I have learned never to judge a gentleman by the cleanliness of his doilies.

Bella Pok to Lucifer Box in The Vesuvius Club : A Bit Of Fluff by Mark Gatiss (2004). Recommended.

From Dull Tool Dim Bulb

… speculation continued to flourish in Germany, where a group of young writers, gathered at the University of Jena, began to explore the philosophical ideas of Friedrich Schelling, and what he called Naturphilosophie. This doctrine, perhaps best translated as ‘science mysticism’, defined the entire natural world as a system of invisible powers and energies, operating like electricity as a series of ‘polarities’. According to Schelling’s doctrine, the whole world was indeed replete with spiritual energy or soul, and all physical objects ‘aspired’ to become something higher. There was a ‘world-soul’ constantly ‘evolving’ higher life forms and ‘levels of consciousness’ in all matter, animate or inanimate. All nature had a tendency to move towards a higher state.

So carbon for example ‘aspired’ to become diamond; plants aspired to become sentient animals; animals aspired to become men; men aspired to become part of the Zeitgeist or world spirit. Evolutionary, idealist, electrical and Vitalist ideas were all evidently tangled up in this system, which had an obvious appeal to imaginative writers in the Jena circle like Novalis, Schiller and Goethe, as well as experimental physiologists like Johann Ritter. It had its attractions, not least in its optimism and its sense of reverence for the natural world. But it also constantly teetered on the brink of idiocy. One of its wilder proselytisers, the Scandinavian geologist Henrick Steffens, was said to have stated that ‘The diamond is a piece of carbon that has come to its senses’; to which a Scottish geologist, probably John Playfair, made the legendary reply: ‘Then a quartz, therefore, must be a diamond run mad’.

Richard Holmes, The Age Of Wonder : How The Romantic Generation Discovered The Beauty And Terror Of Science (2008). In some ways the joys of this book are encapsulated in a single brief sentence on page 273:

The Anti-Jacobin magazine made a more general link between radical politics, inhaling gas, flying balloons and mesmerism.

Lac D’Indiference

Mer D’Inimitie

From Ptak Science Books

The weedy, asthmatic, fey and trembling poet Dennis Beerpint has, I am afraid to say, been caught red-handed in an act of blatant plagiarism. The title piece in his latest slim volume of twee verse, Swamp Demons, And Other Demons, And Other Swamps, has been copied word for word from the August-September 1936 issue of Weird Tales magazine, where it was correctly ascribed to the writer C A Butz. Reclining on a divan, feeling faintly ill, Beerpint has refused to comment on his act of poetic perfidy. Here is Butz’s original verse.

The lights that wink across the sodden moor

Like phosphorescent eyes that beckon men

To risk fell footsteps in the treacherous fen,

And sink in loathsome muck, without a spoor —

What ghosts of former days, what dread allure,

Abides within this subterranean den?

Or, reaching out, snares victims to its ken,

With wraith-like fingers, to a peril sure?

‘Tis told that evil things lurk out of sight

With human bones that fester in the ooze;

Belike ’tis true, these bones that once were clothed

In fleshly form now harbour deadly spite

Against the living, and this swamp still brews

Within its bubbling depths the curse men loathed

Before they turned to leprous Things of Night!

At last, a proper job! It is with some pride that I announce my adoption by an American baseball team as their mascot. According to the Baltimore Orioles, I am “a family friendly character”, and apparently I was unveiled just last week, though I must admit I don’t recall the event. Perhaps I was taking a nap at the time.

Particularly exciting is that I have been given my own army, known as “Frank Key’s Army”. I think I shall lead them on manoeuvres in the near future, though rather than deploying them to one of the world’s trouble spots it might be more satisfying to set them, armed to the teeth, upon defenceless persons I abhor. Luckily, I do not detest quite so many people as Percy Grainger did, so the world is (relatively) safe in my hands.

Of course, becoming a deeply adored mascot would cause a swimming in the head for an unstable or partly deranged person, so I will be careful to keep a proper perspective. Now I must go and drill the troops and issue them with their blunderbusses, muskets, and surface-to-air missiles.

Yesterday we learned that real men don’t write postscripts, and that “the apogee of superficiality” is to scribble a PS on the outside of an already-sealed envelope. Clearly this is something only a girly like “Case 11” would do. According to W L George, any man exhibiting such behaviour must be a mincing unmanly fop with an interest in the arts.

But wait! His thesis is comprehensively demolished when we consider this passage from Richard Holmes’s The Age Of Wonder, in an account of Mungo Park’s second African expedition:

The atmosphere among the surviving members of the expedition is caught in a letter which the cheery, hardbitten Captain John Martyn wrote… Finally he added a scrawled note on the stained outer flap of his letter, dated 4 November. It captures a soldier’s-eye view of the British imperial mission. “PS Dr Anderson and Mills dead since writing the within – my head a little sore this morning – was up late last night drinking Ale with a Moor who has been at Gibraltar and speaks English – got a little tipsy – finished the scene by giving the Moor a damn’d good thrashing.”

[My italics.] Now, does hardbitten Captain Martyn sound like an effeminate prancing ninny? I think not. This whole matter of girly postscripts evidently requires further study.

Now you too can speak and write like Percy Grainger! At Strange Flowers, which I am extremely pleased to have discovered, James Conway provides a splendid list of Grainger-approved words. He explains:

… the older he got the more cantankerous he became. A 1958 piece entitled “The Things I Dislike” began “Almost everything. First of all foreigners, which means: all Europeans except the British, the Scandinavians & the Dutch.”

Grainger was nothing if not thorough, and his distrust of anything originating south of Holland led to him to try and purge his writing of Greco-Latin elements

There is much more in the piece about the madcap Antipodean composer, but the highlight is the glossary itself. Go thou hence and memorise it, and soon you will be able to write vast epic poems akin to those of Charles Montague Doughty, surely Grainger’s guiding spirit?

See Beatus Of Liébana at the Public Domain Review

Men do not, as a rule, use postscripts, and it is significant that artists and persons inclined toward the arts are much more given to postscripts than other kinds of men. One might almost say that women correspond by postscript; some of them put the subject of the letter in the postscript, as the scorpion keeps his poison in his tail. I have before me letters from Case 58, with two postscripts, and one extraordinary letter from Case 11, with four postscripts and a sentence written outside the envelope. This is the apogee of superficiality.

W L George, The Intelligence Of Woman (1916)

What with the foul and beastly vice and further spookiness at South Mimms, I admit to lying awake at night, tossing and turning, fretful that nothing of comparable import ever seemed to happen at North Mimms. One likes to think of the Mimms (Mimmses?) as equal in their attractions, albeit those attractions are largely historical. Balanced Mimms are so much easier to comprehend, within my head, than lopsided Mimms. I am going to have to consult a reference work to decide on the proper plural.

To my delight, I have discovered an event at North Mimms to serve as a counterweight to all that shenanigans at South Mimms. The Age Of Wonder : How The Romantic Generation Discovered The Beauty And Terror Of Science by Richard Holmes is itself a wonder of a book. Nige has a postage on it which you would do well to read. In his chapter on ballooning, Holmes tells us of the foppish Vincent Lunardi (1759-1806), a young Italian who made the first manned balloon ascent in Britain, rising from Moorfields in London on 15 September 1784. He took his cat with him. After drifting across London and over Hertfordshire, eating chicken, drinking champagne, and accidentally breaking one of his aerial oars, Lunardi noticed that the cat was numb with cold. He brought the balloon down (by paddling the oars, he claimed, which Holmes points out is impossible), and delivered the shivering cat into the hands of a no doubt nonplussed peasant girl in a field, before reascending and continuing his historic flight. And where was this field? Why, in North Mimms!

I have not yet managed to ascertain the name of the cat, more’s the pity. If any reader knows it, perhaps they would be kind enough to let me know in the Comments. You can see the cat for yourself in this portrait of Lunardi published by Edward Hodges of Cornhill just six weeks after his act of feline mercy in North Mimms.

Yesterday, an idea for an opera. Today, an idea for a ballet, courtesy of the magnificent headline

Swan ‘falls in love’ with a tractor

I do think they could have omitted those pesky inverted commas. The ballet would have to have a role for animal behaviourist Daniela Fiutak, who could communicate her insight “The swan presumably had contact with machines during puberty. He sees the tractor as a sexual partner” through the medium of interpretive dance.

… the decade being the 1970s, my source again Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age Of Paranoia (2009). It is a book of many delights, not least the account of the evening of 5th  April 1976 at 5 Lord North Street, the London home of Harold Wilson. Earlier that day, Wilson resigned as prime minister, and now he has invited two BBC journalists, Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtior, to join him for a quiet drink – and to persuade them to investigate the many plots against him, variously ascribed to the KGB, the CIA, MI5, or the Post Office, perhaps all of them. At one point, Wilson says:

I see myself as the big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man may tell you something, lead you somewhere.

The implications of this would seem to me to be quite colossal. [If a man could influence inanimate objects by the power of thought,] then surely it becomes more than possible that we all either have within our minds or can be in direct touch with powers so massive as to dwarf our mightiest machines and maybe ultimately to make our whole materialist technology obsolete? In medieval times, the Establishment, faced by such a threat to its orthodox beliefs, would quickly have burnt Uri Geller at the stake. In our more sophisticated modern world The Times simply maintains a dignified silence.

Hamish Scott of London SW10, reading perhaps just a teensy bit too much into the conjuring tricks of Uri Geller, in a letter to The Times in 1973, quoted in Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed : The Golden Age Of Paranoia (2009). A more sensible response to Mr Geller was uttered by Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, no less, who secured herself a wee corner in history when, on television early in this century, she uttered the immortal words “These are Uri’s underpants. Burn them.” A contemporaneous report can be found here.

Chapter One of The Saga Of Halfred The Sigskald : A Northern Tale Of The Tenth Century by Felix Dahn, translated by Sophie F E Veitch (1886)

Nigh upon fifty winters ago, there was growing up in the North a boy named Halfred. In Iceland, on the Hamund Fjord, stood the splendid hall of his father, Hamund.

At that time, so the heathen people believe, elves and goblins still moved about freely among the Northern nations. And many say that an elf, who had been friendly to the powerful Hamund, drew near to the shield cradle of the boy Halfred, and for his first food laid wild honey upon his lips, and said—

Victory shall be thine in harping / Victory shall be thine in singing / Sigskald shall all nations name thee

But this is a mere idle tale of the heathen people.

And Halfred grew, and was strong and beautiful. He sat often alone on the cliffs, and listened how the wind played in rifts in the crags, and he would fain have tuned his harp to the same strain, and because he could not do it he was filled with fury.

And when this fury swept over his forehead the veins in his temples swelled, and there came a red darkness before his eyes. And then his arm sometimes did that whereof his head knew nothing.

When his father died Halfred took the seat of honour in the hall. But he took no heed to preserve or improve his inheritance. He gave himself up to harp playing and feats of arms. He devised a new strain in singing, “Halfred’s strain,” which greatly charmed all who heard it, and in which none could imitate him. And in hatchet throwing, not one of the men of Iceland could equal him. He dashed his hammer through three shields, and at two ships’ lengths he would not miss with its sharp edge a finger broad arrow shaft.

His mind was now set upon building a dragon ship, strong and splendid, worthy of a Viking, wherein he might make voyages, to harry or levy toll upon island and mainland, or to play his harp in the halls of kings.

And through many an anxious night he considered how he should build his ship, and could devise no plan. Yet the image of the ship was always before his eyes, as it must be, with prow and stem, with board and bow; and instead of a dragon it must carry a silver swan on the prow.

And when, one morning, he came out of the hall, and looked out over the Fjord, towards the north, there, from the south-south-east, came floating into Hamund’s Bay a mighty ship, with swelling sails. Then Halfred and his house-churls seized their weapons, and hurried out either to drive away or welcome the sailors. Ever nearer drove the ship, but neither helmet nor spear flashed on board, and though they shouted through the trumpet all was still. Then Halfred and his followers sprang into the boat, and rowed to the great ship, and saw that it was altogether empty, and climbed on board. And this was the most splendid dragon ship that ever spread sail on the salt seas. But instead of a dragon it bore a silver swan upon the prow.

And moreover also, Halfred told me, the ship was in all things the same as the image he had seen in his night and day dreams; forty oars in iron rowlocks, the deck pavillioned with shields, the sails purple-striped, the prow carved with runes against breakers, and the ropes of sea-dogs’ skin. And the high-arched silver wings of the swan were ingeniously carved, and the wind rushed through them with a melodious sound.

And Halfred sprang up to the seat of honour on the upper-deck, upon which lay spread a purple royal mantle, and a silver harp, with a swan’s head, leaned against it.

And Halfred said—

Singing Swan shalt thou be called, my ship / Singing and victorious shalt thou sail

And many said the elf who had given him his name had sent the Singing Swan to him.

But that is an idle tale of the heathen people. For it has often happened that slightly anchored ships have broken away in storms, while the seamen were carousing ashore.