Over at The Dabbler, Brit has written a review of Impugned By A Peasant & Other Stories. If his perceptive and sensible words do not convince you to buy, oh, at least a dozen copies, then what will, what will?
“Nothing Short Of Heroic”
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Category Archives: The Dabbler
Dabbler Plaza
This coming Monday marks the forty-seventh anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy. In The Dabbler this week, I provide full instructions for the construction of your very own model of Dealey Plaza made from cardboard and plasticine.
Dabbling With Liszt
Gritty historical realism in Key’s Cupboard at The Dabbler this week, where I present a reconstruction, based upon impeccable source material, of an episode in the life of Franz Liszt. The reader is transported, as if by magic, to nineteenth-century Rome, and an assignation between the newly-ordained Abbé Liszt and his Russian-born lover, Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein…
Remember, Remember, Re Dabbler
In my cupboard at The Dabbler this week, I have transcribed the words of a children’s song appropriate for today’s date.
The song is taken from a garish publication of the last century entitled Special Agent Rastus Blot’s Traditional Songbook For Winsome Tinies. It was a piece of spectacular self-aggrandisement by Blot. Though the songs purport to be much-loved chants and ditties sung by billions of children around the world, they were all in fact devised by the Special Agent himself, and feature him in a starring role, carrying out deeds of daring and bravado. When I did some research into the matter, I discovered that not one tiny has been heard singing any of these songs, anywhere, ever.
Quite frankly, if you are going to present an urchin with a book as a gift, I would give Special Agent Rastus Blot’s farrago of nonsense a wide berth and buy Impugned By A Peasant & Other Stories instead.
Words o’ Wisdom
“Hrrurr gretsch pfftdf, Wagtail, mrmpgghaw (cough) azzerbunmhher, Swan”
Reported by Ian Vince in The Dabbler.
Wolfenbüttel Footnote
Readers who keep track of these things will know that I am fond of Horace Walpole’s coinage “bewolfenbuttlement”, recently noted in my cupboard at The Dabbler. I have today learned that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, that great figure of the Enlightenment, was for some years the librarian at the Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. In the 1770s, he published, anonymously, the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, essays by the (deceased) Professor of Oriental Languages at Hamburg, Reimarus, questioning the status of miracles recounted in the Bible.
His skepticism in this regard means Lessing is one of the few European thinkers who has a ditch named after him. It is an ugly, broad ditch, but, disappointingly, is a theoretical ditch rather than a real one.
He also had an interestingly egg-shaped head.
How To Stun A Europeasant
This week at the super soaraway Dabbler, I turn my attention, not before time, to certain aspects of mediaeval church decoration. Modern readers will discover a useful method of stunning the puny brain of a Europeasant, if that kind of activity is your “bag”, which it probably is, if you’re honest, and which of my readers is not?
Dabbling With Terror
This week, my cupboard over at The Dabbler contains a story so terrifying that big tough persons, wrestlers and dockside brawlers and such, have been known to quake in their boots when reading it. When it originally appeared, some years ago, it was voted the “tale most likely to disarm a ruffian bent on brutality” by the Association For The Disarming Of Brutes And Ruffians By Means Of Prose And Verse (Registered Charity No. 2). This is a very worthy organisation which Hooting Yard is pleased to promote. A percentage of the money we receive in donations is diverted from the Fund For Distressed Out Of Print Pamphleteers to help the Association continue its work, which, weirdly, is both valuable and invaluable. Click that button to the right and please give generously.
Further Dabbling
For my cupboard at The Dabbler this week, I exhumed a brace of ancient tales buried, like Chilean miners, deep in the Hooting Yard archives, dusted them down, glued them together, and applied a lick o’ lacquer to freshen them up for a new readership. And in a promptly-posted comment, I preempt an objection that may be raised by pedants on the lookout for flaws in what is a piece of startling, even brutal, realism.
Bedabblered!
To celebrate the restoration and reopening of Strawberry Hill, I suggest we do our utmost to revive a word coined by Horace Walpole and used by him, as far as I know, just once. Devoted Hooting Yard readers will know the word whereof I speak, but it seemed appropriate to persuade readers of the super soaraway Dabbler to join us in our cause.
Dabble ‘N’ Mash
While you wait for me to aim my alphabetic skewer at the letter U, hike over to The Dabbler where, it being Friday, the doors of my cupboard are thrown open. The doors of my cupboard, incidentally, are not unlike Aldous Huxley’s Doors Of Perception, in some ways. In other ways, they are utterly different. I shall leave it to you to allocate the similarities and differences, it will give you something to do at lunchtime. Anyway, this week I confess my foolish fascination with a president and his potatoes.
Abba Dabbler
We interrupt this programme alphabet to point readers, with a pointy stick, towards The Dabbler, where this week Mr Key’s cupboard contains a couple of pieces about Belshazzar’s feast. Or, more accurately, one is set before Belshazzar’s feast, and the other just after it. Intriguingly, when these little tales first appeared here at Hooting Yard, many readers thought they were about the Swedish pop group Abba, presumably because the protagonists share their Christian names with the Scandinavian foursome, and quote lyrics from a couple of their songlets. I would like to take this opportunity to make it crystal clear that these are sheer coincidences, and no resemblance to any real persons, either living or passed beyond mortal realms, was intended.
ADDENDUM : The two “Belshazzar’s Feast” tales, with musical accompaniment provided by legendary noise decomposer Lepke Buchwater, will form Mr Key’s segment of the Resonance Radio Orchestra evening at the Jellyfish Theatre on Sunday 3rd October. (See D is for Date For Your Diary.)
Insurance Company Men
Over at the super soaraway Dabbler this week, my cupboard contains some notes on the fascinating world of insurance in the eastern United States and in the Kingdom of Bohemia early in the twentieth century.
Dabbling With Little Ruskin
This week at The Dabbler I recommend the setting up of a free school with a curriculum devoted to the works of John Ruskin, and include two Tales Of Little Ruskin suitable for reading aloud to tinies. Incidentally, I could not help noticing the manner in which the Grauniad reported the official approval given to the setting up of sixteen such free schools. One idealistic teacher suggested that among the things deemed important in his planned school, in a deprived area, would be good manners and the basic civilised matter of sitting down together at mealtimes. The privately-educated well-brought-up Grauniad staff take these things for granted, of course, but the very idea that they should be inculcated in the lower orders is anathema. The front page headline sneerily misrepresented the plans as teaching “etiquette and fine dining”.
In My Cupboard
This week at The Dabbler my cupboard features the well-loved Hooting Yard Pontiff Mnemonic. When declaimed aloud it is always a crowd-pleaser, so I should take this opportunity to remind readers that, for an appropriate fee, I will be happy to come and shout it aloud at your community social cohesion hub or neighbourhood frolic ‘n’ learning zone. I was hoping I might get an invitation to boom it out at one of the official events during the imminent Papal visit, but as yet no Vatican nuncio has beaten a path to my door, alas.
ADDENDUM : In the comments at The Dabbler, Barendina Smedley asks “So, who’s going to set this as plainsong?” and imagines it being chanted lugubriously. Perhaps a musically inclined reader might wish to take up her suggestion…