Lac D’Indiference
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Two Bodies Of Water
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Monthly Archives: April 2011
Swamp Demons
The weedy, asthmatic, fey and trembling poet Dennis Beerpint has, I am afraid to say, been caught red-handed in an act of blatant plagiarism. The title piece in his latest slim volume of twee verse, Swamp Demons, And Other Demons, And Other Swamps, has been copied word for word from the August-September 1936 issue of Weird Tales magazine, where it was correctly ascribed to the writer C A Butz. Reclining on a divan, feeling faintly ill, Beerpint has refused to comment on his act of poetic perfidy. Here is Butz’s original verse.
The lights that wink across the sodden moor
Like phosphorescent eyes that beckon men
To risk fell footsteps in the treacherous fen,
And sink in loathsome muck, without a spoor —
What ghosts of former days, what dread allure,
Abides within this subterranean den?
Or, reaching out, snares victims to its ken,
With wraith-like fingers, to a peril sure?
‘Tis told that evil things lurk out of sight
With human bones that fester in the ooze;
Belike ’tis true, these bones that once were clothed
In fleshly form now harbour deadly spite
Against the living, and this swamp still brews
Within its bubbling depths the curse men loathed
Before they turned to leprous Things of Night!
Mascot
At last, a proper job! It is with some pride that I announce my adoption by an American baseball team as their mascot. According to the Baltimore Orioles, I am “a family friendly character”, and apparently I was unveiled just last week, though I must admit I don’t recall the event. Perhaps I was taking a nap at the time.
Particularly exciting is that I have been given my own army, known as “Frank Key’s Army”. I think I shall lead them on manoeuvres in the near future, though rather than deploying them to one of the world’s trouble spots it might be more satisfying to set them, armed to the teeth, upon defenceless persons I abhor. Luckily, I do not detest quite so many people as Percy Grainger did, so the world is (relatively) safe in my hands.
Of course, becoming a deeply adored mascot would cause a swimming in the head for an unstable or partly deranged person, so I will be careful to keep a proper perspective. Now I must go and drill the troops and issue them with their blunderbusses, muskets, and surface-to-air missiles.
P.P.S.
Yesterday we learned that real men don’t write postscripts, and that “the apogee of superficiality” is to scribble a PS on the outside of an already-sealed envelope. Clearly this is something only a girly like “Case 11” would do. According to W L George, any man exhibiting such behaviour must be a mincing unmanly fop with an interest in the arts.
But wait! His thesis is comprehensively demolished when we consider this passage from Richard Holmes’s The Age Of Wonder, in an account of Mungo Park’s second African expedition:
The atmosphere among the surviving members of the expedition is caught in a letter which the cheery, hardbitten Captain John Martyn wrote… Finally he added a scrawled note on the stained outer flap of his letter, dated 4 November. It captures a soldier’s-eye view of the British imperial mission. “PS Dr Anderson and Mills dead since writing the within – my head a little sore this morning – was up late last night drinking Ale with a Moor who has been at Gibraltar and speaks English – got a little tipsy – finished the scene by giving the Moor a damn’d good thrashing.”
[My italics.] Now, does hardbitten Captain Martyn sound like an effeminate prancing ninny? I think not. This whole matter of girly postscripts evidently requires further study.
Speak Like Percy Grainger!
Now you too can speak and write like Percy Grainger! At Strange Flowers, which I am extremely pleased to have discovered, James Conway provides a splendid list of Grainger-approved words. He explains:
… the older he got the more cantankerous he became. A 1958 piece entitled “The Things I Dislike” began “Almost everything. First of all foreigners, which means: all Europeans except the British, the Scandinavians & the Dutch.”
Grainger was nothing if not thorough, and his distrust of anything originating south of Holland led to him to try and purge his writing of Greco-Latin elements
There is much more in the piece about the madcap Antipodean composer, but the highlight is the glossary itself. Go thou hence and memorise it, and soon you will be able to write vast epic poems akin to those of Charles Montague Doughty, surely Grainger’s guiding spirit?
The Land Of Cheese And Wine
I have been called many things in my time – “Mr Key” and “a Diogenesian recluse” are two that spring to mind – but the one I particularly treasure is “the anti-Capitalist Music journalist”. Alas, the tiny speck of Interwebshire where these words appeared has vanished. Let us hope it pops up again somewhere one day.
Capitalist Music were an endearingly preposterous band, based in Norwich, in those heady post-punk days circa 1979-1982. Their chief characteristic, as I recall, was an almost boundless self-importance. For the crime of having given them a so-so review in a local rag, I earned my immortal epithet. Not “an” anti-Capitalist Music journalist, note, but “the” (as if they were otherwise universally adored), and the implication that my opinion of them was the defining fact about me. I may have been scribbling reviews of other bands, and of films, and bashing out a cartoon strip, but what did that matter? Surely everybody knew me as “the anti-Capitalist Music journalist”.
But was I, truly? After all, here I am writing about them thirty years later. The reason for doing so is basically a plea for help. For me, the band’s finest work was the ludicrous “Jane’s Gone To France”, with its rousing lines “It’s the land of cheese and wine / It’s the land of Marshal Petain!” Yet no matter how efficiently I sluice out my ears with Dr Baxter’s Ear-Sluicing Preparation, I have never, ever been able to work out what on earth the great Steve Bloch is singing in the next line. So in a desperate attempt to solve this puzzle that has haunted me for three long decades, I am posting the song here. Have a listen, and when you have calmed down sufficiently, and stopped giggling, do let me know what you think that line is.
Jane’s gone to France
It’s the land of cheese and wine
And it’s the land of Marshal Petain
And it’s the land of [what, for God’s sake?]
She was a good girl
But now she’s gone for good
Capitalist Music – Jane’s Gone To France
from the 1981 compilation album “Welcome To Norwich A Fine City”
Dance Of Doom
See Beatus Of Liébana at the Public Domain Review
Hark! Hark!
Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark
Upon the deck of Noah’s ark.
Noah decides to muzzle them
Helped by Japheth, Ham, and Shem.
Thus the dogs are rendered mute
So we can hear the dulcet flute
Played by a chap standing on one leg.
Not Herman Melville’s tar Queequeg,
This fellow goes by the name of Ian,
A name emblazoned once in neon
At vast arenas throughout the land
For he was the leader of a band
A hairy band called Jethro Tull
Now he’s beshat on by a gull
Upon the deck of Noah’s ark.
The bird flies on into the dark.
The flautist wipes his old tramp’s coat,
Cursing the day he boarded this boat.
But it rained and rained and rained and rained
And rained and rained and rained and rained.
The ark was a lifeline to which he clung,
And he’d long ago lost his aqualung.
P.S.
Men do not, as a rule, use postscripts, and it is significant that artists and persons inclined toward the arts are much more given to postscripts than other kinds of men. One might almost say that women correspond by postscript; some of them put the subject of the letter in the postscript, as the scorpion keeps his poison in his tail. I have before me letters from Case 58, with two postscripts, and one extraordinary letter from Case 11, with four postscripts and a sentence written outside the envelope. This is the apogee of superficiality.
W L George, The Intelligence Of Woman (1916)
Mimms. Mimmses?
What with the foul and beastly vice and further spookiness at South Mimms, I admit to lying awake at night, tossing and turning, fretful that nothing of comparable import ever seemed to happen at North Mimms. One likes to think of the Mimms (Mimmses?) as equal in their attractions, albeit those attractions are largely historical. Balanced Mimms are so much easier to comprehend, within my head, than lopsided Mimms. I am going to have to consult a reference work to decide on the proper plural.
To my delight, I have discovered an event at North Mimms to serve as a counterweight to all that shenanigans at South Mimms. The Age Of Wonder : How The Romantic Generation Discovered The Beauty And Terror Of Science by Richard Holmes is itself a wonder of a book. Nige has a postage on it which you would do well to read. In his chapter on ballooning, Holmes tells us of the foppish Vincent Lunardi (1759-1806), a young Italian who made the first manned balloon ascent in Britain, rising from Moorfields in London on 15 September 1784. He took his cat with him. After drifting across London and over Hertfordshire, eating chicken, drinking champagne, and accidentally breaking one of his aerial oars, Lunardi noticed that the cat was numb with cold. He brought the balloon down (by paddling the oars, he claimed, which Holmes points out is impossible), and delivered the shivering cat into the hands of a no doubt nonplussed peasant girl in a field, before reascending and continuing his historic flight. And where was this field? Why, in North Mimms!
I have not yet managed to ascertain the name of the cat, more’s the pity. If any reader knows it, perhaps they would be kind enough to let me know in the Comments. You can see the cat for yourself in this portrait of Lunardi published by Edward Hodges of Cornhill just six weeks after his act of feline mercy in North Mimms.
Bashed On The Bonce With A Sap By A Copper
Bashed On The Bonce With A Sap By A Copper is a fascinating addition to what St Clair McKelway (1905-1980) called the “annals of crime and rascality”. It is subtitled The Collected Arrests Of Detective Captain Cargpan, Volume One, which has devotees of the legendary policeman salivating with pleasure at the prospect of further bashing collections.
For the time being, though, even Cargpan’s greatest fans ought to be sated by this rip roaring record of thousands of arrests. It includes famous cases such as Dinsmore the budgerigar trainer, the weighted jam-jar man, and the spectral cardigan-knitter of Cardiganshire, together with a host of the undeservedly obscure and neglected, including the beekeeper Plath and the toastrack poisoner of Box. The Detective Captain himself emerges as perhaps a more complex figure than hitherto acknowledged. I was surprised to learn, for example, that on many occasions he had his sidekicks rough up a culprit before bashing them on the bonce with his sap. Sometimes he whacked his lead-weighted sap on their bonce and in the kidneys. And it comes as a complete revelation to learn that he sometimes lit his pipe, crammed with acrid Serbian pipe tobacco, with one hand while simultaneously sapping a malefactor with the other. Most pipe smokers need one hand to hold the pipe and the other to steady the lit lucifer. It is a measure of Cargpan’s insouciance that he was able to deploy his pipe-igniting skills with such aplomb in the face of incorrigible villainy.
Among the incidental pleasures of the book are the glimpses we get of the Detective Captain arriving at, and leaving, the scenes of arrest; a virtuoso description, covering forty pages, of the glint in his eye; and the lyrical evocation of the cellar down at the nick, its appurtenances and décor, the scene of so many vivid post-arrest roughings-up. For, in spite of that subtitle, this is not a mere record of Cargpan’s arrests alone. We are led from arrest to confession in almost every case, whether the miscreant blubs like a baby instantly, or it takes the sidekicks as long as ten minutes to extract an admission of their squalid criminality. In almost every case, note, because of course now and then one bash from Cargpan’s sap was all it took to send a ne’er-do-well spinning into the fiery satanic realm of death.
If I have one criticism of the book, it is the absence of lurid high definition colour photographs of hapless villains reaping the grisly deserts of their malfeasance. Otherwise, it is a cracking good read, in more ways than one.
Dabbling With The Law
This week in my cupboard at The Dabbler I launch an exciting new series in which I dispense free online legal advice to the unwashed masses. Our first topic is bonkers alibis. There is, I am told, a body of opinion that reliable legal advice is best sought from qualified practitioners who have devoted a number of years to study of the law. There is some merit in this view. Unfortunately, if I took it seriously, I would not be in a position to dispense legal advice of any sort, and that would never do, would it? I like nothing better than to stand on street corners haranguing passers-by with legal tips, through a loudhailer if necessary, or even a tannoy, whether those passers-by are in need of the advice or not. After all, the day may come when they will need it, hoit cum toit, tolly polly, rinkum dinkum.
It is also worth pointing out that you may benefit from deep textual study of my legal tips even if you are not a member of the unwashed masses, for example if you are the sort of person who bathes occasionally and shuns human company, aloft in your ivory tower. Such persons are still placed under arrest, rightly or wrongly, particularly if Detective Captain Cargpan is in a bad temper, as he so often is, when he has not roughed somebody up for a few hours. Why, only the other day I heard tell of a fellow, an inhabitant of an ivorian turret given to preening upon his balcony spitting upon and hurling anathemas at the unwashed masses gathered below at the foot of his turret, with their pitchforks and stink. Up the spiral staircase lumbered Cargpan and his toughs, and they bashed this chap about and dragged him off to the nick, where they bashed him about some more before charging him with several obscure crimes most of us thought had been removed from the statute book, such as “leaning against his own mantelpiece” and “having an oddly-shaped head”.
Of course, I knew these were still heinous acts of criminality, even though I have never studied the law. My knowledge comes from having memorised Dobson’s pamphlet How To Fill Your Brain With Arcane Legal Precepts Through Simple Will-Power And Osmosis (out of print). The ivorian turreteer did not, alas, retain me as his legal advocate, and that is why he is now serving twenty thousand years in Sing Sing, or in the Pointy Town equivalent of Sing Sing, which is called something like Bing Bang or Ping Pong or Whiff Whaff. It is not to be confused with the thrilling sport of the same name, played with light little white balls and bats. The bats are not white, though they are fairly light and fairly little, when compared, say, to big bats like bludgeons, the ones Detective Captain Cargpan issues to his ruffians on the morning of an arrest. Nor are these the same bats that hang upside down in caves and flit and swoop and occasionally become entangled in the hair of screeching girlies in certain genres of film.
I hope from the above it is clear that I have an enviable grasp of many matters, legal and otherwise, and therefore can almost always be relied upon when dispensing advice, in The Dabbler and elsewhere.
Anniversary
‘Twas on this day in the year Two Thousand and Four
Mr Key came a-knocking at a filthy black door.
The door was in Denmark Street off the Charing Cross Road
Where the Sex Pistols rehearsed and punk rock did explode.
But now behind the door was a radio station,
By far the finest in the entire nation.
For this was the home of Resonance FM,
A radiophonic treasure, a jewel, a gem.
As Mr Key did upon the black door knock
The time was approaching four o clock.
A buzzer buzzed, and in he stepped
Into a hallway that had never been swept.
Then through to a back room where laptops did hum
“Mr Key” said a fellow, “Thank God you have come!”
He was tall and bearded was this man,
The then station manager Knut Aufermann.
In a corner a bucket caught leaks from the ceiling
And upon the walls the paint was peeling.
It was a squalid place for sure
(Resonance is not based there any more.)
“I am here to broadcast my first ever radio show,”
Said Mr Key. Said Knut “Yes, I know.
You must clamber up that narrow stair
And when you get to the top please beware
The floor above is close to collapse
It will last another year or two perhaps.”
So up the stairs climbed Mr Key
Where he met a man called Malachi.
“Hello,” he said, “I’m your sound engineer.
My job’s to ensure the audience can hear
The sensible prose you’re going to spout
As our transmitter beams it out
To all four corners of the planetary sphere.
It is nearly time, so sit down here.”
He proffered a chair that was falling to bits,
But Mr Key sat and gathered his wits
He cleared his throat and tested the microphone
And he started to speak in mellifluous baritone
“This is Hooting Yard On the Air,” he said.
Indeed it was. And those seven words led
To seven whole years of Hooting Yard shows
To hours and hours of lopsided prose
For the moral instruction of a grateful nation
On the world’s most astonishing radio station.
And the shows are not lost in the dust of the past
Hundreds can be heard in the form of podcast
Yet ‘twas babble o’ the future when he knocked on that door
On the fourteenth of April, Two Thousand and Four.
*
The first ever episode of Hooting Yard On The Air will be repeated on Resonance104.4FM today ay 6.30 PM. A podcast will be available for download in the near future.
Podpersons’ Delight
Idea For A Ballet
Yesterday, an idea for an opera. Today, an idea for a ballet, courtesy of the magnificent headline
Swan ‘falls in love’ with a tractor
I do think they could have omitted those pesky inverted commas. The ballet would have to have a role for animal behaviourist Daniela Fiutak, who could communicate her insight “The swan presumably had contact with machines during puberty. He sees the tractor as a sexual partner” through the medium of interpretive dance.
