[Thomas Carlyle’s] aversion for the ‘fixed smile’ of Greek statuary was equal to that of Ruskin, and his way of expressing it no less individual. Carlyle sat to G F Watts for his portrait, and Watts, as he often did in conversation with his sitters, began to talk of Pheidias. Carlyle advanced a criticism which no one else seems to have thought of. He contended that among all the sculptured beings which the genius of Pheidias had produced there was ‘not one clever man’. With the long upper lip of Ecclefechan obstinately tightened he declared that a short upper lip showed an absence of intellect. He stuck to his point even when Watts cited Napoleon, Byron, and Goethe as evidence against him. He added that the jaw of the Greek was not sufficiently prominent. ‘Depend upon it,’ said Carlyle, ‘neither God nor man can get on without a jaw.’ ‘There’s not a clever man amongst them all,’ he repeated, ‘and I would away with them – into space.’

from William Gaunt, Victorian Olympus (1952)

Thanks to Nige for alerting me to this splendid book, in this post over at The Dabbler.

These are not real owls. Find out where they are perched here.

Readers will recall the podcast Airy Persiflage, wherein from time to time its onlie begetter, Walter O’Hara, turns his attentions to scribblings by Mr Key and the recitation thereof. In his latest outpourings for podpersons, Mr O’Hara tackles Ambrose And Signor Ploppo (accompanied by “young Gar”) and The Cruel Sea.

It is perhaps worth giving some background to Mr O’Hara’s choice of the latter piece. The other day, he “befriended” me on Facebookcloth. There, I noted that he can lay claim to having posted the most sensible status update ever to appear on the social networking site, a transcription of The Cruel Sea in its entirety. Several of his Facecloth friends wondered what he was wittering on about and made various (wrong) guesses before he revealed the sordid truth. At which point I stepped in to say how delighted I would be were he to recite the piece on his podcast. And lo! it came to pass!

Complete and (initially) unattributed transcription of Hooting Yard texts as Facecloth updates is clearly the way forward. Let us hope it catches on.

The 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest awards have been announced, and there is some terrific – that is, awful – stuff duly honoured. Go here for the winners and runners-up.

There is one passage that, to my mind, doesn’t belong in the list. I would have been proud to write the sentence that made Mike Mayfield the runner-up in the Adventure category. Far from being “bad” writing (deliberately or otherwise), I think this is superb, and rather Hooting Yardy:

Sensing somehow a scudding lay in the offing, Skipper Bob tallied his tasks: reef the mains’l, mizzen, and jib, strike and brail the fores’l, mizzen stays’l and baggywrinkles, bowse the halyards, mainsheets, jacklines and vangs, turtle and belay fast the small cock, flemish the taffrail warps, batten the booby hatch, lay by his sou’wester, and find the bailing bucket.

Long long ago, when I was wet behind the ears, I wrote a story which began: “Oh, I so wanted this to be a seafaring yarn.” Then and now, I could learn a thing or two from Mike Mayfield.

UPDATE : Readers who follow the link to By Aerostat To Hooting Yard and read it for the first time should note that the Dobson in the story is completely unrelated to that well-loved character Dobson the out of print pamphleteer.  Just so you know.

It has been an industrious week at Hooting Yard, what with the publication of a brand new paperback and the production of those lovely lapel accoutrements. Global domination has never seemed so surely within my grasp. Whatever next?, you may ask. Fridge magnets? Monogrammed bomber jackets? Hooting Yard tea-cosies? Tee-shirts?

Mention of tee-shirts is as good a pretext as any to bring to your attention this splendid (if unrealised) design by recently-deceased Hooting Yard aficionado Martin Clare, recorded by his brother in a funeral tribute.

Hooting Yard reader Richard Carter has a letter published in the latest edition of the London Review Of Books. I take the liberty of reproducing it here for your edification and instruction. Our resident anagrammatist R. (who is not Richard, by the way) should find it of particular interest:

Steven Shapin writes that Darwin’s uncontrollable retching and farting seriously limited his public life (LRB, 30 June). Some years ago, to my delight, I worked out that the great man’s full name, Charles Robert Darwin, is an anagram of ‘rectal winds abhorrer’. Unfortunately for my anagram, the meanings of words, like species, can evolve. On the rare occasions that Darwin mentioned his problems to friends, he always used the word ‘flatulence’. Nowadays, we think of flatulence as being synonymous with farting, but in Darwin’s day it meant (as it technically still does) an accumulation of gases in the alimentary canal. While I’m sure that Darwin must have vented his excess gas one way or the other, there’s no reason to believe that his farts were uncontrollable.

A gallery of ventriloquists and their dummies. Think of poor Michael Redgrave in Dead Of Night, and shudder…

It may come as a relief to some readers to learn that I am done with Cornelius Cardew for the time being. I am now turning my attention to Percy Grainger. Thanks to Strange Flowers, we have already learned how to speak like the madcap Antipodean, and when I start reading the biography I have borrowed from the library I shall regale you with interesting snippets. For now, let us consider the title he gave to a pen-portrait of his mother:

“Mother’s Wilfulness, Recklessness, Fearlessness, Bossiness, Violence If Opposed, Tendency To Burn Food When Cooking, Vehemence”

Percy and his Ma

On May 13 1988 I was amused to read a report in The Daily Telegraph that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had erected a mesh fence to keep bird-fanciers away from a colony of little terns on Great Yarmouth beach, whose numbers had grown from 20 pairs to 70 pairs in three years.

On August 2 1990 I was interested to read a report in The Daily Telegraph as follows:

“Britain’s biggest breeding colony of little terns, on Great Yarmouth Beach, Norfolk, where 201 pairs were nesting, has been largely wiped out by two hedgehogs and a kestrel.”

Kestrels, of course, are fanatically protected by all the high-tech and paramilitary resources of the multi-million pound RSPB, which on this occasion seems to have been hoist with its own petard, as they say. It is hard to know with whom we should sympathise most in this tale: the ordinary bird-fanciers, who were kept away from fancying little terns by a mesh fence put up by the superior bird-fanciers of the RSPB bureaucracy, or the unfortunate little terns, condemned to twitter away unseen.

My own sympathies are with the hedgehogs. They are delightful, if slightly flea-ridden, animals, with whom it is sometimes possible to hold an intelligent conversation. Has anybody ever had an intelligent conversation with a little tern? Hedgehogs do not demand a whole apparatus of repression to survive. Every time a hedgehog wipes out a little tern, it is a blow for freedom.

Auberon Waugh, “Nature Notes”, The Daily Telegraph, 11 August 1990

John Tilbury, in his biography Cornelius Cardew :  A Life Unfinished (2008) on some of the later songs, when our hero had become a member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party Of Britain (Marxist-Leninist):

Invariably, the songs are extended by virtue of repetition ; in “Revisionist Somersaults And The Opportunist Opposition” the brevity and uneventfulness of the melody is a blessing, except that there are ten verses; the crude lyric is provided with music which is appropriately routine… How can this be explained – by which I mean, what was Cardew thinking at the time? I quote just the first verse:

One jumps out and one jumps in saying

CPC(ML) agent of the bourgeoisie

The Moscow ‘communists’ really love this country

And say that CPC(ML) is against democracy

With one foot in and the other also

The revisionists and opportunists defend the status quo

“An Opportunist Has Come Back Home” is an endless, turgid, sectarian tract attacking a ‘revisionist’ who has betrayed the Party. The text is spoken and sung; the music is interspersed with, and accompanies, speech alternating with a sung chorus… the whole text [is] of extraordinary length, doubtless uncut and unabridged. Here, towards the beginning, Voice 1 describes the young man:

Oh beautiful sight! What a striking pose!

Oh look at his Russian greatcoat,

The Mao badge on his lapel,

His Castroite fatigues,

And this is not all! Oh yes!

(Voice II)

An opportunist has come back home

For me, the wonderful thing about these songs is that they are sung in an impeccably upper middle class accent, and have a jauntiness redolent of the Bloomsbury set on a picnic outing. Not so much jolly hockey sticks as jolly petrol bombs. (I’m also intrigued by the way the ideological imperative of the lyrics means that they rarely scan comfortably. Well, you try packing “our ideology is Marxism-Leninism, we’re workers and like workers everywhere our aspiration is for socialism ushered in by violent revolution” or “in utter chaos the old order spews out unlimited decadence and parasitism” into a singable song.)

“Fortunately, there was no sign of the bird and we can only assume that it had flown away probably suffering from a headache.”

Details here.

Here is another magnificent extract from Further Science : Book 20 by Norman Davies. (See here.)

FASHION SEQUENCE

1. That from 1272/1327, there was a simple monk style.

2. 1327/99 – pointed shoes and sleeves.

3. 1399/1461 – bull horn hats – hence narrow central next/theatrical.

4. 1461/85 – Welsh witchy narrow central hats.

5. 1485/1509 – square curtained bed fashion peak/tall thin people.

6. 1509/47 – square wooden Henry 8th puff sleeves.

7. 1547/58 – dark fan skirt – Spanish.

8. 1558/1603 – Elizabethan/Drake bearded pirate/big tent waists and shoulders.

9. 1603/25 – Odd – big waists and metal narrow thorax.

10. 1625/49 – Van Dyke Cavalier/untrustworthy/lax floppy.

11. 1649/60 – dark Welsh witchy.

12. 1660/89 – dark brigand/Quaker hats.

13. 1689/1714 – tall narrow heads reaction.

14. 1714/27 – black Red Riding Hood.

15. 1727/60 – big waists.

16. 1760/90 – big heads.

17. 1790/1837 – long and thick/squashed.

18. 1837/60 – wooden thick.

19. 1860/80 – overdone.

20. 1880/1900 – odd.

21. 1901/18 – contrived.

22. 1918/30s – flighty freaks.

23. 1940/5 – War/frenzied mean to lower Middle class on.

24. 1946/8 – peak fine simple bold quality Middle class fashion.

25. Peak fine fashions occurred in the 14th Century/semi late 15th century /late 15th century / 1515 / 1695 / 1896 / 1946/8.

Newly available from Munsey’s, those fine purveyors of out of copyright e-books, is a yarn by Joe Archibald called “How Green Was My Valet”. File it on your e-book e-shelf alongside those titles devised some years ago by the great Max Décharné, “Dr Terror’s House Of Horace” and “When Dinah Shore Ruled The Earth”.

With the demise of a vile diet of moral squalor and pap their favourite newspaper which they bought in their millions, no doubt the British working class are at last ready to heed Cornelius Cardew’s stirring call-to-arms from 1979…

All together now…

British ruling class puffed up with arrogance
Boasted that the sun shone on your vast empire
That sun has now eclipsed.
British ruling class, we have got news for you.
Your time has run out; You have got to go.

Light is shining in the sky
Heralding the dawn of a glorious new day,
British working class you’re the revolutionary force.
To build our socialist land.

British working class you have a fine history
Fierce battles waged against a vicious enemy
With grim determination.
British working class aspires to revolution
In the face of attempt to crush this aspiration.
Of socialism in Britain

Chorus

In the 1840s Marx and Engels on our shores
Organised and hammered out the objective laws propelling history
Marxist-Leninist science is the guiding star
Charting the course of the working class:
Socialist revolution.

Chorus

Persisting in the face of every difficulty
In 1979 was formed our new party, a glorious victory.
Rallying to this flag is the only way, workers
To usher in, a bright new day of
Socialism in Britain.