American Fez

The Meisterbelchers of Nürnberg

Part One: How We Live Now

Someone screamed “verdammte scheiße” into the Nürnberg night. It was like a verbal knife slashing through the formerly peaceful evening air, but the baboon and I simply resumed our fireside contemplation of Hölderin’s Der Tod Des Empedokles with unruffled composure and concentration.
Well, to be honest, the baboon was more or less just ripping the pages out of his book and then stuffing them into his cavernous, hairy maw rather than actually reading them, but it could still be said that we were both equanimous and sophisticated, despite such an obviously unorthodox approach to Hölderin studies.
“Perhaps, Robert,” I whispered, “You might not chew with your mouth open?”
Yet so rapt with his printed repast was the baboon that he gave no indication of hearing my suggestion. I tried another tack, “How are you enjoying your Hölderin, Robert?”
Suddenly an overwhelming stench, reminiscent of a large zoo after feeding time, filled the reading room as the baboon crouched contentedly upon his armchair, slowly and satisfyingly evacuating his bowels.
"Yes." I agreed. "It is stodgy stuff indeed. Perhaps tomorrow we will consult the works of Thomas Mann instead. Meanwhile, we shall enjoy a little nacht muzik, eh, while I prepare for blissful slumber and before you must return to your well-appointed cage."
Selecting an appropriate recording, Beethoven's Schnitzel Scherzo in F Sharp, from the stack of gleaming phonographs beside my spitoon, I offered it to the baboon for his inspection and approval, but he immediately smashed the treasured disc over his head and threw the shattered fragments at me.
"Then you would prefer Mozart?" I asked. "Or Schubert, even?"
Such civilized choices are but one consolation of a liberal education.

Beer Gogols

I am writing a very Russian ghost story about a young man who falls victim to the enchantments of two witches. The witch named Morwenna is beautiful, slender and ethereal. The second witch, Grimelda, is a horrible fat hag. They have a sort of Good Cop/Bad Cop thing going on, except in their case it's obviously more of a Sexy Witch/Ugly Witch thing. Anyway, one night Morwenna appears at the young man's bedside, letting her black silken robes slip from her lustrous, naked body as she approaches. His lips quiver with anticipation. But sexy Morwenna suddenly turns into ugly Grimelda, who transforms the young man into a toad and rubs him all over her warty tits for half an hour. It's very autobiographical.

Z Box

The only computer game I play is Blogstation. The object is to accumulate as many readers as possible before you bore everyone to death with interminable posts about the Microsocrates who pontificates in the agora of your own umbilicus. I'm up to level fourteen on that.
I don't think there really is much difference between me, slouched in front of my computer typing nonsense, and some bald-scrotummed manchild in a Green Day t-shirt and skate shoes battering his X Box for hours on end each day. We are both staying out of trouble: I won't waste time writing my unpublishable book, Quetzalcoatl in Cornwall, and he won't steal studded leather wristbands from the local punk rock megastore, and the world can breathe a sigh of relief because of it.
Mind you, if anyone has any information about Quetzacoatl in Cornwall (or the Devon area), I would be very grateful if they would contact me. I'm desperate.  Dale Williams once saw a small grass snake and some feathers in the same field near St Ives about eight years ago, but that's all I've go to work with so far.
(No boring Merlin rubbish, please, and no D. H Lawrence versus Peter Warlock, either. Thanks)   

Haagen Daz: Haagen Doesn't

"Perhaps, hidden 'neath a canopy of souvenir magnets and kid's paintings somewhere, forgotten in an dusty, unexplored crevice of an ancient and unexcavated kitchen, stand the rusting ruins of a pre-Gourmet era refrigerator, whose hieroglyphically decorated freezer box conceals a tub of pure ice cream; ice cream that is not some faux new-fangled flavor, and ice cream that does not have the shrapnel from a candy factory explosion embedded in it. If only I could discover it," explained Professor Skoop, leader of our expedition, "The lost tub of the plain Vanillas. Then my life's work would be complete, and I would be the envy of the Royal Society."

Claudius the Pod

I am experiencing a Jungian garage sale of synchronicity on the internet at the moment, mostly centered around H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Graves. I would provide links to all the sites that reference these two titans of literature, but then I am also experiencing an Oblomov's worth of laziness on the internet at the moment, and so I can't be bothered.
I wrote about my special relationship with Lovecraft last year in The Plastic Horrors, but I don't think I've ever scribbled much on the subject of the Welsh-Mallorcan bard.
We read his poems in school, of course: "This is a wild land, country of my choice/With harsh craggy mountain, moor ample and bare"; and we perused 'The Long Weekend' leisurely at weekends; and then I never returned 'Goodbye To All That' to Lichfield Public Library because I couldn't say goodbye to it. But it wasn't until I broke the spine of Andraste's copy of 'The White Goddess' that I began to fully appreciate the Gravesian gravitas in all its full grave glory.
I suppose that 'I, Claudius' and 'Claudius the God' are his most famous works, if only because of the absurdly over-praised television adaptation, starring the bizarrely orange-faced Derek Jacobi. Mind you, the fabulously gifted Sian Phillips manages to somehow make the whole sorry spectacle extremely watchable, wiping the floor with every portrayal of a Roman matron before and since. Indeed, she is the only actor in the series who doesn't swan around the cardboard scenery with "BBC Drama School" stamped on her forehead.
Oh dear. I seem to have wandered off the topic of Robert Graves' literary genius and written a panegyric of an older women instead. Never mind, I think the old goat himself would approve.

Do Androids Shag Electric Sheep?

Scientists -- at least that's what Ludovico and I are calling ourselves these days -- are predicting that bestiality will become more prevalent in the future. Since humanity will undoubtedly devolve into just a mindless herd of fat, grunting beasts by 2169, there will obviously be no other kind of sexual intercourse (rutting) available for mankind to engage in except bestiality.
By the turn of the next century, researchers estimate that all of Earth's livestock will have either been eaten, shot, suffocated, poisoned or infected with foot-and-mouth disease and destroyed; and so all our farm and woodland friends will be spared the revolting amorous attentions of twenty-second century "man" by virtue of their fortuitous extinction. Those weird, laboratory-raised white meat clone things, however, won't be so lucky.
It is thought that the suitor of the future will look like an Orc dressed in silver basketball kit and will attempt to attract a mate by increasing the amount of noise he makes when masticating the remains of as many white-meat clones as he can cram into his swollen, expressionless face at one sitting.

(Authors note: I have just returned from an excursion to a shopping mall. I had to run through the food court in order to escape)

See also:

And the winners are

A day in the life

If I were a lettuce

Ecclesiastes '08

The Lord moves in mysterious ways, and one of them is leaving humans in charge. Indeed, voting in an election is rather like choosing what type of Biblical plague you wish to suffer from; and even then the choice has been reduced from ten to two: lice or locusts, take your pick. My text today is drawn from the first book of Erewhon, chapter zero, verse none, wherein the citizen wonders what the point of the Federal Constitution was, since most of  his Presidential candidates somehow manage to degrade the reputation of even the worst frat house in the electoral college:
"Venality of venalities, saith the Political Pundit, venality of venalities; all is venality.
What profit hath a citizen of all his voting which he taketh under the sun?
One election campaign passeth away, and another election campaign cometh: but the government abideth for ever.
The fool also ariseth, and the fool goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
The hot air goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the hot air returneth again according to political circuits.
All the opinions run into the record; yet the record is not full: unto the place from whence the bad ideas come, thither they return again.
All things are full of lobbyists; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun except Mitt Romney's latest opinion on abortion.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is sense? it hath been already exposed as nonsense, which was before us.
There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after."

Nose Dive

I first saw this wonderful frame of Fletcher Hanks' comic book weirdness on Carter's Across Difficult Country blog. The obviously doomed but still admirably optimistic head may even have been the meteor that recently hit Peru, making numerous villagers rather unwell. Perhaps our plummeting, mercy-seeking head was suffering with a sinus cold?

There is more of Hanks' remarkably primitive work online at the website for I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets

Follywood

I have recently discovered that most reality television shows are not actually edited, but are simply and cheaply stitched together by ragged, hunchbacked orphans who are forced to slave over the endless hours of footage in cramped, disease-ridden, sweat-shop video studios haphazardly constructed amidst the swamps and jungles of the Far East.
One poor, starving and abused child I spoke with, Tekke, a sound engineer for hit show 'The Congressman,' told me that he often has to work twenty hours per day re-recording the audio from senatorial debates which is otherwise completely incomprehensible. He is given just half a bowl of filthy yellow rice and an Emmy nomination for his Herculean efforts.
From Shirley Temple to Tekke, unregulated Follywood child labor law transgressions have reaped a "harvest of shame" that makes Victorian London seem like a chimney-sweepers paradise by comparison. Surely it is time we put an end to the iniquitous production of reality television once and for all (although I have a good idea for a show about bloggers that would be amazing - so if anyone from the networks is reading this: get it touch!)

Raising Awareness About Awareness Raising Campaigns

Are you aware that your awareness of certain "issues" is being relentlessly raised by self-righteous cabals of self-interested, good-for-nothing do-gooders? Vast experience of these insidious awareness raising schemes has taught me that as soon as my awareness of a certain issue has been raised I always wish it were immediately lowered again. Alas, this is impossible since self-perpetuating propaganda for the issue becomes so all pervasive that my poor, bruised awareness can find no respite from its overpowering effluence.
"Raising awareness" actually means "raising money," especially when the phrase is uttered by some hempen-clad student in a woolly hat, and the money is raised by selling tickets to the formerly unaware for a chance to witness three or four dire rock bands bullying their amplifiers into submission. But if you are lucky the awareness raiser will merely slap a bumper sticker into your hand in exchange for your donation. Frankly, I am surprised that the awareness raising campaigners don't sell bronze, silver and gold levels of awareness like proper charities do. Then you could drive around town displaying your new found degree of awareness to the more ignorant traffic behind you: "I break for people who have achieved gold standard awareness of the humanitarian disaster in Darfur."
What fond memories I retain of someone simply standing on a street corner rattling a can of change in my face:
"Money for Darfur?
"Sure. Here you go."
"Thanks. Have a nice day.
"Yep. You too."
You just can't beat the old-fashioned, bumper-stickerless, anonymous, non-condescending ways.

Hearing Secret Rock Operas

During those somewhat unstructured summer afternoons of my early adolescence, when idle pastimes replaced the more rigorous demands of ink-stained schoolwork, I would always allocate several balmy hours each day to perfecting the art of that popular tavern diversion known as pinball; a reflexive if sedentary sport in which shiny ball-bearings are propelled across a table-top assault course by means of a spring-loaded firing system, consequently ricocheting back and forth between a series of illuminated levers and buffers until the inevitable termination of its noisy parabola in the bowels of the machine. From the greasy, Maltese cafeterias of Soho's Old Compton Street where Keith Moon and I had once shared an especially grim bowl of oxtail soup, to the dreary, out-of-season inns that pockmark the seaside promenade at Brighton, briefly the haunt of Townshend and others of his kind, I must have devoted many, many happy hours applying whatever expertise I had attained to the prosecution of a successful pinball session in every establishment that contains the necessary equipment, but in none of these disparate arenas of dissolute activity had I ever witnessed such an astounding display of superior pinballmanship as that performed by a curiously disadvantaged curly-haired youth called Thomas something-or-other, who was not only incapable of processing aural information, but was also a stranger to the wonders of spoken communication and visual perception.
Indeed, if one may compare him to Cheveneaux's marble study of the great stoic Zeno, then ... (oh I've had enough of this claptrap already)

Science Project

I've been cultivating "cultures" in those decorative petri dishes Professor Gleedle bought for my birthday. I took one blob of imported marmalade and placed it in Alpha Dish. Then I filled Beta Dish with a blob of a cheaper, domestic marmalade. Finally, Gamma Dish contained a blob of marmalade that my elderly neighbor Mrs Herbert made, and that is acting as the "control" blob. The cultures were then treated as follows.
Alpha Dish was attached to electrodes which were in turn connected to an iPod that was playing a loop of Edward Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius."
Beta Dish was sonically drip fed with an especially lengthy live version of Hawkwind's "Space Is Deep."
Gamma Dish was awoken at noon every day with a recording of a nurse saying "it's time for your bath Mrs Herbert."
After six weeks the blob of marmalade culture in Alpha Dish had become covered with a tweed-like substance and somehow acquired a brace of pheasant; the blob of marmalade culture in Beta Dish smelled bad and was levitating a full six inches off the bottom of the petri dish; and the blob of marmalade culture in Gamma Dish had gone for a walk but forgotten where it lived.
The team at BioSystems Laboratories have so far been unable to duplicate my results, but this is only because they haven't returned my phone calls yet.

A Dance to the Music of Bob Dylan

One often wonders, as one trawls one's eating implement through one's morning bowl of lukewarm porridge, scraping the last lumpy clumps of oaten repast from the depths of the ceramic vessel before one, exactly how many endless thoroughfares one - or indeed anyone - must perambulate in a linear manner before we can ascertain with any degree of certitude that one (or whomsoever else may also be navigating the same route) may unequivocally be defined as a member of the male gender?
Furthermore, a particularly curvaceous and poetic question mark hovers over the total sum of saltwater expanses that a chalkily feathered bird of the genus Columba Livia will be forced to traverse prior to falling into troubled slumbers amid the dunes of a distant and not especially Elysian shore.
It was Zimmerman who mentioned that the much sought after solution to these thorny problems was probably being buffeted about in the breeze, as if it had been exhaled by one of those generously cheeked graybeards who often graced the perimeters of seventeenth century maps.
Outside, a slow but steady drizzle was beginning to fall from the sky.

See also:

The Long-Winded Bluesman

The Verbose Backing Vocalist

City Vignette

The bum came shambling out from the kerbside shadows, then just stood there wavering, uncertain in his own lankiness and ill-fitting rags, like a clown on stilts waiting for someone to throw a bucket of water over him.
"Change?" he pleaded, holding his cupped hands out as if expecting a cascade of shiny coins to suddenly fall from the clouds.
I gave him whatever was stuck in my pockets, forty-five cents or so, or possibly twenty-seven, it was hard to tell in the dark. Perhaps he could save up and buy a burger in a few weeks time.
"What are you going to do?" I asked him "In several years time, when it's all debit cards and plastic transactions and nobody carries any actual cash anymore? There won't be any spare change then."
"Yeah" he said, still swaying, not really listening, already eagerly scanning the road ahead for other incoming Samaritans. "Yeah, ha, ha."
Later I ran into Dale Williams, who told me of his encounter with Princess Anne in Sandwell, and afterwards we spoke of the Ghost of West Midlands Past: "It was Henry Tilney." he said "All along."

Fan Fiction

There is very little difference between the popular fantasy worlds of Tolkein and Evelyn Waugh: Middle Earth has its Gandalf and Brideshead has its Nanny; there is the questing Frodo Baggins in one story and the social climbing Charles Ryder in the other; and the both have lots of fairies in them.
So I am surprised that there is no Brideshead Revisited board game that tweedy pipe-smokers (in all senses of the term) can play. A version of Dungeons and Dragons called Drawing Rooms and Oxford Dons. After all, Evelyn Waugh's creaky novel inspires the same sort of zealous devotion that The Lord of the Rings does. Readers love to pretend that they are like the characters in it; adopting their pithily mincing modes of speech, holding philistine opinions about modern art, eating plover eggs, drinking Brandy Alexanders and practicing a peculiarly hand-wringing brand of Catholicism. Brideshead Revisited is not a novel anymore, it has become a way of life. There has already been a famous televisual adaptation, so why no board game also? And why no action figures? Why no Boy Mulcaster lunch box? Someone is missing out on a very good commercial opportunity here. Why the dark, satanic gaming mills confine themselves to sci-fi fantasy grist is beyond me.

For a serious discussion about "worldbuilding" see here

RIP

I have been invited to stage my atonal Scottish opera Loch Nessun Dorma at a memorial service for the late tenor Luciano Pavarotti.
Scored for bagpipe orchestra and tin whistle, the opera is loosely based on Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' and concerns the wizard Preposteroso who has been exiled to an enormous piece of shortbread floating in the loch. The libretto contains the following magical musical exchange in the key of  G Flat:
MacFerdinand: Is this shortbread?
Sickovit: No, it's the normal size.

Main Characters:
Preposterouso, a wizard - Baritone
Hormona, his daughter - Soprano
Gin, a spirit of the island - Slurrissimo
Cannibelle, a transvestite of the island - Basso Falsetto
Iago, in the wrong opera - Silencio
Fattobutta, the King of Bastardy - Basso Obnoxious
Prince Nez, his son - Tenor Reefa
Dale Williams - Wind machine

Bad Herr Day

For many years now, and not many people know this, I have been a secret knee-cymbal virtuoso.
Alas, since I never get any solo recitals, and have absolutely zero interest in being a cog in an Oompah band wheel, it is unlikely you will ever see me play.
This is a great shame because I have adopted a more modern approach to knee-cymbal performance than most, and do not wear traditional lederhosen and silly Alpine cap with a feather in it. No. Instead I prefer to bound on to the stage shirtless, wearing nothing but sleek leather trousers and jackboots, and reciting the poetry of Goethe through an industrial megaphone while slamming my knees together to create dense rhythmic patterns. But I have made recordings, naturally.
My latest CD sold twelve copies in Hamburg, six in Berlin, nine in Dresden, and five thousand in Wisconsin. And my professional dream? Yes. My professional dream is to learn to play the guitar like any normal person.
But unfortunately I find myself a musical prisoner in my own percussive Black Forest Gateau that has been left out in the rain, just like that other famous cake of song.

Indices

In these exhausting days of toil and strife, when our very lives are ruled by those brutally implacable tyrants Juan Thing and A.N.Other, I often think it a great pity that novelists never include an index at the back of their books. This simple addition would make re-reading favorite passages from their fictional worlds much less time consuming. For instance, in the back of Kafka's great entomological story 'Metamorphosis' you would be able to easily locate the following popular reference:
Samsa, Gregor: turns into gigantic insect 1-2, 7, 10; sister's reaction to transformation 2, 4-159; etc.

And in Lampedusa's 'The Leopard' we could find this highly readable entry in a heartbeat:
Amphitrite, fountain of:  12, 15, 42, 118-120

Or in the great Norse sagas, swiftly access this awesome index notation:
Slaughtered heroes on battlefield, ravens feeding on flesh of:  1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,20,22, ad infinitum.

Ghost Hunter F

I was going to print the photograph of a hideous ghost I took this past weekend at The Old Rectory, but unfortunately it didn't come out (meaning the photograph didn't come out, not the ghost; that came out from behind an ancient tombstone engraved with a buck-toothed skull wearing this really weird winged headset type thing). Anyway, the terrifying apparition appeared in the form of a monstrous fiery eyeball looming towards me in the darkness. Unfortunately my wife Hilda had forgotten to disengage the "red eye reduction" feature on our camera, which apparently works really, really well. And so, to cut a long ghost story short, you obviously can't see anything in the picture.
We had the same experience last year when I tried to photograph my spine-chilling encounter with the Headless Horseman. If these camera manufacturers are going to equip their products with a worthless "Face Finder"function, then I wish they'd also provide the consumer with detailed instructions on how to turn the bloody thing off. There we were, cowering beneath the hooves of the Headless Horseman's demonic steed, and all I've got to show for it is a close-up shot straight up Hilda's nostrils. Damn this new-fangled technology.

Science Saturday

If there are such organic compounds as pro-teins, then why are there not anti-teins also, that perform an opposite function? I thought all our molecules were supposed to operate, you know, in "balance" and everything. Come to think of it, why are there no neutral-teins as well? If I'm going to have digestive juices I would like them to be fresh-squeezed rather than processed. Come on you biologists, sort it out!