American Fez

Tip For 2005

My tip for 2005: buy a parrot. Why? Well, I shall tell you ....

I always find it amusing to observe all the desperate people anxiously transcribing their ludicrous "to do" lists on to creased and dog-eared sheets of foolscap paper. Personally, I never write anything down, since I assume that if the item has not clamped itself irremovably upon my mind like a limpet shell upon a seaside rock then it obviously wasn't very important to begin with.

If I am absolutely forced to record something for later recollection, I carefully impart the gist of whatever it is to my pet parrot Elton, who will then repeat it back to me at regular intervals from his perch upon my left shoulder. And so my daily grind is often interrupted by squawked sentences such: "Polly want a cracker. Pick up laundry. Sandra is a big fat cow. Buy milk. Pieces of eight. Polly want a cracker. Where the hell did I put that pen. Pick up Eliza from airport. Polly want a cracker. Shut up you stupid bird. Pick up laundry ..."

Who needs a daily-planner when you have a loyal parrot?

W2

Behold a W upon the pathway and take care, for it is the mark of the snake and here the serpent has slithered and perhaps still slithers on his slithery expedition from apple tree to apple tree. Beware, also, a W in the water, for it betokens the wake of the slippery eel and the grim swim of the parasitical lamprey. Harken ye to the flutter of W in the air, for it be the monstrous wing of the gryphon whose flashing fangs run red with the blood of ….excuse me, I was getting rather carried away there.
Anyway, the letter W, a deriviation of the Runic “wynn” and properly pronounced “double U”, is the only English letter name comprised of more than one syllable. Consequently, when spoken aloud, the supposedly abbreviated version of the expression “world wide web” – “double U, double U, double U” – actually employs more syllables than the original phrase itself.
In my book, then, W stands for “Worthless”, and let me just add by way of certain proof that the letter does not appear in any of the romance languages. This clumsy and awkward letter would obviously be far more interesting had it remained the “double V” it was in ancient times.
And that is all from the alphabet in 2004, we shall deal with X, Y and Z in the new year.

Visage

There was a young woman traveling on the train this morning who most certainly would have been declared very beautiful by all standard authorities on the subject, were it not for a disfiguring and unsightly nose that sucked the beauty from her remaining facial feartures like a giant leech: a nose that even the most hideous of witches would have been proud to claim as part of her evil physiognomical bag of tricks; an ugly stepsister's nose haphazardly attached to a Cinderella's face; indeed, for a moment I even imagined that she must be returning from an all night fancy dress party and had merely forgotten to remove this ridiculous element of her costume appendage, and so I looked in vain for the elastic string that would have held such an appendage in place, but the mournfully bleak depths of her eyes, long wearied by staring down through that crooked lump of cartilage and across those bulbous brown freckles where thick hairs sprouted, told the true story. How many, many hours, I wondered, must she have spent cursing her nose while weeping in the mirrors hung in her home, or when casting sidelong distressed glances at the reflecting windows of the buildings that she passed. What glorious and glamorous female heights she could conquered without that nose, what dashing male admirers she could have shimmered among if only that nose conformed to the ravishing qualities exhibited by the rest of her face, only the most tear-stained and melodramatic of romance novels could tell of. And so I was glad that, although I am not particularly handsome, I am adequately and equally plain all over.

Flying V

Observe how the letter V always appears in the heroic language and insignia of the militarized world: "Valeria Vicesima Victrix", catchphrase of the infamously sheep-skin clad Legio XX, garrisoned for centuries far from their sunny homes beneath the gray skies and relentless rain that battered those dense green forests and wild heather-heavy plains of Roman Britain. And today, when only the archeological coins of those long dead legionnaires remain, we still associate some vaguely Churchillian concept of victory via valor with this most warlike letter called V, the camouflaged commando of the alphabet who clandestinely creeps across international borders, ill met by moonlight, cunningly disguised as a U:

"I will tell you nothing but my name, rank, and serial number, which is V V V V V V V."

"That's not a number, pig dog spy."

"It is if you're a Roman, you Nazi swine, it's 555555. Did they teach you nothing at Gestapo school, Fritz?"

"Silence!"

Anyway, as you may have gathered by now, V is my favorite letter and so I've not been mean to it at all.

A Typical Woman's Revenge

So I took Hyacinth into town to have her fortune told for Christmas. One of those Rumanian looking women who have a stall in the Whole Foods market did it for her. You know the type. Massive great big gypsy ear rings and silky scarves wrapped her head like a turban. Probably wearing curly shoes too but I couldn't see her feet because they were under the table the whole time. Stank of that hippy oil they all pour down the back of their necks. There were all sorts of religious statues propped up around her table, Egyptian ones, Greek ones, Roman ones, Voodoo ones, Hindu ones, some Virgin Marys, all this iconography all over the place and all jostling for space with loads of candles, crystals and sparkly stuff that I didn't recognise.
Anyway, Hyacinth sits down and I plop down next to her because I'm paying, and then the Rumanian looking woman starts dealing out the cards like they were on fire or something: 'The Lovers' is the first one she turns up. Don't know what that's all about, I snigger out loud, got nothing to do with me. Hyacinth gives me a sharp elbow in the ribs and tells me to shut up and the Rumanian looking woman gives me a nasty stare as if I 'd just puked cheese goulash all over her best linen.
The pair of them pore over some more cards and the woman mutters some crap about higher planes and astral souls and the yeti for all I know because I was checking out this bloody great cabbage that was hanging one of the fruit and veg stalls across the aisle at the time.
Anyway, eventually the woman stacks her cards away and has a go at Hyacinth's palm. You are a cancer, yes? the woman says to Hyacinth, and Hyacinth replies that yes she is.
Then you must approach life sideways as the crab does, the woman tells her.
That's interesting, I say in a fake voice like I really am interested or something, you see I'm an Aquarius so does that mean I'm got to carry great big buckets of water with me wherever I go? I tell you, it's a load of crap all this astrology and the future business. They make it up as they go along those fortune tellers do. Still, Hyacinth seemed to be happy enough with what the woman had told her. Girls always are for some reason. Afterwards we had a quick walk around the market before it closed and Hyacinth asked me to buy a six pack of Evian to take back with us, then we walked home.

Stephenesque's Annual Literary Quiz

Please read the questions carefully and email your answers to me. All correct entries will be placed in a hat and the Grand Prize winner will be announced at some point in the future when I get around to dealing with it.

The Quiz

1. True or False: In the classic novel The Last of the Mohicans, the native hero's first name is actually "Last", which is the Mohican version of "Trevor"?

2. In Andre Gide's unreadableThe Immoralist, the central character is immoral because he borrows Alphonse's foot deoderant and never returns it: True .... or False?

3. What is the secret ingredient in the Count of Monte Cristo's aunt's best friend's Pie de Trashie which she makes especially to celebrate the Count's younger brother's graduation from Escapology Camp, and why did she claim it was important to place her bare buttocks to the crust while the pie was cooking?

4. Rosamond Lehmann was 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% better looking than Virgina Woolf?

5. True or false: I could take Ernest Hemingway in a bare knuckle bullfighting competition to the death?

As I said: think carefully! And good luck.

U and Me

U is the letter sacred to lazy and illiterate university students and faculty who are either unsure or incapable of pronouncing long words such as "university", and when rendered in a variety of bizarre fonts, it is also urban graffito shorthand nomenclature for the individual to whom the graffito user is addressing his remarks, as in "U R stupid 2".

Indeed, you can see for yourself what an integral part u plays in the word "stupid", although being an idiotic letter it obviously needs the close attention and saner guidance of t and p to tell it how to behave properly when forming that infamously under-used word.

One of the more moronic aspects of U is the fact that the upper and lower case versions of this cretinous letter are exactly the same, since the letter has not the wit nor imagination to adopt separate appearances for the different roles it must assume in sentences and phrases.

Some authorities may claim that U's resemble lucky horse shoes, but such views are the result of a foolishness that can only be exceeded by that of the tongue-lolling, drooling, vacant-faced letter itself.

And so, with that thought, we bid adieu to U.

Tidings of Hoovers and Gin, Hoovers and Gin, Oh Tidings of Hoovers and Gin.

Those of you with an interest in fine literature might be interested to know that, as I discovered in the Christmas bumper edition of The Spectator, not only have the "Selected Stories" of Julian Maclaren Ross been finally been re-issued in Great Britain, but also his "Collected Memoirs" too. This is a great boon by any standard, even for those of us who have spent much money and many hours tracking down those rare copies of the great man's work that infrequently become available in musty bookshops around the globe.
Since no American company has the verve, wit, or understanding to publish these books in the US, I was forced to phone my dear old English grandmother, persuade her to brave the freezing wind and rain in Cookham, take the bus to Maidenhead, buy books for me, and then mail them on. You, on the other hand, will probably have to order them from the UK online retailer of your choice and have the tomes shipped. But take my advice, do this today, you will not be disappointed by the quality of the man's writing.

Stalingrad. We Are Surrounded

So. I return to Boston from Christmas Day spent at my tow-year-old nephew's house in the cacophonous company of the hauntingly cadaverous Murray Wiggle and his antipodean friends, only to find the city in the icy, double-fisted clutches of a capricious winter blizzard. Beacon Street, in particular, I thought, stepping out of the airport cab I had managed to commandeer into curbside dunes of thick white flakes, could most defintely have provided the contents of a highly effective snow globe, myself with suitcase and duffle bag cast in the role of tiny plastic figure standing stationary forever outside the minature two-dimensional brownstones in this swirling souvenir of some tourist's inability to discover the location of TV's "Cheers" bar, having walked four blocks down the road in the wrong direction as they invariably do.

All through the remainder of the night - or so it seemed to travel weary people - Boston Public Works departments were out in force, ploughing the road with their huge urban tractors and scooping the unwanted snow up on to .... the sidewalks, which consequently become impassable by all except mountain goats, extremely experienced Himalayan guides, and the yeti, none of whom, at least as far as I am aware, live in Greater Boston area - definitely not in the Back Bay, at any rate.

I harbor a vague notion that had the Boston Public Works departments been deployed at Stalingrad, then the siege of that battle scarred city might never have resolved itself at such an early stage in the war, since I absolutely certain that even the T-34's and heavy artillery of the Soviets could not have pierced the densely packed walls of ice along the streets created by BPW's snow clearance methods:

"I bring terrible news Comrade General Chuikov, a division of Boston Public Works snow ploughs are ploughing the streets of Stalingrad!"

"Indeed this is most disastrous news, Ivan Ivanovitch, I begged them not to plough this year, for it means that the Red Army must postpone our encircling pincer movement until next spring ... perhaps even next summer, since I doubt that such huge untraversable piles of snow will not melt until July and the Germans can send reinforcements!"

"What shall we do Comrade General Chuikov?"

"Hand me my pistol, Ivan Ivanovitch, I am going to shoot myself. Send word to Stalin."

"I shall try Comrade General Chuikov, but I don't think the mail can get through now, at least not with the sidewalks in this condition.

"Oh woe are we, Ivan Ivanovitch. Boston Public Works are most certainly the enemy of the people if there ever was one!"

T- Bone

And now we resume our idyllic stroll through the revealed wonders of an exposited alphabet by examining the fascinating secrets of the letter T.

" ... T minus seventeen seconds and counting" the monotone computerized female voice informs our brawny celluloid hero. "T minus sixteen seconds and counting" the voice continues: a narrative device informing the rapt, popcorn-devouring cinema audience that something interesting is about to occur: a missile launch; a space craft lift off; some sort of explosion.
But that's just in the movies, of course. In normal everyday life enunciation of the letter T usually implies that something that is already extremely boring is about to become even more impossibly tedious: "T-t-t-toothache", for instance.
I suppose that, at least viewed from a particularly poorly educated and unsophisticated point of view, the resemblance of the lower case "t" to a ship's anchor might endow this junior version of the letter with an amusingly naif nautical charm, rather like the sort of cheap prop that might decorate the stage of an especially shoddy amateur production of The Pirates of Penzance, but that is purely a matter for those unimaginative sorts of people.
Anyway, the Hebrews, naturally, and the ancient Greeks, obviously, knew T as "taw" and "tau" respectively, and were sick to death of the tiresome letter as it was also the chief bore of their written communication systems. And finally, the Egyptian hieroglyphic scribes - cheekily - drew their T's as a yawning and very sleepy Pharoah.
Fortunately, tomorrow we pick up the pace with U.

Festive Interlude

My aunt is marrying a Lithuanian homosexual on Christmas Eve: his name, predictably, is Klimas (we call him and his family "the social" Klimas) .... and so, with gloomy and furrowed brow, this evening I mount those rickety metal airline steps and take my seat aboard a Swissair plane bound for Geneva, where, with all the dignity of an especially comical clown, this absurd union of two ill-matched buffoons is to be staged ... but alas not, I fear, consummated.

Anyway, suffice it to say, it is very unlikely that any form of writing shall appear again in this space until next Monday, 27th of December.

Enjoy your holiday, readers. I shall be thinking of you as I cast a cold eye upon the wedding ceremony and its guests.

Memories of Christmas Past

"God is black!" How well I still recall that strange and exotic exclamation echoing around the decorated walls of the school gymnasium during the performance of my first nativity play.

I had been cast in a starring role as the third King of Orient: "And I present you with this jar of myrrh" I screeched in a creaking, pre-pubescent voice, struggling in my polyester robes to deposit the gift beside the Christ child's balsa wood crib, spitting out strands of huge itchy fake beard, my over-sized faux turban continually slipping over my eyes, while also trying very hard not to drop my heavy wooden prop on the Madonna's foot.

"God is black!"

At that moment, so uncomfortable and self-conscious did I feel that I would have happily prayed to a purple God with green spots if he could have rescued me away from that kindergarten theater Hell.

The racial demonstrator, incidentally, was an elder step-brother of the boy playing Joseph.

The S Sense Of It All

S, obviously, is the snake-shaped letter, and I personally can never inscribe an S upon my page without visualizing this wriggling, seductive letter clasped to Cleopatra's heaving, dusky and ample bosom.

So we should not be suprised that the Semitic world knew S as the sound 'sin', which, funnily enough, is the old Hebrew word for "Cleopatra's heaving, dusky and ample bosom."

The Greeks, typically, called S 'sigma', which means "The Socratic method", apparently an ancient form of birth control practised in the labyrinth of back alleys winding around the Athenian agora.

In Latin, three S's in a row was - and remains - classical shorthand for "stra'tum super stra'tum", meaning "layer over layer" in our modern language. It was, naturally, the cry of itinerant onion vendors in Roman streets during the dictatorship of Ludicro Maximus Vegetanius.

Note: If you would like to complain about my exposition of the alphabet, please feel free to air your grievances in the comments section below, as so many others have already felt obliged to do.

Winter Poesy

Winter Poesy

Dedicated to Debra's Legs Clad In Her Furry Boots

And so we spat at Creeping Jenny
In her shattered lattice-work coffin.
And burnt all those Petunias
On a pyre made of rose briar.
Don't go gentle into that cold night?
Ha! We stamped on their withered, clinging fingers.
Never again shall they see the sunlight
And so, like a crippled bumble bee
Choking on a shard of frozen honey
The flowers die in the garden.
But Debra's legs go on forever!

Things As They R

As anyone who is familiar with the heavenly spheres will be aware, R is the letter sacred to Jupiter, and consequently, when augmented slightly by a slash across its foot, R can suddenly claim medicinal qualities, and like all medicines, it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.
The ancient Greeks knew this, which is why they called the letter ‘’Rho’, meaning "fish eggs" – and let’s be honest, the ancient Greeks knew nothing of Beluga caviar or sushi rolls. And the Hebrews gave R the name of ‘Res’, which symbolized the old Semitic phrase: "I’ve tasted some truly horrible gefilte in my time, Moses, but this bit of fish really takes the burning bush!"
Finally, as every school-age child knows, there are the three Rs: Repellant, Rotten, and Wretched.

December AM

Morning: the flower beds outside my window are reduced to black, frozen, Mongol horde ravaged tundra. A blistering wind ushers remorseless flakes of driving snow across the barren steppe of Beacon Street. So, dressing-gowned and slippered, I gently lower the curtain on the first act of this year's wintry drama having already forgotten my lines.

Returning to the warm warren of my couch, I hibernate deep within in the cushions and pillows, caressing a mug of coffee as if it were my first born, viciously crunching toast as though I were a starving grizzly bear devouring its favorite prey.

Back to sleep, dreaming, I toss and turn on the couch like a Spanish galleon with a hold crammed with melted butter, drifting and buffeted at full sail, navigating unscrolled parchment latitudes, precariously balanced atop the gilt crested waves of uncharted Seventeenth Century oceans rendered in deepest aqua.

Monday. Uggh.

Redirected Mail

I feel a little not unlike Santa Claus today, as I have spent a good deal of my early afternoon re-delivering seasonal mail that had been incorrectly delivered to my house by the postal service. This, I believe, is very public spirited of me, and I'd better receive some sort of karmic reward (I can think of several things that I would like).

Karmic rewards should also be showered upon Jan Bear for pointing me in the direction of the Mozilla web browser which corrects the problem I was experiencing in my earlier "The Riddle of the Sphinx's Brother" post.

So Blogger and Blogspot users can expect comments from me in the near future.

Minding my Ps and Qs

I decided it was perhaps best to discuss the letters P and Q together if they need so much minding, and they obviously do.

I mean, just look a P go on, give it a good, long hard stare: it either continually waves the white flag of surrender or, if your ink gets all blotty, it waves the black flag of anarchy.

And after a cool appraisal of Q we can easily deduce that this risibly pathetic member of the alphabet is merely a  O with its tongue hanging out like some kind of cretin reduced to a retarded vegetative state. Or it's a juvenile delinquent O who has drunkenly walked slam straight into a wall while smoking a cigarette. Call security and have this hooligan ejected immediately! This is why Q requires the chaperonage of U all the time. As I've said time and time again, the letter Q simply cannot be trusted.

P, of course, was the Greek 'pi', and the semitic 'pe' meaning "mouth"; consequently, when translating ancient Hebrew into ancient Greek you are pretty much stuffing a pie into your mouth. In the Roman world the combination of the letters P and C was shorthand for "Patres Conscripti", which meant The Senate. Today, alas, the mean "political correctness", which is the exact opposite.And in contemporary Britain, p is shorthand for the monetary unit known as pence, as in "How much is that mini Greek pork pi?" to which the hungry questioner will receive the reply, "It's 85p, squire."

Q, meanwhile, is a labial plosive (might've guessed) letter. Its Greek name is 'Qoppa', which - funnily enough - in modern Britain is the slang name given to the figure of authority who would arrest the letter for its persistant wrongdoing.

In Wodehousian language, the word "question" is always abbreviated to a simple Q,  as in "Once again I was forced to confront the matrimonial horror that was Madelaine Bassett and pop the terrible q."

Anyway, that's P and Q ... so Q.E.D

The Riddle of the Sphinx's Brother

My computer - a grape colored iMac - is equipped with Internet Explorer version 5.0.
So, after digesting this important selection of my personal hardware and software usership habits, can some engineering brain invested with the relevant particles of data wisdom perhaps explain what powerful forcefields of blogging service programming prevent me from posting comments on Blogger and Blogspot sites?
I fully comprehend that my edition of IE is quite ancient, and that I really ought to have updated to OSX last year or whenever it was, but I absolutely refuse to endure all the tedious downloading and disc inserting involved in such a technical operation. Frankly, I'd rather just buy a new computer next year.
Please refrain from including the ugly phrase "buy a P.C instead" in your solution.

Questions of the Season

I just received a Christmas card whose cover depicts the three Kings of Orient, who, having ridden their camels over vast tracks of desert following yonder star, have dismounted outside the lowly cattle shed and are delivering their gifts to the new born prince of peace: three bags full of gold, frankencense, and myrrh.

Now, perhaps I did not pay as much attention to the story of the nativity as I ought to have done in Sunday school, but I don't seem to recall what happened to all that gold.

I mean, if my wife is giving birth in a bloody stable, and someone presents me with enough gold to provide all the rappers in the world with all the gold teeth they could ever desire, well then, I don't know about you, but I'm taking a stroll back around to that Inn with no vacancies:

"No room at the Inn, eh?"

"Nope. No room at all. Fully booked. Sorry."

"Well, you know what, I've just bought the bloody Inn and so from now on there's no room for you either. You're fired. Get out."

"Yes sir. Certainly sir. I shall leave effective immediately."

I don't know. It seems to me that after the arrival of the three kings and their gifts, the holy family really needed a visit from the three wise financial advisers rather than having a bunch of shepherds stumbling through the door with absolutely no understanding of high yield investment strategies. If all that gold had been deposited in a really aggressive portfolio and Jesus could really have lived the high life to the max.

"Mr.Jesus. It's so very nice to see you here again, sir. Your usual table?"

"Naturally ... oh and Geoffrey, I'm expecting another guest for supper so you'd better bring a thirteenth chair."

"Certainly sir."

Just think, all those weird Catholics could be quaffing champagne at communion instead of sipping cheap red wine ... "and this mountainous serving of cavier slathered mouthwatering all over this imported bisquite shall represent my body ..." The possibilites would have been endless.

O How The Wheel Becomes It

When a perfectly circular font is chosen, the letter O is formed by the jetstream of a dot on a very fast merry-go-round: "make it stop. I want to get off. I think I'm going to be sick". But not all O's are round, of course, some are oval, and others look like a big fat typographical zero that a giant has sat upon. And – “O tempora! O mores!” – O is also the letter of sado-masochism, as witnessed by the infamous The Story of O, and since in old Hebrew O was called “ein” and was represented by an eye, we can include Georges Bataille’s truly taboo shattering The Story of the Eye in our litany of debauched O references. Although perhaps the best use of O is as a patronymic for transforming people into Irishmen with a single circumferencial stroke of your pen. That is all I'm going to write about O because I don't want to get into the whole serpent devouring its own tail thing.

Welcome To Lardland

According to most of my news sources this morning, this year we should change the phrase "Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat" to "The INS are coming and the immigrants are getting fat." Apparently some recent study has shown that livin' la vida Americane has transformed our latest batch of greenhorns into a bunch of obese wobble bottoms: too much fast food, sugary drinks, and couch dwelling. It seems we've done away with the Pledge of Allegiance and now we just provide people with a Pizza God menu (home of the Massive Mammoth Extra Cheese Double Titan Super Saturated Ultra Sandwich) .... from Ellis Island to Weight Watchers in one move: "Yes. My family name back in Germany was Grutelgrurberheinz, but now that I have arrived in America I wish to shorten it to Fatso."

Why do people eat this muck?

To The Nth Degree

N is the loud-mouthed, pushy, fake-tanned, leather trousered, bleached and blow-dried haired, pouting, swaggering self-important rock 'n' roll letter: nothing can stand in N's egotistical bid for the spotlight: observe how N elbows A 'n' D aside in modern renderings of the word "and": see how N kicks G off the end of so many contemporized "ing" words in its relentless drive for glory!

And N is not just content with usurping other letters. In mathematical set theory, for example, N is also quite ready and willing to become a generic number and take the place of any other, prime or whole, N doesn't care as long as it is center stage at all times!

This must be why the wise old Hebrews drew N as a slippery eel that they called "nun", for that which tries to be all will eventually become none: you cannot be all things to all men, as the saying goes, and that is exactly what N tries to do.

In Spanish the falangista N has even become two different sounds, and it wears a black beret called a "tilde" at a rakish angle to inform people of which pronunciation of the word to use.

So. Beware of N in your writings, this tyrannical letter may try and wrestle control of your entire paragraph if you don't heed the warnin' signs.

Great Expectations

If your mother is anything like my mother or, indeed, perhaps you are my mother (in which case: hello mom!) or perhaps somebody else's mother altogether, then you will no doubt be familiar with the illuminatable 1:33:1 scale - or thereabouts  - Charles Dickens' model village series of collectibles: the Olde Curiosity Shoppe, of course; the local tavern; the blacksmith's workshop; the fish and ironmonger's premises; the quaint, olde-worlde parish church; the twee, oven-lit bakery; Mrs Bumblebottom's thatched cottage; and so on.

And if you are my mother (look Ma: no hands!) - and I'm sure your mother or you yourself are exactly the same - then at Christmastime you arrange your massive faux Victorian conurbation of these storybook dwellings and storefronts all over the bookcases and coffee tables so that there is no vacant surface left in the room for anyone to put their egg nogg down on. And then you populate your terra-del-nostalgia with the (available seperately) tiny plastic model choir of carol singers and bell ringers, sleigh riders and coachmen, ice fisherman clustered around the village pond and Lord and Lady Amplebosom out for a stroll before dinner.

But let me tell you this all you moms of the world, this year I am adding a little Dickensian realism to the strawberry shortcake mix. You see - hahahaha! - this year I have built my own addition to that Charles Dickens model village. Yes, this year I'm bringing the scale model prison hulks with me on Christmas Eve, complete with model convict figurines bound by their tiny ball and chains. And I've even created a carpet of stagnant marshy hinterland that you can roll out on the outskirts of your unsuspecting village. And there's a gallows too, crafted out of balsa wood with the rotten remains of Short-Arsed Jake the Pentonville Footpad hanging from it.

And ... oh! Who can that be hiding behind the coal shed door at Mrs Whisker's cottage? Why I do believe it's Mad Jack the Hatchet Man who has escaped from the hulks and stalks the village streets at night in search of his next victim. And who is that dark, hunchbacked figure climbing through the freshly smashed window of the bakery ....?

Yes, Stephenesque's new range of Charles Dickens Village model buildings and figurines, they are so realistic that you can almost smell the gin. Add them to your mother's collection this year.

"M will see you now, James."

Ah yes. The old bilabial nasal consonant we call “M”. The Hebrews, of course, called it “Mem”, and they pictured the letter as wavy water; so, for our purposes, perhaps the best way of thinking of M is like a dead W that has fallen from its perch on the sentence tree and is floating upside down in the alphabet river.
But then, to my mind anyway, M actually looks more like two bleak and inaccessible, snow-capped Alpine peaks with a steep, treacherous ravine between them. Or, perhaps, two of those viciously gabled Swiss ski chalets that always smell like rotting pine.
In Egyptian hieroglyphics, an owl represents M, so, for example, if a scribe wanted to inform his readership that his breakfast melon was especially delicious, rather than writing “Mmmmm”, he would draw a parliament of owls instead.
The owl, obviously, was the symbol of Athens, and then later the bird sacred to Minerva, whose Roman devotees scribbled down an M when they wanted to express the number we call “one thousand”, as in the following sentence:
“Oldus Macdonaldum, there are M owls nesting in your barn.”
Finally, and some might think most importantly, M is the title of one of the greatest motion pictures ever made: Fritz Lang, after all these years, still no cinematic peer.

Caledonian Questions

From what ancient pictish mists of scotch drenched time can a national psyche develop that adopts the braying bagpipe as its national instrument and the heated haggis as its national dish, yet adopts not the brief nor the boxer as its national underpant?

Here, lost in an dense undergrowth of highland heather and sunk beneath the black depths of mysterious lochs, here, where the kilted hero straddles the caber and the claymore glints like a leaping salmon, here, where the grim and peat-blackened crofter dismembers the grouse for the laird, here, where you can stay for five luxurious nights in the five star Bonny MacEnsuite Hotel featuring discounted guest dining in our award-winning brasserie and continental breakfast for only $325 per night. Why not get away from it all this year and discover the romance of Scotland? Play endless rounds of golf while your bored wife flirts with the barman and your kids pick up a nasty heroin habit. Yes. Caledonian Dream Tours can screw up your life faster than you can say "nae".

For Rhonda Who's Bored of the Alphabet

The Ghost of Romance Past
A Spooky Christmas Story

I was clanking my chains around the Christmas party punch bowl, trying to project a little ectoplasm into Dora's glass when the fat woman saw me. She screamed and threw her glass of Egg Nog into the air, then, pointing a trembling finger in my direction, she sank to the floor babbling on and on about what she had seen.
Typical. We ghosts have a saying: "It's only the people who you don't want to see you who actually see you. The people you want to see you never do." How very true that is. I mean, why would I want to get in touch with the fat woman? I have no vital and important messages from the Other Side to impart to her. And - for Heaven’s sake - it’s not as if we have anything in common: she is very substantial and I am not. It was the pale and thin, ethereal Dora with whom I wanted to communicate. Now she is much more my type, oh yes, although she is apparently about as psychic as a bag of cement.
Meanwhile, the other guests had gathered around the fat woman and Dora went to fetch a glass of water for her - striding right through me on her way to the kitchen! Obviously I tried to catch Dora’s eye as she rushed by, but without success, since our heads are on different levels, mine being tucked under my armpit while hers is in the normal place about two feet above my eye line.
Anyway, nobody believed the fat woman's story, of course. They began slowly drifting away from her in small, whispering groups: someone said she was drunk: too much rich food, somebody else explained: chocolate fondue makes her go all wobbly and she starts dribbling down her chin, they all agreed.
But Dora was wonderful with her. She is very good at dealing with the living, not so good with the dead, alas. Never mind, I bet she probably just gets nervous around people she doesn't believe in. Who wouldn’t?
Dora and I had met - if you can call it that - twice before. The first time indirectly when I was acting as Spirit Guide at a séance she was attending at her mother's instigation. They were trying to contact the spirit of Dora's Uncle George. Although why they would wish to undertake such a course of action, I cannot imagine. Uncle George is a restless spirit in more ways than one, and he really gets on my nerves with that annoyingly fidgety behavior of his, never able to sit still and decompose in one grave at a time, just farts and belches his way around the astral plane like some kind of disembodied Frat Boy. Dora was very different, however, and I knew instantly she was the girl for me. Unfortunately, the medium came out of her trance before I got a chance to put my best pick up lines across, and all I had a chance to say was the usual banal and meaningless stuff: "Your Uncle George is very happy with us on the Other Side" - which may have been true, but as I said before, the Other Side was not especially happy with Uncle George …whatever. The second time Dora and I met she was part of a group experimenting with one of those Ouija board things. I had just managed to spell out "SWM. Deceased with GSH seeks" with the planchette when this know-it-all lesbian interrupted: “a malevolent spirit has entered the circle" she whined, and I couldn't finish my sentence. Then they started playing Monopoly instead.
So both meetings were what you might call “unsuccessful”.
Fortunately, being in possession of special powers as it were, I knew that Dora would be at this Christmas party, and so I spent the previous week practicing all my most successful seduction techniques and best lines, such as: "Hi Dora, remember me, I was the cold damp spot on the floor at the séance last week.”
Or, and this never fails: “If you were dead too we could walk through walls together. What do you say ...your tomb or mine."
Unfortunately, I suffer from lack of confidence, much as I did in life. I have phantom neurosis and find it very difficult to believe in myself, and so I never think others will believe in me either. Of course, convincing arguments can be made for the survival of the spirit after death: an impression in the fabric of time, for example: a sort of Monet-ish dab in the ether. All that seems reasonable enough. But, and this is really weird, the fat woman had said I was dressed in some sort of fishing outfit from the Edwardian era, which doesn't make a lot of sense when you think about it. Of course, Tweed is famously very durable. But, nevertheless, it is hard to believe it lasts beyond the grave, however excellent the tailoring might be. And how do you explain phantom shoes? Are they are doomed to stalk the Earth forever searching for the shoe trees that abandoned them in life? It seems unlikely.
However, summoning all my courage, I picked up a sprig of mistletoe and drifted over to where Dora still leant over the fat woman, "Dora, Dora, Dora." I whispered, breathing my most expensively scented ectoplasm in her lovely ear.
"Ugggh. I think Agnes is being sick on my hair." Dora cried, and ran off to the bathroom.
It seems like she’s been in there for an eternity, but that doesn’t bother me, naturally. I can wait.

Alphabet Interlude

Trouble at the Priory (A "Better Than Cadfael" Story)

He was a thin, sinewy bastard called Brother Derek. Very sanctimonious, he was. Very solemn.  I suppose it was the air of sanctity we couldn't stand. You know, that smug, holier-than-thou, "I've read the Bible more times than you've had hot turnip soup" sort of hair-shirt wearing, self-flagellating superiority that makes you want to break your vow of silence and tell it to him like it is. You know what I mean. He never wore any shoes neither, did Brother Derek. He was just this great big pair of dirty feet with gnarly toenails sticking out the bottom of his grubby cassock with a greasy swirl of brownish hair on top. You may have an air of sanctity, I thought, but you stink like the Devil.

Spent most of his time out in the garden ... just digging. You'd see him through the chancel window picking up all these wriggling worms and moving them from one place to another. After putting them down on another bit of dirt he'd make the sign of the cross over them as if they were people or something who'd come for a blessing or whatever.

One day I was in my cell trying to do the most elaborate illuminated manuscript this side of Lindesfarne when he walked in with the Abbot. Now we're not allowed to speak, obviously, so I just did this "Yeah, what do you want, Brother?" sort of thing with my eyes, and the Abbot wrinkled his nose in a manner meant to imply. "Brother, Brother Derek tells me you, Brother, have been looking at him, Brother Derek, in a funny way. Is this true, Brother?" So I glared back at him, you know, like, "Don't waste my time with churlish nonsense, Brother, can't you see that I'm much too busy illuminating the Gospels According To Chad to waste my valuable time looking at Brother Derek in a funny way. If he wants to spend all his time delving around in the mud with a bunch of worms like he's the Patron Saint of Wriggling Things or whatever, well, Brother, that's up to him isn't it. I mean, who does he think he is anyway?"

At this point, Brother Derek, unable to contain himself any longer, suddenly rushed forward and scribbled all over my manuscript with his horrible bit of black pencil. So I poked him in the eye with end of my paint brush, kneed him in the groin, and then forced him to drink green paint, "Try that again," I indicated to him by waving my fist in front of his nose. "And next time I'll illuminate your stupid bloody face."

"Brothers! Brothers!" the Abbot screamed ineffectively by waving his hands in the air and jumping up and down on the flagstones.

Afterwards, despite all the rosary beads I had to shuffle for the next six months, I felt much better about everything, and peace at last returned to the Priory.

To L And Back

Architecturally speaking, sandwiched as it is between the sleek, Bauhaus machine-age modernity of K and the sun-kissed, classic Augustean villa overlooking the Caprisian bay that is M, the letter L seems rather like an austere and featureless warehouse down by the docks; the sort of place where a grim-faced longshoreman might keep leaky oil drums and empty cargo crates.
And yet there is a slight whiff of the Pythagorean about L: it is the right-angled letter, forever frozen at ninety degrees.
The Egyptians must have been impressed by L, since they pictured it as a lioness in their hieroglyphical system. The Hebrews, meanwhile, called it "lamed" - not a very promising name - but it apparently meant "ox goad"; and if you know your Bible you will be aware that someone called Shamgar slew six hundred Philistines with an ox-goad, although it was, in fact, actually a tool employed by olden ploughmen to guide their beasts along the correct furrows.
L is obviously also the Roman numeral that signifies 50 of something. For example, a Centurion fighting the Iceni might report: "Half my soldiers have been killed so I've only got L left, and they're all wounded." .... and it is from their amazement at just such a victory that the ancient Britons derived the exclaimation "Bloody L!"

Special K?

Is there actually anything special about the letter K at all, really? No. I don't think so. After all, the Romance languages ignore Ks completely, which must make this decidedly unattractive, gauche, and never-been-kissed letter the most unromantic of the all alphabet. Indeed, one might go as far as to say that K's are rather awkward and furtive letters; perhaps somewhat sordid, even.
But one thing is absolutely certain, K is a very insecure letter, and if it isn't assured of first place at the beginning of a particular word, K will only make an appearance if it is chaperoned by its long suffering friend and confident known as the letter C.

It was the Greek "Kappa" - an ugly word which has, incidentally, been adopted by the manufacturers of a brand of athletic clothing favored by plebian girls -and in Egyptian hieroglyphics it was represented by a plain looking sort of bowl (a begging bowl, no doubt).

But I should be careful, and not be so damning of this letter, since in days long bygone the false accusers were branded on their foreheads with a K, which stood for "kalumny". And I certainly would not want to walk around with that horrible typographical scar on my face.

Anyway, on Monday we shall discuss the realtive merits of L.

I must now go and prepare for the staff Christmas party, and I am short of breath from blowing up colored balloons. Just where the hell is that pump we used last year?

J'accuse

The letter J is an i with a visious looking hook on the end of it, making J the storybook pantomime villain Captain Hook of the alphabet fairy tale, and so at Theaters de Calligraphy all across the world, small children yell "Look out, he's behind you!" to the I character whenever the evil J appears on the stage.

For a long time, in fact, i and j were often the same letter, rahter like a case of paranoid schizophrenia, and it was not until the sixteenth century that they were finally split into two separate entities, by a man named Pierre de la Ramee.

For non-French speakers, of course, J was made famous by Emile Zola and the Dreyfusards, a fact celebrated in the title of this very post.

I, Ludicrous

Since this is written by me, "I" becomes the letter that is all about me. It is the perpendicular pronoun, strong and proud. When dotted, i becomes the lighthouse of the alphabet, safely guiding all the other letters away from those treacherous rocky sentences that are written in the dense fog of a third person plural present indicative.

Obviously, then, in Egyptian hieroglyphics "I" should be represented by a picture of yourself in profile standing beside Anubis and Amen-Ra while holding a really, really massive ankh. In Hebrew the letter was called "yod", and if you have read The Bable (King Frankie version), you will be familiar with the parable of the Prodigal Exotic Dance Show Attendee who forgot to bring any yods with him to the strip club. The story appears in 'Complete Fabrications, Chapter 6 Verse 9' - but nobody cares a Greek iota about such things anymore.

Speaking of the Greeks, it is interesting to note that those classical fellows referred to I as the "Lacedemonian letter", and - here's a piece of fascinating trivia - the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry were once nicknamed "The Lacedemonians" because in 1777 the colonel of that regiment once provided his troops with a lecture on Spartan military discipline and Lacedemonian tactics whilst coming under heavy fire.

And, finally, as everybody knows of course, in Roman numerals i stands for 1, unless it is the last of a series of ones, in which case it is replaced by a j (or at least it should be if you transcribe them properly) - but, anyway, more about that particular usurping letter tomorrow.

Meandering Through H

H's are the movable goalposts of the alphabet through which the letter is often drop-kicked through itself when cockney pronunciation is observed: as in the word 'urrah! when someone scores a field goal. In old Hebrew H was called "heth", and it was represented by a privet hedge or pickett fence, a pre-H construction over which the small Hebrew boys would sometimes kick their Hebraic footballs, which consequently landed in thier neighbor's gardens. The small Hebrew boys would then have to go around to their neighbor's house and say: "Excuse me, Mr Nebuchadnezzar, but can we have our ball back please?"

It is also rumored by irresponsible sources such as myself that the Roman prelate Absurdus tried to convince the Senate to adopt H as the Roman numeral for 3.5 (three and a half), but that has never been confirmed.

In Egyptian hieroglyphics, meanwhile, H was drawn as a .... well I can't quite make out what that is supposed to be ... a candle wick is it? I don't know. It looks like a bit of twisted rope if you ask me

Rules For An Enjoyable Evening Out

1. If your city is not equipped with a Ritz Hotel with a bar, then you should probably stay at home.

2. The Henry Ford rule: you can wear any color shoes as long as they're black.

3. Men drink brandy, women drink champagne cocktail.

4. If there are salt shakers and pepper mills on the table, leave immediately.

5. When irritating waitstaff ask "How is everything?", the correct response is "adequate".

6. If everything is not adequate, then the correct response is "I feed my horses with superior slops than this muck that you have placed before me."

7. If you are dining in a sushi restaurant and everything is not adequate, then the correct response is: "What rotting and putrid stomach of beached whale carcass did you scrape this slimy filth out of? And why did you hire the stinking, dazed Jonah you found curled up beside it to be your head chef?

8. It is acceptable to beat the guilty with the heavy golden tip of your ebony cane liberally when admonishing lazy and inattentive waitstaff.

9. I usually tip somewhere between fifteen and twenty percent.

God's Turban and Tutu

It has been pointed out to me on more than one occasion that the proud stalk of this formerly prim and proper blog has sprouted a rather lubricious leaf of late; the debauched botanical result, no doubt, of impure and corrupted hothouse, red-light photosynthesis.

In my defense, as a word-gardener of once spotless character, may I say that it must surely be the heady of atmosphere of seasonal festivities and their attendent temptations that has brought me low.

If only I stayed true to the healthy regimen of book readings and art gallery tours prescribed to me by my friends at The New Criterion, then perhaps I should not be the pitifully depraved creature you observe crawling along the internet gutter before you.

Indeed, one of the advantages of being a Friend of the New Criterion (cheap yearly out-of-towner rates) is the number of invitations from that elegant group which obscure the other objects on my mantlepiece each week. Between the book signings, important lectures, gallery openings, and other cultural events, it is a great wonder that I have anytime left at all for my more nefarious activities! But then, you see, all these improving extravanganzas seem to occur in New York, and, since I live in Boston, and will only travel long distances if, when making the required journey, I can be assured of a level of luxurious, pampered comfort that would turn VIP first-class passengers on the Orient Express greener than an extremely envious greenfly, I never seem to show up to any of them, including the New Criterion/Armavirumque holiday party.

And so here I am, forced to wallow abjectly - louche et boheme - in the sordid boudoir my own blogged lubricity. My sincere apologies to all who expect higher purpose from me.

Rated G for General Admission

G is the letter of exclaimation and suprise. For example, after the liberation of Paris by the allies during the second world war, the casual novelist could find himself capable of penning the following sentence:

"Golly gee!" exclaimed the G.I, emitting a low whistle in the key of G, as the g-string wearing Gigi showed the location of her G spot.

Approriately, then, G is one of the most ornamental and decorative of letters, rather like an Italianate baroque representation of a C, which is pretty much what a G really is, since the version of the letter that we know and love was invented by the Romans

Gift Ideas For The Kids

Hoping to cash in on people's usual Christmas gift-giving crisis, this year I will be making available two fine Yuletide themed books for children that are certain to imbue all young readers with the traditional holiday spirit.

The Resentful Dog is the beautifully illustrated tale of a large bulldog called Rambo who awakens on Christmas morning to discover that his owners have forgotten to leave any presents for him beneath the tree. In retaliation he savages Auntie Agnes to death with his viciously razor-like jaws.

So, My Little Ones, You Never Thought You'd Hear From Uncle Herod Again is a charming pop-up book that follows the colorful adventures of maniacal monarch Uncle King Herod as he victimizes the local kids with a yet another seasonal bloodbath.

Both of these special books are bound in sumptuous, plague-free rat skin leather and cost $19.99 excluding shipping and handling. Orders received by December 3rd will be dispatched in mid January. Why not brighten your child's holiday this year by telling him or her on Christmas day that one or both of these wonderful gifts will be delivered in a few weeks time, subject to availability and applicable state fair-trading laws?

Eff

It is a black and evil day indeed when the letter F comes a-knocking at your door, for an F in postman's clothing will most certainly be delivering a big, fat, steaming dollop of failure.

The ancient Egyptians knew of these scary properties of F, which is why their hieroglyph for this nasty member of the alphabet is a Horned Viper - although it seems to me that some of the priests of Ra could not have been particularly skilled hieroglyphers, since their drawings of horned vipers often look more like your average garden slug.

F's were also regularly confused with S's in Elizabethan calligraphy, and this caused an enormous number of headaches for William fhakespeare. In some folios of The Tempest, for example, the words of Ariel are rendered as: "Where the bee fucks, there fuck I." Lines that always caused a great deal of bardic embarrassment when unwittingly declaimed from the stage.

Which, naturally, brings us to the F word. Here are some examples:

We Are Sorry. This Paragraph Has Been Censored. You Do Not Have The Parental Privileges To Read It. Please Return To The Main Menu.

Next week: G

Hobbies of Yesteryear

When I was a very young man several years ago, having put aside grubby young man things after succumbing to a formerly dormant romantic streak occasioned by my viewing of The Three Muskateers on television, I decided to take up Olympic fencing as a hobby. I felt it would be approriate, or so I thought at the time, if I were more like the swashbuckling figure of d'Artagnan during my after school activites. Imagine my consternation, then, when I swaggered into my first fencing lesson only to discover that, instead of the flowing silken shirts I'd been expected, I was supposed to garb myself in white tunic and breeches with a sieve-like face mask obscuring my roguish grin and twinkling swordsman's eye; a sartorial outfit that, as far as I was concerned, inspired all the romantic appeal of, and made the wearer resemble one of one of those featureless and wooden, multi-hinged anatomy models that sketching students draw in order to ascertain the correct proportions and various contours of the human body. Swinging from chandeliers was not an option, apparently. Neither was leaping up on to a long oak table laden with fruits and meats whilst in the midst of a duel to the death with the evil Cardinal's men and continuing the fight on that noble surface something that was encouraged by my teachers. And, or so I was informed by the man in charge, it was also considered unsportsmanlike to kick one's worthy opponent in the testicles and then jab between his ribs the glistening dagger you had hitherto kept concealed in your boot. So I only took the one lesson and gave it up as a bad lot. Fortunately, I had just seen the brilliant Zulu and so I developed a healthy interest in red coats, pith helmets, and Lee Enfield rifles, subjects which I began to find far more macho and heroic than all that namby-pamby French epee-waving, frilly-knickerbocker wearing nonsense.

E And Its Discontents

E pluribus unum indeed! In this case, one of twenty-six, and the fifth one at that!

But does twenty-six count as many? Well, it depends on what your counting doesn't it: twenty-six letters? Yes, I suppose it's enough to be going on with. But twenty-six dollars? No, that's not very much at all - although, of course, it is a relatively large amount if you are a homeless bum on the street. So, in conclusion, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, we can declare with absolute certainty and confidence in the majestic totality of our combined intellects that it is all much of a muchness really.

E is also the Cockney Londoner's word for a male personage, as in the following phrase: 'E's gahn dahn the bleedin' pub, ain't 'e. And bearing that fascinating E-fact in mind, it is worth noting that the old Hebrew's knew the letter E as "He" - which was also their sign meaning "window", which is exactly the thing that a cockney climbs through when he is breaking into your house to steal your silver. Hence the old Cockney Hebrew saying: 'E crept in through the bleedin' He, didn't 'e.

Phew, the logic is exhausting!

Anyway, that about wraps it up for E, except of course to say that you can e-mail me if you disagree with any of the profound wisdom I have imparted to you today.

Royal Personages In Limbo

His Royal Exiledness the Decrowned Prince Usurpim of Annexania
And Her Royal Inconvenience the Embarrassessa de Tiaraless.
Both of whom have no fiefdom, and in the case of this post, no story neither.

Umberto D

D is for Dickens, which is curious, since a daily dosage of vitamin D guards against developing rickets - and where would Dickens be without children suffering from rickets? Still revising Mr Pickwick, probably.

In the ancient world, the letter D - the lowest passing grade - was also the Hebrew sign "daleth", which was old Moses' word for door. Interestingly enough, then, that in Egyptian hieroglyphics D is represented by a hand - that isn't grasping a key. So no wonder these two great peoples never saw eye to eye.

The Roman numeral that means 500 of something, D is half of M yet twice B(-C)

Anyway, to my mind, D looks rather like an O that walked into one of those cartoon garden rakes and received a flattened face because of it.

Finally, D is a contraction of the words "could" and "would"; and so we can construct the following sentence: "I'd have written a better post if I'd have thought of anything else to say about this dreary letter."