Cupcake O’ The Future

I hesitate to tread into that realm where blogging and cupcakes collide, as it is territory where Brit at Think Of England stands proudly alone, far above the petty doings of mere mortals.

I do think it worth mentioning, however, that next month I shall be taking a trip to Mortlake, where I shall be served with a nice cup of tea accompanied by a cupcake emblazoned with the Monas Hieroglyphica of the Elizabethan magus Dr John Dee. See below, for the mystic symbol, if not the cupcake, which I assume has yet to be baked. A full report on this extremely sensible outing will follow in due course.

monad4

The Boot Is On The Other Foot

Here are simple instructions to achieve that state of being where the boot is on the other foot.

Let us assume you are a biped, of the kind known as a pauper biped. Your pauperdom affords you but one boot. In the normal run of things, during your waking hours when you are out and about begging for alms, you will have one foot shod in the boot and the other bare, or perhaps ensocked, or partly wrapped in trailing straggles of puttee.

It is best to carry out the following manoeuvres in front of a mirror, so you can see what you are doing. Let us say the boot is on your right foot. In the mirror, it will look as if it is on your left foot, but a moment’s reflection, ho ho, should suffice to confirm it is on your right.

Now, sit on a clump. Lean over and, taking the boot in both hands, prise it off your foot. You may wish to avert the nasal passages as you do so. If the now unbooted foot is bare, it is a good idea at this point to transfer on to it the sock or ragged scraps of puttee from the other, left, foot, which will appear to you in the mirror as the right. You can also go and dip it, the right foot, into a nearby rill or stream. Keep an eye on your boot as you do so, however, for the land is riddled with brigands who might make off with your boot while you are incommoded with one foot in running water.

Back on the clump, jam your left foot, the right one in the mirror, remember, into the boot. Stand up. The boot is now on the other foot, compared to where it was before you started.

It is worth noting that this is a pastime the pauper can enjoy with much more ease than the rich man. When there is only the one boot, as with the pauper, it is child’s play to keep track of what you are doing. The rich man, possessed of many boots, and many mirrors, can often become hopelessly confused by the manoeuvres, and fly into a rage, throwing boots about his palace and inadvertently smashing mirrors.

Osbert Sitwell’s Nurse

Apart from her antipathy to bananas as “a very common fruit indeed”, her intense devotion to Aberdeen granite as a divinely-ordained medium for tombstones and memorials, and her devotion to the particular Queen under whom she lived, she was, in other respects, just as true to the reign of Anne or Elizabeth as to that of Victoria; a Shakespearian character, a nurse of all time. Although, perhaps, she belonged to the age of Webster more than to any later one, for there was a certain quality about her at once robust and morbid. She loved the sea, and all its smaller fruits, shrimps, prawns, and winkles (here her aristocratic prejudices, as evinced in her horror of bananas, broke down); she loved the lanes, then fuller of wild flowers than of charabancs, and could name any flower, bird, or tree with its proper English name; she loved theatres and any form of pageantry; but more, I think, than anything, did she love to read of a murder – though it was only in the Bible – visit a friend dying of some lingering disease, or roam at her ease in a well-ordered cemetery, observing every inscribed and floral detail… it was this woman, with her “invincible ignorance”, as those responsible for the welfare of the present writer termed it… together with the old house in the shelter of which he lived, that nevertheless joined everyday life for him on to that of previous ages, prevented the nineteenth century from cutting itself off entirely from the past, and provided a healthy current of red blood to that which otherwise might have seemed a dull, bloated, yet anemic age.

Osbert Sitwell, in the preface to Sober Truth : A Collection Of Nineteenth-Century Episodes, Fantastic, Grotesque And Mysterious, compiled and edited by Margaret Barton and Osbert Sitwell (1930)

The Lobster’s Tune

In Act III, Scene III of Death’s Jest-Book, or The Fool’s Tragedy by Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1829), Isbrand asks an important question:

What is the lobster’s tune when he is boiled?

Alas, he does not answer it, but goes on to sing a song about an unborn ghost, a Nile crocodile, and a “little, gruntless, fairy hog”. This is all very well, but I still want to know about the lobster’s tune. Can any reader point me in the right direction? Are there any contemporary cover versions?

Eelworm In Phlox, Etc

The way to deal with eelworm in phlox is to spray with Murphos, a paraltrion curb. The way to avoid being slighted by bus drivers, waiters and salesgirls is to be unselfish, self-confident, thoughtful, enthusiastic and happy. The way to stop a long-winded speaker is for the chairman to rise, thank him for his splendid contribution, and lead the audience in thunderous applause. The way to resist a male seducer is for the lady to sit in an armless straight chair and pop a piece of salt-water taffy into her mouth every time he is about to kiss her… The way to keep matches dry in a row-boat is to put them in a fruit jar whose lid has been fastened to the underside of the seat; to get at them, unscrew the jar from the lid. The way to hem a circular flounce on a slipcover is too complicated to go into here. The way to make a “Stradivarius” violin is to do what it tells you to do in You Can Make A “Stradivarius” Violin, a publication of Popular Mechanics Press. The way to raise the Devil is as follows: draw a circle with consecrated coal and chalk and write around it, “I forbid you, Lucifer, on the name of the Blessed Trinity, to enter this circle”; then take a stand inside the circle and recite: “I conjure thee, Lucifer, by the ineffable names ON, ALPHA, YA, REY, SOL, MESSIAS, INGODUM that thou comest to do, without harming me” [you then tell him what you want]. Nota bene: this works only on Mondays; on Tuesdays, for instance, Lucifer must be addressed as “NAMBROTH”, on Saturdays as “NABAM” (Note to printer : no typos please, matter of life and death) and on Sundays he will answer only to “AQUIEL” and will ask for a hair of your head which on no account should be given him – he can be fooled with a hair from a fox.

The above useful information is a dipperful from the great American reservoir of know-how…

The R R Bowker Company publishes How-To-Do-It Books : A Selected Guide, two hundred pages of descriptive bibliography compiled by Robert E Kingery… Mr Kingery has cut a few paths through the jungle of howtoism, culling out a mere 3,500 titles, which he has arranged under nine hundred heads, from Abacus to Yoghurt, but traversing even these well-blazed trails is fatiguing. Alcoholics, Allergy, and Alligators; Candle-Making and Candy-Making; Chiggers and Children; Diving Boards and Divorce; Embroidery, Emotions, Enamelling, Encyclopaedias, Entertaining, and Etching; Mental Illness cheek by jowl with Metalwork; Money (Counterfeiting) cozying up to Money-Making Ideas; Survival (Atomic Bombs) modulating into Swans. There are books on how to succeed as a motel operator, a woman, a baby sitter, a committee member, a guest, a parent, a child, a lover, a Chevrolet owner, and a baton twirler, (The Baton: Twirling Made Easy!) There are howtos on encouraging bees and earthworms (Thomas J Barrett’s Harnessing The Earthworm) and on discouraging ants, budbugs, cockroaches, moths, silverfish, and termites. There are howtos on pigeons and pigs and poker; on poultry, pregnancy, printing, and poison ivy; on sleuthing and sleeping (How To Sleep Successfully); on standing (Your Carriage Madam!, by Janet Lane) and sitting (Sitting Pretty by, needless to say, the same author); on rabbits, rheumatism, riddles, rifles, and rugs; on lace and lizards, lacrosse, and lampshades; on wood carving, meat carving, soap carving, and ice carving; on how to make mobiles, be a widow (three titles, including Donald I Rogers’ Teach Your Wife To Be A Widow), and get tall (Paul O’Neill’s Why Be Short?); on how to collect books, bottles, buttons, and butterflies; on how to buy things and even one book on how to throw things away – Morgan Towne’s Treasures In Truck & Trash, which tells “how to pick out the treasures from the junk in the cellar and attic, how much they are worth, and where to sell them” and which is by no means the only entry in Mr Kingery’s 3,500 that sounds as though it might really be quite useful in dealing with one of the many special problems that bother people in this intricate age. After all, it is not the fault of the howto author that modern life gets more and more complicated, calling on him to settle problems that are more and more arcane. One sometimes wonders, however, whether a feedback is not at work here and whether a number of these problems would perhaps never have arisen to bother us if books had not been written telling us how to solve them.

Dwight Macdonald, “Howtoism”, collected in Against The American Grain (1962)

In My Dabblebag

Dabbler-3logo (1)Over at The Dabbler this week, a note on bags, on holes in bags, on monks and moths, on palaces of the Tsar, on corridors in those palaces, on Yoko Ono. Is it, then, a set of notes rather than a single note? Perhaps so, and I should be more precise in my title. “A Note On Bags” should be about bags, and nothing but bags. But of course there are all sorts of bags, from the pippy to the tea, so I would need to spell out precisely what bags my note was about, if it were about nothing but bags, and had nothing to add on holes and monks and moths and palaces and Tsars and corridors and Yoko Ono, but it concerns itself with all those things, so the title as given is a misnomer. “An Imprecisely-Named Note On Bags” might do the trick, or “A Set Of Notes On Bags And Other Things”. What a palaver.

Bird Binder

I mentioned the other day that I have mislaid my binder of ornithological resources. I have hunted and searched and rummaged and fossicked, high and low, in every nook and every cranny, but still have not found it. I would be grateful if you would add a plea for its discovery to your daily prayers, for I fear that without my bird binder Hooting Yard itself may simply grind to a halt. Without it, whole swathes of this website could never have been written.

It is a chunky ring-binder, somewhat battered with age, into which are crammed a lifetime’s accumulation of paper-based bird documentation: notes on nesting habits and flight and swoop patterns; profile depictions of beaks and bills; feathery prose-poems; transcriptions of song and trill and chirrup and caw and shriek and warble and tweet; egg lists; talon imprintings; brain scans; analysis of millet and tiny semi-digested mammals and owl pellets; and so on ad avian.

In the nineteen-seventies, leftist theoreticians coined the phrase “actually existing socialism” to account for the fact that Communist regimes such as those in Eastern Europe, rather than being the Utopia of their dreams, were drab grey concrete hellholes. By the same token, my bird binder represents what I like to think of as “actually existing ornithology”. It is a field in which my expertise is, or at least ought to be, unquestioned.

Bereft of my binder, I am lost, like a blind man stumbling in fog, in danger of plunging down a crevasse, at the bottom of which are piled the bleached and brittle bones of long dead Elephant Birds and Upland Moas and Kangaroo Island Emus and West Coast Spotted Kiwis and Korean Crested Shelducks and Amsterdam Island Ducks and Pink-Headed Ducks and Réunion Pochards and Auckland Island Mergansers and Pile-Builder Megapodes and Viti Levu Scrubfowls and Himalayan Quails and Javanese Lapwings and Tahitian Sandpipers and North Island Snipes and Eskimo Curlews and Great Auks and Canarian Black Oystercatchers and a plethora of Rails, the Antillean Cave and the Hawkins and the Red and the Rodrigues and the Bar-Winged and the New Caledonian and the Wake Island and the Dieffenbach’s and the Vava’u and the Chatham and the Hawaiian and the Laysan, among Rails, and Ascension Flightless Crakes and Saint Helena Crakes and also from Saint Helena Saint Helena Swamphens and then Tristan Moorhens and Mascarene Coots and Colombian Grebes and Bermuda Night Herons and New Zealand Little Bitterns and Réunion Sacred Ibises and Spectacled Cormorants and both Small and Large Saint Helena Petrels and Guadalupe Storm-Petrels and Chatham Island Penguins and Bonin Woodpigeons and Réunion Pink Pigeons and Rodrigues Turtle-Doves and Sulu Bleeding-Hearts and Norfolk Island Ground-Doves and Thick-Billed Ground-Doves and Red-Moustached Fruit-Doves and Mauritius Blue Pigeons and Dodos and Society Parakeets and Paradise Parrots and Oceanic Eclectus Parrots and Newton’s Parakeets and Glaucous Macaws and Martinique Amazons and Delalande’s Cuas and Saint Helena Cuckoos and Guadalupe Caracaras and Réunion Kestrels and Mauritius Owls and New Caledonian Booboks and Laughing Owls and Puerto Rican Barn-Owls and Jamaican Pauraques and Coppery Thorntails and Brace’s Emeralds and Bogota Sunangels and Turquoise-Throated Pufflegs and Giant Hoopoes and Imperial Woodpeckers and Bush Wrens and Chatham Island Bellbirds and Lord Howe Gerygones and Mangarevan Whistlers and Nuku Hiva Monarchs and Guam Flycatchers and Short-Toed Nuthatch Vangas and both North Island and South Island Piopios and Huias and White-Eyed River Martins and Red Sea Swallows and Moorea Reed-Warblers and Rueck’s Blue Flycatchers and Chatham Island Fernbirds and Tana River Cisticolas and Black-Browed Babblers and White-Chested White-Eyes and Rodrigues Bulbuls and Aldabra Brush-Warblers and Starlings, so many Starlings!, the Kosrae Island and the Mysterious and the Tasman and the Pohnpei and the Bay and the Bourbon Crested, among Starlings, and Grand Cayman Thrushes and Cozumel Thrashers and Black-Lored Waxbills and Slender-Billed Grackles and Bachman’s Warblers and Semper’s Warblers and Tawny-Headed Mountain Finches and Bonin Grosbeaks and both Lesser and Greater Koa Finches and Kakawahies and Black Mamos and Hooded Seedeaters and Arabian Ostriches and Bering Cackling Geese, so many dead birds, so many bird bones, piled high and white, it is a wonder I could name so many, without the aid of my bird binder. Therein lies the beauty, the dazzling beauty, of actually existing ornithology.

Skew, Whiff

Mr Skew and Mr Whiff went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. They met at the foot of the hill, at a point equidistant from Fort Hoity, where Mr Skew was aide-de-camp, and Fort Toity, where Mr Whiff had charge of the goats. It did not need two to fetch and carry a pail of water, but Mr Skew and Mr Whiff were Brothers Of The Salt, and whenever a pail of water was needed, either at Fort Hoity or at Fort Toity, they would arrange to meet and stroll up the hill together, arm in arm, fraternally.

They were able to stroll, rather than clamber and pant and strain, because a pathway had been cut into the hill at a very gentle gradient, winding round and round and round until it reached the top, where the well was. The well had its own pail, attached to a hefty rope. Mr Skew or Mr Whiff would lower this pail to fill it with well-water, raise it, and pour the water from the well-pail into an empty pail. Either Mr Skew would have brought an empty pail from Fort Hoity, or Mr Whiff the same from Fort Toity. It was within the bounds of possibility that Mr Skew and Mr Whiff would both bring empty pails at the same time, but this never, ever happened. The water replenishment schedules at Fort Hoity and Fort Toity never quite clicked into alignment.

Mr Skew and Mr Whiff arranged their meetings at the foot of the hill by bell and flag. The one was audible, the other visible, across the expanse of marshland that separated Fort Hoity from Fort Toity. The bell might not be heard if, say, fighter jets on practice runs were screaming across the sky, nor the flag be seen if there was a thick and eerie mist o’er the marshes. That is why Mr Skew and Mr Whiff, between them, had devised the system of using both bell and flag, just in case. Fighter jets can come screaming without warning, mists can descend in the blink of an eye.

On their strolls along the path slowly slowly gently up the hill, the one carrying an empty pail and the other empty-handed, Mr Skew and Mr Whiff would babble to each other of the latest doings and frolics and fights and hatreds and recriminations and savageries and vexations and plots and schemes and jollities and japeries and flaps and trysts and couplings and comings and goings at Fort Hoity and Fort Toity. To an outsider such as you or me, it was unremittingly tedious blather.

Of more interest, perhaps, were the various birds which swooped through the air, sometimes very close to the heads of Mr Skew and Mr Whiff, as they strolled. Alas, I have mislaid my binder of ornithological resources.

Mr Skew was deaf in one ear and Mr Whiff blind in one eye. The accident that caused both maimings was the source of their close bond in the Brotherhood of the Salt. It had happened many years ago, in the last century, during – but in no wise related to – the Vietnam War. It was a Thursday morning, and by chance Mr Skew and Mr Whiff, not then known to each other, were in the same field, a field of mown hay, the one crouching, the other jumping, I have no idea why, and the accident which robbed the one of half his hearing and the other of half his sight involved  a torrential downpour and thunder and lightning and howling winds and a flock of innumerable birds. Without my binder I cannot be more specific. In their confraternity Mr Skew and Mr Whiff made a pact never to speak of what happened in that field on that wet windy storm-wracked bird-haunted morn.

They went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. We shall leave them there, half way up the hill, babbling inanities the one to the other, unidentified birds swooping about their heads, the aide-de-camp and the goat-keeper, Skew and Whiff, far from their forts. The sun is obscured by clouds.

My Inner Glove Compartment

Since my appointment with a psychotherapist last week, I have been making strenuous efforts to get in touch with my inner glove compartment. To be honest, I didn’t even know I had one. The psychotherapist, however, was quite sure. Her view was that only by allowing my inner glove compartment free rein could I find happiness, or, if not happiness, at least a measure of contentment with my lot. When I objected that, not being a car owner, I did not actually have an outer glove compartment, she waved her hand dismissively and said our session was at an end.

The first step, I supposed, as I made my way home, was to visualise my inner glove compartment. I found this immensely difficult to do, not having an outer one to picture in my mind’s eye. I thought about various cars I had sat in as a passenger and tried to summon up their glove compartments, but to no avail. This led me to question the pertinence of the psychotherapist’s advice, but I had a whole week to get through before I saw her again, during which time I might suffer a complete mental collapse if I did not do as I was bid. Were I to dry myself in the air of crime, as Arthur Rimbaud once recommended, I could have stolen a car and claimed it as my own, and thus gained possession of a glove compartment. But I eschew criminality in all its forms, and I have never learned to drive, so that particular avenue was not open to me.

What I did, when I got home, was to sit down at my metal tapping machine and send messages to everyone I knew who owned a car, asking them to furnish me with details of its glove compartment. The replies came in over the next couple of days, and from the details afforded to me I built up a mental picture of a sort of Ur-glove compartment. I next tried to imagine this being lodged inside me, in my brain, or my stomach, or my soul. The psychotherapist had not been specific about its location.

I thought I was getting on quite well, and was certainly showing no signs of delirium or derangement or discontent. Then I happened to mention the business to a colleague, who suggested that it was perhaps the contents of the inner glove compartment, the stuff I had crammed into it, with which I needed to get in touch. This was a revelation which necessitated a further round of metal tapping machine messages. From the responses I received I was able to draw up a lengthy list of items. Granted, this was a list of the things my car-owning acquaintances kept in their actual glove compartments, rather than the contents of my own inner one, but it gave me something to work with. And work I did, my mental cogs whirring away, greased and thrumming.

I was incapable, however, of reaching any sensible conclusions. I had a pretty good idea of the general shape and capacity of my inner glove compartment, and had filled it with a higgledy-piggledy collection of gubbins drawn from a Dictionary Of Correspondences Between The Physical And Psychical Realms by Blötzmann. Thus, for example, a spare set of car keys in the real world corresponded to a spare set of so-called “spiritual transportation hypnovehicle keys” in the kingdom of the mind, and a discarded toffee apple wrapper signified a “discarded mental wrapping, a bit sticky, and decisively crumpled”. This was all very well, but what did it mean? It wasn’t my stuff after all, but the ethereal correspondents of my acquaintances’ stuff.

It dawned on me that in order to get in touch with my inner glove compartment I was going to have to have my own real, solid, physical glove compartment after all. Then I could shove various bitty-bobs into it, remove them, lay them out neatly on the kitchen table and check each one against its corresponding item in Blötzmann. I could not afford to buy a car, which in any case would be of no use to me, but perhaps I could pick up a secondhand glove compartment, salvaged from a pranged and crushed crashed machine. But where would I put it? Presumably a glove compartment would have to be inserted into a host of some kind to truly count as a glove compartment. Otherwise it might as well be an old shoebox or a carton. How much easier things would be if my psychotherapist had told me to get in touch with my inner shoebox!

The more I thought about my inner shoebox, the more it appealed to me. Indeed, I was quite convinced that I was already in touch with it, with an intensity my psychotherapist would surely approve of. I thus consigned my inner glove compartment to oblivion, and dallied with it no more. That is probably why, before my next appointment, I suffered a complete mental collapse and was carted off to a grim bleak institution perched on a wild and windswept hillside. From my window, I look out upon a major arterial thoroughfare, along which, in both directions, cars zoom by. Each one, I know, has its own glove compartment, crammed with stuff, stuff of which I can but dream.

Waugh In The Lion’s Den

From 1973 to 1975 Auberon Waugh wrote a regular column for the New Statesman. So unlikely was this alliance that Waugh gave the apposite title In The Lion’s Den to a 1978 book collecting fifty of his pieces. In the introduction, he described the imaginary New Statesman reader he was addressing:

My image of the New Statesman reader was that of a taut, slightly embittered female school-teacher, possibly in Coventry but certainly in one of the less well-favoured areas of the country, struggling valiantly against the inherited and environmental disabilities of her charges to preserve some quasi-theological Hope in the socialist future. She was a convinced atheist and a convinced progressive in sexual matters although her own experiences in that field had seldom been encouraging. In foreign affairs she was endlessly progressive but in home affairs subject to strange disciplinarian urges which might suddenly demand unspeakable punishments not only for racists, rapists and male chauvinists, but also for litter-louts, cigarette-smokers and males generally. She approved of homosexuality and unmarried mothers, disapproved of drink and drugs, approved of education, disapproved of anyone excelling in it, approved, rather nervously, of the working class in most of its manifestations except football hooliganism and represented, in fact, the only surviving bastion of middle class values.

Am I So Poised?

Do I know what my colours are?

Do I make my vowels sing?

Am I direct, sincere and simple?

Do I know the proper way to sit in and rise from a chair?

Am I lovable?

Am I original?

Am I valiant?

Have I made a legal will?

Do I know where it is?

Do I hang up my clothes as soon as I take them off?

Do I sew a snap-fastener on to each end of a piece of tape about an inch and a half long, and sew these tapes in the centre of all shoulder seams?

Am I so poised, so on my centre, so innately joyous that life cannot sway me this way or that?

Jill Edwards’ Self-Searcher, a series of questions for daily reflection, quoted in Against The American Grain : Essays On The Effects Of Mass Culture by Dwight Macdonald (1962).