While I struggle with the act of belching prose from the very core of my being, here is number two in our series in which Outa_Spaceman pigmentises ancient drawings by Mr Key.
The Birdhole Prison Riots
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Monthly Archives: April 2010
Ghosts
In considering this subject with the attention that is due to it, it has appeared to me that all the stories of ghosts and super, or, un-natural appearances, may be referred to some of the following causes:
1. To the augmentation produced by fear in any effect on the senses—thus the ear of a terrified man will convert the smallest noise into the report of thunder, or his eye will change the stump of a tree into a monster twenty feet high. As the senses are furnished for protection, their irritability, under the impression of fear, is part of their economy, as the means of preserving our being; but it is absurd to refer back the effects thus augmented, to external causes which might be capable of producing the augmentation. To such an error of the senses and of reasoning, is, however, to be referred half the ghosts and supernaturals of which we hear in village ale-houses, in nurseries and schools.
2. To diseased organs of sensation; as an inflamed eye producing the effect of flashes of light in the dark, or fulness of blood producing a ringing or singing in the ears. Sometimes diseases of the visual organs are accompanied by hallucinations of mind; and persons ill in fevers often see successions of figures and objects flit before their eyes till the disease has been removed. The workings of conscience or nervous affections will also produce diseases of the senses, and such hallucinations of mind as to occasion a person to fancy he sees another, or to be haunted by him. But there is nothing supernatural in all this; it is sometimes a local disease, sometimes an effect of fever, sometimes a nervous affection, and sometimes partial insanity.
3. To natural causes not understood by the parties. Thus, anciently the northern lights were mistaken for armies fighting; meteors and comets for flaming swords, portending destruction or pestilence; the electrified points of swords to the favour of heaven; the motions of the planets to attractive effluvia; and all the effects of the comixture of the gases to benign or diabolical agency, as they happened to produce on the parties good or evil. So in the like manner old houses are generally said to be haunted, owing to the noises which arise from the cracking and yielding of their walls and timbers, and from the protection and easy passage which in the course of time they afford to rats, mice, weasels, &c. whose activity in the night-time affords the foundation of numerous apprehensions and fancies of the credulous.
4. To spontaneous combustions or detonations, which produce occasional lights and noises, or, under unchanged circumstances, recurring lights and noises, chiefly claiming attention in the night. Thus houses shut up and unaired are apt, from the putrefaction of animal and vegetable matter, to generate hydrogen gas, the accidental combustion of which by contact with phosphoric matter, naturally generated in the same situation, will produce those effects of lights and noises heard in empty houses. So Church-yards, Churches in which the dead are buried, Cemeteries, and Ruins of old buildings, must frequently give out large quantities of these gases; and consequently, from exactly similar causes, they are likely to produce the very effects which we witness in the will-o’-the-wisp, or in hydrogen gas when inflamed during calm weather in marshy situations.
5. To the prevailing belief that effects, which cannot readily be accounted for, or which are caused by the contact of the invisible fluids or media always in action in the great laboratory of nature, are produced by the agency of spirits or demons; which belief, concurring with the unknown causes of the effects, and affording a ready solution of difficulties, prevents further inquiry, silences reasoning, and tends in consequence to sustain the prevailing errors and superstitions.
Such are the general causes of ghosts, spirits, charms, miracles, and supernatural appearances. They all arise either from hallucinations of the mind or senses; from the mutual action of the natural, though invisible, powers of gaseous and ethereal fluids; from the delusions of ignorance, implicit faith, or the absence of all reasoning.
Sir Richard Phillips, A Morning’s Walk From London To Kew (1817)
Muggletonian Cosmos
The giant ball of the earth. Above, day, and a tiny sun. Below, night, and stars, and the moon. Beyond the outer circle, nothing, nothing at all. “System According To The Holy Scriptures”. This is the Muggletonian Cosmos, as depicted in the nineteenth century by Isaac Frost.
A big zoomable image can be found here, and another of Isaac Frost’s Muggletonian engravings is here. Many thanks to Ed Baxter for drawing them to my attention.
Adopt A Lobster
As we have learned, from time to time the so-called “real world” catches up with Hooting Yard in quite charming ways. And what could be more charming, and more like something I made up, than the chance to adopt a lobster? I have to say I am extremely impressed that the National Lobster Hatchery, which offers this splendid opportunity, insists that the first stage of the process is to Name Your Lobster. Thus is the act of naming given its proper, paramount importance.
These conscientious lobsterists at the Hatchery have gone to the trouble of listing all their thousands of adopted lobsters, at the point where they are released into the wild, and so will your adopted lobster appear on the website when its turn comes. Note my assumption that you will be adopting a lobster as soon as you have finished reading this. Do not let me down.
While I do not wish to dictate in so important a matter as lobster nomenclature, I cannot help thinking that it would be a fine thing indeed if the waters around Padstow were to have clacking about in them lobsters named after your favourite Hooting Yard characters, such as Dobson, Tiny Enid, Old Halob, Dennis Beerpint, Little Severin The Mystic (Badger) Lobster, and the rest. Go on, you know it makes sense.
Please leave a note in the comments when you have named and adopted your lobster.
A Lucky Find
Burrowing through the dust-caked and tottering piles in Old Pa Dustcake’s secondhand bookshop the other day, I was delighted to light upon a copy of Pebblehead’s absurdly precocious autobiography I, Pebblehead! Published when he was still wet behind the ears, it was his first bestselling paperback. The fact that he was completely unknown to the world when he wrote it, and had lived so short and uneventful a life up to that point, makes its astounding success all the more bewildering. The prose is callow, clunky, and at times incoherent, the narrative devoid of incident save for the famous hydroelectric power station picnic explosion disaster and its aftermath, to which an entire, lengthy chapter is devoted. Yet the presses kept rolling as more and more copies had to be printed to satisfy the public’s seemingly hysterical demand. One observer calculated that more copies were sold than there are stars in the heavens. That being so, one might think it would be an easy title to track down, in shops such as Old Pa Dustcake’s, even so many years after publication. But one hardly ever sees a copy for sale. One explanation, which I find quite convincing, is that a flaw in the binding caused the majority of the books to fall apart when touched by human skin. Luckily, when I was rummaging in the shop, I was wearing my sinister black mittens, simply to strike a pose, you understand.
Six Long Years Of Wittering ‘n’ Babble
Those of you familiar with the important Hooting Yard Book o’ Days will know that precisely six years ago today, the very first episode of Hooting Yard On The Air was broadcast on ResonanceFM. I will be celebrating by drinking a flask of aerated lettucewater and sacrificing a (vegan, marzipan) goat.
Once upon a time, of course, radio shows were fugitive, ephemeral things, but today, with the wonders of podcasting, untold hours of Mr Key’s babbling remain available for you to download from the ResonanceFM archive. Apparently, thousands of people do, certainly more than ever read this blog.
This seems as good a time as any, then, to note that a new podcast maestro has taken over the reins, whose self-appointed task is to increase the frequency of releases. Past programmes have been issued as podcasts generally about once a fortnight, but the plan now is for them to appear twice a week, until the backlog is cleared.
For an insight into the tremendous technical challenges of the process, I refer you to this piece from the 2006 archives. Little has changed, save perhaps for the metal from which the maestro’s hat has been welded.
My thanks are due to the podcast maestro and his predecessors, and you can make their dedication to this noble cause worthwhile by subscribing, downloading, and listening, for so long and so often that Mr Key’s voice haunts your dreams. And please remember that the very existence of ResonanceFM is a fragile and rickety thing, and your donations to the station will help it to survive.
More About The Modern Pig
I’m so happy, I’m dancing a jig. Why am I happy? Because I rented a pig. It’s a highly intelligent, modern pig. Hey, daddy-o, it flips my wig.
When you hire a pig on a rental scheme, it can be like a pig in an opiate dream – the kind of pig S T Coleridge’d invent, or De Quincey, perhaps, if he could afford the rent.
For a rented pig does not come cheap. It costs a tremendous amount to keep. There’s the sty and the swill and the brain scans to pay, and bales of straw and bales of hay.
But a modern intelligent pig is a treasure, a joy and a boon quite beyond measure. A pig is a must. A pig is the top. Rent one, as I did, from a pig hire shop!
The Modern Pig
“This is accomplished by inserting the pig into a ‘pig launcher’… push it along down the pipe until it reaches the receiving trap – the ‘pig catcher’… there are “smart pigs” used to measure things… though some product can be lost when the pig is extracted… All systems must allow for the receipt of pigs at the launcher… pigs must be removed, as many pigs are rented… the pig can be ejected from the barrel and operators have been severely injured when standing in front of an open pig door… the pig is shuttled up and down… Modern intelligent pigs are highly sophisticated… Some smart pigs can combine technologies… the pig is unable to directly communicate with the outside world… It is therefore necessary that the pig use internal means to record its own movement during the trip… The original pigs were made from straw wrapped in wire… There are several types of pigs for cleaning… A pig has been used as a plot device in [the] James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, where Bond disabled a pig… A pig was also used as a plot device in the Tony Hillerman book The Sinister Pig.”
My thanks to Duncsnoai Plover for drawing to my attention this exciting stuff about modern pigs (many of which are rented).
Blodgett’s Mucky Proclivities
Until now, Blodgett’s mucky proclivities have been passed over in silence by those who have written about him, myself included. They were so very mucky, as proclivities go, that to contemplate them in any detail would be to shatter the brain. Lord above, they were mucky! We must, I think, agree with Mr Tuppin, who said “of all the mucky proclivities it has been my displeasure to examine on a professional basis, those of Blodgett were without doubt the muckiest”. Of course, there is muck and muck, and some muck is filthier, much, much filthier, than other muck.
In times past, there was no way of measuring the muckiness of a person’s proclivities, and it is likely that there were proto-Blodgetts the muckiness of whose proclivities surpassed perhaps even his. We will never know. But thanks to Mr Tuppin, we are now in a position to be quite precise about the extent of the filthiness, for that costive Papist has unveiled his Patent Muck-Measuring Proclivity Gauge. It is a simple enough machine, though not to look at. Constructed of dubbin and wires and bakelite and marzipan and rotating boosters and pig iron and cloth of gold and sticks and prongs and tin and titanium and horse-wedges and cornflakes and the pips of clementines and magnetic resonating galvanised sheet metal pipes and hods and unguent and terrific flapping drapes and bleached bones from a badger and cut zinc and cement and furry funnels and cadmium and lace and snippety cloggings and dust and mud and plasmatic plasma plasm and toothpaste tubes and reconstituted guttering and elk antlers and shoddy and beef dripping and grease and the tongues of wrens coated in conductive fluid and misshapen nozzles and tar and more tar and febrifuge and other tar and seawater and duckpond water and boiling lint and the twigs of a sycamore and mustard and pegs and wool and cardboard and string and tar, tar again, and bales of rotting straw and chickenwire and nails and bunting and calcified chemical compounds and Red Hudibras and oil and cheviots and glitter and vast stained glass screens and pins and tatterdemalion webbing from Vietnam and goat horns and satin and base brickish blocky clumps of tough rubber thwarts and air bubbles and tar trapped in air bubbles and hazard lights and the blood of the lamb and jet knicknacks and petroleum jelly and baize and gauze and St John’s wort and basalt and lime and jars crammed, crammed with flakes of iron, and lead and catgut from tennis racquets and pus from buboes and scrapings from shelving units and isinglass and hair from the hanged and talc and lobster pots and dunny paint and fluorescent lanterns and paste and cracked planks and vellum and grit and Strontium 90 and cartridges and toad sweat and phosphorus and adamantine and a weird sort of non-adhesive glue and great clanking chains and gorgeous perfumes and rags and plugs and sturdy tent canvas and palings and warped fork tines and batik shawls and clingfilm and batteries and giraffe hide and litmus paper and big bolts of lead and wreckage from the Lusitania and calibrated siphons and sponge saturated with egg white and bristly pointy bittybobs and breadcrumbs and cushions and slush and wax and throbbing electric motors and vaseline, Mr Tuppin’s engine has completely transformed the business of denouncing people for their mucky proclivities, Blodgett included.
Indeed, no sooner had Mr Tuppin pushed the starter knob on his terrific machine to give it a test run than Blodgett hove into view to see what all the palaver was about, and became the very first wretch to have the full extent of his mucky proclivities properly and scientifically measured. Obviously, being Blodgett, he protested, and even had the gall to question the accuracy of Mr Tuppin’s exquisite device. But the Blodgett brow was damp with beads of sweat, and he shifted uneasily in his loafers, loafers which, I might add, were themselves covered in filth, as if he had been wallowing in the sewers, which, in all likelihood, he had been, so mucky a pup is he. Afterwards, when the Patent Muck-Measuring Proclivity Gauge spat out its results in a handy poster-sized format so they could be photocopied many times over and posted upon noticeboards throughout the faubourg, and in other faubourgs where Blodgett might go scuttling about in pursuit of his proclivities, Mr Tuppin received many pats on the back, and three cheers were shouted for him, and hats were thrown in the air to celebrate the successful launch of so useful an engine.
Blodgett himself crept away, as well he might, and he headed into the deep dense dark woods, where he found a hole, and covered himself in soil, and waited for nightfall, when owls would awaken, and hoot.
Stationery
“out of insecurity and boredom I developed an elaborate form of displacement activity, a self-estranging technique, creating what I called ‘angel trap stationery’ — paper painted with symbols and impregnated with scents designed to attract various powers and dominions of the air to aid me in the act of composition.”
Peter Blegvad, interviewed in The Believer, November/December 2009
Victorian Magic
“His native land conquered, he had renamed himself the Great Wizard of the North and headed south to London. John Henry [Anderson]’s magical repertoire had grown accordingly, featuring egg-writing and an incomprehensible guinea pig trick, and he started something of a trend when he had become the first magician to pull a rabbit out of a hat… An unprecedented approach to advertising had seen whole towns papered with playbills announcing the most extraordinary sounding illusions, such as the ‘Grand Metamorphesian Wonder’ or the ‘Phoenixestocalobian’… His tricks might be standard, but the language of his posters promised something quite unique: ‘A Grand Ambidexterological Illusion with 12 Handkerchiefs, into which will be introduced the Enchanted Loaf and Learned Bottle, the Animated Orange and the Invisible Pigeon’. Not that anyone had the slightest idea what that was supposed to mean, any more than they would have recognised a Phoenixestocalobian, but that was just the point.”
Peter Lamont, The First Psychic : The Peculiar Mystery Of A Notorious Victorian Wizard (2005) (The book is a biography of D D Home, but includes this splendid stuff about Anderson.)
John Henry Anderson with his invisible pigeon
Thog From The Planet Barg
A gentle reminder that you have one day left to bid for an extremely rare out of print pamphlet.
Hell, Its Bells
The bells of hell do not ring, says Theophrastus Dogend, they clank and clunk, eternally, awfully, deafeningly. This is because they are battered and broken, with great cracks and fissures. He adds that they are covered in mould, of stinking greeny-grey.
There are no bells in hell, we are told by Pilupus Taxifor. He says the clanks and clunks are the din of infernal machinery, engines of havoc, designed to torment the damned. If there be stinking mould upon the machines he does not say.
While Optrex Gibbus maintains there are precisely ten thousand bells in hell, each of them numbered, each in its own belfry, and they are rung by sinners, in expiation, the bell-pulls in the form of vipers, which bite the sinners’ hands and wrists each time they peal their designated bell.
Dobson’s pamphlet Hell, Its Bells (out of print) is an attempt to untangle the contradictions in these authorities, each of which, he contends, has at least a grain of truth. Are there bells in hell, he asks, or are there not? If there are, do they ring or do they clank? And clunk? Are there ten thousand bells, or fewer, or more, even an infinity of bells, just as there is an infinity of pits and dungeons and oubliettes in which the damned languish forever?
The pamphleteer’s research for this paper, which he read aloud at a meeting of the Sawdust Bridge Platform Debating Initiative on the tenth of April 1954, led him up some pretty horrible pathways, pathways more abhorrent even than the one that runs parallel to the disgusting canal wherein the vomit of generations has collected. Why it is that drunks and those with stomach disorders have habitually seen fit to throw up their guts in a canal basin at the end of a long and twisting lane far from any clinics and hostelries is a mystery Dobson never investigated, so far as we know. But he was spellbound by the bells of hell, upon which, he believed, so much, so very very much, hinged. It is a pity he never got round to writing the follow-up pamphlet, Hell, Its Bells, And All That Hinges Upon Them, With Lots Of Details, a work which exists only in the form of illegible scribblings in a notebook half of which is burned and the remaining half smeared with a stinking greeny-grey goo, which might be mould scraped from the bells of hell, but might on the other hand just be the sort of goo that Dobson managed to attract to himself, in his wanderings, God knows how.
Discombobulated Naval Lieutenant
“Dropping his studies in the realms of proverbial philosophy, that amiable mid-Victorian butt, Martin Tupper, toyed for a time with spiritualism. He attended one of Mrs Hall’s séances, when, with Home as the medium, the company included ‘a countess, the widow of a colonel, and a naval lieutenant’. As a preliminary, they were instructed to ‘kneel down and offer up a prayer’. This appears to have been effective, since the table rose from the floor, raps resounded by the dozen, and Home pulled red-hot coals out of the fire with his fingers. Although he had braved battle and the breeze often enough, such a spectacle was apparently too much for the representative of the senior service. ‘It quite altered his career’, says Tupper, ‘and, soon afterwards, he took Holy Orders’.”
Horace Wyndham, Mr Sludge, The Medium : Being The Life And Adventures Of Daniel Dunglas Home (1937)
Worthy Of Further Research…
“I not only investigated the so-called supernatural powers of the child known as the Infant Magnet, but, on a public stage, during the performance of certain mysterious phenomena by a young lady who shall be nameless, I consented to be locked up in a dark cabinet with that interesting maiden, whose toilette was superb.”
William Manning, Recollections Of Robert-Houdin, Clockmaker, Electrician, Conjuror (1890)