Daniel > Recent Status Updates

There are great novels which, to read them, is to read a great novel. Then there are great novels which, to read them, is to live another life.

... A eunuch priest of the highest caste sets tapers before a pair of old shoes.
... The dog worries the dirty glove which hath seen many better centuries.
... The blind Norns strike a tiny silver anvil with fingers that are mallets. Upon the metal lies a length of blue light.

I begin to understand that this book has a hidden author. The credited author, Henry Mayhew is responsible for most of it, and is seemingly a decent humane man. Then there is an unnamed editor who occasionally injects insults against the book's subjects.

[...] and making our many societies for the civilization of savages on the other side of the globe appear like a 'delusion, a mockery and a snare,' when we have so many people sunk in the lowest depths of barbarism round about our very homes.

[...] it has been shown that the consciences of the London costermongers, generally speaking, are as little developed as their intellects; indeed, the moral and religious state of these men is a foul disgrace to us, laughing to scorn our zeal for the 'propagation of the gospel in foreign parts,' [...]

Wherever he goes, he carries a collapsible five-string banjo with him in a compartment near to where his heart used to be. When he plays it he becomes a kind of negative Orpheus and men follow him to Hell.

Wherever he goes, he carries a collapsible five-string banjo with him, in a compartment where his heart sued to be. When he plays it he becomes a kind of negative Orpheus and men follow him to Hell.

'Alvin was an explorer, and all explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.'

'If the diet of a people be a criterion, as has been asserted, of their character, it may be feared that the present extensive fish-diet of the working-people of London, is as indicative of degeneracy of character, as Cobbett insisted must result from the consumption of tea and "the cursed root," the potato.'