I haven’t read anything by J G Ballard since I was a teenager. Nor have I read, or enjoyed, much science fiction. A simple statement by Ballard, filmed in 2006 and shown on a Channel Four News obituary last night, makes me suspect I’ve been missing something. He said:

“The great thing about science fiction is that nobody lives in Hampstead.”

Compare and contrast with this extract from a book review by some airhead a few years ago, which I shall have to paraphrase because I cannot track down the exact quote:

“This is a perfectly-observed portrait of North London literary life, with such telling details as the copy of the weekend Guardian Guide on the coffee table.”

I don’t recall which novel was under review, but it could have been one among hundreds, couldn’t it?

Here is a very rare photograph of Dobson hiking in the mountains:

UPDATE : A particularly rigorous Dobsonist has written a hot-headed letter insisting that this is not a photograph of the out of print pamphleteer, but is in fact a still from Arnold Fanck’s 1930 “mountain film” Stürme über dem Montblanc.

Over at The New Psalmanazar, Ian Woolcott remarks: “If my cat were to write a book I think it would read something like Mein Kampf.”  He describes his cat as a wicked, embittered creature, which is almost certainly true of all cats, whose saving grace is their unfathomable stupidity. It is this combination of characteristics which makes them so engaging, unlike dogs. As we have seen, dogs are boring.

We can adduce further evidence of cats’ fundamental malevolence from Nerea De Clifford. In her study What British Cats Think About Television, she wrote: “Most cats show an interest of some kind, though it is often of hostility… a significant reaction is the display of excitement when any picture, especially of birds, moves quickly across the screen.” (Previously quoted in the Archives, March 2004.)

Here is a photograph of Nerea De Clifford, described by the Cats Protection League as “a popular and gracious lady”.

Aladdin is possibly the best-known of the Tales Of The One Hundred And One Nights, fodder for panto and Disney and even for film-makers in the Soviet Union. I have never read the story myself, in any version, and I doubt that I ever will, now that I have chanced upon Thomas De Quincey’s judgment of it.

In Infant Literature, he wrote: “in Aladdin, after the possession of the lamp has been once secured by a pure accident, the story ceases to move. All the rest is a mere record of upholstery; how this saloon was finished today, and that window on the next day, with no fresh incident whatever”.

That said, it’s an interesting narrative technique, if one has a particular readership, such as upholsterers, in mind. But I don’t.

To celebrate what would have been Samuel Beckett’s one hundred and third birthday on Monday, Nige (whom I’ve not come across before) quoted from Watt:

“The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep’s placentas and the long summer days and the new-mown hay and the wood-pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and the corncrake in the evening and the wasps in the jam and the smell of the gorse and the look of the gorse and the apples falling and the children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others and the chestnuts falling and the howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy and the standard oil-lamp and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush and every fourth year the February debacle and the endless April showers and the crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting over again.”

As is probably crystal clear, Watt – along with much else of Beckett’s prose – is a key text for Mr Key. It remains for me one of the funniest books I have ever read. I was introduced to Beckett by my English teacher when I was about fifteen. The teacher’s name was Dick Shone – the schoolboy joke was that, as an English teacher, he lived in a Dick-Shone-ry. He was a fine pedagogue with a talent for withering sarcasm, and I remember him with affection.

 

Mr Key would like to draw to your attention a very promising new blog entitled The Pavilion Of Innocent Pastimes. Its onlie begetter is Hooting Yard’s Antipodean research boffin Glyn Webster. The latest postage, entitled A page from an O’Houlihan’s Wharf primer?, is particularly splendid, and is reproduced below, but do not let that deter you from making many, many visits to the site itself.

Referring to a player called Rolando, the commentator on last night’s Champions League football match said:

“I wonder how long it is since Ronaldo was marked by an anagram of himself?”

Exquisite.

There is much to instruct, entertain and amuse in Flaubert’s Dictionary Of Received Ideas. It is tempting to quote something from every page. But for now, ponder this, and ponder it well:

DUCKS. Always come from Rouen.

Much as all eels emerge from the wide Sargasso sea, I suppose.

Speaking of malevolent putti, as I was below, here is a picture of a pair of them dissecting a dog. Elsewhere in the image, of which this is a detail, another couple of cherubs are examining the entrails of a freshly-slaughtered hare. So, for your own good, don’t be taken in by their oh-so-cutesy appearance!

From the Wellcome Library, via Holly Tucker at the splendid Wonders & Marvels.

“Attention to and gratitude for socks is not a commonly expressed attitude.”  – Theodore Dalrymple in the New English Review.

Jeff Goldstein has devised an excellent new euphemism for children. After rejecting little persons and pre-adults and future adults, he lit upon spatiotemporally-challenged proto-adults. I hope to see this accepted as the common usage in all official reports, directives, ukases and commands.

Yesterday I posted an extract from The Devil’s Party : A History Of Charlatan Messiahs by Colin Wilson. Wilson is quite a maddening writer, slapdash and hurried, but I have to admire the way he litters his text with marvellously entertaining snippets of information. On page 73, for example, we learn that Jim Jones of the People’s Temple funded his early cult-building efforts by being a door-to-door monkey salesman.