It has become common in recent years for the annual Hooting Yard paperback to be published in late autumn. This year, however, Mr Key has decided to tap the summer reading market. Now you can sprawl on the beach at a dilapidated and unseemly seaside resort clutching this fantastic new anthology to your heaving bosom!
Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke contains 250 pages of majestic sweeping paragraphs, together with discussion notes for your Book Group and a photograph of the Parp-O-Phone! It even has wider margins than earlier books, so you won’t need to crack the spine to sup your fill of what one critic (Snigsby) called “Mr Key’s delicious prose nectar”.
As ever, these timeless words are ignored by the accountants and airheads of the literary establishment, so the only way to get your copy is to hie over to Lulu. Do so right away!
Earlier today I was rummaging in the ReR Megacorp catalogue when I discovered, somewhat to my astonishment, that Mr Cutler’s emporium has “a few copies” of House Of Turps for sale.
He describes it as “classic Oulipoesque Keyiana” which is fairly accurate. It is a booklet originally published by the Malice Aforethought Press in 1987, although the copies available may be from a second print-run made as the “gift item” appended to subscribers’ copies of one of the legendary ReR Quarterlies. (Incidentally, besotted devotees may wish to snap up the entire collection of Quarterlies, two sets of which also seem to be available.)
Here, then, is your chance to clasp to your heaving bosom a true rarity, nigh on a quarter of a century old. I suggest you hie hence and place your order and send Mr Cutler your monies.
Over at The Dabbler, Brit has written a review of Impugned By A Peasant & Other Stories. If his perceptive and sensible words do not convince you to buy, oh, at least a dozen copies, then what will, what will?
In my cupboard at The Dabbler this week, I have transcribed the words of a children’s song appropriate for today’s date.
The song is taken from a garish publication of the last century entitled Special Agent Rastus Blot’s Traditional Songbook For Winsome Tinies. It was a piece of spectacular self-aggrandisement by Blot. Though the songs purport to be much-loved chants and ditties sung by billions of children around the world, they were all in fact devised by the Special Agent himself, and feature him in a starring role, carrying out deeds of daring and bravado. When I did some research into the matter, I discovered that not one tiny has been heard singing any of these songs, anywhere, ever.
Quite frankly, if you are going to present an urchin with a book as a gift, I would give Special Agent Rastus Blot’s farrago of nonsense a wide berth and buy Impugned By A Peasant & Other Stories instead.
In 1922, Charles Ives self-published his collection of 114 songs. Now, almost one hundred years later, Mr Key has self-published a collection of 114 stories. Yes, at last, wrenched from the innermost core of his creative innards, Impugned By A Peasant & Other Stories is available for you to buy, to fawn over, to stroke tenderly with your fingertips just like Christopher Plummer as Atahualpa in The Royal Hunt Of The Sun, in dazzling sunlight, strokes the Holy Bible. Or you may prefer to keep your copy locked away in a lead-lined cabinet, submerged in a pit, cordoned off by an electric fence patrolled by wolves and hogs. It’s up to you, really. The important thing is that you buy as many copies of the book as a sensible person would, what with Christmas coming up, and all those birthdays and anniversaries and saints’ feast days on which you will want to present your nearest and dearest with a treasurable gift. So get with the programme, readers, and hike over to Lulu at once to make your purchase!
August has been exceedingly fecund here at Hooting Yard, with more postages in a single month than at any time since the site reared its gorgeous head almost seven years ago. However, I now wish to alert readers to the possibility that things may quieten down for a week or so, the reason being that a critical stage has been reached in the production of this year’s Lulu paperback. Yes!, fear not, fairly soon now your Christmas-present-purchasing-befuddlement will be washed away, like the blood of the lamb, with the publication of another fat (350 pages or thereabouts) anthology of mighty lopsided prose, direct from Mr Key’s pea-sized yet pulsating brain to the printed page!
The mind-numbing business of bashing the book together is at an advanced stage, formatting the text and proofreadnig and reformatting the text, etcetera etcetera ad nauseam.. This ought to be a simple matter, but as the ever-reliable Mr Fadhley, who directs the operation, points out, the programme used to create the book “was designed by nerds for nerds and is monstrously complex”. Think of that when, eventually, you clutch the treasured tome in your dainty little hands, as tiny as Scriabin’s, if that is an approximate description of your hands, though I realise it may not be. You may have huge hairy paws. It matters not.
So for the next few days at least I will be trying to tackle the remaining monstrous complexities. Should anything momentous bubble up in my cranium I shall try to post it here, but I thought it worth alerting you that things may quieten down just a tad.
Meanwhile, you might want to make a day trip to Beccles.
Here is a list I never thought I would be included in : General Sir Richard Dannatt… Susannah York… Rt Hon Sir John Major… Prunella Scales… Frederick Forsyth… Sir Michael Caine… Sir Richard Branson… Joanna Lumley… Nicholas Parsons… Stephen Fry… Frank Key. Oo-er, missus!
Your favourite impoverished scribbler is in this august company as a contributor to that recipe book I was telling you about a few weeks ago, in connection with my participation in a broadcast by Phil Minton’s Feral Choir. Mr Minton’s recipe, Deptford Squat Stir-Fry, is truly sensational.
The book is Able To Cook, and all proceeds go to the charities Age UK Norfolk and Connects & Co. I command, by diktat, all readers to go here, immediately, and buy a copy.
My thanks to R., by the way.
While you wait for Mr Key to stop shillyshallying and produce this year’s Lulu book, the print aficionados among you will be delighted to hear about a new magazine entitled Polarity. The first issue, Death Vs. Taxes, is due out imminently, and its London launch party is to be held next Sunday, 27th June, from 6.00 PM at the Slaughtered Lamb, 34-35 Great Sutton Street, London EC1. Among other enticements, there will be poetry from Carol Watts, songs from the great Peter Blegvad, and some prose from Mr Key himself, making a rare public appearance. All Hooting Yard readers and listeners should, of course, cancel all other appointments and attend. I am told that the dress code for the event is “bird masks optional”.
Thin and spineless, We Were Puny, They Were Vapid is the fourth Hooting Yard book now available from Lulu. Volume One in a projected series of Out Of Print Pamphlets Reprinted, it contains three stories from before Mr Key’s Wilderness Years, together with recently discovered illustrative matter by Dan Chambers and a brand new bit of prefatory twaddle from Mr Key himself. So go and buy it, right this minute.
Note to subscribers : Those of you who have subscriptions at Old Halob level or above will receive a signed and dedicated copy, brought to you by your postie. To ensure delivery, please send an email giving me your current postal address (even if you think I already know it), and be patient while I get so complicated a business organised.
Note to putative subscribers : Anyone taking out a subscription at Old Halob level or above by 31 December 2009 will also receive a signed copy.
I have packed my pippy bag and will be off on my travels first thing tomorrow morning. Postages at Hooting Yard will thus be sparse, or perhaps non-existent, for the next couple of weeks. You can stave off hysteria by rummaging in the Archives, or buying the books. Speaking of which, almost as soon as I return to Blighty in the second week of December, a brand new Hooting Yard book will be published, thus solving your Christmas gift problems!
Apparently, if you use Lulu’s super-duper extra fast express uberexpensive delivery option, it is Not Too Late to receive copies of Hooting Yard books in time for Christmas. (While we are on the subject, I would like to point out that I insist on calling Christmas Christmas rather than one of those wretched multi-or-no-faith euphemisms which are, as we know, abominations not to be tolerated.) So to avoid being faced with sulky disappointed relatives and friends on Christmas Day, go here and order your copies right this minute.
Recently I bemoaned the fact that, not being a member of the literary in-crowd, I find it impossible to get my books reviewed. While not being reviews as such, a couple of blog posts devoted to Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags warmed what pass for the cockles of my heart. When you have read what Georgy Riecke and The Lumber Room had to say, you would do well to immerse yourself in the rest of their outpourings.
A book like no other that ever will be, as twenty brilliant acknowledgements from literary sovereigns, – “scintillating,” “fascinating,” “subtle,” “sincere,” “sublime,” “gorgeous,” “fantastic,” “exquisite,” “ambrosial,” “most soul-compelling,” “so suggestive of still higher things,” “a glimpse into Eleusinian mysteries or the literature of the planet Mars,” “like purple mountain peaks rising above the clouds and disappearing in the whiteness of shrouds of mist,” – expressly and by necessary implication agree.
There is nothing like it in literature; and a splendid mind it is that goes flashing on through these pages.
The ebullition of your thoughts makes me feel as if I had been attracted to within a few hundred miles of the sun and had his gas-jets in full view.
Thanks to Odd Ends, I have learned that these measured statements appeared on the back cover of My Soundspeed Discovery, Expanding into a Constructive Medley of Wit and Song; being a Four Years After-Inflorescence of The Life-Romance of an Algebraist, by George Winslow Pierce (1895). I think we can honestly say that such a matchless blurb applies equally well to Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags.
A brief note. Those of you who read Hooting Yard via an RSS feed will have spotted that you now only get the opening lines of each post, and will have to visit the site itself to read the whole thing. The purpose of this change is not to inconvenience you unduly, but to ensure that you are compelled to keep glancing to the right, where you cannot fail to see the books available – a fourth one is due early in 2009 – and of course the ‘Donate’ button, designed to instil pangs of unbearable guilt that so many, many words have been offered freely over the past five years.Â
ADDENDUM : Actually, I ought to say that not all readers need be beset by guilt-pangs, as some of you have been very generous. You know who you are, and I thank you.
“And about bloody time!” I hear you cry. At long last, after much travail, the new Hooting Yard anthology is available. Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags contains no fewer than a hundred and one stories eked from the pea-sized but pulsating cranium of Mr Key. 340 pages, or thereabouts, packed with common sense, with a few pictures thrown in, including that old favourite the Chumpot Patent Soap label. Now you can curl up in your exciting 60’s style wickerwork seating pod, or sprawl on a lawn in a snowdrift during a winter picnic, and furrow your brow as you grapple with the exceedingly sensible doings of exceedingly sensible characters such as Dobson and Pebblehead and Tiny Enid and fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol.
Simply click on the picture to order your copy.
