“Curiouser and curiouser!”
“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).
They say that Lewis Carroll , while travelling across Russia, recorded the Russian word "защищающихся" ('those who protect themselves', participle, genitive/possessive case) as he marked in his diary. He recorded it in Latin transcription instead of Cyrillic, and the look of this word is truly terrifying: zаshtshееshtshауоуshtshееkhsуа.

*bad as it is, it could be worse*
If you ever heard the Australian accent you’d never laugh at the American one, I was told once on the Net--present company always excerpted, and the opinion cannot concern the amazing Australian actors like Richard Roxburgh whose fan I am. How to describe my own accent? As I speak English my pronunciation sounds much like German or South African. For me there is no use to speak English every day, so I never spent a lot of time practicing in the spoken language. Speaking English I use my native consonant r; and my t and d are hard, and that’s no big deal in my view, but I’m in great difficulty pronouncing the English vowels, and I’d like that to improve. However that may be, nobody can hear my speech on the Net--this being so, as it stands, it is good enough.

an article
Lately I read an article that put me onto some thoughts. Here they are. Let’s suppose, blogging and musing are almost synonyms. Therefore if a human’s mind produces life-born images, and influenced by the emotional loading of the images a thought or thoughts arise, then the thought or thoughts instantly take shape of a statement. Frequently, a man who has not got used to speaking, has in his mind--that cannot be prostrate if it is not asleep--several images that “live” and “awake”, but a thought doesn’t awaken, since the acquired habit for formulating statements is not enough, and taking shape of a statement the thought hangs over in consciousness as an emotion and remains stuck to the eluding image. Memory hardly can keep this “sticking”, since being related to irrationality, emotions do not bear “bytes” of information and do not “incise” the associative chain of conductivity upon our grey matter, which is our memory. And in the mind of a man, who got used to speaking, or rather, who can work on texts, the images form a thought-statement, and more, the statement take a grammatical-literary shape, that is the man begins working on a text. A result of the work may be a completed opinion or a question-problem. Either “engraves” the steady chain of memory, to which one can return to use it at the following acts of mental activity. While working on texts we use a definite vocabulary that can be evaluated quantitatively. The more the quantity is, the richer, more explicit that is profounder the mental process is. Proportion: the more the vocabulary is, the profounder the thought is. Consequently, the more facile the thought is, the less the vocabulary is, and the oftener smileis and emoticon like these ;-) :-\ :-D appear on the Internet forums and communities.

For the Reader with Love and Squalor
This is a censorial cut, two innocent lines from Nabokov’s brilliant work, the abandoned novel Solus Rex . Translation is mine. Other translations are welcome:
“With his thick fingers Prince undid Ondrik’s trousers, extracted the whole rosy mass of the parts, chose the main one and began rubbing the glossy trunk rhythmically”.
source: the collected essays and memoirs entitled 'Nabokov: pros and cons', 1990s.

did you know that…
In December my friend wrote to me: “I hope you had a nice Xmas…” Not exactly. Believe it or not, yet in fact, not everyone in East Europe celebrates Xmas in December. Our, the Eastern Orthodox Christians’ Xmas will be on the 7th of January. The Eastern Orthodox Christian countries are: Belarus, Bulgaria, Republic of Cyprus, Georgia, Greece, the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine and Ethiopia. So, I’ve not had Xmas yet (today is January 1). Thank you again. Hope you are warm and well and happy, dear friend.
One more comment on the topic:
at the website of the modern day Greek writer Vlassis G. Rassias you can find interesting information about CHRISTIAN PERSECUTIONS AGAINST THE HELLENES
http://www.rassias.gr/9011.html
A small notification:
there is a beautiful website, dedicated to an ancient philosopher and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria
http://www.hypatia-lovers.com/
with kind regards
Lara

P. S.
It’s winter now, I know, but recently I found a melancholy autumn and pagan themed fragment from The Manuscript Found in the Bookcase by Henri de Regnier --a French symbolist poet--that has caught my fancy, and now I’d like to show it to my reader. The translation is mine. If someone can cite another, more professional translation, I’ll delete mine instantly:

…Loneliness perhaps doesn’t exist, and whatever one thinks of loneliness of desire or impassiveness, they are not lonely. They either look at themselves in the future or contemplate themselves in the past; they either foresee or recall; their loneliness is seeming. Any loneliness is seeming. How true is my loneliness, the loneliness of the man who seems to shrink into himself? And yet, sometimes it seems to me that I am lonely, that I am lonelier than any mortal here, in my loneliest dwelling.
…Today I saw leaves fall one by one into the reservoir. May be I erred giving myself to other pursuits but this melancholic hours of counting that like the leaves fell one by one into a sombre and alerted water. Of all days in my life a recollection would remain as a tree filled up with another and a line of following ones, adjoined and going deep into my past as an alternating and prophetic row, distant as my past.
The leaves fall faster and faster; two of them conjoin in the air. The wind weights them carefully one by one before letting them fall, as they are, fatigued and useless. In the reservoir the leaves float on the surface first, and then being soaked in little by little they grow heavy and half sink; it’s yesterday leaves; but there are others wandering under water. One can see them through the lucid icy water, lucid to the bottom, scaly from the deceitful bronze of the sunken leaves.
I know the fate of the leaves; I know how they open and become green, how they die in autumn despite their sham array of many-coloured gold and histrionic purple. The sunset shows red through the trees; the lilac-tinged decay of the twilight gnaws it by its melancholy clouds. The sadness of the moment nearly wounds. The lamp shines in the corner of the spacious hall with tall ached windows, and I stare at the mat glass. I see the falling leaves no longer; I feel something breaks off now and piles up within me. It seems to me that I hear the fall of my own thoughts. They fall from the height one by one as a slow fall of the leaves and I meet them with my entire past that lives within me. Their dead light fall is weightless; they have nothing what they want to be. Vanity has fallen; glory has faded.
The new day. There is the lamp! Yes, I saw the leaves fall one by one, and yet there were the thyrsi in the vineyards and orchards! The lips drank the juiciness of the pears. The child carried the golden apples in his hands; and in the evening, when he turned round at the threshold, with his temples bays-crowned, the buccna sounded in the deep grottoes!
I hear the hoarse trumpets sing from the old cedar in front of the house, at the heavy stone slab! The gold of their sound is as though split. Their breath is jerky and out of tune. They mock at the glory which they trumpet; they say they have no something main, and the distorted sound of the fanfare slips into a throaty scream. It’s peacocks trumpet from their roost, the old cedar at the stone slab. Black, they stand out against the reddish-grey twilights. Like agates on the Tyrrhenian sky they seem black because they have been burnt by their own glitter and consuming heat of their plumage and not because they have been charred by the fiery bonfire of the sunset. Black and prophetic, they as though guard somebody’s tomb, and the stone slab looks like a tombstone this evening. Its eroded block frowns and as though grows heavier. When will you heave off the similar depressing slab, o inconceivably lost, o the catacombs dweller, you who are more than life, who may be possessed only after life and whom I called […]
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P. P. S.
*the sun and the frost*
In the branchy antlers
the sun plays sparkling;
the snow under the hoofs.
The fur is sunshine saturated.
It’s frosty. Steam of breath curls skywards.
The green fir-trees dance in a ring;
the blue skies whirl above.
null

haiku or something of the kind:
Wind whipped
snow dust.
Translucent veil.

Snow stamped footprints,
what traveler has left you?
Short memory.

Frosty night
I watch the stars.
Other worlds.

The green, wicked, prickly
cactus I’ll garland--
a new-year tree after fast-food. :)

It’s frosty.
In all the warm clothes
I feel like a penguin. :)

*Vive la bagatelle!*
Burst into tears the cloud-distraction.
Burst out laughing the pain-action.
Vampire bit his red lip
and gathered the shade-abstraction. :)

;) :wave:
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