,n. cubiculum, conclave interius, sanctuarium principis, it. gabinetto. antikencabinet, münzcabinet numotheca: „du zeigest dich so grosz im cabinette, als auf der siegesbahn und deinem ehrenbette.“

GÜNTHER 730.

Entnommen demWörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm

Das Onlinemagazine Cabinet gehört zu den Besten seiner Art. Es macht immer wieder Spaß darin zu stöbern.

Gestern fand ich dort den Artikel über die London Necropolis Railway.

Sie „belieferte“ den Friedhof Brookwood mit Leichen und den dazu notwendigen Trauergästen. „ The funeral trains originally ran once a day (64,000 people were buried at Brookwood in its first twenty years), although by the 1930s it was unusual for the trains to operate more than twice a week. They left the private station at Westminster Bridge Road and joined the London & South Western Railway’s main line for the hour-long journey, and then reversed into the cemetery grounds at Brookwood. There were two stations to greet them there: North Station, which served Nonconformists, and South Station, for Anglicans, who occupied by far the larger part of the cemetery. Each station had its own licensed bar. (…)

Irgendwie fiel mir dabei sofort wieder Thomas Pynchon ein: "Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage´s frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city...(…) ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose names he has never heard... The walls break down, the roofs get fewer and so do the chances for light. The road, which ought to be opening out into a broader highway, instead has been getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter and tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the final arch: brakes grab and spring terribly. It is a judgment from which there is no appeal."

Gravity´s Rainbow, Page 3

Das oben bereits erwähnte Zitat von GÜNTHER

„du zeigest dich so grosz im cabinette, als auf der siegesbahn und deinem ehrenbette.“

bekommt eine ganz unerwartete Wendung, kennt man erst die Geschichte dieser Bahn. Die einen nennen es wohl Siegesbahn und Ehrenbette, die andern schlicht Necropolis Railway.

Animal, Vegetable and Mineral

Und noch ein paar schöne Stiche. Ein wenig klein, aber wenn man die Namen der Zeichner oder Wissenschaftler in eine Suchmaschine eingiebt, sollte es doch möglich sein größere Bilder zu bekommen.

Tankens bilder - Images of Thought

Ich blättere mich da jetzt seit einer halben Stunde durch. Wahnsinn. Was soll man dazu sagen?

A History of the London Tube Maps ist toll. Alte Pläne der Londoner Tube. Als ich einmal in London war bin ich sehr gern mit diesem Ding gefahren.

Link via Cartography

Eine Ausgabe des Life Magazine von 1966 beschäftigt sich mit LSD.

Zitat: "The Exploding Threat of the Mind Drug that Got Out of Control Turmoil in a Capsule One dose of LSD is enough to set off a mental riot of vivid colors and insights — or of terror and convulsions"

Als Zeitdokument ist der Artikel ganz interessant.

Charmant fand ich die Aussage von Dr. Sidney Cohen: "Many people are doing to themselves what we would never consider doing experimentally. Some day their brains may wind up in the laboratory and give us the answers."

Dr. Cohen erinnert mich ein wenig an einen Arzt aus einer Kurzerzählung von Thomas Pynchon mit dem Titel "the crying of lot 49".

Dort heißt es: "We still need a hundred-and-fourth for the bridge." Chuckled aridly. The bridge, die Brucke, being his pet name for the experiment he was helping the community hospital run on effects of LSD-25, mesca-line, psilocybin, and related drugs on a large sample of surburban housewives. The bridge inward. "When can you let us fit you into our schedule."

"No," she said, "you have half a million others to choose from. It's three in the morning."

"We want you." Hanging in the air over her bed she now beheld the well-known portrait of Uncle that appears in front of all our post offices, his eyes gleaming unhealthily, his sunken yellow cheeks most violently rouged, his finger pointing between her eyes. I want you. She had never asked Dr Hilarius why, being afraid of all he might answer.

Zu LSD lies auch den Artikel von Thomas Pynchon " A journey into the mind of Watts"

"At the Deadwyler inquest, much was made of the dead man's high blood alcohol content, as if his being drunk made it somehow all right for the police to shoot him. But alcohol is a natural part of the Watts style; as natural as LSD is around Hollywood. The white kid digs hallucination simply because he is conditioned to believe so much in escape, escape as an integral part of life, because the white L.A. Scene makes accessible to him so many different forms of it. But a Watts kid, brought up in a pocket of reality, looks perhaps not so much for escape as just for some Calm, some relaxation. And beer or wine is good enough for that. Especially good at the end of a bad day."

Auf die Seite Gothard´s X-Ray Images bin ich zufällig bei der Suche nach Eidechsenbildern gestoßen. Sie ist Teil der Website des Gothard Astrophysical Observatory.

Wer sich für Sterne und so ein Zeug interessiert, der kann ja mal die Linkliste plündern.

Theatrum instrumentorum et machinarum Iacobi Bessoni

Besson hat schon verrückte Erfindungen gemacht. Hauptsache groß, so kommt es mir manchmal vor.

Link via historicum.net