Docking Hack

Hats are off in Docking; caps are being doffed. The council's got a town plan. The maths are on a chart. Pips have been spat out and drudgery is bye-byed. Chocolate puddings seem to be in everybody's pantry. And here comes Traitor Bill. He caught a shark in waters. His sou'wester's been askew since 1954-ish. Bubbles surge from froth. The chemist's shop is shut. There's pills & pills & pills that no Docking man could swallow. Suffering aborted. The council in a caucus. The shaven heads of heads of state are battering the doors down. The city gates, the turrets, the alleys, roads & mews: Docking has its ears all go for red alert decisions. Language has been no-no'd, the bamboo men are wailing, the breakage rate is scheduled: the system has been broken. Crayons pink & stacked, the burnt sienna packaged. Vandals clash at nightfall, but Docking has its crackers. Plastic wrapped in plastic. The Docking coffers emptied. Idiot brawl saloon bar, a gorgeous snag-tooth babble. Prepared to dance a hoocha, not a tear or boo-hoo. Thousands of museums stacked with golden maps. Misshapen trunk road closures. Big stone reconstructions. Docking's cottoned on: it's a town about a tower. The frame is out of kilter, the coughing's filling coffins. Oh, but I want to go back to that Docking, Docking hack.

Dobson

How are we to get the measure of Dobson? We do not know his first name. We know neither the year of his birth, nor that of his death. (We do know that he is buried near his favourite lighthouse.) Virtually every last scrap of his work has been destroyed. All that remains is a short play, The Glue In The Palace Was Rarefied; The Putty Was Dreadful. This astonishing drama has only ever been performed once, on the London radio station Resonance FM, by Pansy Cradledew and Evrah - and even then, it was misattributed to someone called Istvan Scrimgeour. Here, then, for your pleasure & education, is Dobson's majestic work in all its glory!

Monomaniac Time

I have always been heartened by those people who devote the best part of their lives to some abstruse activity, or field of learning, to the exclusion of all else. Sometimes I can quite envy that focus. Take, as an example, Kjell Scharning, indefatigable collector of bird-related postage stamps. His site is a marvel. Click on the ostrich and go and look, and lose yourself for hours…

The Buttons of Beb

Potted Biographies of a Marine Hue, No. 1

Captain Flask, of the HMS Corrugated Cardboard, was a bad and dangerous man. He never washed his hair, and he was fond of tormenting badgers. His ship was falling apart, because whenever any of his miserable crew tried to repair something, like the rigging, or a fo'c'sle, or even the whole orlop deck, he would fly into a rage like something out of the Old Testament, and the crew would be cowed, and go back below decks to their scrimshaw and grog.

Every day, all day, and every night, all night, Captain Flask lurched around the deck, shouting at the sky. In the pocket of his weskit, where his fob watch ought to have been, he kept a supply of tin baubles, and he would throw these at any birds that came within his range, particularly guillemots, which he loathed, and cormorants, which he did not understand, but his aim was not good, and he usually missed.One of his arms was withered from scrofula.

His fob watch lay, abandoned, in the untidy drawer of his escritoire, hidden among old pencils, bits of calico, drawing pins, bottle tops, cornflakes and dust. Every morning at six o' clock, or whatever that is in maritime parlance, Captain Flask drank a whole pint of milk of magnesia.

Oh, he was such a bad man! Such a dangerous man!

Poetry Corner

Mention of an “intense mangle” in the Amazon.com review (see below, 16th December) reminded me of a similarly infelicitous phrase I came upon recently. When George W Bush made his state visit to Britain, The Guardian invited the usual suspects to write open letters to him for a special edition of the G2 supplement. The so-called “Poet Laureate” Andrew Motion contributed a poem, the first stanza of which is:

The child who has lost his arms

thought he was catching a ball

when the bomb his enemies dropped

bounced through his dapper hall.

This titanic piece of versifying repays considerable attention. Just one point to ponder - in the fourth line, why is the boy's hall “dapper”? Is he in the hall because it rhymes with ball? Have you ever visited someone's house and, looking around admiringly, announced, “My, isn't this dapper?” No, you have not. Nor has anyone else. Ever.

Robertson's Minerva

To hell with the Wright Brothers, or Percy Pilcher, or any of those other aviation pioneers being celebrated this week. The man for me is Robertson. In 1804 he published in Vienna a plan for La Minerva, an aerial vessel destined for discoveries, and proposed to all the Academies of Europe, by Robertson, physicist. The Minerva would have a balloon of 150 feet in diameter, made of unbleached silk, coated within and without with india-rubber. For some reason it was imperative that the balloon be manufactured in Lyons. Atop the balloon would gleam a weathercock, “the symbol of watchfulness”, and at the sides would be two purely ornamental wings. Suspended from the balloon would be a ship, containing a small boat (“in which the passengers might take refuge in case of necessity, in the event of the larger vessel falling on the sea in a disabled state”); a store for water, wine and other provisions; silk ladders; closets; the pilot's room; an observatory containing compasses “and other [unspecified] scientific instruments”; a room “fitted up for recreations, walking, and gymnastics”; a kitchen, medicine room, theatre and music room; a study; and lastly, tents for the “air-marines”. Tragically, the Minerva was never built.

The Ship of Fools

From balloons to ships. There is much in the Key archives (see below) that was not on the old Hooting Yard site, but that seems worth an airing here - like this drawing of the ship of fools which first appeared on the cover of Re Records Quarterly Magazine Vol. 2 No. 4 as long ago as 1989.

Unabashed Advertisement Feature

Go immediately to the ReR Megacorp and buy this album:

Here are some of the credits:

Lukas Simonis - guitars & mandolin. Bob Drake - bass & guitars. Chris Cutler - drums & electrified kit. Frank Key - liner notes & illustrations, naming of album & track titles.

You can see a larger version of the cover here, read some of the liner notes (among other things) here, or for your general edification and delight visit Chris and Bob. Incidentally, Bob has a magnificent online art tutorial which is highly recommended.

Here is the Amazon.com editorial review :

“Vril is an adrenalized, poppy, rampant batch of rock guitar instrumentals. The Shadows, The Ventures, Surf music, early Hendrix are invoked, but they’re all put through the intense mangle of 21st century thinking and studio trickery. It’s a twangy guitar album gone mad, complete with a fascinating art-and-texts booklet which reads like a liner notes by Edgar Allen Poe. The album features three unlikely avant-garde musicians: Dutch guitarist Lukas Simonis, bass player/mastering wiz Bob Drake and famed percussionist Chris Cutler.”

Breathless prose, eh? Flattering though it may be to be compared to the great neurasthenic one, I'm not sure I see the connection.* And couldn't they have spelled Allan correctly?

* NOTE : Bob Drake writes (17th December 2003) : “It is true. Have you not read any of Edgar Allen Poe's work? (Not to be confused with Edgar Allan Poe.) He mentions stolen paint, calcium, unguents, poultices, swollen diagrams, purposeless turnips, cilliated plumula, and cormorants in every one of his works.” To enrich your experience of Bob's informative letter, I have added those links so you can see what he's talking about. But beware! Following any of them will lead you away from Hooting Yard - possibly pursued by big fearsome owls - so do make sure you come back

You know, Virginia Woolf was right!

Archival Rescue Service

The old, vanished, Hooting Yard site was packed with many stories & illustrations which will gradually reappear here. We begin with a personal favourite, Gigantic Bolivian Architectural Diagrams.

Newton News

In 1689, Sir Isaac Newton was elected Member of Parliament for Cambridge University. He held the post for just one year, during which time he spoke only once - asking someone to close the windows as he could feel a draught.

Apropos of Poe

William Fearing Gill's book Edgar Allan Poe - After Fifty Years begins with a supremely bad-tempered paragraph:

“When Rufus W. Griswold, ”the pedagogue vampire,“ as he was aptly termed by one of his contemporaries, committed the immortal infamy of blighting a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's works, which he found ready at hand, by supplementing his perfunctory labors with a calumniating memoir of the poet, nearly fifty years ago, there were many protests uttered by the poet's contemporaries at home and abroad. Charles Baudelaire, the Poe of French literature, in his tribute to the dead poet, indignantly wrote: ”What is the matter with America? Are there, then, no regulations there to keep the curs out of the cemeteries?“ In view of the fact that the Griswold biography of Poe has been incontestably discredited, and proved to be merely a scaffolding of malevolent falsehoods - the outcome of malice and mendacity - the deference paid to Griswold and his baleful work in the memoir accompanying the latest publication of Poe's writings seems well-nigh incomprehensible.”

Hobbies & Pastimes

If you find yourself at a loose end during the long winter evenings, why not have a go at building this?

Ask Uncle Dan

Dear Uncle Dan

I read in an old encyclopaedia that Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), author of Arthur Mervyn: or Memoirs of the Year 1793, Alcuin: A Dialogue, Wieland: or The Transformation, Edgar Huntly: or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, Ormond: Or, The Secret Witness, Clara Howard, Somnambulism and other stories, Carwin: The Biloquist And Other American Tales And Pieces, An Address To The Government Of The United States On The Cession Of Louisiana, An Address To The Congress Of The United States On The British Treaty, and A Prospectus of a System of General Geography, was a frail, studious child, reputed a prodigy, and encouraged by his parents in that frantic feeding upon books which was expected, in those days, of every American boy of parts. What I want to know is, how can I become a “boy of parts”?

Yours sincerely,

Horst

PS - I am not American. I was born in Sumatra and now live in Belgium.

Uncle Dan says:

What you need, my boy, is vim. Vim is the trade name of a range of household cleaning products. Indeed, a scouring powder called Vim was one of the first products created by William Lever, the soapmaking tycoon whose family firm merged with a Dutch margarine manufacturer in 1930 to create that modern titan Unilever. As I am sure you know, Horst, Unilever owns Dove, Lipton, Ragu, Calve, Hellmans, Knorr, Domestos, Cif, Axe, Rexona, Calvin Klein, Cerrutti, Valentino perfumes, Bird's Eye, Domestos, Impulse, Vaseline, Ponds - that's right, Horst, Ponds! - Signal, Comfort, Slimfast, Magnum, Solero, Findus, and Ben & Jerry's. But I digress. We are talking about soap. Perhaps, young man, you are not of a technical bent? There are enticing opportunities in the soapmaking world for artistic temperaments too! You could, for example, design soap labels such as the one shown below.

Before modern soap, of course, people often used lye, which is still used today when preparing the Swedish delicacy known as Lutefisk, which is basically codfish jellied in lye. So, my lad, I'll wager that if you eat a big bowl of that every day you will indeed become a boy of parts.

Uncle Dan recommends wikipedia.

Celebrity News

I know, I know…. this is not really the place to come to read about the doings of celebrities. Thereagain, that's just what makes Hooting Yard so different, so appealing. In any case, this isn't exactly news, just something I feel ought never to be forgotten.

QUESTION : Has Tara Palmer-Tomkinson ever done anything to justify her existence?

ANSWER : Oddly enough, the answer is a resounding “Yes!”. The French writer Raymond Roussel once claimed that, in time, his fame would eclipse that of Napoleon Bonaparte: and who knows, he may yet be proved right. I venture to suggest that Tara Palmer-Tomkinson's name will likewise ring down the centuries, yea, e'en unto the time when, as Carl Sagan so memorably put it, “the earth is a charred cinder, and the sun… dead”. Why should this be so? Recall the first series of that wretched television programme I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! There is one superb moment when Tara and the log-obsessed Tony Blackburn are clearing up the camp. The other participants - including Uri Geller - have left. Tara stoops to pick something up. She looks at it, whatever it is, distastefully. Then, handing her find to Tony, she pronounces the immortal words: “These are Uri's underpants. Burn them”.

The Private Memoirs & Confessions of an Ignorant Ornithologist

Hooting Yard Blog, day one, and one's thoughts turn, of course, to ornithology. How better to spend one's time than to read an extract from The Private Memoirs & Confessions of an Ignorant Ornithologist?

Tuesday. Saw something sitting in a tree. It had a head, two legs, and seemed to be covered in feathers. I only saw the back of the head, so could not tell if it had a beak. I suspect it may have been a linnet.

Wednesday. Trained my powerful binoculars on a speck up in the sky in the far distance. It was moving quite fast. Perhaps a wren?

Thursday. Saw a worm being dragged from the soil by something much bigger than it, possibly with wings. Rang Dennis to tell him about it. He said he'd come and check, but by the time he arrived, puffed out, ten minutes later, the thing was gone, and there was no sign of the worm. Dennis said it was probably a cassowary.

Friday. Overheard a couple of people in the park talking about sedge warblers. Later, I discovered these are a life-form which all authorities agree is a type of bird. Ticked off a box in my notepad.

Saturday. Went to the church fair. When I said how nice all the flags and bunting looked, Dennis said, “That's also the name of a bird!” “Flags and bunting?” I asked. “No, you nitwit,” he said, “Just bunting. Also known as the ortolan.” I was very, very impressed with the breadth of his knowledge.

Sunday. Woke to find an owl sitting on my head.

Marvellous stuff. And here's a crumpled map, followed by a resurrectionist plea.

Useful Words

Vigilant readers of the Hooting Yard Search Engine Lure will note within it the splendid word “bewolfenbuddlement”. Like “solipsism”, this is a coinage by Horace Walpole, but sadly one which never caught on. When the future George III was a teenager, his grandfather tried to marry him off to a European princess, much to the dismay of George's mother. The name of the princess was Sophia Caroline Maria, daughter of the Duchess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Under his mother's influence, George became fretful and aghast at the proposal, and - as Walpole wrote - he “declares violently against being bewolfenbuttled”. To resurrect the word successfully, perhaps it is necessary to widen it from the sense of being forced into an arranged marriage to being forced into anything one doesn't want to do. Start using it today!