Jamboree

A highlight of the Hooting Yard year is the annual jamboree jointly organised by the Sawdust Bridge Community Pole-Vaulting Collective and the Pointy Town Avant-Colliery Marching Band. Sebastian Coe may have described tickets for the 2012 Olympics as “the greatest tickets on earth”, but clearly he has never seen a jamboree ticket, a thing of unsurpassed beauty not just on earth, but on any other planet or planetoid or flaming ball of gas in the known or unknown universe. Had he done so, he would eat his hat, with knobs on. It may look like a mere slip of thin beige cardboard with a few letters and numbers printed upon it in bold black ink, but this year, as every year, the jamboree ticket was designed by the noted ticketist Rex Tick, a man who knows more than Sebastian Coe could ever learn about the design of tickets, had he but world enough and time. And he has not, for all those naked wrestling bouts with William Hague in a basement gymnasium at the Palace of Westminster have taken their toll, and now he is reduced to uttering hyperbolic twaddle whene’er a broadcaster’s microphone is thrust towards his gob.

The gob of noted ticketist Rex Tick, however, is taciturn. He is a taciturn fellow. In fact, one wit dubbed Tick “the taciturn ticketist” on precisely that account. The fruit of his taciturnity is the unparalleled beauty of his ticket designs. Every year he comes up with something of such blinding glory that some foppish aesthetes have been known to buy a ticket without any intention of attending the annual jamboree, in that squelchy, squelchy mud-strewn field. No, the dandies put their ticket in a frame and hang it on the wall of their boudoir or salon, to impress their equally foppish pals with the exquisite delicacy of their sensibilities. So I am told, at any rate, by Rex Tick’s sister, the vamp Dot Tick, who has been seen “stepping out” with an art critic or two.

But the tickets are not the only things of eye-popping splendour on show at the jamboree. When they come vaulting into view from across Sawdust Bridge, the athletes of the Community Pole-Vaulting Collective display, on their jerkins, insignia designed by the noted heraldic emblemist Rex Blem. Consisting of three Bobnits rampant engrailed azure on a field gules, with boisson gingembre lashant, sewn into place over their pounding hearts, the emblem has thrice won the Top Pole-Vaulting Club Insignia Cup awarded by the Academy Of Pole-Vaulting And Bird-Spotting And Shilly-Shallying (Sawdust Bridge Branch). Rex Blem himself has never turned up to accept the cup, for he is a recluse with a fear of cups. According to his sister, the flapper Dot Blem, the great insigniaist drinks his tea from a flask, and has his boiled eggs balanced in a contraption of wire and rubber bands and balsa wood.

It comes as something of a surprise to learn that the avant-miners of the Avant-Colliery Marching Band from Pointy Town have no insignia of their own. They seem happy enough to have co-opted the generic Pointy Town badge, emblazoned on the backs of their helmets. What they lack in visual zip, however, is more than made up for by their musical prowess. With their tubas and xylophones and oompah-parpers, they march across the bridge in the wake of the pole-vaulters, playing a repertoire including Scriabin, Arnold Bax, transcriptions from field recordings of howler monkeys, and Kinnie The Explorer.

The field in which the howler monkeys were recorded is, of course, a very different field from the squelchy, squelchy mud-strewn one in which the jamboree takes place when the Community Pole-Vaulting Collective and the Avant-Colliery Marching Band have crossed the bridge and successfully negotiated their way past the heavily-armed sentries. Drawn exclusively from the ranks of the most sociopathic cadets, the sentries have their own insignia and their own music, buzzed directly into their ears by transmitters which pick up signals from the netherworld. Ticketholders have nothing to fear from the sentries, but woe betide the fool who tries to skulk past their concrete huts ticketless. What do you think is the reason for that line of heads impaled on spikes, stretching as far as the eye can see?

Thanks to Roland for the Community Pole-Vaulting Collective (and insignia) and to Robin for the Avant-Colliery Marching Band.

Antipode Of Pointy Town

As an adjunct to my Maddinathon, I investigated the work of Guy Maddin’s old mucker in the Winnipeg Film Group, John Paizs. Paizs directed, among other films, Top Of The Food Chain (1999), a highly amusing homage to 1950s alien invasion movies.

I mention it here because it is a film that can be watched with real pleasure by those of us bored to tears by those endless examples of what one critic has dubbed “the cinema of Pointy Town”. Indeed, one could get no further from Pointy Town than the setting of a key scene, where the atomic scientist Dr Karel Lamonte (who works at the Atomic Academy) reports: “We found the remains of a dead human corpse, deceased, in the hilly, lumpy, bumpy part of town outside of town.”

As if to drive home the anti-Pointy Town point, the “lumpy, bumpy part of town outside of town” is pointedly mentioned several times.

Hooting Yard Rating : dozens upon dozens of bright pointy stars.

Deckhand With Mop

Deckhand With Mop is a large nautical portrait, done in emulsion, by the Royal Academician Chamfer Ticktape. Apart from the vast swathes of brightly-coloured emulsion with which it was executed, the notable feature of the painting is the hideous countenance of the deckhand – a countenance so hideous that none can look upon it without, in an instant, becoming gibberingly insane. In this respect, the painting is akin to some fatuous melodramatic incident in a story by H P Lovecraft. Yet the effect of that hideous deckhand’s countenance is, regrettably, all too real, as a brief visit to the locked ward of the grim bleak windswept granite asylum, perched on the hillside, makes clear. There one will find, gibbering and insane, a gaggle of art critics and newspaper hacks who were present at the painting’s unveiling.

But what of Chamfer Ticktape himself? How did he paint, in swathes of brightly-coloured emulsion, the hideous countenance of the deckhand, without himself succumbing to gibbering, and to insanity? For years, the noted Royal Academician has refused to speak of his painting, referring all enquiries to his PR toady, a master of obfuscatory fol-de-rol. At various times, this slippery fellow has hinted either that the artist was blindfolded as he painted, or that his brain was protected by a mysterious carapace, or that he prepared a “painting-by-numbers” grid and directed the execution from behind a screen, his assistants then being carted off one by one to the very same grim bleak windswept granite asylum, perched on the hillside, where they are kept in a separate wing, also locked, in which they gibber insanely while sucking on wafers. Not one of these tales is likely to be true. Some say the deckhand is a self-portrait of the painter, but how could that be? Chamfer Ticktape is a man-about-town, sweeping in and out of fashionable restaurants and nightspots, in cape and muffler, pursued by paparazzi, and he does not leave in his wake a trail of the gibbering and insane.

My own theory is that, when viewing this gigantic painting, done in emulsion, one must keep one’s eyes fixed steadily on the mop, the mop, the mop!

Sui Generis

There is a simple explanation for the quietness which has stolen over your favourite website in the past few days. I have been immersing myself in the films of Guy Maddin, for me the greatest living genius working in cinema. I first enthused about him here in the summer of 2008, when I saw Brand Upon The Brain! and I am now, through the magic of Het Internet, catching up with as much of his work as I can.

For all the echoes of early cinema, his films are sui generis. His is an absolutely individual talent, to the point where one could say a single shot could not be mistaken for the work of another director. Melodrama, ice hockey, sexual obsession, Winnipeg, dreams, amnesia… just some of the joys of a Guy Maddin film. And let us not forget that he can be deliriously funny.

Here is Odin’s Shield Maiden, a short from 2007.

Dabbling With Modernism (By The River Ouse)

Dabbler-3logo (1)This week in The Dabbler I conduct a long-overdue inquiry into the death of Virginia Woolf. If everything goes according to plan, this should be the first in a series of inquiries into the deaths of the great modernists, a necessary step, surely, into any proper understanding of postmodernism. I have convinced myself that, once I fully grasp every last little detail of the deaths of the modernists, I will be in a much better position to winkle some meaning out of the endless clogged blather of standard po-mo prose. Some would say it is not worth the effort, and they are probably correct, so perhaps I ought to put the whole project into a dustbin or wastepaper basket. What a quandary!

The Polyglots

It is quite something to witness tongues of pentecostal fire lapping and flickering around the head of a monoglot, quite something indeed. And then to hear the monoglot babble in languages previously unknown to him, that is even more extraordinary. There has been but one disappointment, thus far, in the course of my experiments, and it is that not one of the languages inspired by the flames is identifiable as a genuine foreign tongue.

When I decided to embark upon this important religio-linguistic hoo-hah, a year ago, my first step was to have constructed for me, by decent honest tradesmen, a chamber, the ceiling of which was so designed that serried ranks of Bunsen burners could be installed in it, pointing downwards. It was not enough, you see, that the heads of my monoglots be lapped by flames. Being of pentecostal fire, the flames must descend from on high, upon the heads below. I next had to make adjustments to the burners themselves. Much as I would like to, I cannot divulge the exact nature of my tweakings and tinkerings. Suffice to say that my assistants at this stage were not the decent honest tradesmen but figures plucked from various ranks in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, plus a couple of fire scientists. Well I knew that ordinary flames could hardly be expected to prompt a monoglot to speak in a foreign language. My burners must blast forth true pentecostal fire.

Obtaining an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to keep a permanent record of the languages uttered by my test subjects was a simple enough matter. There is a boy with a barrow in the marketplace from whom such items can be bought. I purchased two, just to be on the safe side, and a mountain of reels of magnetic tape.

The beadle at Pang Hill Orphanage was of immense help to me in procuring volunteers. He gave me his personal guarantee that each one of them was a monoglot, and I never had reason to doubt his word, especially when I saw the grubby drooling halfwit urchins he regularly delivered to me on his cart, drawn by horses as inelegant as his cargo. Indeed, it was a wonder to me that some among these tatterdemalion hobbledehoys had ever mastered their mother tongue.

Ushered into the chamber, where the reel-to-reel tape recorders were already whirring away, each volunteer was strapped into a chair. Nothing if not rigorous, I had each of them utter a few words, to provide recorded evidence of their spoken language before the pentecostal fire was unleashed upon them. Some had to be prompted to speak by being poked at with sticks. I owe a debt of gratitude to my hunchbacked assistant Mungo for expediting this part of the process.

Mungo and I then left the chamber, locking and bolting the door behind us, and fastening it further with a length of heavy iron chain. I took my place in an armchair, while Mungo scrambled up on to the roof of the chamber in his spidery way and set the Bunsen burners roaring, spitting out pentecostal fire upon the heads of my monoglot volunteers.

On the following day, the beadle came rolling up in his cart to collect the newly-minted polyglots, taking some back to Pang Hill Orphanage, some to a clinic discreetly hidden in the mountains, and some to the graveyard. With Mungo at my side, I transcribed the recorded utterances from the tapes while snacking on loganberries and fried dab.

I have now filled thousands upon thousands of pages with polyglot speech inspired by pentecostal fire, and every single word of it is incomprehensible babble and raving. But if I have not my faith, I have nothing. I know, deep in my holy bones, that sooner or later one of my little orphan volunteers is going to pipe up in pure unalloyed Swedish, or Tagalog, or Vlaams. For through the pentecostal flames speaks the Spirit. If, thus far, it has not made clear its intentions for the people of the earth, prattling gibberish instead of sense, then I must wait, wait with inhuman patience, and continue to funnel monoglots into my chamber, and have Mungo set the burners in the ceiling belching fire down below.

More Airy Persiflage

Over at Airy Persiflage, Walter O’Hara – known to his friends as Mister Nizz – gives a fine rendition of “I Had A Hammer”. I am very fond of the grain of his voice, which has the curious quality of making me believe every word of what he tells me. There is also a pleasingly ramshackle air to his podcast, as if he has simply plopped himself down in front of a microphone for a few minutes in between feeding the hens or fixing the roof. (I should make it plain here that I am wholly unacquainted with Mr O’Hara and have no idea how he spends his days.)

Links to his earlier readings from the Hooting Yard Treasury O’ Prose can be found here.

Horn Of Plenty

Tell me, if you will, for what conceivable reason you would snap off the horn of a goat, cram it with exotic fruits and flowers, and present it as a gift to the maimed goat? That is one version of the origin of the horn of plenty, or cornucopia, and it seems to me an example of where the Greek Gods got things decidedly skew-whiff.

Presenting a goat with a gift, whether in recompense for its injury or out of simple generosity, is a perfectly legitimate act, though it would probably be content with leaves and nettles. My concern here is not with the goat but with the horn of plenty.

Put yourself, for a moment, in the position of the recipient. (You need not be an actual, or mythical, goat in this scenario.) Zeus, or some other donor, hands you a cornucopia.

“Why thank you! That is so kind!” you chirrup, having been well brought up.

“You are most welcome,” says Zeus or the Zeusy figure, who can now vanish, their part in this little playlet fulfilled.

You are left holding a receptacle stuffed with fruits and flowers, but any warm feelings of gratitude you may have are immediately overcast by the realisation that such is the shape of the container you cannot put it down safely. Unlike a vase or a bowl or a jug, wrought by human agency, the horn of a goat is not designed to be placed on a flat surface such as a coffee table or sideboard, the sorts of places where you are likely to want to put a gift of fruits and flowers. It will simply topple over, disgorging its contents, some of which, such as apples and Carlsbad plums, will roll off the coffee table or sideboard on to the floor, where they are likely to be bruised, crushed underfoot, or worse, gnawed or swallowed whole by your domestic pet, depending, that is, on the size and rapacity of said pet. Even those fruits and flowers which remain atop the coffee table or sideboard will be scattered and possibly damaged by their scatterment, and in any event, the charming visual arrangement of the cornucopia will be ruined. So although you will be happy to have been given lovely fruits and flowers, and in such abundance!, a moment’s reflection will lead you to dark mutterings that the form in which they have been given is both unsuitable and inconvenient.

For unless you are going to spend the whole day cradling the goat’s horn in your arms, keeping it upright, thus frittering away the hours when you could be doing something useful, you are now forced to find some way of relinquishing the cornucopia while keeping it intact. You could try leaning it up against something, but there is no guarantee that in doing so it will retain stability. Alternatively, you may have a vase or bowl or jug of sufficient size that the horn of the goat can be placed within it, snugly enough not to fall over. A third option is to remove the fruits and flowers one by one, with care, and to marshal them in attractive display at an appropriate place in your hovel. Of course, once that is done you are left holding an emptied goat horn, which you may as well toss aside as worthless.

Whichever of these strategies you employ, my point is that any gratitude you feel towards Zeus, or to whomsoever gave you the cornucopia, will not be unalloyed. There will be an admixture of irritation or resentment, even of active hostility, for the hoops you have been put through. When the time comes to write a thank you letter, as your exquisite manners demand, it may be hard to refrain from injecting a somewhat jaundiced tone which, if picked up by the cornucopia donor, could lead to ill-will between the pair of you, even to the utter sundering of the ties of friendship which have bound you so close over many years. And all because the fruits and flowers came in a container not fit for purpose.

The Editor, His Neighbour, And The Neighbour’s Twins

After reading this post at ZMKC, it seemed like a good idea to familiarise myself with the work of Honor Tracy. Here is a quick character sketch (of Desmond Marjoribanks, editor of Torch, “some new dynamic weekly that’s going to teach us all how to live”) from her novel A Number Of Things (1960):

“He was a man of about forty with a lofty brow made loftier by hastily retiring hair, and the wide thin mouth, the nutcracker nose and chin that often go with large progressive views: his light blue eyes positively glared with love of humanity, his nostrils expanded and deflated with enthusiasm like those of a passionate horse. He dearly loved resolutions, workers’ councils, committees, monster rallies, his children and his second wife. His first wife had thrown herself under a train.”

His downstairs neighbour, Orlando Figgis, has twin children named Summerskill and Hallucination. I suspect I am going to enjoy this book.

Fruiterer’s Gleam

There was a gleam in the eye of the fruiterer. His dog was worrying a toffee apple wrapper in the drain. He sold me a Carlsbad plum. He was a travelling fruiterer, and he soon went on his way, swinging his basket. The dog did not immediately follow. Some yards along the lane, the fruiterer stopped, and turned his head, and called out to the dog. The dog’s name was Flaps. “Here, Flaps!” cried the travelling fruiterer, in a rich baritone that would have done him credit on the stage. Flaps relinquished the toffee apple wrapper and scampered towards his master, and continued beyond him, along the lane, panting. I have no idea what sort of dog it was. It was soon out of sight, but the fruiterer did not appear at all worried. He, too, continued on his way, more slowly than his dog. On the spur of the moment I decided I wanted to buy a second Carlsbad plum. I got up from the laneside bench on which I had been sitting and followed the fruiterer. I did not call out to him, for the simple reason that I am mute. When I was but tiny I was witness to an abomination. You can draw your own inference from that pair of snippets. In any case, I am sure the travelling fruiterer is a more interesting “character” than I am. With the gleam in his eye and his theatrical voice and his swinging basket and his dog, Flaps, he is the type to gain attention, whether he wishes to or no. I, by contrast, could have sat all day upon the bench without attracting the attention of passing persons or dogs or, above, birds. The fruiterer himself would have strode on past oblivious had I not hailed him and brought him to a halt to buy my Carlsbad plum. Voiceless, my hailing method was to flail my arms, or to wave a stick. Now, to buy, as an afterthought, a second Carlsbad plum, I had to catch up with him further along the lane, so I sprinted. Doing so took me back, in reverie, to my youth, when I won many a medal, running round and round an athletics track, wearing a singlet to which bold numbers were attached, both front and back. I usually wore the number nine. I am older and creakier now and I was puffed out by the time I came alongside the travelling fruiterer. Panting, like Flaps, I slowed to match the fruiterer’s pace. I held aloft the Carlsbad plum I had already bought, and with my other hand pointed at the fruiterer’s basket, and by some other signals made plain to him that I wanted to buy a second Carlsbad plum. To effect this transaction, we both stopped dead on the lane. Looking up ahead, I saw Flaps micturating against the trunk of a lonely yew. The fruiterer handed me a second Carlsbad plum and in turn I gave him some coinage. There was still a gleam in his eye, a gleam so resplendent it dazzled me. One is seldom dazzled by fruiterers, in this day and age. Lord knows how much water Flaps had lapped from his bowl, or from a rill, that morning, for even as I was bedazzled by the fruiterer’s gleam I saw out of the corner of my eye that his dog continued to expel a stream of piss against the yew, in an unstoppable flow. I worried he might poison the roots. The yew would wither, and woodsmen with axes would come to chop it down, and it would all be the fault of Flaps, and by extension, of the fruiterer. Would his eye still gleam, when, in a far town, a year hence, he sat at a tavern table drinking his pot, and read in the local paper of the shrivelled and felled yew tree, and cast his mind back to that summer’s morning, when he sold a brace of Carlsbad plums to a mute, and Flaps relieved himself, his jet of canine piss powerful and prolonged, drenching the trunk of that very yew, sinking and seeping through the soil, withering the roots?

The Maintenance Of Reservoirs

My attention was drawn to a letter in today’s Grauniad:

Brian Simpson (Obituary, 2 February) was indeed a gifted raconteur. At a British legal history conference many years ago, his presentation on 19th-century case law on liability for reservoir maintenance wasn’t just learned and lucid, it was also one of the best stand-up comedy routines I’ve ever seen or heard. – Dr J B Post, Castletownbere, County Cork, Ireland

The good doctor Post does not give the precise date of the legal history conference to which he refers, which is a pity, as it leaves us unclear whether the late Brian Simpson was inspired by the out of print pamphleteer Dobson, or vice versa. For nineteenth-century case law on liability for reservoir maintenance was, as any Dobsonist knows, a pet subject, even a Shandean hobby-horse, of the pamphleteer’s. His antipathy to public speaking meant that he would never have had an audience rollicking in the aisles, as Simpson did, and not even the most enthusiastic Dobsonist would call his many pamphlets on the subject funny, or even mildly amusing. If anything, the Dobsonian brow was beclouded by a mist of deathly seriousness whenever he addressed the issue of reservoir maintenance, from any angle. For he was fascinated not just by nineteenth-century case law on liability, but by the minutiae of reservoir maintenance in other centuries, and in fields other than the legal, such as general water management, engineering, geography, geology, history, archaeology, and the by-ways of fanatical and hysterical religion.

It has been said that Dobson’s interest in reservoir maintenance began after he toppled from a dam into an ill-maintained reservoir one St Mungo’s Day in a year no scholar has ever been able to pin down with any certainty. What he was doing atop the dam in the first place is one of those ineffable mysteries that drives sensible persons to the brink of madness if they cannot be persuaded to drop the matter. One is reminded of the tragic case of F X Spray, who lost his wits after thirty years of increasingly monomaniacal research, without ever having ascertained which dam Dobson toppled from, in which country, on what date, in what year, and whether the boots he was wearing at whatever time it was had any role to play in his topplement.

Adding to the tragedy of the Spray case is the possibility that the pamphleteer’s interest in reservoir maintenance was not occasioned by his own experience at all. New research into his benighted infancy suggests that among the few periodicals to which his parents subscribed was Annals Of Reservoir Maintenance, bound copies of which were found in a dustbin about a mile from the pamphleteer’s childhood home, at least one volume carrying on its reindeer-hide cover a thumbprint almost certainly belonging to Dobson père. But these are matters of conjecture, and conjecture is the enemy of blinkered certainty, as well we know.

Wearing our blinkers, we are able to assert that Dobson wrote no fewer than a dozen pamphlets on the subject of reservoir maintenance, each of them, alas, now out of print. With equal certainty, we can say that the most important of these pamphlets, the one which will be read a hundred, nay, two hundred years hence, if of course anybody sees fit to reprint it, is the one in which Dobson posits a correlation between the types of ducks disporting themselves in a reservoir and the number of criminals drowned in the same reservoir, after being convicted of their crime or crimes, bound hand and foot with hemp, inserted into a burlap sack, and flung into the reservoir by a pair of executioners each paid in poultry for their services. Such were the ways of judicial mercilessness, at one time, in certain districts. One might think that drowned wretches from the past and present-day ducks had no connection whatsoever. One might even continue to think this after reading Dobson’s pamphlet. For it must be said that, for all its statistical tables and graphs and bold illustrations, Ducks And Criminals And Well-Maintained Reservoirs (out of print, as previously indicated) is written in a sort of hysterically overwrought prose, possibly inspired by hypnagogic visions, which make the thrust of Dobson’s arguments extremely difficult to grasp. There is also the point, of course, that the pamphleteer could hardly tell one type of duck from another, even when armed with an illustrated field guide suitable for nippers. His ignorance does not deter him, and he makes what one gathers, if read several times to wring some sense out of them, are sweeping pronouncements about matching tallies of pickpockets and pochards, forgers and mergansers, murderers and teal.

The other eleven pamphlets on reservoir maintenance are somewhat easier to understand, written in plainer prose, and were collected together in a sort of überpamphlet entitled Eleven Essays On Reservoir Maintenance, By One Who Knows (out of print). The cover featured a spectacular mezzotint by the noted mezzotintist Rex Tint, showing a mezzotintist sitting on a camping stool atop a spectacular dam, executing a mezzotint of a spectacular reservoir, in which pochards, mergansers and teal bob about on the surface, while patches of shading and cross-hatching hint at a number of soaking wet sacks many fathoms deep, containing the soaking wet corpses of pickpockets and forgers and murderers, bound with soaking wet hemp.