… speculation continued to flourish in Germany, where a group of young writers, gathered at the University of Jena, began to explore the philosophical ideas of Friedrich Schelling, and what he called Naturphilosophie. This doctrine, perhaps best translated as ‘science mysticism’, defined the entire natural world as a system of invisible powers and energies, operating like electricity as a series of ‘polarities’. According to Schelling’s doctrine, the whole world was indeed replete with spiritual energy or soul, and all physical objects ‘aspired’ to become something higher. There was a ‘world-soul’ constantly ‘evolving’ higher life forms and ‘levels of consciousness’ in all matter, animate or inanimate. All nature had a tendency to move towards a higher state.

So carbon for example ‘aspired’ to become diamond; plants aspired to become sentient animals; animals aspired to become men; men aspired to become part of the Zeitgeist or world spirit. Evolutionary, idealist, electrical and Vitalist ideas were all evidently tangled up in this system, which had an obvious appeal to imaginative writers in the Jena circle like Novalis, Schiller and Goethe, as well as experimental physiologists like Johann Ritter. It had its attractions, not least in its optimism and its sense of reverence for the natural world. But it also constantly teetered on the brink of idiocy. One of its wilder proselytisers, the Scandinavian geologist Henrick Steffens, was said to have stated that ‘The diamond is a piece of carbon that has come to its senses’; to which a Scottish geologist, probably John Playfair, made the legendary reply: ‘Then a quartz, therefore, must be a diamond run mad’.

Richard Holmes, The Age Of Wonder : How The Romantic Generation Discovered The Beauty And Terror Of Science (2008). In some ways the joys of this book are encapsulated in a single brief sentence on page 273:

The Anti-Jacobin magazine made a more general link between radical politics, inhaling gas, flying balloons and mesmerism.

Lac D’Indiference

Mer D’Inimitie

From Ptak Science Books

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!

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.

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.

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?

See Beatus Of Liébana at the Public Domain Review

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)