In Act III, Scene III of Death’s Jest-Book, or The Fool’s Tragedy by Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1829), Isbrand asks an important question:
What is the lobster’s tune when he is boiled?
Alas, he does not answer it, but goes on to sing a song about an unborn ghost, a Nile crocodile, and a “little, gruntless, fairy hog”. This is all very well, but I still want to know about the lobster’s tune. Can any reader point me in the right direction? Are there any contemporary cover versions?
From Agence Eureka
The way to deal with eelworm in phlox is to spray with Murphos, a paraltrion curb. The way to avoid being slighted by bus drivers, waiters and salesgirls is to be unselfish, self-confident, thoughtful, enthusiastic and happy. The way to stop a long-winded speaker is for the chairman to rise, thank him for his splendid contribution, and lead the audience in thunderous applause. The way to resist a male seducer is for the lady to sit in an armless straight chair and pop a piece of salt-water taffy into her mouth every time he is about to kiss her… The way to keep matches dry in a row-boat is to put them in a fruit jar whose lid has been fastened to the underside of the seat; to get at them, unscrew the jar from the lid. The way to hem a circular flounce on a slipcover is too complicated to go into here. The way to make a “Stradivarius” violin is to do what it tells you to do in You Can Make A “Stradivarius” Violin, a publication of Popular Mechanics Press. The way to raise the Devil is as follows: draw a circle with consecrated coal and chalk and write around it, “I forbid you, Lucifer, on the name of the Blessed Trinity, to enter this circle”; then take a stand inside the circle and recite: “I conjure thee, Lucifer, by the ineffable names ON, ALPHA, YA, REY, SOL, MESSIAS, INGODUM that thou comest to do, without harming me” [you then tell him what you want]. Nota bene: this works only on Mondays; on Tuesdays, for instance, Lucifer must be addressed as “NAMBROTH”, on Saturdays as “NABAM” (Note to printer : no typos please, matter of life and death) and on Sundays he will answer only to “AQUIEL” and will ask for a hair of your head which on no account should be given him – he can be fooled with a hair from a fox.
The above useful information is a dipperful from the great American reservoir of know-how…
The R R Bowker Company publishes How-To-Do-It Books : A Selected Guide, two hundred pages of descriptive bibliography compiled by Robert E Kingery… Mr Kingery has cut a few paths through the jungle of howtoism, culling out a mere 3,500 titles, which he has arranged under nine hundred heads, from Abacus to Yoghurt, but traversing even these well-blazed trails is fatiguing. Alcoholics, Allergy, and Alligators; Candle-Making and Candy-Making; Chiggers and Children; Diving Boards and Divorce; Embroidery, Emotions, Enamelling, Encyclopaedias, Entertaining, and Etching; Mental Illness cheek by jowl with Metalwork; Money (Counterfeiting) cozying up to Money-Making Ideas; Survival (Atomic Bombs) modulating into Swans. There are books on how to succeed as a motel operator, a woman, a baby sitter, a committee member, a guest, a parent, a child, a lover, a Chevrolet owner, and a baton twirler, (The Baton: Twirling Made Easy!) There are howtos on encouraging bees and earthworms (Thomas J Barrett’s Harnessing The Earthworm) and on discouraging ants, budbugs, cockroaches, moths, silverfish, and termites. There are howtos on pigeons and pigs and poker; on poultry, pregnancy, printing, and poison ivy; on sleuthing and sleeping (How To Sleep Successfully); on standing (Your Carriage Madam!, by Janet Lane) and sitting (Sitting Pretty by, needless to say, the same author); on rabbits, rheumatism, riddles, rifles, and rugs; on lace and lizards, lacrosse, and lampshades; on wood carving, meat carving, soap carving, and ice carving; on how to make mobiles, be a widow (three titles, including Donald I Rogers’ Teach Your Wife To Be A Widow), and get tall (Paul O’Neill’s Why Be Short?); on how to collect books, bottles, buttons, and butterflies; on how to buy things and even one book on how to throw things away – Morgan Towne’s Treasures In Truck & Trash, which tells “how to pick out the treasures from the junk in the cellar and attic, how much they are worth, and where to sell them” and which is by no means the only entry in Mr Kingery’s 3,500 that sounds as though it might really be quite useful in dealing with one of the many special problems that bother people in this intricate age. After all, it is not the fault of the howto author that modern life gets more and more complicated, calling on him to settle problems that are more and more arcane. One sometimes wonders, however, whether a feedback is not at work here and whether a number of these problems would perhaps never have arisen to bother us if books had not been written telling us how to solve them.
Dwight Macdonald, “Howtoism”, collected in Against The American Grain (1962)
From 1973 to 1975 Auberon Waugh wrote a regular column for the New Statesman. So unlikely was this alliance that Waugh gave the apposite title In The Lion’s Den to a 1978 book collecting fifty of his pieces. In the introduction, he described the imaginary New Statesman reader he was addressing:
My image of the New Statesman reader was that of a taut, slightly embittered female school-teacher, possibly in Coventry but certainly in one of the less well-favoured areas of the country, struggling valiantly against the inherited and environmental disabilities of her charges to preserve some quasi-theological Hope in the socialist future. She was a convinced atheist and a convinced progressive in sexual matters although her own experiences in that field had seldom been encouraging. In foreign affairs she was endlessly progressive but in home affairs subject to strange disciplinarian urges which might suddenly demand unspeakable punishments not only for racists, rapists and male chauvinists, but also for litter-louts, cigarette-smokers and males generally. She approved of homosexuality and unmarried mothers, disapproved of drink and drugs, approved of education, disapproved of anyone excelling in it, approved, rather nervously, of the working class in most of its manifestations except football hooliganism and represented, in fact, the only surviving bastion of middle class values.
Do I know what my colours are?
Do I make my vowels sing?
Am I direct, sincere and simple?
Do I know the proper way to sit in and rise from a chair?
Am I lovable?
Am I original?
Am I valiant?
Have I made a legal will?
Do I know where it is?
Do I hang up my clothes as soon as I take them off?
Do I sew a snap-fastener on to each end of a piece of tape about an inch and a half long, and sew these tapes in the centre of all shoulder seams?
Am I so poised, so on my centre, so innately joyous that life cannot sway me this way or that?
Jill Edwards’ Self-Searcher, a series of questions for daily reflection, quoted in Against The American Grain : Essays On The Effects Of Mass Culture by Dwight Macdonald (1962).
Canon Freddy Hood (Principal of Pusey House) – cream jug.
Lord Hailsham (Quintin Hogg) – set of Pyrex dishes.
Naomi Mitchison – Highland rug.
Ian and Mary Mikardo – breakfast coffee set.
Chips Channon – edition of Shelley.
J B S Haldane – kitten.
Elwyn Jones – model donkey.
Tony Benn – silver card case.
Graham Sutherland – drawing (by G Sutherland).
Ronald Searle – drawing (by R Searle).
Evelyn Waugh – copy of Helena (by E Waugh).
Nancy Mitford – copy of The Blessing (by N Mitford).
Seretse and Ruth Khama – fish knives.
Ted and Barbara Castle – face towels.
Jim and Audrey Callaghan – four ashtrays (two broken).
Some of the gifts given to Tom Driberg and Ena Binfield at their wedding in 1951, as listed by Francis Wheen in Tom Driberg : His Life And Indiscretions (1990).
Just weeks after we celebrated her 94th birthday, we mourn the passing of Leonora Carrington.
At Airy Persiflage, the golden-voiced Mister Nizz recites useful hoofprint advice first delivered to readers and listeners here at Hooting Yard. Mr Key is apparently the “favourite hard-living surrealist” chez Nizz, though at least two of those terms are decisively erroneous. Links to earlier splendid readings by the Nizzter are here and here. Listen and learn.
Recently I posted a piece about a giant who roars “Fee Fi Fo Fum!” and smells the blood of an Englishman, and a couple of years ago I became enthusiastic about Thomas Nashe (1567-c.1601) among whose works is the splendidly titled Have With You To Saffron Walden – which, alas, I never got round to reading. Had I done so, I would already have learned what I found out today.
Father had taken us to see John Gielgud in the title role [of King Lear] at Stratford-upon-Avon, and although Gielgud was marvellous, it was the words of Poor Tom, the Bedlam beggar on the stormy heath (actually Edgar, in disguise), that still rang in my ears:
Child Rowland to the dark tower came;
His word was still
Fie, foh, and fum!
I smell the blood of a British man!
“Did Shakespeare steal that from Jack and the Beanstalk?” I had whispered in Daffy’s ear. Or had the fairytale borrowed the words from Shakespeare? “Neither,” she whispered back: both had cribbed them from Thomas Nashe’s Have With You To Saffron Walden, which, having been staged in 1596, pre-dated them.
This is from The Weed That Strings The Hangman’s Bag by Alan Bradley (2010), the second of his Flavia de Luce mysteries. These are new to me, but I am pleased to tell you that the heroine is an eleven-year-old amateur chemist and sleuth – a plucky and resourceful tot who bears a striking resemblance to our very own Tiny Enid, without the fascism and the club foot. It is a hugely enjoyable read, as one might expect from a book which makes mention of “a pair of gutta-percha motoring galoshes (‘Ideal for Country Breakdowns’)”.
I noted below that when my Flemish-speaking mother wanted to improve her English, she worked her way through the classics of literature. Nowadays, we just slump in front of the television and watch foreign-language thrillers on BBC4. Thus I have embarked upon a crash-course in Danish by watching, somewhat belatedly, Forbrydelsen, or The Killing, the highly popular murder ‘n’ knitwear detective series. Apart from being a splendid example of Nick Cohen’s observation that ethnic minorities are never the villains in BBC cop shows, the series has done wonders for my Danish language skills. I think I could successfully apply for an IT post in Copenhagen, armed with these additions to my vocabulary:
English : computer. Danish : compuder.
English : password. Danish : password.
English : fuck-up. Danish : fuck-up.
Not only has Hooting Yard been in security lockdown for a week or so, but Mr Key has neglected to keep abreast of the goings-on in those corners of Het Internet to which his fuming brain is usually attuned. I am thus a few days late in drawing your attention to Brit’s excellent piece in The Dabbler on Joyce’s Ulysses.
No mention of that book can ever be allowed to pass without my chucking in the following addenda:
1. Here are extracts from two contemporary reviews of Ulysses, written when it was strange and new:
“An immense mass of clotted nonsense” — Teachers’ World
“The maddest, muddiest, most loathsome book issued in our own or any other time… inartistic, incoherent, unquotably nasty … a book that one would have thought could only emanate from a criminal lunatic asylum” — The Sphere
2. James Joyce always pronounced the title as Oo-liss-iss.
3. My late mother made a famous pronouncement on Joyce. Born in Belgium, she came to Britain in her early twenties after her marriage to my father. One of the ways she chose to improve her English was by reading through the canon – Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Dickens, et cetera. She eventually decided to tackle Ulysses. Casting it aside after a few pages, she declared – after a guttural Flemish expostulation which defies accurate transcription, but sounds more or less like the correct pronunciation in Flemish of the final part of the name Vincent Van Gogh – “James Joyce – dat man is a fool!”
Mr Key is taking a brief break from Hooting Yard duties to attend to a number of matters in the mundane world. Rather than wailing and gnashing your teeth and rending your garments in the extremity of despair, you should pop round to Diana Sudyka’s Tiny Aviary. I am most grateful to reader Richard Carter for telling me about it. Don’t miss the plaster monster loon!
Another splendid quotation from the journal of Brian Cornelius Cardew, circa 1959:
My passport is more important to me than my sex-life.
On the bus : I have to write to distract me from the woman, the warm pressure of the femme de trente ans, her softest arm. Boulez – rescue – your programme note must curb my corpuscular eruptions.
Cornelius Cardew, aged twenty-two, in his journal, quoted in Cornelius Cardew : A Life Unfinished by John Tilbury (2008). I have just begun reading this book, which – at over a thousand pages – is clearly both a Herculean labour of love (thirty years in the writing) and mildly bonkers. In other words, the best kind of biography. Expect further reports as I wade through it.
The house is frame, painted gray with green shutters. A wire fence runs round the trim yard. The owner works as a draftsman in a downtown company, his wife keeps house. They have lived in the neighbourhood for many years.
It is now dark, a little after eight o’ clock on a winter evening. The downstairs light is on, the blinds are drawn. A man comes to the front door, raps lightly, and is admitted. Soon another man, walking at a leisurely pace, rounds the corner and enters. He has parked his car on another street.
Ten minutes pass. A third man knocks. He has come by bus from downtown. To make certain nobody was following him, he had ridden two stops past his correct destination, then walked back. Five minutes later a fourth person, a woman in a dark coat, arrives. Everything is quiet : no loud voices, no cars parked in front, no reasons for the neighbours to suspect that a Communist party meeting is in progress.
Communist Party groups like this are small, containing three, four, or five people – a security precaution. In that way fewer members know each other and detection is less likely. Meeting places are frequently changed : this evening a private home, next time a public library or an automobile. Members have been known to sit on park benches, in bus terminals, even in hospital waiting rooms, hatching their plots in casual, conversational tones…
Night after night, week after week, these men and women are plotting against America, working out smears, seeking to discredit free government, and planning for revolution. They form the base of a gigantic pyramid of treason, stretching from the little gray house with green shutters to the towers of the Kremlin.
J Edgar Hoover, Masters Of Deceit : The Story Of Communism In America (1958)