Archive for the 'Essays' Category

On The Dubbin Club

Published by Frank Key on Wednesday, 22 February, 2012 in Essays, Prose and Speak, Memory!. 0 Comments

I have never been much of a joiner. I can count on the fingers of one hand the clubs or associations to which I have signed up over the years, and almost invariably I have allowed my membership to lapse after the minimum period has expired. In the late seventies, however, I actually formed my own organisation. There was only one other member, and as far as I can remember it lasted about two weeks before being consigned to the dustbin of history. I am not sure what made it pop into my head yesterday, for the first time in decades.

This short-lived yet important society was the Dubbin Club. I am afraid I recall very little about it, save that it issued certificates of membership and it was intended that members purchase one tin of dubbin each month. I think in total one tin of dubbin was bought, shared between the two members, before the club petered out due to lack of enthusiasm. It may also be pertinent, in terms of the club’s collapse, that neither Member Number One (me) nor Member Number Two (my friend David) had any pressing need for dubbin, as we were not engaged in any sporting activity for which the rubbing of dubbin in to boots would have proved beneficial. In short, the Dubbin Club was an ephemeral private amusement between a pair of pals. I would not say it is a memory I cherish, and indeed I cannot for the life of me think what on earth we were doing, wasting what little cash we had on a polish or unguent for which we had not the slightest use. But I suppose I was young, and given to preposterousness of one kind and another, and it raised a few laughs at the time.

Over thirty years later, there is one point about the Dubbin Club that I still understand, which is the fact that dubbin is inherently funny. Now, we know from bitter experience that any attempt to analyse humour, or to explain a joke, leaches the life out of it and leaves it curled up, shrivelled and dead, so I am not going to be so foolish as to fret away at the intrinsic amusement value of dubbin. You will either share my appreciation or you will not. You will chortle along with me at the sight of a tin of dubbin, and at the very sound of the word, or you will not.

If, like me, you find dubbin amusing, you will be equally likely to see the comedy inherent in both swarfega and linseed oil. A few years after the demise of the Dubbin Club, I was pleased to note that the Monty Python team recognised the comic value of linseed oil, with that splendid line “Now, two boys have been found rubbing linseed oil into the school cormorant” from The Meaning Of Life (1983). Obviously the school cormorant has a large part to play in our uproarious laughter here, but we must not overlook the fact that, of all the goos or unguents or substances that could be rubbed in to it, linseed oil is almost certainly the funniest. Though I think it is significant that the line still works with dubbin or swarfega substituted for linseed oil.

Having said that I will not try to analyse the source of my hilarity, it does occur to me that both dubbin and linseed oil are intrinsic elements in what we might think of as a certain British twentieth century sporting milieu. We can imagine baggy-trousered chaps rubbing linseed oil into their cricket bats, and rubbing dubbin in to their football boots. These are the same sort of chaps, with their clipped accents and emotional repression and thorough decency, who amuse us today because, perhaps, they seem so impossibly distant from our own barbaric age. It is a vein of humour explored by many, the funny and the hopelessly unfunny, over the past fifty years, from Beyond The Fringe onwards. I think we ought to acknowledge that dubbin and linseed oil and, to a somewhat lesser extent, swarfega are important elements of it.

This was surely the – unconscious – motive behind the establishment of the Dubbin Club and its sadly curtailed activities. My friend David and I recognised, even if we did not know why, that dubbin was not just something that could be bought in a tin and then rubbed into boots, but was more than that – a waxy goo that signified a lost world, so the comedy was tinged with nostalgia, a nostalgia for a world that, if it ever existed, was dying or indeed dead before we were born.

The fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol, of whose doings you will have read here, belongs to that same era, as I trust is evident. Like Tupper of the Track, Bobnit Tivol is a clean-living and morally upright athlete, a far cry from the reprehensible scalliwags of today. His fictional world is richly infused with dubbin and linseed oil, though for his chosen sporting activities he wears spikes rather than football boots, and brandishes a pole-vault rather than a cricket bat. His coach and mentor Old Halob, on the other hand, comes from a different world, though a roughly contemporaneous one. Old Halob’s is a world of fog and trenchcoats and Homburg hats and Stalinism. It is in some ways a shadow world, the morally ambiguous, shifting and uncertain other side to the clean bright decency of the dubbin-and-linseed oil world of gentlemanly sport.

Perhaps it is time I revived the Dubbin Club for the twenty-first century. Those of you keen to join may express an interest in the Comments section. If sufficient numbers perk up, we can begin long and detailed discussions on such matters as the club’s constitution, purpose, and activities. Most importantly, we should decide on a coat of arms and a Latin motto.

On A Yapping Dog And A Bramble Patch And A Bog

Published by Frank Key on Tuesday, 21 February, 2012 in Essays and Prose. 0 Comments

I had a vision. I saw, in my mind’s eye, a small dog, yapping at a patch of brambles. I could not see what, if anything, was hidden in the brambles that had attracted the attention of the dog. The bramble patch was close by a bog. This was a terrain of both fens and bogs. I was not clear on the distinction between a fen and a bog, so I sought to educate myself on the matter. The water in fens is rich in minerals, and it is alkaline, and supports many animal and plant life forms, including tall marsh plants. But the water in a bog is acidic and low in minerals and in terms of plant life is dominated by low-growing sphagnum and other mosses. Because the vision was so vivid, and burned on to my brain, I was able to revisit it, as if it were a snapshot, and so could confirm that the body of water by the bramble patch was a mossy bog and not a reedy fen.

It might be asked why I did not educate myself likewise about types of small dog, so I could be more specific in my description of the pooch that was yapping in the direction of the bramble patch. To which I would say in response that there is only so much educative material one can cram into one’s head in a single day. Dogs, small and large, are invariably fairly low down on my list of things I wish to learn about. There always seems to be something of more interest, of more urgency. I can only speak from my own perspective. There may be some readers who do not give two hoots whether the bramble patch at which the dog in my vision was yapping was close by a fen or a bog, but who are avid, avid!, to know what type of dog it was. I could dissemble, for those readers, and say “Oh, it was a Jack Russell terrier”, but that would be conjecture on my part. As I said, the vision was vivid, but I do not know enough about dogs to identify with pinpoint accuracy precisely what type of dog it was. It was a small dog, that much I can state, unequivocally, and it yapped.

It did seem important to me to be able to distinguish the type of the wetland, whether bog or fen. That is why I consulted certain reference materials, with the mental picture of the bog or fen clear within my brain. Why my insistence on precision in this case, and not in the case of the dog? After all, it could be argued that the dog was the more critical element of my vision than the bog in the vicinity of which lay the bramble patch at which it yapped, and yapped relentlessly. The bog was merely a side issue, a wet marker the better to place the vision within some recognisable terrain.

This begs a couple of questions. Was the vision one brewed in my brain, a phantasm with no counterpart in reality, or was it the swimming into consciousness of a long-suppressed memory? As far as I know, there are no reference materials I could consult to assist me in answering that question. It must remain moot, pending the intervention of a psychobabbler or a neurosurgeon, neither of whom, I hasten to add, I am in any hurry to have gain access to my cranium.

A second question which arises is why the marker in my mind is a wet marker. Either because I have imagined it, or summoned it from half-forgotten memory, the marker that gives me a sense of the location of my vision is a bog. Other wet markers might be a fen or a marsh or a puddle or a lake or a mere or a cwm or a pond or a duckpond or even the vast and roaring sea. I will not even begin to catalogue the multitude of unwet markers, or dry markers if you will, which could have served equally well. On the other side of the bog there might be, for example, the remains of an ancient burial mound, or an abandoned cow byre, or something base and brickish. Dammit, I am in danger of beginning the catalogue I said I would not list. So I shall cease while I yet have my wits about me. The point is that my focus all along was on the bog, the bog.

So there is the dog and the bog, but what of the third element? I have been silent so far on the bramble patch. That too, of course, could be more specifically defined, had I the gumption. After all, there are many different types of bramble patches, possibly as many as types of small dog, or wet markers. Of thorny foliage there is a huge variety. Again, in the purview of my vision, the bramble patch was at best a generic bramble patch. I can give no specific details. In any event, what was clear was that it was the focus of the dog’s yapping, either in and of itself or because of something that lurked within it.

It is this last point that leads us, perhaps, to the significance of my vision and to the form it took, and to that part of it upon which I sought to educate myself and those parts which I was happy to leave blurry and beclouded and phantom. It is quite obvious that the nub of the vision is the object of the yapping of the dog. That may be in plain, if blurred, sight – the bramble patch itself in all its pointy brambliness – or it may be hidden, occult, concealed within the brambles. If I am to have any understanding of my vision, and of what it means, then surely that should be my focus. Yet I shy away from it, and instead turn my attention to the scarcely relevant bog, the wet marker. It commands my attention, so much so that I consult reference materials to ascertain if it is indeed a bog, or might possibly be a fen. I show no such compelling interest in the dog, nor in the bramble patch.

While the vision is yet imprinted upon my brain, I ought to revisit it, to winnow from it further and better particulars of its secrets. If I delay, the vision will fade, and I will have learned nothing from it save for the basic distinction between a bog and a fen. Perhaps that is enough, at least for today.

On The Wellspring Of Debauchery

Published by Frank Key on Monday, 20 February, 2012 in Essays and Prose. 3 Comments

Perhaps the most neglected work of the Renaissance scholar Gabbitas Hatpinne, the thousand-plus pages of Fons de luxuria (1549) have been newly translated as The Wellspring Of Debauchery. This is a significant academic achievement, and one which should rescue Hatpinne from the oblivion that beckoned. Few read him in his lifetime, and in the four hundred years since his death those few have dwindled still further. Indeed, his new translator, Desdemona Snodgrass, suggests she may be the only person alive to have read Fons de luxuria in its entirety, and even she admits there were several occasions when she nodded off and had to go on a brisk hiking expedition in order to wake herself up so she could continue with her important task.

The Wellspring Of Debauchery attempts, at great length, to answer the question “does salacious knavery, untrammelled sauciness, and inappropriate hobnobbing in sinks of vice lead, inescapably, to the excesses of high debauch?” I will not give away Hatpinne’s conclusion here, for fear you would use that as an excuse not to read the book yourself, and in the time thus saved, you may be tempted to acts of salacious knavery and untrammelled sauciness and inappropriate hobnobbing in sinks of vice. It is much better for your moral fibre, and indeed for the fate of your immortal soul, that you have your head stuck in a very fat book. It will keep you out of mischief.

But though I do not wish to divulge the contents of this lengthy and by no means untedious work, it is perhaps worth recalling the circumstances in which it came to be written. If we have but world enough and time, we may even look into the circumstances in which it came to be translated, here in the twenty-first century space age, but let us not jump too far ahead of ourselves. In any case, Desdemona Snodgrass may not want her motives to be inquired into too pointedly. She is a sensitive soul, with many a skeleton stacked up in her closet, or so I have been told by perfidious rumour-mongers and her rivals in the groves of academe. So even if we do have time, we are not going to be discussing that episode with the siphon and the pastry cases and the Chris De Burhg [sic] bootleg tape. I have taken legal advice and I shall not be swayed.

Unlike his translator, Gabbitas Hatpinne himself is safely dead, and can be impugned without fear of litigation. Shall I therefore impugn him? It would be easy enough to do, not because he lived a life of high debauch and naughtiness, but because the likelihood is that you know nothing about him. I could thus make up all sorts of stories about his salacious knavery and untrammelled sauciness and inappropriate hobnobbing in sinks of vice, and you would soak them all up, o! credulous reader. Tempting though it may be to wend my way down that particular path to perdition, lined as it is by lightning-blasted pine trees and shrivelled lupins and blighted potato patches, swept by fearsome gales and battered by hailstones, patrolled by ravening wolves and stampeding half-starved bison, it is a path I shall turn away from, in my prissy mincing morally upright manner, I shall turn my eyes instead upon the glorious light shining atop the mountain of saintliness and piety, and begin to clamber up towards the summit, there to grasp in my unworthy paws the halo of virtue.

You see how, even without reading The Wellspring Of Debauchery, I am become a model of sanctity? For it is indeed the case that I have not been able to concentrate my mind on this hefty doorstopper of a book, with its seemingly endless paragraphs of hectoring prose. I have better things to do with my time, and, no, they do not involve salacious knavery and untrammelled sauciness and inappropriate hobnobbing in sinks of vice. Would that they did! I have occasionally wondered if I might abandon myself to a life of high debauch. Though perhaps when I say “occasionally” I ought truthfully say “often”. Indeed, just before sitting down at my escritoire to pen these timeless words, I was weighing up in my overheated brain whether to contact Desdemona Snodgrass and, under the guise of academic rigour, to seek an assignation with her, in some leafy arbour, far from prying eyes, bent on sin. Fortunate indeed that I averted the besmirchment of my soul by leaping from my escritoire and plunging my head into a pail of icy water, and then embarking on a hike through the hills in wind and rain, until such time as I had cooled my phantasmal ardour, and was ready once more to sit, and to write, and to banish all thought of Desdemona Snodgrass from my brain.

Now, with regard to the circumstances in which The Wellspring Of Debauchery was written, as I seem to recall that is what I was intending to write about before I got carried away. We have only fragmentary details of the biography of Gabbitas Hatpinne. We know neither the year of his birth nor the year of his death. We do not know where he lived, nor what he lived on, and we know nothing of his forebears or any progeny he may or may not have had. The sole traces of him that survive are a few widely-dispersed and unreliable references in fusty musty damp and dog-eared unauthorised documents found wedged in the walls of crumbling parish churches. And such references as there are may well relate to several different Gabbitases, several different Hatpinnes, and have nothing whatsoever to do with our man.

It is all a great historical conundrum. The only way it might be solved is if someone were to devote themselves to the research required to write a proper biography. It is the sort of job ideally suited to, let us pluck a name at random, Desdemona Snodgrass.

I think I shall contact her to suggest this course of action. I will arrange for us to meet, in a leafy arbour, far from prying eyes, bent on scholarship, bent on sin.

On My Own Zona

Published by Frank Key on Sunday, 19 February, 2012 in Essays and Prose. 2 Comments

I have not read Geoff Dyer’s new book Zona : A Book About A Film About A Journey To A Room. As the title indicates, it is devoted to a film, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and to Dyer’s obsession with it. I vaguely recall seeing Stalker, probably around the time of its release, and have not seen it since. Clearly it did not make a great impression on me, unlike the same director’s Andrei Rublev (1966), which I saw in the mid-seventies and from which I can still remember certain scenes. Reading a couple of reviews of Dyer’s book led me to wondering which film I would choose to write an obsessional book about.

It then struck me that, much as I might be given to enthusiastic ravings about, say, Celine And Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974) or The Falls (Peter Greenaway, 1980), or Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942), or Even Dwarfs Started Small (Werner Herzog, 1970), or pretty much anything directed by Guy Maddin, it is unlikely I will ever sit down and concentrate and write about them at length.

Dyer’s Zona is, apparently, “one long movie summary, a shot-by-shot rewrite” of Stalker, which I assume indicates that he gives us a detailed account of the film and wanders off into discursive byways. (At one point he provides us with the useful information that, after the completion of Sympathy For The Devil / One Plus One (1968), Mick Jagger said of Jean Luc Godard “He’s such a fucking twat”.)

Taking a similar approach, might it not be interesting to consider not just one of my favourite films but, say, three of them, and construct a narrative that intermingled them, had elements from each colliding, happily or otherwise, stirred them together in a pot and made something new and strange? I think this is what young persons call a “mash up”. What would happen were I to sprinkle together, in chronological order, Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945), Noroît (Jacques Rivette, 1976), and Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)?

Certain choices, or strategies, seem compellingly obvious. Hans Gruber and his criminal gang could invade and hold hostage the occupants, not of the Nakatomi building but of the coastal castle which is the setting for Noroît. Ah, but the castle is home to a pirate gang rather than a law-abiding Japanese corporation. So Giulia, the pirate leader, could be replaced by Laura Jesson’s well-meaning but exasperating friend Dolly Messiter. Ruthless German criminals pitted against Francophone female pirates, both perhaps to be outwitted by New York cop John McClane, who is attempting to rescue Laura, aided by Erika and Morag, the avengers. Dr Alec Harvey can sit in a police car with Sergeant Al Powell, parked close to the castle, perhaps in the lee of the pollarded willows by the canal just before the level crossing.

Noroît is partly based on The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), long attributed to Cyril Tourneur but now thought to be the work of Thomas Middleton. These echoes of dark brooding Jacobean tragedy should serve to remind us that in Brief Encounter, the part of Dr Stephen Lynn, Alec’s colleague from whom he borrows the flat for his unseemly and sordid – and ultimately abortive – assignation with Laura, was played by an uncredited Valentine Dyall (1908-1985), an actor whose sepulchral tones made him famous as the Man In Black, host of the long-running BBC radio series Appointment With Fear. I do not know if Valentine Dyall ever acted in any Jacobean tragedies, but if he did not, he should have. He did do some Shakespeare.

We would have to find a role for Dr Stephen Lynn, perhaps applying his professional medical knowledge in the closing scenes of Noroît, where at a torchlit nocturnal masked ball Morag and Erika and Giulia, oops, I forgot, Dolly Messiter, get a bit carried away with the stabbings. I suppose John McClane should be wandering about in the dark somewhere, too, bloodied and in his vest.

I realise that I have not yet managed to insert any steam trains, nor Albert Godby nor Myrtle Bagot from the Milford Junction tea room, nor Holly Gennaro-McClane, nor the pirate castle musicians. But fear not, space will be found in my narrative for all of them.

I am in something of a quandary about the title, for though one can cobble together various combinations of, here given in alphabetical order, Brief and Die and Encounter and Hard and Noroît, no one admixture springs out as obviously preferable. For the time being, while I continue to worry away at it, like a dog with a bone, I shall refer to it as My Own Zona, echoing Geoff Dyer.

Cast, in order of appearance:

Hans Gruber – Alan Rickman (1946- )
Giulia – Bernadette Lafont (1938- )
Laura Jesson – Celia Johnson (1908-1982)
Dolly Messiter – Everley Gregg (1903-1959)
John McClane – Bruce Willis (1955- )
Erika – Kika Markham (1940- )
Morag – Geraldine Chaplin (1944- )
Dr Alec Harvey – Trevor Howard (1913-1988)
Sergeant Al Powell – Reginald VelJohnson (1952- )
Dr Stephen Lynn – Valentine Dyall (1908-1985)
Albert Godby – Stanley Holloway (1890-1982)
Myrtle Bagot – Joyce Carey (1898-1993)
Holly Gennaro McClane – Bonnie Bedelia (1948- )
Castle Musicians – Jean Cohen-Solal, Robert Cohen-Solal, Daniel Ponsard (dates unknown)

And here is the seaside castle where the action takes place:

On Birds

Published by Frank Key on Saturday, 18 February, 2012 in Essays and Prose. 2 Comments

Let us consider the birds of the air, with their feathers and their wingspans and their tiny little heads. It is an arresting thought that many of the birds we know today are descended from the fierce and rapacious pterodactyl of prehistory. Though we should not forget that many modern birds are themselves fierce and rapacious. We need only think of the swan, for example, or dozens of different types of gull.

You can test the fierceness and rapaciousness of a seagull by placing a paper bag full of breadcrumbs on the wall abutting the promenade at a seaside resort. Stand well back, and wait. Sooner rather than later, a seagull, or seagulls, will swoop upon the paper bag and frenziedly slash it to ribbons to gain access to the breadcrumbs within, which it will gobble up so greedily that many of the crumbs will be scattered upon the paving. Further birds – other gulls, or pigeons – will then descend upon the leavings, and within seconds not a trace of breadcrumb will remain, and the shreds of paper bag will be blown away on the winds.

This is an example of the sort of violence Tennyson must have had in mind when he wrote of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” in In Memoriam A. H. H. (1849), even though no blood has actually been spilled. The seagull is a scavenger rather than a bird of prey, the chancer of the avian world. But what I wish to advert to here is, let us say, attitude. A seagull may not slash at and tear to shreds something quick and alive, say for an example a vole or a hamster or, indeed, you, standing there at the seaside, but that is a mere accident of evolution. It is certainly imbued with all the fierceness and rapacity of its prehistoric ancestor. Ask the paper bag.

Of course there are other birds, befeathered and bewinged and with tiny little heads, which are more docile. One thinks of budgerigars. One does not think for too long of budgerigars, because quite frankly their charms pall rather quickly, unless one has a particular “thing” for them. It was long thought that the budgerigar’s natural habitat was a cage plopped on a sideboard in an ornate parlour or drawing-room crowded with knicknacks and gewgaws, lit by gas, which perhaps tells you most of what you need to know about them. Their heads are particularly tiny, in relation to their bodies.

The tininess of birds’ heads in general means that there is not much room inside them for the brain, which in itself is therefore a tiny thing. We might wonder at how much, or how little, cognitive ability resides in the average brain of the average bird. Not much at all, we will conclude. As a life form, birds are pretty thick. Yet their lack of intelligence has not prevented them being masters of the air, nest-builders, hunters and scavengers and even – in the case of Newfoundland crows – skilful exploiters of the possible uses of twigs. We should not be tempted to discount the powers of birds simply because most of them are stupid.

The thing most types of birds can do that we cannot is, of course, to fly. That is where their wings are so decisive as appendages. Mankind has had to fashion wings out of balsa wood and straw and string, and still he cannot fly. I think this may be to do with the fact that we cannot flap our arms with sufficient rapidity. An interesting question to ask is if you would accept a putative Faustian bargain, that you would be granted the ability to fly in return for having your brain shrunk to the size of a budgerigar’s, with the commensurate diminution in mental capacity. To give your reply to that question some import, we would have to predicate that the process be irreversible. I think all of us would cry out an impassioned “Yes!” if we thought we could fly about for a couple of days, stupid as a bird, and then resume our normal flightless daily lives with reswollen brains and our wits intact.

Let us further assume that we could choose not just to be granted the gift of flight but actually to become a bird. Which bird would you pick? Most of us, I think, would avoid the fate of becoming a budgerigar, or indeed an ostrich. Not only is the ostrich particularly moronic, but it cannot fly. I suppose a very stupid person, who did not know these things about ostriches, might accept the Faustian bargain and then choose to be transformed into an ostrich, with the net result of simply being turned into a life form even more stupid than he started out as, without the compensation of being able to fly.

It occurs to me that there may be a profitable opera or stage musical to be made from that notion. It would of course be a tragedy. The part of the protagonist would have to be written with exceeding care, for there is a risk that an audience would be resistant to identifying closely with such an irredeemably thick hero. So perhaps a comedy would be more appropriate. One can readily imagine packed theatres loud with laughter at the antics of Ostrich Man. It would be cruel laughter.

Birds, too can be cruel, but they do not laugh. At least I am unaware of any birds that laugh, as opposed to birds whose song can be interpreted as chuckling or guffawing. But such interpretations are mere anthropomorphism, a besetting sin. Can birds commit sin? I am sure this is a question theologians must have asked, over the centuries, but I am not familiar with their arguments. I would assume that the answer must be “No, birds are incapable of sin”, for the simple reason that they are so damned stupid.

Another thing birds can do that we cannot is to lay eggs, but that is a topic so plump with possibilities that it deserves an essay of its own.

On Sand Robots

Published by Frank Key on Friday, 17 February, 2012 in Eggs, Essays and Prose. 3 Comments

The creation of the first fully operational sand robot is a tale of maverick science and unparalleled seaside resort ingenuity. For it was a maverick scientist, on holiday at a seaside resort, who conceived the idea of the sand robot, and built one, and made it work. As always with stupendous scientific initiatives, there were many false starts and hiccoughs along the way. From the first glimmer of the idea within the maverick brainpans of Ignatz Edballs to the initial wheezing plodding creaking steps of the prototype sand robot, entire days passed in witless tinkering and frustration and, sometimes, yes, despair. But in spite of all he never gave up, and at last, a fortnight after the spark of inspiration, the world’s first sand robot took its first steps across the glistening sands of Dilapidation-On-Sea.

There was little in Ignatz Edballs’s past – nor, indeed, his present – which would have prepared the world for his matchless achievement. Those holidaymakers whose jaws dropped open as they watched the sand robot bearing down on them upon the beach could never have guessed that its creator was a lowly janitor at a mop factory. Nor would they realise that it was only by accident that he had come to the seaside resort in the first place. Given two weeks’ furlough by his overseer, Edballs packed a suitcase and headed for the railway station, intending to go to somewhere with mountains and snow and goats, for he was temperamentally attuned to mountains and snow and goats. As it happened, he was fatefully distracted by the hoot of an owl in the rafters of the railway station, and boarded the wrong train. Thus it was he found himself in Dilapidation-On-Sea. There were no mountains, no snow, and no goats. He was inappropriately dressed, and he was terrified of the sea. And so, having booked a room in an insalubrious guest house and sat on the hard bed and sobbed, he summoned from within the deepest core of his being a reserve of manly grit, and headed down to the beach, and lay upon the sand, and smoked his pipe.

In all the years he had been mopping the corridors of the mop factory, Ignatz Edballs had been turning over in his mind various ideas for creating an automaton. This was, let us remind ourselves, the nineteen-fifties, and automata were, for most people, the stuff of science fiction. Edballs was not an aficionado of the genre, but his visions of the robot he would build fell in with the conventions of the time. It would be of humanoid shape, and chunky, and it would whirr and clank and plod, and possibly have some flashing lights and buzzers. In other words, it would only vaguely resemble the sand robot he actually made.

He sat on the beach, smoking his pipe, his back turned to the terrifying sea, and he picked up handfuls of sand and let it fall through his fingers. As an amateur scientist, he knew that sand could be turned into glass, however unlikely that seemed to the dimwitted brain. And it was as he considered the unlikelihood that this stuff falling through his fingers could be turned into something solid and flat and see-through that he wondered if it could also be turned into something of humanoid shape that whirred and clanked and plodded, and could even be imbued with primitive intelligence. And so the spark was lit.

The history of scientific achievement is littered with happy accidents. We have already seen how Ignatz Edballs was only sitting surrounded by sand because of the hoot of an owl. It would be splendid to be able to say that it was another hoot, of a second owl, that set in train the creation of the world’s first sand robot. But it was not. Rather, it was the shrieking of gulls. It was this ungodly din that made Edballs look round, towards the sea he feared so, and to note, as he had never noted before, that sand, when wet, becomes impacted, and, while wet, solid. His keen scientific brain instantly realised that, if an adhesive agent were added to the sand while it was wet, it could remain solid when it dried. Leaping up from the beach, he scampered into the streets of Dilapidation-On-Sea in search of such an adhesive. And here there was a second happy accident. In his excitement, running pell mell, Ignatz Edballs collided with a seaside resort hawker, an egg-man selling eggs laid by his Vanbrugh chicken. One egg fell to the ground, and smashed upon the paving, and Edballs stepped into the egg’s spilled innards. He paid the hawker for the breakage, then sat on a seaside resort bench to wipe the egg-goo from the sole of his boot. And then he saw, in a flash, that it was sufficiently viscous to act as an adhesive, the adhesive that could bind wet sand, the wet sand which he could mould into the frame of a robot!

The rest is history. Ignatz Edballs chased after the hawker and bought all his remaining Vanbrugh chicken eggs. Then he returned to the beach. Fearful of approaching too close to the awful sea, he commandeered the services of a sandcastle-building tot to fetch pail after pail of wet impacted sand from the shoreline. Slowly, over the following fortnight, he moulded the sand, fortified with albumen, into a humanoid shape, nine feet tall. When it was done, he inserted various bits of wiring and magnets and resonators, and fashioned a control panel small enough to be worn on the wrist, similar to the one sported by General Jumbo to control his army of miniature soldiers and sailors and airmen in the comic strip you will recall from days gone by.

We must be thankful that Ignatz Edballs never managed to build an army of sand robots. His prototype proved to be an automaton of awesome destructive power. Within seconds of stirring into artificial life, as it plodded across the bright sands of the beach at Dilapidation-On-Sea, the strange sandy synapses in its strange sandy artificial brain snapped into artificial yet malevolent life, and it went on the rampage. It was a slow, plodding rampage, but a rampage nevertheless, as hordes of screaming terrified holidaymakers later attested.

Ignatz Edballs faffed frantically with the control panel on his wrist, trying to halt his creation in its tracks. His efforts were in vain. At the last, he was alone upon the beach with his sand robot, the holidaymakers having fled. As the sun dipped below the horizon, horrified observers on the promenade watched as the huge implacable malevolent sand robot pursued its creator into the cold pitiless sea, the sea that had always terrified him, and now engulfed him, as he sank beneath the waves, and his sand robot, lethal and relentless, followed him, and crumbled, and was dispersed upon the waters of the earth.

On The Magnificence Of Peter Wyngarde

Published by Frank Key on Thursday, 16 February, 2012 in Essays and Prose. 4 Comments

Today’s essay is a guest postage by BlackberryJuniper & Sherbet. When she told me she was planning to write On The Magnificence Of Peter Wyngarde, I realised this was a perfect topic for the Hooting Yard daily essays, but one which I was not qualified to address. This is an abridged version. You can read the full mad frothing at the mouth here.

Have a proper look at this exhibition of early seventies utter cool, and ask – who else can carry off leather pants in this way, and a moustache, and still be astonishingly intelligent and a slightly louche action hero also?

Now, I don’t mean for a moment to be merely dribbling over one of the most gorgeous actors still alive, in a horrible sexist way. I would sincerely love to meet Peter Wyngarde and have, umm, a croissant and some orange juice with him. I would love to chat and hear stories, and just listen to the marvellous George Sanders-esque voice. I truly think the man is one of the best actors we had, before some people got hot under the collar that despite always being a ladies’ man on TV, he got arrested for some business in a toilet in Gloucester with a truck driver in 1975. (The fact that his acting colleagues often called him ‘Petunia Winegum’ as a nickname testifies to the fact that being gay wasn’t a secret among people that knew him.) Since some people weren’t ready to handle the fact that the leather trousers were active in a way they hadn’t expected, his career suffered and got halted, really. What a total bloody shame! After all those sudden 1965-67-ish appearances in staples like The Avengers, The Saint, Armchair Theatre and The Prisoner, he drifted away. Just when it was all getting going.

Now, I haven’t looked into his career in any great detail, but if he’s in something I will watch it and keep it, as he never disappoints. Such presence, such confidence. I think this used to be called brio, as in – full of energy, life and enthusiasm. And class!

My earliest Peter Wyngarde memory is a masked Peter Wyngarde, as seen in Flash Gordon (1980). Which is one of the most perfect films ever made and I wouldn’t change a hair on its head whatsoever. Why so many people dislike this film so strongly is completely beyond me. What does it matter that the actor playing Flash Gordon apparently wasn’t acting very well? I thought he did fine, they didn’t paint him as a great brain – more as a character that had heart and energy; Sam Jones did fine with that brief, I reckon. What is there to dislike about the intense, insane over-colourisation: all that GOLD, and green, and red, and orange, and shininess everywhere?? Every time I watch it I am cheered up even if the sound is down! And if the sound is up, I get to hear Ornella Muti purring and sulking, Melody Anderson cheerleading and offering Suzanne Danielle the elixir that will make a night with the Emperor Ming doable (his sexual weirdness is hinted at several times, in a rather titillating way). And then there’s Emperor Ming himself, Max von Sydow, who despite his marvellous face makeup and great costuming, still manages to attract my attention by doing more evil hand-rubbing acting than anyone I have since seen in a film; more pregnant pauses before evil sneering. And of course, Brian Blessed yelling ‘DIVE!’. And the Queen soundtrack… the Love Capsule music is always overlooked and so sensually splendid I bought the whole soundtrack just for that, those few seconds…

And then, there’s the voice that I didn’t really identify properly until about three years ago. I have watched this wonderful soul-edifying frothy film of excellence about a thousand times, and yet, oddly, I had never really connected the cast list. I think I forgot George Sanders was dead, and imagined the voice of Klytus, Ming’s state torturer, was him, somehow. Then one day, I really listened and realised that (a) George Sanders had indeed been dead since 1972, and Flash Gordon was a 1980 film, and (b) that voice didn’t really sound like George Sanders at all – it was too deep and way more nuanced. So the fact I had been dribbling all this time over a masked person I had only just realised starred in one of my other favourite films was …well, I have a quiet life, I was very excited.

The other favourite film was Night of the Eagle (1962). I can’t recommend this film highly enough. Spoiler alert!! It is about a scientific and sceptical professor who is doing very well in his rising career at a small university, but is unaware this is because his wife is working protective voodoo on his behalf; as she is actually battling the forces of greedy and voracious bad magic, summoned up by the Head Teacher, Margaret Johnston. At the end she summons a huge thoughtform eagle to get rid of Wyngarde’s character, but a wonderful contrivance with an old eight track player sends it against her instead, hence the title. End of Spoiler. This is the face of Peter Wyngarde I had been very familiar with for years –

Which doesn’t look at all like the first picture, does it? I had no idea it was the same person. It’s a genuinely scary film, with some good jumpy moments. Go and feast your eyes on the acting talent that is this man, on YouTube – the whole film is up there.

Another thing I had been wanting to see for ages was the Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense (1984). I started to watch them in the day, and an episode came on with That Voice! Putting down my toast and honey, I see that Peter Wyngarde is there, complete with wonderful moustache, and robed as a devil-worshipping priest. I think it’s slightly likely that he was a little bored by this acting assignment, as I have rarely seen him loucher in something; then again, it’s a very slight story. There’s a funny scene near the end of the episode (‘And the Wall Came Tumbling Down’) where Wyngarde’s character is supposed to be dead on the floor. The scene’s focus is away from him, to the actors still alive, upright and talking, gesturing. Of course, I was just staring at Peter Wyngarde on the floor, loving those cheekbones and eyebrows. I don’t know how long the scene may have taken to film, but he gets bored being on the floor and makes a face, licking his lips and the tip of his moustache very obviously. It made me laugh out loud.

In speaking of his TV and film stuff, I am leaving out his notorious record, recently re-released on CD – When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head. I’m not even going to attempt to tell you about this – you have to go and listen to it! It’s a concept album, its very funny, full of social commentary. There’s rap, to country music – imagine! There’s much talking – its got ATMOSPHERE fizzing to the tip of the champagne glass he offers you at the start. It was removed shortly after its initial release, for offending loads of people with the song ‘Rape’. Listening to it as the feminist I am, I think its not meant to be taken literally at all, and there was a lot going on in there about attitudes of the times, being mocked, quite harshly.

But the true gem, of any length or consistency, that I have – that, as a nation, WE have – is his excellence in the ITC shows Department S, and then the spin-off Jason King, where Wyngarde is a novelist, international travelling playboy and sleuth, as only the early seventies could dress and cast a man. I mean, look…

People make much of how kitsch these series are today; how camp, how unreal, how …silly. Now. You’re talking here, with someone who violently adores Flash Gordon, so are these things going to bother me in the slightest? I really think not. It is all silly, and light; and yet so disarming. Fun. Escapist. Occasionally very clever in terms of story telling, and even thought provoking. The ensemble of the team of the Department S series was great, and it’s quite shameful that it was only the one series. But then there was Jason King, so at least my favourite character is still about.

He would say things like ‘I abhor violence’, before gracefully launching himself across a room to box someone’s ears in that very theatrical and obviously unreal way they did in those TV days. And his hair would not ruffle; his handkerchief would remain dandily in the pocket. And you can’t see it, but his sleeve turnbacks would also remain blissful and unpeturbed. I have no idea why this is so important to me; I think it ties in to my sense of screaming for order in a life of chaos. Wyngarde’s portrayal of Jason King managed to make me actually want to BE him as this character. He managed to be astonishingly arrogant, yet also vulnerable and emotional. Intelligent, and strangely clueless at times. And so stylish in terms of fabric and colour that I think it really did get burned into my brain forever and affect the way I see clothes even now.

I think what I saw there, in his portrayal of that character was an amazing ability to disregard the categorisations of other people, and sail through life as HIMSELF. To not be afraid, to not be cowed, to speak out and say your piece and hold your head up while doing so. And not be afraid to be clever.

And then you see Peter Wyngarde’s actual life, and see that for the time he was in, he was too big to handle, too large for the life around him, for the narrow minded among us. He did get cowed, in the sense that his career got stalled so badly he had to go and do theatre work abroad and it never really recovered here when he got back.

Long Live the Peter Wyngarde of the past, the present, and the imagination… King of Cool, and Much Underrated Brilliant Actor. May I take on those traits I see in him, and glide through life with the same casual insouciance and verve. I wish I may.

On Certain Books I Have Read

Published by Frank Key on Wednesday, 15 February, 2012 in Essays, Prose and Speak, Memory!. 1 Comment

I keep a list of every book I have read, which now goes back thirty years. (In January 1982, the first book I read was The Annotated Snark by Martin Gardner.) Almost always, I have a book on the go. As soon as I finish one, I begin reading another. There was a time when I was able to have several titles in my “current reading”, switching between them as I saw fit, but for the past couple of decades I have been a one-book-at-a-time reader. There is rarely any pattern or method to my reading. I flit from one thing to another, often jarringly. (The three most recent titles in my list are Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski, Race And Culture : A World View by Thomas Sowell, and – almost finished, about to be added – A Cup Of News : The Life Of Thomas Nashe by Charles Nicholl.) Occasionally I immerse myself in the work of a single author for book after book after book. I note from my list, for example, that in 1991 I went on a protracted Franz Kafka jag, and that the spring of 1993 was devoted exclusively to Vladimir Nabokov. It is not just writers of fiction who can keep me in thrall. I suspect I am about to plough my way through several other books by Charles Nicholl in the coming weeks, on Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Ralegh and Rimbaud. (The ability to lay my hands on all this stuff is entirely due to the paradise that is the London Library, which has had a seismic effect on which books I choose to read. I still cannot fathom why I spent so long living in London without being a member.)

Cursed, or blessed, with a memory so godawful that it approaches the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, I can forget a book within days, even hours, of reading it. One reason to maintain my list is simply to be able to recall what I have read in the past. Such forgetting makes rereading a pleasure, of course. It is no judgement on the worth, or otherwise, of a particular book that I remember little or nothing about it. Intriguingly, sometimes I can remember vividly the circumstances in which I read a book without recalling the content of the book itself. Again, scanning my list, I can quite clearly picture myself sitting beside a lake, on a summer’s evening in 1995, reading The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey. Other titles summon up less specific memories, but are resonant of times and places in the past.

My list, as I said, begins in 1982. For some years before that, beginning I think in 1975, there was a list now lost. It is those early years of my reading that I want to attend to. Without the aide memoire of a list, what I recollect is fragmentary. What interests me are the books I chose to read, in those early years of “adult” reading, and which ones I can remember.

One that I remember clearly is one I never actually read. I grew up in a house full of books. My parents’ collection, much of which I have today, was a mixture of classics and general fiction and poetry and blue-spined Pelicans and history and art and film books, a heteroclite jumble. One of my older sisters had a small collection of, mostly, Penguin paperbacks suitable for a budding intellectual of a certain stripe – Nietzsche, R D Laing, D H Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and Iris Murdoch. Why do I recall so clearly her copy of Murdoch’s A Severed Head, which I took from her shelf and leafed through, repeatedly, without ever actually sitting down and reading the damned thing? Reflecting on it now, I think the young teenage me identified something amusingly portentous in that title. Gosh, this must be a serious and significant work, I thought to myself, laughing at its preposterousness. It still seems preposterous. I have still never read it.

Was it the contents of those four small shelves in my sister’s room, rather than the more extensive collection downstairs, that set me on the path I took? If we’re going to have a budding intellectual in the family, it’s going to be me! And to hell with these English writers! Being, as I alas remain, an utter monoglot was not going to stop me reading foreigners in translation. Kafka! Albert Camus! Alfred Jarry! Thomas Mann! Did I understand any of what I read? I am not sure that I did. I was, for example, completely oblivious to the humour in Kafka. But there was another writer with a reputation for being bleakly serious whose humour I got immediately, and I laughed my head off as I read him (and still do).

The other great influence on my reading at that time was my English teacher, Richard Shone. (“Where does Mr Shone live?” “In a Dick-Shonery!” we chuckled.) It was he who introduced me to Samuel Beckett – the novelist rather than the playwright. My sister had a copy of Waiting For Godot, of course, of course!, but my aversion to the theatre, and more particularly my aversion to reading plays, meant that I had returned it to her shelf after the briefest of glances. I cannot recall how or why Mr Shone introduced me to Beckett’s Watt. It was a revelation. I still consider it one of the funniest novels I have ever read, uniquely mad and maddening. From there I moved swiftly to Molloy and Malone Dies and The Unnamable. My first attempts at writing were gruesome pastiches of Beckett. I can still spot echoes of those four marvellous novels in the stuff I bash out today.

I have no idea whatever became of Mr Shone, who would be I suppose in his seventies now, if he is still alive. But I think I can say that, by suggesting to me that I read Watt, he planted the seed of the mighty larch or laburnum or cedar or plane tree that is Hooting Yard. For which I owe him immeasurable thanks.

On The One-Eyed Crossing-Sweeper Of Sawdust Bridge

Published by Frank Key on Tuesday, 14 February, 2012 in Dobson, Essays, Pointy Town and Prose. 0 Comments

Cyclops With A Broom!, Dobson’s pamphlet on the one-eyed crossing-sweeper of Sawdust Bridge, is one of his very few efforts to address the subject of one-eyed crossing-sweepers. With Sawdust Bridge, of course, he was on more familiar turf, having written a full account of this crumbling yet still majestic structure in A Full Account Of Sawdust Bridge. It is a tragedy of colossal proportions that both these pamphlets are now out of print.

My own pamphlet-in-the-works, A Tragedy Of Colossal Proportions, is an attempt to come to grips, once and for all, at long last, without fear or favour, in the nick of time, huncus muncus, no holds barred, warts and all, in sickness and in health, do or die, with all due respect, up to a point, now or never, come hell or high water, with the precise lineaments of the pamphleteer’s working methods during the composition of the first mentioned pamphlet, the one about the one-eyed crossing-sweeper of Sawdust Bridge, the one entitled Cyclops With A Broom!

I have been fortunate enough to gain access to certain papers, once thought consumed in the conflagration which laid waste the Potato Building at exactly the same time as, yet decisively unrelated to, the Tet Offensive. The authenticity of these papers has been questioned by preening young Dobsonist Ted Cack, on a number of television chat shows, some of them still available for viewing on the iTarbuck and similar devices. I have addressed every single one of his pernickety little fiddle-faddles, in the pages of several journals, learned and unlearned, and also by employing a trio of rough tough ne’er-do-wells to lie in wait for him at dusk and to have at him with clobberings. It was perhaps somewhat mischievous of me to arrange for this twilit ambuscade to take place on Sawdust Bridge. I wanted to leave young Ted Cack in no doubt as to who had engineered his clobberings, without him having any proof. I wanted, as politicians are so fond of saying, “to send a message”, and equally, I wanted to ensure that for young Ted Cack, and as politicians are also so fond of saying, “lessons would be learned”. I think I succeeded in these ambitions, for there has been not a whisper from within the walls of the clinic wherein the upstart Dobsonist languishes, hovering in that unfathomable realm betwixt life and death.

It was that very realm Dobson was to probe as he struggled with the writing of Cyclops With A Broom!. His first encounter with the one-eyed crossing-sweeper of Sawdust Bridge came about when Dobson was skim-reading an article in Monocular Factotum magazine, a back number of which he found discarded in a dustbin near a splurge of lupins on the towpath of the filthy canal. Sprawling on a bench to rest his weary legs, the pamphleteer leafed through the tatty, damp pages to pass the time. He describes what sparked his interest in one of the papers I have access to, and which Ted Cack says is counterfeit, a scrap torn from a seed catalogue in the margin of which Dobson scribbled

Sawdust Bridge crossing-sweeper. One eye. By all accounts hovered in that unfathomable realm betwixt life and death. If true, of brain-numbing significance. If not, pish! Investigate with a view to writing a pamphlet.

The story of the one-eyed crossing-sweeper of Sawdust Bridge which appeared in the magazine, and which Dobson was to plagiarise, fatuously, in his pamphlet, was one which had apparently transfixed the citizens of Pointy Town for a few short weeks in the nineteenth century. This “Cyclops with a broom”, as Dobson dubbed him – though why he added an exclamation mark is anybody’s guess – was a shabby yet sinister figure who appeared on the southern side of Sawdust Bridge, armed with a broom, sweeping, sweeping, on a muggy summer morn in 1861. He neither spoke nor responded to others’ speech, seemed impervious to the heat, was unresting, and swept the crossing by the bridge, back and forth, from dawn until dusk. He appeared again the following day, and for a further six days thereafter. On the next day, there was no sign of him, nor did he ever appear in Pointy Town again.

Again, in the papers, this time on a shred of Kellogg’s cornflakes carton, Dobson pinpoints the nub of the matter, as he frets with the best way to approach the tale, short of outright plagiarism, a temptation he was, alas, unable to resist.

This broom-wielding Cyclops business. Alive or dead? Man or spectral being from that unfathomable realm betwixt life and death? How to winnow wheat from chaff? Enter realm myself, via sortilege and traffic with wraiths and mumbo jumbo? Or could just copy out magazine article word for word, and change some of the adverbs.

As we know, Dobson chose the latter course. It was his unmasking as a plagiarist, and his insistent denial of guilt, that led directly to that whole sorry interlude in the pamphleteer’s career popularly known as the time of “the watercress infusion”, not to be confused with the Robert Ludlum potboiler of the same name.

But as I have pored over the scrap torn from a seed catalogue and the shred of a Kellogg’s cornflakes carton, I have become ever more convinced that, before resorting to copying out verbatim the Monocular Factotum article and changing some of the adverbs, Dobson did actually enter into that unfathomable realm betwixt life and death by means of sortilege and traffic with wraiths and mumbo jumbo. It is an astonishing tale, of pamphleteering on the brink of reason, and one which I hope to present with great flourish in my own forthcoming pamphlet. The world is waiting.

There is a possibility that young Ted Cack may be restored to health and discharged from the clinic before my pamphlet hits the airport bookstalls. If so, I want to announce here and now that there will be neither a jot nor scintilla of truth in the charge the callow upstart will lay at my door, that I have plagiarised entire, changing some of the adverbs, every last word of my pamphlet, by simply copying out his own unpublished research paper.

On Pontiuses

Published by Frank Key on Monday, 13 February, 2012 in Essays and Prose. 0 Comments

Pontiuses is the name given to the healthful and invigorating physical exercise system devised by Joseph Pontius in the early twentieth century in Germany. It is broadly similar to the rival system known as Pilates. Well, actually, it is completely dissimilar, but I am all of a dither what with one thing and another. Only a person in the throes of a dither could possibly confuse their Pontiuses with their Pilates, for they have nothing whatsoever in common save for being physical exercise systems developed in the early twentieth century in Germany by men called Joseph whose surnames began with the letter P. I will try to stabilise my dither so I can continue this essay in prose of glistening clarity.

If you were to stumble upon a grouplet of Pontiuses-practising persons in a field, or in a municipal leisure facility, the first thing that would strike you would be their “gear”. Not for the Pontiusesist the leotards favoured by Pilatesists. No indeed. Here is a first-hand description of the outfit commonly worn when getting into the Pontiuses groove:

I had my feather in my cap as big as a flag in the fore-top; my French dublet gelte in the bellie as though (like a pig readie to be spitted) all my guts had bin pluckt out; a paire of side paned hose that hung downe like two scales filled with Holland cheeses; my longe stock that sate close to my docke, and smoothered not a scab or a leacherous hairie sinew on the calfe of the legge; my rapier pendant like a round sticke fastned in the tacklings for skippers the better to climbe by; my cape cloake of blacke cloth, overspreading my backe like a thorne-backe, or an Elephantes eare, that hanges on his shoulders like a countrie huswives banskin which she thirles hir spindle on; & in consummation of my curiositie, my hands without glooves, all a more French, and a blacke budge edging of a beard on the upper lip, & the like sable auglet of excrements in the rising of the anckle of my chin.

Readers of a Tudor bent may recognise that dandyish apparel as being broadly similar to the costume worn by young Jack Wilton, the narrator of Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). What am I saying, “broadly similar”? It is identical. Clearly I have yet to subjugate my dither. I must marshal my forces. Perhaps I ought to go and do some Pontiuses myself.

Now you might think it would be difficult, or at least inconvenient, to perform invigorating exercises when dressed up to the nines like a foppish Elizabethan roister doister. As indeed it is. But therein lies the key to the magnificent efficacy of Pontiuses. Or at least, one of the keys. Apparently, there are several, if we are to credit the title of the “guidance” published by Joseph Pontius, The Several Keys To The Magnificent Efficacy Of The Pontiuses Physical Exercise System Devised By Myself On A Thursday Afternoon In Düsseldorf During A Downpour (1929). I give it in English, though the book, all nine hundred pages of it, was written in Solresol, the artificial language devised by François Sudre and expounded in Boleslas Gajewski’s Grammaire du Solresol (1902), a signed copy of which Pontius had committed to memory. Not being able to speak or read Solresol myself, I have no idea what Pontius has to say in his “guidance”, but I am not going to let that stop me. I am manfully overcoming my dither and shall press on.

I said that the first thing that would strike you were you to come upon a grouplet of Pontiusesists would be their clothing. Hard upon the heels of that sensation would come a second, as you were made dizzy by the sight of what at first glance would look like people engaged in haphazard jumping about while having spasmodic fits. You might even cast your eyes about to spot a rabid dog, foaming at the mouth, assuming all the people had been bitten by it. But gradually you would begin to discern a pattern, indeed a profound order, in what seemed to be mere frantic cavorting. If it turned out there was a rabid dog in the vicinity, that would be mere coincidence, though you would be advised to report its presence to a public health official on doggy duty in his booth or kiosk, if you could find it. Sometimes these officials hide themselves away so they can spend their days uninterrupted by hound-troubled citizens. It is quite scandalous.

Scandal was something that dogged Joseph Pontius too. But then, the Weimar Republic was riddled with scandal, from top to bottom, so when the inventor of Pontiuses was arrested and charged and convicted and imprisoned in a case of unseemliness, it barely made the headlines. He did not waste his time in gaol, however, adapting his physical exercise system for the confined space of a cell. Rather than seemingly haphazard jumping about, the incarcerated Pontiusesist throws himself repeatedly at the walls in a strictly regulated sequence of spasmodic lurching movements. Reluctantly, Pontius had to discard the preening Tudor gallant’s apparel and approve the practice of Pontiuses while wearing the harsh grey sackcloth of Weimar prison uniform.

What this means is that there is a deal of difference between Pontiuses In Prison and plain old Pontiuses. Even I can tell them apart, even when my senses are muffled by dither. Which, I am pleased to say, they are not, any more, today, for I have smashed the dither to bits, simply through willpower, and I did not even need to perform any Pontiuses to get me this far, which makes me wonder if the exercises are actually worth doing. Probably not, I would aver. I think I shall put my feet up and have a cup of tea instead.

On The Lambing-Hall Boogie

Published by Frank Key on Sunday, 12 February, 2012 in Essays and Prose. 2 Comments

[My thanks to R.]

The lambing-hall boogie may refer to two distinct, yet allied, phenomena. First we need to be clear what we mean by the lambing-hall. Almost invariably, this is the farm building wherein newborn lambs are brought fumbling and puling into the world. In the specific context of the lambing-hall boogie, however, it refers to the site associated with the other extremity of the lamb’s life. Certain evil farmers mischievously give the name “lambing hall” to the barn – often cavernous, windowless, and grisly – in to which lambs are led to the slaughter. Those of you who have bathed in the blood of the lamb, the better to become Christ-like, will be familiar with this latter designation, as will those of you who have read Thomas Harris’s potboiler The Silence Of The Lambs, or have seen the film adaptation starring Jodie Foster as rookie FBI agent Clarice Stalin.

Incidentally, if I may digress for a moment, the agent’s name is often given, erroneously, as Clarice Starling. Even the potboilerist himself refers to her as such throughout his text. Yet the parallels between the fictional law enforcement officer and the non-fictional pock-marked moustachioed Georgian petty thief who rose to become the paranoid and demented tyrant of the Soviet Union are surely too obvious to need repetition here. For my part, I have gone carefully through each page of my paperback copy of The Silence Of The Lambs, Tippexing out the extraneous letters “r” and “g” in each mention of Stalin, and then, using a black biro, slightly thickened the “a” and the “l” to close the gap created between them. Laborious though the process is, it makes for a much more satisfying read, for one is no longer distracted by what seem to be frequent and irrelevant references to a starling, the passerine bird known to congregate in vast flocks often numbering in the thousands, or even millions. I was once reading the potboiler, as yet unmodified with Tippex, when I paused to look out of my window and saw a flock of starlings in the sky, blocking out the sun, but that is an anecdote for a later occasion.

The primary definition of the lambing-hall boogie, then, is that it is the name given to a riotous dance which may be organised by the evil farmer after he has cut the throats of all the lambs he has corralled into the cavernous grisly barn. The sawdust on the floor is awash with the blood of lambs, and into this gruesomeness the evil farmer will inveigle his farmhands and their extended families. First they roll about in the sawdust until they are smeared and splattered with lambs’ blood, and then they dance. Perhaps the closest non-rustic equivalent of the dance is the pogo once practised enthusiastically by punkists in the latter part of the nineteen-seventies. But the music to which the farmpersons leap and hurl themselves about the blood-soaked barn could not be more different from punk music as we know it. Evil farmers are wont to employ for the evening a so-called chamber farm orchestra, which performs a combination of baroque minuets and oompah marches, overlaid, or possibly underlaid, I don’t really understand the technicalities, with funereal dirges on cello.

Intriguingly, there is some evidence that Josef Stalin may have taken part in several lambing-hall boogies during his youthful years in Georgia. Clarice Stalin, however, did not, insofar as we can glean from Harris’s text. Further research on this matter is probably pointless, at least in the case of the rookie FBI agent, for the simple reason that she is fictional.

The secondary definition of the lambing-hall boogie is, as I indicated, allied to the first. If you have spent any appreciable time in a rustic milieu, you will know that you can barely pass ten minutes without being buttonholed by a toothless ancient or drooling village idiot eager to regale you with barely comprehensible countryside lore and legend. Much of this can be airily dismissed with a wave of your elegant hand, swathed in an Italianate silken glove, but occasionally it pays to sit with the crone or idiot and to listen carefully. That is how I learned of the undoubtedly real terrors of the other lambing-hall boogie, where “boogie” refers not to a dance but to a boogie-man or sprite or hobgoblin or wraith or phantom or possibly even to the devil himself.

This figure, with the head of a blood-soaked lamb and the body of either a goat or a hedgehog or a starling, is said to appear from within an engulfing mist of foul and noisome vapours on the stroke of midnight, when the pogoing farmpersons are sprawled, exhausted and nauseous, on the bloody sawdust in the barn. It wreaks its terrible vengeance by casting a hypnotic spell over all those gathered, condemning them to a calendar year of rustic drudgery, flooded drainage ditches, pricking by thorns, torrential rainfall, maddened cows, and other such miseries of countryside existence.

There is some conjecture that the lambing-hall boogie may have somehow entered the body of, and commandeered the brain and soul of young Josef Stalin. There is further conjecture that there exists a suppressed text by Thomas Harris in which Clarice Stalin goes in pursuit of the lambing-hall boogie in an attempt to bring him to justice. I have spoken to someone who claims to have seen the manuscript, who reports that the potboilerist mires the whole business in unnecessary confusion. In his version, the lambing-hall boogie, as it emerges from an engulfing mist of foul and noisome vapours on the stroke of midnight, is erroneously given both the head and the body of a starling, making it effectively identical to the bird itself. My informant tells me that the bulk of the text then has Clarice Stalin chasing a starling across the continental United States, armed with a butterfly net.

On Gods

Published by Frank Key on Saturday, 11 February, 2012 in Essays and Prose. 0 Comments

Geb. Hapi. Anubis. Khnum. Ra. These are gods. They are not toys or trinkets, plastic figurines or dolls made out of scraps of wool or straw. They are gods. Maat. Aten. Sekhmet. Hathor. Horus. These too are gods. Mighty, imperious gods. Geb is the Great Cackler, Hapi the Father of the Gods, Anubis the Jackal, Khnum the Lord of the Cool Waters, Ra the Sun God, Maat the Goddess of Truth, Aten the Lord of All, Sekhmet the Mighty One, Hathor the Mistress of Heaven and Horus He Who Is Above. Bow down before them for they are powerful deities. While you cower in your ditch, grovelling, they bestride the heavens. Not toys, I say, but gods. Ammut. Isis. Bastet. Nut. Ptah. The devourer, the throne, the tearer, the sky, the opener. Above you the sky is black and fat with stars, for it is night, illimitable and desolate, and you are an uncomprehending mite alone on a burning planet, sprawling in your ditch. They are gods. Aker. Khepri. Sobek. Taurt. Seshat. Seth. Big, towering, potent gods and goddesses. Aker the Double Lion God. Khepri He who comes into existence. Sobek He who causes fertility. Taurt the Great Lady. Seshat, ah Seshat, the Lady of the Library, and Seth the Lord of Upper Egypt. These are the gods. You are not in Upper Egypt, nor in Lower Egypt. You are not in Egypt at all. But wherever your ditch is, in this night as hard as iron, you abase yourself before these gods, because you must. The time for toys and trinkets, for the bauble and the gewgaw, is long past, and you have left all fripperies behind you. Now there is simply you and your gods, locked together, in the face of the stark blank sky. Min. Mut. Osiris. Amun. Nephthys. Neith. The Chief of Heaven, the Lady of Heaven, the King of the Dead, the Hidden One, the Lady of the House and the Great Goddess. Bow down, bow down. You have a forelock. It is there to be tugged, so tug it. Tug it in obeisance to Thoth, the Great Measurer. And to Ra, to Ra, to Ra!

Now plant your brow in the muck on the floor of the ditch and cast your mind back to that golden happy childhood when you plashed in the paddling pool on a sun-blazed summer’s day. The water was cool and delightful, the water in your paddling pool. Did you rush home wrapped in your big yellow towel and worship Khnum? Did you thank Khnum for the coolness of the water? Dried and cooled, did you clutch your library ticket in your tiny hand and scamper excitedly to the public lending library to borrow a book of fairy stories? You would have looked for something with pictures of elves and wizards and peris and hobgoblins, and found a compendium, perhaps, carried it on tippytoe to the issuing desk bathed in the glorious sunshine streaming through those enormous library windows, had it stamped, and borne your borrowed book away, out onto the path in the bright afternoon. When you got home, safe in your bedroom strewn with pillows and cushions and patchwork quilts and throws, did you cry out in gratitude to Seshat?

Mut. Nut. Horus. Seth. Anubis. These are gods. All-powerful and eternal. I can picture you, a few summers later, older but no wiser, traipsing around in the park at lunchtime. You have a bag of breadcrumbs and you intend to cast them upon the grass as food for sparrows and magpies and starlings, for linnets and ravens, for bufflehead ducks and grebes. Sitting on the rusty bench with its rusty plaque in memory of one long dead who sat here often and adored the view, the view of rooftops and chimneys and football fields and allotments, of tennis courts and orchards rich in cherry trees, I see you casting your crumbs to the birds, and I know that you are not giving thanks to Aten or Geb or Sekhmet or Ptah. No. Still at this time, despite your riches and your bravura, your poor head is filled with visions of Itzpapalotl, Coatlicue, Temazcalteci, Tlaloc, Mayahual, Cihuateto, Huixtocihuatl, Popocatepetl and the like, for these are your gods. In the grip of your delusions, it is perhaps not coincidental that you like to sport a yellow polo neck sweater like the one worn by Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man, and even have your hair cut in a similar mop, though you are not yet going grey, and you insist that you have not seen the film, for you profess a devotion to the silent screen. In your pantheon, Abel Gance rubs shoulders with Oxomoco, Lilian Gish with Quetzalcoatl. You have seen Broken Blossoms more than a dozen times, and sometimes you like to pace the back streets of Limehouse as if in search of the opium dens that are no longer there, the dens from which Sherlock Holmes emerged twitching and shattered in The Man With The Twisted Lip. Those fog-enshrouded days are as distant now as the bright summers of your paddling pool youth, yet you cling to your false gods as you feed the birds and ducks in the park, shaded from Nut’s glittering sky by the overhanging branches of sycamores and hazel trees, on the bench by the magnificent iron railings which were replaced after the war in which you were wounded thrice. You were shot in the stomach, burned by flaming barrels, and crushed by falling masonry, but now there is not a scratch on you, and you have forgotten that terrible day in Scheveningen. You were treated well in the field hospital, but what did you do, once you could again use your hands? You scavenged scraps of wood and built a little toy altar and put it on your bedside shelf, praying to Ixtlilton, your god of healing, for having saved you from the realm of Mictlantecuhtle.

So let us spring forward again now, another ten, twenty years, and now your hair is grey, but no longer cut à la Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man. Your yellow polo neck is threadbare now, and you use it as a dust-cloth. There is much dust in your home, for the air is never still there. Draughts curl in under the doors and around the window frames, for much of the wood is rotting away under sustained attack by weevils and woodworms, microscopic forms of life you have ignored for too long. Baleful, greasy, plump, a little cracked, you shuffle from room to room, pointlessly, as if you have been kennelled. All your money is gone, exhausted by your postwar debaucheries. You have a blighted reputation and constant pins and needles. That is what accounts for your restlessness, this shuffling from bedroom to pantry to parlour to outhouse, from attic to cellar, and back again, up and down and round and round and always with your liver-spotted fist clamped around a little tin medallion of Montezuma as if that might fend off the night, the darkness, the vastness of eternity. You have a kitten, but it hates you. You have not yet been subjugated by Bastet, but that time is drawing nigh. So you call your kitten Karen Carpenter and feed it with fish that you pluck from ponds, or with eels you thieve from the back-kitchens of canteens, and your kitten hisses at you and claws you and loathes the sight of you. You are fearful of the light in those green eyes, for you rightly sense that they see into your soul, your small and puny soul, all curdled by a life of waste and delusion that Centeotl would bring you corn, that Chantico would warm your hearth, that the wind cried Ehecatl. The gods are in readiness for you and the wind is cold.

Yes, it is night now, and you are in your ditch. The wind is cold and the sky is black and there are no birds, not even crows. Your kitten tore that pitiful tin medallion from your hand and dropped it down a well. You are alone, but for the gods. Geb. Hapi. Anubis. Khnum. Ra. You have sunk to your knees. That blurred black and white image of Lilian Gish, stricken by panic in The Wind, is fading fast. Like Sherlock Holmes, you too are twitching and shattered, but no opiates brought you to this. Maat. Aten. Sekhmet. Hathor. Horus. There is no longer any traffic, no car horns, no rattling carts, no clanking steamer plying across the strait. Despite your wealth, you never did fly in an aeroplane across oceans and continents. You never did go and live in that house on stilts that you pictured in your mind’s eye when you were young. Parks and ponds were your domain, parks and ponds. And now this ditch, a trickle of foul brackish water running through it. You cup some in your hands and splash it on your burning brow but it is not the cool water from the paddling pool given to you by Khnum all those years ago. Ammut. Isis. Bastet. Nut. Ptah. Aker. Khepri. Sobek. Taurt. Seshat. Seth. There came that day, that Thursday, when your nerves were so brittle and the pins and needles became too much, and you flung your Montezuma medallion across the pantry and cursed your gods, and the kitten crept up to you and fixed its green eyes on you. You retrieved your tin gewgaw and fled to the park to watch the grebes, but you were shaken. You have not been still since then, you are like the gusts of air swirling around your house, the house you lived in then. Min. Mut. Osiris. Amun. Nephthys. Neith. These are the gods. And Ra. And Anubis. And Thoth, the Great Measurer, Thoth who is ready to take your measure now. Be still. Be measured. Be still.

On Nitwits

Published by Frank Key on Friday, 10 February, 2012 in Essays and Prose. 0 Comments

It was my intention today to use this space to compile a list of nitwits. The idea was to save you, gentle readers, from having to work out for yourselves who was, and who was not, a nitwit. You could simply memorise my list and then, whenever you saw or heard a nitwit, you could cry “Nitwit!”, and pay the nitwit in question no further regard, thus freeing up your time for more salubrious pursuits than being exposed to nitwittery. If your cranial integuments were unequal to the task of memorising the list, you could print it out and carry it with you at all times, in pocket or reticule, hoisting it out to check it when in the presence of a possible or probable nitwit.

I am not suggesting that you do not know a nitwit when you see one, but I thought it would be helpful for you to have a ready made list. Ah, but already your eyes are scanning the splurge of text below this line, and you see no sign of a list. Did my plan gang agley, and if so, why, for heaven’s sake?

Well, jumping out of bed before dawn and plunging my head into a pail of ice-cold water, as ever, I began compiling the list within that same head, wet and freezing. There would be time enough to write down the names of this first flurry of nitwits when I repaired to my escritoire after breakfast, breakfast today being eggy, accompanied by a single smokers’ poptart, washed down with liquefied vitamin-enriched pap. The difference between common or garden pap and liquefied pap is that the latter is runnier, and can be poured into a beaker for the swigging therefrom. Common or garden pap, while still runny, when compared say to a potato or a block of suet, is usually served in a bowl and eaten with a spoon. I know these things.

But I am leaping ahead of myself. Let us return to where I was doubled over with my head plunged into a pail of icy water. The names of seven or eight nitwits sprang to mind before I lifted my head, took a gulp of air, and replunged. During the second immersion I thought of several more nitwits. One more deep breath, and the third and final plunge, and before I was even wrapping a towel around my freezing head I had a mental list of at least a score of nitwits.

I just need to clear something up here before we proceed. I may have given the impression that I am only capable of thinking of the names of nitwits at such times as my head is immersed in ice cold water. Not so! I can as well summon the names of a legion of nitwits with my head wrapped in a towel, or indeed not wrapped in a towel or any other swaddling, just plonked atop my neck breathing in the air, fresh or foetid as may be. Don’t get the wrong idea.

So, as I prepared my breakfast eggs ‘n’ smokers’ poptart ‘n’ pap, with my habitual ritualistic precision, I congratulated myself on having made a splendid start to my nitwit list. And here I must confess that self-congratulation is my fatal weakness. I have been known to give myself a thunderous round of applause simply for completing a mundane task, for instance making my breakfast, or tying my bootlaces. In my defence, I would point out that I only do this because it was recommended to me by the author of the only self-help book I have ever read. In Clap Yourself Stupid! – Ten Steps To A Dementedly High Level Of Self-Esteem, Dr Bruce Terrific – pictured on the back cover wearing splendid moustachios and a cravat – suggests not only applauding oneself but also patting oneself on the back using a patented arm-extension device, striking one’s own medals from milk-bottle caps, and playing tape recordings of the cheering of hysterically overexcited crowds, cleverly modified so they sound as if they are bawling one’s own name through tears of happiness and joy. I have found these methods work wonders, and it is now at least three weeks since I have compared myself to a worm wriggling in the muck.

More names of nitwits popped into my head, now dry and slightly warmer, as I ate my breakfast. I was impatient to get to the escritoire and to start writing them down. At this point, I began to wonder whether I ought to simply scribble the names down, one after another, on sheets of notepaper, or if it would be better to make use of a stack of index cards. If I gave each nitwit their own individual card, I would have space for annotations. These could prove invaluable. Already, in my mental list of nitwits, I had two nitwits with very similar names, differing in fact by only a single letter. Granted, they were both nitwits, through and through, but the nature of their nitwittery varied – one was a saintly nitwit, the other a knave and jackass – and it would not do to mix them up. It also occurred to me that, as my list lengthened, there may be a similar similarity in the name of a nitwit and the name of one who was not a nitwit by any stretch of the imagination. I did not want the users of my list to call its reliability into question by making the assumption that I had included a non-nitwit on a list of nitwits or, worse, that I had declared one who was quite clearly not a nitwit to be a nitwit. Were that to happen, I would run the risk of being called a nitwit myself. Perish the thought!

If only the thought had perished. But it began to gnaw at me, before I had even finished my breakfast, before I had even got as far as my escritoire, and my notepad, and my stack of index cards, and my pot of propelling pencils. Should I be on the nitwit list?, I asked myself, over and over again. Sometimes I answered no, sometimes yes, sometimes I left the question hanging, and it hung over me like the sword of Damocles, to the point where I got all wibblywobbly and frightened and jellylegged and fretful. Hoping for some kind of succour, I reached for my self-help book and stared at the photograph of Dr Bruce Terrific. His black and white eyes gazed back at me, curiously unreadable, fathomless, cold. It was like looking into the unreadable fathomless cold eyes of a swan.

I received no succour, no answer. Mopping up the last bit of egg with the last corner of smokers’ poptart, I decided I could not take the risk of being dubbed a nitwit. If I were called a nitwit, I might become a nitwit, my name at the top of my own list of the names of nitwits. It was a prospect too horrible to contemplate. I banged my fork on my plate and stood up, and I walked right past my escritoire, out through the door, into the freezing cold, and I gulped the icy air, as dawn came crashing across the sky.

On Having The Prize Within One’s Grasp

Published by Frank Key on Thursday, 9 February, 2012 in Bobnit Tivol, Dobson, Essays, Old Halob and Prose. 0 Comments

Thump thump thump. What is that sound? It is the sound of a human heart, stimulated by excitement, beating harder and more rapidly than it is wont to do when the body or the brain is at rest. I am sure you can think of dozens, if not hundreds, of circumstances in which the human heart will go thump thump thump, but today I wish to concern myself with but one. Interestingly, however, it is a circumstance which can take wildly divergent forms. The thumping result on the human heart is the same – the outward appearances could not be more different.

It may be easier for you to cotton on to what I am blathering about if we devise a couple of vignettes, as illustrative of my point.

Let us first consider fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol, sprinting as fast as he can round and round and round a running track. He is, in this instance, competing in the second qualifying heat to gain a place in the semi-final of the Pointy Town All-Comers Super Duper Athletico Jamboree. No, scrub that. My argument falls flat on its face if it is a qualifying heat. So we must imagine fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol has already qualified for the semi-final, and not only that, but he has whizzed his way triumphantly through that semi-final, egged on by his redoubtable coach, catarrh-racked Old Halob, there at the side of the cinder track in his raincoat and Homburg hat, and our vignette is actually of the spindly Wunderkind sprinting round and round and round in the final itself. The sky is grey, there is a mild breeze, meteorologists have forecast a blizzard later. Certain birds are perched on the branches of certain trees, singing their tiny birdy hearts out. The birds’ hearts too may be going thump thump thump, but that will be for a different reason, one that need not concern us here, id est avian metabolism. The trees line one side of the field commandeered by the organisers of the Pointy Town All-Comers Super Duper Athletico Jamboree. Usually, cows loiter here, but they have been driven away, with shouting and sticks, to a neighbouring field. Once the cows were gone, at the crack of dawn, a fellow wheeled a canister filled with whitewash round and round the field, painting the lines of a running track, and other athletically significant lines, by releasing whitewash from the wheeled canister through a nozzle. While he was about this business, fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol was already limbering up, puffing and panting in the lee of a pavilion, wherein sat Old Halob smoking his way through his first pack of gaspers of the day. Now all that limbering up and puffing and panting and triumphant victories, or at least placement in the top three, in several qualifying heats and in the semi-final, have led the baggy-shorted sprinter to the moment caught in our vignette. He is whizzing towards the tape. His heart is pounding thump thump thump. He has the prize within his grasp.

Our second vignette could not be more different. There are no trees, no birds, no cows, no whitewash. There is no fictional athlete nor his Stalinist coach. We are not outdoors, in a field, but indoors, in what might best be described as a hovel. The interior is gloomy, lit by sputtering tallow candles because the electricity bill has gone unpaid. There are several eggs and a packet of breakfast cereal in the larder, but little sign of other food save for a discarded toffee apple wrapper in the waste paper bin. The wrapper sits atop a heap of similarly discarded sheets of paper torn from a notepad, crumpled and scrunched up and tossed to oblivion. There is scratchy writing on each sheet, but we shall never read it. The waste paper bin rests on rotting linoleum next to an escritoire. Sitting at the escritoire, slumped, despairing, blighted by miseries unnumbered, is Dobson, the twentieth century’s titanic pamphleteer. He has come to a stop in the composition of his latest screed, stricken with vacancy-between-the-ears. He takes a gulp from a smudged beaker of aerated lettucewater and peers dispiritedly out of an even more smudged window at nothing. Where in our previous vignette we had speed and motion and activity, to the point where one might consider it suitable subject matter for a Futurist painting, here all is still, silent, beige, crumpled, woebegone. But of a sudden the silence is shattered by an ungodly buzzing. The pamphleteer’s metal tapping machine is processing an incoming message. Dobson stirs on his stool and gropes his way through the gloom to the worm-eaten sideboard upon which the metal tapping machine sits. The message is quite astonishing. It is a tip-off that Dobson is to be announced as the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics. Dobson is perplexed, for he knows nothing of economics, yet the source is trustworthy, and unimpeachable. Well, that is what Dobson believes, for he does not realise he is being twitted by a mischief maker. Instead, mistaking the sender of the message for his most trustworthy and unimpeachable pal, his eyes shine brightly, and he pictures himself, besuited and natty, being given a cheque for a vast amount of money by some Norwegian persons. His heart is pounding thump thump thump. He has the prize within his grasp.

It is instructive, is it not, that two such shockingly dissimilar vignettes can yet end with identical sentences? Were we to stay with our two protagonists, and to follow them through the next minutes and hours, we would find that, though they had the same thump thump thump stimulation to their hearts, for the same reasons, when the thumping subsided their destinies were as different as their vignettes. For fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol won his race, and grasped his prize, but Dobson learned that he had been made a fool of, and had never even been shortlisted for the Economics Nobel, and so he did not grasp his prize.

It would be well to reflect on this, next time your human heart goes thump thump thump, whatever the cause of the stimulation that makes it thump so.

On Groaning Minions

Published by Frank Key on Wednesday, 8 February, 2012 in Essays and Prose. 0 Comments

Dennis Beerpint’s latest poetry collection, a slim volume of twee verse entitled Groaning Minions, is an experiment in what the weedy ex-beatnik calls “fictional autobiography”. “Fictional”, note, not “fictionalised”. In a preface he makes his intentions clear:

By any measure, my life has been one of unremitting tedium. Nothing remotely interesting ever happens to me, nor do I cause anything of remark to occur. My motto can be encoupleted as “Neither a mover nor a shaker be / Just write verse relentlessly twee”. In my advancing years, however, rightly celebrated as probably the greatest poet ever to tread the earth, I am constantly beset by eager young whippersnappers beating a path to my door, clutching their notebooks and propelling pencils and tape recorders, desperate to hear me tell tales of my life so they might be the one to write the Life. It always amuses me to watch them doze off as I explain that, no, I never swapped beekeeping tips with Sylvia Plath, I was never declared insane like Ezra Pound, I never saw my work turned into a hit West End musical like T S Eliot, and I never even shared a Lemsip with Andrew Motion. Having scurried breathlessly up the path, the wannabe biographers trudge away a couple of hours later, their notebooks empty, their cassette tapes blank.

It has occurred to me that if anyone does ever succeed in writing my Life, the book will be so damned boring that nobody will ever want to read it. Thus I have taken it upon myself to invent a life of thrills and spills and adventures and extraordinary excitement, all of it chronicled in the form of twee and vapid verse. Let future biographers pick over the contents of the present volume, and rewrite it as prose. That will keep them occupied, and I will no longer have to heave myself out of my armchair and answer the doorbell to another panting whippersnapper, and parry a legion of pointless queries about the part I played in the Spanish Civil War and the Hindenburg Disaster and the Tet Offensive and the Orpington By-Election and the Relief of Mafeking and the Munich Air Disaster and the Kennedy Assassination and the Cold War and the Cod War and the Arab Spring and the Summer of Love and the Fall of Saigon and the Winter of Discontent and many another world-shuddering kerfuffle.

Beerpint appears to be teasing us here, because there is not a single mention of any of those world-shuddering kerfuffles in the forty-nine poems in the collection. Instead, we get a sort of Ruritanian fantasy, with the fictional poet born and brought up in an eerie and phantasmal castle, surrounded by the groaning minions of the title. Indeed, he gets rather carried away by these minions, whose incessant groaning he is at pains to account for. One, it seems, has a burst appendix. Another groans because he is overtired. A third is a minion of melancholic disposition whose groaning is

Both religious, like a tortured Christian martyr

And existentialist, like Jean-Paul Sartre

I was not going to quote directly from the book, what with Dennis Beerpint’s fondness for unleashing savage packs of wolves at any hint of copyright violation, but perhaps I can be forgiven just the one couplet.

The poet’s growing obsession with the groaning minions is apparent when one considers that, though they make only fleeting appearances in the first half of the book, from poem number twenty-six onwards they are increasingly dominant. In fact, the concluding set of six villanelles seem to consist of nothing but groaning, as if Beerpint’s very psyche has been invaded and overtaken by these minions of his childhood. This is both perplexing and worrying when we lift our eyes from the page briefly to remind ourselves that they are entirely fictional and never actually existed. The unrelenting focus on the groaning minions also means that, in terms of chronology, Beerpint never gets beyond the years of his youth. He thus undermines his own stated purpose of fobbing off the doorbell-ringing wannabe biographers, who are still left in the dark about the poet’s involvement, or otherwise, in such world-shuddering kerfuffles as the Spanish Civil War and the Hindenburg Disaster and the Tet Offensive and the Orpington By-Election and the Relief of Mafeking and the Munich Air Disaster and the Kennedy Assassination and the Cold War and the Cod War and the Arab Spring and the Summer of Love and the Fall of Saigon and the Winter of Discontent.

It may be that he has a second volume of “fictional autobiography” in the works, but quite frankly, let us hope not.