I have just started reading a collection of stories by Marcel Schwob (translated by Iain White) and was pleasantly startled by the opening sentence of “Train 081”:

The great terror of my life seems far distant from the shrubbery in which I am writing.

Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) was a friend of Alfred Jarry, and the dedicatee of Ubu Roi. I may have more to say as I read the book, The King In The Golden Mask & Other Writings (1982).

Here at Hooting Yard we are, as you know, ever vigilant for news of lethal or otherwise miscreant cows. We could not fail to take note of the alarming tale of the Brazilian man killed by a cow falling through his roof.

Elsewhere, though it is hardly “news”, we learn from a list of children detained in a Worcestershire insane asylum between 1854 and 1900 that one poor little tot was there because he or she was “frightened by a cow”. Whatever terrors the cow may have provoked pale beside an entry further down the list, which tells us that another mite was placed in the asylum after “being put inside a recently killed pig”. To which one can only respond with a blood-curdling “eek!”.

Here is another excerpt from Nashe’s Lenten Stuff:

There was a herring, or there was not, for it was but a cropshin, one of the refuse sort of herrings, and this herring, or this cropshin, was censed and thurified in the smoke, and had got him a suit of durance that would last longer than one of Erra Pater’s almanacs, or a constable’s brown bill, only his head was in his tail, and that made his breath so strong that no man could abide him. Well, he was a Triton of his time, and a sweet-singing calandra to the state, yet not beloved of the showery Pleiades, or the Colossus of the Sun, however he thought himself another tumidus Antimachus, as complete an adelantado as he that is known by wearing a cloak of tuftaffaty eighteen year, and to Lady Turbot there is no demur but he would needs go a-wooing, and offered her for a dower whole hecatombs and a two-hand sword; she stared upon him with Megaera’s eyes, like Iris, the messenger of Juno, and bade him go eat a fool’s-head and garlic, for she would none of him; thereupon particularly strictly and usually he replied, that though thunder ne’er lights on Phoebus’ tree, and Amphion, that worthy musician, was husband to Niobe, and there was no such acceptable incense to the heavens as the blood of a traitor, revenged he would be by one chimera of imagination or other, and hamper and embrake her in those mortal straights for her disdain, that, in spite of divine symmetry & miniature, into her busky grove she should let him enter, and bid adieu, sweet lord, or the cramp of death should wrest her heart-strings.

I was going to post some Daily Nashe for a while, but it seems to me I could happily quote the entire book, so perhaps it is a better idea for you to go and read it directly – PDF here. You might also like to know what Edmund Gosse had to say about it, in An Essay On The Life & Writings Of Thomas Nashe (1892):

“Lenten Stuff” gives us evidence that Nashe had now arrived at a complete mastery of the fantastic and irrelevant manner which he aimed at. This book is admirably composed, if we can bring ourselves to admit that the genre is ever admirable. The writer’s vocabulary has become opulent, his phrases flash and detonate, each page is full of unconnected sparks and electrical discharges. A sort of aurora borealis of wit streams and rustles across the dusky surface, amusing to the reader, but discontinuous, and insufficient to illuminate the matter in hand. It is extraordinary that a man can make so many picturesque, striking, and apparently apposite remarks, and yet leave us so frequently in doubt as to his meaning.

From Greg Ross at Futility Closet, I learn that an eriff is a two-year-old canary. Why there should be a specific word for a two-year-old canary is a deep and abiding mystery, at least to me.

And Thomas Nashe, in his Lenten Stuff, suggests that another name for a kestrel is a windfucker.

So eminently quotable is Thomas Nashe that I have decided to post a passage from his Lenten Stuff every day while I am reading it – The Daily Nashe, if you will. The Stuff is, among other things, a paean of praise to Great Yarmouth – though it appears he was sorely tempted to go further afield:

I had a crotchet in my head here to have given the reins to my pen, and run astray throughout all the coast towns of England, digging up their dilapidations and raking out of the dust-heap or charnel-house of tenebrous eld the rottenest relic of their monuments, and bright scoured the canker-eaten brass of their first bricklayers and founders, & commented and paralogized on their condition in the present, & in the preter tense, not for any love or hatred I bear them, but that I would not be snibbed, or have it cast in my dish that therefore I praise Yarmouth so rantantingly because I never elsewhere baited my horse, or took my bow and arrows and went to bed.

I think I have written before about my dislike of the busie old foole, unruly sun, and its pitiless battering heat. Proper Hooting Yard weather is an overcast sky with a hint of drizzle. It may well be that this current mini-heatwave is what has caused the lack of sweeping paragraphs of majestic prose at your favourite website. I am listless and enervated, possibly even neurasthenic.

Anyway, at times like this, I find it can be useful to spur myself back into action by reading the titanic prose of past masters. Here is Thomas Nashe, from his final – and fabulous – work, Nashe’s Lenten Stuff (1599):

That good old blind bibber of Helicon, I wot well, came a-begging to one of the chief cities of Greece, & promised them vast corpulent volumes of immortality if they would bestow upon him but a slender out-brother’s annuity of mutton & broth, and a pallet to sleep on, and with derision they rejected him, whereupon he went to their enemies with the like proffer, who used him honourably, and whom he used so honourably that to this day, though it be three thousand year since, their name and glory flourish green in men’s memory through his industry. I trust you make no question that those dull-pated pennyfathers, that in such dudgeon scorn rejected him, drunk deep of the sour cup of repentance for it when the high flight of his lines in common bruit was oyezed. Yea, in the word of one no more wealthy than he was (wealthy, said I? nay, I’ll be sworn he was a grand-juryman in respect of me) those greybeard huddle-duddles and crusty cumtwangs were struck with such stinging remorse of their miserable Euclionism and snudgery, that he was not yet cold in his grave but they challenged him to be born amongst them, and they and six cities more entered a sharp war about it, every one of them laying claim to him as their own

First we had Brian “One Brain” Eno advertising catfood, now we have Rasputin’s daughter urging us to buy breakfast cereal. (Click a couple of times to enlarge.)

Many thanks to Glyn Webster for drawing this to my attention.

Bartleby the Scrivener, from Herman Melville’s 1853 story of that name, is one of the most numinous characters in literature. Though fictional, he has always seemed to me to be a role model, a man to emulate if we wish to live a better life. Handily, for those of us seeking to Be Bartleby, the estimable John Ptak at Ptak Science Books has gathered into a single list all the separate utterances of our hero. Armed with the list, we can confine our own speech to the words and phrases spoken by the scrivener. Note how splendidly appropriate they are to almost every conceivable situation.

“I would prefer not to.”

“I would prefer not to.”

“What is wanted?”

“I would prefer not to.”

“I would prefer not to.”

“I prefer not to”

“I prefer not to”

“I would prefer not to”

“I prefer not.”

“I would prefer not to.”

“I would prefer not to.”

“At present I prefer to give no answer”

“At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable”

“I would prefer to be left alone here”

“No more”

“Do you not see the reason for yourself?”

“I have given up copying”

“I would prefer not”

“I am very sorry, sir”

“Sitting upon the banister,”

“No, I would prefer not to make any change”

“There is too much confinement about that. No, I would not like a clerkship; but I am not particular.”

“I would prefer not to take a clerkship”

“I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not particular.”

“No, I would prefer to be doing something else.”

“Not at all. It does not strike me that there is any thing definite about that. I like to be stationary. But I am not particular.”

“No: at present I would prefer not to make any change at all.”

“I know you, and I want nothing to say to you.”

“I know where I am”

“I prefer not to dine to-day,”

“It would disagree with me; I am unused to dinners.”

The organic things – Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid – inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities. They – or the degenerate gelatinous fermentation of which they were composed – seem’d to ooze, seep and trickle thro’ the gaping cracks in the horrible houses . . and I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting-point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and inundate the world in one leprous cataclysm of semi-fluid rottenness.

From that nightmare of perverse infection I could not carry away the memory of any living face. The individually grotesque was lost in the collectively devastating; which left on the eye only the broad, phantasmal lineaments of the morbid mould of disintegration and decay . . a yellow and leering mask with sour, sticky, acid ichors oozing at eyes, ears, nose and mouth, and abnormally bubbling from monstrous and unbelievable sores at every point . . .

H. P. Lovecraft describes Manhattan’s Lower East Side in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, cited in H. P. Lovecraft : Against The World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq (1991, 2005)

In an appendix to On The Writing Of The Insane, G. Mackenzie Bacon notes the similarity between the writing of the insane and the writing of the lower orders.

In the position I occupy I receive a good many letters from the poorer class, and have often had from some of my correspondents very odd specimens. The three following [which you can consult at the Public Domain Review] are from individuals belonging to what is called the sane portion of the public. In [one] the contrast between [the] style and those in the preceding pages [by certified lunatics] is perhaps not so well marked as one would like to expect.

“The patient was a respectable artisan of considerable intelligence, and was sent to the Cambridgeshire Asylum after being nearly three years in a melancholy mood. . . . He spent much of his time in writing – sometimes verses, at others long letters of the most rambling character, and in drawing extraordinary diagrams . . . After he left the Asylum he went to work at his trade . . . but some two or three years later he began to write very strangely again .  . .

“This is one of the letters he wrote at this time, after a visit from a medical man, who tried to dissuade him from writing in this way : –

Dear Doctor,

To write or not to write, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to follow the visit of the great ‘Fulbourn’ with ‘chronic melancholy’ expressions of regret (withheld when he was here) that, as the Fates would have it, we were so little prepared to receive him, and to evince my humble desire to do honour to his visit. My Fulbourn star, but an instant seen, like a meteor’s flash, a blank when gone.

The dust of ages covering my little sanctum parlour room, the available drapery to greet the Doctor, stowed away through the midst of the regenerating (water and scrubbing – cleanliness next to godliness, political and spiritual) cleansing of a little world. The Great Physician walked, bedimmed by the ‘dark ages’, the long passage of Western Enterprise, leading to the curvatures of rising Eastern morn. The rounded configuration of Lunar (tics) garden’s lives an o’ershadowment on Britannia’s vortex.

“… In the course of another year he had some domestic troubles, which upset him a good deal, and he ended by drowning himself one day in a public spot. The peculiarity was, that he could work well, and not attract public attention, while he was in his leisure moments writing the most incoherent nonsense.”

from On The Writing Of The Insane by G. Mackenzie Bacon (1870). Available online at the Public Domain Review.

This is really important, so please read it very carefully and make every attempt to memorise it:

(COLONY)=(ANT+YES)
(FLOWERS)=(LADYBUG+GOD)
(SHIP’S OUIJA BOARD)=(AIRCRAFT CARRIERS)
(SUBMARINES)=(SOLAR WEB+GOD)
(PLANET MARS+X)=(MAGNETIC BOOTS)
(I’M A GENIUS)=(SELENIUM)
(CHILDREN OF “BRIAN”)=(666 CODE)

You will also need to familiarise yourself with what we call the “series of headings”:

COMPUTER/CYBERNETICS AND COMMUNICATIONS
INFLATION
SOCIAL SECURITY
FEAST OF TABERNACLES
EGYPTIAN ARTEFACTS
HAWAIIAN ISLANDS
DOLPHINS
CARIBOU FUR
INSECTS
MEDICINAL
INDOOR BBQ GRILL
MENTHOL PIES
WISDOM TEETH
PSYCHIC DATA BASE
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
SYNTHETIC OILS AND FUELS
ARTIFICIAL MUSCLES
JUMP SOLDIERS OR THE GROUND JUMPERS
ROGUE WAVES
FLYING PODS (DELPODS)
RETRACTABLE ROOF
FIRE FIGHTER
MURDER BY SLANDER
THE PAPACY
SPACE PROGRAMS

Got all that? Further details, should you require them, here.

Thanks to OutaSpaceman for alerting me to this old magazine advert. Clearly the world o’ catfood advertising has been deprived of Brian’s presence for far too long. He really ought to get back to doing what he does best.