Macabre Folding Camp Chairs

According to the visitor statistics, someone arrived at Hooting Yard yesterday having searched for the term “macabre folding camp chairs”. I hasten to add that I am not making this up. I suspect what the inquirer was looking for was Dobson’s exceedingly rare Eerie & Macabre Picnic Praxis, a set of practical guidelines which appeared, oddly, as an appendix to his pamphlet A Dictionary Of Squirrels (out of print).

Unusually for Dobson, the Praxis was written in response to a request from a reader. The pamphleteer was notoriously dismissive, even contemptuous, of his audience, such as it was. Marigold Chew recalls the great man stamping about in his study, spitting into the fireplace, shouting his head off at nobody in particular and insisting that his readership was composed of spiteful lickspittles and human wreckage. He had no evidence to back this claim, of course. He just enjoyed his misanthropic ravings, as who does not?

We must wonder, then, why the pamphleteer responded with such alacrity to the letter he received from a correspondent signing himself simply as “JFK”. There are compelling reasons to believe this was the soon-to-be-assassinated thirty-fifth Potus, but that is unlikely to have impressed Dobson, who had a weird animus towards men who wore surgical braces for excruciating back pain. A devotee of the “back quack” Rastus Tebbit, whom he occasionally visited in prison, Dobson swore by the old fraud’s patent back pain remedy of lettuce, toad, and cake.

The letter itself was clear and concise. Dear Dobson, it read, I am planning to organise a picnic outing that will be both eerie and macabre, but I have no idea how to go about it. It has been suggested to me by one of my secret service agents that a pamphleteer such as yourself would be able to bash together some guidelines at the drop of a hat. Thanks in advance.

It has been estimated that throughout his long career, Dobson received no fewer than eight direct requests from readers to address a particular topic. The other seven were binned or burned or torn to shreds or, on one memorable occasion, folded into a paper aeroplane of uncommonly aerodynamic soundness and launched from atop an Alpine peak into the blue empyrean, to the applause of a gaggle of Swiss boy scouts. Yet this one letter stirred something in the pamphleteer’s brain, and he immediately sat down at his escritoire and took a newly-sharpened pencil from his pencil pot and wrote the Praxis, it is thought in a single burst of concentrated picnic prose. The subject, it should be remembered, was one familiar to him, for he had written teeming pages on picnics in earlier years. Indeed, one of the first pamphlets ever to bear Dobson’s name was entitled God Almighty, Is There Anything More Satisfying Than A Well-Executed Picnic? (out of print).

As mysterious as the enthusiasm with which he tackled a reader’s request, however, is the fact that, as soon as the Praxis was written, Dobson shoved it into a cardboard box and forgot about it. Within days, the manuscript was covered with other scribblings, and with biscuit crumbs and dust and spilled talcum powder and a cackhandedly-folded map of guillemot habitats and shells from a packet of brazil nuts and newspaper cuttings and a hiking boot catalogue until the box was full and its lid was fitted and it was consigned to a shelf in the cellar alongside dozens upon dozens of other cardboard boxes filled with a heteroclite jumble of forgotten miscellania. This habitual Dobsonian practice has proved infuriating for scholars. Perhaps it really would have been better if the whole damned lot had been burned to a cinder.

Almost a decade passed. One Thursday afternoon, during a thunderstorm, Marigold Chew remarked to Dobson that his Dictionary Of Squirrels, which she was readying for print, would, in her opinion, be immeasurably enriched by the addition of a few more pages. But Dobson had exhausted his knowledge of squirrels, and had nothing more to say. By chance, he was rummaging about searching for the map of guillemot habitats, in preparation for his next project, A Dictionary Of Guillemot Habitat Maps, and, grabbing at the Praxis, he tossed it over to Marigold, muttering something along the lines of it being a “companion piece”. This was nonsense, of course, for it is nothing of the sort. Squirrels are not even mentioned in its sixteen brief paragraphs. Marigold was skim-reading it, and about to protest that Dobson was fobbing her off with a non-squirrel-related text, when there was an almighty clap of thunder and both the pamphleteer and his inamorata were stricken with sudden terrific clap of thunder shock syndrome. Dazed and bumbling, Dobson then made things worse by insisting they both take Rastus Tebbit’s so-called “curative”, a potion of toad, cake and radish, the only effect of which was to unhinge their reason for a period of forty-eight hours. It was during this time, with her judgement impaired, that Marigold Chew printed all known copies of the Dictionary Of Squirrels, with its wholly irrelevant appendix.

Should we be glad she did so? The Eerie & Macabre Picnic Praxis is a curious work, and it is hard to see how practical the guidelines are if one is actually intent upon organising an eerie and macabre picnic. Paragraph six, for example, the one I think my visitor from yesterday was searching for, reads as follows:

Most reputable stockists of folding camp chairs will be happy to listen to any requests from you regarding eerie or macabre ranges of their merchandise. They will listen happily because they tend, as a tribe, to be happy, even when faced by plague and cataclysm. I know this much because I have seen them laugh hysterically at an approaching swarm of locusts, on more than one occasion.

As Aloysius Nestingbird, that most temperate of Dobsonists, asked, after reading this passage, “What in heaven’s name is he blathering on about?” To date, no one has given a satisfactory answer to that question.

Great Wisdom

The Islamic chaplain at Yale University says there is “great wisdom” in the idea of putting to death those who leave his religion. I suspect he may need to have his brain tampered with, or at least be given a dictionary so that he can learn the meaning of “wisdom”. Here, for example, is a proper example of great wisdom from Mick Hartley:

“In these dark days it’s somehow comforting to think that someone, somewhere, has been spending their time fitting eye-patches on bees.”

It is indeed.

A Brief Note On Cats

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”.

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A Mere Record Of Upholstery

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.

The Pastures Red With Uneaten Sheep’s Placentas

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.

 

Living In The Heart Of The Beast

It is rare indeed to find video links at Hooting Yard, but… good grief, this is superb! Mr Key’s favourite beat combo, Henry Cow, performing “Living In The Heart Of The Beast” at Vevey in Switzerland in 1976. (It looks to me as if they’re in the middle of a field*, which may explain the absence of the standard lamps which were such a beguiling feature of their usual stage set.) Irritatingly split into three parts. Watch, listen, and learn.

Incidentally, “Living In The Heart Of The Beast” was the piece that prompted Peter Blegvad’s dismissal from the Henry Cow / Slapp Happy collective on the grounds of flippancy. Tim Hodgkinson wrote the music and, as Blegvad recalled in an interview in Hearsay magazine, “I was assigned the task for the collective to come up with suitable verbals, and I wrote two verses about a woman throwing raisins at a pile of bones. Tim just said, I’m sorry, this is not at all what we want. And he wrote reams of this political tirade. I admired his passion and application but it left me cold. I am to my bones a flippant individual”.

Well, it is a tirade, but it’s still magnificent.

*NOTE : This being Switzerland, I am reminded, most appositely, of the timeless quotation “Here we are in the field of dreams, surrounded by fields of cows.” See here for the source.

 

The Pavilion Of Innocent Pastimes

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.

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Timetable

05.30 Awaken and ablute.

06.00 Breakfast upon bloaters.

06.35 Ponder the pariah status of the Pyrenean Cagots, forced to enter churches through a low door, obliging them to stoop almost to the ground as a perpetual memento of their degradation.

07.45 Paint side of van.

08.45 Take tablets and swill down with milk ‘n’ vinegar mixture.

08.46 Conduct preliminary egg count.

09.00 Listen to “Timetable” by Henry Cowell.

09.03 Impugn crusties.

10.00 Attend goat sacrifice. Stand at the back.

12.30 Rub cutlery in desultory fashion with rags and swarfega and align upon a countertop.

13.00 Burn waxen effigy.

13.30 Nap.

17.00 Accept blandishments from a Cagot.

17.07 Topple from plinth.

17.08 Prepare rhubarb.

17.30 Write notes upon the golden and black striped roofing material of the covered dinghies made by the defunct Dutch dinghy makers Van Der Dax Covered Dinghies N.V.

19.00 Channel Four News with Krishnan Guru-Murthy.

20.00 Lighting up time for the Toc H lamps.

20.30 Throw rhubarb to the cows.

20.45 Attend glittering soirée. Cause rumpus. Steal decoy duck.

22.00 Check cows and patches of regurgitated rhubarb.

22.45 Ablute and sleep.

Lemsip Has Been Deployed

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”.

Hoofprint Advice

Upon waking, the sight of hoofprints on the ceiling, hoofprints that were not there when you fell asleep, can be worrisome. The regime has now issued a helpful step-by-step guide setting out precisely what to do in the circumstances.

i. Remain lying in bed, quite still, staring at the ceiling. Try to recall any dreams you may have had while you were asleep. Did any hooved beasts, such as goats or horses, feature in these dreams? If so, they were probably not dreams at all, and thus you have a preliminary explanation for the hoofprints on your ceiling. Report this immediately to your local nocturnal hoofprint investigating officer.

ii. If you did not dream of hooved beasts, or cannot recall doing so, you are left without a satisfactory explanation for the hoofprints. This will not do. Get out of bed, plunge your head into a pail of icy water, thrice, and look again at the ceiling. If the hoofprints are no longer visible, bury the memory of ever having seen them.

iii. If, on the other hand, the hoofprints are still there, clamber on to a step ladder and try to obliterate them with a rag and a proprietary cleansing spray such as Hoofbegone!â„¢. If you are able to eradicate the hoofprints entirely, fold up your step ladder, return the spray to your cupboard, and wash the rag in warm soapy water.

iv. It may be that the hoofprints on your ceiling are impossible to remove. Do not even think about painting over them with whitewash. Instead, get dressed in something fetching and pay a visit to the local nocturnal hoofprint investigation office. Make an appointment to see a ceiling hoofprint specialist.

v. At the subsequent interview, before you are tied to a chair in the cellar, provide the specialist with any snapshots you have taken of your ceiling. When asked to describe the hoofprints, and any other phenomena that may be pertinent, give full and frank answers before the hood is pulled over your head.

vi. When you recover consciousness in a ditch in a remote part of the country, dressed in a paper suit, make your way to the border. Report to the guards, and on no account say a word about the hoofprints. Submit willingly when one of the guards points a sort of magnetic ray gun at your brain.

vii. As a sleeper agent in the neighbouring statelet, obtain a menial job and await further instructions. Note that the suckers on your hands and newly-behooved feet should be kept free of dust and grime. Avoid podiatrists, even in social settings such as cocktail parties and pétanque tournaments.

The Boring Dog

Once upon a time there was a man who had a dog and the dog bored him senseless. Even its unearthly howling, with which it greeted the moon every night, and kept up until sunrise, and which drove his neighbours crackers, bored him. When he took it for walks in the daylight, and threw sticks for it to fetch, it failed to stir his interest. It drooled when chewing on dog biscuits, and as he mopped up the drool from the rug, the man sighed and complained about the unutterable tedium of his dog. Nobody heard his complaints, for he lived alone with the dog, and the dog was deaf.

Eventually the man went to see a dog advice person.

“I have come to see you because I am bored by my dog,” he said.

“Ah,” said the dog advice person, “Have you considered the possibility that you have a boring dog?”

The man admitted this had not occurred to him.

“I have always felt that it is me who is at fault,” he said, “I have been consumed with fierce self-loathing because I am neither amused nor entertained by my dog’s howling and stick-fetching and dog biscuit drooling.”

The dog advice person examined the dog with a scope and a scanner and a probe and other instruments from his dog analysis kit. While this was going on, the man leafed through the magazines on the dog advice person’s coffee table, none of which had any dog-related content whatsoever. There were lots of articles about international shipping protocols and Antarctic weather stations and derelict railway lines and the man became so mentally absorbed in them that the dog advice person had to shout at him repeatedly and  kick his shins and slap him on the head to gain his attention when the examination was over.

“I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt and without fear or favour that you have a boring dog,” he said, packing away the instruments in his dog analysis kit and placing it carefully in a cupboard.

“Well, that is a weight off my mind,” said the man.

He took the dog home. On the way, he threw sticks for it to fetch. Back indoors, he gave the dog a dog biscuit to chew on and mopped its drool from the rug without complaint. And at nightfall, the dog began its unearthly howling, and the man went to bed and slept the sleep of the unweighted mind. He slept so deeply that he did not wake up when the neighbours gathered in the moonlight in a ring around his house, waving pitchforks, bent on dog death.

Dobson’s Card Index

“Along the path, glued to the window panes or hung on the bushes or dangling from the ceiling, so that all free space was put to maximum use, hundreds of little placards were displayed. Each one carried a drawing, a photograph, or an inscription, and the whole constituted a veritable encyclopaedia of what we call ‘human knowledge’. A diagram of a plant cell, Mendeleieff’s periodic table of the elements, the keys to Chinese writing, a cross-section of the human heart, Lorentz’s transformation formulae, each planet and its characteristics, fossil remains of the horse species in series, Mayan hieroglyphics, economic and demographic statistics, musical phrases, samples of the principal plant and animal families, crystal specimens, the ground plan of the Great Pyramid, brain diagrams, logistic equations, phonetic charts of the sounds employed in all languages, maps, genealogies – everything in short which would fill the brain of a twentieth century Pico della Mirandola.” – René Daumal, Mount Analogue : A Novel Of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures In Mountain Climbing, translated by Roger Shattuck (1952; 1959).

The astonishing thing about the “little placards” displayed by Father Sogol, the Professor of Mountaineering in Daumal’s novel, is how similar they are to the immense card index maintained by Dobson, upon which he relied when writing his out of print pamphlets. Dobson would have approved, too, the Professor’s method of displaying the cards – at least, sometimes. One of the pamphleteer’s more irritating characteristics was his inability to settle on the keeping of his cards. At times, like Sogol, he pinned them up on every available surface. Then a frenzy would take him and he would tear them all down and shove them into one of his innumerable cardboard boxes. Marigold Chew reports that Dobson spent hours upon hours arranging the cards when they were in their boxes, ordering and reordering them according to various abstruse cataloguing systems. No sooner was he done than he would once again tip them out of their boxes and pin them up on walls and screens and pinboards and what have you. And of course, all the time he was adding new cards to the collection.

Much of Dobson’s card collection perished in the Potato Building fire, and ever since researchers have been attempting to reconstruct it. This is probably an impossible task, but that doesn’t stop them trying. The reward would be to create a sort of cardboard model of the innards of Dobson’s pulsating brain – not to be confused with the cardboard model of the carapace of Dobson’s brain which is currently being carted around the globe by a devotee. According to the timetable posted on the Cardboard Brain Of Dobson World Tour website, the cart with its precious contents is en route to one of the –nesses at the moment, either Skeg- or Dunge- or Foul-.

There was a flap of controversy some months ago when a previously unheard-of Dobsonist, one Bunko Chongue, claimed to have recreated an accurate cardboard box’s worth of index cards. After painstaking study of clues littered throughout the pamphleteer’s out of print works, and a visit to a stationery shop, the mysterious Chongue placed on display the results of his research. Purists’ suspicions were roused by the fact that one had to pay an exorbitant fee to get through the door of the Nissen hut where the exhibition was held. Inside, however, there was an attempt to reflect the pamphleteer’s indecision, with half the cards gummed to the walls and half crammed into a cardboard box. The cards themselves, too, demonstrated the variety that was characteristic of Dobson’s collection, as it was of Sogol’s. One visitor to the hut, later to denounce the show as a “despicable farrago of falsehood and Nissen hut windowlessness”, made a list of the cards he saw.

Instructions for the proper care of ostriches in captivity. Street map of Skegness. Photo of a duck escaped from Rouen. Pig brain diagram. Bootlace aglet comparisons. Lopped Pol Pot poptart. Torn and rent stuff. Widow’s buttons. Tips on bell ringing. Sandwich paste reviews. Drawing of ghost. Railway station smudge. Voltage statistics. Unsullied napkin from a remote canteen. Gunshot punctures. Drool from a pauper. Old Halob’s hat measurements. Imaginary portrait of Tecwen Whittock. Muggletonian dinner menu. Fatal microbes. Winnipeg pumpkineer’s cravat knot schema. Potter’s duffel bag toggle analysis. Starling feathers. Stalin brooch. Desiccated plum pulp. Rubberised atomic sackcloth scrap. Latch. Pins. Bolt. Set of amazing stains. Devotional card of St Abodwo, arguably the patron saint of monkeys. Periodic table of the crumplements. Gravy recipe. Tabulation of Orwellian egg count. Snapshot of Schubert’s grave. Mezzotint of Schubert’s boot. Handwritten screed of gibberish. Lock of Pontiff’s hair. Gummy ick. Definitions of flotsam and jetsam and plankton and krill and lemon meringue pie. The dust of death. The dewdrops of doom. Pointless scribblings.

The Dobsonist who made the list, whose name has never been made public, was initially impressed by the exhibition. A few days later, however, in a letter to the Daily Nisbet Spotter, he got into a fit of the vapours about the windowlessness of the Nissen hut, pointing out that, depending on the disposition of the purlins, it is quite simple to insert windows into the hut’s frame. It is rare for one who spends his life studying Dobson also to have expertise in the construction of huts, whether Nissen or not, and this suggests that we may be able to identify the writer, if anyone can be bothered to sift through the documentation in the register, if there is indeed such a register, as the rumour mill insists is the case, though of course its existence may be a wild fantasy. We know of such phenomena, of fictional imagined registers, not least because Dobson himself wrote so forcefully of them in his pamphlet Wild And Unhinged Fantasies Regarding The Existence Of Wholly Imaginary Registers (out of print). We can only guess how many index cards the pamphleteer used during the writing of this frankly blithering text, which Marigold Chew for some reason typeset to make it look like a pipsy-popsy book for infants.

Following the writing of his letter to the press, our unidentified Dobsonist had second thoughts about the exhibition. Where he had been positive, he now heaped execrations upon it, at first privately, shouting at his reflection in a mirror. He seems to have been oddly reluctant to bruit his views abroad. This changed after he spent a prolonged stay in a sensory deprivation tank and emerged hopelessly bonkers. He was seen wandering around various post offices babbling at anybody who would listen, and then he was seen scampering like a mad thing in the hills, and then he was seen weeping and rending his garments at the graveside of fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol. Then he vanished. He was missing during the dog days of the year, emerging as they petered out to publish his magnificent counterblast to Bunko Chongue, which I cited above.

By quoting his words, I do not necessarily lend them my imprimatur. For one thing, I did not see Bunko’s show myself, so I cannot say whether he grasped the essence of the Dobson card index in all its lost glory. And for another thing, I rarely lend my imprimatur to anything. It can be rented at a cost, usually a cost involving blood and body parts, and undying fealty, and one or two tangerines, and seeds, and the plasticine head of a wolf on a stick.