It has come to my attention that an art person called Alan Disparte has a “work on paper” entitled Hooting Yard, depicting transmogrified owls. Go and look at it here, and at his main page, or portal*, here. Hommage or coincidence? Who can say? I cannot help but notice that his name is an anagram of Natal Despair.

* Do people still refer to “web portals”, or has that phrase gone the way of “the information superhighway” and other once thrilling coinages? This is not the kind of thing I know about, although I think this very page you are reading ought to be known as The Hooting Yard Portal, or Lobby, or Vestibule.

Over at BibliOdyssey, Peacay has a fantastic quotation from Robert Payne, in a letter to Gilbert Sheldon written in 1650:

“The truth is, this Jesuit, as generally the most of his order, have a great ambition to be thoughte the greate and learned men of the world; and to that end writes greate volumes, on all subjects, with gay pictures and diagrams to set them forth, for ostentation And to fill up those volumes, they draw in all things, by head and shoulders; and these too for the most part, stolen from other authors. So that if that little, which is their owne, were separated from what is borrowed from others, or impertinent to their present arguments, their swollen volumes would shrink up to the size of our Almanacks. But enough of these Mountebankes.”

The first in our Occasional Graveyards series is a shrine to a graveyard rather than a graveyard as such. You can read about the Cross Bones Graveyard here. It is about five minutes walk from the ResonanceFM studio on Borough High Street, so next time you listen to Hooting Yard On The Air, bear in mind that Mr Key may well have been pondering the Eternal Verities at the shrine just beforehand, or possibly soon afterwards. The photographs were taken by Pansy Cradledew, who has not posted them on a flickr page, because she’s not that kind of girl.

Here are a few useful things I learned while reading Buchanan’s Journal Of Man, Volume 1 Number 4, published in May 1887:

“Pianos have lately been made from paper in Germany, instead of wood, with great improvement in the tone.”

“There is no denying that the young man about town of the nineteenth century is a blot upon our boasted modern civilization. His is not a pleasant figure to contemplate, though it is one that we all see very often and know very well – clothed irreproachably in the most expensive raiment that London tailors and unlimited credit can supply. He lives lazily and luxuriously on his father’s money and his wife’s, and, being after his natural term of days laid away in a tomb at Mt. Auburn, ends his existence without making any more impression upon the world’s history than a falling rose leaf, or an August cricket’s faintest chirp.”

“In 1885 we were informed of the success of spirits at Cleveland, Ohio, in communicating messages by the telegraphic method in rapping, in which our millionaire friend, Mr. J. H. Wade, has taken much interest. A little apparatus has been constructed, with which the spirits give their communications in great variety. I have repeatedly stated that the diagnoses and prescriptions of deceased physicians have always proved in my experience more reliable than those of the living. This has been verified at Cleveland. The late Dr. Wells of Brooklyn has been giving diagnoses and prescriptions through the telegraph.”

I think we can agree with the correspondent of the Vineland Rostrum, who said of the Journal’s editor J R Buchanan “We never read an article from the pen of this world-renowned thinker, but that we feel we are in the presence of one whose shoes’ latchet we are unworthy to unloose”.

Many thanks to Odd Ends.

If, like me, you are unreasonably obsessed with the weird goings-on in the Anglican church, you might have discovered the blog being tapped out by Bishop Gene Robinson*. I am certainly pleased that I stumbled upon it, for I have learned about Saint Rumwold.

Saint Rumwold was born at King’s Sutton in AD 662, the son of Saint Cyneburga and King Alchfrid. His first words, on the day he was born, were “I am a Christian”. He then asked to be baptised, and to receive Holy Communion. The next day he preached a sermon, quoting freely from Scripture. On the third day he addressed another sermon, to his parents, and then he keeled over and died. A pious infant indeed.

Possibly even more pious than Edward Gorey’s Henry Clump…

*NOTE : Pansy Cradledew has asked me to point out that Bishop Gene Robinson, a gay bishop, should not be confused with Gay Bishop, the TV newsreader who sometimes presents news items about gay bishops.

Following on from Corncrake Project, the first in a series of what might be called Hooting Yard’s Readers’ Digest-style digested news stories, here is another one. Actually, this one is so digested that I have plucked just a single phrase from it.

… tinkering with a generator, while handling a sausage …

If I end up posting more of these enticing little bagatelles, they will need a proper collective name. “Hooting Yard Digestive Biscuits”, perhaps.

There are two films I adore without reservation. Both of them have been constant guiding influences on me, either consciously or in more subtle ways. One of them, Jacques Rivette’s Celine And Julie Go Boating (1974) I have seen umpteen times, whereas the other, Peter Greenaway’s A Walk Through H : The Reincarnation Of An Ornithologist (1978), I saw once shortly after its release and only again last year.

Of course there are dozens, or hundreds, of other films I have relished over the years, from Brief Encounter to Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, from Love And Death to Random Harvest, but somehow those two have been my touchstones. I saw them first when I was young, and they opened up new imaginative possibilities to me. It would not be true to say that I haven’t been bowled over by a film since then, rather that I can’t think of one that has given me precisely that sense of wide-eyed surprised gleeful imaginative abandon.

Until yesterday, when I went to see Brand Upon The Brain! by Guy Maddin. Hooting Yardists will need only to know that the film takes place in a lighthouse orphanage on Black Notch island, that the characters include a harp-playing teenage detective and an evil boffin in his underground lab, and that communications are made via aerophones and a foghorn, to understand my enthusiasm.

Here is Andrew Sarris in The New York Observer: “Brand Upon The Brain! succeeds at one and the same time in functioning as both a celebration and a deconstruction of the conscious and unconscious glories of silent movies through the barely thirty years of their existence at the beginning of the 20^th century. Let us say simply and definitively that I have never seen anything like it. The pace of the twelve chapters, told over the course of ninety-five minutes, surges along, propelled by the archaic silent-movie storytelling device of intertitles coupled with a faux-naif verbal narration…[it] is one of the most compelling avant-garde excursions into the narrative cinema ever.”

Apparently the film is to be released on DVD next month, so everyone should buy a copy. It is a work of genius.

Razorbill 41. Sulphur-crested cockatoo 80. Fulmar 40. Golden eagle 32.

Learn many more exciting facts about the lifespans of various birds by reading Derwent May in The Times. Verily, Hooting Yard provideth a tiptop ornithological education.

Christopher Frew’s letter in today’s Guardian is worthy of note:

I am sure professional broadcasters will have many stories to tell of Charles Wheeler, but my favourite dates from the defection of Kim Philby at the height of the cold war (Obituaries, July 5). Wheeler was asked whether he was surprised at Philby’s treason. “Not really,” replied Wheeler, “I never really trusted him. He was the sort of fellow who … smiled at breakfast, that sort of thing.” A great loss, fondly remembered.

Quote of the day from the BBC’s Andrew Castle at Wimbledon. A few minutes ago, he just said: “Tim Henman – like a molecule in a box!” My thoughts exactly.

I have just created a Wordle. As far as I can see, it’s based on the most recent Hooting Yard entries, rather than all of them, which is what I would have preferred. And yet it is still a thing of beauty, I think.

If I had more skill in technical jiggery-pokery, I would have copied the image and posted it here to save you following the link, but it didn’t seem to lend itself to standard copying and pasting. Perhaps I can rely on the helpful nature of a technobod reader to tell me how to do that, and also to tell me if it’s possible to do a Wordle of all of Hooting Yard, rather than just some of it.

N.B. – There is a second one here.