~*Revue_Blanche*~

the script
Reading The Magician, by W. Somerset Maugham, I thought that the novel could be a good groundwork for a script of a good mystic thriller:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14257/14257-8.txt
The Magician is an early W. Somerset Maugham novel, published in 1908. In this tale, the magician Oliver Haddo, a caricature of Aleister Crowley, attempts to create life. Crowley wrote a critique of this book under the pen name Oliver Haddo, where he accused Maugham of plagiarism. Maugham wrote The Magician in London, after he had spent some time living in Paris, where he met Alister Crowley. The novel inspired a 1926 Rex Ingram film of the same name.

exotic humor:
Ilf and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs (1928):
http://www.lib.ru/ILFPETROV/ilf_petrov_12_chairs_engl.txt
Ilf and Petrov, The Little Golden Calf (1931):
http://www.idlewords.com/telenok/

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970)
My favorite book by Remarque is The Black Obelisk, and I dearly love his other books, such as Arch of Triumph, Three Comrades, Shadows in Paradise. If an authoress is sentimental, then nothing good comes of it. If a man gives his sentimental feelings the bridle, then a masterpiece like Three Comrades comes into the world. I never read through his book The Spark of Life, because it would become too hard experience for me, but I read the book’s ending, and I love its main idea.
Erich Maria Remarque is the first to touch the theme of the German refugees of the war--WWII. The personages of his books are stateless refugees, displaced persons without passports or any other documents, who live under a constant threat of being captured and deported from one country to the next, and back again (see Remarque's earlier novel Flotsam for an expansive treatment of this theme). He knew the life of a refugee, since he himself experienced something of the kind. “Russians were the first”, says one of his characters in Arch of Triumph, meaning White Russians, of course, and the enforced emigration--and in my opinion, German people and White Russians are two long suffering nations, the nations-martyrs of the 20th century. In my opinion, German people and White Russians are two nations whose suffering has been wrongly forgotten for some reason, and we can only guess why.

poetry
A couple of years back I found one website of Japanese poetry, saved the page and held on my computer, but on the Net I could not find it again when recently I tried to check it out, so I copied the text and now here is the file for Japanese poetry lovers:

erotic
A little bit of heterosexual erotic. Alexander S. Pushkin; Secret Journal 1836-1837 (translated into English from Russian). Excerpts:
http://www.mipco.com/english/pushtengl.html

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Happy May Day. . .

The Leonardesque painting of Bacchus in the Musee du Louvre is based on a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci but executed by an unknown follower, perhaps in Leonardo's workshop. The drawing Sidney J. Freedberg assigns to Leonardo's second Milan period. (Wikipedia)
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my books of choice list has been updated lately:
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous by Royston Lambert.
Epigrams by Marcus Valerius Martial
The Satyricon by Petronius
De Profundis by Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde by Peter Ackroyd
Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann
La canne de jaspe by Henri de Regnier
The City and The Pillar by Gore Vidal
Cabbala by Thornton Wilder
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov
The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928) by W. Somerset Maugham
The Book Bag (1932) by W. Somerset Maugham
The Unconquered (1944) by W. Somerset Maugham
The Razor's Edge (1944) by W. Somerset Maugham
The Ministry of Fear by Grahame Greene
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac
The Possessed by Dostoevsky
The Gambler by Dostoevsky
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontё
A Study in Scarlet by A. Conan Doyle
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

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*green peace for ever*
A long time ago (April, 1905), in a world far far away (St. Petersburg), an outstanding poet by the name of Alexander Blok wrote a poem called The Little Priest of Marshland or The Marsh Little Priest that ended in this way (translation is mine):

…He takes off his hat and prays
for the blade of grass that sways
for every animal’s bad paw
and for the Pope.
Don’t fear the quagmire--
the little black cope saves everywhere.

Reading the poem I though why the Marsh Little Priest? And I quickly could answer the question: in Russian the “duckweed” that covers stagnant water is the word that can be translated as “the little cope” or “the little vestment” or “the little cassock”. So, as I think, the poet says to himself: if there is the little vestment of a priest, then there should be the little priest himself, who dwells in the marshland, saying his prayers among the hillocks and stagnant water covered with duckweed. And he invents the Marsh Little Priest who is a fairy personage akin to a gnome or wood-goblin or rather marsh-goblin or nix. The poem that depicts this fairy entity and his environment is from the cycle of poems entitled Bubbles of the Earth. In THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH by William Shakespeare we can read: “BANQUO. The earth hath bubbles as the water has, And these are of them. Whither are they vanish'd?” And the town of St. Petersburg, as my reader knows, was built on the marshland.

Blok’s poetry related graffiti

*rereading Shakespeare*
Two green peace themed quotations:

"...swearing that we
Are mere usurpers, tyrants and what's worse,
To fright the animals and to kill them up
In their assign'd and native dwelling-place".
(Shakespeare, As You Like It)

"...And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.
I would not change it".
(Shakespeare, As You Like It)

*creative writing and arts conception*
“…for affection,
Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes”.
(Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice)
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reading some books:
“We should look for knowledge where we may expect to find it, and why should a man be despised who goes in search of it? Those who remain at home may grow richer and live more comfortably than those who wander; but I desire neither to live comfortably nor to grow rich.” (Paracelsus)

"…while desiring to be rid of prejudice, to refrain from all passion, every man goes for choice to those works which correspond most intimately with his own temperament and he ends by relegating all the rest to the background". (Joris-Karl Huysmans, A Rebours)

"…and indeed it is very true that, just as the finest air in the world is vulgarized beyond all bearing once the public has taken to hum it and the street organs to play it, so the work of art that has appealed to the sham connoisseurs, that is admired by the uncritical, that is not content to rouse the enthusiasm of only a chosen few, becomes for this very reason, in the eyes of the elect, a thing polluted, commonplace, almost repulsive." (Joris-Karl Huysmans, A Rebours)

"Nations have always good reasons for being what they are, and the best of all is that they cannot be otherwise." (Marquis de Custine(1790–1857), Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia)

"The love of their country is with them only a mode of flattering its master; as soon as they think that master can no longer hear, they speak of everything with a frankness which is the more startling because those who listen to it become responsible." (Marquis de Custine, Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia)

"I came here to see a country, but what I find is a theater... The name are the same as everywhere else... In appearances everything happens as it does everywhere else. There is no difference except in the very foundation of things." (Marquis de Custine, Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia)

"If a God had made this world, I should not like to be that God; the misery of the world would break my heart." (Schopenhauer)
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*Easter musings*
There is a poem Hamlet by the famous Russian poet Boris Pasternak, and it’s most interesting to know my reader’s opinion whether the author exact depicting Shakespeare’s personage or not:

The murmurs ebb; onto the stage I enter.
I am trying, standing in the door,
To discover in the distant echoes
What the coming years may hold in store.

The nocturnal darkness with a thousand
Binoculars is focused onto me.
Take away this cup, O Abba Father,
Everything is possible to Thee.

I am fond of this Thy stubborn project,
And to play my part I am content.
But another drama is in progress,
And, this once, O let me be exempt.

But the plan of action is determined,
And the end irrevocably sealed.
I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:
Life is not a walk across a field.
(1946)

In my view, in this poem the author mixes up (deliberately) images of Hamlet and Jesus. I remember, how I was sorry for Jesus, when I was a kid. Then I saw the movie Hamlet (Russian version), and Hamlet had become the second literary personage after Jesus, who I was sorry for--feeling it in the same way. Then, being a schoolgirl, I read the play Hamlet and felt the same what I felt to him when I was younger, being impressed yet more. Of the poem Hamlet (as well as of all the rest Pasternak’s poems and of his novel) I could learn only in 1989, and now it’s most interesting to see that the author of the poem shares my delusion (or very personal opinion) concerning the two personages. At present, following Vladimir Nabokov I can say: “I love junction of times” (!!)
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There are some stories which I dearly love and which I would like to be published on the Net. One of them is:

SREDNI VASHTAR
by
SAKI

Conradin was ten years old, and the doctor had pronounced his professional opinion that the boy would not live another five years. The doctor was silky and effete, and counted for little, but his opinion was endorsed by Mrs. De Ropp, who counted for nearly everything. Mrs. De Ropp was Conradin's cousin and guardian, and in his eyes she represented those three-fifths of the world that are necessary and disagreeable and real; the other two-fifths, in perpetual antagonism to the foregoing, were summed up in himself and his imagination. One of these days Conradin supposed he would succumb to the mastering pressure of wearisome necessary things---such as illnesses and coddling restrictions and drawn-out dulness. Without his imagination, which was rampant under the spur of loneliness, he would have succumbed long ago. Mrs. De Ropp would never, in her honestest moments, have confessed to herself that she disliked Conradin, though she might have been dimly aware that thwarting him “for his good” was a duty which she did not find particularly irksome. Conradin hated her with a desperate sincerity which he was perfectly able to mask. Such few pleasures as he could contrive for himself gained an added relish from the likelihood that they would be displeasing to his guardian, and from the realm of his imagination she was locked out---an unclean thing, which should find no entrance.
In the dull, cheerless garden, overlooked by so many windows that were ready to open with a message not to do this or that, or a reminder that medicines were due, he found little attraction. The few fruit-trees that it contained were set jealously apart from his plucking, as though they were rare specimens of their kind blooming in an arid waste; it would probably have been difficult to find a market-gardener who would have offered ten shillings for their entire yearly produce. In a forgotten corner, however, almost hidden behind a dismal shrubbery, was a disused tool-shed of respectable proportions, and within its walls Conradin found a haven, something that took on the varying aspects of a playroom and a cathedral. He had peopled it with a legion of familiar phantoms, evoked partly from fragments of history and partly from his own brain, but it also boasted two inmates of flesh and blood. In one corner lived a ragged-plumaged Houdan hen, on which the boy lavished an affection that had scarcely another outlet. Further back in the gloom stood a large hutch, divided into two compartments, one of which was fronted with close iron bars. This was the abode of a large polecat-ferret, which a friendly butcher-boy had once smuggled, cage and all, into its present quarters, in exchange for a long-secreted hoard of small silver. Conradin was dreadfully afraid of the lithe, sharp-fanged beast, but it was his most treasured possession. Its very presence in the tool-shed was a secret and fearful joy, to be kept scrupulously from the knowledge of the Woman, as he privately dubbed his cousin. And one day, out of Heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion. The Woman indulged in religion once a week at a church near by, and took Conradin with her, but to him the church service was an alien rite in the House of Rimmon. Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret. Red flowers in their season and scarlet berries in the winter-time were offered at his shrine, for he was a god who laid some special stress on the fierce impatient side of things, as opposed to the Woman's religion, which, as far as Conradin could observe, went to great lengths in the contrary direction. And on great festivals powdered nutmeg was strewn in front of his hutch, an important feature of the offering being that the nutmeg had to be stolen. These festivals were of irregular occurrence, and were chiefly appointed to celebrate some passing event. On one occasion, when Mrs. De Ropp suffered from acute toothache for three days, Conradin kept up the festival during the entire three days, and almost succeeded in persuading himself that Sredni Vashtar was personally responsible for the toothache. If the malady had lasted for another day the supply of nutmeg would have given out.
The Houdan hen was never drawn into the cult of Sredni Vashtar. Conradin had long ago settled that she was an Anabaptist. He did not pretend to have the remotest knowledge as to what an Anabaptist was, but he privately hoped that it was dashing and not very respectable. Mrs. De Ropp was the ground plan on which he based and detested all respectability.
After a while Conradin's absorption in the tool-shed began to attract the notice of his guardian. “It is not good for him to be pottering down there in all weathers,” she promptly decided, and at breakfast one morning she announced that the Houdan hen had been sold and taken away overnight. With her shortsighted eyes she peered at Conradin, waiting for an outbreak of rage and sorrow, which she was ready to rebuke with a flow of excellent precepts and reasoning. But Conradin said nothing: there was nothing to be said. Something perhaps in his white set face gave her a momentary qualm, for at tea that afternoon there was toast on the table, a delicacy which she usually banned on the ground that it was bad for him; also because the making of it “gave trouble,” a deadly offence in the middle-class feminine eye.
“I thought you liked toast,” she exclaimed, with an injured air, observing that he did not touch it.
“Sometimes,” said Conradin.
In the shed that evening there was an innovation in the worship of the hutch-god. Conradin had been wont to chant his praises, tonight be asked a boon.
“Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.”
The thing was not specified. As Sredni Vashtar was a god he must be supposed to know. And choking back a sob as he looked at that other empty comer, Conradin went back to the world he so hated.
And every night, in the welcome darkness of his bedroom, and every evening in the dusk of the tool-shed, Conradin's bitter litany went up: “Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.”
Mrs. De Ropp noticed that the visits to the shed did not cease, and one day she made a further journey of inspection.
“What are you keeping in that locked hutch?” she asked.
“I believe it's guinea-pigs. I'll have them all cleared away.”
Conradin shut his lips tight, but the Woman ransacked his bedroom till she found the carefully hidden key, and forthwith marched down to the shed to complete her discovery. It was a cold afternoon, and Conradin had been bidden to keep to the house. From the furthest window of the dining-room the door of the shed could just be seen beyond the corner of the shrubbery, and there Conradin stationed himself. He saw the Woman enter, and then be imagined her opening the door of the sacred hutch and peering down with her short-sighted eyes into the thick straw bed where his god lay hidden. Perhaps she would prod at the straw in her clumsy impatience. And Conradin fervently breathed his prayer for the last time. But he knew as he prayed that he did not believe. He knew that the Woman would come out presently with that pursed smile he loathed so well on her face, and that in an hour or two the gardener would carry away his wonderful god, a god no longer, but a simple brown ferret in a hutch. And he knew that the Woman would triumph always as she triumphed now, and that he would grow ever more sickly under her pestering and domineering and superior wisdom, till one day nothing would matter much more with him, and the doctor would be proved right. And in the sting and misery of his defeat, he began to chant loudly and defiantly the hymn of his threatened idol:
Sredni Vashtar went forth,
His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white.
His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death.
Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful.
And then of a sudden he stopped his chanting and drew closer to the windowpane. The door of the shed still stood ajar as it had been left, and the minutes were slipping by. They were long minutes, but they slipped by nevertheless. He watched the starlings running and flying in little parties across the lawn; he counted them over and over again, with one eye always on that swinging door. A sour-faced maid came in to lay the table for tea, and still Conradin stood and waited and watched. Hope had crept by inches into his heart, and now a look of triumph began to blaze in his eyes that had only known the wistful patience of defeat. Under his breath, with a furtive exultation, he began once again the paean of victory and devastation. And presently his eyes were rewarded: out through that doorway came a long, low, yellow-and-brown beast, with eyes a-blink at the waning daylight, and dark wet stains around the fur of jaws and throat. Conradin dropped on his knees. The great polecat-ferret made its way down to a small brook at the foot of the garden, drank for a moment, then crossed a little plank bridge and was lost to sight in the bushes. Such was the passing of Sredni Vashtar.
“Tea is ready,” said the sour-faced maid; “where is the mistress?”
“She went down to the shed some time ago,” said Conradin. And while the maid went to summon her mistress to tea, Conradin fished a toasting-fork out of the sideboard drawer and proceeded to toast himself a piece of bread. And during the toasting of it and the buttering of it with much butter and the slow enjoyment of eating it, Conradin listened to the noises and silences which fell in quick spasms beyond the dining-room door. The loud foolish screaming of the maid, the answering chorus of wondering ejaculations from the kitchen region, the scuttering footsteps and hurried embassies for outside help, and then, after a lull, the scared sobbings and the shuffling tread of those who bore a heavy burden into the house.
“Whoever will break it to the poor child? I couldn't for the life of me!” exclaimed a shrill voice. And while they debated the matter among themselves, Conradin made himself another piece of toast.
The End
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*Through the Looking Glass or A Rebours*

And after words, in radiant garments dressed
With sound of flutes and laughing of glad lips,
A pomp of all the passions passed along
All the night through; till the white phantom ships
Of dawn sailed in. Whereat I said this song,
Of all sweet passions Shame is the loveliest.
(Lord Alfred Douglas “In Praise of Shame”)
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plea for help

Can someone let me know any information of Alfred Waterhouse Somerset Taylor? All I found is: "Alfred Waterhouse Somerset Taylor (born circa 1862) was well educated and was said to have run through a fortune of £45,000. His house in Westminster was used as a meeting-place for male homosexuals. Wilde first met Taylor in 1892. He refused to turn Queen's Evidence against Wilde, and so shared the same fate. After his release he lived in Canada and the U.S.A."
I’d like to have his photo.

Can someone tell me the name of the author of this book and its title? A couple of years back I found this text on the Net but I did not save the name of its author and have forgotten it, and the website doesn’t exist any longer:
"… In New York in the early fifties, Jimmy would push the boundaries of his sexuality in ways he never had before. With one young man who was a dancer, Jimmy had a wild, passionate sex life that was defined by a total lack of restraint. Jimmy's friend, beautiful, blue-eyed, blond-haired, had, of course, the slender yet delicately muscular body of a dancer…”
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The Voice, By Henri de Regnier
(Translation by Eli Siegel)
I do not wish anyone to be near my sadness--
Not even your dear step and your loved face,
Nor your indolent hand which caresses with a finger
The lazy ribbon and the closed book.

Leave me. Let my door today remain closed;
Do not open my window to the fresh wind of morning;
My heart today is miserable and sullen
And everything seems to me somber and everything seems vain.

My sadness comes from something further than myself;
It is strange to me and is not of me;
And every man, whether he sings or he laughs or he loves,
In his time hears that which speaks low to him,

And something then stirs and awakens,
Is perturbed, spreads and laments in him,
Because of this dull voice which says in his ear
That the flower of life in its fruit is ashes.
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Nickolas Grace Appreciation Society:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=11033743462
If you have any spare time, please feel free to have a look at it. It would be wonderful to have you join and I would be so appreciative. But if not, I quite understand, and thank you for taking the time to read this.
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Sonnet CXXI
'Tis better to be vile than vile esteem'd,
When not to be receives reproach of being,
And the just pleasure lost which is so deem'd
Not by our feeling but by others' seeing:
For why should others false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own:
I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown;
Unless this general evil they maintain,
All men are bad, and in their badness reign.
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KT Tunstall -- White Bird
White bird in a golden cage
on a winter day, in the rain.
White bird in a golden cage
alone.
White bird must fly or she will die.
White bird must fly or she will die…
[The author of the song White Bird seems to know of Chekhov’s play The Seagull.]

APRIL 9--birthday of Billy Brandt.

APRIL 13--my one year anniversary on the website. Welcome to the aerie…

*the debris field for ever*
Time. Perhaps the only valuable thing, the only what one cannot return. Fourth dimension in which we’ve not learnt to be at ease--unless being like algae that drift slowly. Stream of Time. Time degrades the past. The past is tarnished by time--scaled golds, dust, curtains closed--but, the more painful remembrance of the vain and sinful days the more powerful my longing for unknown ways, for the Unrealizable. The past is seen like a golden age, like better than the present. But don’t touch the ashes of that memory. It seems to me that only touches of your little hand can cure the dissonance and pain--your hand and our mutual friend’s eye, a shining beacon of hope in the unforgivingly void face of space.

more births:
APRIL 15 -- Leonardo da Vinci
APRIL 20 -- Adolf Hitler
APRIL 22 -- Lenin
APRIL 23 -- Vladimir Nabokov
APRIL 23 -- William Shakespeare
[these two last dates are controversial]

My springtime miniatures for your enjoyment:

*seasons*
So the sky’s broken--its melting splinters are in branches of trees;
people crumble into the snow. And the silence like a way home over a chasm.

Now the sun has melted; it’s honey on your lips;
the birds sing and drink the air. And you kiss the sky--it’s springtime!

Sunlight--to emerald; then--rubies on blue, diamonds on black.
And golden straws within your hair--summer is with you!
(2006)

*springtime deflection*
The crazy blue bottomless sky contemplating the fussy life.
Love has written a song for you, who don’t know love.
A running lion upsets my inkpot. The lion chases the north wind; its cloud-like mane
disperses the song to droplets of silence, but the song is in my every breath,
in your happy eyes, in the heady dew that I drink from your skin.
Listen! Feel! Let your lips recall mine.
The song’s in the lips’ avidity--the crystal sky echoes to it.
The lion is winged, but the wind is faster.
My wicked jealousy makes black bed.
Insomnia.
[Notice: Author is not an insomniac.]

*symbolism*
I am a poet--I want to enter the torques eye of the white lily. Its heart begins singing; its heart’s winged, but the flower has the stem. I cut it, and the white swan opens its torques eyes. Eyes of the lily the swan opens. Its heart begins singing; its heart is winged. The swan aspires up to the ether, to the clouds, white lilies of the sky, swans of the heaven. Torques is the eye of the sky. The sky begins singing; the sky is winged. The sky wants to enter me--I am a poet.
[Notice: A white lily was Wilde’s favorite flower].

*in the manner of Oscar Wilde*
You are Prince of Lilacs, a friend of flying foliage. You've known the nuance of springtime in autumn and autumn in springtime.

*deviation*
The kind god of amnesia is not kind to me. Inquisitor Memory torments--slightly--so that I wouldn’t get blind or become deaf--teasing with your smell, voice, face. Pantheon of Forgotten Passions is deaf to me. It sends nemesis to one who denies it. The nameless deities take vengeance for fidelity in love. Only the demi-god of demi-slumber is merciful. For the white moments, for the sips of the insulated oblivion I act at the scarlet mysteries of impassioned strangers. I drink it with the help of the invoked Daemon of Mercy. Crucified in vacuum, tormented by the unforgettable in sonnets, I am without you, o Oxyrhynchus of my heart. The dammed god of amnesia--he never helped to forget.

*links of the past*
The past days--heavenly necklaces, constellations at noon of youth, they are invisible, yet they are. The days turn into pre-dawns, pre-gloamings. Their shadows are interwoven in memory, in dreams, in the semi-darkness of deviation. I meet them only at nightfall, but no hurry: they shine for me, tempting with a day to come. Ignis fatuus--the links of the past days are hidden. They are within me.

*the unrealizable*
Entering a port I recognize the distant shores in the skyline where the bowsprits of waiting ships point to. The boom, cries, chanty, demonic wail of a hooter, all this is full of passion and promise. And further, beyond the harbour, in the country of counties, in the deserts and forests of your heart, in the skies of your thoughts the Unrealizable shines, the mysterious and wondrous deer of the eternal chase.

*The Sweet Peas*
(a tale in the manner of Oscar Wilde)
Unsophisticated and tender like a baby’s thoughts, the Sweet Pears came into blossom on the beds around the pillars and stands of the verandah. And as it happened, he fell in love with the dumb Marble, beautiful and ancient. The twiner was as though enchanted, out off his head. But in vain blooming at dawn he embraced the impassive waist: the Marble was made not for happiness; the beautiful cold idol could not feel love. Now autumn came, it grew colder, and the Sweet Peas began wilting. And the moss-clad Marble looked at itself in the mirror of the puddle, speaking with an air of importance: “The moss becomes me. But why I’m intertwined with the ill weeds?” Hearing that Zephyrus, the west wind decided to change the Marble’s look. With the help of the army of grains of sand from the pathway he joyfully, half in jest attacked the specimen of antiquity--and the Sweet Peas fell like a crimson snow of a dream.

more pictures:

Selene ("moon") was an archaic lunar deity and the daughter of the titans Hyperion and Theia. In Roman mythology the moon goddess is called Luna, Latin for "moon". The Roman moon goddess, Luna, had a temple on the Aventine Hill. It was built in the sixth century BC, but was destroyed in the Great Fire of Rome during Nero's reign. There was also a temple dedicated to Luna Noctiluca ("Luna that shines by night") on the Palatine Hill. There were festivals in honor of Luna on March 31, August 24 and August 29.

*on a clear night*
The violet nicotianas slowly wove the moon-dilute cloth of sounds. Over the flowers the veil-like baby Aeolus showed moonlit, throwing pebbles to water. “Cinq!” his coral lips whispered; he seemed neutral, neither a girl nor a boy. A boat trembled on the lake. Everyone listened to the poet, a masked phantasm-maker in the arch of the old pergola, in the shade of the wild grape vines. Everyone drowned in the moonlit drowse, carefree. And now, as a phantom of a dull misery, there was the alarm bell. And in the fire-reflections of the burning castle the poet paused like a miserable acrobat: the kingly life had proved to be a lout.

Spring of 2005--author at the blessed stage of writing her first novel--my images in a state of flux.

*Memory*
by A. Pushkin
(the word for word translation is mine)
At the hour, when the noisy day subsides for mortals,
and the night shade and slumber
fall upon the benumbed roofs of the city,
the hours of a depressing wake wear for me.
Pangs of conscience burn brighter in my heart
at inactivity of night;
dreams boil;
excess of painful thoughts crowds in depressed mind;
Memory unrolls its long scroll
before my eyes in silence.
And while reading my life,
disgusted, I tremble and curse, and complain
shedding poignant tears, but… I don’t obliterate the awful lines.
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quotations
"Manuscripts don't burn." (Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita)
“Reading is sexy”. (Unknown Author)
"Writers are sexy." (Unknown Author)
"Writers are not bunnies, white and fluffy. Writers are not kind. Are they wicked? No. A writer is a hybrid of a dinosaur and cobra." (Lara Biuts)
"In Russia all is a secret and nothing is mystery". (Pushkin)
"In Russia all is mystery and nothing is a secret". (Lara Biuts)
“Assiduity is also a talent. Some writers should be photographed from the rear instead of full face”. (Anthony Blanche)
“Life is not so beautiful as you want, and it is not so dreadful as it seems”. (Lara Biuts)
“There are three categories of egoists: egoists who live and let live; egoists who live but not let live; and egoists who don’t live and don’t let live”. (Anthony Blanche)
“Learn as though you are to live forever; live as though you are to die tomorrow”. (Bismarck)
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read more:
http://ohlala007.blog.co.uk/2007/07/27/anthony_blanche_fan_blog~2709191
http://ohlala007.blog.co.uk/2007/08/20/vamp_up~2837823
http://ohlala007.blog.co.uk/2007/11/05/the_italics_are_mine~3246835
jocosity:
http://ohlala007.blog.co.uk/2007/04/27/sundries~2173391
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