In a pioneering new work of social history, Dot Tint focuses her beady bluestocking eye – through a lorgnette, we assume – upon the Festival Of Argumentative Music At Ṻlm. To be precise, she examines the first occasion on which the festival was broadcast over what used to be called the wireless, back in one of those years in the first half of the twentieth century.

In an age of apples and pods, it can be a bit of a strain for us to imagine the excitement generated by the news that peasants in far-flung hovels would be able to listen to the goings on live from Ṻlm. Dot Tint writes: “When  it was announced that the full programme of concerts, workshops, provocations and shouty stuff would be broadcast, there were outbreaks of mass hysteria in the countryside. Farmhands fainted in the fields. Hens acted weirdly in their coops. Wells were poisoned, and cows became fractious.”

Many countryside wirelesses in those days were primitive pieces of kit bolted together from odds and ends of metal and wiring and bakelite panels. The fact that, as soon as one depressed the starter knob, they began to hiss and crackle and emit ear-splitting shrieks made them the perfect medium for listening to the racket from Ṻlm.

The festival that year was devised by a singularly bad-tempered Teutonic hothead by the name of Klaus Krank. Dot Tint’s pen-portrait of him includes the fascinating note that “even the furrows of his tempestuous brows were themselves furrowed, deeply so, deep as the grave wherein my friend was laid”. She does not tell us who this friend might be, not even in a footnote, and I would have liked a footnote, given that the rest of her text is fairly riddled with them, sometimes two or three to a page, in tiny, tiny type, so tiny that I have had to crack the spine of my review copy to flatten it so that I can place it on a platen and view it through the lens of a large important industrial magnification instrument. It might be argued – it has been argued – that I would be better off getting my eyes tested and wearing a pair of prescription spectacles, or contact lenses, but why the hell should I? I see no reason to be cowed by the gradual, inevitable dilapidation of my physical self, by the relentless withering away of my senses. I shall fight that dereliction with every atrophying fibre of my being, and, where necessary, with large important industrial magnification instruments. Like Dot Tint’s unnamed friend, I too will one day be laid in a grave as deep as the furrows, or rather the secondary furrows, of Klaus Krank’s mighty brows, and until that time comes I shall simply refuse, in a booming voice, to be extinguished. As the poet Dennis Beerpint wrote, “Do not prance winsomely into that grave / Rage, rage against the [something], Dave” in his verse Lines Upon The Imminent Death Of Dave, My Pet Viper.

Beerpint was not yet born when the Festival Of Argumentative Music At Ṻlm was first broadcast on primitive wireless sets. One wonders how he might have tackled a commission to write a threnody for it, to be set to music by one of Klaus Krank’s hotchpotch collection of composers, each outdoing the others in misanthropy and general grumpiness. Yet theirs was a grumpiness of a very earnest, serious-minded sort, and they wrote music to match. The lucky peasants who tuned in to the wireless in their windswept fenland hovels were treated to such masterworks as Six Bagatelles Upon A Windswept Fenland Hovel by Von Straubenzee, The Drainage Ditch Variations by Ack, and Lullaby For A Cow Felled By Ergot Poisoning by Ergott.

The great value of Dot Tint’s book is that she makes explicit the link between the confrontational nature of much of the music and the violent altercations between Klaus Krank and the composers and the ticket sellers and the security patrols and the audience and the paramedics and the wireless engineers and the dog handlers and the piano detuners and the ratcatchers and the festival docents at Ṻlm. Not only that, but she puts it in the wider context of Uruguayan political intrigues of the time. She blithely dismisses the predictable objection that Ṻlm is not even on the same continent as Uruguay in prose that glistens like a jewel. She even appends a picture of such a jewel, in the form of a mezzotint by her brother, the noted mezzotintist Rex Tint.

It is one of several such mezzotints in the book, which also contains a small selection of photographs. The one reproduced below purports to show Tiny Enid, Mrs Gubbins, and Old Farmer Frack listening to the broadcast of Klaus Krank’s own Festival Overture For Cello, Pots And Pans, And Electronically Modified Corncrake, but this cannot be right, as the three of them are known never to have occupied the same time and space upon this or any other planet. Dot Tint confirms as much in a highly amusing Erratum slip inserted into my copy of the book.

 

Here is a simple magic trick to astonish your family and friends. When performing it, wear a sweeping black cape, and apply some mascara around your eyes. Doing so will add a dash of mystique and make you seem a little more exotic than you are already. If you have no family, and few friends, you can drag some mendicants and urchins and dogs off the street.

The trick can only be performed on a sunny day, for to begin you need to position yourself in such a way that you are standing in a shaft of sunlight beaming through your window into an otherwise gloomy room. This shaft of light will make visible motes of dust dancing in the air around you. The OED defines a mote as a particle of dust, esp. one of the innumerable minute specks seen floating in a beam of light. There are several other definitions of mote, but that is the one I am talking about. Dust, meanwhile, is given as earth or other solid matter in a minute and fine state of subdivision, so that the particles are small and light enough to be easily raised and carried in a cloud by the wind; any substance comminuted or pulverized; powder. Again, the dictionary gives other meanings of dust, including that to which anything is reduced by disintegration or decay; spec. the ‘ashes’, or mouldered remains of a dead body. Note that I am not for one minute suggesting that you should perform this astounding magic trick while engulfed in a cloud of the dust to which some close relative, say your Ma or your wan tubercular sister, has recently been reduced. If you are grieving for one not long departed, whether it be your Ma or your sister or anybody else, you should probably not be trying to do conjuring tricks, even as a way of perking yourself up. Grief is grief, and must run its course, as any number of books in the self-help section of your local library will tell you, even in this day and age. You may search fruitlessly, in your library, for a work of literature or history or science, but I am told that the shelves still heave with self-help books of all kinds, especially ones with a television tie-in.

Make sure you are standing within the shaft of sunlight erect and resolute. Do not hunch your shoulders, or slouch, and try not to topple over. If you are the sort of person who tends to topple, because you are overwhelmed by the sheer weightiness of existence, shore yourself up with something. Metal poles, artfully placed, can keep even the weediest of neurasthenics upright, at least for long enough to perform this trick.

Explain to your audience that you are going to astound and amaze them. Speak in a booming voice resonant with melodrama. If you are incapable of producing sufficiently booming and melodramatic sounds, hire a ventriloquist, who can be hidden somewhere within the gloom. Do not be disheartened if any members of your audience chuckle, or titter, or even guffaw. That will be a reflection upon them, not upon you. They will, I would wager, be chuckling or tittering or guffawing due to nerves, nerves strained to snapping point in anticipation of the eldritch forces you are about to unloose. Meet any laughter with a cackle of your own, or of your ventriloquist’s, and make it a fiendish cackle, but do not overdo it.

Now it can happen, especially in a climate such as ours, that a sudden cloud will scud across the sky and occlude the sunlight, thus rendering the motes of dust around you much less visible. If your room is sunk in particular gloom, the motes of dust may not be visible at all, and you yourself may be but a shadow in the murk, and a blurred shadow at that, to those of your audience whose ocular faculties are pitiable. It is imperative that you keep their interest until the cloud passes and the shaft of sunlight beams once again upon you. Whip out a banjo or a ukulele and launch into an Appalachian folk song, preferably one with innumerable verses but a less-than-compelling narrative, so that you can play and sing for as long as necessary, but break off as soon as the sunlight returns, even in the middle of a verse, without disappointing your audience. Some people find it difficult to play stringed instruments while wearing sweeping black capes. I have never quite understood this, but apparently it is something to do with movement of the arms being hampered by the cape. If you are affected by this problem, try tucking the cape behind your back, or pick an Appalachian folk tune that requires only desultory strumming so that you need not move your arms too much.

It may be that the cloud blocking the sunlight is a harbinger of further clouds, even of a completely overcast sky, and that a torrential downpour will begin. That would not be surprising in this land. Now, while such a turn of events may leave you crushed, and in no wise able to perform the astounding magic trick due to the lack of a shaft of sunlight beaming through your window, it has the advantage that your audience will almost certainly wish to remain indoors. True, some of them may have come armed with sou’westers and mackintoshes and galoshes, and be willing to trudge back across the fields in the pelting rain, but the likelihood is that most will stay with you, for though you and they are enshrouded in gloom, it is at least dry gloom. I assume, of course, that you do not have gaping holes in your roof through which the rain comes in and forms puddles in the dents of your floor. If your repertoire of Appalachian folk songs is scanty, and you have exhausted it before the rainfall ceases, you will need to devise some other form of entertainment for your guests. This is where the ventriloquist, if you have hired one, can be a godsend. Even if he or she has not brought their usual dummy with them, it is a simple enough matter to bundle a few rags together into a puppet. While the ventriloquist is keeping your audience spellbound, you can familiarise yourself with a few more Appalachian folk songs using speed-learning techniques picked up from a self-help book.  Between the two of you, it ought to be child’s play to keep your audience entertained for hours and hours, by which time, even in this country, the sun should shine once more. On the other hand, if you have a booming and melodramatic voice, and saw no need to hire a ventriloquist, things might get a bit ugly once your store of Appalachian folk songs has dried up. This is particularly the case if among your audience you have persons with short tempers, low boredom thresholds, or those on day release from the nearby secure clinic for the criminally insane. In these circumstances, it will be well if you have borrowed from the library a self-help book such as How To Pacify Enraged Audiences Who Were Expecting A Conjuring Trick But Were Fobbed Off With Appalachian Folk Songs Followed By An Eerie Silence.

But let us be optimistic, and hope that that scudding cloud was no more than a fugitive visitor, and that the sun shines brightly once more. Cast aside your banjo or ukulele and make a couple of sweeping gestures with your cape. Ensure, as you do so, that nobody in the audience gets a glimpse of the badger concealed within its black folds. Now, ask one of their number to step into the shaft of sunlight with you and to lend you their hat. On very, very rare occasions, not a single person in the audience will be a hat-wearer, but this need not concern you. You will have taken the precautionary measure of planting a stooge with a stovepipe hat among your guests. Should nobody else volunteer, this person now leaps up, with enthusiasm yet without betraying that the pair of you are old muckers who go way, way back. You take the stovepipe hat from him, and, using sleight of hand, insert the badger into it. It is absolutely crucial that no one sees you do this. You then place the hat on your stooge’s head and tell him to return to his seat, or stool. At this point, do some flummery for a minute or two. Then, with an air of distraction, as if it is an afterthought, ask your stooge to take his hat off. To the audience’s amazement, he will do so to reveal a badger asleep upon his head! To resounding applause, go and collect the badger. Remember that you will need to pump it full of antidote fairly soon to rouse it from the coma induced by the serum with which you injected it earlier.

You can then pass your own hat around, upturned, to collect any coinage which your stunned audience wishes to give you in gratitude for so thrilling a magic trick. A proportion of any monies collected should of course be spent on a treat for the badger.

“It is difficult for wasps suddenly to turn cuddly.” – Theodore Dalrymple.

Difficult, but by no means impossible. In his secret underground laboratory, the experimentalist Dr Fang has set up a “wasp chamber”, to which he lures any wasps he comes upon on his perambulations around the perimeter fence of his compound. Once the wasp is trapped within the chamber, Dr Fang goes to work with what he terms his “wasp behaviour modification techniques”. These are, of course, never to be divulged to anybody outside the secret underground laboratory, so I cannot tell you much about them. By bribing several of Dr Fang’s hunchbacked troglodyte albino assistants, however, I have learned that the techniques involve a serum, a ray gun, spooky buzzing music composed by an argumentative German, icing sugar, tweezers, and mesmerism. Please note this is not an exhaustive list, so do not try to experiment on a wasp yourself.

Dr Fang remains tight-lipped regarding the cuddliness, or otherwise, of his wasp chamber alumnae, which are released into the wild when he has finished with them. Those of you who know more or less where Dr Fang’s compound is located may wish to go picnicking in the vicinity on an idle summer afternoon. Remove the lids from your jars of picnic jam and picnic marmalade, and wait to see what happens.

Bones of birds buried in a ditch. Rain falls upon the ditch and great puddles are formed. A passing pig roots in the puddles for chewables. The pig uproots the bird bones. Detective Captain Cargpan is called in to investigate. He does not immediately recognise the bones as being bones of birds. His top forensics wallah is sick in bed. The rest of the team are on a seaside outing. Cargpan leaps to the conclusion that he has found the bones of a homunculus. He rounds up a few known criminals and roughs them up back at the station. Not a one of them confesses. Cargpan trawls through a logbook of missing homunculi. He tries to tally up locations and dates. He taps one of the bird bones against a saucer. From the sound it makes he guesses it to be twenty years old. But no homunculi went missing twenty years ago. He lights a cigarette and mooches about the deserted police station canteen in the middle of the night.

In a spinney a long way away a miscreant is up to something. The miscreant is surrounded by feathers. Blood is dribbling from his mouth.

In the morning the forensics wallah is worse. She is taken to a clinic by a fast loud ambulance. The rest of her team are trapped at the seaside. Detective Captain Cargpan wakes up on a bench in the canteen. He stumbles to the cells and roughs up a ne’er-do-well. Upstairs, he throws the missing homunculi logbook across his office. He returns to the canteen for many, many sausages. He kneels in the chapel and cries out to God. Cargpan is a Muggletonian. He lines up the tiny bones on his desk and counts them and tags them with tags. He returns to the ditch for a stakeout.

The miscreant hobbles out of the spinney. He has wiped the blood off his lips and chin with a rag. He is carrying a suspicious carrier bag. He waits at the bus stop.

Detective Captain Cargpan trains his night vision goggles on the ditch. He has commandeered a bird hide. He roughed up the birdists who were there when he arrived and sent them packing. The rain pours down, creating fresh puddles in the ditch. Cargpan slurps cocoa from a flask confiscated from the birdists. He wants more sausages, but there are none to be had.

The miscreant is aboard the bus. It is hurtling along the lanes towards the field where the ditch is. In the darkness, the driver loses control and the bus plunges down a chasm. It is swallowed up in the sopping wet mud at the bottom of the chasm.

When Detective Captain Cargpan returns to the station he sees a forensics locum. His wallah has taken a turn for the worse. The bigwigs have sent the locum to replace her for the time being. The locum tells Cargpan that the bones lined up on his desk are the bones of birds. Cargpan thumps his fist against his own forehead. A minion runs in to the room to tell Cargpan that a bus has inexplicably vanished. This will be his next case.

In the spinney, from underneath a pile of bloody feathers, a homunculus emerges. It blinks and cackles and scampers away, leaving a trail of weird gas.