We awake to discover the Great Wen matted with snow. The city is a white wasteland. Buses and trains stand cold and neglected in their depots. By the day’s end, if the snow does not melt, or worse, if there are further falls, there is a real risk of an epidemic of piblokto. Shivering in their hovels, the populace cries out as one, “Oh what shall we do? How can we cope with a world o’ snow?”

Far away, in Portland, Oregon, artist Hayley Barker has the answer. Back in December, she wrote:

Snow has hit Portland hard. It is causing some serious cabin fever. The perfect antidote – the Hooting Yard podcast. Frank Key’s podcast of strange, erudite, somehow Victorian short stories is certainly worth your time. This man has created a rich fictional village full of bird-watching pamphleteers, troublesome janitors, and more juicy language than you can fit in a pippy bag, which is a phrase he uses often and one that I truly love. If you love alliteration, tongue-twisting phrases, and antiquated language strung into run-on sentences, please download his podcast, The Hooting Yard. I love Henry James’ language, and Frank Key is like a postmodern Henry James with a dry sense of humor and a small town perspective. One of my favorite phrases is “gossamer fripperies,” found in the story Pitfalls On The Path To Sainthood. How can you not love it? I thank my husband for finding him…. Now go listen to a story about Dobson the pamphleteer. Or better yet, buy one of the books. Let’s keep this writer writing!

Ms Barker is clearly a very sensible woman. You can see her art here. Meanwhile, take her advice, batten down the hatches, and immerse yourself in Hooting Yard until the snow disperses and tiny, fragile signs of life reappear in the white and silent city.

It is now quite clear that, since the inauguration of Barack Obama as Potus, we can all rest easy in our beds. For I learn that Obama keeps on his desk an Egg Of Power.

Could it be that, when he publishes his presidential diaries in years to come, Obama will take a leaf out of George Orwell’s book, and give us simply a daily status report on the egg?

January 31. One egg. But it is the Egg of Power!

The Oval Office may be renamed the Ova Office, and Alfred Hitchcock will be rolling in his grave.

Moderniser is favourite to lead Russian church, says the headline in today’s Guardian. The online edition sadly does not include the photograph of dynamic thrusting modernist Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk which appeared in the paper. But do not fret. I have found one, so readers’ jaws can drop at the breathtaking modernity of the man they call “Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk”. That’s him on the right, in the oh so modern colourful robes, unlike the hopelessly passé figures next to him, who look positively mediaeval in their black garb. On the other hand, they might be beatniks, and it’s Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk who’s behind the times, daddy-o.

Currently in preparation, The Hooting Yard Encyclopaedia Of Birds will prove, I think, to be a majestic work of birdy scholarship destined to blow the roof off the pretty little hut of contemporary ornithology. Apart from anything else, it will include stuff about dozens of birds other avianists don’t even know exist, such as the lopwit. As a brief taster, here is part of the entry on the great grey shrike:

The Latin name of the great grey shrike, Lanius excubitor, translates into English as butcher sentinel. Whenever this bird is hereafter mentioned in Hooting Yard, that is what it will be called, as in the sentence “Oh look,” said Dobson, taking a pause from hammering a nail into a plank to no apparent purpose, “There is a butcher sentinel singing its little heart out atop that wooden pale.”

Mustard Plaster provides a link to the pamphlet The $100 Prize Essay On The Cultivation Of The Potato, Prize offered by W.T. Wylie and awarded to D.A. Compton to which is appended How To Cook The Potato, Furnished by Prof. Blot (New York, 1870). Well worth a read if you are a potatoey person, which I sincerely hope you are.

Prof. Blot, by the way, is Pierre Blot (c.1818-1874), a man whose name I would have had to invent had he not already existed. According to culinary historian Jan Longone, “As far as I can tell, no other nineteenth-century cook in America was treated with a comparable level of media hyperbole”. Alas, after his death, an article written about him concluded that “he lived to see himself neglected and discarded by a capricious public”.

The Pierre Blot revival begins here!

Given that this weekend sees the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch 2009, I thought it would be helpful to repost these two diagrams from the Hooting Yard archives, giving readers some idea of what to look out for, in their gardens, through their binoculars, this weekend. (Click to see the diagrams a bit bigger.)

The Independent reports on some very sensible new rules issued by the Vatican to deal with people who have visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or BVM.

Anyone who claims to have seen an apparition [of the Virgin Mary] will only be believed as long as they remain silent and do not court publicity over their claims. If they refuse to obey, this will be taken as a sign that their claims are false.

The visionaries will then be visited by a team of psychiatrists, either atheists or Catholics, to certify their mental health while theologians will assess the content of any heavenly messages to see if they contravene Church teachings.

If the visionary is considered credible they will ultimately be questioned by one or more demonologists and exorcists to exclude the possibility that Satan is hiding behind the apparitions in order to deceive the faithful.

I have put my name forward as a volunteer outreach demonologist for the new scheme. Peeking behind apparitions to check for the presence or absence of Satan is, after all, a long-standing hobby of mine, and I think I have the required skills-set. I would also perform my demonology duties in a robust and transparent manner, or in a weedy and opaque manner if that is what the Vatican would prefer.

Five years ago today, when the Hooting Yard website was in its infancy, I posted this quotation from The Daily Telegraph Book Of Obituaries. It still makes me laugh.

Sir Atholl Oakley (1900-1987) was a champion wrestler, an impresario of giants, organiser of “rugged holiday cruises” and an authority on Lorna Doone. His wrestling career began after he was beaten up by a gang of thugs. He built up his physique by drinking eleven pints of milk every day, a regimen designed by the giant wrestler Hackenschmitt, who later told Oakley that the quantity of milk prescribed was “a misprint”.

A letter plops on to the mat from keen Hooting Yardist Roland Clare:

Dear Frank, he writes, In view of Hooting Yard’s present, thoroughly understandable, preoccupation with slobbering, now may be the right time to recall a pleasingly Keyesque passage in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando:

“… the doctors were hardly wiser then than they are now, and after prescribing rest and exercise, starvation and nourishment, society and solitude, that he should lie in bed all day and ride forty miles between lunch and dinner, together with the usual sedatives and irritants, diversified, as the fancy took them, with possets of newt’s slobber on rising, and draughts of peacock’s gall on going to bed, they left him to himself …” (p48 of the 2000 Penguin Modern Classics edition).

Many thanks to Mr Clare for that. Inexplicably, it may be the first appearance of the word posset on this website. I suspect it will not be the last.

Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti has a marvellous post on words ending in –fuge. He notes Thomas Hardy’s coinage of dolorifuge in Tess Of The D’Urbervilles –

“The children … had made use of this idea as a species of dolorifuge after the death of the horse.”

– and cites a contemporary reviewer of Hardy complaining about his “outlandish words” –

“Think how absolutely out of colour in Arcadia are such words as ‘dolorifuge’, ‘photosphere’, ‘heliolatries’, ‘arborescence’, ‘concatenation’, ‘noctambulist’ – where, indeed, are such in colour? – and Mr. Hardy further uses that horrid verb ‘ecstatisize’.”

There are many more –fuge words to chew over, and I may well make use of some of them in the coming year.

Back in November, you will recall, we had a brief look at George Orwell’s diary and its – at times – exclusive concentration on egg-counting. I have not seen fit to keep you abreast of the daily totals, confident as I am that you are equally fascinated by this egg business, and thus have added a check of the online diary to your daily routine. However, the latest seventy-year-old entry is somewhat alarming, so I thought I should draw your attention to it.

26-28.12.38 Have been ill. Not certain about number of eggs, but about 9.

Not certain? Get a grip, George, get a grip!

I am indebted to the great Max Décharné for drawing to my attention this little-known (to me, unknown) work by H G Wells. The title is foolish enough, but I am particularly fond of that resounding subtitle: Adventures, Poses, Stresses, Conflict, and Disaster in a Contemporary Brain. Somehow I think that deserves an exclamation mark. If any Hooting Yardistas have read it, perhaps they could post a review in the Comments.

Go and visit the online exhibition. Right now.

Last Sunday, 14^th December, came and went without my realising that it marked the fifth birthday of the Hooting Yard website. Belatedly crack open those bottles of aerated lettucewater! (There was, of course, an earlier Hooting Yard site on the interweb, but it was static, in that it contained various stories and pictures and was very, very rarely updated.) We have come a long way, readers, you and I, and I thank you for your support. Here, for the hell of it, is the very first item posted. The Search Engine Lure referred to is buried somewhere in the Archive.

Vigilant readers of the Hooting Yard Search Engine Lure will note within it the splendid word “bewolfenbuttlement”. Like “solipsism”, this is a coinage by Horace Walpole, but sadly one which never caught on. When the future George III was a teenager, his grandfather tried to marry him off to a European princess, much to the dismay of George’s mother. The name of the princess was Sophia Caroline Maria, daughter of the Duchess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Under his mother’s influence, George became fretful and aghast at the proposal, and – as Walpole wrote – he “declares violently against being bewolfenbuttled”. To resurrect the word successfully, perhaps it is necessary to widen it from the sense of being forced into an arranged marriage to being forced into anything one doesn’t want to do. Start using it today!

“Miss Stein likes to look at rocks and cows in the intervals of her writing. The two ladies drive around in their Ford till they come to a good spot. Then Miss Stein gets out and sits on a campstool with pencil and pad, and Miss Toklas fearlessly switches a cow into her line of vision. If the cow doesn’t seem to fit in with Miss Stein’s mood, the ladies get into the car and drive on to another cow. When the great lady has an inspiration, she writes quickly, for about fifteen minutes. But often she just sits there, looking at cows and not turning a wheel.”

A splendid example of the intersection of cows and literature, from a 1934 New Yorker profile of Gertrude Stein quoted in Daily Routines (How writers, artists, and other interesting people organise their days), an excellent new blog. Among those so far included are Franz Kafka, Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and Anthony Trollope. Neither Dobson nor Pebblehead has yet been attended to, and I may have to deal with those two titans myself.