Over at The Dabbler this week I turn my attention to some lesser-known editions of the Bible, as noted by Isaac Disraeli in his Curiosities Of Literature. This is a splendid work, highly recommended to Hooting Yard readers. To take just one essay at random, in Amusements Of The Learned, we are told that

When Petavius was employed in his Dogma Thealogiea, a work of the most profound and extensive erudition, the great recreation of the learned father was at the end of every second hour, to twirl his chair for five minutes.

Twirling in a seated position wasn’t good enough for Cardinal Richelieu. He preferred “violent exercises; and he was once discovered jumping with his servant, to try who could reach the highest side of a wall.”

Most amusing, perhaps, is the manner in which Baruch Spinoza liked to unwind from his philosophical labours:

After protracted studies Spinoza, would… unbend his mind by setting spiders to fight each other; he observed their combats with so much interest, that he was often seized with immoderate fits of laughter.

Here are some flappers:

You can read about one particular flapper, and a criminal flapper at that, in my cupboard this week at The Dabbler. The flapper is accompanied in my tale by a chump (unillustrated).

Ray Bradbury wrote a famous collection of short stories called The Illustrated Man (1951), made into a film (1969) starring Rod Steiger (1925-2002). Were Mr Steiger still with us, I think I would write to him suggesting he play a character called The Unillustrated Chump. This would not be an adaptation of The Chump And The Flapper, the story in today’s Dabbler, but a wholly different work, based on the boiling frustrations of a chump who, try as he might, cannot get his likeness depicted by a single illustrator. Mr Steiger did boiling frustration very well, and though he may have had difficulty playing a chump – for he was the most unchumpish of men – his training in the Method would no doubt have stood him in good stead. Alas, it is not to be.

This week in The Dabbler I pioneer a new form of close textual analysis of classic songs, starting with “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen. And when I say “close”, I mean close – in my attempt to winkle out the deep meaning of the song I concentrate on a single six-word phrase, jettisoning the rest of it. And when I say “winkle”, well, as you will discover when you pore over my piece, winkles and other hardy organic life-forms of the tide pool have a crucial part to play in the heretofore hidden deep structure of the song.

One unexpected advantage of my brain-numbing work was the realisation that there is a connection, albeit tentative and tangential, with my concurrent lobster research. I make no great claims for what we might call “the Suzanne lobster”, but it suffices, I think, that the word “lobsters” appears, not at all gratuitously, in my analysis.

These are hideously complicated matters, but I hope I have been able to shed some little light on them.

Never reluctant to revisit the same material again and again, I turn to what some have called one of my obsessive themes in The Dabbler this week. And what theme might that be? Well, answer the following picture quiz before clicking on the dabblelink, and you will know what to expect.

What is the connection between this man

and this bird?

This week in The Dabbler, my cupboard contains a bran tub of bittybobs. To give you some idea of what I am talking about, here is the Oxford English Dictionary definition of bran-tub (with a hyphen) which, as you can see, leads directly to its definition of bran-pie (also with a hyphen), a term I confess is entirely new to me:

bran-tub n. = bran-pie n.; also fig.

bran-pie n. a tub full of bran with small gifts hidden in it to be drawn out at random, as part of festivities at Christmas, etc.

I am disconcerted to learn, however, that neither bittybob (without a hyphen) nor bitty-bob (with a hyphen) is defined in the OED. Can such things be?, to quote Ambrose Bierce.

For my cupboard in The Dabbler this week I have exhumed, dusted down, and spruced up a short piece that appeared on Hooting Yard long long ago. It occurs to me that it serves as a first variation on a theme by Gerard Manley Hopkins, the “theme” in this case being the tall nun from The Wreck Of The Deutschland. Her name, incidentally, was Henrica Fassbender, her last words were reported as “Oh Christ, Christ, come quickly!”, and her body was never found. But she is commemorated on the headstone in St Patrick’s Cemetery, Leytonstone, where the other four drowned Franciscan nuns were buried. Go here for a photograph of the headstone and an amusing anecdote.

Sister Hortense, the even taller nun in my little tale, is not actually based on Henrica Fassbender. All they have in common is nundom, tallness, and of course a predilection for ships, in Hortense’s case a barquentine, in Henrica’s a German steamship.

This week in The Dabbler I provide a unique insight into my working methods, casting a frank and unstinting* gaze upon the creative process involved in the writing of the masterpiece that is Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke.  Mention of which reminds me that, several days after publication, there may be one or two readers in far-flung corners of the earth who have not yet bought copies. You know who you are. Zip thyselves o’er to Lulu and make purchase now, tardy ones!

* NOTE : “Unstinting”, in this context, means “not involving at any stage the participation of a stint”. As any fule kno, a stint is a type of bird, specifically a very small wader known in North America as a peep. They can be difficult to identify because of the similarity between species, and various breeding, non-breeding, juvenile and moulting plumages, but you shouldn’t let that stop you.

This week in my cupboard, a Dabbler exclusive, and an astonishingly topical one at that. Hie thee hence to find out about The Missing Murdoch.

In The Dabbler this week, I reproduce part of an instruction manual from the Frank Key Academy of Terpsichorean Élan. I am afraid to say that a pre-publication reader for The Dabbler, employed to vet all contributions, contacted me a few days ago and had the gall to call into question my qualifications for running such an academy.

Dear Mr Key, he wrote, on laughably self-important “Dabbler Pre-Publication Vetting Protocol” headed notepaper, Much as we admire your pratings, we must strain every sinew to protect our readers from charlatanry, poppycock, and flapdoodle. If, for example, we were to run a piece on the Black Bat of Harrenhal, we would entrust the commission to a writer fully conversant with the career of Ser Oswell Whent, not to some booby. These are important and serious matters, after all. That being so, I cannot help wondering why in the name of all that is holy you presume to lecture our readers on the art of dance, when it is blindingly obvious that you could not dance your way out of a paper bag. Yes, Mr Key! Before I took up my current post with The Dabbler I was an official observer at the Pointy Town Paper Bag Danceathon, and well do I recall the pitiful figure you cut, for six or seven hours, as you failed to make your escape from the paper bag by dint of the twist, the hoo-cha, the Watusi, and the peasants’ reel, turn and turn about. I am afraid that wild horses would not drag me into the unconscionable position of passing your piece for publication.

As it happens, that last sentence was an idle boast. Upon receipt of this pompous cant, I hi-ho’ed over to Dabbler HQ with a harras of wild horses in tow. Wild? They were savage, almost demonic. We soon got the matter settled, and I doubt I shall be hearing from that little twerp in future.

This week in The Dabbler I pose a tricky problem one might encounter in the game of Spite, or Lantern Jaw as it is known in some circles. Amateurs ought not to be intimidated by the seemingly “expert” solutions posited in the Comments, all of which so far – to my eye, at least – have the fatal flaw of mistaking Spite for a card game. A simple enough error, I suppose, considering that the symbols

are employed, but any truly experienced Spiteologist will know that these denote something wholly different from the hearts and clubs and diamonds and spades of the standard card game, so different indeed that to gain a full understanding one needs to have one’s brain artificially modified by the Blötzmann Procedure, from whence there is no turning back. It is true that everyday life can become somewhat problematic after the modification, but the benefits to one’s Spite skills are immense and glorious and majestic, so only a pipsqueak would dare to complain or, ruinously, to pursue Blötzmann through the courts.

Over at The Dabbler this week, a note on bags, on holes in bags, on monks and moths, on palaces of the Tsar, on corridors in those palaces, on Yoko Ono. Is it, then, a set of notes rather than a single note? Perhaps so, and I should be more precise in my title. “A Note On Bags” should be about bags, and nothing but bags. But of course there are all sorts of bags, from the pippy to the tea, so I would need to spell out precisely what bags my note was about, if it were about nothing but bags, and had nothing to add on holes and monks and moths and palaces and Tsars and corridors and Yoko Ono, but it concerns itself with all those things, so the title as given is a misnomer. “An Imprecisely-Named Note On Bags” might do the trick, or “A Set Of Notes On Bags And Other Things”. What a palaver.

I exhume the tale of the glib hatter in The Dabbler this week. When the piece first appeared here at Hooting Yard, long long ago, I remember that I was bombarded with letters from readers desperate to be told what sort of hats the hatter made, and in what manner his glibness manifested itself. I refused to answer those questions at the time, as I refuse to answer them now. There is only so far one can go when holding the reader by the hand and leading him or her along the fictional path. The fictional path is a very different path to a real path, of kerbstones perhaps, or just gravel. One can be led a merry dance along either kind of path, if that takes one’s fancy, and if it does one might find the dance leader is a hatter, and a glib one at that. Or so I am told.

As one who, for the most part, loathes talking on the telephone, I am perhaps not best placed to advise on telephone etiquette. That is, however, the subject I address in Key’s Cupboard at The Dabbler this week. Read and learn.