Jessica Warner, in Craze : Gin And Debauchery In An Age Of Reason (2003) provides what she says is a complete list of victims of spontaneous human combustion in literature from 1798 to 1893.

The narrator’s father in Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown (1798)

William the Testy in Knickerbocker’s History Of New York by Washington Irving (1809)

A woman in Jacob Faithful by Captain Marryat (1834)

A blacksmith in Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (1842)

Sir Polloxfen Tremens in The Glenmutchkin Railway by William Edmondstoune Aytoun (1845)

The sailor Miguel Saveda in Redburn by Herman Melville (1849)

Mr Krook in Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1852-53)

The whisky-sodden and derelict Jimmy Flinn in Life On The Mississippi by Mark Twain (1883)

A character in Docteur Pascal by Emile Zola (1893)

The list does not include the female cook in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), who was merely “in a frame of mind and body threatening spontaneous combustion”.

Perhaps it is simple good manners that impels me always to read the ‘Acknowledgements’ section in a book. More often than not this will be a list of names, almost all unknown to me, and institutions whose doorways I have never breached. Sometimes the tone is fulsome, sometimes arch, but in general writers keep it neutral and flat. It is always a pleasure, then, to find a jarring note, such as this:

In London I continued in what was by now an established pattern of finding kind and knowledgeable people and shamelessly exploiting them. These included, most notably, Dr. Ruth Paley, then of the Public Record Office, and Harriet Jones and Louise Falcini, both of the London Metropolitan Archives. Such happiness, however, was not destined to last, for my next stop was the new British Library. There I encountered a staff that was impervious to exploitation in any form; indeed, such was their fondness for reading The New York Review of Books that many could scarce find the time or energy to help readers humbler than themselves.

Sadder but wiser, I returned to Toronto.

Jessica Warner, in the PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, Containing As Many DISCLAIMERS as EXPRESSIONS OF GRATITUDE, along with Divers ENCOURAGEMENTS to the READER, in Craze : Gin And Debauchery In An Age Of Reason (2003)

Charles Johnson:

An austere character – he deemed jam “effeminate” and replaced his lost eye with a glass one from a stuffed albatross

His grandson, Anthony Brooke:

[was] supercilious, reluctant to take advice and had displayed a tendency to judge officers according to their horoscopes… The unreliable Ranee later alleged that Anthony had been guilty of folie de grandeur, having cardboard crowns pinned to his car and ordering traffic to draw aside as he approached. Anthony denied this.

From an obituary in the Telegraph, to which I was led by Peter Risdon.

Elsie Schrotthaufen brings us the most fabulous object in the world. The world? Nay, the known universe!

Reading P J O’Rourke’s Holidays In Hell (1988), I learned that in Communist Poland, during the mid-1980s, there was a postpunk band called Garaz w Leeds, or, in English, Garage in Leeds. Had they actually hailed from Leeds, or indeed from anywhere in the UK, this would have been a terrible, terrible name. But precisely because they were languishing behind the Iron Curtain, playing their reportedly very gloomy “Cold Wave” music, I think this is one of the most fantastic band names ever devised. Where are they now, I wonder?

UPDATE : They’re on YouTube!

In November 2000, a crew from ABC television descended upon Winnipeg to film a biopic called Inside The Osmonds. Guy Maddin inveigled himself onto the set. A climactic scene was planned in which the actors playing the popsters would stand aside, to be replaced by the real – now aged – Osmonds themselves.

O-Day at the Walker Theatre. I’m not even the director and I’m dizzy with fear. Since late last night, real Osmonds have been flying in from all parts of Utah, one by one: Virl, Merrill, Wayne, Jay, et al. – the first Osmond reunion in seventeen years! The Winnipeg that awaits them this morning is locked in a cruel dome of permafrost – forty degrees below, and twice as cold with windchill! We Winnipeggers pride ourselves on  moments like this. Compulsively, we muse about the impact our perfrigid town will have on the unsuspecting who visit us. How will the newly arrived celebrities cope with being here? Will they be frightened when their nose hairs are twisted out by the invisible pincers that stab into one’s nostrils at temperatures this low? What will Donny make of that first biting mouthful of air outside the airport when the cold rips into his lungs like a swallowed scissor? Will he wonder why his eyelids have frozen shut as he gropes towards his limo? And what will happen to the real parents, George and Olive, now elderly? Will the cold simply kill them? Will they be borne home in coffins, in the chilled cargo hold of the same plane that brought them here as warm and loving parents?

From “Death In Winnipeg”, collected in From The Atelier Tovar : Selected Writings by Guy Maddin (2003)

That bouffant! That hauteur! It can only be psychopath maestro Lothar Preen!

A rare and wonderful CD cover unearthed at the Pavilion Of Innocent Pastimes. While you are there, take some time to examine the ignorant ornithology archive.

Thanks to Elsie Schrotthaufen

My brother has started a blog, and his second postage is an interesting anecdote about air raid sirens. I would ask all Hooting Yard readers to go and read it, to leave comments, and to bookmark the site or subscribe to it. That way, he may be encouraged to post more often than once a month.

There used to be a library cataloguing methodology called the Dewey Decimal System, which could result in books with enormously long references: A.832.102.098/67 might be an example. Instead, every book fanatic knows that the quaint, humane system used in the London Library is much clearer: all the interesting stuff is in Science and Miscellaneous and arranged alphabetically. Fruit Farming follows Flagellation.

Thus Stephen Bayley, in the Telegraph, while bemoaning the decimalisation of our currency forty years ago. The London Library’s idiosyncratic approach to cataloguing is indeed a thing of wonder, as the juxtaposition in this photograph shows.

Snapshot from the London Library’s set for St Valentine’s Day

There is a simple explanation for the quietness which has stolen over your favourite website in the past few days. I have been immersing myself in the films of Guy Maddin, for me the greatest living genius working in cinema. I first enthused about him here in the summer of 2008, when I saw Brand Upon The Brain! and I am now, through the magic of Het Internet, catching up with as much of his work as I can.

For all the echoes of early cinema, his films are sui generis. His is an absolutely individual talent, to the point where one could say a single shot could not be mistaken for the work of another director. Melodrama, ice hockey, sexual obsession, Winnipeg, dreams, amnesia… just some of the joys of a Guy Maddin film. And let us not forget that he can be deliriously funny.

Here is Odin’s Shield Maiden, a short from 2007.

Wrenched out of context, a splendid quotation from Miss Candida Firebrace *:

“And to behold Minneapolis is one of my dreams. I hunger and thirst for it above all else save righteousness.”

* A character in A Number Of Things by Honor Tracy. See here.

Top quality Roman Catholic literature, number one in the series “Books I wish I had written”.

Thanks to Duncsnoai Plover, who found it here

After reading this post at ZMKC, it seemed like a good idea to familiarise myself with the work of Honor Tracy. Here is a quick character sketch (of Desmond Marjoribanks, editor of Torch, “some new dynamic weekly that’s going to teach us all how to live”) from her novel A Number Of Things (1960):

“He was a man of about forty with a lofty brow made loftier by hastily retiring hair, and the wide thin mouth, the nutcracker nose and chin that often go with large progressive views: his light blue eyes positively glared with love of humanity, his nostrils expanded and deflated with enthusiasm like those of a passionate horse. He dearly loved resolutions, workers’ councils, committees, monster rallies, his children and his second wife. His first wife had thrown herself under a train.”

His downstairs neighbour, Orlando Figgis, has twin children named Summerskill and Hallucination. I suspect I am going to enjoy this book.