American Fez

Faute de Mieux

Yesterday, like one of those consumptive characters so lovingly described in fin de sieclé novelettes, my neighbor, the aged and immensely wealthy Widow Mendelbaum, she of delicate and collapsing lung, was slid into an ambulance and stretchered far away from the frightful clamor and destructive vapors of central Boston. Very shortly, thanks be to the wonder of aeronautical science, she shall be confined to a private room in some claustrophobic Alpine sanatorium. Here she will be spoon-fed from a square, short-necked bottle of green vitriol by her spiteful nurse, who looks like Whistler’s mother in an especially grim mood and maliciously destroys the flowers and cards sent by the Widow Mendelbaum’s anxious friends. And in this cheerless and sterile clinic - or so I was told by Charlotte-Ann, her stepdaughter and only living relation - the somnolent Widow Mendelbaum will be securely fastened to her iron-framed bed by buckled leather straps, as if she were an Edwardian seafarer’s heavy oaken trunk, where, concealed within a secret compartment, are lain the looted treasures of a prehistoric empire. Poor old Widow Mendelbaum. What will become of Rufus, her little russet brown, yapping Pekinese? Who will feed him boneless scraps from the dinner table now that his mistress’ body lies embalmed in medicinally induced dreams in distant Switzerland? I am afraid that the Widow’s former neighbor is far too busy to attend to such canine chores, since he will hopefully be announcing his engagement to lucky, windfallen Charlotte-Ann before too long ...

A God That Failed

Gods from all walks of worship - even those lazy, fat, smug-looking divinities of pan Asian mythology – usually manage to accumulate believers from most of all the continents of the Earth, no matter how deluded these shaven-headed, bead-threading and bare foot disciples might be, or how especially ludicrous and bizarre that God’s particular doctrines may appear to rational minds. And so, when compared with the self-actualizing, proactive achievements of his heavenly peers, and despite the best efforts of the bearded phallus-fan DH Lawrence, we must judge the career of the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl, whose reputation and influence have barely advanced beyond the dust and mud of New Mexico, to be a complete and utter total failure.
Of course, Quetzalcoatl’s dismal failure to disseminate his creed among the peoples of the world has much to do with the fact that this spiritual loser chooses to manifest himself as a feathered serpent. Now, I don’t know about you, and I can only guess about the adobe-dwelling citizens of the Southwest, but the idea of a furry snake does not fill my spiritual being with very much confidence. Personally, I don't find it at all surprising that very few people - even especially gullible persons - could possibly be religiously inspired by the sight of a huge great slimy python slithering through the sky above their heads, and you'd think that any God worth his thunderbolts would be able to figure that much out as well. So, in conclusion, I'm afraid we must award Quetzelcoatl a big fat F grade for effort, content and style.

Exile and Kingdom

Perhaps the blackest sheep in a notably eldritch flock was old, hard-drinking Appomattox Baldwin: born April 1865 in Old Scrotum, Massachusetts, and died in 1963 at Nouvelle Liverre, a much vilified French island that sheltered an grubby enclave of aging pederasts and amateur diabolists, and hung off the edge of the Barbary Coast like a limp wrist. Appomattox had built himself a rambling mansion here after surviving the horrors of the First World War; he had been a sort of unsuccessful trench-to-trench traveling salesman, having spent the last of his inheritance on a truckload of bottled prune juice laxatives that he was unable to resell to either side. Broke, desperate, and adrift in the mud of No Mans Land, lugging a waterlogged canvas suitcase of laxative samples through acres of barbed wire, Appomattox eventually made his way to the tiny village of Aix Marc de Spotte. Here he was able to boil the prune juice on an abandoned stovetop, and with the addition of syrup, and baking soda, managed to produce a series of chewable lozenges that became very popular with African troops of the - you guessed it - Legion de Nouvelle Liverre et Sudan.
Appomattox's final years were spent in quiet seclusion in the upstairs rooms of his island mansion. He received few visitors except for the usual disreputable and seedy confabulations of debt collectors, enraged parents, drug dealers, and members of the Academie Francais. Finally, at the age of ninety-eight, elderly, infirm and confined to his massive four poster bed, he ironically, perhaps justly, fell victim to a violent, teeth-clenching case of Bugger's Constipation, a nightmare ordeal that finished him off for good. Alas, at the very end, even his own trusty laxative lozenges, having seen him through so many scrapes in the past, could not save him from the icy bowel-gripping claw of Death.

The picture of Appomattox Baldwin's African mansion is actually the former Russian Embassy building in Bangkok, which I stole from the excellent www.2bangkok.com site

Hollow Hills of the Human Mind

Today - anniversary of the death of Anthony Powell - I was about to write an admonitory critique of the dismal "novels" of highly overrated Dutch writer Jan Oopdyke, author of the truly wretched Windmills of Vermeers Mind, and yet ... somehow ... words fail me. My pale fingers are poised and flexed, hovering over the computer keyboard like birds of prey about to dive and tear the flesh from the bones of Oopdyke's literary reputation with vicious, relentless talons; or it is as though these twitching knuckles were those of a hunched mad organist about to perform the "Dance of Death" in double-quick time on an enormous surrealist harmonium ... but then, the lights go out and my hands suddenly freeze, suspended in mid-motion, immobilized as if I had been encased alive in hot wax like some doomed figure in an old, scratchy black and white horror film placed among the other waxen exhibits in some maniacal artists Museum of Horrors, unable to communicate my dreadful predicament to the visitors passing through and beg for rescue.
Inspiration, of course, is the gift of a capricious Muse. I can see her now: saucily sauntering through my mind, twirling a gaily-colored parasol and casting coy glances over her shoulder at my infatuated blank page, then teasingly turning around to whisper "chase me" as she scampers off into the deep hollows and impenetrable mists that enshroud the winding lanes of unmapped, impassable sentences.
So, in consequence, theres nothing written here about Jan Oopdyke today. But there is this picture by Titian of Venus and Cupid with an Organist, which I hope will act as some form of recompense.

Obesity: Appeasement and Denial

A transcript of a speech broadcast to the House of Pancakes by Neville Tenderloin, former Prime Eater of Great Britain and "Defender of Big Ben":

I am speaking to you from the cafeteria at number 10, Downing Street.
This morning the Fast Food ambassador handed me a large cheeseburger with bacon and extra cheese and double fries, stating that if I ate it all by 11.00 a.m. and also sucked down the Super Size Fizzo Cola he gave me, a state of fulfillment would exist in my stomach. I have to tell you now that such an undertaking has taken place, and that I also ordered a cream pie for dessert. Consequently a state of gross and bloated satisfaction exists between me and my tummy-tum-tum.
Nevertheless, the claim has been made by certain skinny minnie's on the opposition benches that obesity is a massive problem of global proportions because many people in the free world are actually beginning to look like big fat globes with little tiny arms and legs sticking out of them and equally round, double-chinned heads on top. But I fart in the face of these dietmongers and scrawny, no-assed, granola-faced whingers.
Indeed, I have in my hand a piece of paper from Chez Hitler. On it is written the menu for the superb range of smorgasboard treats available from this convenient eatery. And remember, receive a free giant soda with every bucket of fried chicken wings you order.
It is a true "Feast in our Time". Enjoy!

Cozy Corners of the World

The brazen affront of a burnt out fire grate: the last few flickering, foxholed embers: the dwindling kindling, scattered and splintered. Around this vacant hearth, cold mussel-black shadows gather to raise eyebrows over the poor performance of an aging brass poker, which only receives a standing ovation of ash for its efforts. Here is soot for the ages.Among these cinders is an archeology of what was decided in front of the evenings fire, beneath the old plaid blanket, a mind is made up and there is a weary untangling of limbs. Once more we turn electric or freeze.
And it is during these bleak barometric moments, when the thermostat sings and the radiators hum along, that I wonder howlmuch longer Boudicca's rebellion against the Romans could have lasted had she enjoyed the luxury of strategizing beside the warm comfortable glow of a really good quality, state-of-the-art, exclusive "Hi Tempo" touch screen control, energy-saving central heating system with several discreet and attractive installation options.
As it is, the warrior queen is buried beneath Platform 10 at King's Cross Station, which is probably pretty cold and damp at this time of year

Sport of Kings

According to Baldwin family legend an inexhaustible archive of dubious and protracted anecdotes that make the Greek Myths look like a hastily conceived shopping list scribbled on the back of an old dry cleaning receipt my Great Aunt Mathilde once owned a proud and noble thoroughbred racehorse named Pegasus Thunderstroke. The horse's trainer, an itinerant Irishman called Cross-Eyed Muldoon who was notorious for the especially rough and prickly texture of his tweed jacket, strongly advised Great Aunt Mathilde against saddling the horse with such a loaded name - Pegasus, after all, not only sprang from the blood of the Gorgon Medusa after her decapitation by Perseus, but also bore Bellerophon during his battle with the chimera. A quixotic name for a racehorse, Muldoon hinted darkly, was surely tempting fate with regard to the the animals performance upon the track, and in certain heavenly quarters might even be considered, he added gravely, to be unforgivably hubristic. Why not, the Irishman suggested, call the beast Tipperary Moonlight or some other more conventional horsey name. But Great Aunt Mathilde apparently closed her mind to this sage Hibernian counsel with predictable results: Pegasus Thunderstroke fell at the first fence of his first steeplechase and was later put to sleep. Although, as Great Aunt Mathilde explained to the wailing Muldoon directly after this unfortunate event: their jockey's failure to complete the course had nothing to do with his mount's grandiose name; the unlucky horse would probably have collapsed anyway even if she had just called him Auld Jim's Nag, since she had only rescued it from the local Knacker's Yard three weeks previously.

Winds of Change

Although my prep school auditorium would have provided a superb and appropriate stage for authentic performances of the bleakest of Samuel Beckett’s most depressing theatrical horrors, for some reason the willowy, eagle-nosed tutors responsible for our annual theatrical productions stubbornly insisted on mounting a Shakespearian comedy every year. By the time they had scheduled Twelfth Night for soporific and adenoidal monotone teenage performance – probably the Christmas of 1982 – my reputation as a classroom malcontent and general disruptive influence had reached its absolute nadir. Consequently, as a form of cruel and unusual punishment, I was cast in the role of Duke Orsino (character most likely to be beaten up by the older boys afterwards), and forced to wear a girl’s blouse, scarlet velvet jerkin, and an outrageously itchy pair of pantaloons each night. An unconvincing adhesive curlicue moustache and an enormous hoop earring leftover from The Pirates of Penzance completed my ridiculous costume. I must have looked something like an El Greco vision of the Gypsy Vagabond rather than a handsome romantic hero of noble birth: but such are the eccentricities of amateur dramatics.
Fortunately, with the exception of excruciatingly choreographed festive square dancing at the very end, most of my really embarrassing acting duties were accomplished by the intermission, and I found myself at liberty to sleepwalk through the remainder of the play by pretending that Orsino had succumbed to an especially virulent form of lovesick catatonia.
Of course, today Twelfth Night is my favorite of all Shakespeare’s works written for the stage; and now oh how I wish I had taken pleasure in my performance of it when presented with the opportunity, instead of shuffling around in the footlights like Estragon on valium. But, as Feste the Clown tells Malvolio in the final act, "thus does the whirligig of Time bring in his revenges." Mind you, at the time, the only type of whirligig I knew were those colorful plastic windmills that children at the beach would planted in the sand, and it was impossible back then, at that awkward and difficult pubescent age, to associate these charming toys with the frightening concepts of either hoary Time or his relentless retributions. You live and learn, eh.

House of Ill Repute

Notoriously, as witnessed amid the excavations at Pompeii, ancient Roman homeowners thought nothing of erecting replica rampant phalluses above the doorways of their country villas: "Please come in," these mounted good luck tokens suggested. "Welcome to my humble but superbly frescoed abode." In the modern world, of course, we have replaced such salutatory domestic motifs with bulky CCTV cameras, whirring paranoid electronic appendages to the threshold that protrude from our walls at a suitably flaccid angle compared to their Priapic pagan predecessors. Even after the flaring nostril, let-it-all-hang-out success of the sexual revolution, it is virtually impossible to conceive of anyone hanging a huge plastic effigy of a cock on their front door today, unless it should be a cottage industry Viagra merchant advertising his wares, although even then he would almost certainly be risking prosecution. The entrance to my own apartment, for instance, deep within the labyrinth passages of a cursed and crumbling brownstone mansionette, is decorated with an extremely chaste wreath of seasonal flowers encircling a tasteful brass plate inscribed "Please Use Side Door" - a diversionary trap for strangers that directs unscheduled callers outside the building again.
However, folk memory of the Roman tradition remains in such modern ornamental doorway contrivances as the elongated rectangular door knocker and, of course, the English door "knob". In fact, as the writings of DH Lawrence have shown, pretty much anything can be interpreted as a phallic symbol, so I would advise you to be very careful regarding the decorative additions you attach to your house. After all, you don't want the neighbors to gossip.
Meanwhile, you can read the naughty Outer Life on his personal reaction to the female form, with multi-blog pertinent comments by the knowledgeable DarkoV and myself.

Ever Present Friends

Here is a list of notable characters both real and fictional who creep into my frontal lobes at least once every two days for various reasons: Fu Manchu, Nicholas Jenkins, Veronica Lake, Hamlet, Brigitte Bardot, The Deptford Builder, Aphrodite, Julian Maclaren Ross, Hecule Poirot, Johann Strauss, Melmoth the Wanderer, John Piper, Le Petomaine, Mata Hari, Frederico Fellini, Ajax, Rosamond Lehmann, Nina Simone, Casanova, Peter Cook, Jobber Skald, Little Miss Muffet, pretty much any woman painted by Whistler.
Why? I have absolutely no idea. Yet these are the figures that remain in my mind more often than most. And since most of the posts on this weblog will be inspired by one or more of these personages, I suggest you do some background reading before you visit here again. So stuff that in your pipe and smoke it!

Way of the Cabbage

Confucius say: why in Chinese restaurant does menu item number 58, Head of Lettuce in Soy Sauce cost exactly the same money as menu item number 89, Whole Roast Duck? Venerable sage also at loss to explain why price of Bean Curd Plate is equal to Combination Platter Number Four (with wonton soup and your choice of spring roll or spare rib appetizer). Surely ancient Chinese wisdom reveals error in menu, since roasted meat much more valuable than simple boiled crops?
But apparently not. Indeed, to my mind at least, the high value Chinese restaurateurs attach to leaves and roots is one of the most inscrutable features of old Cathay, and like those dreadful Mandarin vogues for footbound women and powerful eunuchs, this strange expensive vegetable fetish will always appear rather peculiar to my Western eyes. One can only imagine that deep within the walls of the Forbidden City in some concealed corner of the Emperor’s herb garden or beneath the glass pagoda of his Imperial greenhouse, intensively trained coolie’s run to and fro with rickshaw wheelbarrows piled high with the Secret Dragon Ingredient that must obviously add such an extra special zesty kick to Chinese vegetables, making them worth much, much more the regular kind. Or perhaps it is the work of that arch-fiend, the despicable Doctor Fu Manchu and his private army of obedient agricultural henchmen, nefariously bent on charging hated Occidentals outrageously absurd amounts of cash for what is only, on the face of it, just a bowl of steamed sprouts.
Whatever. I am sure the message in your fortune cookie is the same as mine: "Leftover Peking Ravioli will go bad tomorrow because Feng Shui in refrigerator is all wrong. Foolish man order too much food. Wise man order only Szechuan Cabbage Leaf in Oyster Sauce. Old proverb say: eat through mouth but pay through nose."

Golden Oldies

Sculpted like collectible porcelain busts coiffured with mad organist hair, or posed in airbrushed leather trousers and snakeskin boots, the fabulous superstars of musical history are dramatically stage-lit at pulse-racing points upon the glamorous and groovy time-line of twentieth-century entertainment: Stravinsky at the Ballet Russe, for example, Charlie Parker at Birdland, or The Beatles in Hamburg, even the Velvet Underground at Warhols Factory. But surely, none has created such an immediate and lasting impact as arch bassoonist Benny Schneizelbaum and his Big Band Knee Benders at the Bumcombe Municipal Lido.
These legendary teatime musical concerts held to complement the local Miss Mermaid Competition in that memorable summer of 1946, where Benny and the boys filled the dance floor with such foot-stompin favorites as "Dirty Berties Blackout Boogie", and "You, the Moonlight, and Forty Thousand Italian Prisoners of War", have achieved a level of immortality comparable only to the mythical lyre recitals given by Orpheus in the Amphitheater of the Underworld.
Of course, Benny and the Knee Benders hit their final notes many years before I was born, so I never got to observe this wonderful ensemble in the flesh, but on special summer nights my grandmother still projects a treasured reel of 16mm black-and-white film of the Knee Benders serenading the cream of Bumcombe society in that first year of peace. But unfortunately the film did not have any sound recorded on it, and so my family would sit in embarrassed silence as my grandmother provided accompaniment for the flickering images by whistling the numbers as best she could recall, which was not, alas, despite her brave attempts, a noise guaranteed to thrill the ear of any connoisseur of melody. Then later in the evening, long after grandmother had fallen asleep in her armchair, we children were allowed to sneak into the den and play our scratchy Sex Pistols album on her monaural record player.

Three Borgs

Some years ago I attended a wedding ceremony performed with commendable speed and charm in the hushed confines of Harvard's Swedenborg Chapel, a stone structure perched precariously on a traffic island situated but a Quaker's leap from the bustling, cosmopolitan center called Harvard Square.
Most people are probably aware of Emanuel Swedenborg (the lugubrious figure for whom the chapel was named) as the eighteenth-century scientist, philosopher, and visionary whose unorthodox belief system, derived from endless conversations with various verbose angels and other spirits of the air, was a profound influence on a diverse range of disciples such as William Blake, August Strindberg, Aleister Crowley, and the lead singer of everyone's techno pop favorites The Lords of Acid. But how many of you know that this fascinating Scandinavean actually labored under several nationalistic pseudonyms before finally settling on the name that made his reputation. Indeed, prior to the famous historical Emanuel Swedenborg we acknowledge and study today, there had stalked the Earth an earlier incarnation of this personage referred to in police reports of the time as "Emanuel Denmarkborg" and "Emanuel Norwayborg", and even "Emanuel Fjordborg", depending upon where he happened to be spreading his unique gospel at the time.
These earlier versions of the final product, however, lacked the essential ingredient of prophecy that made the later model so successful in his endeavors. For Emanuel Swedenborg, as has been well documented, predicted the emergence in our world of Communist China, the Great Depression, the construction of Britain's Millenium Dome, an affordable Volvo with four-wheel drive, and Super Mario Brothers (although even the great seer could not foresee the finger-aching rigors of Super Mario Brothers Level 98), and all of these visions of the future, naturally, were revealed unto him during his long-winded discussions with celestially angelic beings in the heavenly spheres of the New Jerusalem, or so he claimed at any rate.
Still, it was a nice wedding in his Harvard chapel, and fortunately there was absolutely no sign of an Emanuel Yankeeborg lecturing the congregation on mysticism and its discontents.

The original oil painting of Swedenborg reproduced above in triplicate is of unknown provenace - at least I have no idea who painted it, anyway

Demon Drink

Cabbagehead, the family dog, took one haunched, wary glance at the purple liquid, sniffed the air, then howled and scampered off into a corner of the room where he cowered for the rest of the afternoon.
"You see." my father concluded sadly, "Even the most desperate bum half-crazed with thirst would turn his nose up at your uncle's mulberry-flavored brandy."
"It's Devil piss." Cousin Barry confirmed.
My uncle's distillery was actually a makeshift shack precariously constructed of warped chipboard and rusting sheets of corrugated iron on a squelchy foundation of waterlogged shagpile carpet samples unsuccessfully concealed, much to my aunt's chagrin, between a large rododendron bush and her favorite apple tree in the remotest corner of their backyard.
Besides mulberry, my uncle's Eau de Vie experiments included such unsuitable fruits as apricot, plum, and damson, all of which, as my cousin accurately pointed out, might reasonably be confused with the steaming, sulphuric contents of Satan's bladder after an evening spent quaffing endless pints of brimstone ale in Hell's most disreputable nightclub.
However, to my mind, it was not the taste or bouquet of my uncle's bottled failures that held my attention, but the labels that he pasted on them. These would always incorporate a painting of a naked lady by the French artist Bouguereau, and these pictures were selected by their similarity to what my uncle referred to as "the body" of the particular brandy in question.
The Mulberry Brandywine Reserve of 1978, for example, was labelled with Bougeureau's "Evening Mood" because, or so my uncle claimed, the color of the alcohol closely resembled the magenta twilights he remembered so well from his year spent sketching the ruins of Athens during his student days.
Although, as my father said, nudging me in the ribs and winking at Cousin Barry: "His memory can linger lovingly over all the Athenian twilights he ever drew, but if he actually drinks anymore of the filth the rest of us will be sketching the ruins of his liver."
And, indeed, had I studied anatomy in the early nineteen-nineties at St Gerald's Hospital, the medical research institution to which my uncle's damaged remains were conveyed after his early death from chronic cirrhosis, that is exactly what might have happened.

An Exemplum

When I was a very, very small boy, I suppose somewhere in the region of approximately about five years old or so, probably circa 1973-ish, I discovered to my immense chagrin and discomfiture that I had been scheduled by The Powers to receive private religious instruction every Wednesday afternoon from a heavily cassocked Belgian Friar named Brother Rene.
Like most of his kind, Brother Rene's face was extremely smooth and round, almost devoid of veins or wrinkles, yet alarmingly florid, like a red balloon that had been tied into the shape of a head by some street performing clown. The ears that flapped on either side of this gigantic rubberized skull were great jug handles of marble-pink flesh, hedged by a thin topiary of greasy brown hair, and seemed to me at that impressionable age to contain, bubbling and frothing in their dark folds and recesses like vile herbs in a witch's cauldron, all the terrible secrets imparted to Brother Rene by those who coughed up their sins to him in the confessional.
Unlike most other Friars, however, Brother Rene was a dwarf, a physical feature he would always draw attention to when recalling his early Benedictine noviate in Belgium by claiming to have a chosen a high calling while living in a low country.
On one particular Wednesday afternoon, I remember, as Brother Rene was reciting from his own translation of the Book of Hercule that strange passage where the famous Dead Sea Detective outwits the moneychangers in the temple and manages to recover Jesophat's golden amulet just in the nick of time so that she can wear it at the Bethlehem Ball, it seemed to me, despite my tender years, that the Powers had made a dreadful mistake by employing this tiny oddball. However, since I was only five years old or thereabouts at the time, there was nothing I could do about it because I was not allowed to speak until spoken to.
And so, to this very day, I often leaf unsuccessfully through my Bible searching for "The Mysterious Affair of John the Baptist's Head, a Dead Sea Detective Adventure", which was one of my favorite psalms when growing up.
Consequently, the moral of this story is, if you are going to write a ludicrous story about a small Belgian Friar, don't be like me, make sure you know how it is going to end before you start writing it.

"Portrait of a Belgian Friar" is actually "The Dwarf Francisco Lezcano" by Velazquez, with the hue slightly skewed by me

Interplanetary Dining

There exists on the lips of bores that rather exhausted and exceptionally tedious joke about astronauts penetrating the most distant moons of the furthest flung reaches of the most remote galaxies, only to discover upon landing that a pioneering Starbucks franchise has already preceded them to this isolated destination.
Personally, if I were a spaceman, I would perform reverse somersaults in zero gravity hoping and praying that a team of highly trained coffee brewers had boldly gone where I was about to go, since, prior to taking that giant leap for mankind onto alien soil in my moonboots, I would definitely need to sink an extra frothy cappuccino or two with, maybe, a chocolate chip for company.
Furthermore, should NASA send me to explore the surface of some gaseous and inhospitable planets that revolve around dying suns in deepest space millions of light-years away from the mother ship, I think I would also like to at least have the option of ordering out for Chinese when I got there.
The restaurant, I like to think, would look something like those strange, abandoned, Pagoda-shaped nuclear research stations that rise from the shingled shore at Orford Ness. The interior of this establishment would be decorated in a manner similar to the art deco sets designed by Hollywood art directors for the "Flash Gordon Conquers Mars" adventure serials of the 1930s, and the waiter, naturally, would resemble the Emperor Ming although, for the sake of the space race, mission control can only hope that the folded contents of Mings fortune cookies will not be as merciless as the Emperor himself.

Picture is a photograph of Orford Ness taken, cropped, and defaced by the author of this post.

And Then It Was Gone

In this detail of Calvert Richard Jones 1846 calotype, "The House of Sallust", in which the grainy sepia patinas of the photograph perhaps suggest that the swirling volcanic ashes that buried Pompeii so many years ago have still not quite yet come to rest, a languidly frock-coated English gentleman leans somnambulantly against a slice of excavated masonry, as if waiting for night to fall and the haphazard contents of a painting by De Chirico to materialize around him with all hazy, sudden velocity of dream logic.
Yet here we only see, fixed in time by photographic paper, the atrium at the front of the house leading to the columned garden court beyond, and then Vesuvius itself, pale and almost indistinct, looming ominously in the background ...
But thats as far as I got with this post since, like the citizens of that doomed city so many centuries ago, my activity was abruptly brought to an unexpected and terminal conclusion.
Unlike the annihilation of Pompeii, however, there was at least no molten rock involved in the cessation of my work, which was, sad to say, merely interrupted by persistent phone calls from a woman called Angela (although, as anyone who has met her might attest, total Pompeian devastation and a phone call from Angela can often amount to pretty much the same sort of thing).
Nevertheless, after talking Angela through a 1040EZ Tax Form crisis with a patient and heartening manner that would shame a Samaritan switchboard operator, I was unable to remember the remainder of what I had planned to write about Calvert Richard Jones photograph. There was something about the use of human, ovine and bovine scale models in seventeenth century painting, I recall, and a sentence or two concerning Chateaubriands remark that the private homes of Pompeii resembled dolls houses, but after that my memory palls. So, with nothing else to add, I shall leave you with this famous scene from Bulwer Lyttons infamous "The Last Days of Pompeii":

Hail, noble Clodius! pardon my interruption; and inform me, I pray you, which is the house of Sallust?'
'It is but a few yards hence, wise Arbaces. But does Sallust entertain to-night?'
'I know not,' answered the Egyptian; 'nor am I, perhaps, one of those whom he would seek as a boon companion. But thou knowest that his house holds the person of Glaucus, the murderer.'

Calvert Richard Jones photograph is taken from "The Origins of British Photography" published by Thames and Hudson, then scanned and cropped by me for my own nefarious purposes.

Rogue Vogue

Viewed in silhouette, those enormous sneakers favored by the teenage youth of modern times so often resemble those strange isosceles forms attached to stick legs dangling from barrel-shapes bodies that runny-nosed children scrawl onto endless sheets of foolscap with brown crayons. Like the nightmare products of a fairytale cobbler forced to design footwear for a family of ogres, these Frankensteinian testaments to the shoemaker’s decline squelch and squeak from fast food counter to entertainment megastore check-out with all the grace and aplomb of an overweight and especially warty toad that has belched itself to death on a surfeit of excrement-filled flies. Is it any wonder, then, that these monstrous, mutant, multicolored leather outrages are so often worn beneath filthy jeans whose elephantine tailoring and incalculable volume force the wearer to literally wade through the abundant folds of streaky denim that flap and cascade around their acne-riddled legs like the ragged flag of an uninspired army billowing around a shattered flagpole that has been broken in two?

The Bad Egg

Behold the wobbly omphalos of the fried egg: a sallow dome enclosed by gelatinous pearly white terrain whose burnt brown perimeter is harried by a battalion of baked beans and a double phalanx of sausage meat. Slice this yolk in twain with one swift remorseless stroke of a ketchup-stained knife and observe how it bleeds: anemic yellow plasma. Ah yes, that certainly pushes the olfactometer needle firmly into the red.

Sands of Time

The draconian concept of Desert Island Discs has always held a horrifying fascination for me. Forced by shipwrecked circumstance to make a mere ten selections from a host of equally loved recordings seems to me to be an impossible task comparable only to Sophie’s Choice.
For example: stranded upon some South Seas atoll with no shoes, ragged trousers, two days of beard and only ten albums clutched under my seaweed entangled arm, what if, for instance, in that eleventh hour moment of indecisive panic, I had chosen to bring, say, Dinah Washington’s Greatest Hits with me instead of the Nina Simone Collection? Would I eventually grow to regret this audiophilic mistake so much that I would commit suicide by impaling myself upon the pointy end of a conch shell?
Another example: every morning, while safe at home in my luxurious apartment, I waltz my clothes around the room to Roses from the South as I dress and prepare to engage the day; but would I need such a preparatory soundtrack for those uncivilized years spent roaming the perimeter of my isolated sandy domain, or could I simply bring a disc of crazy Steel Drum and Pan-Pipe music instead and just let it all hang out native style?
I don't know. To be honest, I can imagine myself teaching Man Friday to whistle accompaniment to all the music I thought I would never really miss, and meanwhile, in a dark and forgotten corner of my palm tree structured shack, that stack of ten discs I originally picked slowly becomes buried by the shifting remorseless sands, just like the statue in Shelley's Ozymandias.

A Burnt Out Case

Today I was going to compile for your reading pleasure a lengthy dissertation regarding the controversial physical phenomenon known as Spontaneous Human Combustion - or SHC - but, alas, it is already the middle of the afternoon and I am too burned out now.
Oh weary limbs! Oh poor, befuddled head! Oh feverish brow! I feel like some writhing, spitting voodoo sorceress has made a hollow scale-model marshmallow figure of me, and then crammed it full of molasses.
But it's probably just that I have caught yet another cold.

The Lower Depths

Deprived of her car by a heavy overnight deluge of snow, Miss Penelope Gawnt unfortunately traveled to her morning destination via subterranean locomotive. A well-heeled, expensively permed woman of forty-seven, chiffoned, silked, wrapped in camel hair coat and Burberry scarf, Miss Gawnt never, ever descended to travel on public transportation except in extreme circumstances, the sort of circumstances that might, perhaps, prohibit the United States Post Office from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Huddled in a remote corner of the train, afraid of invisibly encroaching germs and desperately trying not to touch anything, Miss Gawnt stared balefully at the plastic lid that sealed her lukewarm sugary coffee into a styrofoam cup as it sloshed around inside its ludicrously decorated container. She had purchased the coffee from a greasy Slav on the platform – whatever had possessed her to do such a thing! – and was loathe to drink from the cup, as if the contents might be some evil witches brew, or an infernal, sulphurous concoction of blended brimstone and mandrake root that might suddenly transform her into a wizened and hunchbacked Mrs Hyde right there in the subway compartment. And as Miss Gawnt cowered, flinched and cringed in her rapidly decreasing corner of the train, yet more grimy, unwashed passengers pushed and elbowed their way into the tight space: uncoordinated forms teeming around her like an army of cockroaches in the night: a seething mass of agonized faces, armpits and crotches that might just as well have been the grunting, grotesque and deformed corpses of The Damned sizing each other up as they await the Day of Judgement.
Never again, she thought to herself, never again.