Last night I dreamed I created an art installation and was accused of plagiarism by a tearful Malcolm McLaren. Worrisome indeed, but I think on this occasion I will eschew the services of a mind doctor.

Every five years, Hooting Yard awards a prize for the best entry received in our Essay Competition. As ever, the subject matter of essays is in some wise related to potatoes. Entries must be at least ten thousand words in length, couched in majestic sweeping paragraphs, and executed in gorgeous handwriting. This year’s title is as follows:

“Potatoes were no food for a dying woman.” – Hannah Maria Jones, The Life Of A Murderer (1848). Discuss, with particular emphasis on potatoes and dying women.

The closing date is tomorrow.

Apropos of crow and hare oracles, R., in a comment, takes me to task for being cavalier about the precise nature of the rug upon which one’s cards are dealt and pebbles scattered, and asks for – or rather demands – a rug reading list. It pains me to suggest that such a request merely demonstrates R.’s lack of attunement with the esoteric spheres. It also reminds me that the old fraud G I Gurdjieff began life as a travelling rug salesman. As how could he not? For his trade is hidden in his name. Take the first three letters, reverse them, and voila!, “Gur” becomes “Rug”. Thus we see how human destinies can, sometimes, be inscribed in our being.

I think it no accident, either, that my correspondent R. shares an initial with the subset of floor covering types he is getting all worked up about. I do not use the phrase “worked up” lightly, for of course it reminds us of “The Work” about which Gurdjieff babbled and wrote for much of his preposterous life. I wonder if R. would be driving himself to the same level of hysteria had I recommended dealing the cards and scattering the pebbles upon a mat, or even upon linoleum.

In addition, may I advise R. to be careful what he wishes for? A cursory reading of the medical literature warns us against becoming fumous-brained about floor coverings such as rugs, mats, and especially carpets. Quite literally, that way madness lies!

It is indeed quite some time since I received any news of the doings of the Blot family. I hope to give readers an update when I can, and am keeping a beady, if myopic, eye on the many and various messages spewing out of my metal tapping machine.

Long-term readers, and those who regularly frequent the 2003-2006 Archive, will be aware that in those distant days Hooting Yard had a certain ramshackle charm. Mr Key had to be dragged kicking and screaming to use a proper blog format, though clearly there are innumerable benefits in terms of indexing and commenting and so on. It was the lack of any helpful method of navigation that led to the old site having what was rightly called an “Unhelpful Index”.

Now, through the titanic efforts of Glyn Webster, the 2003-2006 Archive has been helpfully indexed. Readers can zip to any item at the click of a mouse. This also means Mr Key can refer you back to some age-old piece without having to use that increasingly annoying instruction to “go to the page and scroll down”.

Mr Webster’s work is very much appreciated, and it seems all good Yardists ought to spend a few days, or weeks, or even months scrubbling around in the Archive to dig out their favourites, or to discover things they didn’t even know were there.

NOTE : The link in the sidebar now directs straight to what Mr Webster calls Project Ṻbercoordinator. He has also provided this handy diagram:

There is a slight possibility that Hooting Yard may be offline for a couple of days, due to ludicrous shenanigans with which I shall not bore you. If this happens, get your fix by burrowing in the 2003-2006 Archives. With luck, however, I may be able to delete this entry. Fingers crossed.

UPDATE : I am pleased to report that the shenanigans, such as they were, have been averted. I was on the point of deleting what I had written above, when a thought popped unbidden within my brain, and my hands, looming in readiness above the keyboard, loomed still, in mid-air, as if frozen in a snapshot. The thought was this: if I leave those measly words in place, could I not use them as a pretext upon which to tap out a further barrage of sensible prose? Each day one struggles, as if through fog, or mud, or foggy mud, for ideas, for things to say, for observations to make, for words to add to the teeming words already bashed from the keys, between glugs of tea, or Lemsip, between staring out of the window at the sky and the clouds and the flocks of swooping unidentified birds. There are of course more bitter struggles, let’s not get carried away. And sometimes it is not a struggle at all. Sometimes the words come as easily as falling off a log, as they say. Twenty two years ago, on the morning after the Great Storm, there were more logs lying around from which one could fall, having first clambered to stand upon them, than one usually finds in this bailiwick. Ordinarily one might have to walk a mile or two, or more, to find a log lying on its side, riddled with worms and burrowing tiny beings and grubs. But there were logs aplenty after so many trees had come crashing to the ground in the night, battered by howling winds. But perhaps I am confusing fallen trees with logs, when they are not quite the same thing, or not at all the same thing, and I am just displaying my ignorance of certain aspects of the world. It would not be the first time. I rarely check the accuracy of my assertions before I tap ’em out, and I never feel constrained to write, as that witless piece of advice has it, “only about what you know”. How dull would that be? Only yesterday, for example, I stumbled upon a reference to the German film director Wieland Speck. I had never heard of him before, but something in his name appealed to me. “Wieland”, with its echoes of Gothic from Charles Brockden Brown’s novel of that name, and “Speck”, a lovely chunky word one can spit out, and its meaning of a thing tiny and evanescent and fugitive. Within five minutes, I had embroidered inside my head a majestic canon of Speck films about which I might hold forth, pretentiously, waving my arms in dramatic gestures, the cynosure of a salon’s worth of credulous admirers. I might be wearing a beret, and sporting a goatee, in this little mirage, taking languid puffs on a Gitane between singing the praises of an intense black and white melodrama of sulky demimondaines directed by Speck in 1966. For me, Speck – pronounced Shpeck, being German – was up there with Fassbinder and Herzog, as fecund as the one and as unhinged as the other, and I was ready to write a monograph about him. Alas, a couple of minutes of research, made so effortless by the interweb, told me that Wieland Speck was not the cinegod of my dreams, merely the director of a handful of features that sounded, frankly, a tad mediocre. Twenty two years ago, at the time of the Great Storm, before the interweb as we know it, it would have taken me much longer, weeks or months or even years, to track down information about Wieland Speck, assuming I maintained my interest long enough to do so. My private Speck would have had a longer life, with time to grow and develop, before the disappointment of the real Speck obtruded. At interweb speed, my dream Speck is come and gone in minutes, become a mere mental speck in my own history, and would be swiftly forgotten. Ah… but never forgotten if I write him down, no, and never deleted. Had I been so rash as to obliterate the shenanigans above, I might never have found myself recalling the glorious fictional cinematic career of my mental Wieland Speck, who has as just a claim to posterity as the real one. Well… probably not, all things considered, but you know what I’m saying, daddy-o, because I’ve just said it.

When I woke up this morning, there were no hoofprints on my ceiling, but I felt as if hooves were thumping inside my head. Overnight I seem to have been transformed into the Sick Man of Europe. Lemsip has been deployed. Andrew Motion famously drinks Lemsip to oil the wheels of his poetic gift, such as it is, but I am afraid it has no similar salutary effect upon me. There may be Hooting Yard silence for a few days until I recover the will to live.

Meanwhile, here is a quotation to ruminate upon, from Eric Thompson at Laudator Temporis Acti: “Misanthropy and cave-dwelling go hand in hand”.

You know, in a very real sense, if Jesus were here today, faced with global financial meltdown and other topical newspaper headlines, he would, I think, wear a chunky knitted cardigan. Most sensible folk would do the same.

Mr Key, on the other hand, is going to barricade himself inside Fort Hoity. Or possibly Fort Toity.

 

I don’t want to get into unspeakable navel-gazing, but cannot let slip one of the comments on the Drabblecast* reading of Boiled Black Broth And Cornets. One of the pleasures of having stories read there – apart from the fact that I was paid thirteen quid for this one – is the nature of some of the contributions to the discussion forum. The audience is, I suspect, at something of a tangent to the Hooting Yard listenership.

Consider this, from “delfedd”: “What the bleep happened in that story? I got the voodoo zombie part. But why did she go absolutely insane?” Perhaps I am reading it wrong, but “delfedd” appears to be suggesting that to ply your friends with voodoo zombie soup is perfectly normal behaviour. Only later does Becke Beiderbix go “completely insane”. I find this quite a worrying attitude, the more so because “delfedd”’s location is given as “Everywhere”, meaning that s/he could barge in through my door at any moment, in full voodoo zombie mode.

* NOTE : Incidentally, I have been wondering what the connection is between Norm Sherman’s podcast and our own dear Margaret Drabble. And does he have plans to launch another podcast named after her sister A S Byatt?

Those of you who enjoyed listening to Norm Sherman’s reading of “Far, Far Away” will be pleased to hear that this week’s featured story on his Drabblecast podcast is “Boiled Black Broth And Cornets”. Once again, his approach to the telling of the tale is wildly at variance with my own*. Actually, I haven’t yet read this piece on the radio, but when I do, it will sound completely different. I am very fond of Norm’s treatment, he somehow makes my words much spookier than I thought they were.

In the preamble, Norm mentions that he has just bought a copy of Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags. He’s obviously a very sensible man. If you haven’t yet purchased your own copy, do so now. 

* UPDATE : In a comment on the Drabblecast discussion forum, listener “tbaker2500” concurs: “Whilst listening to the story, I also heard in my head how Frank would read it. Two entirely different beasts. Frank always sounds so indifferent, Norm so earnest. ” Hmm… “indifferent”? An interesting choice of word. I think it may be the mot juste.

The Heresiarch laments: “The depressing thing is that, increasingly, custard is all we have left.”

But remember the wise words of Ned Ward (1667-1731) in British Wonders; Or, A Poetical Description of the Several Prodigies and Most Remarkable Accidents That have happen’d in Britain since the Death of Queen Anne (1717):

“Custard, that noble cooling Food,/ So toothsome, wholsome, and so good, / That Dainty so approv’d of old, / Whose yellow surface shines like Gold.”

You can find a longer extract from the poem, including some terrific lines about pudding, at BabelStone.

The other day I very belatedly installed a programme that provides statistics on this site, telling me how many visitors have alighted here, which posts they have looked at, and so on. The most amusing feature is of course the list of search terms, typed into Google or some other engine, which have brought the innocent and unwitting to the big iron gates of Hooting Yard. I am preparing a post on this topic, which should appear in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, however, I was startled by one item in today’s list of “search terms people used to find your blog”. It is this:

is frank key will self? hooting yard

Well, to whomsoever typed that, the answer is a resounding: No, of course not.

Although I would like to add that towards the fag end of last year, I went to see an art installation called Seizure. It was located in a derelict and abandoned housing estate in southeast London and, because it had gained rather a lot of publicity, I thought it would be a good idea to arrive early to avoid being at the end of a long and straggly queue. On the morning of my visit, however, the rain was teeming down and Pansy Cradledew and I were only the second people to arrive. Ahead of us was a family group, and I recognised among them the tall lugubrious figure of Will Self. Shortly thereafter, I discovered that my cigarette lighter was kaput. So I asked Mr Self for a light. In the downpour, he twice tried unsuccessfully to light my cigarette, grumbled miserably about lighting his own cigarette first and, having done so, proceeded to light mine. I said thank you, and he carried on moaning to his family about the rain. So, although I am not Will Self, he did light my cigarette in a downpour.