Another splendid quotation from the journal of Brian Cornelius Cardew, circa 1959:
My passport is more important to me than my sex-life.
More From Cardew
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Job Application
With Osama Bin Laden dead, the position of figurehead for the global Al Qaeda franchise is vacant. I would like to put myself forward to fill this important role. It is true that I do not believe in Allah, have never handled a Kalashnikov, and, indeed, have in the past scribbled a blasphemous cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed (see here and below). No doubt these things will count against me in the initial round of interviews, which I understand will be taking place in some remote mountain fastness in the coming days. But I have every confidence that I will be able to win over the wild-eyed nutters and gun-toting beardy persons with my unique vision of the role. What Al Qaeda desperately needs, I will argue, is an injection of woolly Church of England-style cardigan-wearing niceness. Instead of all that chanting and suicide bombing and beheading, I see the waging of jihad as a matter of cups of tea and arrowroot biscuits and seed cake, with a spot of choral evensong and a sermon. And instead of all that shouty sermonising packed with threats against Jews and infidels, the sermons under my dispensation will be abstruse and windy, full of qualifying phrases and equivocation. This is the way forward, or backwards, or even sideways, for all these directions are of course equally valid in the eyes of Allah, who we should think of as a sort of benign uncle with an unruly beard and fantastic hairy eyebrows, not unlike the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Blasphemous portrayal of the “Prophet” Mohammed
Cornelius Cardew On The Bus
On the bus : I have to write to distract me from the woman, the warm pressure of the femme de trente ans, her softest arm. Boulez – rescue – your programme note must curb my corpuscular eruptions.
Cornelius Cardew, aged twenty-two, in his journal, quoted in Cornelius Cardew : A Life Unfinished by John Tilbury (2008). I have just begun reading this book, which – at over a thousand pages – is clearly both a Herculean labour of love (thirty years in the writing) and mildly bonkers. In other words, the best kind of biography. Expect further reports as I wade through it.
Git On A Bough
I am a grandee
I have a long beard
And I wear a big hat made of fur
I sit in a tree
And things become weird
When the cogs in my brain start to whirr
Birds fall from the sky
Lakes boil to steam
Hens and chickens come home to roost
Oh do not ask why
It is not a dream
But the tethers of sense are unloos’d
The tree is a pine
I perch on a bough
My grandeur will dazzle your sight
“O give us a sign!
And give it us now!”
You caterwaul with all your might
But I just sit
And gesticulate
And summon up thunder and storm
‘Cos I am a git
Deciding your fate
You’ll wish you had never been born
Farmers In The Coalition
According to J Edgar Hoover in his 1958 book Masters Of Deceit, “Farmers In The Coalition” is a “typical” title of the kind of Mimeographed pamphlet issued to Communist study groups in the United States during the 1950s. “Written in a simple style and slanted to the average reader”, these publications were used in the “slow and gradual” process of indoctrination that turned previously patriotic Americans into slavish devotees of a Godless ideology.
“Farmers In The Coalition” is also the title of a pamphlet issued by Old Farmer Frack last year, shortly after Cameron ‘n’ Clegg’s sun-splattered appearance in the Downing Street garden to announce the formation of the coalition government. Though it is Gestetnered rather than Mimeographed – a small yet important distinction – the mad old farmer’s tract is as doctrinaire and as sinister as any screed aimed at the malleable brains of American fellow-travellers half a century ago.
Written in an incoherent style and slanted to the deranged reader, the 2010 edition of “Farmers In The Coalition” ought more accurately be called “Cows In The Coalition”, for Old Farmer Frack presents the case for a number of his bellowing herd to be granted senior positions in the new regime.
“At this critical juncture in our national story,” he writes, in one of his few coherent passages, “Nothing can be more important than that my cows are installed in the great offices of state, from Home Secretary to Foreign Secretary, from Postmaster General to Keeper of the Privy Purse.”
Cynics and conspiracy theorists will suspect that the cows thus empowered would be mere puppets, put in place to further the nefarious, if befuddled, aims of Old Farmer Frack himself. Not so, he argues.
Those who claim that the cows thus empowered would be mere puppets, put in place to further the nefarious, if befuddled, aims I myself harbour within my curdled black worm-riddled heart could not be more wrong! Caligula, who made his horse a consul, is a much-misunderstood Roman Emperor, and one for whom I have a soft spot in my curdled black worm-riddled heart. I will be proud to follow in his wake. I will do all in my power to make sure that when my cow Binky is made Postmaster General, she will lick all the stamps in the land herself, with her rough tongue and copious cow-spittle. Then you shall see real change, of the kind these politicians are always prattling on about.
Old Farmer Frack is less forthcoming about the changes to be ushered in by his other cows, in other ministries. But it hardly matters. In time-honoured fashion, the evil Tories and the hapless Liberal Democrats have crushed beneath their boots the inspiring revolutionary vanguard represented by the mad old farmer and his bellowing cows. Undaunted, he is thought to be working on a new pamphlet, entitled “Other Farmers With Other Cows In Other Coalitions, A Sweeping Historical Perspective”.
Suburbia, USA, 1958
The house is frame, painted gray with green shutters. A wire fence runs round the trim yard. The owner works as a draftsman in a downtown company, his wife keeps house. They have lived in the neighbourhood for many years.
It is now dark, a little after eight o’ clock on a winter evening. The downstairs light is on, the blinds are drawn. A man comes to the front door, raps lightly, and is admitted. Soon another man, walking at a leisurely pace, rounds the corner and enters. He has parked his car on another street.
Ten minutes pass. A third man knocks. He has come by bus from downtown. To make certain nobody was following him, he had ridden two stops past his correct destination, then walked back. Five minutes later a fourth person, a woman in a dark coat, arrives. Everything is quiet : no loud voices, no cars parked in front, no reasons for the neighbours to suspect that a Communist party meeting is in progress.
Communist Party groups like this are small, containing three, four, or five people – a security precaution. In that way fewer members know each other and detection is less likely. Meeting places are frequently changed : this evening a private home, next time a public library or an automobile. Members have been known to sit on park benches, in bus terminals, even in hospital waiting rooms, hatching their plots in casual, conversational tones…
Night after night, week after week, these men and women are plotting against America, working out smears, seeking to discredit free government, and planning for revolution. They form the base of a gigantic pyramid of treason, stretching from the little gray house with green shutters to the towers of the Kremlin.
J Edgar Hoover, Masters Of Deceit : The Story Of Communism In America (1958)
The Magic Mountain
Fair stood the wind for France
The land in which I’ll prance
Along the boulevards and rues
In my winklepicker shoes
Then to Switzerland I’ll proceed
To the Alps! Fear not, I’ll heed
Warnings about the high thin air
Which warn my brain may need repair
But that thin air is just the thing
For those of us who’re suffering
Who suffer as I do from TB
Lying shattered on a balcony
High in the Alps’ imperious span
Like a character from Thomas Mann
Intelligent Aerial Pig
Roll up, see this pig in the balloon basket!
Any question you have, you must ask it.
Within its brain sparks’ll zag and zig.
It is the Intelligent Aerial Pig.
The balloon is up high so you’ll have to shout
Whatever your query, bawl it out.
The pig will answer as best it is able
And send its reply down the tethering cable.
It taps its trotters on one end of the rope,
Once for “Yes” and twice for “Nope”
I feel the vibrations down here on the ground
And tell you the answer in return for a pound.
I spend all the profits on pigfeed and swill
Bought from the farmyard just past yonder hill.
That’s where the pig has its earthly sty
When not answering questions from its perch in the sky.
So put your query, hand over your cash,
Before the balloon comes down with a crash
The Intelligent Pig will suffer no harm
Or, if it does, I shall smear it with balm.
Balloons tend to plummet if not kept aloft
But all will be well if the landing is soft
That’s why I’ve strewn all these cushions and pillows
Across the fields as far as those willows
The willows that weep, that sob, that bewail
When I end up being carted off to gaol
Accused of being a scoundrel and rotter
Pretending to count the taps of a trotter
There’s no pig up there borne by balloon
It’s as fanciful as the man in the moon
But when I get out from my durance vile
You’ll see that my face bears a glittering smile
I’ve had an idea that’s sure to win big
An invisible intelligent aerial pig.
Judgement Of Character
I have learned never to judge a gentleman by the cleanliness of his doilies.
Bella Pok to Lucifer Box in The Vesuvius Club : A Bit Of Fluff by Mark Gatiss (2004). Recommended.
The Regal Woading
Today at The Dabbler, my indispensable guide to the Regal Woading, which I reproduce here:
By rights, several dimblebys should be on hand to guide you through the events of today’s regal woading, but they have been ripp’d untimely from their anchorage, so I am stepping into the breach. Let us be joyful.
Before entering into the state of woaded bliss, the darlings are pulled by elegant horses in procession through the streets of the capital. These streets are lined by flag-waving peasants and other savages, watched over by coppers with clubs “on the ground”, as they say, and, from high buildings, by snipers armed with high-velocity rifles and walkie-talkies. But the mood is rightly joyous. The peasants wave their flags and, as the carriages progress, the darlings, yet unwoaded, wave back, though flagless. The horses have been equipped with tackle that occludes their peripheral vision, to prevent them seeing anything that might make them panic and, in panic, go galloping pell mell, crushing peasants beneath their hooves. Were that to happen, to continue with the woading would be unseemly, and there must be not a smidgen of unseemliness on this day of all days. Hence the horses’ blinkers-tackle.
Within the huge ensteepled and consecrated edifice await the guests and the shamen. None has need of blinkers. The arch-shaman is a fellow with a ragged grey-white beard, as is considered proper for his office. He will perform the rite of regal woading when the darlings are ushered, separately, into the cavernous interior of the edifice. See, there, the trough of woad, and the siphon and funnel and besplattering implement which will be used to woad-besplatter the darlings at the most significant moment of the ceremony.
But first there is much rigmarole, of a kind that cries out for interpretation-by-dimbleby. The arch-shaman, or one of his acolytes, will ascertain that the woading is pure, unalloyed and sullied not by any hint of bewolfenbuttlement. In a modern woading such as this, those watching electrical transmissions may be able to see each individual grey-white hair in the arch-shaman’s beard trembling faintly in the cool air. It is a sight to behold. The horses remain outwith the edifice, stamping their hooves, being fed from nosebags. The peasants and savages too, stay in their pens beside the streets, feeding from crisp-packets. The coppers and snipers stay alert.
Inside there is solemn blathering and the woading itself, and the darlings buss their lips, and a great hosannah of voices is raised in song. Here even a dimbleby might pause, to let it sink in, sound and spectacle without comment. Then, blue with woad, the darlings emerge, upon the steps, to much cheering and clanging of bells, before climbing together into a carriage to be pulled by snack-refreshed horses for the return procession. Somewhere in the teeming masses, a “student” raises a placard of contempt. Before he can be clubbed by a copper or shot by a sniper, he is torn limb from limb by a gaggle of peasants, unnoticed by the larger throng. It is meet that it should be so.
Across the land, jelly and ice cream are gobbled. Huzzah!
Dismantled Wooden Myrna Loy
He came, clutching an Alpenstock, from the far Tyrol.
He joined the Baader-Meinhof Gang, along with Astrid Proll.
He joined an English folk group, and sang a Fol De Rol.
And no one ever realised that he was a wooden doll.
His name was not Pinocchio, a different wooden boy.
Our hero’s name, quite weirdly, he shared with Myrna Loy,
That siren of the silver screen who brought filmgoers much joy.
Our Myrna was a terrorist and a folkie, a simple wooden toy.
Pinocchio’s nose, you will recall, grew longer as he lied.
But Myrna Loy’s did not, he took truth as his guide.
Well, he only did so after Ulrike Meinhof died.
For on that day his revolutionary fervour was cast aside.
He cast aside the folk group too, hey nonny nonny no.
He met a man in a field, one man who went to mow.
He lay down on the fresh-mown grass, he had nowhere else to go
And Myrna Loy, when winter came, was buried under snow.
He lay there until springtime, a wooden boy, frozen, dead
Until he was found by urchins, who carried him to a shed.
They dismantled him piece by piece, the urchins Lars and Ned.
And then they had a game of football with his wooden head.
So when you tour, with your Alpenstock, the fabled far Tyrol,
Say a prayer for Myrna Loy, the dismantled wooden doll.
Thursday Morning Thriller
Little did Sir Foljambe Junket suspect, as he was poised to dunk a Rich Tea biscuit into his piping hot cup of Darjeeling, that he was about to precipitate a series of events that would lead to the toppling of one of the great crowned heads of Europe, events involving a bewildering cast of Lascars, dacoits, thugs, assassins, diplomats, remittance men, bankers, parish constables, distressed gentlewomen, flappers, floozies, defrocked Jesuits, pastry chefs, princelings, Savoyards, cutthroats, bellringers, sots, wastrels, ragamuffins, street urchins, detectives, privateers, signalmen, costermongers, pedlars, peasants, boulevardiers, flaneurs, snake charmers, circus strongmen, footballers’ wives, cripples, mendicants, sisters of mercy, merry widows, bluestockings, bloated jantors, gumshoes, ski instructors, film directors, zanies, clowns, mountebanks, captains, my captains!, mavericks, cowpokes, jewel thieves, gentlemen callers, beldams, duennas, docents, governesses, papal nuncios, gold prospectors, mining engineers, stokers, undertakers’ mutes, chat show hosts, cashiered cadets, shanghaied sailors, brevet colonels, elephant hunters, expats, spies, irredentists, snowmen, chimney sweeps, gangmasters, snipers, balletomanes, aesthetes, charges d’affaires, rapporteurs, adulterers, divorcées, milkmen, struck-off doctors, discharged bankrupts, airmen, balloonists, hod carriers, birdwatchers, clock makers, traitors, Frankish kings, mothmen, athletes, sprinters, vampires, zombies, psychopaths, straw men, poetasters, boobies, nutters, wazirs, muftis, hunchbacks, ombudsmen, topers, gasmen, helots, hellions, hippies, swamis, gurus, rotogravurists, shamen, city slickers, minstrels, metallurgists, paviours, ravers, bohemians, Tundists, fishmongers, safe crackers, recusants, hermits, anchorites, movers and shakers and Quakers and bootblacks and boffins and henchmen and murderers and tallymen and bus conductors and even the Crown Prince himself. His biscuit hovering over the cup, Sir Foljambe paused before dunking. The thing about a Rich Tea biscuit, he thought, was that it had the consistency of cardboard and tasted of nothing. Dunked, it had the consistency of hot wet cardboard and still tasted of nothing. Of a sudden, with uncharacteristic impetuosity, he flung the biscuit across the room, where it clattered against the wainscot and broke into smithereens. Did he but know it, the aged grandee had, at the eleventh hour, averted a series of events that would have led to the toppling of one of the great crowned heads of Europe, events involving a bewildering cast of Lascars, dacoits, thugs, assassins, diplomats, remittance men, bankers, parish constables, distressed gentlewomen, flappers, floozies, defrocked Jesuits, pastry chefs, princelings, Savoyards, cutthroats, bellringers, sots, wastrels, ragamuffins, street urchins, detectives, privateers, signalmen, costermongers, pedlars, peasants, boulevardiers, flaneurs, snake charmers, circus strongmen, footballers’ wives, cripples, mendicants, sisters of mercy, merry widows, bluestockings, bloated janitors, gumshoes, ski instructors, film directors, zanies, clowns, mountebanks, captains, my captains!, mavericks, cowpokes, jewel thieves, gentlemen callers, beldams, duennas, docents, governesses, papal nuncios, gold prospectors, mining engineers, stokers, undertakers’ mutes, chat show hosts, cashiered cadets, shanghaied sailors, brevet colonels, elephant hunters, expats, spies, irredentists, snowmen, chimney sweeps, gangmasters, snipers, balletomanes, aesthetes, charges d’affaires, rapporteurs, adulterers, divorcées, milkmen, struck-off doctors, discharged bankrupts, airmen, balloonists, hod carriers, birdwatchers, clock makers, traitors, Frankish kings, mothmen, athletes, sprinters, vampires, zombies, psychopaths, straw men, poetasters, boobies, nutters, wazirs, muftis, hunchbacks, ombudsmen, topers, gasmen, helots, hellions, hippies, swamis, gurus, rotogravurists, shamen, city slickers, minstrels, metallurgists, paviours, ravers, bohemians, Tundists, fishmongers, safe crackers, recusants, hermits, anchorites, movers and shakers and Quakers and bootblacks and boffins and henchmen and murderers and tallymen and bus conductors and even the Crown Prince himself.
La Maison De Térébenthine
Earlier today I was rummaging in the ReR Megacorp catalogue when I discovered, somewhat to my astonishment, that Mr Cutler’s emporium has “a few copies” of House Of Turps for sale.
He describes it as “classic Oulipoesque Keyiana” which is fairly accurate. It is a booklet originally published by the Malice Aforethought Press in 1987, although the copies available may be from a second print-run made as the “gift item” appended to subscribers’ copies of one of the legendary ReR Quarterlies. (Incidentally, besotted devotees may wish to snap up the entire collection of Quarterlies, two sets of which also seem to be available.)
Here, then, is your chance to clasp to your heaving bosom a true rarity, nigh on a quarter of a century old. I suggest you hie hence and place your order and send Mr Cutler your monies.
Pang Hill Plop Pit
Upon Pang Hill, there is a plaque, battered and burnished and copper and commemorative, affixed to a stone marking the spot once occupied by the Pang Hill Plop Pit, the pit into which generations of tinies from Pang Hill Orphanage plopped things discarded and abandoned. Incessant rainfall in those parts meant that there was forever a puddle at the bottom of the pit, and the presence of the puddle meant that when a thing discarded or abandoned was tossed into it, the thing made a plop as, tossed and falling, it landed in the puddle. Oft times the depth of the puddle was such that the plopping thing was wholly submerged under the rainwater. Sometimes, when rainfall was light, was but a drizzle, much of the puddle water would leach into the muck, and the puddle become shallow, and then the thing discarded or lost would remain visible, to those who looked, until a storm came, and the puddle level rose, and the waters covered the tossed-away abandonee.
Once a week, on Thursday mornings, the Pang Hill Plop Pit became a bubbling fizzing fuming frothing gaseous pit. The Orphanage Janitor emptied into it numerous pailfuls of nigh-impossibly corrosive acid, which dissolved all the items tossed and plopped into the puddle during the previous seven days. By dusk on Thursdays the acid had done its work and further rainfall served to dilute the puddle and it ceased to bubble and fizz and fume and froth.
We have a record of all that was tossed away to plop into the Plop Pit, for the orphans were charged to maintain log books. Here are some telling extracts, from a recent compilation published by the Pang Hill Orphanage Documentary Archive. I have obliterated the dates, through a lack of pernicketiness.
Orphan Carstairs. Chucked into the plop pit several lobster pots of no further use since the imposition of the revised sea creature protocol.
Orphan Brandt. Up bright and early that day, feeling awful, and out to take a turn by the Pang Hill Plop Pit, and tossed into it cheesecloth trousers rent in many places following bramble bush and hornets mishap.
Orphan Cuddy. Into the pit plopped wrench, awl, adze, cutters and pincers.
Orphan Furbelow. Dun flap o’ tarp, eggs o’ larks, talc ‘n’ seed sprinkler, Jap keg lid, sconce ‘n’ punnet. All thrown into the Pit o’ Plops, all sank in the puddle, to be forgot.
Yet due to the log books, nothing is forgotten. Tossed away, plopped into the pit, discarded and abandoned and eaten by the janitor’s acid, every last item is granted immortality. The orphans themselves have perished, the long line of janitors too, the Orphanage crumbled to ruin, even the battered and burnished and copper and commemorative sign hangs from a single rusty nail and will one day fall and be buried in the muck. Pang Hill itself will be flattened by tectonic shifts or cataclysm. The sound of the plops, though, travels on, across unimaginable distances, in space and time, and with it the memory of all that was discarded, of all that was abandoned, of all things.
Your Guide To Vitamins, Part One
From Dull Tool Dim Bulb