Facecloth & Witter

I would like to remind readers that Hooting Yard has an eerie, shimmering “presence” on both Facecloth and Witter.

The Facecloth group is sunk in lassitude, but it can be revivified if you lot all join up and start posting the sorts of posts persons post on Facecloth, whatsoever they may be.

The Witter site is automatically updated* every time Mr Key posts something here at Hooting Yard, which means I never have to lift a tweety finger, thank heavens. But I understand that following and retweeting things is a constant activity for half the planet these days, so I encourage you all to get cracking.

*NOTA BENE : Due to inexplicable and quite possibly Lovecraftian forces at work in the aether, the updates have not been appearing for several months. This should be fixed soon, possibly by the time you read this.

The Truncheon Of Truth

I was sprawled on the sofa, dozing off as I read the latest issue of The Truncheon Of Truth, when I was startled by an urgent pounding at the door.

“Come in!” I shouted, for the door was not locked. As I tossed my magazine on to the floor and prepared to rise to greet my visitor, whoever it was, the door crashed open and a man wearing a frock coat and a bippety-boppety hat came striding in. I immediately recognised him as Tarleton, the amateur’s amateur.

“Why, as I live and breathe, it is you, Tarleton!” I yelled. Strictly speaking, none of these words was actually necessary.

“Spare me your unnecessary words,” rapped Tarleton, “Put on your coat and hat and boots and follow me. There is not a moment to lose!”

Thus began one of the more thrilling adventures of my long and, for the most part, undistinguished life. I had no idea, at the time, that I was to play a significant part in what became known as the affair of the Mitteleuropean Crown Prince, the missing jewellery box, the dachshund, the drainage ditch, and the freckle-faced lighthouse keeper. On that sopping wet Sunday morning I was preoccupied with the fact that Tarleton had interrupted my reading of an article in The Truncheon Of Truth on the subject of Blunkett.

“I was in the middle of reading a very interesting piece about David Blunkett,” I protested to Tarleton as I hastened after him along the rain-swept streets of my bailiwick.

“Save your breath, man!” rapped Tarleton, “And keep up! There is not a moment to lose!”

We turned down an alleyway next to the ice-cream kiosk, and then down another alleyway, and another, and yet another, until I realised that I was no longer in my familiar surroundings and had no idea where I was. In spite of the fact that each alleyway was narrower and darker and more foetid than the last, Tarleton kept up a cracking pace.

“At the point when you knocked,” I panted, “Blunkett had just entered a field wherein a cow awaited him – a cow that, I think, was about to attack him, on his birthday to boot.”

“You looked as if you were dozing off when I arrived,” said Tarleton, “So you cannot have found the article that interesting. Now hush!” he added, and he made a melodramatic gesture, placing one silk-begloved finger vertically in front of his lips. We stood, soaked, in front of a doorway on which the paint was peeling, the wood was rotting, and the number 49 had been scratched as if by the claws of a maddened bear.

“I was dozing off because the prose was leaden,” I said, “But the content in itself was absolutely fascinating.”

“For God’s sake hush!” hissed Tarleton, and as he did so he pushed the door open gingerly. It creaked on its hinges nevertheless. “Follow me down this secret corridor,” he whispered.

The secret corridor was unlit, and when the door swung shut behind me, I was as blind as Blunkett in the pitch blackness. Recalling the article in The Truncheon Of Truth, I apprehended just how terrifying it would be to be attacked by a cow. I groped forward and clutched at the tail of Tarleton’s frock coat, and we stumbled forward in the Stygian gloom.

“We are not likely to meet with a cow, I take it?” I whispered.

Tarleton hushed me for the third time.

In blackness and silence, like the message of Sylvia Plath’s yew tree, we made our way along the secret corridor for what seemed to me untold hours but was, when I looked later at my wristwatch, only a few minutes. We emerged eventually into the large and imposing pantry of a large and imposing hotel, and now I was Blunkett-blinded not by darkness but by the glare of several Klieg lights. Tarleton, ever prepared, snapped on a pair of sunglasses.

“We are only just in time!” he cried.

There, chained to the pantry wall, gagged and dishevelled, was a Mitteleuropean Crown Prince, and on the floor at his feet a missing jewellery box. With one swift and decisive move, Tarleton smashed the chains with an axe. Then he helped the Crown Prince to his feet, pocketed the jewellery box, dusted down his frock coat, straightened the bippety-boppety hat on his head, and prepared to leave the pantry through a connecting door to a second, equally large and equally imposing pantry, from where we could make our way to the hotel lobby, and then out into daylight and safety and a majestic boulevard. As I made to follow, Tarleton turned, wagged a silk-begloved finger in my face, and said. “Wait here!”

I never saw Tarleton or the Mitteleuropean Crown Prince again. I kept myself occupied in the pantry, rearranging the pots and pans and packet soups on the shelves, and doing a little light dusting, until one day, weakened by hunger, I saw a hallucinatory cow intent on attacking me, and I realised it was time to leave. I made my way back through the secret corridor and out into the alleyway and the other alleyway and the other alleyway and the other alleyway until I got my bearings and made my way home. Several weeks’ copies of The Truncheon Of Truth were piled up on the doormat. I made myself an infusion of boiled lettucewater and sprawled on the sofa to catch up on my reading. There was an article recounting in great detail the affair of the Mitteleuropean Crown Prince, the missing jewellery box, the dachshund, the drainage ditch, and the freckle-faced lighthouse keeper. Tarleton was not mentioned, and nor was I – at least, not in the first few paragraphs. The piece was written in prose so leaden that before I read any further I dozed off.

I was startled by an urgent pounding at the door. But I had taken the precaution of locking it, and I ignored the pounding, and went back to sleep.

Kew. Rhone.

When Kew. Rhone. was released by Virgin Records back in 1977, it was somewhat overshadowed by another record issued by the label on the very same day – Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols. The influence of John Lydon’s band was immeasurable, prompting thousands of snotty and not-so-snotty teenagers to form their own groups and make their own racket. Kew. Rhone. had far fewer adherents, but it had a decisive influence on some, not least on Mr Key himself. Along with Edward Gorey, Kew. Rhone.‘s lyricist and illustrator Peter Blegvad was my teenage self’s great creative spur, firing my imagination in ways that have not yet fully worked themselves out.

Almost four decades on, Kew. Rhone. is now a book, and one which I urge every last one of you lot to add to your shelves. It is with a certain amount of overexcitement that I tell you I am one of the contributors, so quite apart from its many other charms, the book is a necessary purchase for all devoted Hooting Yardists. Here is the press release:

First released in 1977, Kew. Rhone. is an album by a mismatched assortment of musicians performing intricate jazz- and pop-inflected songs with lyrics about unlikely subjects and unlikelier objects, lyrics which refer to diagrams or function as footnotes, or are based on anagrams and palindromes.

Kew. Rhone. would never trouble the charts, it aspired to higher things, and yet, re-released in various formats over the decades, curiosity about this categorically elusive work has grown. Now its authors and some of its connoisseurs have broken silence to discuss the record and to reflect upon the times in which it and they themselves were forged.

Peter Blegvad, Kew. Rhone.’s lyricist and illustrator, excavates each song in turn, uncovering themes and sources. In the second part of the book, a consortium of writers and artists respond to the album in various ways, illuminating without dispelling the mystery of a work designed to resist interpretation even as it invites it.

With contributions from: Amy Beal, Carla Bley, Franklin Bruno, Sheridan Coakley, Jonathan Coe, Jane Colling, Andrew Cyrille, François Ducat, John Greaves, Doug Harvey, Lisa Herman, Jeff Hoke, Dana Johnson, Andrew Joron, Glenn Kenny, Frank Key, Simon Lucas, Karen Mantler, Harry Mathews, Tanya Peixoto, Benjamin Piekut, Margit Rosen, Philip Tagney, Robert Wyatt, Rafi Zabor and Siegfried Zielinski.

Kew. Rhone. is published by Uniform Books on 26 November.

kewrhonecover

The Pursuit Of Knowledge

er1

I was not surprised, when I set out to reacquaint myself with Robert Wyatt’s complete back catalogue, that memories came flooding back. The earlier part of his career coincided with my adolescence, that time when some of our enduring enthusiasms lodge themselves in our souls. Wyatt was my great musical hero when I was fourteen, and he remains an abiding figure, even if I no longer worship him, as I did then, as a god. But listening to the very first records, with Soft Machine, prompted memories of another of my teenage talismans, and more particularly of something irrevocably lost, and lost not just to me but to everyone.

At the beginning of Soft Machine Volume Two, Wyatt announces that what we are about to hear is “a choice selection of rivmic melodies from the official orchestra of the College of ‘Pataphysics”. Like many another spotty youth with intellectual yearnings, I pored over the lyrics of my favourite albums, and in this case I wondered: was there really such a college?, were Soft Machine really its official orchestra?, and, er, what the hell was ‘pataphysics anyway? That word rang a faint bell, and it was not long before I recalled where I had heard it before. “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” from Abbey Road – arguably the most irritating song in the Beatles’ canon – opens with Joan studying “’pataphysical science in the home”.

Because it was Wyatt, because it was intriguing, because it was obscure, I wanted to find out more about this ‘pataphysics business. But where to start? And that, precisely, is what we have lost, that question of where to start. If I were a teenager today, the question would not even occur to me. I would head straight for the wikipedia. From the comfort of my smelly sock-strewn bedroom, and pausing only for the occasional pot noodle, within a few hours I could find out all I wished to know about ‘pataphysics, familiarise myself with the life of Alfred Jarry, download the texts of his plays and prose, and veer off in other promising directions, towards Dada and surrealism. By the time I tumbled into bed my head would be crammed with the knowledge that, four decades ago, took me years to acquire.

And this, I think, is a great loss. Complete access to everything all the time seems – and sometimes is – wondrous, even miraculous. But what is lost is the pleasure of pursuit, following a trail, serendipitous discoveries, unexpected byways, and – most importantly – the time taken. The instant availability of all that information to me, aged fourteen, could never be as valuable as the process of its gradual acquisition over months and years.

Where I did begin was with my parents’ bookshelves. I have written before about the experience of growing up on a bleak council estate, but of course I was never culturally impoverished. Quite apart from the teeming bookshelves, I was a bus- and Tube-ride away from London. Also, back then, my local library was still a building filled with books, and not the “chat-‘n’-snack zone” (in the approving words of Labour’s last “culture” secretary) it, and so many others, have become.

Unfortunately, eclectic though my parents’ tastes were, they did not run to a love of screechy-voiced madcap alcoholic visionary French writers of the fin de siècle. I was able to dig out stray references in some of their many art books. Further mentions popped up from time to time in the pages of the dear old NME in its halcyon days, usually in interviews with some of my other favourites like Slapp Happy or Henry Cow. In the library I found a copy of Ubu Roi. I somehow discovered the existence of a book called The Banquet Years by Roger Shattuck, a quarter of which was devoted to a biography of and critical essay on Jarry. I remember asking my father to buy it for me the next time he popped into Foyle’s (which was pretty much every week.) On one of my own forays into town, at a time when Charing Cross Road was packed with bookshops, I found a Jonathan Cape anthology of Jarry’s Selected Writings. And one day I was unreasonably overexcited to receive in the post, as a gift from my sister in America, a copy of the Evergreen Review (Volume 4, Number 13, May-June 1960), a 190-page paperback special issue entitled What Is ‘Pataphysics? It remains one of my most treasured possessions.

The point is that this was all very piecemeal and gradual, and therein lay the pleasure – of pursuit and discovery, stretching over time. It is a pleasure to a large extent lost. Had I not sworn off the booze, I would celebrate it, mournfully, in the spirit of Alfred Jarry, with a couple of bottles of wine and a pint of absinthe before breakfast. No wonder he was dead at thirty-four.

RW & AB

Approaching his seventieth birthday, Robert Wyatt has reportedly decided to “stop making music”. The writer Richard Williams rang him up to confirm if this was true. Wyatt responded with an anecdote

about the novelist Jean Rhys, who, after a long period of inactivity, responded to her publisher’s gentle suggestion that she might like to write another book by asking him if he’d enjoyed her last one. “Yes, of course,” he answered. “Well, read it again,” Rhys said.

Indeed. I will be taking up the invitation (the command?) to listen again to Wyatt’s extensive back catalogue. He was one of my earliest musical uberenthusiasms, from the day in the very early 1970s when my older brother came home clutching a double-album reissue of Soft Machine Volumes One and Two. (Side one of the latter remains one of my putative Desert Island Discs.)

Just as the career of the out of print pamphleteer Dobson is intertwined with his inamorata and Muse, Marigold Chew, so we must never overlook the contribution of Alfreda Benge to Wyatt’s work. I was once asked to name my favourite painting. It wasn’t an Old Master or modernist masterpiece from one of the great galleries. It was – still is – Benge’s cover for Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (1975). (Click for huge version.)

risstr

Dream Report

Last night I had a dream in which I met a young idiot savant who had committed to memory the entire contents of every single issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.

“Recite the story about the blue caravan that appeared in 1965 or thereabouts,” I said.

Before he was able to do so, the dream veered off in another direction, alas.

NOTA BENE : For the correct placement of the apostrophe in the title of Reader’s Digest magazine, see this potsage [sic].

Raid And Attack

I was excited to note in the television listings that there is a showing this afternoon of a remake of the 1977 film Raid on Entebbe, entitled Raid on N. Tebbit, in which a crack team of Mossad agents attempts to rescue hostages from the home of a deranged octogenarian ex-cabinet minister.

4020517

Readers may recall that the very same N. Tebbit was in the news a few years ago for attacking a child dressed in a dragon outfit.

Crevasse Poppet

A couple of years ago I had reason to mention a crevasse wanker. Today, while solving the Guardian crossword, I was reminded of that rather more charming figure of the mountaineering world, Gertrude Chumpot, known as the crevasse poppet (16 down, 3 down). Gertrude earned this soubriquet because she was a sort of one-woman mountain rescue service, adept at saving the lives and limbs of hapless mountaineers who, not looking where they were going, plummeted down crevasses to what would otherwise have been certain death.

One of the great mysteries of the crevasse poppet was the manner in which she effected her rescues. Eschewing the usual kit of ropes and pitons and whatever else is used by standard mountain rescue teams, she employed a form of inexplicable mesmerism. Standing at the edge of a crevasse wherein languished a moaning ninny who had fallen in some minutes earlier, Gertrude would make enigmatic sweeping movements of her arms while babbling gibberish and gazing at the sky. By this means, she somehow levitated the nitwit out of the crevasse. At least, that is what she told the Commission of Inquiry when it was considering whether to prosecute her for witchcraft. She was such a charming poppet that the case was dropped.

The crossword is particularly ingenious because it is littered with references to her story. The chairman of the Commission, for example, was an unromantic taciturn Lett (23 across, 1 down, 24 across), named Arpad Klingklang. Arriving for the first session on his horse (9 across), he gave a press conference where he stated that he was ready to burn Gertrude Chumpot immediately, given that in his view it was a clear case of possession (11 across) by Old Nick (10 across). The crevasse poppet had only been on the witness stand for a few minutes, however, before the Lett was like a moonstruck calf, hopelessly in love. Soon enough, he called proceedings to a halt, put all the paperwork through a shredder (5 down), and was persuaded to take a rest cure (26 across) at a seaside resort (7 down), where he spent his time drinking café noir (8 across), dancing the habanera (20 across) with various ladies (22 across), and poring over erotica (17 across). In an attempt to rid him of his Gertrude-mania, the staff fed him a diet of gruel containing bits of leek (2 down) and locust (22 down).

There are several Alpine folk songs about the crevasse poppet, usually yodelled to the accompaniment of an alpenhorn. If you listen to them you will probably need to take a rest cure yourself.

Madge Strudwick

Madge Strudwick, Madge Strudwick, where goest thou?
I’m going to the barn for to milk me a cow.
Madge Strudwick, Madge Strudwick, what will you do then?
I’ll read the hot entrails of a fresh-slaughtered hen.

After studying this verse for several hours, pupils are required to write a potted biography of Madge Strudwick, of no fewer than twenty thousand words, following her progress from the iron cot in the orphanage to a pauper’s grave, and taking in significant events in her life, including the appearance of milk teeth, theft of her breakfast porridge by bears, pole-vaulting competitions, airship disasters, the darning of a rent in her polka dot dress, ignominy and pelf, later further pelf, deployment of the Snodgrass implement, pantry etiquette, on her first looking into Chapman’s Homer, dreary rainy autumnal afternoons, the thing with the spatchcock, the encounter with a spider while sat on a tuffet eating curds and whey, what she really thought about curds, the pricking of her thumbs, dust in her boudoir, the agony in the garden, gardening tips, her reputation as a chatterbox, clown murder, shortcake recipes, planetary influences, chocolate swiss roll, gladioli, Choctaw lineage, speech impediment, holiday snapshots, filbert hedges, the pounding of those infernal drums, pictures of Jap girls in synthesis, collusion with vampires, baffling reappearance of milk teeth, sun worship, pet budgerigar, possible sighting on the grassy knoll on 22 November 1963, ribbons, melodrama, shoes, bus pass, library ticket, pippy bag, anaconda, hoop, shutters, antimacassar, nunnery, pincers, peg, tap, bedevilment, soot, soap, soup. Extra points will be given for pointy bits.

Rarest Of Rarities

pafi1

Twenty-six years ago, the Malice Aforethought Press published Penitence And Farm Implements in an edition of twenty-six copies. Each copy was individually lettered from A to Z. The front and back covers contained twenty-six photographs, snipped out of (I think) old copies of National Geographic magazine. One of the original snippages was pasted in on the inside title page of each copy.

The preface – or “A Few Words Before The Drivel” – ran as follows:

The seventy-five pieces in this book were written between 1981 and 1987; they are arranged here in no particular order. Readers whose brains become frazzled by the often turgid nature of these poems may prefer to muck about with the illustrative matter; this consists of sheets of sticky labels inserted here and there within the book. Indeed, it is possible to ignore the texts completely and to spend hours of idle amusement rearranging the pictures in jigsaw-like fashion, or to remove the labels from the book entirely and use them as charming decorative accessories, guaranteed to brighten up the home, office, or slaughterhouse.

To which was appended a line from John Aubrey’s Brief Lives:

“after his Booke came out, he fell mightily in his Practize, and ’twas beleeved by the vulgar that he was crack-brained”.

The “illustrative matter” consisted of further snippages from National Geographic, printed – in black and white – on to sheets of Gestetner sticky labels. Of the written content, the less said the better.

Penitence And Farm Implements is possibly the rarest of rare out of print pamphlets published by the Malice Aforethought Press during the last quarter of the last century. I would be interested to hear from any long-time Hooting Yard fanatics who actually own a copy. There can only be twenty-five of you in total.

pafi2