American Fez

So Long 2005 We Hardly Knew Ye

It was the year of furious waters and shifting, blood-stained sands; bacon was outlawed and every single pink leopard was finally eliminated; King Tut came back to life and the first hydrogen baby was born; twigs and berries became the official monetary unit of Alsace Lorraine and Nic Roeg's "Performance" was again not released on neither DVD nor on self-adhesive tattoo.
Considering that it's been such an annus horribilis for most people, it is interesting to note that when added together the individual numbers of 2005 make 7, supposedly a lucky number, so that pretty much gives the squawking bird to the last shred of credibility that the so-called science of Numerology can claim for itself.
And what will the New Year bring for blogs? Probably just more of them I should imagine, as if there weren't enough already! Frankly I have a beastly time keeping up with the blogs I like, never mind reading some new ones.

The Music of Your Life

A younger relative of mine is currently enjoying winter break from his freshman year at college by transferring numerous songs into the iPod he received for Christmas, most of which are very unfamiliar to me. Alas, I fear for him that these songs won't provide such emotional support as he will require of them when the time comes: I refer, of course, to setting the correct mood in his bachelor dorm when the first girl arrives, tranquilizing his feelings after this first romantic failure, and other rite-of-passage events of similar gigantic teenage consequence.
Therefore I have compiled the following list of "must have" musical lifeboats suitable for younger men whom contemporary culture leaves bereft of an adequate emotional soundtrack.

1. Best Music To Play When Preparing To Go Out At Night:
It depends on where you're going and with whom, obviously, but I believe that J. Strauss waltzes, Iggy Pop's "The Passenger", something by Louis Armstrong, or Scott Walker at his melodramatic best will always create the right tone for a good night out.

2. Best Music To Play When You Return Home Drunk And Have Absolutely No Idea What Time It Is Or What Neighbors Are.
The Animals. Hands down. Unbeatable swaggering sounds for when you've had one to many and don't care what anybody thinks.

3. Best Seduction Music:
Sade maybe a cliche but she's also a truism with a proven track record of successful liasons accomplished by even the most awkward of adolescent suitors. Kate Bush may also be a good idea if your target is "witchy" or your first Gypsy Jones. Add some Chet Baker to mix it up since it's important that she will think that you are sensitive and caring.

4. Best Music To Play The Morning After As You Make Coffee And She Slowly Picks Her Clothes Up Off The Floor:
A little Stan Getz to soften the mood always soothes this often embarrassing time of undefined feelings.

5. Best Music To Play When You've Fallen In Love By Accident And Got Dumped:
Bob Dylan's "Blood On The Tracks" and Frank Sinatra for when you feeling manic. You may also want to keep Richard Strauss' "Four Last Songs" around for those occasions when you just stare out of the window at nothing in particular for hours on end.

6. Best Music To Play For Those Wistful And Unsure Moments On Loose-End Afternoons.
The Lou Reed canon comes in handy here: something by the Velvet Underground; "Transformer" or "Coney Island Baby". Alternatively, Britten's "Albert Herring" can get the job done too.

7. Best Music To Play When Summoning The Courage To Clean Behind The Back Of Your Toilet:
Mahler, Beethoven, Brahms: you get the picture.

8. Best Music To Play When You Just Want To Listen To Music:
Good grief! How should I know?

How To Write A Novel

And get published! Just follow the following E-Z literary steps:

1. You need a snappy title. No problem: choose the name of a famous historical personality and a cool object. For example: "Hitler's Kaleidoscope" - that will look pretty cool emblazoned in golden embossed lettering on the cover of your book!

2. Now you need to add story elements. We do this in two simple stages:
a> Write down all the grisly details from your most disastrous romantic entanglement.
b> Describe an event involved with the historical personality named in your title. Since we chose Hitler, we could use the Holocaust.
We shall put these two story elements aside until later, since we now need to work with character

3. Characters in a modern novel are created using these hackneyed and unimaginative stereotypes:
a> A hero or heroine based upon yourself, preferably a sensitive artist, who will become the character whom your readers "relate to" and who shall henceforth be denoted as 'I' - perhaps he or she is writing a book about the Holocaust.
b> The lover whom 'I' is romantically entangled with. This person should be emotionally damaged in some way. Perhaps they have been raped, or are Mexican?
c> Your historical characters such as Hitler and Herr Oberst Mueller.
d> Other sundry cardboard cut-out characters who are used to exposit the 'I' character's awesome sensitivity, intelligence and unimpeachable goodness.

4. Structure, structure, structure. This is very easy. Simply write chapters that alternate between the story elements of I's present and the historical past in the repeating abababab pattern. Sandwich them between a quizzical introductory chapter and an elliptical conclusion.

5. The plot thickens. In the (a) chapters you should tell the story of your romantic disaster in the most portentious and self-absorbed manner you can muster. Meanwhile, the (b) chapters should be devoted to your historical drama. Why not have it be the diary of a concentration camp victim?

6. And don't forget subtext! Another easy one. Your best bet is probably to equate the lover character with Hitler or an SS guard at the camp - you know, something like that.

7. Finally, choose an interesting and pretentious epigraph. Did somebody say Shakespeare or Nietzsche! (Why not have two and make the second a quote from a U2 song or something else modern.)

8. Now get writing. See you in the remainders aisle!

It's All Take, Take, Take

I donate quite a few wads of hard-earned albeit tax-deductible dollars to several Centers, Institutes and Foundations, yet did not receive a single Christmas card from any of these self-proclaimed "worthy and august" non-profit bodies. Consequently I'm not bothering with the hand-outs in 2006. I'd rather simply make my full contribution to the sons of Alphaeus, since at least the IRS does remember me once a year.
Petulant? Oh yes indeed. I'm as petulant as a King of Orient's younger brother who must mind the palace while his royal sibling's myrrh-laden camel follows yonder star.
Obviously I realize that my non-donated money will now be used for developing some sort of secret military rocket or missile instead of teaching kids with rickets how to read or restoring Beethoven's favorite piano, but I don't care anymore. All I wanted was a simple Christmas card from those organizations I support, even one of those pre-printed mass circulation greetings would have appeased my affronted self. Alas, my letterbox remained a spurned receptacle for their seasonal goodwill.
I suppose the Theodore Dalrymple Fanzine did invite me to their holiday party, so I will let them off the hook. Otherwise, with mostly undisturbed coffers, I shall wait until April's forms arrive, heralding the Federal and State messengers who really love me.

The Spirit of Christmas Yet-To-Come

Sprawling beneath the electric glow of an angel apexed Christmas tree surrounded by ripped ribbons and crumpled wrapping paper, I suddenly realized how our environment actually becomes a veritable presentation box universe during the holiday season: from the enormous snow-shaker shopping malls to our gingerbread cookie-cutter gated communities via scale-model international airports (batteries never included) or Thomas the Tank Engine's seasonal shunting tour. We are boxed-up, labelled, and exchanged like toys sent from one artificial ecosystem to another while the manic holiday muzak plays.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, communities were built in the shadow of the factory where citizens worked. Today communites are pre-fabricated in the shadow of the mall where citizens shop. Soon we will all live in the shadow of the Greater Airport. Glance upwards at the sky and you will be able to view thousands of planes gliding between the spaghetti formations of multiple freeway overpasses as citizens are shuttled between Cheescake Factory departure lounge and The Disney Store arrivals.
We will all stink of glossy magazine Colognes and Starbucks coffee and our clothes will be uniforms of washable silk and denim. There will be no shoes, only comfort socks.
Citizens will not actually do anything at all, ever; only watch movies about people who used to do things long ago, none of which we will really want to watch, but we will because there will be nothing else to do - except eat, drink, and be brainlessly merry.
If you're thinking that my flight home was disastrously delayed, you would be correct.

Christmas Cracker: A-I

Christmas coming, goose is fat, etc.
Anyway, as I promised back in November or whenever it was, since I shall be spending the rest of this festive week away from my computer wiping hot turkey from the chins of spindly orphans and removing brussell sprouts from their noses, I am re-posting my very own Christmas Cracker from last year: my "Critique of the Alphabet."
See you next Tuesday and my very best wishes to you and yours whomever you or they might be. Right, here we go:

A Critique of the Alphabet
We begin, reasonably, with the letter A.

Into the valley of sentences rode the twenty-six letters, urged onwards by the leader of the pack, A, which, as anyone familiar with the meaning of auguries in Greek sacrificial prophesy will tell you, is not an especially good omen: those ancient Athenians believed that you don't want an A is your entrails if all is to be well; alas, there is one in the word, right between the r and i. So, right off the bat, this does not bode well at all!

Never mind, A is also the wigwam of letters. It is the tent from which the other members of the alphabet tribe issue forth on to the plain of words in their torrent of disorganized mumbo-jumbo, preparing for the great pow-wow between the vowels and the consonants.

In Egyptian hieroglyphics A was drawn as an eagle, from which shape the letter takes its current form. But the Phoenicians knew A as the sign of the ox, no doubt drawing the plough that churns the furrows of sense. And if we return to the Greeks, as it seems we always must, Pythogoras would have had something to say about the letter that his friends would have called Alpha, especially the top bit.

And that, pretty much, is A.

Non-Linear B
The old Hebrew sign for "house", B is the shelter to where we all must run when our first plan fails, which is why the letter resembles a capital P who has got itself foolishly pregnant and must find lodging since it has been cast out of its family home. B is certainly no stranger to ignominy, since in olden days it was branded on the forehead of blasphemers.
B's Egyptian hieroglyphic equivalent is either a smelly foot or a well-sheared sheep, depending on which foolhardy archeologist with a pharoah's curse hanging over his head you decide to consult. Although it's also possible that Nefertiti and her Nile dwelling cronies knew it simply as a sort of unimaginative box shape. Meanwhile, in later years B.C, a wealthy Roman who marked his Egyptian slave girl "B.d" would be asking 300 denari for her services.
Finally, B is also the chemical symbol for Boron, a word which if slightly mispronounced could very well describe this post.

Add A Cedilla, If You Are Foreign
C: the letter of the average, the mediocre, the mundane, the humdrum, the okay, the not bad, the run of the mill, the just getting by, the reasonably passable. Looking rather like a discarded, unseasonal Zero cast into the darkest of closets where a bored moth has taken a bite out of it, C is the proverbial "can do better."
In Hebrew C is called Caph, which means the "hollow of the hand" (presumably an empty hand, which is all we can expect from the C outlined above). And, of course, it is the ancient Greek's Gamma and the Roman numeral signifying one hundred, as in: "Disney's CI Dalmations - Now Playing At Your Local Bread and Circus".
The character of Baldrick in the BBC's Blackadder defines C as "green wobbly thing that mermaids live in", which is pretty unbeatable so I'll leave it there.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Christmas Cracker: J-Q

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

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.

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!"

"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.

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.

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.

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

Christmas Cracker: R-Z

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

X the Unknown
Very little is known about the macabre and mysterious rites of the letter X, for its terrible secrets are jealously guarded by the Bathers of the Sacred Font, those nakedly sans-serif mythopoetic silhouettes who glide and back-flip in magenta misted waters like lascivious nymphs in some X-rated cinematic debauch-o-rama supposedly based upon the Dionysian orgies of ancient times.

Yes, it is no mere accident that louche rows of winking X's symbolize kisses scrawled beneath the signature of perfumed letters exchanged by clandestine and adulterous  lovers.

So X is certainly the most sinful and secretive member of the alphabet, in fact I'm suprised that it hasn't been blackballed by the other letters long before now.

But fortunately X is redeemed by the fact that in ancient times the new breed of non-pagan Xtians - disciples of Jesus X - were often crucified on X-shaped structures rather than the traditional upright cross so crucial to Xtian symbolism, and to this day X remains an abbreviation of Christ, as in the festival of xmas that has just passed so quickly.

Ours Is Not To Reason Y
Perhaps the most prominent - at least in my own case - application of the letter Y was as a frontal gusset decoration for the infamous "y front" genre of men's underpanting, a hardy design perennial of male lingerie which can still be encountered today when examining the modern "boxer brief" for example, the whole being a memorable - at least in my own case - example of form following function.

Obviously I could drone on and on about the use of Y in the Welsh and Spanish languages; about how the Romans stole the letter from the Greeks and perverted it for their own nefarious purposes; or how the Saxons hammered the letter into shape in their own inimitable style. But then I would not have room left enough to speak of the "samian letter", which is what Y is sometimes called.

Y, in its guise as "the samian letter", was chosen by Pythagoras to be the letter representing the straight and narrow path of virtue, hence its later if heavily adapted appearance as a featured line on certain types of graph. Alexander Pope mentions the samian letter in his Dunciad:

"When reason doubtful, like the samian letter/ Points him two ways, the narrower the better"

Alas, Stephenesque's road of reason is always an extremely wide, dual carriageway with no exit ramps and no service stations.

Zzzzzz
Zzzzzz. Now I'm very tired after all that alphabet.

A Yawn on the Violins

There always seems to be far more pouting and hand wringing about the distinctly dim and tremulous future for classical music at Christmas than at any other time of the year. Wither Bach, Beethoven and Mozart in this dreary tuneless neophiliac world of hardcore rap and Radiohead? Why doesn't the urban youth of today give two distorted ring-tones about the pastoral symphony of yesterday, the music critics commentators wonder.
I suppose it's because around early December that these worried aficionados of chamber quartets start observing that their already severely shrunken corner of the record store is being yet further reduced and diminished to make room for the masses of Santa sing-a-longs and other seasonal CDs.
It is true, of course; the popularity of classical music is declining rapidly. Just think, for example, soon nobody at all will wish to listen to Smetana's "The Bartered Bride."
And why should they? This is the Age of Celebrity, after all, and exactly who the Hell is this Smetana guy anyway? Who has he divorced lately? Was he sexually abused as a child? Did he do drugs or say no to them? Has he come clean to Katie Couric on national television recently?
No. Smetana hasn't done any of those things, at least not in full color or over a podcast. And so to the contemporary consumer of hyper-packaged retail personality cults Smetana remains anonymously dead and Czechoslovakian: Bedrich? What's up with that? Likewise, what does Beethoven mean to the mallrats? A mean-faced marble bust of man with mad hair, that's what.
Obviously most teenagers need to become interested in an artist's life prior to cultivating an appreciaton of the masterpieces they produced. The classical music cabals need to conduct themselves as more glossy lifestyle section than musty old manuscript. Of successful living composers, Philip Glass is a friend of David Bowie and Ned Rorem is a friend of Dorothy: both of them whistle the media tune very well and consequently both sell more tickets and shift more CD units than they probably deserve. But good luck to them, however. As E. M. Forster is so often quoted as saying, "Only connect." Alas, most of the classical music world currently does not, and its po-faced pompous devotees in their Ivory Concert Halls are the killjoys we should be pointing our fingers at. If it is to survive Classical music needs some Beethoven's fifth columnists in the popular press, that's for sure.

Hark the Herald Anxieties Sing

Neurosis: an idea clad in Harlequin costume and carrying a huge golf umbrella while riding a unicycle across a highwire strung from one end of a fool’s mind to the other.
Personally, I only have one such mental performer beneath the big top of my brain. In the darkness of my night I am often tossed and turned with nagging agony by the irrational notion that there is some important and very necessary daily ritual of personal hygiene that I was never told about. What this ablution might be, however, I can’t possibly imagine: greasing one’s toenails, perhaps; or irrigating one’s nostril cavities with saline solution.
I eventually obliterate this feverish concern by confronting my fear with the undeniable fact that no such unknown bathroom chore can actually exist because, whatever it might be, my sister would surely have purchased a bottle of it for me as a Christmas present long before now.
This year, besides the Powell-Pressburger “Tales of Hoffman” DVD and Julian Maclaren-Ross’ finally republished “Bitten by the Tarantula” that I asked her for, there is also bound to be some sort of scented ointment from either Woods of Windsor or George Trumper wrapped up in shiny paper beneath the tree.

Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time

Taking a tip from top-notch author Anthony Powell, himself a keen exponent of collage, Bleak Mouse has recently found himself worthily engaged amid a mountain of magazine clippings, antique advertising posters, chipboard and slimy former jam jars filled with gooey paste. The difference, of course, is that Powell was probably personally acquainted with many of the louche figures and ornate establishments appearing in these papery compositions. Bleak simply makes the tight connections with his highly imaginative, fertile, and overflowing mind.
Art lovers should also check out the excellent photography on display at Mortimer Shy's weblog. He is a first class stylist of what I call "The Visual Poetics of Mundanity."
I, on the other hand, well I do it in oils with a knife like Goya. The results may lack quality, depth, and skill, but the bloodstains of inspiration are plain to see.

Napoleon at the Ice Rink

Once the shivering cold sensation has conquered your body, no tankard of hot chocolate or boiling cider can expel that frigid physical feeling from your bones, as if a glacial tape worm had coiled itself around icy organs and frozen ribcage. Sometimes you must retreat from the winter wonderland and simply warm yourself beside a flickering fire built of burning toboggans. Rosebud? It's more like flocon de neige, if you ask me.

Meanwhile, some good news: Tosser has returned to the fold.

Electric Chairman Mao

At this special time of year we remember Mary's boy child born in a lowly stable, and we also pump convicted felons full of the Elixir of Death.
Peace on Earth, mercy mild, goodwill to all men unless they are manacled to a stone bench on Death Row for murder. Happy Christmas, California!
And just in case you're wondering, as several of you seem to be, what I would do if the criminal in question had raped and killed my sister, well, I'd fight him and one of us might die (probably me), but I wouldn't have some bleary-eyed, red nosed, gray haired collection of legal perverts do the job for me while the evildoer is strapped down. No, sir.

Clemenceau Rides Again

I am in favor of clemency for convicted Crip gangster Tookie Williams as long as he changes his first name to something normal like Gerald or Aaron or Hector, even.
"Tookie," however, deserves to fry. So let's drop the nickname NOW.
Meanwhile, those hideously hunchbacked old hags who squat bloodthirstily at the foot of the scaffold with their knitting, they should consider this news snippet from USA Today: " ...among the celebrities who took up Williams' cause were Jamie Foxx, who played the gang leader in a cable movie about Williams; rapper Snoop Dogg, himself a former Crip; Sister Helen Prejean, the nun depicted in Dead Man Walking; Bianca Jagger; and former M*A*S*H star Mike Farrell."
With B-List supporters like that, Williams needs all the mercy he can get!
On a personal note, I just wish to add that I think that capital punishment is the lowest form of state barbarism and that anyone who promotes it is an animal, a mentally defective stoat.

The Fat Controller

While the world's sweaty hand-wringers are currently engaged gnashing their bleached teeth over the new cinematic adaptation of C.S. Gas' "Chronicles of Banana" it seems that Doubting Thomas the Tank Engine has slipped under the religious radar. As Mrs. Lesbian and the Finger Pointing Society have pointed out, these beloved railway stories are actually written by none other than the infamous Reverend V.W. Tawdry, Papal Envoy to the BBC.
Surely any decent non-deodorant wearing sandalista will be sick in their granola when they discover that, for example, the episode called "The Chuff-Chuff Express to Salvation City" is actually a thinly-veiled promotion of hardcore Christian theology and anti-abortion rhetoric! And no amount of deviously recorded Anglo-Zionist voice over narration by Ringo Starr can disguise the fact that the character of the Fat Controller is none other than the Blessed Virgin Mary Bakker Eddy himself!
So if your child asks for a "Thomas the Tank Engine" DVD this Christmas, I suggest you crucify the little nappy-rashed zealot before it's too late.

'Tis the Season to be Qwerty

Responding to my request for Christmas gifts, Janet Williams kindly sent me a copy of her painting "Embers", which I have reproduced here in a philistine manner. Hopefully I have uploaded the picture so that it may be seen in its rightful glory by clicking on the thumbnail I've provided. Ding! Czz-Sheeekunk!
Until "Embers" arrived the twin concepts of typewriting and ink ribbons hadn't been hammered into the rolled A-4 page my mind for some considerable period of time. These clunky machines were things of the past, byzantine contraptions associated with days at college, bottles of No-Doze, and shaky fingers stained with white-out. Ding! Czz-sheeekunk!
I wrote "Feelin' Really Existential" on a borrowed typewriter; my first attempt at a novel, it was the story of an idiot not totally unlike me who enters an Albert Camus impersonator competition in Algiers, but accidently shoots one of the judges when a spotlight momentarily blinds him. It was supposed to be funny. Ding! Czz-sheeekunk! .... Ziiiiiip! Scrunch scrunch. (Followed by echoing footsteps of author walking over to trash can.)

In the Grotto

So my living room currently resembles a festive fir-lined Alpine ski resort into which a flashing UFO has crash-landed, spilling Ruritanian projections from the most frivolous and nutcracked corners of Tchaikovsky's mind onto the mantelpiece. Excellent. Merry Christmas everyone.
Now that these seasonal decorations adorn my home, I can concentrate on faxing to my relatives the extensive list of things I want them to buy me.
You see, although I do not accept the myth of the nativity of Jesus Christ, I devoutly do believe in those Three Kings Bearing Gifts with a pure and simple faith. Anybody who denies that presents are the best thing about Christmas is a liar and doesn't deserve to get any.
And I would like to take this opportunity to remind all potential gift-gifters that I personally have been very, very good this year.

Hi. It's Me

Hi. It's me. I have the key to your heart. It is made of brass and it’s slightly bent from where I tried to force it that time. It also has “do not duplicate” engraved on it. But I decided to have it copied anyway. So I took the key to your heart down to the hardware store on the corner, the one called True Value. It didn’t take very long because apparently the key to your heart is cut from a fairly common key template. The old guy behind the counter, you know, the one who advised us about the plumbing, he said that he does about nine or ten of that that kind of key every day. Anyway, when I got the copy of the key to your heart I hung it next to the original and all my other ones on that keychain I always carry around with me, yeah, that one, the souvenir from Las Vegas one shaped like Sammy Davis Junior’s head

The Long March to Bethlehem

As we approach the gift-giving season, skating across Christmassy streets and mooching through Santa's Mega Malls, humankind quickly metamorphasize ourselves into polyhedral constructions of sharp-edged shopping bags, quilted overcoats and flowing scarves. A cadaverous Salvation Army sergeant shakes his brass bell into frowning, frosted faces. Workmen dressed as elves fuse an entire city block as they attempt to provide power to a zillion faery lights strung around a forty-foot fir tree from Norway. Ye olde Yankee candle shoppe is hard-selling the flickering flame of nostalgia for the ghost of New England Christmas Past.
But, alas, we are informed that wishing our fellow citizens "Merry Christmas" is actually unacceptable in this multicultural age, and that we should now greet one another with "Happy Holidays" instead ... and all the seasonal signs in all the stores agree, despite that cacophany of unmistakable Christmas Carols still blaring forth from their winter wonderland interiors, deafening shoppers and passers-by alike. And typically it is those responsible for denouncing Christmas in the first place, those politically correct Cambridge fuzzballs with their graying ponytails and wooly purple socks who dance down the aisle with their macrobiotically-raised children whenever "Feliz Navidad" is played, surely one of the most Jesus-centric of all Christmas songs.
Nevermind. Keep the Yuletide fires burning, eh. After all, as I wrote in this space last year:

I Am the Thomas Kinkade in your Mind

Hello. I am the Thomas Kinkade in your mind. I hope you are feeling cozy in your quaint thatched cottage with the mossy stone wall that runs alongside it set amid rolling patchwork hills. Behold the dappled trees and wild flowers in lush, colorful and resplendent bloom!
And yet it is also softly snowing! See how the dainty, glistening flakes tumble down to the pure white carpet in which your pretty cats gambol and prance.
It is magenta twilight. The sun illuminates fluffy clouds drifing peacefully across an azure sky. And the moon shepherds its flock of twinkling stars. A peach-faced child in a silken nightdress scans the night sky and waits for Santa Claus.
A beautiful golden fire shines forth from the latticed cottage window. Someone is roasting marshmellows. Who could it be? Well if it isn't lucky old you and your handsome family!
Meanwhile, torrents of human blood begins to pool in the locked room upstairs: drip, drip, drip through the creaking attic floorboards, staining the Persian rug in the room below. There has been a horrible murder.
Mad Jack the Hatchet Man lurks in the misty red woodshed with his gleaming cleaver. Your name mumbles across his quivering lips. His grip tightens on the evil weapon as he silently lifts the latch and begins to ...
... No. No wait! What's happening? This is all worng. The Thomas Kinkade in your mind is having one of its funny turns. Too much turkey dinner. I'm terribly sorry. This happens from time to time .... Move along please. Nothing to see here. Move along please. Nothing to see here ... yes, madam, it's just a Thomas Kinkade gone bad. I'm sure you'll read all about it in the tomorrow's newspaper. Move along please. Nothing to see here. Just a Thomas Kinkade gone bad. Move along please ... Happy Holidays.

The Ostrogoth and His Discontents

A gusty and blustery wind this afternoon, as if the North Wind was making an extra special effort to extinguish all the candles on his birthday cake with an almighty exhalation, for without doubt such prevailing conditions could only have been Nature's birthday gift for some celebratory Wind or other. It was cold too, heralding the arrival of winter's bitter chill. Strolling along the river, taking my shivering life into my frozen hands, I somehow managed to create enough circulation in my fingers to snap this picture of the first icicles I have seen since last March; pellucid mini-stalactites glaciated in the act of dripping from a brittle entanglement of tree banches half submerged by surging, rolling, relentless waves.

Politics As Usual At The New Criterion

Frankly I couldn't give a third-rate reproduction of a tattered Andy Warhol silkscreen of fossilized prehistoric zebra crap about the Whitney or Maureen O'Dowd or Iraq or all that other nonsense we can read about elsewhere.
What I want to know about is Charles Ephraim Burchfield at the DC Moore Gallery

Lull in Summer Rain, 1916
by Charles Ephraim Burchfield

The Daddlands

The new picture illustrating the masthead of this weblog is "Portrait of a Young Man" by Richard Dadd, a nineteenth-century manic-depressive, probably bipolar painter of mostly mythopoetic scenes who murdered his father in 1843 and was subsequently confined to the world's most famous lunatic asylum. It was chosen as representative of "Stephenesque" because of that crumpled fez sadly discarded on the strangely organic pre-art-nouveau bench across which the young man sprawls his disaffected self, and because Dadd must have painted the background scenery from memory alone since, except for the grim exercise yard, residents of Bedlam were permitted zero access to the outside world. Make of that what you will.
Dadd himself wrote: "On my return from travel, I was roused to a consideration of subjects which I had previously never dreamed of, or thought about, connected with self; and I had such ideas that, had I spoken of them openly, I must, if answered in the world's fashion, have been told I was unreasonable. I concealed, of course, these secret admonitions. I knew not whence they came, although I could not question their propriety, nor could I separate myself from what appeared my fate."
The identity of the subject of 'Portrait of a Young Man' remains unknown.