March 28, 1941. On her note to her husband she wrote: "I have
a feeling I shall go MAD. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I
hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it
but cannot fight any longer. I owe all my happiness to you
but cannot go on and spoil your life.">>
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Edward Gibbon
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/g/g43d/chapter31.html
<<At the Roman tables, the birds, the SQUIRRELS {The want of an
En[GLIS]h name obliges me to refer to the common genus of squirrels, the
Latin GLIS, the French loir; a little animal, who inhabits the woods,
and remains torpid in cold weather, (see Plin. Hist. Natur. viii. 82.
Buffon, Hist. Naturelle, tom. viii. 153. Pennant's Synopsis of
Quadrupeds, p. 289.) The art of rearing and fattening great numbers of
glires was practised in Roman villas as a profitable article of rural
economy, (Varro, de Re Rustica, iii. 15.) The excessive demand of them
for luxurious tables was increased by the foolish prohibitions of the
censors; and it is reported that they are still esteemed in modern Rome,
and are frequently sent as presents by the Colonna princes,
Note: Is it not the DORMOUSE? - M.}
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Alice did not quite know what to say to this:
so she helped herself to some tea and BREAD-and-BUTTER,
and then turned to the DORMOUSE, and repeated her question.
'Why did they live at the bottom of a well?'
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What the Romans did eat
http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/Apicius.html
<<One recipe which has survived virtually intact since
Roman times is French TOAST (7.11.3), served with HONEY on top.
The Romans principal source of starch was BREAD,
though they did import rice, which they used to thicken sauces.>>
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THE VOYAGE OUT (1915) by Virginia Woolf: Chapter 2
Meanwhile Helen herself was under examination, though not from either of
her victims. Mr. Pepper considered her; and his meditations, carried on
while he cut his TOAST into bars and neatly BUTTERed them, took him
through a considerable stretch of autobiography. One of his penetrating
glances assured him that he was right last night in judging that Helen
was beautiful. Blandly he passed her the jam. She was talking nonsense,
but not worse nonsense than people usually do talk at breakfast, the
cerebral circulation, as he knew to his cost, being apt to give trouble
at that hour. He went on saying "No" to her, on principle, for he never
yielded to a woman on account of her sex. And here, dropping his eyes to
his plate, he became autobiographical. He had not married himself for
the sufficient reason that he had never met a woman who commanded his
respect. Condemned to pass the susceptible years of youth in a railway
station in Bombay, he had seen only coloured women, military women,
official women; and his ideal was a woman who could read Greek, if not
Persian, was irreproachably fair in the face, and able to understand the
small things he let fall while undressing. As it was he had contracted
habits of which he was not in the least ashamed. Certain odd minutes
every day went to learning things by heart; he never took a ticket
without noting the number; he devoted January to PETRONIUS, February to
Catullus, March to the Etruscan vases perhaps; anyhow he had done good
work in India, and there was nothing to regret in his life except the
fundamental defects which no wise man regrets, when the present is still
his. So concluding he looked up suddenly and smiled. Rachel caught his eye.
"And now you've chewed something thirty-seven times, I suppose?" she
thought, but said politely aloud, "Are your legs troubling you to-day,
Mr. Pepper?"
---------------------------------------------------------------
<<Yes, they did eat edible DORMICE (GLIS GLIS) (as Magnus Pyke was fond
of telling us), for which two recipes have survived. One involves
glazing them with HONEY and then rolling them in poppy seeds
(Petronius), while the other involves stuffing them with a mixture of
pork mince, DORMOUSE meat trimmings, pepper, nuts, asafoetida and
nuoc mam and then roasting or boiling them (Apicius 8.9.1).>>
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PETRONIUS Arbiter (c.27-66 CE)
The Banquet of Trimalchio from the Satyricon
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/petronius-satyricon-feast.html
[Introduction (adapted from Davis)]
<<The following is a excerpt from a comic romance probably composed
during the reign of Nero. The picture of Trimalchio, the coarse freedman
parvenu, who has nothing to commend him but his money, and who is
surrounded by countless parasites and creatures of his whims, is one of
the most clever and unsparing delineations in ancient literature. .
At last we went to recline at table where boys from Alexandria poured
snow water on our hands, while others, turning their attention to our
feet, picked our nails, and not in silence did they perform their task,
but singing all the time. I wished to try if the whole retinue could
sing, and so I called for a drink, and a boy, not less ready with his
tune, brought it accompanying his action with a sharp-toned ditty; and
NO MATTER WHAT YOU ASKED FOR IT WAS ALL THE SAME SONG.
The first course was served and it was good, for all were close up at
the table, save Trimalchio, for whom, after a new fashion, the place of
honor was reserved. Among the first viands there was a little ass of
Corinthian bronze with saddle bags on his back, in one of which were
white olives and in the other black. Over the ass were two SILVER
PLATTERS, engraved on the edges with Trimalchio's name, and the weight
of silver. DORMICE seasoned with HONEY and POPPIES lay on little
bridge-like structures of iron; there were also sausages brought in
piping hot on a silver gridiron, and under that Syrian plums and
pomegranate grains.>>
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[T]winkle, twinkle, little bat!
[H]ow I wonder what you're at!
[U]p above the world you fly,
[L]ike a tea-tray in the sky.
<<Dante Gabriel Rossetti kept a pet wombat that slept on a silver
serving dish on the dining table. The Reverend Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was a visitor of Rossetti's, and there is
speculation that the wombat was the inspiration for the DORMOUSE
in the Mad Tea Party in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.>>
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/2324/wswombat.htm
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The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: Chapter 4
"That's the painful thing about pets," said Mr. Dalloway; "they die. The
first sorrow I can remember
was for the death of a DORMOUSE. I regret to say that I sat upon it.
Still, that didn't make one any the
less sorry. Here lies the duck that SAMUEL JOHNSON sat on, eh? I was
big for my age.
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SAMUEL JOHNSON's Last Years - 1784 -
From "The Life of SAMUEL JOHNSON", by Sir John Hawkins
http://www.samueljohnson.com/hawkins/1784.html
[Dec.] 10th. This day at noon I saw him again. He said to me, that the male
nurse to whose care I had committed him, was unfit for the office. 'He is,'
said he, 'an idiot, as aukward as a turnspit just put into the wheel, and as
sleepy as a DORMOUSE.' Mr. Cruikshank came into the room, and, looking on
his scarified leg, saw no sign of a mortification.
11th. At noon, I found him dozing, and would not disturb him.
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Twelfth Night Act 2, Scene 5
FABIAN: A FUSTIAN riddle!
Act 3, Scene 2
FABIAN: She did show favour to the youth in your sight only
to exasperate you, to awake your DORMOUSE valour, to
put fire in your heart and brimstone in your liver.
You should then have accosted her; and with some
excellent jests, fire-new from the mint, you should
have banged the youth into dumbness.
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http://www.writersalmanac.org/docs/03_07_28.htm
<<28 JULY, 1844: British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, born in
Stratford, England. He was the oldest of nine children born to
High Church Anglicans. His father was a marine insurance adjuster and
also a poet. For a while Hopkins wanted to be a painter-poet like Dante
Gabriel Rossetti. Then he got involved in religion and became a Jesuit
priest. He preached in the slums of industrial cities: Manchester,
Liverpool and Glasgow. He went through a phase where he felt that poetry
was too self-indulgent, and he burned his early poems. But he eventually
grew out of it and sent his written poems to his good friend Robert
Bridges, who became Poet Laureate in 1913. Hopkins wasn't well-known as
a poet until after he died. He was very depressed toward the end of his
life because he was working as a Professor of Greek and Latin in Dublin
and hated it. He hated grading papers, especially since so many of his
students failed their translation exams. Hopkins wrote, "The world is
charged with the grandeur of God.">>
<<28 JULY, 1878: newspaper columnist, playwright, and short story
writer Don Marquis, born Donald Robert Perry Marquis in Walnut, Illinois
born. He went to work at the Washington Times and then the Sun and the
Tribune in New York. He had a column called "The Sun Dial." Marquis
created the characters Archy the cockroach, and Mehitabel the alley cat.
Archy was a former free verse poet who "sees life from the underside
now." He wasn't able to reach the shift key so everything he wrote was
in lower case. And Mehitabel was an alley cat with questionable morals
who insisted that she was Cleopatra in one of her former lives. After
using Archy and Mehitabel in columns for 10 years, Marquis made books
out of their writing, beginning with archy and mehitabel (1927). Don
Marquis wrote of himself, "Height, 5 feet 101/2 inches; hair,
dove-colored; scar on little finger of left hand.dislikes Roquefort
cheese, 'Tom Jones,' Wordsworth's poetry, absinthe cocktails, most
musical comedy, public banquets, physical exercise, steam heat,
toy dogs, poets who wear their souls outside, organized charity,
magazine covers, and the gas company.">>
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"Ah, my time is not valuable," replied the man with a
melancholy smile. "Still it belongs to government, and I
ought not to waste it; but, having received the signal that
I might rest for an hour" (here he glanced at the SUN-DIAL,
for there was everything in the enclosure of Montlhery, even
a SUN-DIAL), "and having ten minutes before me, and my
strawberries being ripe, when a day longer -- by-the-by,
sir, do you think DORMICE eat them?"
"Indeed, I should think not," replied Monte Cristo; "DORMICE
are bad neighbors for us who do not eat them preserved, as
the Romans did."
"What? Did the Romans eat them?" said the gardener -- "ate
DORMICE?"
"I have read so in PETRONIUS," said the count.
"Really? They can't be nice, though they do say `as fat as a
DORMOUSE.' It is not a wonder they are fat, sleeping all
day, and only waking to eat all night.
Count of Monte Cristo - Dumas
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http://www.abcgallery.com/R/rossetti/rossetti19.html
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Dantis Amor. (Dante's Love) was the central
panel of three, the others showing the earthly and heavenly salutations
of Beatrice; all three were painted on a cupboard door. Love stands in
front of a diagonally divided sky with the head of Christ in the upper
left, and that of Beatrice in the lower right. Love is holding an
unfinished SUNDIAL, which would have shown the time to be nine o'clock,
nine being the mystic number, which Dante associated with Beatrice.
http://www.abcgallery.com/R/rossetti/rossetti26.html
Dante Gabriel Rossetti Beata Beatrix is a portrait of Rossetti's dead
wife, Elizabeth SIDDAL. Once again the subject comes from Dante's Vita
Nuova, and shows the mystical translation of Beatrice from earth to
heaven. On the right stands Dante, staring across to the Angel of Love.
Beatrice sits beside a SUNDIAL on which the shadow falls on nine, the
hour of her death on 9 June 1290. A red bird, the messenger of death,
drops a poppy, the symbol of sleep, into her folded hands.
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Dickens was in a train accident on JUNE 9, 1865 but he didn't
die until: JUNE 9, 1870 aged 58.
Henslowe's records indicate that there
was a performance of Hamlet on (Thursday) June 9th, 1594.
276 years later Dickens died on (Thursday) June 9th, 1870.
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http://www.glirarium.de/bilch/literatur/alice.html
<<The British DORMOUSE is a tree-living rodent that resembles a small
squirrel much more than it does a mouse. The name is from the Latin
dormire, to sleep, and has reference to the animal's habit of winter
hibernation. Unlike the squirrel, the DORMOUSE is nocturnal, so that
even in May (the month of Alice's adventure) it remains in a torpid
state throughout the day. In Some Reminiscences of William Michael
Rossetti, 1906, we are told that the DORMOUSE may have been modeled
after Dante Gabriel Rossetti's pet wombat, which had a habit
of sleeping on the table. Carroll knew all the Rossettis
and occasionally visited them.>>
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WOMBAT by Ogden Nash
The wombat lives across the seas,
Among the far Antipodes.
He may exist on nuts and berries,
Or then again, on missionaries;
His distant habitat precludes
Conclusive knowledge of his moods,
But I would not engage the wombat
In any form of mortal combat.
[http://www.regiments.org/wombats/wombats/sightings.htm]
[http://www.zfiles.xylene.com/funny/wombats.html]
http://www.thecolors.com/artpre/dante_rossetti.html
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti attempted suicide on JUNE 8, 1872
but didn't die until: Easter Sunday April 9, 1882.
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti dies: EASTER Sunday: 9 April, 1882
BacON dies from snow chill: EASTER Sunday: 9 April, 1626
[Gregorian] : a week after EASTER: 19 April, 1626
ByrON mortally chilled by rain: 9 April, 1824
ByrON dies a day after EASTER: 19 April, 1824
ByrON's daughter ALLEGRA dies: 19 April, 1822
Charles Darwin dies: Wednesday 19 April, 1882
Halley's comet within .09 AU of earth: Wednesday 19 April, 607
Francois Rabelais dies: Sunday 9 April, 1553
ByrON's daughter ALLEGRA dies: 19 April, 1822
Cervantes' _Persiles_ dedication to "We READ" LEMOS 19 April, 1616
ByrON's _Parisina_ published 22 January, 1816
ByrON born: Tuesday 22 January, 1788
BacON born: Wednesday 22 January, 1561
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti (English 1828-1882)
<<Charles Dante Rossetti was born in London on May 12, 1828, the son of
Gabriele Rossetti, a political exile from Naples who was forced to
abandon his native country due to his liberal politics. Gabriele
relocated to London where he became a professor of Italian. A a literary
scholar and great admirer of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Gabriele named
his first son after the poet. Rossetti's Mother was a devout woman of
strong intellect and her faith would later have an influence on her
son's early Pre-Raphaelite paintings. The Rossetti's had four children,
Dante Gabriel, Maria, Christina, and Michael. Due to his upbringing the
young Gabriel learned to speak both English and Italian at an early age.
Dante Gabriel and Christina were temperamental and emotional while
Michael and Maria were of a more stable nature, leading their father to
refer to them as 'the calms and the storms'. The Rossetti household was
a bohemian one, frequented by guests who would spend hours discussing
politics or poetry. In 1841, Rossetti enrolled at the Sass Academy art
school in preparation for studies at the Royal Academy School. Rossetti
had difficulties choosing between devoting himself to painting or poetry
and by this time had already translated several volumes of Italian
poetry to English. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1848 but was
impatient with the tedium of artistic training, a characteristic which
prevented him from developing the technical skills displayed by his
fellow Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood members. Often Rosetti would spend his
time writing poems or drawing illustrations for poetry. By 1848, he had
grown tired of his studies and left the Academy for tutelage under
painter Ford Madox Brown. At this time he also began to use the name
which he is known by, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
In September of 1848 William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and
Rossetti formed a group which they called the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood based on the ideals they had been exposed to through the
writings of John Ruskin, primarily Ruskin's Modern Painters. The
young artists sought the reform of art and to return it to a
pre-Renaissance style of painting with emphasis placed on symbolism,
purity of form, and simplicity. The term 'Pre-Raphaelite' was chosen
because the three admired early Italian art before Raphael and
'Brotherhood' for it's secret-society connotations. The number seven
was considered mystical so they decided that this would be the number of
members within the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Soon four others were
persuaded to join, Thomas Woolner, Frederick George Stephens, James
Collinson and Michael Rossetti who would become the group's historian.
Often the artist would sit for each other's paintings and the mysterious
"PBR" became their signature.
In 1849, Walter Deverell introduced the milliner's assistant, Elizabeth
Eleanor Siddal, to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Deverell had met her
in a London shop and the seventeen year old Lizzie soon was modeling for
the artists in the group, appearing in several PRB paintings. Her
ethereal, romantic beauty lead her to become known as one of the
Brotherhood's 'stunners' and her image is seen in Millais' Ophelia,
William Holman Hunt's A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian
Priest, and in some of Rossetti's most important works. Eventually
Rossetti monopolized Siddal's posing for himself, and the two
established a romantic relationship with Lizzie becoming Rossetti's
Beatrice. He then began calling her by his pet name of 'Guggum'. Lizzie
was physically weak and in constant ill health but her condition began
to decline to where she started taking laudanum to ease her pains.
The couple were engaged for ten years but did not marry until 1860. By
Christmas that year, Lizzie was pregnant but sadly on May 2, 1861 a baby
girl was stillborn to them. The death of the baby plunged Lizzie further
into depression and in February 1862 she committed suicide by taking an
overdose of laudanum. Rossetti arrived home from teaching to discover
Lizzie lying unconscious in bed with an empty medicine container on a
table nearby. Attempts to revive her were unsuccessful and the next
morning Lizzie was declared dead. Rossetti mourned deeply, blaming
himself for the suicide of his wife. Before Lizzie's coffin was sealed
and taken to London's Highgate cemetery for burial, the grieving
Rossetti placed a manuscript containing the only copy of his poetry he
was preparing for publication into her casket.
After Lizzie's death, Rossetti moved into a large house at 16 Cheyne
Walk in London where he became neighbors with other artists such as
Whistler. Here he withdraw from the world, filling the house with a
menagerie of exotic animals from peacocks, kangaroos, armadillos,
raccoons, a Brahmin bull to a wombat. He was seen in public in a drunken
state and though always having been sensitive to criticism, his
sensitivity increased. Rossetti developed an interest in spiritualism,
holding séances with hopes of contacting his dead wife's spirit.
After October of 1866, Rossetti rarely ventured outside his house in
the daylight and developed a case of insomnia. During the later 1860's
and 1870's his paintings turned toward a style of melancholy female
beauty, the subjects often modeled by wife of William Morris, Jane,
who Rossetti had met in 1857. By 1869 Rossetti and Jane had become
lovers with Morris sadly aware and the three lived together at
Kelmscott Manor. His later work would be dominated by her image.
In 1870 Rossetti completed his most well known portrayal of Lizzie
Siddal, Beata Beatrix. In October 1869, seven years after Lizzie's
death, Rossetti had Siddal's grave exhumed in order to retrieve the
volume of poems he had buried with her. News of the exhumation spread
along with the story that Lizzie's hair had continued to grow, filling
the coffin with it's golden splendor. The poetry was published in the
volume Poems in 1870 and met with heavy disapproval from critics,
terming it from The Fleshly School of Poetry. Rossetti, forever
sensitive to criticisms, went against the advices of friends and
composed an article titled The Stealthy School of Criticism. The writing
soon enflamed the controversy and began a vicious public argument.
Rossetti's insomnia returned and he began to take doses of chloral
hydrate washed down with whiskey, declining into alcoholism and drug
addiction. Also, like his father, he suffered from paranoia and became
convinced others conspired against him. On June 8, 1872 Dante Gabriel
Rossetti attempted suicide by drinking an overdose of laudanum but was
nursed back to health by his friends.
In December of 1881 Rossetti suffered stroke which left him largely
paralyzed and his already waning health deteriorated rapidly. Dante
Gabriel Rossetti died on April 9, Easter Sunday, 1882. Rossetti had made
clear that he did not wish to be buried next to Lizzie in London so he
was laid to rest in a churchyard in Birchington-On-Sea.>>
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Art Neuendorffer