There are many ways of arranging a water-party at yachting stations and at all riverside places. At yachting stations, for instance, a sailing yacht is hired to convey a party of from eighteen to twenty-five to some point of interest on the coast, in which case luncheon and tea are provided at an hotel in the vicinity of the place where the party have landed, and the expenses are equally divided. Not unfrequently, on the return journey, the yacht is becalmed, and does not reach its destination until between two and three the following morning. If it happens to be a fine moonlight night, this prolongation of a water-party is an additional source of enjoyment; but if there is no moon as well as no wind, and the calm betokens a storm, it is the reverse of pleasant. But these little contretemps, when they do occur, rather lend a zest to the day’s pleasure, and are something to talk about afterwards.

from Manners And Rules Of Good Society, Or Solecisms To Be Avoided by A Member Of The Aristocracy (1916)

At first glance, I assumed this headline was about me, and booked up for some Recovered Memory Syndrome therapy to try to recall what I’d done…

Power crazy Key diverts plane

But, alas, it was – remarkably – about someone else entirely.

It is possible that these may be even more terrifying than tiny lethal phantasmal poison frogs…

Reader Kimika Ying has unearthed a treasure from the past.

Dear Mr. Key, she writes, I’ve found a book which put me in mind of Hooting Yard which I would like to pass along, “The Infant Moralist” by Lady Helena Carnegie and Mrs. Arthur Jacob, published in 1903. Public domain versions of the book, with a delightfully illustrated copy of the original, are located here

It contains some of the usual moral lessons on “The Consequences of Greed”, “Profanity”, “Envy”, “Courage”, etc. What caught my attention were the less commonly heard ones: “Insensate Mischief”, “Inevitable Retribution”, “Unsuitable Jesting”, and “Ill-Timed Levity”.

And this:

THE CHATTERBOX

I needs must beg you, Caroline,

To cease your Chatter whilst I dine.

It deafens every Ear.

John Footman cannot hear my Words,

And I have asked him twice for Curds

And still he cannot hear.

If Caroline were with us today she would undoubtedly have a cell phone out at the dinner table as well. Anyway, all fine moral lessons and a good addition to any library. It also occurs to me that this book might be a superior replacement for the usual deadly dull workplace employee handbook.

… as I was just now, in The Wooden Lake, reminds me to bring to your attention a weekend postage at The Dabbler, where Mahlerman tells us about Havergal Brian’s Gothic Symphony, which

calls for up to one thousand performers, including nine choirs, four offstage brass bands, and the normal orchestra size doubled-up to about 150 players. A vast percussion section includes chains, a thunder machine and a bird scare.

That Brian was one of the great British eccentrics has never been in doubt

Given that it was published in 1970, Bernard Levin’s The Pendulum Years : Britain In The Sixties is a remarkably clear-sighted view of the decade, and most of his observations and conclusions would hold good even with the benefit of forty years’ hindsight. But pop music (sorry, make that “pop-music”) was not exactly Levin’s strong point, though he makes a tremendous effort to address the phenomenon…

The growth of pop-music groups – many, no doubt, inspired by the gigantic commercial success of the Beatles to believe that the lightning might strike them too, if they only formed fours and began to perform, but many, also, clearly in the business of self-expression – was the most extraordinary phenomenon in the world of entertainment of the whole decade; long before its end there were literally thousands of them, in Britain and America, and though many flourished only briefly, many displayed surprising endurance, and in any case there were always ten to take the place of one which fell. Some were almost as famous, and successful, as the Beatles; some were known only to the most devoted aficionados. But all added to the atmosphere of the decade, and the isle was full of noises as never before, coming from, among others, the Rolling Stones, the Bee Gees, the Monkees, the Doors, the Cream, the Mothers of Invention, the Seekers, the Who, the Small Faces, the Pretty Things, the Animals, the Pink Floyd, the Scaffold, the Grateful Dead, the Tremoloes, the Family, the Supremes, the Holding Company, the Four Tops, the Led Zeppelin, the Shadows, the Exploding Galaxy, the Editors, the Fugs, the Gods, the Kinks, the Hermits, the Paper Dolls, the Breakaways, the Greaseband, the Casuals, the Amen Corner, the Big Sound, the Flirtations, the Herd, the Marbles, the Status Quo, the New York Public Library, the Hollies, the Foundations, the Electric Havens, the Four Seasons, the Bachelors, the Seychelles, the Love Affair, the Fifth Dimension, the Three Dog Night, the Equals, the Vagabonds, the Marmalade, the Mindbenders, the Moody Blues, the Mirettes, the Tuesday’s Children, the Plastic Penny, the Procol Harum, the Troggs, the Fruit Machine, the Union Gap, the 1910 Fruitgum Co., the Beach Boys, the Fairport Convention, the Vanity Fair, the Harmony Grass, the Aces, the Young Tradition, the Nice, the Dubliners, the Tinkers, the Fleetwood Mac, the Incredible String Band, the Web, the Little Free Rock, the Blodwyn Pig, the Liverpool Scene, the Spooky Tooth, the Third Ear, the High Tide, the Mamas and Papas, the Carnations, the Pacemakers, the From Genesis to Revelation, the O’Hara Express, the Pentangle, the Chickenshack, the Blind Faith, the Fourmost, the Searchers, the Four Pennies, the Bar-Kays, the Unit Four Plus Two, the Hedgehoppers Anonymous, the Applejacks, the Box Tops, the Edison Lighthouse, the Blood, Sweat and Tears, the Vibrations, and the Rada Krishna Temple.

The bulk of the output of all these, including that of the Beatles themselves, vanished, quite rightly, down the memory-hole of instant oblivion.

Many thanks to Ruth Bosch for drawing to my attention a sea-creature headline almost as enticing as Porpoises Rescue Dick Van Dyke. This one is

Giant prehistoric krakens may have sculpted self-portraits using ichthyosaur bones

Read all about it here. Those pesky giant krakens! You never know what they’ll get up to next!

Emily’s correspondent and critic, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, reported in 1870 that the poet told him “…’ people must have puddings’, this very timidly and suggestively, as if they were meteors or comets”.

from Emily Dickinson : Profile Of The Poet As Cook, With Selected Recipes by Guides at the Dickinson Homestead : Nancy Harris Brose, Juliana McGovern Dupre, Wendy Tocher Kohler, and the Resident-Curator, Jean McClure Mudge (Amherst, 1976)

Many thanks to Salim Fadhley for drawing to my attention this whole flapdoodle about magnetically aligned cows. Personally, I have always been convinced of the unbreakable link between cows and magnetism, ever since an episode in a field during a picnic when I was a child. The memory grows dim, for I was but tiny, but magnets and cows were both involved, inextricably, I think. My father, too, and one of my sisters, and a priest who had joined us for the picnic, clad in his black soutane, but non-magnetic. If I could recall the exact date I could check the weather conditions pertaining at the time, if, that is, I could remember precisely where we were, at picnic, near cows, and magnets.

Yesterday I watched The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963) on television, and I was struck by a scene about an hour into the film which fatally undermines the plot. Up to that point, we are rooting for the Allied prisoners of war who, as is usual in such dramas, say things like “OK, chaps, let’s form an Escape Committee and smoke our pipes”, and we accept their statements that it is their duty to try to escape and to otherwise make life as difficult as possible for their Boche captors.

But then comes the scene where Blythe, played by Donald Pleasence, gives an ornithology lecture to some of the men. He whistles the song of the warbler, and then shows them how to draw the masked shrike. We are asked to believe that sensible British chaps would rather risk gruesome death at the hands of the Gestapo when they could see out the war having bird-life explained to them by eerie-eyed Donald Pleasence. This seems to me utterly implausible, and for all the thrills and spills of the remaining two hours, I think the film would have been much better had it concentrated solely on Blythe’s ornithology classes.

Has this got something to do with Jimmy Goddard?

Cutting from Elsie Schrotthaufen

Most celebrated of all the experimenters in other-worldly ways of life were some of [the] Beatles, one of whom, towards the end of the decade, caused great offence to many by going to bed in public with his new bride, a Japanese lady who was variously described as a sculptress and a film-maker, though none could remember seeing any sculpture by her, and the only film she was known to have made consisted entirely of shots of naked buttocks moving, with more or less grace, away from the camera. Mr and Mrs John Lennon, then, having been married, elected to spend their honeymoon entirely in bed, a custom which was, after all, not entirely original. What made their honeymoon different from most is that it was spent in conditions of extreme public exposure, in a suite at the Hilton Hotel, Amsterdam, to which reporters, interviewers, newspaper and television photographers and other interested parties were free to come, and in suitable cases invited to join them in the bed, and there celebrate with the loving couple what was supposed to be the point of the entire proceedings, to wit a demonstration on behalf of personal and international peace. To this end, the walls of the bedroom were decorated with signs saying ‘Bed Peace’, ‘Hair Peace’, ‘Stay in Bed’ and ‘Grow Your Hair’, and the peaceful two argued, reasonably enough, that if everyone stayed in bed, occupying themselves in growing their hair, there would be no wars. To the question, what would happen if most stayed in bed and grew their hair but a few of the more ruthless declined to do so, they had clearly not addressed themselves, for the philosophy behind the performance was summed up by Mr Lennon, who said that all would be well if the Vietnamese, both North and South, would only take their trousers off, followed by the Arabs, the Israelis, the Russians and the Americans, while Mrs Lennon unwittingly touched upon the fallacy in the argument by proclaiming that their mood could be summed up in the words: ‘Remove your pants before resorting to violence’. It might, of course, be objected that this is the spirit which in practice presumably guides every rapist, but granting that Mrs Lennon meant to say that he who removes his pants will be unable to resort to violence, it still left unresolved the problem of what to do about those whose pants stayed resolutely on, and still more the problem of how to deal with those who had learnt to do violence while naked from the waist down, or up, or even both.

Bernard Levin, The Pendulum Years : Britain In The Sixties (1970)

Elsewhere, in one of his newspaper columns, Levin said memorably of Lennon “there is nothing wrong with [him] that could not be cured by standing him upside down and shaking him gently until whatever is inside his head falls out.”

I have just started reading The Pendulum Years, and thus far it seems an eerily clear-sighted vision of the decade given that it was written at its very tail-end. Bernard Levin – who as you will learn we should habitually refer to as Bernard ‘Massive, unflagging, moral, exquisitely shaped, enormously vital, enormously funny, strong, supple, human, ripe, generous and graceful’ Levin – is remembered in a recent comment thread over at The Dabbler, well worth reading. But of course everything in The Dabbler is well worth reading.

Click the image for a bigger version. From the breathtaking The Englishman Who Posted Himself & Other Curious Objects

For no reason whatsoever, I feel it is high time we enjoyed once again dance critic Wilma Salisbury’s report of the “crumpled Jesuit” Father Bob VerEecke’s magnificent performance, as recorded in The Plain Dealer in July 1999. Below, a priceless snap of Father Bob putting his students through their paces.

As an introduction to the Jesuit priest’s choreography, Kahn performed Overwhelmed, an expressionistic evocation of a dark emotional state that suggested sacred dance only in a few gestures of prayer. Set to a recording of prepared piano music by John Cage, the brief piece ended with the exhausted dancer lying in a heap as the stage darkened. When the lights came up, Kahn had disappeared, and VerEecke had taken her place in the same crumpled position. Rising from the floor, he cried out to God, ran around the periphery of the stage and pounded his fists against the rear wall. His cries of the heart were picked up and developed in lyrical movements by ten dancers who had learned the graceful choreography in VerEecke’s workshop.