Category Archives: Dobson

Hell, Its Bells

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The bells of hell do not ring, says Theophrastus Dogend, they clank and clunk, eternally, awfully, deafeningly. This is because they are battered and broken, with great cracks and fissures. He adds that they are covered in mould, of stinking greeny-grey.

There are no bells in hell, we are told by Pilupus Taxifor. He says the clanks and clunks are the din of infernal machinery, engines of havoc, designed to torment the damned. If there be stinking mould upon the machines he does not say.

While Optrex Gibbus maintains there are precisely ten thousand bells in hell, each of them numbered, each in its own belfry, and they are rung by sinners, in expiation, the bell-pulls in the form of vipers, which bite the sinners’ hands and wrists each time they peal their designated bell.

Dobson’s pamphlet Hell, Its Bells (out of print) is an attempt to untangle the contradictions in these authorities, each of which, he contends, has at least a grain of truth. Are there bells in hell, he asks, or are there not? If there are, do they ring or do they clank? And clunk? Are there ten thousand bells, or fewer, or more, even an infinity of bells, just as there is an infinity of pits and dungeons and oubliettes in which the damned languish forever?

The pamphleteer’s research for this paper, which he read aloud at a meeting of the Sawdust Bridge Platform Debating Initiative on the tenth of April 1954, led him up some pretty horrible pathways, pathways more abhorrent even than the one that runs parallel to the disgusting canal wherein the vomit of generations has collected. Why it is that drunks and those with stomach disorders have habitually seen fit to throw up their guts in a canal basin at the end of a long and twisting lane far from any clinics and hostelries is a mystery Dobson never investigated, so far as we know. But he was spellbound by the bells of hell, upon which, he believed, so much, so very very much, hinged. It is a pity he never got round to writing the follow-up pamphlet, Hell, Its Bells, And All That Hinges Upon Them, With Lots Of Details, a work which exists only in the form of illegible scribblings in a notebook half of which is burned and the remaining half smeared with a stinking greeny-grey goo, which might be mould scraped from the bells of hell, but might on the other hand just be the sort of goo that Dobson managed to attract to himself, in his wanderings, God knows how.

Pebblehead Goes To Porlock

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Some years ago, I wrote about Dobson’s foolish theory that the person from Porlock who fatally interrupted the composition of Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge was, in fact, some kind of pod person from a parallel Porlock beyond the stars. I noted at the time that Dobson had never seen fit to devote a pamphlet to this twaddle, leaving us in some doubt as to the nature of this pod person, and in utter ignorance about the Porlock from whence it came.

Most people who have studied the matter conclude that the person in Dobson’s theory was a flesh-eating space zombie hatched from a pod, the pod itself brought to the vicinity of the Exmoor cottage in which Coleridge was staying by a primitive interplanetary cargo ship, intentionally or otherwise. But if this were so, and one such pod person came bashing upon the cottage door, how did the poet survive such an encounter? Survive it he did, of course, going on to live a long(ish) and fantastically talkative life thereafter.

Other questions surround the matter of Porlock, whether – in the theory – the pod-packed cargo ship crash-landed in the Somerset village of that name, or whether there is, somewhere in the mighty universe, a planet Porlock where are bred pod persons.

The latest writer to turn his attention to this fascinating business is Pebblehead, whose brand new bestselling paperback is entitled Person From Porlock! Note the missing Pod prefix. Pebblehead’s book is a first-person narrative, as if recounted by the “person on business from Porlock” himself, beginning a week before he strides o’er the loam to the cottage where Coleridge is ensconced, and ending, years and years later, as he faces death in a Victorian Porlock workhouse, his business, and his wits, having failed. In a tremendously exciting passage, Pebblehead has the raving and babbling person from Porlock imagining, on his deathbed, an encounter with his pod-doppelgänger who, it transpires, has been skulking about in his wake, like the familiar in the story by J Sheridan Le Fanu, ever since the fateful day in 1797 when he rapped upon Coleridge’s cottage door.

Several readers have pointed out the efforts Pebblehead takes to emphasise that this part of his narrative is, in his own words, “the hysterical drivel of a brainsick maniac”, and taken this to be a barb aimed at Dobson. Could it be that the paperbackist is limbering up for his long-rumoured unauthorised biography of the out of print pamphleteer, a work in progress which, it is said, will topple Dobson from his plinth in the pantheon of pamphleteers? No word comes from Pebblehead’s “chalet o’ prose”, only the sound of the indefatigable hammering of his fat fingers upon his battered and bloody keyboard.

Person From Porlock! by Pebblehead is published by Hefty Airport Bookstall Paperbacks Ltd, and is available from all good airport bookstalls.

Pancake Day

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[This piece ought to have appeared on Tuesday. Mea culpa.]

Dobson adored Pancake Day. Every year, in the weeks leading up to Shrove Tuesday, he grew ever more hot-brained and excitable, gathering sacks of flour, carrying out repeated Orwellian egg counts, and begging Old Farmer Frack for churns of milk from the mad old rustic’s cow collection. Every year, too, he revised, polished, embroidered, and sometimes even rewrote from scratch his pamphlet Pancakes : Food Of The Gods? (out of print).

In the complete Dobson bibliography, this title appears both with and without that question mark, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s fatuous Soviet Communism : A New Civilization?, written in 1935 at the height of Stalin’s terror, which lost its question mark between its first and second editions. Why Dobson ever phrased his title as a query in the first place is unfathomable, for he was absolutely convinced that all divine beings subsisted on pancakes and nothing else. A glance at any sacred text or compendium of myths quickly disproves the pamphleteer’s theory, if we can call it that, though “delusional idée fixe” would express it better. Dobson spent a preposterous amount of time working his way through the foundational texts of all major religions, Tippexing out all mentions of foodstuffs and, as soon as the Tippex was dry, scribbling in the word “pancakes”. At one point he commissioned Rex Tint, the noted mezzotintist, to create a mezzotint showing the Greek gods atop Mount Olympus, stuffing their faces with pancakes. The work was never completed, or even begun, because Dobson wanted to pay the mezzotintist in eggs, flour, and milk, and Rex Tint, famously, was a “cash only” mezzotintist.

It comes as something of a surprise to learn that in spite of his enthusiasm, Dobson was a hopeless pancake maker. He could never get the mixture quite right, and his tossing technique was laughable. He tried to divert attention from his pancake ineptitude through a combination of bluster, weeping, and pointing out of the window at an imaginary flock of chaffinches. Only late in his life did he face up to the truth, in the remarkable pamphlet My Pancake Ineptitude : A Heart-Rending Confession In Sixteen Bursts Of Hallucinatory Prose (out of print). In the sixteenth and final text, Dobson makes his most compelling case for the divine nature of this simple aliment, although the prose is so hallucinatory that not even the most diligent, pancake-focused reader can work out what in heaven’s name he is babbling on about.

ADDENDUM : A better, and more accurate title than Soviet Communism : A New Civilization would have been Soviet Communism : Enemy Of Orchards, as Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti reminds us.

Epigone

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According to the art critic Cosmo Hoxtonwanker, “few things boost the ego of the great artist as much as the emergence, and failures, of their epigones, talentless imitators whose own work never cuts the mustard, but clearly owes everything to the example of the master. The opportunities for preening are legion.”

One might have hoped that the egos of the truly great would need no such puffing up, but Hoxtonwanker is surely right in this (as he rarely is in anything else). One thinks of the out of print pamphleteer Dobson, convinced at an early age that he would bestride the twentieth century like a colossus, but at the same time forever riven by doubts and insecurities. Marigold Chew has recalled how happy Dobson would be when some neophyte pamphleteer would blunder onto the scene, publishing a handful of hand-stitched copies of a tract with a title like Gosh, How I Wish I Was Dobson!, in prose that curdled as one read it. The bestselling paperbackist Pebblehead is reported to be equally gleeful when he sees the shelves stacked with pathetic imitations of his own tremendously thick glossy potboilers, so much so that he invites their authors round to his “chalet o’ prose” for cocktail parties, lording it over them and taunting them, often physically, by poking at them with a stick and dropping beetles into their drinks.

It is, of course, only the supreme talents, in any creative endeavour, who provoke the slavish and witless efforts of epigones. The rest of us must continue to plough our lonely furrows, keeping our spirits up as best we may, our egos fragile and subject to the vicissitudes of a world of pap.

Until now. For it is with possibly preposterous overexcitement that I can report the latest innovation from Blodgett Global Domination Cyber Enterprises GmbH. For the past couple of weeks, this brand new company, operating from an allotment shed near Sawdust Bridge, has been seeking ways to crush the likes of Google and Microsoft under its singularly decisive boot. Their first product is designed to appeal directly to persons of a creative bent who wish like hell they had an epigone, for just the kind of ego-boost Hoxtonwanker identifies.

The E-Pig One is a tiny robot pig that can be plugged in to your computer with a USB cable or a bit of fusewire knotted to a magnet. Once initialised, synched, and prinked, the circuit boards in the E-Pig One start buzzing away, creating copies of your most recent creative projects – whether they be novels or paintings or three-hour slabs of improv racket – and then cleverly draining all the spark out of them (if any). The resulting mess is then belched out on to the E-Pig One’s so-called “sty”. It has all the hallmarks of your own work, as it might have been imitated by a lesser being without access to the empyrean peaks of creative genius you inhabit. So you can bask and preen, while the E-Pig One whirrs to a standstill, charging up for its next task.

Such has been the industry buzz, Apple are apparently already working on an iPig. It won’t succeed. The beauty of the E-Pig One lies almost entirely in its spelling. That is what the punters will pay for.

One Thousand

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Today there is cause for celebration. No, not the Muggletonian Great Holiday, that was last week. The reason for unbridled cheer is that what you are reading is the one thousandth postage at Hooting Yard since the site was rejigged at the beginning of 2007. (I cannot recall precisely how many postages appeared in the old format, to be found in the 2003-2006 Archive, but if memory serves it is something in the region of 950.) A milestone to be celebrated, then – but how?

Ideally, you lot would cancel all other engagements, put your feet up, and spend the rest of the day rereading all one thousand postages, in chronological order, making notes in your jotter, pausing occasionally to stare out of the window as you mull over a particularly arresting item, and generally wallowing in the sheer Hooting Yardiness of it all. Always remember that a day devoted to Mr Key is never a wasted day. However, I am sensible enough to realise that most of you will have other things calling on your attention, such as feeding the hamster, waiting at the bus stop, smoking, genuflecting, pootling about, milking the cows, rummaging in the attic, taking your pills, repairing the fence down by the drainage ditch, tallying up the entries in your ledger, doing the dishes, spreading jam on bread, clutching at straws, embarking on a perilous journey downstream by kayak, grovelling in filth, putting the spuds on, intoning spells against the pestilence, mucking about, boiling your shirts, describing an arc parallel to the surface, dusting the mantelpiece, rekindling that lost love, chopping celery, going for gold, doing the odd bit of trepanning, squeezing out sponges, cutting up rough, vomiting, preening, polishing your shoon, checking the gutters, making hay while the sun shines, piling Ossa upon Pelion, folding your towels, voting with your feet, remembering a childhood idyll, splitting an atom, clocking in, lurking in the shrubbery, gathering your wits, burning an effigy, being Ringo Starr, toiling to no purpose, making whoopee, burgling the Watergate building, casting the runes, mesmerising a duck, emptying the bins, licking some stamps, darning a hole in your pippy bag, crunching numbers, thwacking a bluebottle, going rogue, distributing alms to paupers, looking shifty, holding out a glimmer of hope, pole-vaulting, caterwauling, playing pin-the-paper-to-the-cardboard, rinsing lettuce, closing the barn door, glorying in crime, sticking to the point, feeling off colour, pondering the ineffable, gargling, straining, wheedling, pining, flailing, and lying crumpled and woebegone and exhausted and hot-in-the-brain. You may have to do all of these or none, but in either case the chances are that you will be unable to devote your every waking hour to Hooting Yard, even though you yearn to do so. We shall have to come up with some other form of celebration.

It is at times like these a person’s thoughts turn to cake. It will have to be an enormous cake, to fit a thousand candles on to it. Think of all that burning wax!

I shall leave you with that thought, and press on. One could, of course, throw a party. Invite a thousand guests, and have each of them commit to memory, for party-piece recital, the text – or, as bespectacled postmodernist Jean-Pierre Obfusc would say, the discourse – of one Hooting Yard postage (including this one). The drawback to this otherwise fantastic scheme is that some postages run to thousands of words, whereas some, very occasionally, have been wholly pictorial, other than the title. Allocating all one thousand to the satisfaction of every single guest is a task fraught with difficulty, and is unlikely to be achieved without conflict and, indeed, fist-fights. Now, incidents of physical violence are not unknown among the readership. Even the surprisingly numerous Hooting Yard devotees of the Mennonite faith engage in punch-ups from time to time. Don’t even go there, as the airheads say. Taken all in all, I am not sure the party is such a good idea. Anyway, where would you fit so many people? They would not all fit into your chalet or hovel or well-appointed yet curiously pokey high-rise urban living pod, and rental fees for barns and disused aeroplane hangars have gone though the roof, according to what I have been reading in So You Want To Rent A Barn Or A Disused Aeroplane Hangar, Do You, Chum? magazine. (It’s interesting to note, by the way, that the late Harold Pinter was on the editorial advisory board of this threatening, sinister publication.)

Cake, burning wax, and party all proving prohibitive, what are we to do? Well, in extremis, one can always turn to Mrs Gubbins for some outré ideas. For once in her life, the octogenarian crone is not helping police with their inquiries, in spite of that dodgy business with the pile of mysteriously bleached bones and the trained vulture, and she is to be found snugly ensconced in an attic room at Haemoglobin Towers, furiously unravelling tea-cosies. Where once she did knit, now she unravels. By heck, there will be a glut in the used wool market by the time she is done! It is possible this is part of yet another criminal scheme, but if so it is one that is far too complicated for my puny and innocent brain. Best to ask no questions, and leave La Gubbins to her unravelling. I popped my head in to her sanctum, though, just to ask if she had any bright ideas for a Hooting Yard Thousandth Postage celebration. She looked up, fixed me with that unnerving gaze, like a blind person looking at a ghost, and pronounced the single word “Nobby”. Then she went back to her unravelling.

It was difficult to know what to make of this. The only Nobby that sprang to mind was Nobby Stiles, the popular Manchester United and England midfielder of the 1960s. His joyous capering on the pitch after England hoisted the Jules Rimet trophy in 1966 had captured the imagination of the press in those more seemly times, so perhaps that was what Mrs Gubbins was recommending – joyous capering on a field of grass. Or was she suggesting that I should enlist Nobby Stiles to help with planning a celebration? It seemed unlikely, though not of course impossible, that the retired footballer was a Hooting Yard fan, but even if he was, I did not know him, had never even collected his autograph when I was a tot, and had no idea how to get in touch with him. I entertained the thought that perhaps the crone had said “knobby”, with a K, meaning that which is characterised by having knobs, or the quality of knobbiness, such as, for example, a gnarled tree-trunk, or the backs of certain kinds of toad, but that seemed even more unfathomable. La Gubbins being the kind of woman she is, it is likely that her pronouncement was a sweeping one, containing all possible meanings of “(k)nobby”, with and without a K, plus additional meanings thus far unrevealed to the common timber of humanity. But I am afraid I had to dismiss, as wildly impractical, the idea of getting Nobby Stiles, and perhaps some other lesser-known Nobbys, to assist me in arranging a celebratory caper, of people and toads, round and round a tree in a field, much as it was appealing.

It was back to square one, and as we all know, deep in our hearts, the question always to be asked at square one is “What would Dobson do?” The beauty of the question is that if we are able to arrive at a half-way sensible answer, we know the guidance given will be infallible. Working out a valid Dobsonian response, however, is to blunder along a path strewn with nettles and serpents, unless of course one is satisfied with the generic answer “Write a pamphlet!”, which is, admittedly, correct ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Even in the present case, I can think of few methods of celebration more apposite than that every one of my readers should sit down at their nearest escritoire and pen a pamphlet. But think of the logistics. Someone would have to collate all the screeds, typeset them, print them, and distribute them to an uncaring world. I try my best to retain an attitude of breezy optimism, but I cannot see it happening. And I have not seen any vans driving past recently announcing, from the lettering on their sides, that they are in the business of Pamphleteering Solutions.

But “Write a pamphlet!” is not, invariably, the answer to the question “What would Dobson do?” Very, very occasionally, by deep analysis of the question, exercising the brainpans to their fullest extent and beyond, a different answer is revealed. To find out what this is we need to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the complete Dobson canon, and to have pieced together as much biographical information on the out of print pamphleteer as we can, not excluding rumour, hearsay, tavern mutterings, and wild surmise. That is why I put the question to Aloysius Nestingbird, who knows more about Dobson than anyone else alive. As it happens, Nestingbird is only barely alive, following a calamitous bobsleigh accident. Quite what a frail ninety-two-year-old was doing plunging down the Caspar Badrutt Memorial Perilous Ice Declivity at the Pointy Town Antarcticorama is a question for the bigwigs at the Fédération Internationale de Bobsleigh et de Tobogganing, who I understand have already empanelled a Board of Geriatric Investigation to be headed by the fiercely independent, because ignorant of bobsleigh matters in general, Ant, or it might be Dec, the taller of the pair, the one with the glassy eyes of death.

Anyway, I bluffed my way into the clinic where Nestingbird languishes, using the techniques prescribed by Blötzmann in his Methods Of Dissimulation To Be Employed When Entering Restricted Medical Facilities (Second Series), an invaluable work which I always carry with me, just in case. Nestingbird was almost invisible beneath a panoply of tubes and wires and monitors and bleepers and what have you, but I ripped them out of my way and put my mouth to his still-bloody, gored ear, and put to him, in a dulcet whisper, the question. I want to arrange a celebration of the thousandth Hooting Yard postage. What would Dobson do? Nestingbird groaned, and some sort of despicable fluid bubbled out between his bloody lips, but he managed to tell me the answer, albeit in a croak so weak I barely heard it. But hear it I did. He said “Nobby”.

Returning home via the funicular railway, I racked my brains to see if I could wring any sense from this. Put in my position, it appeared, Dobson would “do Nobby”, or, I suppose, “do a Nobby”, as if that made any difference. Neither was a phrase I had ever heard before, and nor had any of my fellow-passengers, whom I badgered about it, growing, I am ashamed to say, rather hysterical, to the point where I was bundled off the train as soon as it reached the base station and taken round the corner, past snow-covered shrubbery, and handed over to Detective Captain Cargpan and his toughs. It is lucky for me that Cargpan is a fanatical devotee of Hooting Yard, otherwise I feel certain I would have ended up back in the clinic, and in a much worse state than Aloysius Nestingbird. Instead, the doughty copper let me off with a mussing of my tremendous bouffant. He didn’t know what “doing Nobby” was, either.

I had the sinking feeling that if I sought advice from anybody else, from born-again beatnik poet Dennis Beerpint, for example, or from Old Farmer Frack, I would get the same response. When I eventually arrived home, I made a cup of tea and heated a couple of smokers’ poptarts. Perhaps the celebration would have to wait upon the two-thousandth postage. Or perhaps I should be grateful for my simple snack. I sat down at the table, slurped the tea and shovelled down the bitter poptarts. Was this, after all, “doing Nobby”?

About Ivan Clank

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Is it not curious, the manner in which the most disparate things interconnect? The way in which we find linkages, some flimsy, some as sturdy as iron chains, between persons and places and objects and events? If Mr Raven, the club-footed inquiry agent in The Strange Affair Of Adelaide Harris by Leon Garfield, could continue devising his spidery diagram beyond the bounds of that book’s plot, would he not eventually encompass the whole world within its web of foul intrigue?

These idle thoughts, bubbling gently in my brain while I stared out of the window hoping to see a heron, or a cow, were prompted by the recollection that Ivan Clank, the bailiff whose grisly demise was mentioned in passing in Variation On A Theme Of Scott Walker, was, albeit briefly, a member of the Pointy Town chapter of the Tuesday Weld Fan Club. He had left, or rather been booted out, before the picnic excursion described here yesterday. In fact, if the membership records are to be believed – and why should they not be? – Ivan Clank’s time in the club lasted but twenty minutes. At 4.25 on the afternoon of a gorgeous summer’s day, he paid his sub, signed his name in the ledger, and received his badge and card and list of rules and regulations and passport-sized photograph of Tuesday Weld and a celebratory slice of flan. A note appended at 4.45 on the same afternoon declares that “Ivan Clank, Membership No. 835, bailiff, has left, or rather been booted out of, the club”. No explanation is given. The handwriting appears to be that of the secretary, Mr Thubb.

In itself, this would be of minuscule interest, but hark! What is that we hear? It is the pencil of the pamphleteer Dobson, scratching across a page of one of his writing tablets! In a further interconnection to warm the cold, cold heart of Mr Raven, we learn that Dobson actually wrote a pamphlet about Ivan Clank and his fugitive Tuesday Weld Fan Club-related activities. The pamphleteer seems first to have become aware of Ivan Clank when he read an account of the bailiff’s gruesome destruction at the hands of brigands in The Daily Bailiff & Brigand Herald. He liked to keep up to speed with these things, did Dobson. The paper’s legendary “Recommendations For Further Reading For Those Whose Curiosity Has Been Piqued” column pointed the pamphleteer in several directions, most of which he failed to follow up. But he did learn, somehow, about Ivan Clank’s membership of the Tuesday Weld Fan Club, and its abrupt termination, and he even seems to have gained access to the membership records, which is a wonder, all things considered, what with one thing and another, from whichever angle you look at it, all in all, shambeko, shambeko, hal-an-tow.

The resulting pamphlet is not one of Dobson’s best. Ivan Clank, The Bailiff, O Is He Dead Then? is a curdled and bickering text, unleavened by any of the pamphleteer’s usual majestic sweeping paragraphs. It purports to be a potted biography of the bailiff in which the Tuesday Weld Fan Club hoo-hah is seen as pivotal, but Dobson does not say what it is that pivots upon it. Instead he launches into a character assassination of Mr Thubb, a man he had never met and of whom he knew not a jot. It was lucky for Dobson that he was not prosecuted for libel, though that would have been an unlikely outcome given that the pamphlet sold just two copies, both to buyers overseas with more money than sense. It is a sad reflection upon the state of pamphleteering, or possibly just of Dobson’s pamphleteering, that it was his best-seller that year.

104 Pamphlets (Out Of Print)

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I am indebted to reader Mike Jennings who, despite being banished to a pompous land, has, in his own words, been “compiling these tentative notes toward a Dobson bibliography”. This seems to me to be a work of magnificent scholarship. Indeed, I cannot begin to imagine how we have all been coping without it.

Mr Jennings adds “Much work is to be done of course with regard to details such as binding, font, illustration etc but I know my limitations.  Such scrutiny I will leave to more qualified Dobsonists with the requisite anoraks and little grease-proof bags of egg sandwiches.”

The bibliography is ordered according to an arcane system of Mr Jennings’ own devising, one the intrinsic beauty of which I hope we can all appreciate. I have taken the liberty of applying a set of Blötzmann Numbers to the pamphlet titles. Though broadly similar to ordinary numbers, they of course harbour a terrifying underlying significance. To paraphrase H P Lovecraft, “the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to understand the Blötzmann Numbers”.

Unless otherwise stated – and it isn’t – all titles are out of print.

1. The Adhesive Properties Of Six Hundred Different Types Of Glue, With Diagrams

2. Dobsonetics.

3. A Recantation Of Dobsonetics.

4. On The History Of Potato Clocks.

5. My Revolutionary New Method Of Moving Sludge Around The Countryside.

6. Hedges Hidden From Sight By Steam.

7. I, Piano Tuner!

8. “The hedgehog grumbling back to darkness is known by me and loved by me” (The Rod McKuen pamphlet)

9. Why I Shall Bestride This Century Like A Colossus.

10. Certain Aspects Of Plastic Baubles And Plastic Sheeting.

11. Killer Bees, Ferenc Puskas, And Tomatoes On the Vine.

12. How I Coped With A Collapsed Lung During A Thunderstorm.

13. Chew, Gnaw, Eel, Teeth, Pap And Slops For Dinner : A Memoir Of Vlasto Pismire.

14. Of the fifteen-part critical analysis of The Life and Times of Captain Cake, Volume IV is entitled Welk, Bankhead, Loy : There’ll Be A Welcome In The Hillsides.

15. Worlds Beyond Sense .

16. Chucklesome Fripperies From My Notebooks (Lavender Series).

17. Things Beginning with B, My Hatred of Squirrels, & Hedy Lamarr: Scientist.

18. How And Why I Built Eight Small Pâpier Maché Brontosauruses.

19. How I Invented a Revolutionary New Birdseed.

20. The Belle of Amherst & Other Essays Written During An Unprecedented Pea-souper.

21. Hideous Execution Practices Of The Blood-Drenched Corsairs.

22. Ten Easy Steps To Grooming Your Cormorant.

23. My Nightmares About Emily Dickinson.

24. Downy, Witched, Dutch Cloud-Heaps of Some Quaintest Tramontane Nephelococcugia of Thought.

25. Dobson’s Heraldic Dossier.

26. Marsh Gas, Badge Man, Prester John & Other Imponderables.

27. Tip Top Encyclopaedia Of Tip Top Pop Bands.

28. There’s Hours Of Fun To Be Had With A Handful Of Pins (Under the pseudonym “Blenkinsop”).

29. Description of & Reverie upon Forty-Four Curlews.

30. Some Hurried Notes On Tab Hunter.

31. Eight Things You Never Knew About Tuesday Weld.

32. Why I Do Not Live In A Grot, Elfin Or Otherwise.

33. Copse & Spinney Nomenclature : A Guide For Tiny Tots.

34. Six Types Of Snodgrass Implement.

35. On The Naming Of Curs As Fido : A Stern Corrective.

36. An Alphabetical Guide To What Every Infant Should Know About The Majesty Of Nature.

37. How My Annotated List Of Chewed Things Was Lost In A Muddy Canadian River.

38. The Bee As Moral Exemplar & Other Insect-Related Parables For Young & Old Alike, Innit.

39. Cornflakes, Ready Brek, Special K and Suicide.

40. Some Things To Eat In The Bleak Midwinter.

41. A Full And Frank Commentary On “The Dark Night Of The Soul”, Wherein Certain Controversial Theories Are Proposed Which Have Led The Author Into Fist-Fights With Sailors Outside Tough Drinking Taverns In The Marseilles Dockyards.

42. Little Stories Of Charming People To Warm The Cockles Of Your Heart.

43. Six Hundred And Twenty Uncanny Tales, Together With A Pen-Portrait Of Victoria Principal.

44. How I Was Attacked By A Flock Of Partridges At A Bus Stop While On My Way To The Potato Club.

45. Bilgewater Elegies.

46. Netherlands, Holland, Dutch – What’s That About?

47. Some Thoughts About Shabby Taverns, Cows And The 1958 Munich Air Disaster Which Wiped Out The Flower Of Post-War English Football, Although Sir Matt Busby Survived The Crash, Praise The Lord.

48. An Essay About Bowls, Dishes And Pots.

49. A Pamphlet Of Majestic Sweeping Paragraphs.

50. Why I Smashed My Copy Of “Thick As A Brick” By Jethro Tull Into Twenty Thousand Pieces With A Geological Hammer And Then Glued It Back Together Again.

51. Notes On A Shelf Of Test Tubes Containing The Blood Of Squirrels.

52. Observations On Cows From A Great Distance, In The Rain.

53. He Who Plucks The Strings Of A Banjo In Wintry, Wintry Weather.

54. Ten Things Guaranteed To Drive Marigold Chew Crackers.

55. Nomenclature of Paraguayan Bandit Musicians & Soviet Collective Farm Administrators Compared.

56. All About My Nocturnal River Trip In The Government Canoe With Captain Vargas, During Which I Was Heavily Sedated.

57. My Parents Are Dead, But Christ!, I Adore Hiking.

58. The Death Of Stalin Has Led Me By Dense Entangled Byways To The Unshakeable Conviction That A Complete And Thorough Pedagogic System Can Be Based Entirely Upon My Own Pamphlets.

59. How I Thwarted My Cacodaemon With A Pointy Stick And Some Bleach.

60. God Almighty, Is There Anything More Satisfying Than A Well-Executed Picnic?

61. A Dictionary Of Squirrels (and its appendix Eerie & Macabre Picnic Praxis).

62. A Dictionary Of Guillemot Habitat Maps.

63. Wild And Unhinged Fantasies Regarding The Existence Of Wholly Imaginary Registers.

64. Why I Can Be Difficult And Self-Centred.

65. The Sane Person’s Guide To Swearing By The Etruscan Gods.

66. Child, Be Thunderstruck As Your Tiny Brain Copes With The Notion That Ice And Water And Steam Are But Different Forms Of The Same Substance!.

67. Why Those Let Loose From Mad Cabins Should Immediately Up Sticks And Settle At A Seaside Resort.

68. “On terrifying facial expressions”.

69. Meetings With Remarkable Owls.

70. “On the forest beings”.

71. The Unutterable Chaos Caused By Panicking Hens.

72. My Mysterious Day Trip To Alaska And What I Did With A Handful Of Pebbles While I Was There.

73. How To Knit Knots While Remaining Invisible To Hurrying Brutes.

74. Tips For Janitors.

75. On the History and Origins of the Fred Jessop Cup.

76. A New And Improved Method Of Drying Your Puck With A Towel.

77. Some Arresting, Diverting, And Frankly Sensational Factoids Regarding Certain Ponds I Have Had The Pleasure To Take A Turn Around, In All Weathers, Arranged In Alphabetical Order By Pond Name.

78. How I Spent Six Months Underground In An Amazing Subterranean Vault Built To House The Blister Lane Gasworks, Together With Mr And Mrs Pan And Their Cat Hudibras. (considered lost)

79. An Essay Concerning A Bird Perched Upon A Promontory.

80. A Disquisition Upon The Various Types Of Cloth From Which Trousers May Be Woven , Together With Some Pictures Of Hume Cronyn.

81. How I Conquered My Fear Of Googie Withers, Together With A Few Tips On The Limitless Possibilities For Entertainment Afforded By A Toy Squirrel Made Of Tin.

82. Fun With Paraffin!

83. How To Dye A Goat.

84. What Planet Does Jeanette Winterson Live On?

85. On The Judicious And Non-Repeating Deployment Of Pancake Hints.

86. Thousands Of Unusual And Arresting Facts About Birds.

87. The Huddled Shapelessness Of The Dead.

88. How I Poked A Pointed Stick Into A Hedge.

89. Mawkish Fables Of Punctilio And Rectitude For Tiny Tots.

90. Never Pack A Knapsack In A Panic.

91. Keeping Cutlery Aligned Tidily In The Cutlery Drawer As An Absolute Imperative If One Aspires To Be Fully Human.

92. The Happy Sprinter : An Eye-Witness Account Of The Training Schedule Of Fictional Athlete Bobnit Tivol Under The Direction Of His Coach, Old Halob.

93. Tacky To Goo : Some Frightfully Complicated Thoughts On The Consistency Of Manufactured Pastes.

94. Ten Short Essays On Chopping And Cutting And Hacking.

95. Some Remarks On The Grotesque Pallor I Encountered This Morning In My Shaving Mirror.

96. The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse… Or Were They?

97. How I Mislaid My Bus Pass During A Thunderstorm.

98. An Anthology Of Disastrous Hiking Mishaps Cobbled Together From A Lifetime Of Ill-Starred Rustic Pursuits.

99. Forty Visits To The Post Office.

100. Six Lectures On Fruit.

101. Where Eagles Dare.

102. The Man Who Put The Bee In Beelzebub.

103. An Anecdote About Channelling Jungle Demons Wearing A Copper Cone Atop My Head While Hiding In A Cubby Full Of Bats.

104. Quite A Few Things I Know About Swans.

A Short Essay Upon Cardboard Breakfast Cereal Packets

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The title of Dobson’s A Short Essay Upon Cardboard Breakfast Cereal Packets leads the reader, not unreasonably, to expect an essay upon the subject of cardboard breakfast cereal packets. It is nothing of the sort. Such a topic was, it need hardly be said, grist to the pamphleteer’s mill, for nothing cardboard was alien to him. But we should recall that he had already dealt with cardboard breakfast cereal packets, exhaustively, in his pamphlet Nothing Cardboard Is Alien To Me (out of print), as well as in several other works.

A Short Essay Upon Cardboard Breakfast Cereal Packets is, in fact, a hand-written and unpublished screed scratched out by Dobson with a butcher’s pencil upon cut or torn sheets of cardboard, once forming parts of breakfast cereal packets, composed during a paper shortage. The historical evidence for this paper shortage is slight, even non-existent, and it may be that it occurred only inside the pamphleteer’s head. He is known to have imagined crises of various kinds, such as outbreaks of ergot poisoning, bird attacks, planetary collisions and thunderstorms, none of which actually took place but fantastic details of which he scribbled down in his journals alongside the mundane and tiresome. Marigold Chew suggested Dobson did this to make his life seem more exciting and to provide any future biographers with opportunities for hysteria-heightened prose. If that is the case, it must be said that an invented paper shortage is hardly the stuff of high drama. Tousle-haired young Dobsonist Ted Cack has suggested that the pamphleteer simply ran out of paper one day and could not be bothered to fetch a fresh supply from the stationer’s.

Whether his recourse to bits of cardboard was genuinely necessary or otherwise, the Short Essay is an intriguing piece of work, chiefly because it remained in manuscript and was never typeset and turned into a pamphlet proper. Dobson perhaps felt it was too short, although at other times he happily issued for publication, in pamphlet form, some remarkably brief works, not the least of which was the famous and much-anthologised Paragraph About Potatoes, for many of us our introduction to the titanic pamphleteer.

Ted Cack’s view, expounded in an incoherent and shouty way during his hour upon the fourth plinth when he took part in Gormless Gormley’s ludicrous pageant of inanity in Trafalgar Square, is that Dobson planned to incorporate the Short Essay, unaltered and in its entirety, into a longer piece, a study of the behaviour of toads in the Soviet Union, which, despite voluminous notes, a research trip to Omsk, and the purchase of a fur cap with ear-flaps, he never actually completed. It is difficult to know what to make of young Ted Cack’s argument, for the words toad, behaviour, Soviet and Union are nowhere present in A Short Essay Upon Cardboard Breakfast Cereal Packets. Where, and to what purpose, we are entitled to ask, did the out of print pamphleteer intend to insert this fragment of prose, barely sixty words long, into a piece which, the extant drafts tell us, was single-mindedly concentrated, with laser-beam precision, upon communist Bufonidae?

An additional curiosity about the Short Essay is that the cardboard sheets were at some point coated with a kind of disgusting yet transparent paste which makes them resistant to all known photocopying techniques. Now there’s a thing.

Further Reading : A Very Long Essay About Stalinist Toads, Written With A Magic Marker Upon Hundreds Of Cream Crackers, by Dobson (out of print).

Government Canoe

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“… the pilot of the Government Canoe which had called at Santa Eulalia on May 2nd, 1966, reported that he was in the best of health and spirits.” – Geoffrey Household, Dance Of The Dwarfs (1968)

The Government Canoeist, or his pilot, checked on Dobson pretty regularly while he was holed up in an estancia twelve miles south of Santa Eulalia. Notes in the canoe log indicate that the pamphleteer was visited not only on May 2nd, but also on the 4th, 6th, 7th and 15th. Each time he was said to be in “the best of health and spirits”, except on the final visit, when he was apparently “cranky and cantankerous and possibly possessed by the evil spirits which haunt the jungle”. It was, of course, on May 15th, 1966 that Dobson was dragged on to the Government Canoe and taken upriver to the capital city, where he was interrogated by Captain Vargas.

But what was he doing in that remote estancia on the edge of the jungle for two weeks? He had neither pencil nor notepad with him, so he was certainly not working on a pamphlet. He shunned the few families who scrabbled a living in the village of Santa Eulalia, and when any of them approached the estancia he hid in one of its many cubbies. And yet he did not hide when the Government Canoe came by. Indeed, he was uncharacteristically welcoming, inviting the canoeist and his pilot ashore and regaling them with anecdotage. It is a pity no record was made of the tales he told them, for then we might have a better idea of his state of mind.

Captain Vargas got nothing out of him, for by the time he was shoved into the interrogation room, Dobson was raving and bellowing. Vargas himself had once been the Government Canoeist, but after an accident with a paddle in which he injured a riverbird he was demoted. Confined to the large important building in the capital city’s most spacious plaza, Vargas hankered for the river, and the canoe, and the companionship of the canoe pilot. He was hoping that if he could crack the Dobson case, he might be rewarded by being reappointed as Government Canoeist. After all, his successor had bonked many a wading riverbird on the head with his paddle, deliberately, and there was talk of demoting him, too. Vargas heard the unofficial chatter in the canteen on the ground floor of the large important building, as he sipped his pilgar and stared out of the window at the spacious plaza.

Yet Dobson defied him. All Vargas could glean was that the out of print pamphleteer had shown up in Santa Eulalia on May 1st, in hiking gear, mapless and famished. He stuffed himself with pancakes, told a couple of anecdotes, and carried on down the river until he reached the abandoned estancia, where he stopped, and stayed, seemingly in the best of health and spirits, for a fortnight. There were many bats at the estancia, and Vargas wondered if he had come to study them. But after a flurry of correspondence with experts, the captain concluded Dobson knew nothing of bats, or at least no more than a child would be expected to know.

The whole point of the Government Canoe was that it was meant to keep tabs on foreign pamphleteers. In this instance, it had signally failed to do so. Vargas felt sure that, had he still been the Canoeist, his reports on Dobson would have been more forthright. He would have questioned him more closely, rather than just suffering his anecdotage. He decided to go rogue, to commandeer the Government Canoe under cover of night and to search the estancia for clues. And he took a heavily sedated Dobson with him.

It is this nocturnal river trip on the Government Canoe that was the subject of Dobson’s remarkable pamphlet, written many moons later, entitled All About My Nocturnal River Trip In The Government Canoe With Captain Vargas, During Which I Was Heavily Sedated (out of print). The prose is hallucinatory, and strangely stilted. It is actually quite difficult to wring any sense out of it. But close reading, in the stupor of half-sleep, allows us to understand that Vargas took the Government Canoe in the wrong direction, bashed innumerable riverbirds on the head with his paddle, and eventually ended up in open sea, having inexplicably navigated his way through the delta. The pamphleteer and his interrogator were hoisted to safety by the Government Chopper, and the Government Canoe was allowed to drift away into the vast and pitiless ocean. Vargas spent the rest of his life trying to find it. Some say he is still alive, an old and wrinkled wreck, roaming the coastlines of the world.

As for what Dobson got up to in those two weeks in the remote estancia, the only clue we have is in the title of another late pamphlet, An Anecdote About Channelling Jungle Demons Wearing A Copper Cone Atop My Head While Hiding In A Cubby Full Of Bats (out of print). Unfortunately, this is written in prose even more hallucinatory and stilted, and it makes no sense whatsoever.

Sick Amid The Blossoms

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“O Dobson thou art sick! Thou art sick amid the blossoms! O what shall we do? What shall we do? Let thy pamphlets be our guide!”

This was the little recitation made, oh so plaintively, by a band of hiking orphans who stumbled upon a sick and feverish Dobson in a blossom-bestrewn field one morning in 1956. Orphan hikes were a short-lived social phenomenon of the decade, one which is almost forgotten today. Inspired by the Swiss film masterpiece The Hiking Orphans, children all across the land gathered into groups and went marching off o’er hill and dale, munching toffee apples and consulting extensively detailed maps. So popular did the hikes become that many of the tots taking part were not actually orphans at all. Some became dab hands at forging death certificates, others suffocated mama and papa in their beds, or poisoned their breakfast cereal.

Dobson became a sort of patron saint of the orphan hikers following publication of his pamphlet My Parents Are Dead, But Christ!, I Adore Hiking (out of print). Because of the blasphemous abuse of the Lord’s name in the title, the pamphlet was swiftly banned and the print run pulped, but such was the demand from hiking tinies that illegal Gestetnered copies were soon circulating, often secreted in the folds of the extensively detailed maps the orphans carried in waterproof pouches strung from lanyards around their scrawny necks.

These maps were themselves a marvel, more extensively detailed than any other maps ever made. It was said that the most extensively detailed of them showed the precise alignment of chaffinches perched on the branches of an aspen you would pass if you bore left at the hedge in which a rusted farm implement had been shoved and abandoned.

Unusually, Dobson’s pamphlet included an illustration of the great man, a linocut by the hyperrealist linocutter Rex Hyper which showed the pamphleteer’s visage in breathtaking hyperrealism. So familiar was his face to the more indefatigable orphan hikers, who pored over it whenever they sat down on a log to rest, that when a band of them came upon the sick and feverish figure sprawled amid the blossoms, they instantly recognised him as Dobson. Hence their plaintive recitation. Let us parse it.

“O Dobson thou art sick!”

The orphans are making it plain that they recognise the crumpled invalid for who he is, and they recognise, too, that unlike the blossoms amid which he languishes, he is far from blooming. We might criticise them for not being more specific in their diagnosis of his ague, but ought to remember that they are mere tots, and orphaned tots at that, except for the one called Vincenzo, who is a fraudulent orphan, having used his pocket money to purchase a counterfeit newspaper cutting claiming his ma and pa perished in an avalanche.

“Thou art sick amid the blossoms!”

By repeating their declaration of the pamphleteer’s medical condition, the orphans reinforce its seriousness. This is no fugitive swoon nor spasm, they are saying, nor is Dobson lying there with his limbs splayed out because he has simply tripped upon a clump. And having driven home the point, they go on to place it in a geographical location – “amid the blossoms”. If an air ambulance is coptering in the vicinity, equipped with fantastic sound detection technology calibrated to pick up piping orphan voices, they have pitched their recitation superbly. But of course, in 1956 such air ambulances were rare, and rarer still those with fantastic sound detection technology calibrated to pick up piping orphan voices. And the chances of one hovering in range of the blossom-bestrewn field in which Dobson lies crumpled are so remote as to be not worth a fig. Tiny they may be, but the orphans know this, and thus the despair of the next line.

“O what shall we do?”

We may be brave and doughty hikers, they say, we may be free from our often repressed and oppressive parents, God rest their souls, except for Vincenzo’s, obviously, yet we are still but fragile and vulnerable tinies, and faced with this dramatic medical emergency we are beflummoxed and in some cases about to burst into tears.

“What shall we do?”

The repetition here is a pleasing echo of the repetition of “thou art sick” in the opening lines. It also commands our attention. The orphan hikers are not larking about. They are confronting, probably for the first time in their lives, a mortal dilemma. Toughened as they are by their hikes, well able to ford streams and negotiate bramble patches and vault dry stone walls and run screaming from flocks of savage angry swans, they are not so tough that they can cope with the sight of a sick and feverish pamphleteer amid the blossoms. Well, Vincenzo can, because he is, let’s say, an interesting little chap. The way in which his voice drops out of the recitation for this pair of lines lends an added harmonic jouissance, if one is listening with due care.

“Let thy pamphlets be our guide!”

Vincenzo’s voice returns for this triumphant ending. There is renewed hope. Medically ignorant and lacking such kit as bandages and tablets and proprietary nerve tonics, the orphans have one invaluable resource – the stricken pamphleteer’s own pamphlets! For all of them, their imaginations sparked by Dobson’s illegal pamphlet on hiking, have each acquired their own little collection of his works, which they carry with them wherever they hike. They realise that by taking all their Dobson pamphlets out of their pouches and combing through the texts, they are bound to alight upon a passage absolutely pertinent to the situation. As the pamphleteer himself continues to groan amid the blossoms, the orphans end their recitation on this note of optimism.

So there we have the words in context. What is curious is that, for as long as the orphan hiking fad continued thereafter, roughly until the winter of 1958, the recitation became a sort of generic chant, along the lines of the seven dwarves’ * “Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go”. Having been cured and then recuperated in a clinic a few yards away from the blossom-bestrewn field, Dobson was as hale and sprightly as ever, a fortnight after the orphans stumbled upon him, and yet they carried on chanting their recitation as they hiked hither and yon, from the outskirts of Pointy Town to the Terrifying Grim Black Mountainous Horror Of Gaar, and even further afield, to places beyond imagining. And as our little band crossed paths with other hiking orphans, their chant was picked up, until all across the land, from Blister Lane to the Big Wet Sea, every hiking orphan knew the words by heart, and chanted and hummed and howled them as they hiked.

* NOTE : See here for important seven dwarves information.

A Note On Pedagogy

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A new academic year will begin soon, and all across the land anxious parents will watch as fresh clumps of tinies skip through the school gates for the first time. By now, most places have been allocated. But I am still receiving letters seeking judicious Hooting Yard advice on what type of school is best. Often, my correspondents seem deluded, for they bang on about so-called “faith” schools, or Montessori schools, or even Steiner schools. Please remember that the latter are based on the ideas of a man who believed in invisible gnomes.

There is of course only one type of institution to which the wet-behind-the-ears infant ought to be entrusted, and that is a Dobson school. Named after the titanic twentieth century out of print pamphleteer, these academies use pedagogic methods devised, not by Dobson himself, but by Desdemona Ferncraze, a brilliant bluestocking who was for many years responsible for the instruction of the inmates of Pang Hill Orphanage.

Shortly after her arrival at Pang Hill, Dr Ferncraze, a voracious reader of everything she could lay her hands on, contracted a common ague which led to water on the brain, after which she became convinced that the sum of all human – and inhuman – knowledge was to be found in the pages of Dobson’s pamphlets. Even the pamphleteer himself did not make such a claim, though he came close to doing so in his slim work of 1953 The Death Of Stalin Has Led Me By Dense Entangled Byways To The Unshakeable Conviction That A Complete And Thorough Pedagogic System Can Be Based Entirely Upon My Own Pamphlets (out of print). Curiously, it seems this was one work of Dobson’s which Desdemona Ferncraze never read. She developed her “method” while lying in her sickbed on an upper balcony of Pang Hill Orphanage, having instructed the gruesome brute Pepstow to dispose of her entire library, save for the Dobson items, by shredding the books and feeding them bit by bit to gulls and other scavenging birds. This he did, despite his qualms, for he burned with a secret passion for the stricken bluestocking. Pepstow was at his least gruesome and brutish when in her presence, though such was his yearning that he became tongue-tied and could only grunt at her unintelligibly. Dr Ferncraze herself was utterly oblivious to his blandishments, before and after her ague, a circumstance of such pathos that it has been adapted for the screen under the title Desperate Pang Hill Orphanage Brutes. For dramatic purposes, a fictional rival brute has been inserted into the story, hence the plural.

When sufficient water on her brain had been evaporated using the Gillespie Head-Steaming Procedure, Desdemona Ferncraze leapt from her sickbed and set about drilling the Pang Hill orphans according to her new lights. Out went the wall-friezes of alphabets and numbers and fluffy farmyard animals, out went the Good Citizenship And High Self-Esteem Module Workbooks, and out went the Tuesday morning caterwauling. Instead, each week was devoted to the memorising of the complete text of a Dobson pamphlet. By midnight on Friday, scratching at their slates, every single tiny was expected to be able to write out an accurate copy, including any marginalia that their wild-eyed teacher saw fit to add. Those who failed were handed over to Pepstow, who wreaked his gruesome brutality upon them down at the drainage ditch.

Dr Ferncraze’s astonishing discovery was that a firm grounding in the pamphlets of Dobson, memorised in whatever order, fitted the orphans perfectly for lives as bumbling, distracted polymaths given to lengthy walks along canal towpaths, chucking pebbles at swans, just like the pamphleteer himself. With her boundless energy, she set up a network of similar Dobson schools in and around Pang Hill, in derelict buildings and abandoned campsites. They are still flourishing, if that is the word I am looking for, though it probably isn’t. Such a school is, without a jot of doubt, the perfect place for the progeny of Hooting Yard readers.

Dobson’s Cacodaemon

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Even the most learned of Dobson scholars has difficulty with his pamphlet How I Thwarted My Cacodaemon With A Pointy Stick And Some Bleach (out of print). For one thing, who knew Dobson had his own personal Cacodaemon? It is never mentioned elsewhere in the canon, nor does it make an appearance in his voluminous diaries. Occasionally, like other indefatigable diarists, Dobson had recourse to codes and symbols, but all of these have been deciphered after decades of study by Aloysius Nestingbird and their significance revealed in his magisterial survey The Meanings Of Every Single One Of Those Enigmatic Symbols And Scribbles In The Journals Of The Out Of Print Pamphleteer Dobson, itself, alas, now out of print too. Nestingbird realised that the childish drawing of a horned and hooved goaty devil figure brandishing a spit fork, usually done in red ink, which appears in the diaries from time to time without additional written comment, had nothing whatsoever to do with some putative Cacodaemon of Dobson’s, but was simply the pamphleteer’s idiosyncratic manner of noting that Hungarian football ace Ferenc Puskas had played a blinder in a match that day. Puskas was never known by a nickname aligning him with a devil of any kind, but Nestingbird shows convincingly that the inside of Dobson’s head was rarely in accord with the wider world.

Nor do we find any reference to a Cacodaemon in any of the recorded utterances or memoirs of Marigold Chew. Surely the woman who knew Dobson better than anyone else would have known of it? There is a possibility, of course, that she did know, but kept a judicious silence for fear of exposing her inamorato to ridicule. But then, there was much else that was preposterous about Dobson, from his boots to his handwriting, and she seems to have happily acknowledged, even celebrated, his various absurdities.

What of the pamphlet itself? In its startling opening sentence, the pamphleteer announces that he is going to tell us all about how he thwarted his Cacodaemon with a pointy stick and some bleach, and that if his prose were paint, in this pamphlet it would be matt rather than gloss. The fact is, Dobson continues in some of the glossiest prose he ever wrote. Indeed certain passages are so glossy that Nestingbird, among others, has recommended reading it through a screen or veil to dull its unearthly sheen.

Dobson gives his Cacodaemon no “back story”. He does not explain when it first began to haunt him, nor how terrible, or otherwise, has been its impact upon his life. It merely shimmers before him after breakfast one drizzly morning in April, and he reports this matter-of-factly, as if it is a familiar accompaniment to his post-breakfast drizzly April morning doings. On the particular morning of which he writes, Marigold Chew is away, which may in itself be significant. Dobson does not tell us where she has gone, but by checking the calendar one can conclude she was probably on one of her periodic jaunts to Shoeburyness as part of the bottomless viper-pit study group.

Dobson then recounts how he loses patience with his Cacodaemon. It is making demands upon him, as we are given to understand it “always does”, and the pamphleteer snaps. He goes to the broom cupboard and takes out a pointy stick, and dips the end of the stick in bleach, and charges across the room at the Cacodaemon, shouting his head off and threatening to impale it upon the stick. At this point, with a hideous sort of sucking and seething and squelching noise, the Cacodaemon seems to implode in upon itself. Bringing himself to a halt just before he clatters into the wainscotting, the pamphleteer peers down at the floor and sees a tiny smudge of noisome goo. This, he suggests, is all that is left of his Cacodaemon. He leans the pointy stick against the wall, and goes to the draining board to fetch a rag. He wipes the smudge with the rag, pours more bleach into a bucket, and drops the rag into the bucket. There is, he writes, “a faint echo of the sucking and seething and squelchy sound, as if heard through a funnel blocked with pebbles and dust”.

And thus the pamphlet ends, save for a rather curious colophon from which not even Nestingbird has been able to wring any meaning. I suppose we have to ask if Dobson was just making the whole thing up. We know there were times when he felt compelled to write a pamphlet even when his head was empty of ideas. Perhaps this was one of those times. Further light will no doubt be shed on the matter with the publication of Aloysius Nestingbird’s forthcoming study Dobson’s Head, Its Innards, And What They Reveal About The Colossus Of Twentieth-Century Pamphleteering.

I had hoped to be invited to write an introduction to this book, but I was told, in a dream, that there would be no such invitation, that Nestingbird had never heard of me, and that my pretensions to Dobsonist scholarship were flimsy and pathetic and doomed. Hard to argue with that, belched and spat out as it was from the fiery maw of a Cacodaemon.

I Am John’s Head

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Dobson went through a strange phase where he was consumed by a mania to have an article published in the Reader’s Digest. This obsession – mercifully temporary – is thought to have been occasioned by water on the brain, following an incident when the pamphleteer toppled off Sawdust Bridge and was submerged in the icy river for over six minutes. His toppling may have been due to the fact that he was, at the time, breaking in a secondhand pair of Tunisian Air Cadet boots, and was unsteady on his feet. Hoisted by a crane from the madly gushing water some miles downstream, Dobson was taken to a riverside crane-person’s hut and plonked in front of a radiator to dry off. There was a shelf stacked with untold copies of the Reader’s Digest in the hut, and the pamphleteer browsed through them as he sat engulfed in steam.

Later, back at home, Dobson set himself to write a piece typical of the magazine’s content. He was in such a flap that he dashed off not one, but four articles, each entitled I Am John’s Head. These are not versions or rewritings of a single essay, but four discrete pieces of prose, and they could not be more different from one another.

In one, John is a Jesuit priest, and his head is the size and shape of a potato. He lives in Shoeburyness, and is wrestling with doubts about his faith, which make his head throb. In the second piece, the head is no longer attached to the body of John – a different John in this case – but floating free, much like a hot air balloon, and subject to the same hazards and imperilments as a balloon, except of course that a head has a much tougher hide. The third piece treats John as a host upon which the head feeds as a parasite. By general assent, this is the most unnerving of the four essays, and there have been attempts to suppress it. In number four, John and his head barely rate a mention, as Dobson seems to get carried away with a prolonged and rancorous piece of invective about the ill-fitting Tunisian Air Cadet boots which caused his Sawdust Bridge mishap.

Dobson seems to have got something out of his system by writing what scholars now call “The Four I Am John’s Head Essays”. He never submitted any of them for publication in the Reader’s Digest, shoving them into an old cardboard box and forgetting about them. In an interview late in life, he was asked about the essays, and asked also why he had not written one called I Am Jane’s Head. Unfortunately, the questions were put to the pamphleteer during the notorious Pointy Town Pavilion interview, in which no sensible, or even half way sane, replies were given, the interviewer’s legs were broken, the pavilion burned to the ground, and a blithely oblivious Dobson sat there drooling into a tin cup and babbling on about President Nixon’s fondness for mashing potatoes as a relaxation technique*, one he was minded to ape. We have no evidence that he ever did so.

The I Am John’s Head essays are due to be published for the first time in a single volume, with notes and commentary by upstart young Dobsonist Ted Cack, when he is released from a Swiss prison.

* NOTE : This is true, of course, but I cannot recall where I read it, and would be grateful to any reader who can direct me to further information.

UPDATE : Here is a reference to the source of my Nixon / mashed potato information. I will try to find the exact quotation during the coming days.

Other Swans In Other Thunderstorms

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We have only Dobson’s word that he blundered into “countless” swans’ nests during balmy-weather expeditions, and a number of commentators have cast doubt on this account. The out of print pamphleteer was probably lying through his teeth, just to make a point, though quite what the point is is one of those ineffable Dobsonian mysteries the like of which will keep students busy for the next thousand years.

One man who certainly did pay visits to swan habitats, in both balmy weather and thunderstorms, was Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp, the artist and mountaineer who perished in the Hindenburg disaster. Although his ornithological studies were decisively amateurish, even flawed, they were sincere, and he approached them with great gusto.

Ah-Fang first became interested in swans when he was asked to draw one by a manufacturer of matches. Incredibly, he had no idea what a swan was, and had to be shown engravings in a large and exhaustive encyclopaedia. It then had to be patiently explained to him that the swan was a type of bird, fond of watery places. Ah-Fang was on his way to the seaside, ready to rent a sailing vessel and ply the oceans, when he received an urgent message on his portable metal tapping machine enlightening him as to the difference between the salt sea and the oceans on the one hand, and ponds, lakes, and rivers on the other. He kept a copy of this communiqué in his pocket until the end of his life, not out of any sentimentality, but simply as an aide memoire whenever he came upon a body of water.

Ah-Fang could of course have copied a swan from the illustrations in the encyclopaedia and earned his matchmakers’-money, but he prided himself on always drawing from life. Sometimes this could prove a considerable challenge, as when he was commissioned to provide a set of plates for an edition of H P Lovecraft’s At The Mountains Of Madness. He never spoke of the circumstances in which he drew so vividly “that nighted, penguin-fringed abyss”, for example, and indeed, when questioned, Ah-Fang trembled with an authentically Lovecraftian shudder.

Once he was on the right track in terms of watery habitats, however, the depiction of swans was a much easier task. Ah-Fang saw his first swan on St Clothard’s Day 1924. He had been told, by whom it is not clear, that there was a pond within hiking distance of his temporary quarters, a shack on a patch of waste ground somewhere in the foothills of a fantastic mountain. Taking a flask of aerated lettucewater, some ready-toasted smokers’ poptarts, a map, a pad and a pencil, Ah-Fang headed off towards the pond whistling an air by Hurlstone. When he got there, he sat on a municipal bench, spotted a swan, executed a quick sketch, ate and drank, and hurried home before becoming drenched by teeming rainfall. He worked up the sketch into a finished drawing with his customary élan, popped it in the post to the match manufacturer’s agent, and sat back to await his payment.

Yet he found himself unable to relax, and in the following weeks was drawn back to the pond again and again, whatever the weather, to gape at swans, hardly bothering to sketch them. It was a stormy season, as it often is after St Clothard’s Day, according to folk wisdom, and Ah-Fang had much opportunity to observe swans beset by thunder and lightning. He left no record of seeing eggs hatched during a storm, and it has to be said there was a profound, if endearing, ignorance in his gaping. Ah-Fang did not actually understand what he was looking at. Perhaps it was this pop-eyed, empty-headed stupidity that made him the artist he was, one whose swan pictures now fetch preposterous sums.

One night by the pond, as storms blasted the sky and a gale howled, Ah-Fang was accosted by a mysterious figure who hove towards him from out of the darkness. Hoisting his lantern to see plainly who, or what, it was, Ah-Fang had only a moment to look before the light sputtered out. The figure wore a cloak, but her face was momentarily visible, and she bore a striking resemblance to, and may even have been the ghost of, Captivity Waite, the childhood sweetheart of Eugene Field, author of, among other works, the children’s favourite Wynken, Blynken, And Nod. When she spoke, it was with a voice both sepulchral and sweet. She told Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp that there were in the world other ponds, and other swans, and there were lakes and meres and rivers and streams where yet other swans might be found, and that he should go to them, one by one, and gape, and sketch, and work up his sketches, and even paint, in great splodges of emulsion, upon sheets of hardboard, the swans he saw, all around the world, in watery places. And then Captivity Waite, if indeed it was she, made a delicate gesture of farewell, and walked away into the howling blackness of the night.

And so, next morning, began the five tremendous years of Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp’s so-called “world swan tour”. Without the guidance of Captivity Waite, or her phantom, however, there were false starts. Ah-Fang spent three months wandering in Arabia Deserta without seeing a single swan, and a further week in the jungles of Borneo. He returned, battered and sick in spirit, to his original pond, thinking he had been in some wise deceived. The sight of the swans he knew, in balmy weather and in storms, coddled him, and he revived. He realised that, if Captivity Waite had spoken the truth, and there were indeed swans elsewhere in the world, he would have to find a more reliable way of tracing them. He hit upon the method of hanging around in the sorts of taverns frequented by waterbird enthusiasts, listening in on conversations, picking up clues, gradually learning the whereabouts of hundreds, even thousands, of locations where the chances of finding swans were high. Sometimes, of course, his information was flawed, or he misheard a significant detail in the rowdiness of whatever tavern he was loitering in, and he would take a long and uncomfortable train journey to a particular pond only to discover it brackish and stagnant and home to nothing but weird, almost Lovecraftian algae. But more often than not, Ah-Fang’s unwitting informants sent him in the right direction, and that is why it is thought that he saw more swans in his five year tour than anyone had ever seen before.

He did not sketch them all, but those he did he worked up, as Captivity Waite had suggested, into huge paintings, swan after swan after swan, some in twilight, some in a blazing sun, some on ponds, some on lakes, some on meres, and some gliding with swanly grace down rivers and streams and even canals. Ah-Fang painted swans in balmy weather and in foul weather, and many a time in thunderstorms, brooding over a clutch of eggs. Many of the pictures look, to the untrained eye, almost identical, for Ah-Fang was never the most skilful of draughtsmen, and his skills lay in sloshing great daubs of emulsion on to his hardboard with haphazard zest, relying on a stencil to capture the basic swan-shape he sought. Curiously, the stencil was cut for him by a man named Bewick.

Swans In Thunderstorms

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“There is a superstitious belief that swans cannot hatch their eggs unless a storm is raging, the sky mad with lightning bolts and thunderclaps. I suspect this is true, for on the countless occasions I have gone blundering into swans’ nests, I have never seen eggs hatching, and the weather has invariably been balmy, for that is the kind of weather I prefer when blundering about among the nests of swans.”

From Quite A Few Things I Know About Swans by Dobson (out of print)