While I very much hope that my series on north Indian raga will encourage you to absorb the melodic and rhythmic intricacies of all the individual items, I’ve reached a point where a certain levity is called for.
Scholars have recently questioned the authenticity of a ragamala painting depicting an obese balding accountant in a pink sombrero, bedecked in opulent wombat furs and clutching a gaily-coloured [can of] Kingfisher, his sumptuous belvedere adorned with a garden gnome.
Questionably, Bhatkande classified rāg Vindaloo under Paneer thaat. It had already appeared by the 18th century in the bold attempt of picaresque, nay swashbuckling, adventurer and arms-dealer Lord Auberon Cholmondeley-Smythe to codify the repertoire, notwithstanding his comment in the Prefatory Observations that “it all sounds the same to me, this Indian music”.
In dhrupad renditions the nomtom syllables tiddley-pom and poppadom are prominent. As to arohana and avarohana patterns, whereas in ascent flat and natural re, ga, dha, and ni, natural and sharp ma may be sounded interminably and apparently at random, in descent all notes are avoided entirely. In the gat, a common phrase—alluding to rāg Madhuvanti, * and later adopted by Henry Mancini—is
Sa, Re ga, Ni Sa Re ga dha Pa, Sa ga Pa Ma,
with a descending anuraṇana “resonance” on the cadential note.
In lengthy alap expositions, the phrase Ni dha pi serves as a cue. The tempo picks up upon the entry of the pakhavaj drum; the rhythmic cycle prescribed in early sources is chapati tāl with 792 mātras. But even in the more leisurely conditions of bygone courtly performance, no-one ever managed to get through even one whole cycle; so more often used in modern times is the challenging dintāl consisting of only one beat, subdivided 2 3 3 4 2 3, the first beat of the 3s marked with a cheery wave of the hand—a subtlety only revealed since the advent of slow-motion technology.
As a legacy from the days of the Raj, the raga is sometimes played in jugalbandi duet with swanee whistle and kazoo, hastening the audience’s departure.
* In a vain attempt to redeem myself, for the sake of including some genuinely wondrous dhrupad in this post, here’s Zia Mohiuddin Dagar playing rāg Madhuvanti on rudra vina:
On Nicolas Magriel’s amazing sarangi site (click here and here), his page on Abdul Latif Khan features a rendition of rāg Surti Vardani, whose madhya lay bandish he finds “somewhat reminiscent of the Pink Panther theme”.
as is this fine story about Esa-Pekka Salonen’s interview for the LA Phil, exposing a mindset that is still common in both WAM and Daoist ritual studies:
Here are links to our initial selection from the magnificent anagram tales by Nicolas Robertson. They group neatly in three trilogies—first, Mozart operas:
The visions emerging here make up a kind of Esperanto fiction—it’s most rewarding to follow the gnomic texts with the aid of the explanatory stories. Here’s a general introduction by Nick himself:
The anagram stories Stephen Jones has been resolutely issuing arose from a specific combination of circumstances. First, amongst professional classical music singers, the 80s and 90s were a high point for tours, residencies, and CD recordings, all of which furnished extended periods of having to sit patiently around—time used in various ways, crosswords, knitting, books and magazines; there were not yet smartphones or iPads, had they already existed it’s unlikely that these texts would ever have developed.
But in 1984 I had been introduced to the work of Georges Perec and the Oulipo, which added to my early enthusiasm for Mots d’heures: gousses, rames and an appreciation of word games of various sorts (though I never enjoyed or was much good at Scrabble, oddly: I think it was the element of competition which spoiled it). Such games had a much more serious aspect for me (as indeed, to a hugely greater extent, they did for Perec), through their function of creating “potential literature”—Oulipo is “Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle”, freeing up through constraints. Having always been keen on writing, I nevertheless had found myself unable, every time I tried, to write imaginative fictional narrative; what began as a collaborative pastime (many anagrams, and certainly the best ones, were deduced by colleagues, once I’d proposed a source text or name) gradually morphed into a generator of unlikely yet rigorously underpinned stories.
As to the process, during recording sessions etc. I collected from volunteers and compiled my own anagrams, which I then joined up in whatever form of narrative appeared possible, permitting myself any old punctuation but always (the few exceptions are noted in the text) sticking rigorously to the sequence of repeated anagram matrices, with the same x letters repeated each time, never overlapping nor transposing—no cheating for effect (however tempting). At first that was as far as I thought of going, but it soon appeared that there was another level of interpretation waiting to be exploited, the “potential literature”, and I spent some months, or even years (in the case of Lili Boulanger and Johann Sebastian Bach) extrapolating the story I felt the anagrams were perhaps telling.
In addition to the nine Steve has published, there are six more which survive—several were wholly or partly lost during the course of time and specifically in a fire in our house in Portugal which destroyed most of my papers (and books) in 2009: the survivals are in great part due to Steve himself, and Charles Pott, a notable contributor, who had kept copies, backed up by a handful I’d managed to consign to the internet (most of the stories also predate the days of web-based email).
These other pieces are:
Israel in Egypt (anagrams only, stitched together but without parallel text, 1989)
Die Entfuhrung (sic—no umlaut, nor the missing ‘e’ it would represent) / Aus dem Serail (introduction + anagrams only, 1991)
Salzburg (introduction + anagrams of Beethoven’s Leonore/Beethoven’s Fidelio + story, 1996—probably the most substantial piece of the whole run)
Alceste (raw anagram list + anagrams + story, 1999)
Merano (intro + raw anagram list + anagrams + story + epilogue, 2000)
Oslo (raw anagram list + anagrams + sort of story + epilogue/more story, 2000).
These last two were envisaged as being integral parts of my reactions to the celebrations at the time of the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, and the many concerts in which I took part during that year. The last anagram piece I wrote of this sort (there’s since been an acrostic anagram sonnet for Fernando Pessoa) was indeed Johann Sebastian Bach, compiled between 2000 and 2021. There’s a hope that the complete set may eventually interest a publisher…
I still can’t write (and don’t believe I have written) fiction. I was just following where the letters led me.
Nicolas Robertson, August 2021.
* * *
[SJ:] With my penchant for zany indexing (see here, and here), I can’t resist compiling a selective general index of some of the more striking people, places, and themes that adorn the plots so far (just the anagrams, not the extrapolations!), and allowing characters to mingle freely after being trapped within the bonds of the individual stories that generated them. In the absence of page references, you can have fun working out which tales the entries belong to.
196.
197.
198.
199.
Alas, Nick died in 2023: click here for my tribute.
After a whole day of fruitless wrangling with the well-meaning wizz-kids of Mac, I find myself at the mercy of forces against which I am ever more helpless.
Will my updated version of Safari work if I upgrade to OS 14.1.1? Sure, if you upgrade to OS 14.1 first.
Great! Can I do that? No.
So I’m completely fucked? Indeed you are, sir. Have a nice day.
Medieval helpline (excuse my abject failure to reproduce the language faithfully, but you get the gyste):
Estymed Syre! Thyne present Qyll ys incompatyble with ye Vellum thou art usyng. Thyne veyn attempt to use “fowntayne penne” founder on ye fact that it will not invented be for many centuriys. Nor wyll any fantasticalle Appe rescue ye from languyshing in Purgatory. Fare thee well.
Cc Dante, Chaucer
Sure enough, this has already become something of a meme:
For a general introduction to the series, see here.
Prelude—SJ The grand finale of this third trio of anagram tales, this wonderful fantasy is much informed by Nick’s own research on Bach, with plentiful allusions to the 2000 Bach Cantata Pilgrimage among his typically diverse cast.
* * *
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Series of concerts and recordings December 1999 –January 2001, 250th anniversary celebration of Bach through his church cantatas, performed each on the liturgical calendar day for which they were written, in places as closely as feasible linked with the original performances; or with the composer himself; or with places dear to or chosen by the director of the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, John Eliot Gardiner. English Baroque Soloists, Monteverdi Choir, multiple vocal and instrumental soloists.
J.S. Bach Denkmal, Arnstadt.
Impossible to encapsulate JSB in an anagram, and I didn’t think of doing so, I reckon, until some time into 2000. The letters were not inviting, as well as too many to control; but on one long bus journey Stephen Varcoe came up with the gem included below, and I understood I had to have a reciprocal try.
Compiling the anagrams took the whole of that year, on and off; the parallel story has taken a bit longer. A substantial part was in place by 2003, John Eliot Gardiner’s 60th birthday, when I submitted an early version of the finale. But the ‘story’ hadn’t been committed to any imperishable medium, and was lost in our 2009 fire. (The anagrams, such as they were, haphazardly survived in a disc I made when leaving the computer on which I’d typed them in London, in 2007, and miraculously had the nous to send to myself by e-mail before the fatal day).
The commentary, though substantially already imagined, has necessarily had to be re-derived, sometimes from scratch, over the subsequent two decades. It follows what I can remember of the original apprehensions, from the anagram matrix, and carrying on…
146 anagrams, in strict rotation. Here goes my 19-letter Passacaglia, followed by a Fantasia on the same ground:
JSB: “Ché ? No shit, Anna !” “Baa”—Anna hatch babies on J.S. JSB: “Ach, isn’t Anna boa!” (he is absent.) Johann, a Bach: “An Eis’nach Abba!” St John = SANCTI JOHANNES
Bach: “St John as Bean, in a thin assonance.” “ABBAH?” J: “Ach, ja, hab Noten in Baß.” [1] Josh Abba, ancient ash’n Eis’nach nabob. Jan: “Hast BA?” “Has insane chant job”—Anna Bach. “Has-be’n? JS? Toi??” Bach (in jeans—bathos): “An anabasis, JC ohne NT. Bah, bah, an incessant job.” “Ah, JSB canonist? Bane…” “Ha ha,” J.S. Bach hones Anna bait, “chess, Anna B.?” “Jah, bon, ta, I…” J.S. Bach, Anna—Tao.
H. IBSEN “Hans O. Jahn St., cabbie!” “Na. Hans? – ja, a bench bastion, cannabis hash-bean, jot NASA cash. Joint, B. Behan?” Behan: “Ban scat jois? Nah! ‘Cats’ jois ebb, Hahn ‘Nana’ hath a nonsensic jabba, an incessant Noh jabba. The job’s ‘Banish Canaan Banana’! – Shona jest…” (hic) “B-banana jibes,” chants. “ ‘Oh, I eat bananas’ – John B’ch’s banjo shanties.” “Na – Bach? J. Bach an’ sons bathe in a Bosnian casbah.” Janet: “A-Anne?” “I shan’t casbah job, shabbiest Canaan john.” Can job astonish Behan? “Joint, Abbess Hannah?” Can Hannah? Abbot: “Jessica? O henna nacht, Jass babi!” Abbess Hanna chant “Joi!” Abbess’ hijo chant “Na-na!” Abbot: “Jinn Cessna, ha ha! Jess, Hannah, botanic BA – ” Johann: “Athens BA basic.”
* * *
BAs? Joanna Hitchens, BA.
* * *
John B.: “The CIA’s bananas!” Bananas—a Hitchens job (John as a cabinet has-b’n). Jessica O’Bannan hath Bishan B., Shane, Jan Cabot—bah, Jan Cabot, ‘sanshine’… “Jinnah nab seacoast, H.B.” “Jinnah?” “Eton, BA –” “– cash BAs. NB neo-Janata bacshish.” “Non-Janata shish-cebab Jahan’s sahib NT beacon – ‘bacon bhaji, nan’ – the ass!” “Netaji Bose, ANC ban, hah!” “Sai Baba, natch, Jens, hon (hasten bhaji, son – an’ cab) – he Johnian (Cantab) bass!” A.Besant: “Bach’s Johnian?”
A BATH ABC Nash, In. Jones (Ian ‘Sabbath’ Jones, nach.) Jones? a Bath cabin. Nash? Bath ascension, jah. Nab cabin Jonathan bashes. A casino? nah, Jebb hasn’t. J. (sob): “The china bananas!” Icon: Saab; Shah; Taj. Benn, Hanoi bachante, S.J., bans Jinnah, Botha (“an abcess”—abcess, Johanna? in Bath??). Basic ash’n be Jonathan: “I scan ‘H’ sonnet – ABBA, jah? ‘Ban’e’snatch, Jab’ !” “No Shia!” “Beat B.S. Johns’n! Aa… chain Satan, can banish Hob.” J.E.: “Ancient bash: Jason. Bah! Johanna’s B’nai B’ith case, Canaan Josh’a, ten shibb–” “Jah. Sheba, BC—an onanist!” “Ba’ath ’n Hossein ABC, Jan?” “Jes. Ch. ahanatos ibn ban Jocanan Bathsheba sin. Bashan benison, jah. Act chasten Jonah.” “NASA bib?” “Ten-inca hash, baas…” “Bon, J. – Habas [beans], join, catch, Jain ass, a bohnen batch” “Baba-ja?” “Ten-shi chanson?” “Chthonian Jaen’s Abbas enchants Habana (obs.). Anna (ij.), bin Jacob’s sheath. Bacon a Jansenist? Ahab?”
* * *
Joanna: “Stein ABC: A B Shh…”
* * *
Johnnie bans a cat-bash: “Nab Jonti, ha!” Bash a scena: Jonti, Hanse scab-ban. “Ah, Hansi C’onje bats—nab! Ha!!” Bet on Hansi C.: Sha’ja’ ban. Abbas – Sha’jah – innocent. Hans—a jab, both canines.” [2]
J.S. Bach has inane baton, J.S. Bach nabs henna iota!
“Abbot – Jenni – a Hans Sachs, an Aachen hobbit’s…” Jan: “Noh ! Banshei! a JSB cantata beano!” Nin has J.S. Bach in sash, Ecbatana john. B-Beth, John: “Anabasis? Can John B., a Sachsen Ta’iban, ban Nash Hanseatic job?” “Bach Iona’s best, Jan.” “Nah” – Jan. “Bach? Iona? SHAN’T!” EBS nab Bach, astonish Jane, bin John’s Sabata ache. N.J.: “I, the Hon. N., ban ACAS, as ban a snobbish Janet, ach.” Ban cane? John abstains: can’t bash a shinbone, ja. “Josh has a BBC antenna—I ban he in sonata.”
* * *
J.S. Bach: “Bassinet, banjo, ha ha, c’n-can sahib…” “The banjo’s an – a ! – Johann Schein sabbat…” Johann Sebastian: “Ah!…”
“Bless you!” – Johann has sneezed, perhaps. “Thanks. Makes me think that ‘praise’ is the root of it, yes.”
A musicologist writes: “I like Bach’s praise music best when it lines up with a non-violent pre-Christian ethical world-view.” “Practitioners of which used to be harried, a bit less now, I hope. But couldn’t we extend ‘Osanna’ –” “Excuse me, there’s an H in Hebrew: it’s Hosanna.” There’s no agreement, curse it; discussion of praise music founders.
* * *
“What? is that really so, Anna?” Sebastian exclaims. Anna, a bit sheepishly, has told Johann she’s pregnant. “Wow, what a girl!” Sebastian cries – and exits to take evensong. His cousin, another Johann, who’s with them today (the Bachs come and go between each other familiarly), reassures Anna, “He’s like the boss in the old Eisenach days!” Sebastian nips back in, looking for a rebus he’s made for the St John. “I like this small shift in harmony, could provide a laugh.” “But where do you get that B natural from?” Johann pleads. “Oh, it’s ok, just listen to the bass line”—Sebastian likes to tease the older Eisenach generation. Jan, whose connection is unclear but who’s obviously entitled to be there and equally obviously allies with the conservative faction, asks “Do you really have the qualifications to risk this?” Anna cuts this off with a cheery “A mad Cantor job, that’s what he has. But Sebastian’s not finished yet, ARE YOU?” Bach, who’s taken off his top to put on his cassock—looking touchingly informal, in his jute trousers—responds seriously, “Look, I’ve been making my way up, as if I were Christ without yet the New Testament. But, oh god, there does seem to be no end to the work that has to be done…” “Right, but you spend your time making fugues! Sod that…” Sebastian laughs, he’s above this, and turns to Anna, with an offer he knows she finds it hard to resist, “How about a game of chess before the service?” Anna’s all confused, thinking she’d been left out of the conversation, “Well, if you think there’s time – yes – thanks – ok –” Johann’s happy to know the two are on the same wavelength.
* * *
“I knew Herr Jahn,” the taxi driver confided, “he was a stalwart of the judiciary, but wasn’t averse to a joint or two, or a subsidy from the space programme. Speaking of which, can I tempt you, Herr Behan?” “As long as you don’t go on about free jazz. I’ve had enough of Lloyd Webber, fin-de-siècle musicals don’t make sense to me, any more than japonaiserie. Scare off African potentates, that’s what I’m here for.” Noting a coolish reception from the driver, Behan temporises, “that’s a joke I heard in South Africa…” but he couldn’t resist breaking into song, ‘Yes, we have no bananas’… He’s delivered safely to the British Council, where the staff ask if he’ll be referring to Bach, whose year it is. “You what? As far as I’m concerned, let the whole Bach family go and enjoy themselves in a Yugoslav thermal brothel.” Janet, an intern, asks “Oh, do you think Mrs Bach would go along with that? I wouldn’t accept it, sounds like dodgy Middle Eastern sanitation.” But Behan is imperturbable, and he spots a nun he recognises: “Join me in a joint, Hannah? Abbess and all?” An abbot across the room has heard this, and calls over with words echoing Lorenzo’s in The Merchant of Venice, “Go for it, lass!” (no one had ever heard the Abbess’s real first name before, Jessica) – “How sweetly sleeps…” Hannah/Jessica, liberated, cries “Bliss!”, and her ‘son’ (presumably an acolyte monk) echoes. The abbot, after veering inexplicably into Indian subcontinental politics (or can that be where he met Jessica, now Hannah, abbess?), launches “Do you remember that devilish monoplane, oh, how we laughed! Jess, ok Hannah, you’re the one who knew about plants, even got a degree for them!”
– across a few centuries, Johann in Leipzig wonders if Sebastian shouldn’t have got a qualification from the Greek academy, for a start
– but for the value of a university degree, I ask you to consider Joanna Hitchens (and I ask her indulgence).
* * *
Meanwhile, in Chichester, the cathedral organist, coolly sceptical, opines over sherry after Sunday Matins, “The US secret services have gone pear-shaped.” That’s what we would expect from the Hitchens brothers, vying with each other for conspiracies. “Wouldn’t you have liked to be a politician?”, JB is asked. Well, yes, he’d had his chance. There are some quite outspoken guests, among them associates of the Dean who’d served in the army in SE Asia. I already overhead Jessica mentioning an Indian spin bowler, plus Alan Ladd, and the Boston founding fathers (oh the bright new dawn long promised, those slave traders who spoke only with god) – “I remember when I told Helena Blavatsky that Jinnah wasn’t going to be content without a sea port.” “But Jinnah was one of us!” “Yes, British education, qualifications…” “One could buy them. And look how that’s turned into nationalist Hindu free-loading.” “Thinking of the Hinduists, I just ordered a beef skewer takeaway, image of the Taj Mahal, that National Trust signpost, in mind. But do you know what the man said? ‘You want a pork fry-up, with onions and chapati?’—what a twit!” “This is like infighting between freedom fighters,” interposed Jens, an old Indochina hand. “Netaji Bose thought it more important to oppose British colonialism than worry about alliances with the Third Reich or Japan—hero to Indian nationalists, ‘a common traitor’ to your father. Not sure how South African Gandhi supporters saw him, though.” “And what about another charismatic guru, Jens, my dear” – I hadn’t met this couple before, but they’re clearly keen to get out of the Vicars’ Close and enjoy their takeaway on the coast, they’ve booked a taxi—though they can’t bear to leave an argument, only had to because the taxi arrived. But as they go, a tantalising throwaway: “You know JSB sang at St John’s Cambridge, as a bass?” Annie Besant hears this, and to her credit can hardly believe it is so.
* * *
What you need to know about Bath Talk of Bath, and you talk first of John Nash, and Inigo Jones. But did Jones build more than a garden shed? While Nash, he saw Bath going up in the world, oh yes. (Still, I wouldn’t mind that shed, Jonathan, since you seem not to think much of it.) Neither of them planned a gambling resort, nor did the Oxford philosopher.
How fragile the past is! I remember a reception in the British Council home on the Île St Louis in Paris, where I and a colleague, our gestures becoming expansive with hospitality, knocked a crystal ashtray off a mantelpiece, which shattered distressingly around our feet. Our hostess was impeccable, she had it cleared up in no time, and told us, “Please don’t worry, the person who gave it to us is dead now anyway.”
This makes me think of memorable images, and how they can fade. Saab – who remembers those stylish cars? The Shah of Iran? The Indian restaurant in York where I saw Victor Lewis- Smith once successfully pay with a library card? Tony Benn’s memoirs tell (or would if they hadn’t been redacted) of a Jesuit having a high old time in Saigon, ignoring both Indian and South African politicians, of whom one was a boil on the body politic—
I must have been muttering aloud to myself, for “A boil? did you hear that, Johanna? – and in Bath!” Jonathan went pale, at least to the level of his foundation make-up: “Let’s talk about Shakespeare. I’ve digitalised one of the love poems, it’s got that Keatsian rhyme-scheme, nicht war? like Lewis Carroll’s ‘Snark’ – ” “That’s a pretty fundamentalist interpretation.” “But avant-garde at the same time! Or eerie, like Quatermass, dig up and pin down the old evil!” John Eliot says this is an old set-to: “It’s all in the Golden Fleece.” “OK, but this is actual: Johanna’s tied up with the Israeli nationalists, a historic second-generation fighter, ten commandments set in st—” “—yes, but it didn’t start there. Long before, an exogamous queen, after her own pleasure…” “Jan, can you give us an up-to-date secular run-down on this?” “Ok, if you can keep up, it’s a bit convoluted. Jesus Christ, who is deathless, is the metaphorical son of John the Baptist and Solomon’s mother. This transgression is compensated for by the fecundity of the fat bulls each brought to the union, right? It’s fair to say though that the prophet Jonah felt personally humbled by this deal.” “Till he was spoon-fed by the Pentagon.” “Not to speak of limitless supplies of peyotl, big boss.” “Fine, Jen, but I’d like you to know there are other virtues in plants:
Fava, runner, haricot bean, Makes a donkey an Indian Queen”
“Yevtushenko? A witch’s spell?” “A song for active meditation?” “Look at it this way. A Pakistani bowler once thrilled Cuban observers in the earthy olive groves of Andalusia (in those days when Cubans played cricket, not baseball). Anna, now living under another name, deliberately neglected to insist Jacob put on the condom. These are accidents, perhaps determinant, of history. Does that make Bacon, who predicated binary computing machines, a predeterminist? Did it have to be this way? Did you have to carry to the end your existential antagonism with the white whale? Was the story only ever you/it/he/she?”
Joanna, looking on aghast, sympathises with Gertrude Stein’s abdication, after much struggle and play, in the face of so many letters.
* * *
The final set of borrowed (burrowed?) images includes a small, rather sad, cricket vignette—as is apparently inevitable, my medium seems to have a predictable set of stand-bys. This one can be quite precisely situated: it’s the time of the infamous match-fixing scandals involving the South African cricket set-up and specifically the captain, Hanse Cronje, a fine upstanding batsman who went dismally wrong. I think there was a tournament in Arabia at about this time where for once the authorities showed their teeth—who knows if they bit all those responsible?
But JSB himself was not immune to unruly behaviour (though I don’t have reason to think corruption as such was ever attributed—hot temper and intolerance perhaps, and a tendency to collar the Thomas-Kirche’s calligraphy ink allowance). Perhaps he didn’t take it so well, when a colleague heard a theme he was working on—curiously redolent of the ‘Dies Irae’—and wondered whether there was enough substance in it. (Another sketch adumbrates a clearly Beethovenian motif, which just shows one can never know what may give fruit later, and furthermore that minimalism goes hand-in-hand with polyphony).
* * *
Sebastian and Anna are playing games with making up cantata titles—they’re both a bit fired up by absinthe. [We too used to do this: I recall, from Stephen Varcoe and/or Richard Savage, Mein Stimme ist mit Scheiss bedeckt, and Ach Gott, du stehts auf meinen Fuß.]
“How about Weinen, klagen, sorgen, sagen?” “Brilliant! A bit over the top, but go for it!” There’s an apprentice with them, who can’t quite follow this, and wonders if they should keep off the anis. “Anna,” says Johann, “don’t you think that’ll put us on the best-seller lists, truly?” Nathan’s insulted by any suggestion of selling-out, and threatens who knows what sort of mayhem. Sebastian, calm, just says to Anna, “Don’t worry—he has this old idea of Indo-European hierarchy.” Though he then swore softly; but I won’t transcribe what he said, it sounded a bit crazy to me.
* * *
Somewhere, a little while before the Bach Pilgrimage, the office are discussing progress with the idea. They’ve got a highly placed cleric, a beloved singer, a small wizz-kid from Aix-la-Chapelle… Jan, who’s everywhere, says “Think of Japanese theatre! We’ll go down singing in glory! It’ll be a great Bach-fest!” Nin immediately imagines scenes with Sebastian dressed in exotic robes, in some sort of Persian latrine. Beth (I stammer as I address her, I’m so nervous, especially as John’s with her) questions the concept of ‘anabasis’, return to the source – “Do we think that Sebastian, who is by way of being a Thuringian fundamentalist, would accept a British makeover of a Baltic town?” We’re called back to the matter in hand. “I’m sure we should concentrate on Iona as a high point, Jan.” “Sorry, I personally won’t be doing Iona.” And so the English Baroque Soloists get the Iona gig, surprising Jane, and assuaging JEG’s problems with the recording. The Honourable representative intervenes to outlaw temporising views, ‘no industrial negotiation, and no smart-alecs either, phew’. Would she even rule out corporal punishment? JE keeps out of it, no knee-capping here. Most importantly, don’t let Radio 3 pirate this—I’ve spotted one of their mikes in the mix—watch out in the ‘Sancta Maria’!
* * *
“Do you know,” Sebastian murmured to Anna, “I can hear low clarinets, I can hear a strumming continuo instrument, wow, I can see the old masters dancing to our tune….” “That—guitar, is it?—can launch you and all your predecessors into a jamboree…” But JSB’s already hearing something else, is it birdsong, sounds from the future, from another country? “Ach, listen…”
CB
“Johann? Sebastian? Hansi? Are you there? Oh…”
CBB
Ernest Thompson Seton, Lives of the Hunted (1902).
Nicolas Robertson, 2000 –2021.
[1] Anagram by Stephen Varcoe. [2] Anagram by Charles Pott. [3] The penultimate bar, violins: AAAA. [4] Amongst the stranded letters in the final anagram, I’d already realised that ETS could mean Ernest Thompson Seton, a Canadian nature writer I’d loved when young; but I had no idea what the still unattributed letters (CB CBB) could do until I looked him up in the British Library.
For a general introduction to the series, see here.
Prelude—SJ In this tale (whose title “Gran visits York” is my all-time favourite anagram), yet another numinous cast includes Sir V. Kitson-Gray (Tory), Sir K.Y. Groins-Vat, and Kirsty Garvison—with gin (already a favoured lubricant in Don Giovanni) again playing a role in the arcane plot.
IGOR STRAVINSKY
Westminster Cathedral Choir and City of London Sinfonia, directed by James O’Donnell, Westminster Cathedral and St Jude-on-the-Hill, Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, June 1990. [Symphony of Psalms, Mass, Canticum Sacrum, Hyperion recording, issued 1991]
Roughly 118 anagrams, compiled at the time of the recording; followed by an explanatory text, written 30 years later, according to principles deduced during subsequent anagram exercises.
GRAN VISITS YORK Sir V. Kitson-Gray (Tory) asks virgin Ros, stray Viking , “Kiss raving Tory!” Sorry vista. King Gorky I riv’n – TASS. Sir K.Y. Groins-Vat—govt. rank, is Sir Y. (Tory)—asks Irving, Irving K. Tory-Ass, “Try Ivor King, SAS.”
“IRA KY is v. strong. Gorn—visit Krays!” “O, striving Krays. Krays’ sin v. grot—vs. snaky riot-rig.” “ ’s Krays givin’ rot. Syrian skirt, gov.” “Syria, King? OR TVS?” “Kristy Grinsova rigs Sky TV on air.” “Sky TV is on air!” “Grr… origin sky vat. Sky vision? RATS! Gr…” “Rory v. Stasi, King? Ran Gorky visits…” “Rory v. giant kiss. Vag ? Rory sinks it. Rory skits Gavin.” “Sir Gavin Torsky? Try visor, King, as virgins stray, ok?” Ros’ skin—gravity… Sorry Viking.
* * *
Sat, I vary stork-sign ink. Grass, tor, ivy: strong, ivy, a risk. Roving yaks stir; “V. strong yak, Iris!” I try saving orks; Gant risks ivory. “Ivory task,” grins ‘Tsar’ Roy, skiving, “or yaks?” Striving Vik’s gyrations risk gravity (Ron’s). “Sir, Roy, vast king, o risk gravy tins.” “Rio gravy stinks.” “Or, is stink gravy? Toss kir in gravy!” “KIR? Gross vanity!” “Oy, risk starving! Gravy on sir’s kit!” “Sir’s kit? Gravy?? NO!!” Raving soy-skirt, striving soy-ark. “O, KV, SIR, STINGRAY!!!” V. risky, roasting. 1 risky Strogan’v…
* * *
Ross, varying kit (groin’s kits vary), is raving. Storky NY vigor is stark (NY vigo*r…) “OK, sis, try!” Raving: “Kris, gravity’s on, or gravity sinks. Toss—KY arriving!” “Ivor,” sang Kirsty, “Vag—sorry I stink. Vag ri’ stonky, sir!” Stygian risk. Or Viv: “Roy’s rig stank. Rosin (gratis) v. KY?” Garry: “I stink.” VSO? “Arvo, try kissing Kirsty Garvison, savory skin-grit. O, KV, stringy sari… Kiss or yang—triv Skytrain vigors.*
* ast’risk: Yank visitors, gr…! [* non-U]
* * *
Tony risks Varig. “Varig? stonky, sir.” “Varig rots in sky—is gory tin ark.” – Gray Visor-Stink. “TGV—air risk.” ‘Sony’ Tanya risks “Rig ‘V’? Rig ‘S’ stank.” Ivory rosary (King T. IV’s), King VI starry, so saving Yorkist. R. Orr, Stakis vying vs. Rotary skiing: “Skiing ? Sorry, VAT.” “O, vary ski-string!” “Tyson v. Rik, Riga?” (Kirov’s Tring, say…) “Ivy’s go-kart, Sir N.?”
Ivan Gorky stirs TV, says “Gin or kir? Gin, Stavros?” “Kyri’ ? Kvas? o, try gin, sir.” “Risky, gin, Stavros. KV!” I tarry, I snog, vary kiss—Girton, King’s or Varsity? “Kiri’ ’av try snogs, roving Starsky, in ‘Savitri’.” Gorky’s GI star, I. Vronsky. Sky ‘Ring’ vista – or – Gran, sky visitor: “Igor’s art’s v. inky…”
Hampstead Garden Suburb / Westminster, June 1990, with acknowledgments to Charles Pott (the title!), Adrian Peacock and other colleagues.
And now the story …
Researching into what had passed for British Foreign Office strategy towards the end of the cold war, I came across a curious transcript of a meeting between a number of high-up government officers and a hypothetical field agent. The curiosity is that the account is by the agent himself, a certain Ivor King of the elite forces:
I was waiting outside the chief’s door, as he’d told me I might be wanted. I couldn’t help hearing what was being said inside, it sounded as if Sir Viv (the chief—not the West Indian cricket giant!) was chaffing Rosamund, his offbeat Scandinavian-looking secretary, suggesting she betray the one of them she thought most bonkers with a kiss. I know this is the sort of thing that goes on, but —looking through the spyhole in the door—it made a sad sight. Down to business. They know, from official media, that the Tsar is in two minds. How to take advantage of this? The powers-that-be decide to ask—me! I entered, feigning surprise.
I was greeted by a challenge: “The Provos are too slippery. Can we suggest you pay a little visit to the Kray brothers?” “In my view, the Krays are trying too hard,” I responded. “Their trouble is they play dirty, and that doesn’t work against the Cobra public-order squad.” “It’s true, they’ve never been much use to us, I wonder if playing on the Damascus elite’s interest in women wouldn’t be more productive?” asks an under-secretary. This seemed to arouse strong feelings among the assembled nobs. “That Russian girl pretends to be presenting a fake Sky channel.” “But there already is a real Sky channel—which is quite fake enough.” “Ha. There’s room for endless pints in the celestial brewery. What do you think Murdoch’s worldview is? That we’re all laboratory animals, that’s what, blast it.” “You, Ivor—do you reckon we could put our impressionist up against the East German secret police? He was good in that Russian travel programme.” “He’s a great softy. But if he sees someone he fancies, there’s no stopping him. What’s more, he takes the piss out of the Comptroller.” “Torsky? oh dear… Well, it’s got to be you,” he said to me bleakly. “Make sure you’ve got your protection, you’re going to have to get close to those people, and you never know, even if they’re nuns.” I closed the door behind me, and leant my forehead against the heavy wood. I wondered how Ros put up with it, and the memory of the touch of her hand made me feel I was being pulled into a black hole. Ros, forgive me; I make a poor pillager.
* * *
This morning’s job was to repaint the notice warning people not to disturb the storks’ nests. (Duties went in turn in our Tibetan eco-village.) I crouched at the foot of the outcrop the birds had adopted, green with spring herbs, but in danger of being overrun with creepers, which I feared might clamber to the nests . Below me the animals were waking up, beginning to move around; I called down to Iris, “Watch the aurochs! Once they get going, there’s no holding them.” I’d spent more of my time attempting to care for live wild species, while a colleague (another ex-musician from the UK) concentrated on the more physically dangerous task of protecting woolly mammoth tusks. Our CO used to tease him about this, though he didn’t do anything himself. Further down the slope an early morning yoga session was in full swing—‘swing’ may not be quite the word, but actually today there appeared to be some unusually hectic movements, as the leader Victoria encouraged Ronald to go a bit too far on the levitation front. The CO, Roy, was now checking on the catering arrangements. A volunteer chef asked him, with due deference, if he could try out Bisto instant sauce. Roy had seen, though, that the supplies were actually a Brazilian counterfeit, so no—it smelt bad. There seemed to be a spirit of rebellion among the kitchen volunteers, though: “I’m not sure that’s where the smell comes from… Let’s try adding some blackcurrant cordial.” “Don’t you dare touch my liqueur cabinet! Such impudence!”—I could hear the chaplain had arrived. “But look, if we don’t make it edible, we’ll have nothing to eat! Oh—sorry, I’ve spilt something on your surplice – ” ”What? My robes? – aargh…” (Some people worry madly about sauce on their clothes, I thought, others earnestly wish a vegetarian Noah had only saved plants on his ark.) “Watch out, your worship! A flying manta!” All good fun, but things were going seriously wrong with the cooking. I rushed down the hill to try to staunch the campfire, where not only something dodgy had got into the stew but the flames looked as if they might get out of control. “Careful with the yurt!”
* * *
Kit had imagined that the worst of her job was looking after the organising of sporting clothing for the Scottish curling team—you wouldn’t believe the details individual players insisted on! But she was up against something much more challenging: passing through US control. First, because the name on the passport wasn’t Kit—as on the ticket—but Christine; and then, as she was accompanying curling equipment, “Go on, explain this to us.” And when she had tried to, “Excuse me, these things are too heavy to move, they must be meant for something else, unless Newton was wrong. OK, heads or tails, we’re bringing in some glycerine to see if what you’ve said makes any sense.” In another quarter of JFK airport, Ivor King continues with his ungrateful task. He’s had to apprehend Kirsty, Vivian, Garry and Arvo, all of whom provide crazed personal detail he could have done without—but the letters proved it—of endless connivance between agents. Two items stand out: Viv’s indictment of ‘King’ Roy’s set-up, with its attempted substitution of margarine (bought) for amber (free), and Kirsty—whom we’ve already met, but under another lightly-disguised surname – who may be involved in – please be careful – slightly clad – show you’re a man, lover boy – “oh, it’s just the normal strenuous negotiations for satellite contracts.”
* * *
We had this opening for a concert in Brazil, but someone had to go there to settle it. The question was: which airline? Anthony—we should send the top man—thought we should use the national company, for form’s sake. Not everyone agreed, one aide told him it’s a terrific airline, but a personage on the board reckoned it wasn’t trustworthy, made of cheap metals, and that he should take the train. Tanya, whose internship is sponsored by a Japanese tech firm, wonders about a floating oil platform to take him across the Atlantic, on the reasonable grounds that a different oil platform smelled too bad. We were distracted by a beautiful religious ornament (apparently from King Theodore’s time, but worthy of the best of Henry the Sixth, and which would have proved the legitimacy of Richard III had it been known). The late composer Robin Orr—joined by a Greek hotelier—interrupts us with a few thoughts on winter sports, and how they should be taxed, especially if they’re organised by Lions Clubs. Several voices are raised, complaining about Prof. Orr’s harping on alpine activities. Would you rather think about a remake of a boxing champion and a comedian in the Baltics? (Ballet Rambert in Danzig, say.) I wouldn’t mind going there myself, but don’t fancy travelling by dodgem, even if the vehicle’s Ivy’s, and I’m blandished by the address.
* * *
Not quite sure what happened , that day in Mykonos. I was thinking hard about content for our pan-island festival, switching from one music channel to another, and, tiring, asked Stavros if he could lay on a drink. But which one? A cocktail or the thing in itself? “Sir,” he replied—I wish he wouldn’t do this subservient thing—“how about slivovitz?”. He saw I made a face—“OK, it’s gin.” “Mind you, I’ve heard that gin is dangerous, Stavros, watch out” (I liked to taunt him). I can’t make up my mind, but am happy, meanwhile, to kiss the girls around me—who cares which college they come from? “Sir, you’ve done that, what about putting on an action series, in a Vedic setting?” I try to reimagine myself as an American soldier adrift but shining in the Russian provinces, a Tolstoy tragic catalyst. Did he understand all that he brought about, or was he a sentimental fool?
The next challenge was going to be the York Festival: TV film of a production in York Minster of the Ring cycle—oh god … could I come up with something else? As often in these straits, I called on my grandmother, by now well ensconced in the heavens, and as if descended from a future time I heard her say: “You know, in Wagner the notes run all over, filling up space, a great wash—and those colours, well, altogether they make up brown—but Stravinsky, now, he puts notes right there, each one counts for himself, black on white…”
That’s Gran for you. So I went for Igor Stravinsky.
At the New Grove dictionary of music and musicians we used to debate some weighty issues of principle (see e.g. here, for Tibet; and here, for China).
Lower down the scale in our discussions was which typeface to use for “ethnic” instruments. The theory was that roman should be used for instruments that had passed into common English usage, whereas less widely-known terms should be in italic. So some, like sitar, shakuhachi, and shamisen, were deemed worthy of roman; whereas most others, like sarangi, zurna, and qin, were still considered exotic enough to be given italics. Some genres or ensembles, such as gamelan, have been awarded roman too—maybe even gagaku.
Of course, it’s all rather subjective, and subject to changing perceptions. I believe some instruments graduated from italic in 1980 (and the 1984 New Grove dictionary of musical instruments) to roman in the 2001 edition.
For instruments like the shakuhachi, “well-known” is a lofty conceit, of course—last I heard, the shakuhachi isn’t constantly on the lips of Albanian villagers or East End pub-goers.
Piffling as the debate may seem, it serves as a marker of our degree of ignorance, with roman as a badge denoting admission to our elite club, depending on which genres happen to have gained a certain exposure in the West through the vagaries of exploration, research, recording, touring, and hype.
Taking the long view, many instruments of WAM (solidly roman) have a history of acculturation from foreign origins, taking time to establish themselves (cf. China). See also under What is serious music?!
For a general introduction to the series, see here.
Prelude—SJ While most of Nick’s anagram creations are based on a musical work or a composer, this is among several that feature places often visited by HIP ensembles. It adopts the unusual format of a play script, with line-by-line scholarly commentary.
BARCELONA Scene of many performances choral and orchestral, in several venues including the spectacular Palau de la Música Catalana: specifically in 1991, Mozart’s Requiem, with soloists, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, directed by John Eliot Gardiner (also Philips recording and DVD).
An Introduction, a sequence of 79 anagrams constituting the brief ‘play’, and finally a rather longer commentary.
INTRODUCTION The following fragment came to light in a large city in Catalonia, in December 1991, as the sequel to some rummaging in a saffron tub near the Picasso Museum. Little has been established of its previous history, but it appears to be part of an Ur-text of what is known as Shakespeare’s King Lear, with elements, in equally embryonic form, of Macbeth, The Tempest, and Othello. The implication is that at an early stage the ideas which were finally to luxuriate into the individual dramas we know so well were encapsulated in one single play, as if, say, the writer (discouraged, let’s imagine, by a schoolmaster making fun of his limited grasp of the classical languages) had supposed there was ‘only one play in me’. How wrong he was!
The survival of the fragment may be due to its character as a tavern scene, replete with lords, commoners, bon viveurs and bores, drinkers in varying degrees of lucidity, saloon-bar philosophers, an old woman cackling ominously and a Moor sitting poetically and a little dementedly aside. One can imagine it enacted in a rowdy pub in Deptford, the scrawled page then stuffed into the braided pocket of a histrionic sea-dog’s waistcoat, whence it landed in Spain—filched perhaps along with the sailor’s other valuables—to line Angel Jobal’s millennial shelves in his spice shop in the Carrer de la Princesa, preserved from the moth by the disinfectant power of cinnamon and cloves before one day, just like any other, falling into the saffron bin below—serendipitously to be encountered by the editor of this edition (final touches to which had to await a subsequent visit to the city in early 1995).
One hardly needs to point out that, what with such vicissitudes of time and chance, the lack of corroboratory material and, by contrast, the plentifulness of red wine and garlic, the likelihood of a definitive (let alone coherent) account of this problematic out-folio is small. In the ‘Notes’ therefore I have confined myself to such elucidation of the often elliptical and archaic (though with surprisingly modern resonances) material as may help the reader make superficial sense of it, without venturing upon the wilder shores of ‘interpretation’ (for reputable versions of this latter, see Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, J.L. Borges, Pierre Mesnard, Author of ‘The Quixote’, Georges Perec, Petit Abécédaire Illustré, and Louis d’Antin van Rooten’s Mots d’Heures, Gousses, Rames). However, it would be only proper to refer, albeit glancingly, to the theory that this fragment originated in Barcelona, derives in fact wholly from Barcelona; in an even more extreme version, that this is the entire oeuvre, thus, all that there is to be found (in Barcelona). My own view is that alternative interpre-/permu-tations are by no means exhausted; but what is unequivocal is that this vestigial ‘Lear’ is signed, not ‘Shakespeare’, but ‘Bacon’.
Nicolas Robertson, February 1995
[1] LEAR (Bacon)
[A lone bar, c/o brae clan]
ALEC O’BRAN: ’Lo! Ace barn, Norb! À la EC? NORB: A… Alec! No lab care—loan brace? [5] ALEC: No bar. (A clear nob, loner, a cab Lacan–bore, rob a clean crab alone…) ARAB: Clone bean, coral orb, a clean banal core – ale cobra! N. BARNACLE: O Arab! Noel? (can be Carol?) Crab, ale, no? NOEL: Baa! RC bacon, real lace, baron, roan… [10] CALEB (a clan bore): Be carnal, olá! Be a corncob, Lear, an able acorn –
BAAL CRONE: Bale acorn Beacon, lar, Blear Cona—a Nobel car
ANABEL: Cor! [15] ALEC: Bran, or ale? bacon?? LEAR: Bacon. Lance boar, Lara! Bonce, or balance a lance-orb – CALEB: Or an – CLARE: – Oban acorn, a bel…
LEAR: Banco! Clean arboreal cob, an Ebor canal – Abraca… [25] LEN: O’er. CAL O’BANOCBERN: Alac, o Lear! Ban, ban, Cal, or ’e.. . CORNELBA: A cable, Nora, Aaron. LEAR: A, B, C… No – CORNELBA: Alec? No Arab be Al? A corn –
1. The title is in the original MS, as is the attribution.
2. The feudal nature of remote highland Scottish society is vividly laid bare in this rare stage direction.
3-4. An early reference to cross-border subsidies, as usual undermined by local deficiencies.
5-7. “No bar”—one of the earliest puns in Shakespeare, but as the following aside makes clear, one not pronounced with much goodwill towards Norb the barman, who in Alec’s eyes is an aristocratic, solipsistic, Sorbonne-educated greedy seafood-lover. But Alec’s own careless alliteration causes a dark huddle in the corner (an early appearance of the Moor in Shakespeare’s work, and lacking the humanity he would later bring to the character) to mutter imprecations to some ideal, or possibly dystopic, vision of Pythagorean genetic engineering, smooth, spiny, essentially pure (if boring) within, the fermenting grain serpent…!
8. Fortunately James Joyce’s wife, somehow present, is moved by the Moor, and recognizing the potential schism, while playing on Christmas onomatology revives the festive spirit with offers of food and drink.
9-10. Her friend, perhaps deterred by the exclusively marine diet hitherto mentioned, launches into a catalogue of red meat products, imitating a lamb, extolling kosher ham (on a doily), superior cuts of beef, and venison—which enables Caleb (the bar is filling up fast) to make another pun, on the dual usage of ‘carnal’, ‘fleshly’; employing a sombre wit which belies his parenthetical characterisation as one of that tedious band of tartan-spotters, more Papist than the Pope. Hinging on the very word ‘carnal’ , he turns the argument (with that breath-taking ease of transition from light to dark, ribald to deadly serious, which we know so well from the mature Shakespeare) directly towards Lear—it’ s not clear if the old man has been here all along—with astonishingly explicit phallic imagery, encouraging the already confused king to throw caution to the winds.
11-13. “Baal crone”—as will hardly need pointing out, a precursor of the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, but in this primitive version more tinged still with chthonic pagan magic, her prophetic doggerel resembling the ‘Triads’ of the Welsh and Irish Druids (cf. Robert Graves, The White Goddess, passim) which were still perhaps current in rural areas in the late 16th century (though it’s interesting to note that Bacon, as distinct from Shakespeare, is known to have been a Rosicrucian and thus inevitably acquainted with the undercurrents of esoteric lore suggestively bound up in the Baal Crone’s Gnostic pronouncements) and which even when ostensibly nonsensical have often a curiously modern ring.
14-17. After the Baal Crone’s first intervention, the tragedy is under way. Alec’s attempt to defuse the growing sense of horror (adumbrated in Annabel’s shocked exclamation) by offering, at random, more food and drink backfires as Lear, speaking for the first time, bursts into rhetoric foreshadowing the ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks’ of the mature play. And he is already living more dangerously than it might appear; as Shakespeare must have been aware, the eating of pork was discouraged in Scotland and actually forbidden at court, which had serious repercussions when James VI became James I of England on the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, and boar was banned at the English court (fortuitously finding a replacement as Christmas centrepiece in the turkey, newly brought from the Americas by Sir Walter Raleigh). Is Shakespeare/Bacon, in demanding the Adonis–sacrifice of the boar by Lara—more research is required to establish if this is a well-known blood-sportsman (we’re within an iota of finding ‘Brian’ in Barcelona) or a literary heroine borrowed from a novella recently in vogue after its importation from the exotic court of Peter the Great—protesting about the change in lifestyles sadly to be expected when national sovereignty is infringed, even, perhaps, sending a coded message to his Venus–Queen to beware not only of seductive alliances from Europe (‘lance-orb’ might well be a reference to the armillary sphere, chosen symbol of the Manueline kings of Portugal, whose throne had recently been usurped by Philip II of Spain—one should not forget the Armada was launched from Lisbon) but also of sterner dynastic absorption from the cold north of her own island?
18-22. A couple of rapid interjections (technically, stichomythia) which serve to heighten the dramatic tension, while at the same time, contrary no doubt to Clare’s innocent intention (she’s unaware of the trigger-word ‘acorn’ , associated with the oak–rituals of the sacred grove—see Frazer, The Golden Bough) let in the Baal Crone again, her words ever more threatening, culminating in a reference to Alban (= ‘white’, as in ‘Albion’, from the Latin albanus), the 4th-century Roman convert and first martyr of Britain; the Crone is telling Lear to arm himself for war in defence of a ‘pure’ concept of Englishness. Nor is this the only inference to be gleaned from ‘Alban’: for, as the legend tells, after the saint, who had sheltered a Christian priest and consented to change clothes with him to enable his escape, was killed (having refused to sacrifice to pagan gods), the eyes of his executioner fell out of his head. Aside from the reference to the Oedipus story (otherwise most graphically expressed in Tom Lehrer’s song, “When he saw what he had done, he tore his eyes out, one by one”), this macabre anecdote is a chilling anticipation of one of the most famous episodes in the fully-fledged King Lear, when Gloucester’s eyes are ripped out, on the brow of what is now Shakespeare Cliff in Dover, the bluff whose “high and bended head / Looks fearfully upon the confined deep”, and which of course is a landmark in the eastern stretch of the ‘white’ (‘alban’) cliffs which run almost without interruption along the bulwark of the south coast until they reach the parallel eminence of St Alban’s Head in Dorset (whose equal attribution to another saint, Aldhelm, merely reinforces the association, ‘Aldhelm’ meaning ‘old helmet’, another evocation of proud and warlike defence). This editor can testify to a more unlikely, though not for that less precious, survival of the Venus-as-Britannia / Albion myth we are sketching: the presence in hollows of the chalk cliffs above those shingle beaches of the most beautiful of blue butterflies, which has the colour of blue sky and pale blue English sea and a skimmer of white chalk dust: the ‘Adonis Blue’…
23. Lear is patently unprepared for the Baal Crone’s implied challenge, which he attempts to flee by joking, suggesting ecological undertakings in York—but which at last topples him over into mental disorder, as he stammers the first syllables of a magic invocation, as if hoping that somehow someone would wave a wand and we’d all be out of this confusion…
But before his vain attempt at self-delusion, Lear has called for help, one last time; called the name of his daughter, the only one who has the independence and purity of spirit to save him (one is reminded of Wotan and Brünnhilde). At this stage of development of the character who was to become ‘Cordelia’ in King Lear, Shakespeare calls her ‘Cornelba’, a name which reveals much of her role, as well as of the playwright’s preoccupations at this time. Unlike the ‘soft–and–low’-speaking Cordelia, whose early death is the final straw in breaking Lear, this Cornelba is strong, and will survive him (Shakespeare undoubtedly came to see this as a weakness in the construction, which required the focus to fall ultimately upon Lear himself). She is not yet ‘Cordelia’; ‘cord’ may refer to the knotted rope of the Franciscan cordeliers, with its implications of self-chastisement, but also cordonnier, ‘shoemaker’, i.e. ‘Schuhmacher’, author of a treatise much talked about at this time, ‘Klein ist schön’, in praise of psychoanalytic methods admittedly then in their infancy but copied with almost textbook clarity by Shakespeare in his tragedy Hamlet (see also the note referring to his acknowledgement of the Oedipus story, l.22), where Cord/elia becomes Oph/elia, the prefixes exchanging wholesome artisanry (and ‘heart’) for the snake, symbol of sexuality and death (the suffix ‘elia’ could be a simple feminine enclitic, but it is also the Greek for ‘olive tree’, a vital resource: Sparta was understood to have gone beyond the bounds of humanity when it cut down Athens’ olive groves…) Cornelba is, rather, Ruth, standing strong and alone amidst the alien corn, in this case the metaphorical corn of Elba, not coincidentally the place of another exile, equally small, strong, and sequestrated.
At the same time ‘Ruth’ summons up the image of an earlier Biblical queen, also an exile, but one who made her dislocated place her own: the Queen of Sheba, or Saba, hence the cry of Napoléon, know ing himself balanced on the axis where the mirror of destiny interrupts historical fact: Saba—la blé d’Elba là-bas! (an unappeasable nostalgia, backward-looking, found also in the English jingle, ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba’); a promise of ever-renewing seasonal richness which the Emperor could never now share, only look upon from an unbridgeable distance, while the humble Ruth could, finally, participate, belonged to the future…
25-26. The dénouement is close, indeed Leonard, the bar manager (perhaps), sadly announces that it’s already time. A tantalizing foretaste of The Tempest is now introduced, in the form of Cal of Bannockburn (to modernize the spelling), evidently one of the Celtic chiefs who helped to gain the famous victory over the English in 1314, and who reveals the cry of the malformed creature Caliban to have been perhaps an enshrinement of the age-old Scottish–English rivalry, and the very deformity to be an inability to escape from the rhythms of the past and realistically confront the modern changed world… Lear is being torn, it seems, between the conflicting claims of England and Scotland, one might say between savagery and civilization (or so, at least, the English would say), or between nature and the exploitation of it—and its fellow habitants (as would say the Scots). In fact, what we have here is a paradigm of the expulsion from Paradise, and Lear cannot take the fearful weight of awareness heaped upon him by the possibility of deciding his own fate…
27. Cornelba, remaining practical, attempts to stem the damage by summoning various helpers, explaining (perhaps optimistically) that things could be solved by filleting the opposition, undermining the authority of the highlanders’
28. spokesman… but it’s too late, Lear is now clearly mad, can only de-Lear-iate in children’s rhymes (strangely preminiscent of Ophelia’s madness), while it is left to Cornelba to try to salvage what little she can, and even she is overcome by an
29. understandable moment of weakness, is led to doubt Alec’s true allegiance, and
30-32. so again wretchedly cues the Baal Crone and her final chilling dicta: amidst the bacchanal, there is to be no safe home-coming for the king. There follows, no doubt, the usual Revengers’ Tragedy mayhem.
The text ends with a surprise equal to any found in this revelatory fragment, the
33. laconic stage direction “clean bar”, underscored, and prefaced by an exclamatory “o” in the appalled hand of a scribe, shaky, perhaps, at the spectacle of the carnage which has to be cleared up, or, who knows, in the aftermath of just one too many the night before
Further to my original post on StevenWright, a reminder of his deadpan style:
Here are some more of his one-liners:
How do you tell when you’re out of invisible ink?
Today I dialled a wrong number. The other person said, “Hello?” And I said, “Hello, could I speak to Joey?” They said, “Uh… I don’t think so—he’s only 2 months old.” I said, “I’ll wait.”
Daoist and Zen literature became popular in the West quite early, with works such as R.H. Blyth’s Zen in English literature and Oriental classics (1942); Eastern mysticism is a major theme in the novels of J.D. Salinger, and Zen in the life of Gary Snyder.
Daoism has since been co-opted to various ends by post-beatnik New Age generations, as thoughtfully studied by David Palmer and Elijah Siegler in Dream trippers: global Daoism and the predicament of global spirituality (2017).
While Herrigel’s Zen in the art of archery (1948) was an ethnographic account, this new movement wasn’t confined by academic rigours, tending towards the co-option of Daoism and Zen as memes for our jaded palette—a gradual broadening of themes, shall we say, such as The Tao of Pooh (1983), via the substantial novel Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance (1974). No topic is now safe, as you can see from my forthcoming bestsellers The Tao of the call centre and Zen in the art of chartered accountancy. But Daoism and Zen are not to be reduced to clickbait—after all,
Note also this 1991 essay by Victor Mair, typically virtuosic.
Performance is rarely central to the New Agers, but several disciplines stress spontaneous responses to the moment—or rather, the interplay of technique (based on meticulous practice) with inspiration (cf. Zen in the art of the baroque lute). Again, Daoism and Zen hardly have a monopoly here. The common instance of this is jazz, closely followed by Indian raga (see Unpacking “improvisation”).
One may seek Daoism/Zen in the art of conducting. Rozhdestvensky had an exhilarating spontaneity, complemented by an aversion to rehearsal. Conversely, Carlos Kleiber, whose stage presence appears so untrammelled, relied on a vast amount of fastidious rehearsal; as he observed,
With a good technique, you can forget technique.
Celibidache was just as hung-up on rehearsal—despite his study of Zen.
And the theme has been applied to sports such as tennis—a genre initiated by Timothy Gallwey, The inner game of tennis (1974). Again, the balance of experience, repetition, with improvisation.
Now, following Jay Sankey’s book Zen and the art of standup comedy (1998), we have
Mark Saltveit, “Comedians as Taoist missionaries”, Journal of Daoist studies 13 (2020; early version here).
As with Zen, the wisdom of the Daoist classics is frequently based on humour.
There is an attitude underlying comedy that shares a lot with Lao-Zhuang thought: mischievous, suspicious of authority and pomposity, fond of humble citizens and workers, very aware of the limits of knowledge and problems of communication, self-challenging, and drawn to non-logical truth, the kinds of thought not taught in school.
Daoism also celebrates a manner of action perfect for comedy; spontaneous, intuitive, humble, perfected through repetition and awareness.
From Saltveit’s standup:
I’ve actually become a Daoist missionary. Which means I stay home and mind my own goddamned business.
I think of Stewart Lee (whose labyrinthine routines, inspired by jazz, are also based on meticulous preparation), or (by contrast) the deadpan one-liners of Steven Wright (here and here).
Other relevant posts include Daoist non-action (“Don’t just do something, stand there!”); and Outside the box, again including a koanesque aperçu by Walt Disney. See also The True Classic of Simplicity and Vacuity, n.1 here.
For a suitable soundtrack, how about Gershwin’s I got plenty o’ nuttin’ (from the 1935 folk-opera Porgy and Bess):
As ethnographer, Saltveit does a nice line in observing the US comedy scene:
City comics live in New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco or Boston, maybe Seattle or Austin. They have day jobs and perform short sets at showcase clubs that don’t pay but offer exposure, as they’re angling for TV appearances. Their acts have distinctive styles (which road dogs might call gimmicks); think of Steven Wright with his sad sack demeanor and verbal paradoxes, or Mitch Hedburg’s rock star look and cerebral stoner one-liners. Lesser city comics resort to in-jokes that only friends laugh at, and often despise the audience.
Road dogs often work in comedy full time, piecing together a very low salary from 3 to 5 day “weeks” at smaller clubs and strings of “one-nighters” at bars in small towns, often hundreds of miles apart. They are not given lodging on their off nights and usually drive around the country, sleeping in their cars between gigs. Some wrangle “corporates” (higher paid private gigs) or move on to squeaky clean and highly paid cruise ship work. Lesser road comics steal jokes and premises, pander to popular prejudice, or get lazy and rehash their older material for decades at a time. One wag said that road comics aren’t really entertainers so much as truckers who deliver jokes to small towns.
City comics look down on road dogs as mindless hacks, repeating ancient stereotypes about men being dogs and women being cats. Road dogs look down on city comics as unfunny, self-important wimps who couldn’t last half an hour at a “real” gig. Comics of either camp who’ve actually worked together often share a deep, battle-worn camaraderie that transcends this pettiness.
Meanwhile, Tibetan monks have long excelled at punch-lines (see e.g. Michael Lempert, Discipline and debate: the language of violence in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, 2012):
For remarkable 1958–59 footage of the young Dalai Lama taking part in such a session for his Buddhist “graduation”, see the film here, from 5.03.
Rowan Atkinson’s classic Roll-call sketch has been modestly tucked away under Philomena Cunk‘s wonderful list of words possibly (not) invented by Shakespeare, but it deserves its own coverage.
As Richard Sparks explains in a BTL comment on YouTube, he wrote the sketch in 1978 for Rowan’s first London revue, Rowan Atkinson and friends; after John Cleese saw it, he invited Rowan to do it for The secret policeman’s ball [in 1979]. Charmingly, it transpired that “the Powers That Be wanted to cut Rowan from the film because he was a complete unknown, and the show was over-long and packed with big-name stars”.
So here’s the sketch’s first outing at The secret policeman’s ball:
Like Alan Bennett’s Sermon, it evokes the peculiarities of the English upper classes at a particular time. Whereas the world of the Sermon was still familiar to AB’s audience, the audience for Roll-call might have had less personal experience of the bygone public-school values that Rowan Atkinson evokes, but the air of supercilious menace is a widely-enough shared characteristic of the English.
We all have our favourite names; alongside Elsworth-Beast Major, Orifice, Plectrum, and Zob, I’d like to put in a word for Kosygin.
Rowan Atkinson is yet another stammerermanqué; his overarticulation of plosives is partly a deliberate block-modification technique. I’d erased from my memory the painful ordeal of having to answer roll-call at school.
Here I expand on a charming vignette in my film Li Manshan: portrait of a folk Daoist (from 35.45), and my book Daoist priests of the Li family (pp.60–61), illustrating how fieldwork can help us not just to observe current activity and collect historical material, but to illuminate earlier practices.
One morning in April 2011, at home in Upper Liangyuan village with Li Manshan, he casually told me that he knew of a stele at a nearby village temple which listed some names of his Daoist forebears. So after lunch we set off to the temple just northwest, known simply as “the Zhouguantun temple,” though it is rather distant in the fields to the north of the village (see maps here and here).
When we arrive, the temple grounds appear to be empty. Finding two weather-beaten stone steles planted on either side of the main entrance, we spend ages trying to make out the names of Li Manshan’s forebears. Eventually we go to disturb the siesta of the solitary temple keeper Zhang Zheng. Most affable, he helps us draw some water from the well so we can smear it over the stone to bring out the engraved characters.
Zhouguantun temple keeper Zhang Zheng.
Slightly lame, Zhang Zheng is a bachelor. Brought up in Zhouguantun, he was attracted to Buddhism, spending time at Wutaishan; his master is now in Datong. As he “roamed the clouds” (yunyou, cf. the Hunyuan Daoist Jiao Lizhong), he came to look after this temple in 1998 (well before it was refurbished), becoming a monk in 2000 with the Buddhist name Shi Zhengci 釋正慈.
As Zhang Zheng tells us, the temple is now formally called Foxian si 佛仙寺; its original name was Zhangdenghe miao 張登河廟, to the deity Zhang laoxian shen 張老仙神. Its three annual temple fairs are on 3rd moon 3rd, 6th moon 6th, and 9th moon 9th.
As we apply water, the steles become easier to decipher. At last we can make out the date: they commemorate donors for the restoration of the temple in 1942, the 31st year of the Republican era—confirming that religious life was still thriving despite the Japanese occupation. If local people were seeking the protection of the deity at a time of crisis, it seemed to work, for today he is considered to have protected them then. Though the temple was destroyed under Maoism, it was refurbished in 2010, and is still considered very efficacious.
And sure enough, in a row near the foot of the right-hand stele, facing the temple, is a heading “Upper Liangyuan” followed by the names of five Lis; unclear at first, they scrub up nicely with plentiful applications of water, and eventually we make out the names of the three brothers Li Peiye, Li Peixing, and Li Peilong, as well as Li Peiye’s son Li Tong (then 33 sui) and Li Peixing’s son, our very own Li Qing (then 17 sui). The brothers’ cousin Li Peisen isn’t listed—he led a separate band. Here’s my genealogy of the nine generations of Daoists in the Li family, from Li Fu, first in the lineage to learn Daoist ritual in the 18th century:
The stele doesn’t list any monetary donations from the Lis; as Li Manshan explains to me, this means that they were not mere donors, but were performing rituals for the temple fair as a “dutiful” (yiwu) offering of scriptures—a devotional act for which they would have been recompensed with donations over the course of the event. At the time, temple fairs were still known by the term jiao 醮 Offering, which is now little known in Yanggao.
Nowadays a band of six Daoists is standard in this area south of the town; but until around 2003 they still commonly used seven (as in my 2007 DVD Doing things, §B6). So the 1942 stele lists only the five adult Daoists; there were probably a couple of unspecified junior recruits too, playing percussion as they learned the ropes (see also here).
This shows how fieldwork with living people can teach us about the past. It’s one thing to document early steles, listing dates and names of donors, but only acquaintance with Daoists like Li Manshan can reveal such clues. Who knows how many names of Daoist bands languish unremarked on old steles? Early artefacts are silent, immobile records of a vibrant ritual life.
Alas, the stele doesn’t record the sequence of rituals that they performed—such lists were commonly made, but on transient paper placards pasted up at the temple (cf. Changing ritual artefacts). Today the great majority of the Li family Daoists’ work is performing mortuary rituals; they still perform for a few temple fairs in the area (see the DVD with my 2007 book, §B), but the ritual sequence is less elaborate than before the 1950s, and has become quite similar to that of funerals (see my book, chapter 12). Most of the former segments have since become obsolete here, but we can glean clues from the ritual manuals that Li Qing and his uncle Li Peisen recopied upon the revival in the early 1980s (for a list, see Appendix 2 of my book), together with Li Manshan’s comments.
In 1942 the ritual segments would have included not only a cappella hymns and fast chanted scriptures such as Scriptures for Averting Calamity (Rangzai jing 禳災經), but also all six long shengguan suites for the instrumental ensemble. Apart from standard morning, noon, and evening segments, the Yanggao Daoists performed two major nocturnal rituals—temple-fair versions of rituals also used for funerals: the nocturnal “Bestowing Blessings” Communicating the Lanterns (cifu guandeng 賜福觀燈) and yankou 焰口; as well as Announcing Text (shenwen 申文), Presenting the Memorial (jinbiao 進表) and Stepping the Cosmos (tagang 踏罡), Inviting and Sending Off the Gods (qingshen, songshen 請送神); perhaps also Prior and Latter Invocations (qian’gao 前誥, hougao 后誥).
Moreover, Willem Grootaers and Li Shiyu were doing fieldwork in the region at the very time—how I would love to discover ciné footage of the 1942 temple fair at Zhouguantun!
It has been a pleasant, instructive afternoon. Before we leave, Zhang Zheng reads my hands. Bidding him farewell, we call a friendly local cab driver to take us back home to Upper Liangyuan. When we arrive, the main gate of Li Manshan’s house is locked, and his wife is out. We stand outside smoking contentedly in the early evening sunshine, waiting for her to return, until eventually I look at Li Manshan and ask him casually, “Do you, um, have a key?” He takes a leisurely drag on his cigarette and goes “Er… yeah.” We smoke some more, digesting this news. Me: “Ah… right.” Further long pause. “Um… Care to open the gate then?” Li Manshan shrugs nonchalantly: “OK then.”
Though the two main temples of Upper Liangyuan were demolished in the 1950s and never restored, on my 2013 stay in the village, thanks to the elderly Li Xu, we discovered steles lying abandoned and forgotten in ditches—again, see my film (from 8.18) and book (pp.46–9). The stele of the Temple of the God Palace (Fodian miao) is dated 1880; that of the Palace of the Three Pure Ones (Sanqing dian) is from 1942, like that of the Zhouguantun temple—again suggesting recourse to divine aid in times of crisis.
Li Manshan inspects the abandoned stele of the Temple of the Three Pure Ones,
with Li Bin (left) looking on.
Chinese scholars have been diligent in copying early steles in Shanxi; for me, such historical work merely provided punctuation for a daily schedule following Li Manshan’s band around the area as they performed funerals.
Despite our best intentions, Hergé’s Tintin books and TV animations remain compelling, both in the West and in the cultures in which he dabbled from afar (see also wiki). The sonorous declamation “Herge’s Adventures of Tintin!!!” in the 1950s’ cartoons is still highly nostalgic for early generations of naïve youth like me—who would have been unaware how we were being indoctrinated by “racial stereotypes, animal cruelty, colonialism, violence, and even fascist leanings, including ethnocentric, caricatured portrayals of non-Europeans”.
Hergé developed the series as illustrator at Le vingtième siècle, “a staunchly Roman Catholic, conservative Belgian newspaper based in Brussels, describing itself as a “Catholic Newspaper for Doctrine and Information” and disseminating a far-right, fascist viewpoint.
His first story Tintin in the land of the Soviets (1929–30) was followed by Tintin in the Congo, written “in a paternalistic style that depicted the Congolese as childlike idiots”. His fictional creation of Syldavia long predates Molvania. After the war Hergé somewhat distanced himself from such racist, paternalistic messages. The first English translations appeared in 1951, and the TV cartoons became popular.
By 2007, the UK Commission for Racial Equality called for Tintin in the Congo to be pulled from shelves, stating: “It beggars belief that in this day and age that any shop would think it acceptable to sell and display [it]” (cf. this Channel 4 report). Still, in Belgium the Centre for Equal Opportunities warned against “over-reaction and hyper political correctness”; and Claude Lévi-Strauss, no less, stated that “Tintin was the comic strip that was the most respectful of world cultures”—admittedly a low bar. A thriving discipline of Tintinology emerged, as well as parodies.
* * *
Tintin: So you see, my dear Chang, that’s how many Europeans see China!
Chang: Oh! How funny the people of your country are!
The Blue Lotus (1934–35; see also wiki), set in Shanghai, was inspired by Hergé’s friendship with the Chinese artist Zhang Chongren, then a student in Brussels.
In the story Zhang appears in the form of Chang Chong-chen, who relieves Tintin of his preconceptions.
In China, pocket editions of the Tintin books were pirated from the 1980s, giving him the pleasingly economical name of Dingding 丁丁. A recent Sixth Tone article explores the reputation of The Blue Lotus there. As Alex Colville comments there, “without Zhang’s humanising influence, it is easy to imagine The Blue Lotus simply becoming a tale of Tintin foiling a group of pigtailed Chinese opium dealers.” The story scored points for its anti-Japanese stance; and moving away from imperialist stereotypes, Tintin defends the Chinese not only from Japanese aggressors but bullying Western businessmen.
Zhang Chongren returned to China in 1936. Rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution, he met up again with Hergé in 1981 in France, where he ended his days.
Here’s a 1992 animation of The Blue Lotus:
* * *
The character of Chang also features in Tintin in Tibet (1958–59, sic) (wiki; note also Séagh Kehoe here). By this time Hergé was doing more research; the story was based on his readings of works such as Fosco Maraini’s Secret Tibet, Heinrich Harrer’s Seven years in Tibet, Tsewang Pemba’s Tibet my homeland, discredited author Lobsang Rampa’s The third eye, and the books of Alexandra David-Néel.
For Hergé, Tibet might seem a Can of Worms, yet another potential candidate for the Duke of Edinburgh Gaffe of the Year award—but instead in 2006 the Dalai Lama bestowed the Light of Truth award on the book. A Chinese edition under the sneaky title Tintin in Chinese Tibet had already been retracted in 2001 after protests by the publishers and the Hergé Foundation. YAY!
Sidestepping politics, there are no baddies here; it’s been seen as a story of friendship, a spiritual quest. Here’s the 1992 animation:
For all their flaws, these works may have enticed many young minds like mine to China and Tibet. Apart from innocent childish pursuits, the whole series must have inspired more anthropologists than crypto-fascists.
Umbrellas, or rather parasols, are an important part of the paraphernalia of Chinese ritual processions. And they’re a common prop for folk-singers at festivals in northwest China.
In north Europe we are unlikely to pray for rain, so I have much more practical use for umbrellas than do the dwellers of drought-prone north China.
Left, “Place this immediately above your own. Saves getting it wet”. Right: top, paternalistic umbrella; lower left, umbrella for dry climates “for collecting the water of life”. From Jacques Carelman, Catalogue of extraordinary objects (1969).
On a personal note, it may be thanks to my great-aunt Edith Miles that I warm to the topic:
For the plucky resistance of British street-signs to continental conformity, see here.
Second recording session with the Hua family shawm band, March 1991: the afternoon entertainment repertoire (Walking shrill CD, §4). Hua Yinshan on shawm, Hua Jinshan on yangqin; sheng player on left is blindman Duan Guanming.
In early March 1991 I took the train from Beijing to Datong, accompanied by local scholar Chen Kexiu, for the first of many fieldtrips to Yanggao county, whose unprepossessing exterior cunningly concealed a wealth of ritual life.
Visiting the great household Daoist Li Qing at his home in Upper Liangyuan, we made a date for a grand funeral the following day at Greater Antan village, where he would be presiding over the Pardon ritual with his Daoist band (my film, from 48.35, cf. my book pp.246–50).
The other main object of my studies in Yanggao was to be the Hua family shawm band, whom we first met one afternoon at their home in Yangjiabu village north of the county-town. We were already impressed by the solicitude of kindly Yanggao cultural cadre Li Jin, whom I have extolled here. He was working at the office in town that day. By the time I began to record the shawm band, most of the villagers were crammed into Hua Yinshan’s courtyard. As I sat there blown away (“literally”, as one says nowadays) by the band’s Ming-dynasty bebop (e.g. sidebar playlist §5, commentary here), Li Jin rode up on his bicycle bearing an urgent message for me.
David Adams, fixer for the English Baroque Soloists, was renowned for his persistence, and somehow he had managed to track me down to Yanggao, seeking to book me for some EBS dates. David had phoned my partner in London, with whom I had left the phone number of the Music Research Institute in Beijing, so he called them; I have no idea how they managed to communicate, but he got hold of the number for the Yanggao Bureau of Culture. No-one in Yanggao spoke any English, but again Li Jin surmised that the phone-call must be from England, and it must be for me (cf. Comrade Paul); and he gamely, if approximately, transcribed David’s name with its unfamiliar letters—Russian was the preferred foreign language when he was studying at school in the 1950s, and pinyin was still little known.
In light snow, Li Jin then promptly set off to Yangjiabu on his bicycle (a contraption that had only become common in Yanggao in the 1980s); somewhat bedraggled, he handed over this important message to me, whatever it meant, before the bemused villagers. Alas, I can’t now find Li Jin’s pencilled note, but the message read something like DEWUEDADAAMS. I was impressed.
Immersed as I was in Daoist ritual sequences and shawm suites, early-music touring already seemed rather remote to me, but it was a pleasant reminder of my other life. In those days, still before email, it was hard enough to make a phone-call from Yanggao to Beijing; it was clearly out of the question to try one of the few landlines in the village, and hey, I was busy… Even when we returned to the dingy county-town, making an international call looked most unlikely. I don’t recall how I eventually got through to David—I guess only on my return to Beijing the following week, in between attending folk Buddhist funerals there. Anyway, I must have hastily pencilled in dates for my diary, perhaps even our Barcelona trip for the Mozart anniversary the coming November?! (Contrast “Can you come and do a Messiah next Monday night in Scunthorpe? There’s no fee, but there’ll be a jolly good tea.”)
Like my early run-ins with the local constabulary, this story soon became a popular source of mirth among my friends in both China and London. Though my forays to the Chinese countryside were far from the utter isolation of early fieldworkers in remote climes like New Guinea or Easter Island, on my early fieldtrips I cheerfully gave up any notion of keeping in touch with home (cf. Laowai, on my 1999 Long March with Guo Yuhua in Shaanbei). Those were the days.
Keen as I was to learn more about ritual life in Yanggao, I made it one of our destinations on a tour of Shanxi the following year with Xue Yibing. For the rest of the 1990s I was busy with a major project on the ritual associations of Hebei (see outline of the progression of my work in the second half of this post); but those early trips to Yanggao made an important basis for my more in-depth studies there from 2001 (for the Hua band) and 2011 (for the Li family Daoists).
The Li family Daoist band tending their motor-bikes and mobiles between funerary ritual segments, Houguantun 2011.
By around 2004 the ritual “food-bowl” of Daoists and shawm bands began revolving around motor-bikes and mobile phones, which allowed them to “respond for household rituals” far more promptly than their forebears over the previous centuries. By 2013, whereas my own phone had already stopped ringing, on our European tours with the Li family Daoists (see e.g. France 2018) Li Manshan and his son Li Bin were busy fielding calls on their mobiles from Yanggao villagers asking them to determine the date for burials and arrange their funeral rituals—a rather similar circumstance to mine in 1991, albeit more convenient.
In 1949 Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972) gave a sublimely elegiac talk on the BBC Home Service, recalling his last visit to the aged Henry James (1843–1916) at his flat off Cheyne Walk in the late summer of 1914. He had already published a written version in his “My meetings with Henry James” (Mark Twain quarterly 6.3, 1945).
The BBC broadcast his talk again in the 1970s, and copies circulated among a little group of friends. Even then, there was a double nostalgia about listening to a 1949 reminiscence of a 1914 meeting. The encounter rather reminds me of my own Cambridge visits to Laurence Picken, as well as Sir Harold Bailey. It’s one of my most treasured recordings, and I’m mortified that the BBC hasn’t made it available online (go on, BBC!). Mackenzie’s delivery is at once hilarious and poignant, evoking James’s sense of frailly handing over the baton to a younger generation; to transcribe highlights on the page is a paltry stopgap.
“And now, my dear boy, make yourself as comfortable, as, in this monstrous time of war, comfort either of body or mind is… is…”. He paused to grasp the adjective, floating for a moment out of his reach, and then, just as his fingers were closing upon it, or rather—I become Jamesian myself as the memory of the scene recurs —or rather, poising like a butterfly hunter, net in air, to swoop upon the perfect adjective and imprison it in the reticulation of his prose… at that moment, his housekeeper came into the room.
Henry James looked round for the epithet, now well on its way to escape, desperation in his mild and magnificent eyes. And then his housekeeper said, gently but most firmly,
“It’s about the marmalade, Mr James.”
“Marmalade…” he ejaculated.
“Marmalade—from the Army and Navy Stores,” she insisted. Henry James turned to me:
“Will you, my dear boy, try to entertain, or perhaps not so much entertain as engage yourself with a book, while I devote a minute or two of most unwilling attention, or rather, er… tortured concentration upon one of these hideous encounters with domestic necessity. A vast emporium, one of these appalling achievements of our modern craving for the huge, the immense… looms between myself and this delightful company of yours […]”
“Mr James,” the housekeeper interposed, with hardly concealed impatience, “the man from the Army and Navy Stores is waiting, for the order.”
“One moment, Mrs Dash, I will not keep you a moment… Now, my dear boy—where is our dear H.G. Wells’s last book, full of that Wellsian quality, which sometimes flows, perhaps a little too…? Or you may rather beguile yourself for a moment while I surrender to the remorseless ritual which these domestic conveniences demand from us… Yes! Here is our dear Arnold Bennett’s last…” While Henry James was picking up book after book on the table, and bumbling around them like a great irresolute bee, his housekeeper was tapping the floor with her foot.
“Mr James, please,” she protested. The great novelist seated himself at his desk, pen poised above the notepaper, looked anxiously up to his housekeeper:
“How would you, er… how shall I address the apex of this pyramid, the, er, director of this magnificent display of co-operative energy?”
“Mr James, just write the order please, and the man will take it,” she almost pleaded.
“And what was the peculiar title of the condiment which we seek to import into this so humble corner of this vast London of ours, Mrs Dash?”
“Mr James! Oh… We were going to order six jars of that Oxford marmalade you liked.”
From the corner of my eye I watched the operation of writing that order, as Henry James’s pen advanced to paper and drew back, and advanced again, and again drew back and then hovered above the notepaper, making a traceless pattern upon the air in a kind of sarabande, to which the housekeeper’s foot tapped quite out of time. At last the pen descended upon the paper, and a large, angular script flowed across it. The six jars of marmalade were ordered, and with a sigh of exhaustion and relief, Henry James came back to his guest, apologising once more for the interruption, and full of solicitude for the way I’d been able to pass the time while the marmalade was being ordered. […]
To this day the very word “marmalade” invariably sends us into fits of giggling. For the tribulations of composers beset by mundane concerns, as recreated by Monty Python, see here.
On a feminist note, Sarah Jane Gill, creator of said delicacy, has been largely deprived of deserved fame by her husband Frank Cooper—Typical!
Anyway, with James liberated at last from his “hideous encounter with domestic necessity”, he can devote his attention once again to his young visitor:
Just before I said farewell to Henry James on that October afternoon, I told him it was my intention to revise, and possibly rewrite altogether my novel Carnival in the light of my experience. He held up his hands in a wide gesture of dismay. […] “I once wasted ten, indeed twelve precious years in foolishly supposing that in the light of experience I could grope my way towards a more… towards that always elusive… in short, that I could add yet something to what, when it was written, I had given all that I could give at that time. Renounce this preposterous ambition of yours, my dear boy. You have been granted the boon which is all a novelist should beg for himself. You have been granted that boon with a generosity beyond that accorded to any of your young contemporaries. You fling the ball up against the wall, and it rebounds immediately into your hands— […] whereas I fling the ball against the wall, whence it rebounds not into my hands but onto the next wall, and from that wall to the next…” He followed, with apprehensive glance, the flight of that ghostly ball around the room… “Until it at last falls to the ground, and dribbles, very, very slowly, towards my feet; and I, all my old bones aching, stoop, and most laboriously, pick it up.”
In 1982 I was fortunate to hear the great Franca Rame(1929–2013) in London performing her Female parts: one-woman plays (1977, co-written with Dario Fo).
Waking up A woman alone The same old story Medea
The stories, satirising the chains of Church, State, and machismo, are based on her Tutto casa, letto e chiesa; here’s the first part of her virtuosic 1977 live performance in Milan—using the clichéd image of femininity to further confuse her Italian audience:
And here she performs Waking up (Il risveglio) for TV that year:
The same old story, with its foul-mouthed dolly (translated by Ed Emery here; and in Stuart Hood’s booklet for the 1982 London performances), is particularly fine. She may be a tough act to follow, but here’s Jennifer Long performing the concluding doll story in English:
So anyway, once upon a time there was a lovely little girl who had a lovely little dolly. Well, actually, the dolly wasn’t lovely at all… she was all dirty and tatty and made of rags, and she used to say terrible swear words, which the little girl learned and went round repeating.
One day her mummy asked her: “But who on earth taught you those horrible swear words?” “My dolly,” said the little girl. “Ooh, you liar! You’ve been hanging round with those horrible boys.”
“No, mummy, really, it’s my dolly. Come on, dolly, say a few swear words for mummy!”
And the dolly, who always did everything the little girl asked her to do, because she loved her so much, came out with a whole string of terrible words: “Porca puttana! Stronzo! Mi piaci un casino! Culo!” [She chants, like a slogan] “Cu-lo, cu-lo, cu-lo!” […]
“Excuse me, gnomey,” she said, “have you seen a big ginger cat with a rag dolly in his mouth, who swears all the time?”
“Er, there he is, there,” says the gnome, waving with his willy, and splosh, he squirts out a big stream of widdle, which lands right on the ginger cat, which promptly falls down dead. Because, as we know, gnomes’ widdle is terribly poisonous for cats! […]
The dénouement makes the message clear:
And the grown-up little girl takes her dolly and hugs her closely closely to her, and gradually, gradually, the little dolly disappears, right into her heart.
And now the grown-up little girl is out there all on her own, on a long, long road… She walks and walks, and she comes to a big tree. And underneath that tree there are lots of other grown-up little girls just like herself, and they make her ever so welcome, and they say: “Sit down here… with us… We’re all telling our own stories. Why don’t you start…” they say to a fair-haired girl sitting there. And the girl begins: “When I was a little girl I had a rag doll who used to say terrible swear-words…”
“Me too!”
“Me too!”
“Me too!”
And all the girls burst out laughing. And one of them says: “Well, who would ever have imagined it: Your story… my story… We’ve all got the same story…!”
You can admire more of Franca Rame’s own performances on her YouTube channel, such as her version of Mistero buffo, debunking Catholicism (Dario Fo’s full version is here, with English translation here; cf. Patricia Lockwood).
For a general introduction to the series, see here.
Prelude—SJ This is Nick’s longest treatment so far in this series, almost a novella—subsuming the Middle Eastern conflict, Free France, the Cathars, Jacques Brel, a furniture-making course, the UNESCO football team in Lagos, an organists’ outing, and Nubia—with a moving dénouement. See also my own tributes to Lili and Nadia.
* * *
LILI BOULANGER French composer (1893–1918), younger sister of Nadia (1887–1979). Concerts and recording, 1999, with the LSO and Monteverdi Choir, directed by John Eliot Gardiner (who studied with Nadia).
192 anagrams, in strict sequence, of the 13-letter matrix, followed by an explanatory ‘story’, in whatever language came to hand.
This is no.11 of the anagram pieces I composed between 1989 and 2002; it’s the first, I would say, in which I attempt to go beyond a strict mapping of anagram/story, and venture into some narrative of my own. In my overall introduction to the series, I explain why it was precisely my inability to do this (write a freehand story) which lay behind my adoption of anagrammatic ‘automatic writing’. My excuse is that the scenes glimpsed elliptically in the course of the anagrams suggested to me larger panoramas, which I needed to explore more extensively to be fair to the letters’ fragmentary vision.
So for the Albi section in particular I resorted to some autobiographical material (and a fable from the Panchatantra), and for Lille too, where I was also influenced, in a generic way, by a story of J.L. Borges, as well as by the art nouveau heritage of the town itself.
The reader will judge better than I can the success of this strategy. I can’t regret deploying the associations which the anagrams themselves germinated, but the results leave me a bit ill at ease.
There’s another, quite distinct, circumstance to be taken into account with ‘Lili Boulanger’. I had completed the anagrams by the end of September 1999 (as indicated in the present text). The accompanying story took longer, and was put together over a period of a few more years, mostly during periods of work in London or on tour, though I believe it was substantially done by 2002. At any rate the whole piece had been completed, but only partially typed up (and put on a floppy disc) by 2007—and only up to the end of the Lille section of the story. This was the truncated part I had the wit to send to myself in an email: not all such accounts were web-based in those days. Our fire in Portugal in early 2009 destroyed not only most paper documents but also all floppy discs and CDs, as well as the computer itself and its hard disk.
Thus the final narrative sections, all after the Lille episode, have been reconstructed from memory during the last few years; they lack some of the detail which I know I had tracked down, specifically in Nubia and Egypt, but are as true to the original aperçus as I could manage.
* * *
LILI BOULANGER “O Rubin! Illegal! Ali’ll—” [Ben–Gurion].”I’ll…?” –Al. Our Begin: “Lo, ‘Bulgar’ Eli!” – I? “Olà! Irgun libel,” begin our Al, “Lil’ El Al lingo…” I rub liberal gun oil, a billion–Luger, bare loin. I gull Rabin: “Loge! Ulli! Liban grouille, Ulli Lego–brain.” Ulli anger boil. “U… obligé!” “Iran’ll bull IRA legion.” I? I’ll ogle urban guerrilla. “NB oil, Ali, oil–bungler, oil’ll ruin bagel…” “Liban gloire!” Ul… Leila gun brio! Luger—bon, I’ll – Aï!
* * *
Iron Gaulle: “Lib – ” Gaul libre? Loin. Berlin IOU gall; nul Albi gloire, Albi grenouille labouring, ill. Gaul—in Loire (blub)—la Loire! linger… No Gaul lib (il gain boule rill), all blue origin. Gr… beau lion ill. I long Brel, lui, à l’agile Libourne, Brel, la gui’nol. I—I, Raoul Belling—lui, Brel, a lingo: I unlog braille, I null Albi ogre, Balin. Le roi Lug! Lui!
Noble grail.
[GRAIL? NI!!]
* * *
“Boulle?” “All Gobelin, Rui. Burin goal, ille, ruling lobelia.” “Elgin—blur a loi?” “Ol’ Elgin burial.” “Ai! Gullible, Ron?” “Gullible on air. No liberal. Ugli?” Glen: “Oil o’ Blair, ‘u’ regional bill, Blair, lounge li…” “Ug. ‘Lionel’ Blair…” B.O.
LULL
Nigeria. Rogue ball: 1–nil. Eli blur in goal. Lor, il a bu! Nigel (Nigel A. Burillo): “Rolling, ’e, il a bu gill in Euro lab.” “Bull—ale origin. Ale or gin.” “I – ” “Bull!” Gin—rue Balliol. “Lo, binge lair,” lu our ill Belgian,Raul. “Gill, Niobe?” Niobe all girl, ‘u’, nubile gorilla. “I lug renal boil, I rung ill (Ebola), oiling rubella, ill—large bunion.” O, gullible air! “Ill, lurgi—o bane! I – I blur galleon…”
* * *
I go urban Lille, au boring Lille. Rob Lille gal in our Lille bang. I uni Lille Garbo—ubi Lille organ? L … Laure – boiling –
* * *
NUBIA ‘El Grillo’. Onager. Bill, lui, air lounge. “Bill?” “Ali, Reg? Bullion!” “Lor’!” “Ubi Agnelli?” “Gerona. Ibi Lull.” “Go—Iberian Lull? Olé, a bull–ring! I – I’ll bug aileron.” “Ignore Bill.” Lua. “I’ll ignore.” Blau, la lune, Rio glib. La lune – “Gil, biro.” “Nebula ?”—oil girl Gillian Rouble. “Leo, Libra, Gil nu?” “Bon, girl! Eulalie?” “Gloria in blu’, lo!” Alluring bile. “Banlieu, ol’ girl. A billion gruel.” “O, gruel in billabong!” Allure? “I lie—Goan Lilliburlero! Lug in Bali!” Ego all in blur, I, N. (‘Boileau’), grill brill. Louange? I ?? “Oi! Ungrillable! Bali rouille n.g., N.R.!” “Aioli–bulge!”—Lou. “Bengali rill. Gibier?” “Nul.” “Allô allô?” Lune. Big rig, blue lilo. I ran, un–label oil rig. “Oi!”—Niall, bugler. “U – ”, Ollie blaring, “lo urinal bilge.” Niall bougre, il, ignoble liar, lui, nubil, allegro, unlilo a gerbil (all Brie), oil gnu, ill Boer. In Gaul, longer alibi. Lua…
* * *
“Ole Bull,” I grin. Nubia—Rogé, Lill, “urbane Lill,” I go. Nullo Gabrieli—Iona. Lulli, Berg. ‘Go, Liu’ (‘Li’l Abner’), our lag Bellini—lo, Bellini ragù! Io liberal lung. Bing, Elli—(Raoul!)—Luba ‘il Re’. I long Gillian Loeb, ur–bell on ‘Liguria’. L. Borgia nulle. I, lorn… Lua. Liebig le loi… “Brian, lug our ale billing. ’lo, Lilian Grube!” “’lo!” I? I brung—alleluia!—Bollinger.
* * *
Böll: “Gin, Luria?” “Beluga.” Blini lager lou’. “Niro, Lil?” (e.g. Lil in labour). “Illiber’l guano.” “Brillig!” “Âne, Lou. Llaregub loin,” il gribouille. An alien lour, glib. “Lo, B. Luini glare!” “B. Luini allegro—Luigi, no–baller.” “ ‘Lear’ bingo—Ulli?” “ ‘Blau, ill, Goneril – ’ ” “ ‘– Regan, boil’ ” (I lu) “ ‘I boil lung…’ ” “ ‘Lear’??”
* * *
Nile log burial… a bull religion, boiling laurel; bull, or—ii!—angel. Gabriel? No, lui, Logi, Belial—run! L…lo, Ariel bulgin’ (‘Ariel’: lu ‘goblin’, il a goblin lure), ‘l’Aiglon’ Uriel belabouring ill Lili –
Blue organ. INRI—gall—o blue Eboli lira lung. Un albergo, Lili… ur–billig, alone. Rouge bilan, Lil.
Lo, un Lili Grabe. Burial. Lil gone.
London, July–September 1999.
* * *
“No doubt I wasn’t the first,” wrote David Ben–Gurion in his (unpublished) memoirs, “to wish that my similarly–motivated colleagues would stay on the right side of the law. Wasn’t Menachem a case in point? How could we wish to give more ammunition to the Arabs? Yet the ethos of the group, the sensation that all were against us, militated against open–handedness. When I tried to draw their attention to this, I was met by precisely the sort of prejudiced stereotyping which should have proved my point. But under conditions of war, it seemed to us, the niceties of human discourse were dispensed with. I was called a self–styled Balkan priest, while another comrade thought even that was too good for me, that my Spanish exile was causing me to slander the underground movement, and that I stood, by now, for little more than a sort of Broadway in–flight–magazine Zionism…”
I was reading this as we sat in the control room, Rabin, Ulli the Lebanese Israeli, Ali the Israeli Arab. I hitched up my shorts so that the lubricating oil we used so plentifully wouldn’t stain the cotton, and carefully anointed my revolver. I knew it was the most reliable weapon we had, a gun in a thousand, and couldn’t resist teasing the others, who drew from lower down the armoury. “Wotan’s sidekicks! Vous ne comprenez pas that Lebanon’s up in arms, you building–block–head?” Ulli seethed, I could tell, but he knew he couldn’t let it out openly. “Th… thanks for the news.” “Khomeini’s mullahs will make the Irish cohorts look like dairy cows…” I wasn’t interested in the subject any more. I was looking at a ‘Wanted’ poster on the concrete wall, of Leila Khaled. I couldn’t decide if she was attractive because of herself, or because of what she did, shirt half–open, Uzi at the ready; but I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. What was it that gave us this fascination with left–wing (exclusively left–wing, mind—if that’s what they really were—no neo–fascist ever got a look–in on this melancholy roll–call) activists, women and even men, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader—never a hero, actually, but Holger Meins, Jan–Carl Raspe, Astrid Proll—Patty Hearst wasn’t serious, she was a sort of John Travolta convert – – I smelt a terrible smell of burnt oil, and realised that Ali was warming up vegetable oil to use as a substitute for the proper gun lubrication, which he’d probably siphoned off to put in his jeep. I wouldn’t complain about this, we all did it, except that he re–used the oil in the bakery, and as a result the pretzels tasted dreadful…
So, after all, I was caught unprepared. My anti–hero/heroine surprised us thinking about food. The sun caught her gun in the doorway, as, brandishing her Levant war–cry, she pinned us down, now this way, now that, and with an ache I admired her panache even as I struggled to release my own pistol, good, I thought, yes… I wasn’t in time.
* * *
“Non! Non!! NON!!!” That’s the de Gaulle some of us know, l’homme de fer, and perhaps it’s true that at certain points in history it’s more important to be able to say ‘no’ with conviction than to accept. Even so, saying ‘no’ sets up a wall which must either be knocked down later, or side–tracked, or backed away from. If you say no, you should simultaneously be saying ‘yes’ to something else, to a wider freedom, not stopping half–way… And France was not free. Far from it. It depended on German repayments, a bitter pill to swallow. Raoul Belling, grandson of the inventor of the electric oven, and dreamer of druidic dominion, descended the slope behind Albi cathedral, to the gravelled walkway beside the river Tarn. An early morning mist was lifting from the river’s surface, as if burnt off by the great Apocalypse of the cathedral screen which hung hot in his mind, and he winced at the thought of how Albi’s huge red long–brick towers now stood for nothing, their Cathar legacy of gnostic communion reduced to the status of the poor frog he saw in an eddy, struggling to breathe, clearly poisoned by some pollution in the river. In his mind, the narrow Tarn broadened to become an image of the Loire, that vast river which is, like its territory, ever changing, reflecting the sky, yet ever massively the same, pouring on between its châteaux and vineyard flanks—France!
Tears started behind Raoul’s eyes as he slowed his pace, to take in his thoughts… “But France is not free!”, Raoul cried. As he walked on, kicking furiously at clumps of grass by the riverside, he came across a dried–up rivulet where he’d once played boules, in a time now lost in an indigo fog of memory. He gritted his teeth, growled into the thickets. “Our fine lion couldn’t overcome even a unicorn! Ah, how we need a Jacques Brel, who could pillory and glorify at once! ‘Ça sent la bière’, aussi le vin, it could be Bordeaux, Libourne on the shoulder of the Gironde” (looking out over Arcachon where Lili Boulanger went once hoping to restore her lost health)—“but Brel presides over all, the pantograph of pantomime –”.
Raoul remembered his visits to the Théâtre du Grand Guignol in Paris, in the Cour Chaptal in the 9th arrondissement: so close to Ary Scheffer’s house where Georges Sand and Chopin called, and to the little theatre where Alfred Jarry first threw ‘Ubu Roi’ at an unsuspecting world—‘Merdre’, a fine opening line for 1896—and to the house where Nadia and Lili lived… Brel continues to speak for us, hadn’t he written
On a détruit la Bastille Et ça n’a rien arrangé On a détruit la Bastille Quand il fallait nous aimer
‘Aucun rêve jamais / Ne mérite une guerre…’ No, that wasn’t the way. Hadn’t he also sung, in Litanies pour un Retour,
Mon Coeur ma mie mon âme Mon ciel mon feu ma flamme Mon puits ma source mon val Mon miel mon baume mon Graal
That was it! ‘Le retour’, as of a King Arthur, waking up himself and his people—‘voilà que tu reviens’!
[‘Mais pourquoi moi, pourquoi maintenant, et.. où aller? (…) Mais qu’est–ce–que jamais j’ai fait d’autre—qu’arriver?’ – J.Brel, J’arrive]
“And this,” cried Raoul aloud, “is where we need our old woodland god, Lugh! Light, clarity! The striking of the midday sun into the forest glade!” Raoul, metaphorically booting out the inner infidel, aimed a kick at a broken pot in the grass verge, suddenly depressed again, knowing that light can’t exist without dark, and unable to see his way from one to another, yet sure this was a worthy quest…
He didn’t see, bound up as he was, the shard that he’d kicked into the undergrowth. It might have born an unnerving resemblance to the Grail he so ardently sought… and it did carry the relic of an inscription which strangely echoed—or prefigured, so time–worn did the fragment appear—the motto of the Revolution.
There’s no way of ascertaining the original text of this lost inscription, but a tentative reconstruction might go as follows:
GAUL LION LIBRE ? OUI, SI ÉGAL IN LOI, BRÛLEZ PAS DANS LE
FEU ILLÉGAL—IN BROTHERHOOD
AND SISTERHOOD, ÔC!
And a translation might be: ‘Is the Lion of Gaul free? Yes, if equal in law, burn not in the illegitimate fire [we can take this to be a reference to the savage Languedoc persecution of the Cathars, and similarly, given the prominent role taken by women in the ‘heretical’ movement, complete the final phrase with the necessary implication]—unissez–vous, frères et soeurs!’ and ending with the Occitane version of the initial northern French ‘oui’ (prudently moving these last unconventional words round to the unseen side of the vase). It may be surprising, but is certainly heartwarming, to find English mixed with French in this inscription from medieval southern France; testifying to a sense—an actuality!—of fellowship and elision of national (and regional, and linguistic—òc!) borders at a time when everything seemed against them.
No one, to my mind, has explained better than Rudolf Steiner the precise application of the famous triad which this Albi fragment adumbrates:
Liberté—in thought Egalité—in law Fraternité—in economics.
Try jumbling up the categories (as do almost all modern societies): they don’t work, you have chaos.
But there are those who prefer not to think about it, much less try to aim for it as a goal (or grail); even some chivalric orders dare not contemplate the true implications of their allegiance, preferring to dally in a shrubbery.
* * *
On the last day of the Furniture–Making Techniques course we gathered in the piano nobile of the Musée Cognacq–Jay. Rui, the Brazilian student, hadn’t quite memorised the historical module, but it didn’t matter. “Not marquetry, but tapestry,” I reminded him. “Engraving’s over there: look how the artist has directed the chisel point, to bring out the overriding floral motif.” “Monsieur –” broke in a French student. “Do you think the Parthenon marbles have the right to stay in England? Aren’t the legal grounds a bit shaky?” “Can’t you let that hoary subject lie?” retorted Ron, a blunt English student. “Oh, Ron, are you so easily taken in?” “When anyone’s listening. I don’t believe in a free–for–all, unlike the so–called socialist government, if that’s what you mean. Would you like an exotic fruit, by the way?” “That Blair’s unctuousness is spread all over the Highlands,” interposed a Scotsman. “Devolution’s only of use to the well–off, people at home in smart salons, like him, the slim – ” “Yuk. You make him sound like a media–courting ballet–dancer.” Oh, imagine the slight scent of his overheated body in the green-room…
* [alchemicalpause] *
One of my less likely career moves was to take up an appointment as manager of the UNESCO football team in Lagos, West Africa. I remember all too well the only match for which I was (nominally) responsible. Eli, in goal, was totally pissed, and when by mistake the Nigerians knocked the ball towards him he reacted like streaked lightning and missed it. Opinions on the touchline were varied, if strongly held. “He’s been at the samples in the laboratory,” reckoned Nigel, a scientist of Latin American descent. “Rubbish,” I snorted. “This is just too many beers. Or spirits.” “Well, look…” Nigel tried to insist. “Rubbish!” I cried again. Didn’t he understand that individual drunkenness was infinitely preferable to the suspicion of misuse of official chemical supplies? But as I remonstrated, I was suddenly flooded by the recollection of another summer’s day, in my college rooms in Oxford, arriving back from a lecture in the Classics Faculty, where my view of the beautiful Greek sculpture of Niobe had been interrupted only by the even more beautiful profile of the girl I hadn’t yet dared to speak to, but surely, after I’d poured myself this drink, I would – I would – “You’re drinking in your hidden memory,” Raul interrupted my bittersweet reminiscence, his sallow face unsullied by irony. He wasn’t well, but he generally made nothing personal of it, in his unfluent Belgian English, as if it were merely a sequence of unpleasant things which might be happening to a mutual acquaintance. “You liked to have been Eric Gill, artist lover of fifty, Niobe, fifty times loved?” How did he know? But he didn’t see Niobe like I did, full of animal desirability and yet, somehow, on my social level. “My kidney’s got a chronic abscess, I had to call in sick with Legionnaire’s Disease, my scarlet fever’s suppurating, I’m malade, I’ve a great boil,” continued Raul. He looked so innocently surprised by all this! And then, suddenly, he burst out in horrified misery, “I am not well, I have a sickness, o curse! And I can’t make out any ship that might carry me home…”
* * *
This year’s Organists’ Outing was to Lille, in northern France. None of us knew much about it, except that it was a big, dull city. But as our interest was simply in the instrument in St M—Church, this hardly worried us.
For everybody else, that’s how it remained, and perhaps remains to this day. But at the reception when we arrived—verbena tea, almond biscuits—I found myself next to a dark French girl with a ringlet of hair hanging over her ear, which fascinated me. As we listened to the welcoming speeches, she removed a hair–pin and shook her curls free. She put the kirby–grip on the table next to her name–card, which had a Lille address on it. The clip was of some matt alloy, and seemed to be shaped like a nymph, or siren, whose fingers, held above her head, merged back into the metallic matrix. Without understanding why I was doing it, and as she was looking in another direction, I took the card and the brooch from the table and put them in my pocket. Perhaps to prevent her having the opportunity to notice this, I asked her in a rush, when she next looked round, if she was going to the dinner after that evening’s recital. She replied “Je préfère être seule”. Soon after, she left, without another word.
There was still an hour and a half to go until the recital. We would only meet the organist afterwards, so the others were setting out to discover a few Lille cafés. I took out the card from my pocket, and read the address. In Lille things work well, except the motions of the heart, and I was able soon to be walking down the street where she, perhaps, lived. (Though even amongst my colleagues, carefully ensconced in the centre, all did not necessarily go smoothly: one member of the group, directed aurally to the restaurant ‘Lutterbach’, spent an age trying to find ‘Le Tabac’.)
Heading, as I felt, away from civilisation, after many minutes I found myself in front of a stone porch, on each side entwined with carvings of bay trees. Above it I took in moulded forms of male and female figures playing, disputing, nymphs with locks cascading over their ears and gods priapically rampant, yet none quite touching another, always reaching… and as the evening sun hit the horizon and blurred my sight, a warm heavy summer rain started to fall, which began stealthily to wash away the details of the carvings in their soft sandstone, starting with the protuberances and ending with the eyes…
I looked at my watch and realised that I was far too late to attend the recital, where perhaps she was. I returned to the city centre, and took the night train back home. I would have put all this behind me, as a dream, but have not been able to forget that at one moment, as (already unmanned, stammering, in my mind) I was looking at her name–card ‘Laure…’, her wrist inadvertently brushed mine; and my skin still felt as if scalded.
* * *
NUBIA
The setting is northern Africa—desert wilderness mingled with the appurtenances of multinational oil extraction. It’s night.
A lone cicada sounds across the landing strip (I think with nostalgia of Josquin). A wild ass trots across the floodlit patch in front of the terminal. I’ve come to meet Bill, who’s taken refuge in the only cool place, the airline lounge.
Bill tells us there’s a delivery of gold ingots, asks where the Turin industrialist is. I reply he’s in Catalonia, just where Ramon Llull worked—by a curious coincidence, on the transmutation of base elements into gold.
Bill, quipping about tauromachy but amused by the Lull connection, wants to keep an eye on all this, but we agree to leave him out of the loop. A great moon, blue at first, begins to rise over the airfield. A Copacabana moon, which somehow doesn’t convince… I’m thinking hard as I go through the usual astrological banter with Gillian Rouble, perhaps not her real name, as she seems to be connected with Russian oil oligarchs. Some of her pithier expressions make me wonder why I ever fancied her (Eulali’s quite fun), but she turns the conversation round till I hardly know who I am (a French man of letters?) and am persuaded to set up the little barbeque we have, and prepare some fish fillets. However I’ve failed again—hoping for praise, I’ve brought out as requested my special Indonesian garlic sauce, but it’s gone off, and everyone declares it inedible. Haven’t I any game instead? Non. The teasing goes on.
Desolate, I look out over the runway, where the moon is looming more and more. And in its blue light, I see something strange on the oil–drilling tower: protective suits, an inflatable mattress—I need to change the labelling urgently, and sprint across the field.
I’ve been spotted, alas, by Niall and Ollie, whose job it was, but who always exaggerate grossly when anything untoward happens. As I try to cover up whatever unnatural coupling is going on, we swap globe–trotting repartee, in a game I think I’m losing, but at least I may have avoided official disgrace. We’d get off more lightly in France… I blame the moon.
* * *
Elsewhere in Nubia… discussions about the coming arts festival. “Let’s think about the residential course,” I smiled round at the committee. “How about historical fiddle techniques in Scandinavia? And then the main programme: for our desert climate, something classical—Debussy, Beethoven, bourgeois excellence, piano recitals under the stars. We won’t have Venetian renaissance, that’s being done in the Scottish Isles.” “But we could have French baroque?” “How about Expressionism?” “I think they’d like stylish musicals mixing Puccini and Broadway, a medley of Italian opera (we could sell pizza in the interval), singers who can let out to their hearts’ content…” “White Christmas?” “… and a couple of turns by our own stars –” I round up, “that means you, Elli, and Raoul, and to crown it the majestic Organosova.” It’s a fine line–up, for a first season, but I’m just thinking of my lost girl, with whom I’d chimed as if for the first time on the cruise–ship over from Italy. She was no Lucretia, but…
The moon sailed higher. I considered the condenser rules in our home–brew store, and had a better idea. There was another girl, after all, and Brian to sort out the paperwork, and I’d a supply of—glory be!—champagne.
* * *
Notes on a meeting between the German writer [Heinrich] Böll and the Russian neuropsychologist A.R. Luria [unless it is the 16th-century kabbalist Isaac Luria, but the context seems to favour the former].
Böll: “Will gin be alright?” Luria: “Just give me caviar.” Yes, and no doubt pancakes, and several beers, that would be like him. “Have you seen any good films lately? And by the way, I hope Liliana’s pregnancy’s going well.” “Gullshit is deposited most selectively.” “Wow,” Louis, his secretary, exclaims. “Lewis Carroll, yeah?” “You ass,” Luria groans, “it was meant to be Dylan Thomas, though admittedly not very close.” And he tries to settle his face into a Martian scowl. Böll again: “Ach, I’ve seen that look on a fresco in Milan!” “Luini’s too cheerful—I was thinking of an Italian with a crooked elbow.” Böll: “There’s an idea—we could play Shakespeare consequences! Ulli,” (that’s me, the interpreter), “I’ll start.
‘Blue, ill, Goneril –’ ”, “ ‘Regan, seethe’ ”, I read. Luria: “ ‘Stewed tripe for me…’ ” “That’s not Shakespeare!”
* * *
The world of the dead, in ancient Egypt, lay on the west side of the Nile: one moved towards the setting sun. And one moved by boat, of course, a boat carved or constructed out of wood. In other times, and places, rites might be associated with bulls and bull games (Minoan Crete), Pythian oracular mysteries (Delphi), or—oh! Hebrew, Mithraic or Christian angels. In this case, not the annunciating Gabriel, as we’re talking of a death. There are other forces, Loki, Baal, best to keep out of their way. Look, look… another mercurial spirit, Ariel, whom we think beneficent though he can have a demonic aspect—and now Gabriel’s counterpart, the summer archangel Uriel, who presides over Lili’s illness, plucking at her insides like the eagle at Prometheus’ liver.
But Crohn’s seems like a moon illness, a poor person spreadeagled on the crux of their own anatomy. Acrid as the bile given to the hung Christ (butChrist stopped at Eboli…). One can understand though why Lili Boulanger tried to turn to the sun in Arcachon (I did the same myself, seventy years later, hoping to salvage a disappearing love). However there was no cure even if you could pay for it, in any currency.
I can imagine Lili, in extremis, looking to find anywhere away, however simple, however cheap, by herself, knowing her account had passed into the red; but the trouble remained inside.
Lili Boulanger was buried in the cemetery of Montmartre. I have visited her grave, where she was joined by her elder sister Nadia over sixty years later, and I didn’t feel her presence there. I was glad, as that meant she is now everywhere.
Nicolas Robertson, London – Lisbon 1999–2021, with acknowledgements to Charles Pott, Tom Phillips, Rachel Wheatley, inter al.
The roster of early American humorists commonly begins with Mark Twain, but he was in good company. Nick Robertson, creator of the outstanding anagram fantasies, led me to the oeuvre of Corry O’Lanus (John Stanton, 1826–71).
Corry O’Lanus.
As the Brooklyn Programme commented (Mark Twain’s letters, vol.2, p.45),
As a humorous writer Stanton has no equal in New York or Brooklyn. While his fun is not so boisterous as Artemus Ward’s, or so cutting and sarcastic as Orpheus C. Kerr’s, or so wildly burlesque as John Phoenix’s, there is a gentle ripple of pure fun about it—humor, in fact—which makes one hug himself (sic) with pleasure to read.
All this while their cohorts were decimating the native population… (see under Native American cultures).
The complete works of Josh Billings (Henry Shaw, 1818–85) are here; those of Artemus Ward (Charles Browne, 1834–67) here. On Ward’s 1866 visit to England he wrote for Punch and gave drole lectures:
Left, portrait of Ann Stephens, c1844; right, Marietta Holley.
Nor should we neglect early female humorists. Antecedents of the great Dorothy Parker included Ann Stephens (1810–86) (links to her works here);Francis [Frances] Whitcher (1811–52); and Marietta Holley (1836–1926), aka Josiah Allen’s Wife (sic), who wrote on women’s rights and prohibition.
Among the wealth of later figures, on this blog I’ve dabbled in Groucho, Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen (here, here), and David Sedaris. Right now, Patricia Lockwood seems the most exceptional of all, her hilarious style and literary flair merely a vehicle for her insights.
For a general introduction to the series, see here.
MISSA SOLEMNIS Setting of the Mass, by Beethoven; soloists, Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, directed by John Eliot Gardiner, performances in various European cities, 1994.
Sequence of 92 anagrams followed by a parallel text (composed at the same date).
* * *
MIMESIS SALONS “Melisma, sons, is some sisal sin. M-minims, o lasses? Ass loses minim, ass in LSO mimes. Lo! ‘Messias’ in MS: me main loss is S. Simeon’s Missal.” Noam smiles, “Is S-Sionism Mass ‘El Al’—is MS Simeon’s?” “O, Missal in mess! Lone, I miss Mass. Missa ‘no smiles’!”
* * *
“Massie’s slim, no? I’m no less mass, I slam emissions, males’ missions, I mess men’s soil, Islam, Simeon, SS…” “…SS means…” – is Milo – “Means Miss Lois!” “SS! – “ “MALE SIONISM,” slam Sion’s misses, “Mole in SAS.” “Miss? Salem, Miss??” “SION!” Miasm’l session: Salome ‘Miss Sin’, lemon Isis, mass lissom Messina, anis, slim; Moses (Solesm’ Sinaï MS), Amos (“missiles ’n Mosesism nails Limies”), Samson’s Messianism, Sol (“less Miami, sons!”); M—Moses is slain!
* * *
Lemnos is a miss. Selim’s maisons… “Mil s/Sâone, si, Ms...” “Minos ass, Selim. Smiles, moans, is Somali mess. Sin!” – Emma iss sinlos?? – “Sins?” – Emma. “Soils lessons Mimi ’as.” (Mimi’s lessons: animal mess. So is loess.) “Imam’s sins!” “Amis, lessons! Minimal mess, so is…” “Is seminal, Moss!”
“Some snail, Sims?” “Semi-snail.” “Moss?” “Miss semolinas. Less Mosiman‟, is slim seasons. I’m seismal.” Simon: “ ’s molasses sin?” “I’m sinless, mimosa…” Mason’s smile is simian, Mo’s less. Mason’s is miles, miles on; Sam’s is aimless. “No!” – Miss Melissa Simons, Islam nose, Miss ‘I’m Miss Sloanes’. Slim men’s oasis. (Limn oasises, Ms. Simons, Melissa…) “Siam melons, sis?” “Melons mi ass—is lemons! Assisi moles…” “Sam’s minis?” “Sam’s mini-sole’s semi-salmon, sis.” Sam misses loin, misses ma’s lino.
Alone, miss Miss.
* * *
ACTING CLASSES (ON THURSDAY AFTERNOONS) The students appreciated the familiar style of their professor, iconoclastic as he was and at home in any period of musical history: “Look, guys, you can fall into a pretty thorny error if you go on spinning out your melodic lines on one syllable – “Y-y-” (he has an occasional slight stammer) “You want some advice about white notes, girls? Only the sort of donkeys who mark time in the back desks of symphony orchestras need that. Look, here’s really something: I’ve seen the manuscript of Handel’s Messiah, and it’s in German! But that’s nothing beside the Saint-Simon partbooks, lost now alas.”
One of the professor’s friends, the philosopher Noam Chomsky, shows a hitherto unattested interest in musicology, and combining disarmingly friendly attention (poking a tiny and good-hearted bit of fun at the stammer) with incisive grasp of the matter asks, “Are you telling me the p-parody mass “Oh, for the wings of a dove, Oh, to home may I roam‟ is in the Saint-Simon codex?” “God knows, the sources are all jumbled up. I seem to be the only one who’s noticed this lacuna, and it’s no laughing matter, it’s as if there were a whole Missa Solemnis out there up for grabs…”
* * *
Fade to a cricket match in the 70s, where a popular sporting figure, in this case an Australian swing bowler (unless it’s the unfairly neglected Scottish novelist), turns out to serve as but a peg on which to hang an array of prejudices, thus:
“I put it down to build. I weigh about the same as him, though it may not look like it, and I too hate the idea that we men have some divine right just because we give out instead of taking in, and that’s the way it is and so on… And anyway, I like to queer our pitch a bit, I mean, we’re sentenced by the Koran, the Bible, Mein Kampf…” “You know what’s going to happen if you touch that topic,” warns a man called Milo. “Yeah. It means that girl Lois.” “But you might not have fully appreciated her extreme views, and …” And sure enough, Lois and her defenders of the faith can be heard demonstrating in the street outside, brutally lumping pro- and anti-Semites together as, worst of all, MEN, rather surprisingly going on to suggest there’s an undercover agent in the élite armed forces, or is it that they propose that there should be one? I can’t say, but I do know that when clearly and politely asked if they will plump for graceful retirement to a borough known for witch-hunting they opt noisily for a mountain top nearer the crucible of contemporary world history.
And thus doing, leave the field to a lurid succession of febrile fantasies, seven veils hardly disguising the citrus flanks of the gorgeous goddess of the Nile, nor the ranks of the sinuous girls of Sicily, high on pastis yet still so slender… A variety of prophets give credence to a French monastery’s claim to own the holograph of the Ten Commandments, and to the theory that a hallowed legal framework plus a few bombs should be enough to keep the British in line. A strong man is seen to betoken a once and future king amidst the ruin of the philistines, and another king enjoins less vice—of the south-eastern US kind in particular—upon his progeny; but the fabric falls apart as we hear the stammered news that the lawgiver has bitten the dust, who now is the authority for any of this?…
* * *
Well, Greek islands are not always what they’ve been cracked up to be; for one thing, they may feature ‘houses’ built by a Cretan-Ethiopian Muslim polyglot who wrings his hands, is effusive in French about a thousand other developments which have apparently been runaway successes—and leaves you sadly disillusioned. You could call his conduct wrong, and that’s certainly what Emma does—who is she to talk? mein Gott—but she talks alright: It’s such a shame , ‘t interferes with Mimi’s classes,” (though Mimi’s classes are a zoo, are in fact about as clean as mud) “actually I blame the muezzin.” And, on cue: “My friends, come to catechism!” the elevated voice clarions, “little is the interference with –” – WITH THE SEED FROM WHICH YOU SPRANG, YOUNG MOSS?? –
a whisper is heard, urgent, can the boy have seen right, can it be, o god mother believe him, the lad Moss is not what he seems –
“What, is Moss not one of us? Call the headmistress!”
“OK, calm down everybody, no, I’m not a woman, I’m in fact a man and have been all along, I’m sorry about the deception but it was necessary, as you’ll find out. Miss Soames was my mother, which is how I managed to fool you, looking so like her—and here’s my team, tough experienced men all.” Here, Nils gives a sort of Portuguese grin, yes, that’s the one, and gestures to the men to introduce themselves, which they do with exemplary terseness, until it comes to Simmons, who when alerted to his turn asks Emma, “D’you still drive that old banger?” and has to be interrupted by his superior who reminds him shortly that carbon monoxide effluvia are known to be injurious. But then they’re off, on their perilous mission…
* * *
I can’t believe that they’re after me—as an ALIEN! O, I’m tired, I’m hungry—but that gives me an idea, here’s somewhere I can go to ground. “What do you think,” they’re asking Sam, “escargots?” “If someone’ll share with me.” “And you?” I tell them I have a yearning for tapioca, but I’m one of those who think nouvelle cuisine portions an extravagance, given that I’m trying to lose weight. As a result, I admit, I’m volcanically starving. Simon wonders if raw cane sugar is bad for you, and is rewarded by virtuous invitations to ‘sin, flower’.
I watch the face of Mason, his atavistic grin, of Maurice, trying hard to keep up, of Sam, without compass bearing now, while Mason finds himself in some unfathomable future… The spell is broken, o bittersweet epiphany, by the arrival of Melissa, her semitic profile and Harvey Nichols clothes accentuating her availability only to those lean pale men who earn access to her fount… (O Melissa, unwed yet, tell how are these founts, describe your secret sources…)
“Like a slice of this Thai honeydew?”, Melissa’s brother asks her. “Doncha honeydew me, this is a citrus fruit. My Franciscan insiders don’t lie…” And those little flatfish Sam hoped were Dover sole? “I’m sorry, Sam, what you thought were baby plaice were salmon fillets.” I see Sam looking lost, longing for a good roast beef, longing for the dirty cracked floor of mum’s kitchen –
Left on my own, I realise that what I long for is her.
Nicolas Robertson Lübeck – Duisburg – Vienna, June–November 1994/ Outurela, Portugal, May 2020
Last week David Cameron was keen to remind us that the current rabble of Tory ministers doesn’t enjoy a monopoly on venality, duplicity, and incompetence. As he reflected on his informal consultancy role for Greensill, stimulated entirely by a desire to help people [Yeah right], he offered some useful tips for alleged gang members politely requested to attend a hearing. Some handy expressions:
I accept that no matter how laudable the motives and cause, [nailing people’s heads to the floor] can be open to misinterpretation.
The amount I stood to gain is a private matter. I don’t recall exactly… I haven’t got a complete record of how many times [I used the private jet].
I take a different view. I was motivated by how to help small businesses.
There are great advantages to be had from technical innovation [just look at chainsaws].
My threats communications were not excessive or a distraction.
[Mugging old ladies] was an honest mistake. I have spent most of my adult life in “public service”. I believe in it deeply [sincere face]. I would never put forward something that I didn’t believe was absolutely in the interests of the public good.
I welcome this enquiry and the related reviews. I am as keen as anyone to learn the lessons.
Dodgy Dave’s turn may remind us of the old Piranha brothers sketch:
Interviewer: I’ve been told Dinsdale Piranha nailed your head to the floor. Stig: No. Never. He was a smashing bloke. He used to buy his mother flowers and that. He was like a brother to me. But the police have film of Dinsdale actually nailing your head to the floor. [pause] Oh yeah, he did that. Why? Well he had to, didn’t he? I mean there was nothing else he could do, be fair. I had transgressed the unwritten law. What had you done? Er… well he didn’t tell me that, but he gave me his word that it was the case, and that’s good enough for me with old Dinsy. I mean, he didn’t want to nail my head to the floor. I had to insist. He wanted to let me off. He’d do anything for you, Dinsdale would.
Homeless people are in desperate need of your support. Please help. Cash donations only, in strictest confidence.
In an inexplicable recent aberration at the supermarket I inadvertently bought slimline tonic. Turns out, all things considered, it’s really not too bad, as long as you leave hardly any room for it by first filling the glass up with gin. That will have to pass for a culinary tip.
Talking of health-food options, * that reminds me:
In the Good Old Days, in search of sustenance before recording sessions for John Eliot Gardiner I sometimes used to go to a caff for breakfast with the principal oboist, who was not exactly an elfin waif. He would cheerfully order 2 sausages, 2 bacon, black pudding, 2 fried eggs, fried bread, hash browns, beans, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms, with side-orders of double buttered toast and a large bowl of chips. Then he’d look at the waitress (sic) and go,
For a general introduction to the series, see here.
Note—SJ Moving on from Mozart opera (Noon? Gad—vini!, Cite not Faust, and Tag, licht—fumée), the world revealed in Die Schöpfung is yet another remarkable creation, indeed The Creation…
* * *
DIE SCHOEPFUNG Oratorio by Haydn; concert performances by solo singers, English Baroque Soloists, and Monteverdi Choir, directed by John Eliot Gardiner, 1993.
One hundred and one consecutive 13-letter anagrams—liberally punctuated—followed by an “interpretation”, one of an unlimited (though not infinite) number of possible parallel texts. The ‘oe’ component of Schoepfung in German can be represented (and more often is, even in transliteration) by ‘ö’; I chose the extra ‘e’, a legitimate alternative and an invaluable aid for the anagrams.
* * *
NICE FUDGE SHOP Fed such pigeon pie, Ogden Fuchs is God. Fee: punch Spence, hug Fido. Feed, cough, spin, gosh, epic fun! Eden!
“Fish?” God, puce. Deuce fish pong. Cede fungi: “Shop! Cèpe ’n fish, Doug?” “Deign chef soup, cop. Feud hinges on chef’s pud.” “E.g.?”, I chide fop. “Genus: fudge.” Phön (sic) pings… Echo— “…feud.” “Sponge feud?” (hic)
Gnu, fed ice, hops: hops fence I dug. Feed no such pig, singe chop… “…feud.” Poe chides gnu , ff—deep sonic hug: “Puce hog! Fiends, go dupe finches! Défi, gnu, Cheops she, Punic; God, fend foe!…”
Epic gush.
GENOCIDE Push ff: EP disc enough. Edison Pugh (F.E.C.), he confused pig Ché, duping foes of Pugh.
CHIC CONFECTIONERS Having eaten one of the best game pies of his life, Ogden Fuchs feels great. But there’s a price to pay: he has to hit the owner (Doug Spence) and embrace his dog. You eat, you belch, your head goes round a bit—that’s living all right, that’s paradise.
“You want some fish now?” calls Doug, holding out the olive branch so to speak. Ogden pales and implores heaven. There’s a desperate stench of old fish hanging in the air. But perhaps he could take it, if accompanied by mushrooms—wild mushrooms. With an attempt at jauntiness he cries, “You in there! What about turbot aux morilles?” “If I were you I’d go for the consommé, squire. Bear in mind though—it’s the dessert which’s really putting the cat amongst the pigeons…” “Miaaow exactly?” Ogden jokes, so badly he hopes as subtly to deflate the fey maître d’. “We’re talking butterscotch.” Doug’s Swiss-made telephone gives an icepick blast. As the sound rings around the room, Ogden thinks he hears a ghostly voice repeating “trouble… trouble…” “Trifle trouble?” he burps, and lapses into memories of a wildebeest he’d known. As a child, he’d fed it snow, and it had leapt in alarm, right across the palisaded moat he’d been excavating. Better not, he’d realised, give just any food to creatures who’ll eat anything: better to burn their whiskers.
‘Trouble…’—does Ogden really hear this? Lost as he now is in deep reverie, hearing rather the voice of his beloved Edgar Allan as if reprimanding the wildebeest in in a voice stentorian and yet somehow embracing the poor animal in a warm flood of sound:
‘Sickly brown thou gorgest piglike, (Devils! Fly and fool the birds!) Brazen bold confront Queen Pharaoh, Antelope, Hannibal in herds: Gnu divine, cleave enemies of thine…’
Truly, the stuff of legend.
MASS MURDER In another part of town, Edison Pugh (known to his friends as ‘F.E.C.’, excuse me, ‘fucking erudite cunt’), he who led ‘that bastard Guevara’ into the final Bolivian trap, thus thoroughly throwing his own enemies off the scent—Edison is entertaining. A couple of tracks from Haydn’s Creation, in German, played at full volume on his anachronistic stereo is sufficient for everybody, but conversation soon flows again, viz.:
“I managed to stymie that Euro-directive,” says Hugo, “I reckoned the distilled juniper subsidy would keep the Japs happy.” Hugo’s a closet boy-fancier with a receding profile reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe, or so he‘d like to believe. “Not even close, you and your imaginary Puero-directives, you great horrible poof”, laughs Charles Fauntleroy Greatorex Dough-Penis. “Sounds ideal material for a Future England Captain, Edison, no?” “Hoist by his own pet ’ard-on, rather.” “Oh, really, you old faggot!” “No, honestly, imagine if young Desmond here had applied a touch of Calvin Klein pur Homme…” “Shame on you, Edison. More wine?” “Ooh yes!” “What exactly would you say is the UN’s role with regard to children?” This is Hugo, trying in his inept way to get back into the conversation. “Christ, what a question. Round them up like a sheepdog? Comfort them like a lapdog? Defend them like a bulldog? Hang on, maybe there‘s something in this. What if – ”
There’s a sudden loud explosion of gunfire, which dies away as rapidly. Hugo whinnies like a horse and stammers feebly “I was worried about Portugal‘s progress in the ERM.” Somehow ‘Dirty Old Town’ is playing loudly on the revived stereo, as a blind Chinese incestuous parricide bursts noisily in with a steaming plateful he claims is for his aged president, the Mike Atherton of the Far East. Edison gestures to everybody to start singing, to raise morale. But it’s more trouble, an earful of cacophony reminiscent of the Footwear Band and likely to raise hackles at raves in the Home Counties: unconscious Freudian bird-echoes such as led to the kidnapping of a Venetian plenipotentiary, and united Cambridge geographers in hasty anti-sinology.
You think there’s anything clever in this? Our friends find themselves obliged to stuff fruit into their mouths while warbling, wash down a sow and her litter because the third sheep in line was found to have athlete’s foot: in short (bitter contrast with Ogden Fuchs’ earlier bliss) ingest, stockpile Gordon’s in the cheeks like hamsters, get blown full in the face by puffball spheres. It reminds me of an Old Testament porcine conflict—
– Memo to Bureau Chief: Pretend interference of paranormal nature with software – Why, for gossake? – It‘s that word PORCINE
You know what that Vietnam-vet hoped? That ‘porcine’ meant ‘funghi porcini’, the beloved boletus of his Italian youth; and he couldn‘t take it, running as he does an armourer’s, it‘s enough to drive him to blur that yearning with analgesics.
* * *
“We could do with a drink, you know,” snorted Denis soon after the heist, a character as I should explain straight out of those days when youngsters shut themselves inside sordid bars, reckoned they could sort out the spiritual problems of the deranged poultry of life, dangled but half-censored goodies within reach of dealers… “Sola Lolita OK for you, ’Umberto, ’Umberto? Behold!” “You’re the sort of person who laughs in a Mozart comic opera.” “Hang on, now…” he temporised softly. “You call this wealth, Nigel?” Denis asked in a yellow voice. “Well, it’s bread, if only peanuts. If I were you, I’d blow it right away. Give the bastards a treat!” (Yes, that’s what I have it down that he said.) Denis kicked his all-weather tyre, muttering in his funny clipped way, “Slurs us up, demned mist.” “Mist?”—Nigel had a sudden idea. The Thames Valley Police were bound to be on their way, and he slammed on the short-wave radio: “Police are warned to beware of impossible weather conditions! You’ll only find us gone to ground Stateside, Plod, you know, growing our own fruit trees like Adam or George Washington, no lie, we’re off to Paradise!”
* * *
Do you feel this self-indulgent ill-spelt Dickensry fills a gap? Do you find it… gregariously… fertilising?
* * *
For a moment, a great wail behind the quotidian din, can be heard the cry: “We’ve lost hold of LOVE, and…”
But detail reasserts itself: a discredited politician (or, it might be, a longed-for paradise) politely chides us, requesting we not confuse quiet with loud, at which point the compiler of these pages apparently declares a moratorium on the whole dichotomy.
So, to end, a little music: perhaps Edison’s (you could say, my) party has resumed. Amid official incredulity, announcement is made of a fugue, in the German spelling, by Chopin, in the key of G major. No one’s scorn, of course, is greater than that of our camp friend who likes to dress up as a South American liberationist, and who—also using, with bitter sarcasm, the German note-names—brands no less than half the octave meretricious kitsch, a vade mecum of ‘intellectual’ fakery …
But as the first, lonely, rising fourth is heard, scepticism turns to rapture: the cry goes up, in French and German, “Oh, Dervish sage of Marseille!”, “Oh, you lovely man!”. And then, the master-stroke: devastatingly turning on its head ‘Ché’ ’s indictment, Chopin (employing an unprecedented time-signature of Pythagorean proportion) breathes a delicate, modal sigh, resting on a left-hand accompaniment of a simple minor third as a sleepy head on a pillow, slyly working in too a ‘forte-piano’ marking—perhaps to convey that brief half-waking engendered by the shutting of a distant door, or the strictures of an editor…
What? Why must you bother me right now? I’m not hungry! Tell Hugo he can go to the devil!
Nicolas Robertson Vienna, Jan–Oct 1993 / Outurela, Portugal, April 2020
with thanks to Charles Pott ( the title anagram!) and other colleagues.
In a rather weird yin–yang pattern with David Sedaris, Bridget Christie also has a new series on BBC Radio 4, a collage of her internal musings on Mortality, with four episodes on Birth, Life, Death, and Afterlife delivered from various domestic settings including her wardrobe.
She’s never very impressed by myth—such as Sisyphus:
I know he was really old, but it was only one thing he had to do, wasn’t it, he only had to push the boulder up the hill—it’s hardly a curse, he didn’t have to do all the housework at the same time or try and find the meaning of life or read Eckhart Tolle’s book—or home-school his kids… ridiculous… If the goddess had cursed him, she’d have given him a hundred things to do at the same time: “Right ’ere, get that boulder up that ’ill, and while you’re at it, shake the crumbs outta the toaster, match up the Tupperware, and mow the ’ill on yer way back down an’ all.”
It’s all suitably low-key.
If you are mortal, then this is the show for you.
The washing-machine cycle recurs as a metaphor. In “Death” (an idée fixe of Woody Allen, such as “Death Knocks”), getting through at last to her washing-machine insurance, she gets bogged down trying to read out her interminable reference number.
F! for, for… Foible, you know—foibles? Somebody’s foibles. F-O-I—F for foible… Yeah. For Foxtrot, yeah you could, you could use Foxtrot, yeah. B! Like a, you know… Bzzz. Bottom? Bee or bottom, yes.
D. I’m sorry, I do know a lot of words, I can just never think of them when I’m under pressure like this. D for Daub. DAUB! Like “I daubed the wall with paint”. DAUB! D-A–U-B-E-D… Oh—they’ve put me on hold again.
In “Afterlife” the disembodied voice of her soul comes into its own, finally more endearing than annoying. Surveying the options offered by various societies, Ms Christie is again underwhelmed by the Greek version (“there’s a lot of blokes there, aren’t there?”). Orkney sounds good to her—no traffic, and lots of fudge.
Apart from David Sedaris on the page, his own readings make an engaging presence on BBC Radio 4. You can hear the final instalment of the eighth series tonight, though you’ll have to be quick to listen to the earlier instalments online.
Once you’ve heard him, you will read his stories in his voice:
I don’t sound like a woman, I sound like a muppet—there’s a difference.
His new series is increasingly personal. As ever, his vision is both drôle and disturbing. As ever, his family provide rich material, notably his sisters Amy, Lisa, and Gretchen. He reflects both on their childhood and on the aging process. In Instalment 2 he leads from his own travails in hospital to visiting his father in intensive care.
He spots a notice online:
To the person who stole my antidepressants—I hope you’re happy.
A couple of favourites from the Sedaris tag in the sidebar:
THE MAGIC FLUTE Opera/Singspiel by Mozart and Schikaneder; soloists, English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, directed by John Eliot Gardiner. Rehearsals and staged performances in Parma, and then several other European cities, 1995. (Archiv recording; Concertgebouw performance here.)
157 thirteen-letter anagrams, at the latest count—I made it 158 in 1995, perhaps I included the title (The Magic Flute is of course an anagram of The Magic Flute—I would have said an isogram, or an autogram, or even a tautogram, but these words are all taken for something slightly different—so I’ll go for a pleonogram ), interlarded with 16 of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—twenty-one letters, grouped as 1-2-3-4-3-2-1, and picked out in red; preceded by their parallel ‘story’ giving as close an account (sticking slavishly to the anagram text) as I could manage of what might be supposed to be going on, as follows:
It had been, lucky me, a wonderful meal: Prosciutto di Parma, with fresh green figs, rucola salad. Just at the finish, though, something seemed to go wrong: I asked for a coffee, and was met by a stony-faced silence, the ass—great, I thought. You do something so well, and then you wreck it by a small idiocy at the end. It was the same with the digestif I tried to order—thinking to please by asking for that Duchess of a liquor they make on the coast across from Capri—which received a frankly rude “What?” in reply. That was enough: I told the chap to clear off. I was still smoking inside, of course, and as happens, another diner observed my mood and tried to cheer me up with gastronomic small-talk. I thought him rather like a household ferret, but he asked a curious question “D’you think he ever worked for Cahiers du Cinéma?”—which set me thinking. Imagine this film scenario:
DAYLIGHT SMOKE In a certain country, gastropods are brought as offerings (let’s say, Trojan snails): it appears there’s a war on, and the anti-haemorrhagic qualities of figs are in demand. The inhabitants subsist, amid gastric suffering, on the odd mollusc, superannuated Oriental fruit, even deep slices from their own calves. They feel their own facial bones poking through (it’s easy to show this, and it’ll have an impressive effect), and to pass the time race the only thing left which (presumably) is not edible, a local flightless bird. (This is also very picturesque, as a sort of parasite on this bird’s fruit-eating parts is the salamander, or baby newt Gila monster, a lizard without vocal chords which features in runic mysteries. I’m wondering if there’s something about this in The White Goddess, and if so, was Robert Graves making it up?) There’s a backdrop of the Three Kings by a star of the Venetian C15 school, that’s fine, if somewhat immediate in its brutal realism… A contrasting scene is set in the leafy self-catering avenues of southwest London, where a Jewish patriarch is walking his dog: a clubbable, diplomatic man and a talented animal. The link between these two extremes is a scurrilous publication of the sort you wouldn’t be seen extracting from your own letterbox, which deals in (again extreme) totemic obsessions involving girls, guilt, glamour, gore and galactic glory—
I’m just fantasising, without great success, about how the breaking of the sound barrier can take its place in this yarn, when my interlocutor disturbs me again, now changing his tack: “I’m thinking it’s the cook who should be cut in pieces… You do receive some money, you know, for Euro-movies.” I reply that I’m glad to hear it, appropriately in German (which is also intended to deter him from further conversation, but in vain: …) “What about capturing the start of the Open Championships? You could have a side from the opera, they love golf, then there’s people smoking, plenty of incidents – ” I interrupt this nonsense by inquiring if he’d like nutmeg, but he refuses violently and reckons rather that lilies are best to banish the odour of seafood. Almost too late, I realise that under cover of this table-talk he is surreptitiously removing my artificial limb…
* * *
It’s international conductor time, and someone has the gall to stop Riccardo Muti, to correct a (simple, diatonic enough) motif. A Japanese executive objects on the grounds of Muti’s grandeur, at which a German ripostes by asking with evident scorn whether you would entrust the peak of intellectual art to a twilit dreamer: to which the conclusive reply is that Muti turns canonic imitation into a thing of liquid beauty. The metronome meanwhile marches on. Sudden strife in the brass section: Jeffrey Tate, whose turn it is, is unhappy, but a suggestion that the players felt even more estranged from Zubin Mehta only brings a sharp rebuke, and instructions that if they don’t like the Méhul passage which seems weirdly prescient of Beethoven’s Fifth, they don’t play it.
Do you think that’s right? While I’m contemplating it, the image of a little salamander snout pops beaming into my mind as I turn on the tap—a tap of which I remember now I swore I’d replace the washer… Why do I always feel so bad about such small failures? Why not come out and say, no, I’ve had enough of pan-Europeanism, I like my souvenir of Scotland. Furthermore, it’s official now that you can’t believe anything they say: there’s a song about Tarzan, that apart from being a bit short in the brain department he was actually a carnivorous predator—or, a mythological snake-haired fiend, or – a shenior shivil shervant of the shixtiesh * (a.k.a. a former editor of ‘The Times’)!
Phew. Quite enough of that. But then a whole pile of people turned up, whose names are self-explanatory (he says going on to explain them, as in ‘I hardly need say…’): a prairie millionaire, an Israeli ditto who’s made his killing in fish oil and is intent on founding a dynasty; the late Timothy Leach; a representative of an English recording company (the only one who’s not permitted to arrive by taxi, with resulting pedal angst, he’ll always remember this day), a Euro-censor, and not quite an honest one at that; two women of whom the second is—what? you? look, can I, hang on—and a born-again pop-star.
Naturally, there’s a call for light, to which the enigmatic reply seems to recall an exchange from The Magic Flute. Well: let there be light, then. This however doesn’t please a chess expert who amongst other signs of irritation lights up (sic) for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, impassively. You got out fast, but I felt as if embedded in glue and got stuck (though with my money) in a throng from which the only escape was to play my magic glockenspiel—in whatever key came to hand—
– and it worked! But even then, being under the weather, my maxillary workings told me I needed a tisane, if a tacky enough one could be found. The Boss asks if I want milk—with a tisane?? Bah, I round on him, wondering if he continues to have interests in American military dependencies, at which he tells me to – leave off. He implies I’m small, too, which irks, I’m just slightly built, but still I make to placate him with a present of an English renaissance instrument, embracing a Welsh friend to celebrate this outbreak of reconciliation. Hah! all the Boss can do is to tell me to pick up a nasty illness, the brute. Even now, I mollify him: introduce, with sycophantic adulation, a German girl. True to form, he insults her immediately, asking her an unlikely question about Belgian football—but Ute’s a match for him, with her knowledge of London equivalents. Naturally this rebounds against me , I’m accused of stealing the theorbo I bought for him, damn it, and am asked to procure a less challenging woman.
I can’t do this, you miserable German person, I’ve only one leg for a start. My luck, if that’s what it is, is in, this time, in that Helmut is distracted (you may have noticed this propensity) on to another tack: he sees there is an American veterans’ baseball game on TV. (This is one of his recurring obsessions.) I tease him by saying playfully that a certain distinguished British philosopher was also a US infantryman; but for once Helmut is not taken in, perhaps because his stomach has more urgent calls on his attention—now he wants ewe’s milk cheese. Really, will this never end? One solution, arguably, is to call in a heavyweight but lighthearted Belgian-Ceylonese-Breton wrestler (frightened of nothing except spiders, hence his nickname Muffet), whose but moderately loud voice announces the octave firebrand which breaks through the hefty trellis decorating this scene, and thus introduces –
(in an undertone, please, like a somnolent guard-dog)
– Lazy days in Cyprus, a honeymoon couple discovering Indo-Portuguese culture and dancing innocently into the bewitched apocalyptic sunset…
* * *
The river of forgetfulness runs through Cambridge, as you, old fruit, must know, having picked up enough tabs there. Stick to engraving, Dark Lady.
Alf is asking the President of Poland to bring a barrel for his French co-pilot, but Wałesa is at the back of the plane, and suggests Alf try instead, why not, a Fabergé jewel—as well as giving him his cue to start skydiving. Ah, crazy great West Country turnips, that sums up the enchantment of Cambridge days! But even an inhabitant of Paradise had to admire the way the Chinese could synthesize two quite distinct sports in one computer programme, at the same time recounting every last detail of an unedifying modern military campaign in the style of a spiritual. (The original ‘naming of the beasts’ in Eden had a more charmingly reticent, throaty quality).
Alec is no more, alas, but another philosopher can be found to fill the gap. Fichte was a man, which is important, but Hegel was a feline in disguise, which made him fit only to instruct clever asses, and play (very well, admittedly) on children’s slides, if one can tell after so many years have elapsed. I’d rather he’d have got the creator of M. Hulot’s Holiday to work on a remake of La Grande Bouffe –
Why’s everything gone terribly quiet all of a sudden? Welch’ furchtbare Stille! **
– but the Melbourne newspapers called the project off, preferring some totally spurious local paparazzi farce called, I think, ‘Newt Dundee’, involving a Scottish idiot astounding everybody, chewing straws, and dancing his balls off in a cloud of smoke. Ah, Margaret, surely you knew that a crowd of South American football administrators (we call them the Ferret Fanciers, but don’t let on) are going back to the land? Yes, to the Portuguese horse-breeding centre Muge, where they serve fish soup every day and wear braided Hebridean headgear.
“Are you cigarette monitor? You know mucus build-up goes a horrible colour…” It’s enough to make one, as an urban guerrilla, want to scratch below the surface of this sweet, playful Zauberflöte. Were you, Amadeus, really a demented music-loving aristocrat who commissioned your own works, thought it would be a laugh to dance with a keeper of the portal, jive with Mephistopheles himself…?
Would you compare this with Graham Greene’s Vienna? God forbid. Would you entrust the mission to an American who refuses to believe his emblematic eagle is bald, and forgets to look at t’ petrol gauge?—but I’d better be quiet. It’s just another flight.
BUT it’s different in summer, when you want to spread your wings and mount to the treetops, make a(n-H-) bomb from your in ( off)-sur (shore )-ance tragacanth/okra policy. Or, follow the example of Joseph Beuys, saved from perishing (in the) cold by being wrapped in felt and fat—we who live in more humid climes can hardly appreciate such extreme needs, but raise our glasses all the same.
For we all suffer from the cold. For, truism as it may be, we can be protected by a present of a nest-egg, a lucky jewel (this could also read, ‘thing of value’, it could be, thus, a musical instrument of rare quality, a flute for example), especially if given to you personally by a freedom-fighter. Where the highest church spire in the world reaches octagonally (Ulm = elm = Ely?) to the sky , a cross-section might tell you that in 1500 AD, this was but a caper, a chamois’ vortex; and that here too your man Sarastro casts his labyrinthine lettery spell.
* * *
TAG, LICHT—FUMÉE Ham, fig, lettuce—I felt much gâté. “Café?” Mute. Light, tight mule-face; cute. “Malt.” If he get Malfi, gut. “Chè?” “Leg it!” Fume. Chat: “Ultimate chef! Glug…” Tame fitch! “ ’E taught EEC film?” Lumache, gift, etc. Emulate fight: heal cut fig met. Get ache if tum lug clam, if teeth fug matt lichee, cut leg (ham), tief. Teeth, gum, facile gulf, thematic éclat, emu fight—cute glam if the emu fig chattel fetch mute Gila eft—Thule magic. Thule game, fictif? The mage-cult—Cima, fleet thug—felt gut. Micah, E. Cheam gîte luft—“Agile mut—fetch!” – fit chum, legate. “Geh, mutt!” Facile! Ult. fétiche mag (e.g. tu fetch mail), female chit tug echt guilt. Fame? Fame! Glitch—tué!! Tué, acme, flight! Mach 1 Flug et – et… “Mutilate chef… Get aught, EC film.” “Ach, gut.” “Film tee, ‘Flute’ team, cig—hazardous game, golf.” “Want mace?” “Filth. Muget fumigate the clam.” “Leg thief!”
– CUT –
FUGAL THEME Tic. “Halt, Muti – GFECE…” “Muti g‘l’eat chef!” “Ha? Fuge mit Celt?” “He melt fuga!” Tic. Cue metal fight: Tate, chief, glum; cite Mehta gulf – “Calm huge fit! Et tacet Méhul, if G-G-C thema futile.” Ethical? Eft mug light me faucet—facet hem guilt. Guilt? Face them! Glut EEC faith, me Leith mug. Fact: ‘Tarzan’s gaga, mum’, flow ode—a wolf? Tarzan? Medusa?? MOGG!
– CUT –
Agh. Me, I left. Mitchel A. Gufet, Chaim T. Gefült (Gulf Cham tête) I, Tim Leach (feu), G.T. Futt (Gimel)—ache, feet, caul might time fate gulch—Emil Guthaft, EC cheat (“Get film ‘U’!”), Thea, Meg (tu!), Cliff—“Luce !”—“– tätig?” Hm. Fiat luce. The GM Michael Tuft, e.g., fumeth, lit Cage (he flegmatic). Tu fleet; I’m caught, gum feet, I latch fee (tight maul)—C chime E FLAT – “Gut, magic.” Flu, teeth felt each gum, it mulch ‘tea!’ if get matt glue. Chief: “Tee? Milch? Gut fate.” Ich: “Left Guam?” “Guam? Flee, titch.” Ému, light: “Facet gift: Cheam lute.” Melt ice, hug Taf. “Get Thai flu, mec.” Thug. “Calif, meet Ute.” “Camel! Fight Liège fut-match?” “Fulham.” “Get cité! Mac, lute-thief, get Mica.” Heft, lug: lame. Cute fight, Helmut Git-face. “Teufel! GI match.” (Helmut GI facet.) “T.E. Hulme GI—fact.” Emit laugh, etc. “Fie! Fetta, milch!” Gag, hit, elect Muffet, huge Tamil-cum-Celt, the gai Flem (if huge). “Acht”—eight—“flame—cut huge lattice” ( mf—hemi-flat, e.g….)
‘The Age’ cut film: Wagga zoom lens fraud, Tam O’Douglas (fart), amaze, gnaw, fume, a gonad orgasm waltz. Tut, Meg, Chile FA (Fitch™ League) face tilth. Muge, täglich fumet, Gaelic hem-tuft helmet. “I/c fag, tu? Flegm hue…” Città flea might cute flute game itch. O Mozart! a mad Walsegg? (fun—Armed Man walz, Faust go-go…) “Lime?” “Faugh!” (etc.) “Tuft eagle, Mitch? MITCH—T’ FUELAGE!” Mute. “Ach, fliegt.”
Été macht flug if huge elm—(aitch) ’uge theft claim—mucilage theft?? – felt heat. Mug, i/c the fug climate, lift them.
Ague. Cliché, fat gem, tu Che amulet gift, Ulm eight-facet:
A fat Magus’ long word maze.
* I actually heard William Rees-Mogg say this of himself during his address at Peter Goldman’s memorial service—where I was singing—at St Martin in the Fields, in the 1980s.
** In the original 1995 MS of this introduction, lost in our 2009 fire, these words of Pamina’s were written in the hand of Christiane Oelze, who sang (and spoke) the role, and whom I asked to insert them—I can see them still, but technology doesn’t yet allow us to translate inner visions into outer reproductions.
Nicolas Robertson Parma – Ferrara, May 1995 / Outurela, Portugal, May 2020
I have the greatest admiration for people who learn to manage their speech impediment to speak in public. Not among them is Bumbling Boris (for his full title, see Stewart Lee—since “Boris” and “BoJo” seem too generous in their familiarity, Lee’s solution “Turds” seems suitable; “Spaffer” also has a certain ring to it).
Along with the tousled hair and shambling walk, his disjointed speech—seeking to convey a spontaneous happy-go-lucky image, making it up as he goes along—seems a public-school affectation. Mystifyingly, in some quarters this is apparently considered attractive, like Hugh Grant’s “Posh Twat” persona, or Jacob Tree-Frog eternally trapped in the ridiculous fancy-dress outfit that he once wore for a laugh at a school party.
Or is his stumbling a recognition that if he does somehow manage to string more than two words together consecutively, the result will inevitably consist of fatuous offensive clichés, or is it a cunning attempt to dissociate himself from them?
Er er er, bumble wumble, ow-ow-our [smirks] European friends [the AfD], the-the-the…, um, ipso facto [smugly], I-I-I, letterbox, i-i-s a… er, world-beating [Ha], um, roadmap, blah, [ruffles hair “endearingly”], Winston, er er… (what was his name again?) pifflepafflewifflewaffle steady ship… um, um um, cavalry…
In his distinctive shtick, I don’t think I’ve heard him stammer on initial consonants, only repeating whole monosyllables (the), often vowel sounds (I) (see also under stammering tag).
Well he said, you’ll be the greatest president in the history of, but you know what, I’ll take that also, but that you could be. But he said, will be the greatest president but I would also accept the other. In other words, if you do your job, but I accept that. Then I watched him interviewed and it was like he never even was here. It’s incredible. I watched him interviewed a week later and it’s like he was never in my office. And you can even say that.
Or perhaps the difference is that Tweety blundered on relentlessly [enjoy that past tense], whereas Spaffer peppers his own drivel with cute hesitancy. So much for oratory (and for fluent impromptu exposition in Indian raga, click here).
Created at a time when the idea of either of them being allowed anywhere near power seemed utterly ludicrous, Paul Whitehouse’s character of Rowley Birkin QC combined the posh Spaffer mannerisms and the relentless Tweety gibberish (playlist):
Here’s Matt Lucas:
Recently a Spaffer–Birkin hybrid has emerged:
I might have a greater tolerance of such eccentricity for a politician not wallowing in a cesspit of opportunism, xenophobia, and duplicity. For a less-than-ringing endorsement from a former colleague (“a clown, a self-centred ego, an embarrassing buffoon, with an untidy mind and sub-zero diplomatic judgment”), click here.
“What I can tell you is this“: on behalf of the, um, stammering “community”, I would like to dissociate myself from this kind of flummery—FFS, either get a proper speech impediment or just learn to engage mouth with “brain”. Ideally, go away.
For a general introduction to the series, see here.
Note—SJ Even before Don Giovanni (here, with general introduction), this was Nick’s very first anagram foray to have a story attached, whose arcane fantasies already emerge fully-fledged—as with
tinto faucets, cute Asti font, scant Fitou…,
explained as
the taps and church vessels are running with red and white from the great houses, and lesser French appellations don’t get much of a look in…
* * *
COSÌ FAN TUTTE Opera by Mozart; soloists, English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, directed by John Eliot Gardiner, 1992—staged performances (stage direction by JEG) and Archiv recording.
The earliest case of an accompanying parallel text—an attempt at describing what I felt might be going on, while adhering literally to the anagram results—composed immediately after the anagrams (here a sequence of the same 12 letters, 100 times).
From Er, textUrtext, Parma 1994.
TUTTI FONSECA: tinto faucets, cute Asti font, scant Fitou; et Tunis café tot. Tofu. Incest at Eton. “Tusa? If C.T. Fancutt’s toe”—I infuse tact to feint Tusa cot—“isn’t out, ‘facet tu’.” “Fine! Scott, a tuft at cosine?” “Tofu! Sine.” Tact. If stout, enact a fit Scot, tune fustian octet, cite not Faust, taunt soft ice (if Tesco taunt fat Tucson tie—satin, tofu, etc.) coast net. “Fuit ut canto?” “Tief. Sit, foetus can’t. Tin cat-foetus.” “Titan foetus…” “Cist ocean”—Futt. “Nice oast, Futt”—Titus Fen-Cato, i/c font. “Astute. Situate font—cut Ascot! Feint toucan, if test cat oft unites (cat oft unties?) teat’s function: eat, suc’, fit to Nic’s tofu teat…” “Est, tunc fiat, o Tuscan foe!” “Tit.” “Tief?”—to Tuscan Tito (US fan, etc.) “Teutonic saft?” “Ficta’s Teuton.” “No ficta,” ’e tuts. Tut! Sit on face.
* * *
I oft tan scout, I, Cnut, feast to toast fun, cite Sufi, Tao. Tent? C’è scant outfit. I, fast-toe Cnut, cut station effect: saint out (Saint ‘tuft’ Coe—cat’s often ‘uit’). Cue soft taint. Et toi, cast fun? Et tu, sicofant?? Canute’s fit to taunt foe’s tic, stint Coe tufa factions. Têtu, FNAC, tote situ (Sufi tote can’t fuse antic tot—fuse Titan cot? Tunic not safe). Ate soft… Cnut, I… I taste of… Cnut… nice, soft, taut…
* * *
“SNCF—têtu, toi? Astute faction, SNCF: Tati et/ou fat Teuton (sic). Caution: test ‘f’—suf’ocate! Tint Sufi tent-coat, nice…” Fast ‘tu’ to Count East, fit, cute stain, oft fist not acute. “Aft, tits! Ounce” (o fuc) “sent a tit faint. Suet cot, soutane-fit.” Ct.—COUNT—T. Fiesta, ictus often at coitus… “Fatten e’static futon!”
“Sofa, Nutt. Cite Cato.” “Fuit. Sent soft Utica net …” Fun Cato test! “It’s…” “… Tout fiancé!” “TU? Ott’s fiancé, of ice stunt? At?” “Tate. Stoic fun.”
ET TU, TOSCA?
– FIN –
It’s monopoly time in Italy and Portugal, the taps and church vessels are running with red and white from the great houses, and lesser French appellations don’t get much of a look in. On the other hand, an espresso and a chaser in North Africa follows naturally; there’s vegan food, and an atmosphere which reminds one partaker of goings-on at an English public school. He recalls the typical, bright-schoolboy talk in which he took part, with its characteristic blend of inside jargon, Latin and modern languages, higher maths and frank vulgarity: “Tusa?”—pretending charm to lull the well-known spark to sleep—“if Fancutt doesn’t pull his finger out, will you do it for him?” “Of course. Scott, will you do my maths prep for me? It’s cosines.” “Put your head in a bowl of quark. I can do without.” More charm is needed. I’m a bit overweight, but pretend to be a tough caber-tosser , give an ‘A’ to the pompous house band, who’re making a fist at Mendelssohn, am careful not to show off my Goethe, and make fun of melting polar ice-caps—it seemed an ok thing to do, the supermarket heir in my dorm used to mock the kitsch dress-clothes of Arizona oil moguls who come visiting, as well as vegetarian protein and lots of other things too—and the huge nets they have to erect to stop the resulting icebergs. “Did I sing it right?” “A bit low. Sit down, you might as well, you’re not an embryo. Correction, yes you are, you’re a cheap feline embryo.” “A giant embryo, at least…” Another boy, Futt, puts in: “And you’ve got thousands of spots!” “It’s a jolly nice oast-house your parents have got, Futt,” tactfully interposes a well-brought up boy who’s a server in chapel. “Really smart. If you get the church on your side, you don’t need to show off at the races! Pretend to be a South American bird, you’ll find pumas regularly give them milk—or is it takes it away? – ” (Fen-Cato’s going off the rails rather here) “ – you can get all the nourishment you need from the soya fountain in Nic’s health-food store – ” “Yeah, yeah. That’s the way it is, so that’s the way it’s gotta be, enemy of the Roman people.” “Idiot.” “Was it really too low?”—this to the ‘Roman enemy’, who’s a great supporter of the United States and all that entails—“Like some German fruit juice?” “The Germans invented the idea of putting in sharps at cadences.” “I d-don’t like that ’abit,” stammers a junior. The stammer is pathetic, and he drops his aitches, so we sit on his face.
* * *
[A stream of consciousness from a sometime Prince of Denmark]
I regularly used to give my Balliol cleaner a hiding, I hold a party just to raise a glass to the holding of parties, I quote from the Rubaiyat, Zhuangzi. I don’t like camping, there’s not enough protection. I’m a good runner, and I don’t like stopping, and none of this sportsmanship like you get from Seb, so holy and with his Tintin haircut, but I can tell you his Dutch cat often clears off at night! I’m against currency fluctuations in the ERM—what, Frenchman? You make fun of me? And you, smarmy Latin brute?? A King of Denmark can mock his enemy’s nervous twitches, he can withdraw money from Seb’s divisive volcano altitude training.
French bookshops are headstrong, they run betting shops in them—not even a mystic gambling system can rekindle the primal child within us, or the hearth where Prometheus is born, and anyway modern artificial fibres are such a fire hazard…
I once had a lovely yielding… Yes, me… I can still taste it… yummee… Just right, yielding and resisting at the same time, the perfect [crême brulée].
Count East is speaking, Government transport minister: “Take on French railways? Off your head, are you? They’re a canny bunch, French railways. They’re M. Hulot and/or Helmut Kohl in one (yep, that’s what they are). A word of warning: try ‘loud’ first, you’ll find you won’t be able even to semi-breathe down there! Why don’t you go back to dyeing Persian desert robes, that was harmless, at least.” This is too much for me. In an instant I irredeemably offend his noble lordship by using the familiar form of address, he becomes apoplectic and bang, there’s a nice mess, sometimes I don’t know where my blows are landing. “Get back, you fools! Pint-size here” (I wince at this description) “has knocked the old twit” (where’s the ‘w’ from? a childhood memory?) “out. Make him up a bed of veal marrow, clad him in a cardinal’s robes,”—I recognise the voice of Ct. (yes, another Count) T. Party, the one they say suffers a paroxysm as like as not at any suggestion of sex—“plump his mattress with kapok and let ’m sleep in seventh heaven…”
* * *
“Fall on your futon, Nutt. Or have you done your Latin prep?” “I have. ‘Given this sweet Carthage entanglement…’ ” I enjoy these Latin exercises. “Go on…” “… I’m engaged to be married.” “WHAT? You?? Engaged—to the daughter of the best wine-maker in Provence? Who does such fantastic ice-skating? Where’s the party?” “The Tate Gallery Restaurant. Rotten luck, eh?”
Which begs the question, was Tosca setting him up? (Did she, in fact, bounce back?)
For if so, it is
The End.
Nicolas Robertson Lisbon – Paris – Ferrara, 1992 (– Parma, 1994) / Outurela, Portugal, May 2020
Long German compound nouns (Bandwurmwörter “tapeworm words”) have been a popular source of merriment since Mark Twain’s satirical comments (cf. gender).
After making her home in London, my orchestral colleague Hildi reflected:
The English ear can be quite overwhelmed by all the composite nouns of German, like Brückenbauingeneuranwärter, “engineer apprentice for building bridges”! Of course, it sounds absurd out of context; but German poetry also has some exquisite creations that touch me every time I hear them, such as Richard Strauss’s Morgen:
… inmitten dieser sonnenatmenden (sun-breathing) zu dem Strand, dem weiten wogenblauen(wave-blue).
Sometimes I would try and invent such words in English, only to be told, “You can’t say that—it’s not in the dictionary!
Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz “Cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law”
Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung “regulation governing the delegation of authority pertaining to land conveyance permission”
Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung “regulation governing the delegation of authority pertaining to land conveyance permissions”
The device took on an sinister new slant under the GDR with euphemisms like Geschichtsaufarbeitung and Vergangenheitsbewältigung—“treating”, “working through”, “coming to terms with”, or even “overcoming” the past—as well as Partieüberprüfungsgesprach, “scrutinising session”.
Of course, all this is a question of orthography: such terms are written in English with spaces, whereas German writes them without; it’s not that German has longer words than English, just that it has different formatting conventions.
The Church of the Blessed Holy Sisters of the Discalced Flower of the Immaculate Virgin Incarnate is a pretty Baroque chapel, which can be a little hard to find as all signs bearing its name have long ago collapsed under the weight of their own letters.
Surely the most celebrated of all April Fools is the elaborate BBC Panorama spoof from 1957—like an aperitivo for the Monty Python travelogue, or Molvania:
One of the perpetrators recollected:
As a bonus to the excellent Pomodoro!, here’s the discussion of the topic in the chapter there on the “tomato conquest”:
In both Britain and the United States, Italian food already was synonymous with spaghetti and tomato sauce. In 1950s Britain, it was still mysterious and exotic enough that in 1957, BBC television could get away with broadcasting a short documentary on that year’s bumper “spaghetti harvest”. Amid scenes of “spaghetti trees”, it referred to “spaghetti plantations in the Po valley”, the fortunate disappearnce of the nasty “spaghetti weevil”, and the achievements of plant breeders in developing new varieties with equal-length strands, which facilitated harvesting. The date of the broadcast, April 1, ought to have given the game away, but many viewers still were fooled.
For a general introduction to the series, see here.
Prelude—SJ Nicolas Robertson, tenor in the Monteverdi choir, litterateur and pinball wizard, has long been based in Lisbon, where he was my guide in 2018. On our Mozart opera tours with John Eliot Gardiner in the 1990s, he and the choir put their leisure to creative use by composing anagrams of the titles, whereupon Nick combined and elevated them into a whole series of delightfully gnomic stories, complete with his own elaborate, arcane exegeses. Aficionados will detect an affinity with Oulipo and Mots d’heures: gousses, rames. For his own reflections, see his introduction to Nubile gorilla.
The series went on to extend beyond Mozart into other projects that the Monteverdi and other choirs were involved in—including Die Schoepfung (“Nice fudge shop”), Missa Solemnis (“Mimesis salons”), Lili Boulanger (“Nubile gorilla”), and Igor Stravinsky (“Gran visits York”, my all-time favourite anagram).
I’ve been cajoling Nick for ages to share these extraordinary creations with the world. After various setbacks, he continues to work on them. I hope this fantasia on Don Giovanni is just an aperitivo for publication of the whole series in a more illustrious organ.
Generously lubricated by lashings of vino and gin (as indeed were we), the motley cast alone is delightful, including Ivan, Godiva, Onan, Gavin D. Onion, Nin, Giono, Dino Vaginno, Donovan, and the splendid Idi von Goa. Just to give a flavour of the story and its interpretation: for the opening text
“Noon? Gad—vini!” “No inn, Godiva.” “Dog Inn, Avon?” “I…” “Don, go in van.” I nod, I go in van. DINGO ON VAN—
Nick provides this commentary:
Somewhere, between Australia and western England, Godiva wakes up, thirsty. It’s already time for wine, but there’s nowhere to find it—or so Don, the narrator, thinks. Godiva knows better, and Don knows better than to resist. No sooner inside the camper, however, than an unexpected peril appears: a large yellow wild dog is on the roof…
As the plot unfolds you’ll soon become immersed—enjoy!
From Er, textUrtext, Parma 1994.
DON GIOVANNI Opera by Mozart; soloists, English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, directed by John Eliot Gardiner. Staged performances in various European cities, 1994, and Archiv recording.
A sequence of 69 (if you exclude the title, which is repeated as a variant later on in the text) 11-letter anagrams, followed by an ‘explanatory’ parallel text.
NO GO, V. INDIAN “Noon? Gad—vini!” “No inn, Godiva.” “Dog Inn, Avon?” “I…” “Don, go in van.” I nod, I go in van. DINGO ON VAN— “Ivan? On dingo!” “I… No, Ivan doing a don in Oving.” “Dino, Gavin?” No. V. good: Ninian. Nin—diva, goon, Onan voiding vain god. “Nino! Nino, Vi, go and —” “No.” “No ??”—“Gin?” (Avid.) “Non… avoid gin.” “Gin and vino?” “O… Gin and I’ ? Novo! Go on! Divina! N –” (‘N’ in vain? Good. No avoiding ‘N’. Non-gain: void.) “ – Non gin? AVOID!”
* * *
Dago vino inn: gonad in vino. “Ovid anno—gin?” Non-Ovidian Gavin in ‘Dog’: “No.” (Gavin D. Onion.) “N., avid ongoing divan onion, dining on ova?” “Non.” I go, “Viand?” “Viand, oignon…” “—Vian, Nin.” “O God—” “—and Giono! VIN!!” Din. “Goa vino? ’n Goan von Indi’ ?” (Idi von Goa.) “NN…” (Io and I go “VNN…”) “Indian Gov. on aid: vin-nog—” “No vin!” And I go on: “Iogi, V Dan—non. V. Indian—no go.
* * *
On, I : “Avon” (ding) (dong) “Avon!” I, in. “Nova? In G?” I nod. “ ‘Don’ in G— o, Ivan!”
* * *
Ogni novi. And oo, Ann diving, goadin’ Ivonn, in Govan; o dining, ovoid Ann, Govan ondini… Digno? Vain? No, no invading o’ Dinan, no Vigo, avion non (dig?).
* * *
Dino Vaginno, Inigo Vandon, Donna Vigion—Donna v. Inigo, Donovan (“Gini!‟), Ian ‘Dong’ Voin, Dion Ganinov, Gavin (no!), Odin,
do,
in
Avignon
Somewhere, between Australia and western England, Godiva wakes up, thirsty. It’s already time for wine, but there’s nowhere to find it—or so Don, the narrator, thinks. Godiva knows better, and Don knows better than to resist. No sooner inside the camper, however, than an unexpected peril appears: a large yellow wild dog is on the roof. Normally Ivan deals with tricky situations like this, but he’s away near Chichester pretending to be a university teacher. Dino and Gavin can’t, or won’t, be found, so the only resort is Ninian, a feckless but gifted character, of whom Don seems to be fond despite a clinical evaluation of his dubious qualities.
Ninian, even with Vi to help, needs persuading. His weak spot, deny it as he try, is a cocktail, and Don—not without a glancing reference to the literature of constraints and the title of a prospective translation of a novel by Georges Perec—plays on this faiblessewith results which might be considered extravagant, though Ninian prefers to mix his gin and Italian with wine rather than vermouth.
The pub is reached, but is not a great success: it seems somehow unEnglish, and there’s a foreign body in the wine. Carried away by his earlier success in winning round Ninian, and remembering that it was the twentieth centenary of an event in the life of the Roman poet Ovid, author of the Metamorphoses—and that the most sought-after juniper berries grow in northern Italy—Don proposes gin; but Gavin is in the pub too, and Gavin’s categorically no classicist, and Gavin vetoes gin. Refusing to be discouraged, Don changes the subject to food and asks Ninian, with a bit of chaff about being a couch potato, if he would like eggs for supper. Ninian, with his irritating penchant for dropping into French, declines but with a bit of prompting dreamily goes for filet mignon with shallot confit. Don however is a stickler, reminding Ninian that he’s just suggested the favourite dish of Boris Vian and Anaïs Nin—neither a writer, it turns out, of whom Ninian is much fond—not to mention that earthy lyrical novelist Jean Giono, which inescapably entails ordering wine; as Don duly and loudly, casting caution to the winds, does.
Alas, with a terrible clashing of glasses the landlord, an Afro-Indian tyrant, marches in bearing the only wine available, an unspeakable brew from a Portuguese ex-colony stuffed with additives provided gratis by the EC, which is greeted with strangulated cries from the assembled diners—none more so than Don and Io, a Greek girl who here makes her first and only appearance in the story and seems if anything more in tune with Don than was Godiva, whose fault it is that they all ended up in this shifty joint anyway… Whether because emboldened by this sympathy, or because his patience just snaps, Don, as he finally rules out any wine-drinking, signs off with a frankly xenophobic, not to say indiscriminate, tirade linking Buddhism, Judo/Karate and the entire sub-continent in intransigent opprobrium.
We join Ivan, it’s unclear if still in West Sussex, but adopting an unusual line in popular scholarship. Using the doorbell-and-bright-cry technique beloved of generations of cosmetic salespersons, he is peddling Italian operas. There’s a gimmick, of course: as a novelty, he’s transposing them into peoples’ favourite keys. At least one member of the public is thrilled to receive Don Giovanni a 4th higher—or, maybe, a 5th lower—and falls swooning into Ivan’s arms.
Everything’s got to be new, Ivan reflects with a weary cynicism, and he’s as fickle as the rest, for now we find him in Glasgow, appreciatively eying, as she cleaves the blue sky at the deep end, the rounded curves of Ann—which so filled with jealous pain the breast of Ivonn (whose parents had a good ear but rather shaky spelling). Curves brought on, it must be said, not only by natural curviness but by serious eating, especially at night which as we know is the worst time. But still, there are nymphs in them thar Glasgow hills…, thinks Ivan, reflecting also, “Am I worthy? Is this search for beauty just personal vanity? I could be worse, at least I don’t go on armed incursions to places where they cultivate mussels, and above all I don’t let the silver ball roll unchecked down the field and between the uselessly flicking flippers, if you understand my reference.‟ *
And who should understand the reference, if not the heterodox party gathered round a pinball machine in the south of France, consisting of an Italian wide-boy, an English architect and his American girlfriend, always at each other’s throat, a superannuated balladeer, who insists on ordering sickly, gassy soft drinks, and his aging roadie with such a nose as one suspects would shine in the dark, a Ukrainian ballet dancer, Gavin D. Onion—how did he get here? Perhaps we underrated him on the grounds of his lack of Latin (and disapproval of gin, quite apart from his still unexplained failure to rise to the challenge of the dingo—but I note that Dino, equally and signally absent at the hour of need, is here too, so one can assume they’re in cahoots)—and an imperious if flawed character with an eye-patch and broad-brimmed hat, who asks disquieting questions and likes to be known, three-quarters of the way through the session at least, as “the Wanderer‟ –
– and where are they, then? Why, the city of the anti-popes, Durrell’s Gnostic capital, a short drive from the Marquis de Sade’s country estate (or the Deller Consort’s, if you prefer), perhaps dropping in to the cool calm space of La Poésie dans un Jardin, to visit (as I did) the Perec exposition in the ’88 Festival; and I hope still congregating on pinball tables whenever they can, escaping the sun, seeking a Lazarus, ** dwelling always on the words of the Wanderer, that the only one who can break the chain of fire and bring freedom must be freer than the god, but he (or she) then has the power to remake the word, sorry, world.
* The reference: Angus Smith and I were told in a bar in Lyon in the late 80s by a French girl who’d done a ‘stage’ in Southampton that avion is the popular term for when the cue-ball goes hopelessly down and out the length of the centre of the pinball table, lost without even being able to be touched by the flippers—a smartingly shameful occurrence.
** Lazarus: when the ball, already past the last pair of flippers and on its way to oblivion, bounces miraculously—or, to the cool (yes, I’m thinking of you, Chris Purves), foreseeably—off the hind wall back into possible play.
Nicolas Robertson Parma, May 1994 / Outurela, Portugal, May 2020
You may be disappointed to learn that the plot concerns not a tomato but the Judgment of Paris, with the prize of the Golden Apple. Still, I can’t help wondering if early performances prompted giggling (I’m like, “Hey guys, Cesti’s gone and written an opera about a tomato!”).
The opera is mentioned in the fascinating, mouth-watering
David Gentilcore, Pomodoro!: a history of the tomato in Italy (2010),
whose basic culinary ingredients are liberally seasoned with wise observations on social and economic change.
The tomato’s uses were continually subject to change, from production to exchange, distribution, and production. […] The tomato is an ideal basis for examining the prevailing values, beliefs, conditions, and structures in the society of which it was a part and how they changed over several centuries.
In Chapter 1, “Strange and horrible things”, Gentilcore dates the recorded history of the tomato in Italy from 31st October 1548, when Cosimo de’ Medici presented a basketful to the excellencies of Pisa—who seem to have been bemused:
And the basket was opened and they looked at one another with much thoughtfulness.
Remarkably, it would be well over 300 years before the tomato gained widespread favour among the Italian population in the pasta sauces we now know and love, belatedly becoming a national symbol—for Italian emigrants abroad, during the Fascist period, and later. Other New World imports (such as maize, potatoes, tobacco, American beans, chillies, cocoa, vanilla) gained acceptance more quickly.
Cesti’s opera was premiered in Vienna; the composer died the following year, and I haven’t yet seen evidence of further performances—staging it would have been a massive undertaking. So audiences in Italy may even have been denied the opportunity of a good giggle, although word must have spread. Still, in Italy, over a century after the tomato was first recorded there, one might suppose that the word pomodoro (the pomo referring generally to fruit, not to the apple) at least had become part of the vocabulary of the elite who were the audience for such spectacles. But then, they would also be familiar with the ancient story—although from the simple synopsis one might not imagine that it called for elaborate stage machinery to depict tableaus like shipwrecks and collapsing towers:
The gods ask the Trojan prince Paris to decide which of the goddesses Venus, Juno, and Pallas (Minerva) is the most beautiful and thus deserving of the Golden Apple. Paris gives the prize to Venus. The spurned goddesses try to get their revenge until Jupiter decides to end the confusion, turns to the audience and awards the golden apple to the Empress Margaret Theresa [“Typical!”].
An early Miss World contest, then, with Paris in the role of Bob Hope.
The tomato had been introduced to Europe by Cortés, reaching Italy by way of Spain, as a botanical specimen. The physician-botanist Mattioli described it in 1544, using the name pomo d’oro in his 1554 revision. But confusingly, the term also continued to denote the fruit in the ancient myth of the Hesperides.
Gentilcore notes the early association of tomato and eggplant (or aubergine, splendidly advertised by British greengrocers as OBOS). The latter, incidentally, reached Europe from Persia by way of Andalucia.
In 1628 the Paduan physician Sala regarded tomatoes as “strange and horrible things”, following
a description of locust-eating in Ethiopia, spider- and cricket-eating in Padua, and ant- and worm-eating in India.
Indeed, to eat them was still commonly regarded as harmful, even poisonous.
Yet, as both Durante and Sala inadvertently suggest, someone was eating tomatoes, regardless of the dietary advice. Costante Felice, a physician near Urbino, tells us who: “gluttons and those eager for new things”.
Left, Arcimboldo, Vertumnus, c1590; right, door frieze, Cathedral of Pisa, 1600/1601. Artistic depictions of tomatoes were very rare before the mid-18th century; the emperor’s mouth is more likely to contain cherries than cherry tomatoes.
In Chapter 2 Gentilcore broadens the theme to consider Renaissance Europe’s apparent aversion to fruit and vegetables—based on the advice of physicians of the time (cf. Sleeper!). Consumption of vegetables increased through the 17th and 18th centuries, but an Italian culinary manual from 1590 contains not a single reference to them.
Still, health warnings were not necessarily heeded by either princes and courtiers or the common folk—as we’ve been noticing recently… Other treatises attest to a great variety of common vegetables and plants being consumed. In 1596 the English courtier Robert Dallington wrote:
Herbage is the most generall food of the Tuscan, at whose table a sallet is as ordinary as salt at ours; for being eaten of all sorts of persons, and at all times of the yeare: of the rich because they love to spare; of the poore because they cannot choose; of many Religious because of their vow, of most others because of their want. It remaineth to believe that which themselves confesse; namely, that for every horse-load of flesh eaten, there is ten cart-loads of hearbes and rootes; which also their open markets and private tables doe witnesse.
Indeed, the religious institutions made a virtue of a diet rich in vegetables. And Gentilcore notes the importance of markets; the ortolani market gardeners of Turin had their own religious confraternity. He offers an aside on what was described as the “incomprehensible predilection” in Rome for broccoli, later to become “le vainquer de macaroni“. To the consternation of English observers, salad (“the mixing of diverse and various things”) came into vogue. Olive oil was still used more for lighting lamps than for cooking.
As he comments, historians always have difficulty finding information regarding the diet of the poor. From an early-18th-century French report on the dietary habits of Naples, it’s clear that much of the population not only ate vegetables but subsisted on them—along with bread rather than pasta; and tomatoes were part of this regime.
Methods of preparation remained basic because the kitchen utensils remained basic. The peasant kitchen thus was basic, with only a few clay or wooden implements.
Recipe, 1705.
Chapter 3, “They are to be enjoyed”, explores the acculturation of the tomato in 18th-century Italy. By 1759 a survey of farming in Tuscany included it among the “fruits prized by men [sic: see below] as foodstuffs or as condiments for them”. Gentilcore surveys the different varieties of tomato.
Sardinia was a Spanish possession until 1720, and the Sardinians, at all social levels, may have been “the first [in ‘Italy’] to take the tomato seriously”. Disappointingly for those of us who supposed that sun-dried tomatoes were invented in 1970s’ Hampstead, they appear in a Sardinian recipe from the mid-18th century.
By the 1830s, but probably earlier too, enterprising peasant women in the Cagliari area were selling sun-dried tomatoes. This is an important reminder of the role of gender in agrarian change. Indeed, women frequently were responsible for the cultivation, preparation, and sale of foodstuffs, and tomatoes were becoming an important element of domestic production, if not consumption.
Recipes, 1773.
We now find tomatoes not only eaten cooked and raw, but preserved in a thick paste, and in sauces. Still, their appreciation was regional: for southern peasants they were a major ingredient of their ordinary food, but they played only an occasional role in northern cuisine—and this remains true today. **
Tomatoes were now becoming so common that people were throwing them away—or at least were throwing them. In Italy, tomatoes were the missile of choice to show disapproval of public performers, and the activity came to be known as a pomodorata.
An 1863 report refers to the poor of Naples eating something called pizza, “seasoned on the top with an abundance or oil or pork fat, with cheese, oregano, garlic, parsley, mint leaves, with tomato especially in summer, and finally sometimes even with small fresh fish”. As Gentilcore observes, tomato was not yet a basic element of pizza, but only one possibility among several.
Moreover, that report may also contain the earliest reference to pasta as a staple food accompanied by tomato sauce—the subject of Chapter 4. It coincided with the movement to unify the different states and islands into a single nation.
Indeed, the triumph of pasta was also remarkably late. Types such as lasagne, vermicelli, and maccheroni were already established by the 16th century (spaghetti was a latecomer), but pasta was eaten soft, cooked for long periods, and thus accompanied by dry condiments; it was still a side dish. The two best-known regions for production were the Ligurian coast and the Bay of Naples.
By the mid-19th century the Neapolitans commonly ate pasta in taverns and as street food. It was now served slightly hard (vierd vierd: the expression al dente only became common after World War One)—a novelty that soon spread.
Making the preserve for the sauce (conserva, passata, salsa) was still largely a small-scale, local activity. Towards the end of the 19th century a French traveller in Calabria commented:
We are, in effect, in the season in which, in every Calabrian house, tomato preserve is made for use during the rest of the year. It is a solemn occasion in the popular life of these lands, a kind of festive celebration, an excuse for get-togethers and gatherings… Neighbours, and especially the neighbourhood women, get together in different houses one after the other for the making of conserva di pomi d’or, a procedure that culminates with a large meal; and they gossip as much as they can while crushing and cooking the tomatoes. It is here that for several months the locale’s chronicle of scandal is identified and commented on; it is here that those old rustic songs, which are today so avidly collected by scholars keen on folklore, are repeated from generation to generation.
By the 1880s tomato paste began to be exported to the USA. Its industrialisation was concentrated (sic, as Gentilore notes!) in Liguria, Emilia Romagna, and Campania. Tomatoes were first canned in the USA and Britain; in Italy, Parma took a leading role in both cultivation and preservation. Tomato ketchup was already becoming the national condiment of the USA.
The marriage between pasta and the tomato is usually said to have taken place in Naples around the 1830s. Pasta al pomodoro only gradually became a national stereotype from the late 19th century—just as millions of Italians started crossing the ocean to the New World, where the tomato had originated. It was to make repeated crossings.
So while I find it a challenge to imagine Botticelli and Michelangelo not tucking into a plate of penne arrabiata, such dishes would have been hardly more familiar to Verdi as they were to Monteverdi. Even as late as the 1930s when Umberto Saba met Gabriele D’Annunzio, he was more impressed by the novelty of the plate of pasta with tomato sauce (“a crimson marvel”) than by the Fascist celebrity himself.
The first acclaimed pizza was cooked for Queen Margherita in Naples in 1889; of three pizzas prepared for her, one was seasoned with tomato, mozzarella, and basil—the red, white, and green of the new national flag. In fact, its history goes back considerably earlier.
Above we saw a folk version of pizza in 1863 (for much earlier antecedents, see wiki). Pizzas were publicly made and sold in Naples by late in the 17th century. During his stay there in 1835, Alexandre Dumas described it as the staple diet of the city’s poor—with pasta eaten only on Sundays. By the middle of the century the city had over eighty pizzerie. In the 1880s Carlo Collodi, writing for a young audience, was underwhelmed:
Do you want to know what pizza is? It is a flat bread of leavened dough, toasted in the oven, with a sauce of a little bit of everything on it. The black of the toasted bread, the off-white of the garlic and anchovies, the greeny yellow of the oil and the lightly fried greens, and the red bits of the tomatoes scattered here and there give the pizza an air of messy grime very much in keeping with that of the man selling it.
The juxtaposition of hunger and gluttony is one theme of Collodi’s Pinocchio, first published in book form in 1883.
Pinocchio jumps into the sea, only to find himself in a fisherman’s net. Pinocchio explains to the fisherman that he is not a fish to be eaten, but a puppet. The fisherman replies that he has never caught a “puppet fish”, and asks how he would prefer to be cooked: “Would you like to be fried in the frying pan, or would you prefer to be stewed with tomato sauce?”
Meanwhile bread, often eaten stale, remained a basic foodstuff. In Puglia there was a popular proverb Ce mange paene e pomedaore nan ve me’ o dattaore (“He who eats bread and tomato, to the doctor will never go”).
In Chapter 5, “Authentic Italian gravy”, the scene shifts to the USA, along with successive waves of migrants. From 1876 to 1945 over nine million Italians crossed the Atlantic in search of a new life, most of them arriving between the 1890s and 1920s (cf. Accordion crimes).
Left, making tomato paste the Sicilian way, Madison WI, mid-1920s; right, supper on the Lower East Side, NYC, 1915.
Ventura’s 1886 short story “Peppino”, set in New York, describes pasta with tomato sauce, then still a novelty. Gentilcore goes on:
Making homemade tomato paste (conserva) was, for many immigrant families, partly a symbolic link to the town left behind, partly a matter of taste preference, and partly good economic sense.
Many immigrants also resorted to canned tomato paste. At first, such preserves were imported from Italy, but local production soon competed. The discussion subsumes the varieties of tomato, and the history of additives—including coal tar and formaldehyde.
In the early 20th century, the UK was the second main importer of Italian tomato preserves; meanwhile the British took to growing their own, with the growth of the suburbs and the increasing availability of greenhouses.
Ironically, American immigrants were often unaware of how much change was taking place as they strove to maintain continuity.
As emigrants, they had left Italy because of “hunger”, but as immigrants nostalgia and longing quickly set in. This was not nostalgia for the “land of poverty”, of course, but for the festive foods and the community to which they belonged. Consequently, they reproduced the food production and consumption patterns that were more dreamed of than actual in the world left behind. The “old country” became a mythologised place, which immigrant parents described to their children as a place where poverty and hunger coexisted with food that was good and natural and where they all ate together as a family.
The ritual of the Sunday dinner signified that the family was living the American dream, and
the focus for the transmission (or, if you prefer, the inculcation) of cultural mores and aspirations from parents to children. The place of origin that parents described to their children on these occasions was not so much a real place as a place remembered, a place imagined. The immigrants gradually filled it with idealised constructions, which had a very real function [for them]: to interpret, explain, criticise, and even deny the New World present, to both themselves and their children.
An account from 1940s’ America remains true today (note the typical use of the male pronoun!):
The Italian forced to live far away from his homeland, wherever in the world he sets his table, rejects every kind of cooking in order to establish his own, the simple but tasty cooking of his native land. And more than anything else he does not give up his traditional dish of macaroni with tomato sauce.
The new hybrid of the Italian-American restaurant too became stereotypical to the point of caricature—the “red-sauce joint, with its dishes smothered in tomato sauce, its red-checked tablecloths, and its candles stuck in Chianti bottles”.
By the 1930s the clientele of such restaurants had shifted from poor single immigrant bordanti to “bohemians” in search of an “Italian experience”.
Somewhat gleefully, Gentilcore also documents the invention of canned spaghetti in tomato sauce, dating from the early 20th century.
The sight of GIs opening cans of tomato spaghetti must have been a strange one to southern Italian peasants as the allied forces made their way up the peninsula in the latter stages of World War II. […]
It is easy to look down on such products, but it was a new way of eating food. After all, both spaghetti with tomato sauce and the invention of canning began about the same time, in the mid-19th century, so why shouldn’t they be united? It is just that we attribute different meanings, different values, and a different social status to pasta al pomodoro and canned spaghetti.
Returning to Italy, Chapter 6, “The autarchical tomato”, takes the story on to the Fascist era.
The mass migration of millions of Italians across the Atlantic had a positive effect on dietary practices in Italy in the form of remittances and return migration. […] For the first time, these remittances gave many Italians a chance to put aside money or goods.
Thus food preservation flourished as never before. But as economic prosperity grew, expectations and aspirations continued to change.
Gentilcore continues the story of the industrialisation of tomato processing—noting a company in Felino near Parma that rejoiced in the name Società anonima di coltivatori per la produzione delle conserve di pomodoro.
Changing patterns of organised labour had been giving rise to social unrest since early in the 20th century. Despite labour laws, even in the 1940s much of the burden for cultivation was borne by women and children. After World War One strikes and riots erupted. Mussolini’s Fascist Party sought to restore order—and to make Italy self-sufficient in food.
While the campaign of the Fascist Futurist Marinetti to abolish pasta was fruitless (indeed, Neapolitans came out onto the streets in protest), he didn’t extend his proscription to the “light and adaptable” tomato. Even ketchup survived the regime, though with their aversion to foreign words, it was renamed Rubra. Much Fascist food advertising was aimed at the resourceful housewife.
After 1924, when the USA restricted immigration, the Italian regime sought to replace it with Libya as a destination; as they proclaimed autarchia, or self-sufficiency, tomato cultivation was propounded there too. None of these projects bore much fruit.
On the eve of Italy’s fateful entry into World War Two in 1940, it was exporting virtually all of its fresh tomato crop to Germany; Gentilcore observes that Italy’s “Pact of Steel” with Nazi Germany that year might as well have been called the “tomato pact”.
Chapter 7, “The tomato conquest”, opens with a reminder of the poverty of Italy (particularly the chronically afflicted rural south) in the 1950s, as depicted in the neo-realist films of the day. But industrialisation, urbanisation, refrigerators, and the rise of supermarkets further transformed people’s eating habits. In the two decades from 1950, Italians grew in height but not in weight, despite the ever greater popularity of pasta. As stereotype and reality began to fuse, Italians could now eat spaghetti al pomodoro to their heart’s content. It was increasingly popular in Britain and the USA too, although pundits like Elizabeth David resisted the cliché, stressing the regional variety of la cucina Italiana.
Gentilcore’s material is now supplemented by feature films, such as two scenes, both from 1954—Totò’s spaghetti scene in Miseria e nobiltà (1954):
and Alberto Sordi’s scene from Un Americano a Roma (also 1954):
The recipe for spaghetti with tomato sauce included in Sophia Loren’s In cucina con amore (1971) is a tribute to the earthy recipes of her grandmother.
The disparity between north and south persisted. In his song Siamo meridionali! (1980) Mimmo Cavallo referred back to the family bathtub of southern migrants, classic receptacle for the growing of tomatoes (coltiviamo pomodori ddint’e vasche ‘e bagno):
Such migration from the south influenced the eating habits of both the migrants and the hosts.
In the Hollywood “pasta paradigm” (see e.g. this 1978 article by Daniel Golden), “the tomato sauces prepared and consumed by gangsters echo the bloody acts they commit”. One thinks of two scenes from Goodfellas (1990)—at home:
and in prison:
Pomodoro! can’t quite find a place for one of the great spaghetti-eating scenes: in Tampopo, Japanese debutantes are strictly schooled in the etiquette of eating them properly (another failed project, like Mussolini’s Fascism):
Nor does Gentilcore mention the “pizza effect” of anthropology, whereby elements of a nation or people’s culture are transformed or at least more fully embraced elsewhere, then re-imported to their culture of origin (cf. Tibetan “singing bowls”). The tomato played a role in the dubious “Mediterranean diet”.
By the 1980s, EU subsidies were further transforming the food economy, with Puglia benefitting notably. The Epilogue surveys the current tomato scene in Italy and beyond. As multinationals service our demand for year-round supply of “fresh” foodstuffs by sending them on vast, irrational journeys, Gentilcore addresses the global problem of labour slavery, organised crime, and trafficking. As immigrants began performing the tasks that Italians now shunned, the organisation and exploitation of labour by gang bosses was already featured in Pummaro’ (Michele Placido, 1989). Heavily staffed by African immigrants, and more recently eastern Europeans, the labour force is more vulnerable than the giornatori of yesteryear. Polish gang bosses exploit the Poles who work for them.
In a justly nostalgic passage which will strike a chord in Britain and elsewhere,
Nowadays, tomatoes look the same everywhere in Italy. Whereas “the real tomato has different, complicated shapes, with splits and streaks, and often pronounced baroque features, which so pleased the Neapolitan painters of the 17th century” [actually not yet, as Gentilcore points out], tomatoes today taste of nothing; they are full of water.
EU subsidies were not only unwelcome to producers in California, but hit West African countries hard. In turn, Italian growers have been hostile to Chinese imports, with the term “yellow peril” rearing its ugly head again (cf. Fu Manchu).
Gentilcore notes the Chinese term fanqie 番茄, “foreign eggplant”—the tomato was introduced there quite early by European missionaries, but still remains quite niche. BTW, it’s also known as xihongshi 西红柿 (“Western red persimmmon”), which reminds me of yet another story that I heard from Tian Qing (e.g. here, and here): during a phase of reviving Maoist “red songs” in Xi’an, some wag suggested the city might be renamed Tomato (Xihongshi 西红市 “Western red city”). I must also put in a word for the succulent tomatoes grown by Li Manshan.
This book will make you hungry—not just for knowledge.
* * *
All this is yet another instance of how things we assume to be eternal and immutable, like harmony and democracy, turn out not to be so. Another reason why I’ve cited Pomodoro! at some length is because its integrative approach, while perhaps a hallmark of most research worth its (um) salt, bears an affinity with that of ethnomusicology, including reception history—as for musicking, so for tomato-ing.
* Not to be confused with his long-lost Russian cousin Cestikoff, whose opera Il trasporto del pompino, regrettably not about fire-engines, was banned in St Petersburg. Allegedly.
** Cf. The Monty Python cheeseshop sketch: Cleese: “How about Cheddar?” Palin: “Well, we don’t get much call for it around here, Sir.” Cleese: “Not much call—it’s the single most popular cheese in the world!” Palin (smugly): “Not round here, Sir.“
In her wonderful book Watching the English, Kate Fox analyses the rules for conducting an English conversation. She notes the stock response to “How are you?”—“Mustn’t grumble”.
Bill Bailey ponders the reply “Not too bad—all things considered” in his show Limboland (currently on BBC iPlayer):
We’ve dialed down our expectations to an acceptable level of disappointment.
As to the more expansive reply “Not too bad—all things considered”, Bill’s list of “things” to which these Brits must be referring includes
the Okovanga delta (the cradle of all life), the Alps, the genius of Mozart, the limpid minimalism of Arvo Pärt; those yogurts with a bit of fruit in the corner; all human artistic endeavour; pushing someone in a pond when they least expect it; wars, religion, ideology, a rose, the uncountable stars, the boundless universe; the opalescence that shimmers on the surface of a tear that wells up in a shepherd’s eye as he marvels at the beauty of yet another Patagonian sunrise…
“You considered that?”
“Yeah.”
“And how do you feel?”
“Not too bad.”
* * *
The variant “can’t complain” is the subject of a story in the Big red joke book:
Kovacs went to the police in Budapest and asked for a passport and permission to emigrate.
“And where do you want to emigrate to, Mr Kovacs?” asked the police superintendant.
“Holland.”
“Aren’t you happy in Budapest?”
“I can’t grumble.”
“Don’t you have a good job here?”
“Can’t grumble.”
“Don’t you have a pleasant enough life?”
“Can’t grumble.”
“In that case, why do you want to emigrate to Holland?”
“Because there I can grumble.”
Talking of complaints, 116 people wrote to the BBC to complain that it was making it too easy to complain about the blanket coverage of Prince Philip’s death.
Ever wondered what Mozart operas are on about? Rainer Hersch has provided a helpful translation of the aria Come scoglio from Cosi fan tutte, in the tradition of the mondegreen/soramimi:
His lyrics are almost haikuesque. Some highlights:
Comely scone
Immobile Vespa [cf. Monteverdi]
Tasteless goatee
And mattress tester Pussy Galore, Trusthouse Forte
Chicken Korma, Onion Bhaji [cf. Berlioz]
Yamamoto’s vest
Tasteless goatee and mattress tester Leprechauns are very naughty
I’m not waiting for Basil Fawlty
Now this opera’s nearly over
Can’t spin in out any more
No inferno
No veranda
Thousands were ignoring the “Stay at home” regulations—not any more
For a “government” struggling to enforice public obedience to Covid rules on social gatherings, Rainer Hersch offers a fine suggestion:
While the livelihooods of musicians are severely affected by the crisis, recorder players— underemployed at the best of times—will be relieved to find themselves recruited to the campaign.
Bill Thorp (see comment below) also directs me to this site:
writes in a lyrical style reminscent of French philosophy, with examples of historical discussion from Galen and Francis Bacon to Freud. Some readers may be more amenable than I am to this kind of thing:
The voice is the vehicle and the arena of this agon between dissipation and replenishment. Our celebrations of the voice are too monotonously pitched in the register of fullness, richness, clarity and penetrativeness, the privilege is too regularly accorded to the energetic out-loud and the “haute voix”. The autumnal, deciduous voice, which is heard in illness, fatigue, ague and age, is not epically shredded by passion, but rather silted with lilting circumstance.
I would love to hear a group of stammerers, or indeed anyone, trying to get their tongues around “paradoxical polyphiloprogenitiveness”.
Call me superficial (You’re superficial—Ed.), but With All Due Respect to Ancient and Modern Sages, I’m intrigued by some of the asides. Connor notes Marc Shell’s observation that when animals were given human speech in animated film, they often, like Donald Duck, or Porky Pig, suffered from speech impediments. I see that Porky shared his stutter with the voice actor who originally played him; but because he couldn’t control his stutter, recording sessions took hours and production costs became too high (cf. my own attempts at voiceover). Here’s a helpful roundup:
There’s even a ten-hour version (WTF). But scholars don’t seem to agree that the word “Hottentot” is an onomatopoeic mockery of stuttering that early Dutch colonists in South Africa thought they heard in the speech of the local people. I’m keen to read Robert Arthur’s 1964 story The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot (cf. the truth-speaking parrot of Tibetan opera).
Stammering’s material culture of the past lends itself to historical analysis and therefore allows us to gauge how medical and social attitudes toward the impediment have changed.
She notes:
The impediment not only provided (pseudo) medical actors with a lucrative market for various curative objects and practices, but also propelled the (sheet-) music business. Stammerers themselves appear in this story of materialisation and market as both agents and objects. The cheap self-cures, medical manuals, sheet music and (later) recordings that were produced not only for, but also by, them, show how easily the impediment was aligned with the modern consumer’s identity and how the persona of the stammerer was, ultimately, lodged in the Western collective memory in very material ways.
Writing of the “collusion between consumerism and stammering” in the late 19th century, she observes:
The cures targeted a middle-class audience that would presumably care most about speech impediments (they were in a profession requiring fluent speech), but—more importantly—would also have the means to afford a cure. Self-help manuals seem to have targeted a similar audience: they were relatively cheaply produced, but a book on stammering would necessarily have been a “luxury” item, requiring its owner to be literate. This image of the consumer of self-help manuals dovetailed conveniently with the image of what most scientists considered to be the typical stammerer: a white middle-class man, the victim of the modern “strenuous” life, but also autonomous and capable of curing himself.
It was often claimed that stammerers were typically found in the professional classes and characterized by an extraordinary intelligence. Hoegaerts cites an 1896 paper:
“Children of weak intellect rarely stutter because their thoughts are slow, and their speech always keeps pace with their thoughts.”
And she observes:
That the stammerer was “civilised” was shown by the fluent speech of “savages”. Travelers were called upon to show that no one had ever encountered speech impediments in the uncivilised world. “All travellers, who have long resided among uncultivated nations, maintain that they never met with any savages labouring under an impediment of speech”. This was because, according to scientists like Hunt, its inhabitants were not subjected to the stress and strain of civilisation: their fluent speech was owed to “their freedom from mental anxieties and nervous debility, the usual concomitants of refinement and civilization.” Likewise, the lower classes did not appear to seek the help of therapists and were considered to be relatively free of the impediment. […]
Women, on the other hand, were not so much thought of as uncivilised, but rather as more suited to civilisation and its rhythms of speech than men. Individual cases of female stammerers occasionally surfaced, but they were thought to represent a very small percentage of stammerers. According to Richard Faulkner, women expended less energy on speaking. “We have compared subsequently the energy developed in conversing by the voice of a man and that of a woman, and have found that women are fatigued, in talking, four times less than a man”. Others had already suggested that women were naturally good at speech. What made women’s speech so fluent, these theories surmised, was that most of it was idle chatter anyway.
So
Whereas “savages” could not speak of anything beyond the concrete and women did not move beyond the trivial, the (male, middle-class) stammerer’s laborious speech betrayed his intelligence.
Hoegaerts goes on,
That a woman could appear at her most attractive and intelligent by not talking at all would easily have been accepted by therapists and gentlemen-scientists of the period.
Women came to acquire the authority in the field of speech therapy—although I note that many of the most famous therapists have been men, while women comprise a majority of the work force—Typical!
The sound of stammering Stammering became a popular theme for Tin Pan Alley songs, further popularised by sheet music. Yet
The popular representation of stammerers in songs, at the turn of the century and up until the 20s, seems very far removed from this image of the privileged, highly intelligent modern individual.
Composers treated stammering as a poetic and commercial opportunity, rather than as an impediment. It is no coincidence that almost all stammering songs were romantic and/or humorous in their content. The impediment was, in that sense, not the subject of the song, but merely a rhythmic device, the means to emotionally engage the audience, or the set-up for a joke. Sometimes, it was all three.
Of course, the rhythmic syncopation of stammering is an extrapolation by composers: the real sound is unpredictably non-metrical, aleatoric.
The connection of stammering to race allowed for rhythmic license. More specifically, the halting sound of stammering allowed composers to ride on the lucrative wave of ragtime music. Most explicit in the “use” of the sound of stammering was the 1913 song Stammering Sam, in which a young black boy’s stammer is presented as the “origin” of ragtime:
Then Stammering Sam sang, and the company sang “babababa! Babababe!” Singing his stuttering song with glee and that was the very first ragtime melody.
Like the stammering girls, these stammering “coons” defied scientific knowledge: their ethnicity as well as their social class should have protected them from speech impediments. Yet there they are, imaginary creatures proudly claiming syncopated speech in order to entertain.
Of course, in many ways the “stammering coons” are images of manifold oppression: their almost clownish representation derided their ethnicity, the connection arguably degraded ragtime music as it refused to take it seriously as a style, and the depiction of their accented, lower-class speech placed them firmly at the bottom of the social ladder. Being put on show, after all, also meant being subjected to the harsh gaze of the audience, to become an object of consumption. Significantly, the songs would most likely be performed by non-stammerers for other non-stammerers (although those who did stammer could, of course, hear them as well). The stammerers in the songs were mere figments of their writer’s imagination, specifically created to be “performed”, “bought”, and “used” to serve the purposes of entertainment and consumption. Whereas stammerers were approached as agents on the market in therapeutic manuals, popular music banked on the characteristic sound of stammering in order to “sell” stammerers, rather than selling something to them. […]
In an ironic reversal of the therapeutic logic, [the stammering song] turned fluent speakers into stammerers (thus perhaps proving that speech could indeed be manipulated to a great extent). […]
The culture that emerged from this “modern” consumerist world was shaped by women, down-at-heel sailors, and young black boys as well. […] One could wonder if the worlds of the privileged stammerer and the imaginary one in songs coincided at all.
It’s good to see the factors of race, gender, and class featuring in the analysis of disfluency.
Caption competition: “Thanks guys, I’m sure I dropped it down here somewhere…” “Excuse me, but whatever do you think you’re doing down there?” “I suppose you think I’m going to do your washing for you.”
While the language of rugby union may not be quite so elaborate as that of Daoist ritual, the roster of arcane infringements is quaint, and subject to constant revision. Not only do players have to understand the distinction between a maul and a ruck, they can be penalised for such faux pas as
And one admires the way the players meekly accept the ref’s decision, whatever it’s supposed to mean. And even while the game is flowing, the obliging ref is full of succinct advice on How to Behave—like
“Remember to take an umbrella in case it rains!” (Confucius)
The best bit is TMO (Too Much Oratory), where we all get to watch dastardly behaviour in slow-mo from every angle—like viewing a burglary on CCTV, while the judge makes learned pronouncements.
As to the basics, the Irish column Ask Audreyoffers a helpful explanation:
Guten Tag. I am in Cork for three months and see that everyone is watching the Rugby World Cup. Can you explain the rules? — Karl, Berlin
Here is my understanding of how it works. The fat guys all run into each other, while the slightly slimmer guys stand in a line watching them. Eventually the fat guys get tired and have a lie down on top of each other. The ball comes out the back of this lie down and the skinnier guys kick it back and forward to each other for half an hour. Then the fat guys wake up and start running into each other again. Every now and again the referee stops play because someone dropped the ball. That’s the only thing you are not allowed to do in rugby. Everything else would appear to be okay. Sometimes one group of fat guys pushes the other group over the line and there is some manly hugging, but no shifting like in soccer. After 80 minutes they add up the score and New Zealand wins.
I offer similar interpretations for snooker and tennis; note also The haka, and suitable responses—all part of a series under A sporting medley. More caption competitions here and here.
* As in “Excuse me sir, do you realise this is a one-way street?” “It’s all right officer, I’m only going one way.”
So very tenuous are my contacts with the Real World that I felt a strange euphoria on going along for my first Covid jab at Ealing Town Hall—almost as if I was being injected with some other substance, like reading Patricia Lockwood (suitable soundtrack, yet again: You’re my thrill).
While I’ve only been able to imagine the terrible sufferings of patients and NHS staff from the distance of the media—“our” NHS, that possessive mainly the prerogative of mendacious politicians (see note here)—I was much encouraged by the cheery, efficient volunteers, even if the scene didn’t entirely resemble that in the painting above.
What’s more, I’ve just renewed my passport—more as a souvenir than as a prelude to exotic adventures in far-flung climes, obvs. I see that only 42% of US citizens have a passport—up from 3% in 1989!?! * “I mean, what is there in Greece?” (cf. The English, home and abroad).
Anyway, I take personally both my passport renewal and the invitation to get vaccinated, as if I have been singled out for an MBE in special recognition of my services to International Cultural Exchange (takes modest bow, and virtuously declines the award).
Heady times, eh. Still, this sense of belonging is fleeting and illusory—back to my reclusive pursuits, punctuated only by pottering down to the corner shop every few days.
* BTW, good to learn that dedicated public servant Ted Cruz, with nothing at all for him to do in Texas, felt able to take a minibreak in Cancún—prompting memes.
I entirely share the universal delight in the intoxicating language of Patricia Lockwood, with her passion for the mind-expanding power of words.
Within her genre-bending oeuvre, the publication of a new article by her is always the occasion for fireworks and champagne. Just when we thought we couldn’t take any more analyses of the genius of Elena Ferrante, Lockwood makes the perfect commentator; so now we can delight in her own delight at Lila and Lenù.
Besides her pieces for organs such as The New Yorker and TheParis review, her LRB articles are virtuosic, perceptive, and exuberant in their language—such as her thoughts on Lucia Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov, Carson McCullers, Marian Engel. Her review of John Updike (“Malfunctioning sex robot”) is a most thoughtful, informed critique, like a more wacky update of Henry Miller’s emasculation at the hands of Kate Millett:
I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling.
See also Insane after Coronavirus?, and this piece on the US Elections, reminding us that her astute, enquiring mind takes wing way beyond mere lit crit. I sing the praises of her latest reviews here and here.
* * *
Her essay The communal mind is a prelude to No one is talking about this, her new novel about living in the internet. Amidst a multitude of blazing fanfares (e.g. this review), this comes from an interview with Hadley Freeman:
“White people, who had the political educations of potatoes, were suddenly feeling compelled to speak about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.”
Lockwood is all too aware that books about the internet have a bad reputation: “[They] had the strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement.”
* * *
Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy (2017; review, interview) celebrates and bewails her eccentric family, in a style distantly akin to the stories of David Sedaris. The title refers to her father, a rare married Catholic priest; she wrote the book while staying back at the family home with her husband Jason during a period of adversity. I guess it’s “confessional”.
While her parents make hapless victims of her trenchant pen, it’s far from mere slapstick; it’s an affectionate, benign portrayal, becoming increasingly reflective.
She was deprived of college by her father’s inability to resist buying a guitar made for Paul McCartney:
Later, I would take a detached literary pleasure in the notion that higher education had unwittingly been robbed from me by a Beatle.
She observes family life with detachment:
The drama of the scene ought to have been tense and throbbing, but it was undercut somewhat by my mother’s decorating, which ran heavily to bowls of gold balls. Still, we played our parts: every once in a while my father would bang down his fist while looking patriarchal, and my mother would turn to stare out the window while looking powerless, which contributed to the impression that we were participating in a Tennessee Williams play where “the internet” was being used as a code for “homosexuality”.
And
The Don Pablo’s in Cincinatti was a large converted factory, so it looked vaguely like a nightclub where people went to have wrong ideas about Mexico. In the corner, a fake cactus threw up its helpless arms, as if my father were holding it at gunpoint.
Her relationship with her husband Jason is most endearing. As he wonders if her father is trying to kill him, she responds:
“Did you give him any indication that you were a pacifist or an intellectual, or that you liked abstract art?”
Pets are a bone of contention too:
My father hates cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, given half a chance.
When Jason takes a job at a local newpaper, she muses:
There was a sign announcing how many days had passed since the last workplace accident, which made me think of the unlucky employee who had to climb up on a ladder the next morning to flip the number back to zero with a maimed hand.
As Tricia tries to watch old movies on TV, her father switches over without ceremony to
something like Bag of Guts: How Much Blood is in a Human Body? or Boom! A Toot from the Bum of the Apocalypse or Ragged Claws: Hideous Mutant Poem from the Deep.
She guesses the plots of his favorite movies based on the sounds coming through the walls:
A remake of The Ten Commandments where the lead actor is just an AK-47 wearing Moses robes. He parts the Red Sea by shooting it.
Indiana Jones flips through his dad’s diary and finds a map of the clitoris. “IT’S MINE”, he yells, but will the Nazis get there first?
God is a cop with a monkey sidekick, but the monkey sidekick is mankind.
She takes singing lessons with her sister:
We often sang together at church because our voices sounded related, though mine was obviously the hunchbacked insane relative who lived up in the attic and only descended for meals.
Her second teacher
looked like she knew where Prague was, which at that moment in time I did not.
But the chapter segues to her suicide attempt as a cloistered teenager.
Some of the most baroque passages come when she explains Catholicism to her bemused husband, suggesting a Martian ethnographer (indeed, she likens her notebook to that of an anthropologist):
“What did these people teach you?” he asked me one night, mystified. “What exactly do Catholics believe?”
I’d been preparing my whole life for this question. “First of all, blood. BLOOD. Second of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead. Do it right now. Fourth of all, Martin Luther was a pig in a cloak. Fifth of all, Jesus is alive, but he’s also dead, and he’s also immortal, but he’s also made of clouds, and his face is a picture of infinite peace, but he always looks like one of those men in a headache commercial, because you’re causing him such suffering whenever you cuss. He is so gentle that sheep seem like demented murderers in his presence, but also rays of light shoot out of his face so hard they can kill people. In fact they do kill people, and one day they will kill you. He has a tattoo of a daisy chain on his lower back and he gets his hair permed every eight weeks. He’s wearing a flowing white dress, but only because people didn’t know about jeans back then. He’s holding up two fingers because his dad won’t let him have a gun. If he lived on earth, he would have a white truck, plastered with bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin who is not a Catholic.”
While reluctant to “harp on” (my garish phrase, sic!) about feminism, Lockwood reflects on her relationship with the seminarians who come to stay:
What else could I do but tease them? I had no real power; it was men like these who were in charge of my life. If they decided tomorrow I had to cover my hair or wear skirts or pray separately, or be barred from reading certain books, or take certain pills and not take others, or be silent in the presence of men, I would have to do it. To have that bald dynamic of power on display in your home every day, pretending to arch over and protect you—it does something to a person. The seminarian calls women “the tabernacle of life”. The tabernacle, if you do not know, is an ornamental box that is largely important for what it holds. It is shut up and locked when the men go away, so the consecrated elements inside cannot be stolen.
YAY!Hallelujah! The “indomitable human spirit”, demurely Renting Asunder the Chains of Bondage—not just surviving but thriving!!!
People do sometimes accuse me of blasphemy, which is understandable, and which is their right. But to me, it is not blasphemy, it is my idiom. It’s my way of still participating in the language I was raised inside, which despite all renunciation will always be mine.
So while she doesn’t give the church an easy ride, she describes her background of taking part ungrudgingly in its rituals. Merging emic and etic, she is altogether gentle in her lack of confrontation—as she observes in this review:
“But in a way, I am happy that I wrote it before all this [the US elections] went down because you can look at those things foreignly. There can be a sort of nostalgia looking back at it. Whereas now, it feels so urgent to excise all these conservative forms of thought as opposed to just seeing them as quirks—which they’re not just quirks, but they are that, especially when it’s your family.” She adds, “I always had the sense that running alongside this book was a book that was much angrier, or was expressed more as a sort of haranguing monologue against various things, but that’s not particularly natural to me as a writer.”
She describes the background and reactions to the publication of her poem Rape joke, and adds a note to her comments on motherhood:
The twinge you are feeling right now is the twinge of wondering whether I am really right-thinking, whether I am really on the right side when it comes to this subject. I put that twinge in because I sometimes feel it myself. But after all that, you must understand that I had to leave right-thinkingness behind.
She reflects on her family’s involvement in the “pro-life” movement (see also this, adapted from the book):
We patronised pro-life businesses, which in the Midwest, back then, was easy to do. It was possible to buy a pro-life pizza, despite the fact that a pizza is by its very definition made out of choices.
She perceives certain feminist credentials in her mother, who is ever alert to danger while not clearly subscribing to the notion of female suffrage. In a charming chapter rejoicing in the title “The Cum Queens of Hyatt Palace”, they bond over finding cum on a hotel bed. After a spirited exchange with the management (not of bodily fluids, I should add),
We join hands and set forth into the morning, united by that human glue which cannot be dissolved.
But amidst the hilarity her account addresses ever more serious topics—the church child-abuse scandal, pollution-induced disease, and her father’s roles in counselling the desperate and officiating for the bereaved.
Eventually he concedes to his errant daughter,
“I never thought it would be so much fun to have you home. It’s so nice when your kids grow up and you don’t have to kill them anymore.”
But while revelling in language she treasures its limitations:
The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin colour, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of the pattern. I am happy every time I see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here.
Do bask in every enchanted word that Ms Lockwood writes! As a suitable soundtrack for such shots in the arm, I suggest You’re my thrill.
Following the Capitol riot, a tweet by Ian Boyden, “the yak re-enactment of the last few days in America”, made me wonder if this might form part of a viral series of Yak Re-enactments of Great Moments in History.
I now eagerly await yak re-enactments of The Signing of the Magna Carta, * The Balcony Scene from Romeo and Juliet, Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and The 1966 World Cup Final.
* Not to be confused with the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Phillip II at Le Goulet in 1200, as evoked by the sinister Jacob “Happy British fish” Wee-Smug, currently glutting on a surfeit of bendy bananas.
I’ve been watching Armando Iannucci’s 2017 film The death of Stalinjust at a time of crisis for another major world power, as the departure of a capricious monster offers the hope of a more humane society (cf. this review).
A study in duplicity and terror, Iannucci’s telling script continues from In the thick of it and Veep. Far from belittling the gruesome history of Stalinism, the film’s black humour makes the macabre, chilling brutality sink home. Amidst the frantic, ludicrous power struggles of the Central Committee, the brilliant cast is headed by Simon Russell Beale as the evil Beria; besides Kruschev, Malenkov, and Zhukov, Michael Palin as Molotov has some telling scenes.
Most commentators agree that it would be churlish to cavil at the artistic licence the film takes with historical facts—indeed, it’s likely to prompt viewers to delve into the grim realities, consulting the detailed work of scholars such as Orlando Figes (cf. this brief page). In her enthusiastic review, the perceptive Sophie Pinkham (always worth reading) also explores the banning of the film in Putin’s Russia (as Iannucci remarked, “In many ways Putin did our PR for us”).
Stalin’s death not only radically altered Soviet people’s lives, but set off a chain reaction outside the USSR. In China, the population was subjected to similar terrors until the death of Mao in 1976 prompted equally momentous change.
The film’s opening and closing scenes (embroidering a story about the pianist Maria Yudina) feature Mozart’s A major piano concerto, making another indelible association for me.
Short of watching the film on other, um, portals, it’s still available for another week on BBC iPlayer.
A most educative aspect of enjoying snooker on TV is the expert commentary by former players. But way back in the Mists of Time, pundits were considerably less well informed. And everyone was hampered by only being able to see the “game” in black-and-white—even live…
Here’s a transcript of the first ever broadcast:
I wonder what he’s going to do with that stick. I think you’ll find the technical term is “baton”. Gosh, he used it to hit one ball onto another one. Well that’s a bad start. Oops, one of the balls has gone down a hole. Obviously another serious mistake.
Yes, unfortunate, that—looks like the ref’s going to punish him by making him take another go.
Hang on, they gave him a goal then, when that ball went down the hole (I think it might be red, but who can tell?). Rewarding failure, if you ask me—Typical! Yes, but I notice they only score one goal for that. Someone should tell them not to bother.
[zzzzz]
Oh no, now another ball has gone down a hole! It’s almost as if they’re doing it on purpose.
This time it looks like a black one—makes a change, I suppose. Screwing up once is understandable, but twice in a row, come on! These chaps are clearly amateurs.
Hey, the ref’s put it back on the table—cheating, surely. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?O tempora, o mores!
Have you noticed how they keep hitting the white ball first? Bit unimaginative if you ask me.
It’d be easier without the stick too—whatever it is they’re trying to do. And they might have thought of the risks and just designed a table without holes in it. Basic design fault, what. I’ll give them a call, once someone gets round to inventing the telephone.
Or they could just play with bigger balls, so they don’t go down the holes.
I think he’s eyeing up a plant!!!
What on earth are you on about? Kindly leave botany out of this. People will think we don’t know what we’re doing. Sorry, no idea what I meant by that. Mind you, now he’s got a nice angle on the blue to go into the pack, hitting the pink full ball. You’re at it again.
Hang on—do you reckon the goal is to Attain Emptiness, after the fashion ofHuineng and Walt Disney?
[…]
Pour me another gin.
I think I’m starting to get the hang of this.
Hmm, not many red balls left on the table. The ref should put them all back. At this rate they won’t have any more balls left to hit—the whole sorry travesty will just fizzle out. Let’s face it, this is never going to catch on. I’m going to take up accountancy. Fancy a curry?
They missed out the essential piece of information that made things comprehensible. No one told me that the village was where the Master of the Earth, the man who controlled the fertility of all plants, lived, and that consequently various parts of the ceremony would be different from elsewhere. This was fair enough; some things are too obvious to mention. If we were explaining to a Dowayo how to drive a car, we should tell him all sorts of things about gears and road signs before mentioning that one tried not to hit other cars.
Since part of my mission (whatever that is) is to vary the distribution of the diverse posts on this blog, keeping you guessing, this latest annual roundup (cf. 2018, 2019) is an occasion to group together some major themes from the last year (see also the tags and categories in the sidebar). This is just a selection (with apologies to the posts I’ve missed—do seek them out!):
And much much more, As They Say. Having grouped them together like this, I hope readers will scramble them all up again like a jigsaw, rather than retreating into their own little boxes… And do click on all the links within these posts! Happy, Happier New Year!
Since Covid struck, there’s been considerable research on droplets launched by speech (e.g. here); singing, too, has been scrutinised for its risks to public health. Here I’d like to add speech therapy into the mix (see e.g. Modifying disfluency), a topic that such studies hardly take into account. *
The main culprits are plosives—both unvoiced (p, t, k) and voiced (b, d, g) plosives p-p-posing a p-p-particular p-p-problem for us stammerers.
Since consonants project over a greater distance than vowels, a three-tier system will be introduced in an effort to slow the spread:
Replacing P with F: anyone speaking to other feofle in a fublic flace will have to stop using the flosive sound; failure to do so could lead to a fine—or even frison. The whole fofulation, even members of Farliament, will have to flay their fart in this.
Replacing T with N: although this may cause some initial confusion—for example, neachers in schools will face challenges when neaching the nen nimes nable—we are confident any froblems will be nemforary; and measures under nier noo will help nurn the nide of this fandemic.
Replacing K with L: after a further brief feriod, we will bring in Near Three. The rules under Nears One and Noo will conninue. We have lonsidered these measures larefully, in line with relommendations from frofessors at Lambridge Universiny.
These new rules will affly also to other languages sfolen in this cunnry, including Nerdish, Folish, Fortuguese, and Inalian. I urge feofle to Leaf Lalm And Larry On. Nogether, we will lonquer the Lovid fandemic and renurn noo normaliny in no nime an all.
To be fair, it’s stressed, especially initial, flosives that are farticularly frojectile—and the major hurdle for stammerers. But requesting PPE may still present a challenge.
Levity apart (and here’s my pretext for relaying the topic here), it makes a good reminder for us stammerers to approach words with light contacts (“easy onset”)—and for fluent speakers, to imagine our chronic tribulations.
* Separately, several sites offer guidance for stammerers during Covid; this one has many links, including a BBC video. Of course, stammering is part of general issues in communicating; communication via masks is a challenge for all (cf. Masked drama in Asia). With so little social contact, I haven’t had much experience of negotiating stammering in a mask. I seem to be more reluctant to stammer “openly”, even if it’s invisible. When encountering a (silent) block, I apparently need people to see that I’m at least making an effort (also a reason why sufferers find phone-calls difficult), even if it’s precisely the tension of the mouth that is my undoing.
Amidst the pandemic it’s been suggested that (fluent) people should take up ventriloquism. I wonder if there are any stammering ventriloquists—perhaps a cruel dummy mercilessly taking the p-p-mickey out of their stammering minder… That would be great therapy.
For more melodious public health advice, click here.
His musical standup is brilliant (e.g. here; and Love song: The duck lies shredded in a pancake, Soaking in the hoisin of your lies…). Here’s another one, ranging from panto and military calls to the Alberti bass (“making the music go further—like cutting your blancmange with Angel Delight”), culminating in the East European version of the Match of the Day theme (“The tractor would not start”), following in the footsteps of Mahler:
All three protagonists—Bernard (Dylan Moran, also co-author with Graham Linehan), Manny (Bill Bailey), and Fran (Tamsin Greig)—are delightful, making complementary role-models. Despite Bernard’s persona as a “vile, rude, arrogant, elitist, filthy, chain-smoking alcoholic”, and, um, all the senseless cruelty and violence, the series has the charming mood of a kinder bygone age.
The first episode of Season 2 has more on learning the piano. If you already know that Bill is an accomplished musician (as one does nowadays), then you just have to suspend disbelief. This is a nice reversal of a persistent dramatic cliché:
I always wanted to learn, but my parents forced me not to. I spent hour after hour playing football, all by myself, peering in at all the other children in the neighbourhood practising their piano.
Click here for Bill discovering an affinity for jazz in the bookshop, as well as this:
In a Baileyesque kinda way, all this might lead us to John Cage‘s Sonatas and interludes, the Persian santur, and Studying the cello.
Cecil Parrott’s biography The bad Bohemian (1978) is full of insights (see also this review, and even this 2019 thesis). As Parrott observes,
Like so many Czechoslovak personalities, Hašek ran the gauntlet of differing assessments according to the prevailing political doctrines of the time. From his death until 1939 he was looked on as a “bad bohemian”; from 1939–45 (under the Germans) he was outlawed and his books burnt; from 1945–48, thanks largely to Communist influence, he was rehabilitated to a limited extent; and since 1948, after a brief period of uncertainty, he has almost been canonised.
Thus, ironically, Hašek became a “hero of Communism”, and Švejk approved reading for the Czechoslovak army. But
Had Hašek not been disillusioned about politics but engaged himself more deeply in party activities, it is almost certain that with time he would have been expelled from the Party too, because by his very nature he could not be anything but a non-conformist. His experiences in Prague soon after his return cooled his ardour and, paradoxically enough, his subsequent withdrawal from political activity was to prove his saving grace and to earn him later a place in the Communist canon.
Indeed, this whole history was submerged as Švejk became a theme for tourist pub-crawls (to which I also plead guilty).
Beermat from U Kalicha, as borrowed from my trip to Prague in 1980.
As Parrott describes in chapter 7 of The bad Bohemian, Hašek had already thought up the character of Švejk by 1911, well before the war, when he published five stories, which Parrott translates in The Red Commissar (1981).
One evening he had returned home very exhausted. Hardly had he woken up next morning when [his wife] Jarmila saw him feverishly searching for a scrap of paper which he had left about the night before. Before going to bed he had jotted down on it a “brilliant idea” and to his horror had now completely forgotten it.
Jarmila goes on:
In the meantime I had thrown it on to the rubbish heap. (Jarmila had a fetish for tidiness.) Hašek rushed to search for it and was delighted when he found it. He carefully picked up the crumpled note-paper, read its contents, crumpled it up again and threw it away. Meanwhile I rescued it again and preserved it. On it I saw clearly written and underlined the heading of a story, “The booby in the company”. Underneath was a sentence which was just legible: “He had himself examined to prove that he was capable of serving as a regular soldier”. After that came some further words which were illegible.
Parrott explains, “At a time when no Czech wanted to be classified as mentally or physically fit for service, the ‘booby in the company’ was literally asking for it!”
In The good soldier Švejk Hašek offers few clues that he might suffer from any delusions of political engagement. Parrott describes the japes of his early years—his hoaxes, spoof articles for The animal world, and his brilliantly-named Party for Moderate and Peaceful Progress within the Bounds of the Law, “designed largely to satisfy Hašek’s innate thirst for exhibitionism and partly to bolster the finances of the pub where election meetings were held” (see also stories in The Red Commissar).
This seems to have been the extent of his propensity for leadership at the time.
* * *
So it’s hard to square Hašek’s bohemian, alcohol-fuelled capers before the War, and after his return to Prague in 1920, with his interlude of commitment and responsibility in revolutionary Russia.
As Parrott notes, Slav prisoners of war were treated abysmally; Hašek was lucky to survive. After a spell in the Czech Legion in Russia, at first he worked as propagandist in Kiev, while continuing to write satirical sketches. He soon found himself in charge of an army detachment.
These years were a convulsive period when people had to juggle personal survival with shifting, murky political allegiances. With the Russian revolutions of 1917 Hašek’s loyalties shifted from monarchism to Bolshevism. From 1918 he broke with the Czech Legion to spend two years in the Red Army, soon becoming a leading figure in the town of Bugulma in southeastern Tatarstan during the civil war.
Parrott opens The Red commissar with Hašek’s nine short Bugulma stories. Like Švejk, the persona of Hašek here blurs the lines between fact and fiction. As Parrott observes, while the stories are satirical, they give a mellow, benevolent view of the convulsive social changes then under way.
With Hašek’s constant aversion to authority, the stories revolve around how he outmanouevres the belligerent yet hopelessly dimwitted Comrade Yerokhymov, Commander of the Tver Revolutionary Regiment. Hašek generally ends up having to give counter-orders to such proclamations by Yerokhymov as
To the whole population of Bugulma and its Region! I order everyone in the whole town and region who cannot read and write to learn to do so within three days. Anyone found to be illiterate after this time will be shot.
Commandant of the Town, Yerokhymov
Also featured is the enmity between the local Chuvash and Cheremis, and their shared bemusement at the struggles they now found themselves caught up in.
In addition to the Bashkirs the Petrograders brought in other prisoners, youths in peasant sandals, aged seventeen to nineteen, who had been mobilised by the Whites and had been watching for the first opportunity to make a bolt.
There were about three hundred of them, emaciated young men in tattered homespuns. Among them were Tartars, Mordvins, and Cheremisses, who knew as much about the significance of the civil war as they did about the solution of equations to the power of x.
Parrott retells another story:
A member of the Central Committee came to Ufa and at once searched for me! “You’re Comrade Gashek, aren’t you?” I nodded… “You’re a former legionary, aren’t you?” He looked at me sternly, straight in the eyes. “Yes, I am.” “You’re from Prague, aren’t you?” “Yes, I am.” “Comrade Gashek, you’re a great drunkard. Isn’t that right?” “Yes, that’s right.” “Comrade Gashek, everything’s all one to you—there’s nothing sacred, right?” “Quite right.” “When you were at home they say you were everything—Anarchist, Social Democrat and working in editorial offices all over the place. Is that correct?” “Perfectly correct.” “Khorosho [good]! You don’t deny anything. You’re a good man.” After his departure in about a fortnight, I was appointed inspector of the Fifth Red Army.
He spent time as Commissar in Ufa, capital of the Bashkir Autonomous Republic—where he was involved in purges, and began a relationship that became a bigamous marriage.
His language skills came into play:
He spoke some Russian, Polish, German, and Hungarian, and later learned some Bashkir as well as a little Chinese. Indeed, his “pidgin” Chinese seems to have great success with the Chinese prisoners-of-war.
He continued studying Chinese in 1920 when posted to Irkutsk in western Siberia, and published a report of his work among the Chinese Communists (for the 1956–57 film of Švejk dubbed into Chinese, see here; and note The definitive transliteration). There too he learned the Buryat language, founding its first ever journal—earning him the title “father of the nation” there. But clues to a planned mission to Mongolia remain elusive.
Accounts differ over Hašek’s alleged abstention from alcohol during this period.
Summoned back to Prague in 1920 by the Czechoslovak Bureau of Agitation and Propaganda (attached to the Central Committee of the Russian Bolshevik Party), his early death in 1923 rescued him from having to confront the more disturbing ramifications of his political involvement, and from learning the limits of satire under the new regime.
The Shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4, whose antecedents date from 1861, is an extraordinary marker of British identity (cf. The Archers and Desert island discs, among many posts under The English, home and abroad). To be fair, Radio 4 listeners may not quite be representative of the whole population (You Heard It Here First), but still…
The forecast is replete with the abstract, poetic litany of
North Utsire, South Utsire, Viking, Cromarty, Forth, Dogger, German Bight…
and
southwesterly veering northwesterly five or six, decreasing four. Rain then showers. Moderate with fog patches, becoming good.
In a perceptive chapter on “weather rules” from her brilliant book Watching the English, Kate Fox notes the power of this “arcane, evocative, and somehow deeply soothing meteorological mantra”:
None of this information is of the slightest use or relevance to the millions of non-seafarers who listen to it, but listen we do, religiously mesmerised by the calm, cadenced, familiar recitation of lists of names of sea areas.
Mark Damazer, Controller of Radio 4, attempted to explain its popularity:
It scans poetically. It’s got a rhythm of its own. It’s eccentric, it’s unique, it’s English. It’s slightly mysterious because nobody really knows where these places are. It takes you into a faraway place that you can’t really comprehend unless you’re one of these people bobbing up and down in the Channel.
Zeb Soanes, a regular Shipping Forecast reader:
To the non-nautical, it is a nightly litany of the sea. It reinforces a sense of being islanders with a proud seafaring past. Whilst the listener is safely tucked up in their bed, they can imagine small fishing-boats bobbing about at Plymouth or 170ft waves crashing against Rockall.
Like Fran in Black books, perhaps:
Charlie Connelly, in his engagingly nerdy book Attention all shipping: a journey around the Shipping forecast (2004, complementing the 1998 picture-book Rain later, good), notes the subtleties of reading the forecast at different times of day.
The late-night broadcast is particularly evocative (as in the old joke “Drink Horlicks before you go to sleep—otherwise you’ll spill it”). It’s perfectly crowned by the healing aural balm of Sailing by (1963), by the splendidly-named Ronald Binge, creator of Mantovani’s “cascading strings” effect [Persontovani, please!—Ed.]:
In case you’re still mystified as to what the forecast is for, click on the YouTube icon and note the BTL comments there.
As reader Jane Watson comments, the forecast is “comforting for people at home, because they’re tucked up in bed and they’re hearing that it’s absolutely blowing a gale somewhere out at sea”—which might sound rather like Schadenfreude.
As with most ritual traditions, the language is slow to change—how I would love to hear the suave tones of Charlotte Green announcing
Pissing down. Bummer.
Among many parodies, most brilliant are Les Barker’s version as read by Brian Perkins:
and Stephen Fry (1988):
Back at the real script, Alan Bennett (“occasionally moderate”) read it for Radio 4’s Today at the inspired request of Michael Palin—taking on a quite different tone, both sinister and hilarious:
Talking of British identity, the forecast waxes philosophical in the phrase “losing its identity”—precisely the paranoid fear bandied by Brexiteers.
Stellar lords of the Northern Dipper, from the chanted Litanies for Prolonging Life (Yansheng chan 延生懺) manual, copied by Li Qing, early 1980s.
Radio 4 listeners, bless their cotton socks, defend the ritual fiercely: there was a “national outcry when the BBC had the temerity to change the time of the late-night broadcast, moving it back by a mere 15 minutes (‘People went ballistic’, according to a Met. Office spokesman).” When the name of sea area Finisterre was changed to FitzRoy, “Anyone would think they’d tried to change the words of the Lord’s Prayer!”
Needless to say, such formalistic language reminds me of the long litanies of deities and pseudo-Sanskrit mantras that punctuate Daoist ritual (e.g. here, under “20th May”), whose efficacy for the devotee is also unsullied by mere cerebral comprehension.
I don’t recall the setting, but tangerine trees and marmalade skies may have been involved. Talking to someone daunted by the extent of my blog, I was explaining the importance of learning to navigate (and I quote my oneiric persona verbatim):
It’s like when you go to a library, you don’t just wander around aimlessly, do you, the books are like, divided up—Real Stuff, Made-up Stuff, Hippy Bollocks, Medieval Albanian Dentistry, that kinda thing. There’s even a catalogue.
They seemed impressed. Not amused, just impressed. The clown shoes I was wearing were not remarked upon. No car chases, just classification—Story of my Life.
You can take this as a reminder to use the Categories, Tags, and Searchbox in the sidebar. But you don’t have to read it that way.
Mahler, a constant inspiration, got me exploring cowbells (wiki: here and here).
For Mahler they represented a far-away realm, “the last greeting from earth to penetrate the remote solitude of the mountain peaks”—suggesting Chinese poetry and painting (cf. Das Lied von der Erde).
He uses them in the 6th symphony, most strikingly (sic) in the first movement, where they feature (along with celeste!!!) in a pastoral vision that suddenly interrupts the trampling jackboots—in my post, on Bernstein’s performance from 12.05, or on Barbirolli’s recording from 8.24. This brief refuge is itself brashly crushed (Bernstein 15.01).
In a later revision to the score Mahler added this typically generous instruction:
Die Herdenglocken müssen sehr diskret behandelt werden—in realistischer Nachahmung von bald vereinigt, bald vereinzelt aus der Ferne herüberklingenden (höheren und tieferen) Glöckchen eine weidenden Herde—Es wird jedoch ausdrücklich bemerkt, dass diese technische Bemerkung keine programmatische Ausdeutung zulässt.
—which, in the spirit of David Pesetsky, I’m tempted to translate as “inaudible”, only it’s a useful insight into his vision—notably Mahler’s final comment “this technical remark does not allow for a programmatic interpretation”.
Cowbells also appear in the slow movement and finale of the 6th. But Thomas Peattie (“Mahler’s Alpine journey”, Acta musicologica 83.1, 2011) unpacks their complex associations, refining the literal programmatic interpretations of critics, and noting that such apparently bucolic scenes are both fractured and fleeting: Utopia as an illusion.
Mahler used cowbells again in the 7th symphony: as this review tells us,
Tennstedt, in rehearsals for his last performances, was intent on showing his percussionists that cows would shake their heads violently and exhorted the player to shake the bell in just such a way (so good was his impersonation of a cow shaking its head, or at least so good was the orchestra’s reaction to it, Tennstedt did it again).
Church bells appear in the 2nd and 3rd symphonies, and sleigh-bells in the 4th. For bells in Bach’s soundscape, click here, as well as at the start of Bach’s sixth cello suite.
Cowbells also feature in Richard Strauss’s Alpine symphony. And they made a natural choice for Messiaen—part of his huge battery of tuned and untuned percussion, along with xylophone, marimba, woodblocks, and so on (not to mention piano and ondes martenot). Cowbells feature in a group of three wonderful works from the early 1960s: Sept haïkaï (with inspirations from gagaku and Noh!), Couleurs de la cité céleste, and Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum.
But that’s enough about WAM! Organology (Sachs-Hornbostel 111.242; cf. the cheesegrater) classifies cowbells as with or without clapper, tuned or unturned, externally struck or not.
Typically (cf. Whistled languages), they are considered as endangered: here’s a heritage project on the manufacture of cowbells in Alcáçovas, in the Alentejo region of Portugal:
And here’s Bill Bailey (currently a Strictly favourite) presiding over a charming rendition of The swan:
This post leads from the ridiculous to the sublime, so don’t despair.
Courtesy of slippedisc.com, here’s a challenge to the imagination: on 2nd January 1952 the sculptor Anna Mahler, daughter of Gustav and Alma, appeared as a contestant on the Hollywood radio quiz show You bet your life, with GrouchoMarx as host. Not just OMG, but
O––––M––––G…
It epitomises the Chinese expression kuxiaobude 哭笑不得, which is somehow more expressive, more versatile, than “not knowing whether to laugh or cry”. Anna tries her luck over the first 11 minutes here:
Undeterred, whether desperate or legally bound (both Anna and Groucho were struggling at the time), she came back for more the very next day for the TV version; thankfully it doesn’t seem to appear online—though in a masochistic kind of way, that too would be hard to resist.
The life of Anna Mahler (1904–88; see also here and here) was just as eventful as that of her mother Alma. Anna’s older sister Maria died in 1907 aged 5; her father in 1911, aged 50; and her half-sister Manon Gropius (the “angel” to whom Berg dedicated his exquisite violin concerto) died at the age of 18 in 1935.
Anna’s first two marriages, to conductor Rupert Koller and composer Ernst Krenek, were short-lived. Having trained in painting, by 1930 she gravitated to sculpture.
After another divorce, she fled the Anschluss in 1938, living in Hampstead and marrying conductor Anatole Fistoulari; their daughter Marina was born in 1943. Following the war she made a home, without her husband, in California, before divorcing yet again in 1956. She returned to London after Alma died in 1964, going on to live in Spoleto from 1969 and taking a fifth husband. She died while visiting Marina in Hampstead in 1988; you can read Ernst Gombrich’s address at her funeral here.
Anna’s father had been fêted in New York, both as conductor and composer, from 1908 to his death in 1911—Groucho, then in his late teens and making his way in vaudeville, could even have attended his concerts. Still, by 1952 he could be forgiven for having but a sketchy awareness of the composer’s towering work—it was some years before the craze for his music that took off in the 60s, often associated with Bernstein and Barbirolli (besides Mahler tag, more links here).
Like Harpo, public persona aside, Groucho was thoughtful and cultured: normal conversation between him and Anna might have been urbane. It’s the superficial format that reduces the encounter.
On the show, although Groucho would already have had background on his guests, he does at least sound suitably impressed to learn of Anna’s parentage and Viennese background, trying out his “old-world charm”. While he doesn’t do his Margaret Dumont routine on her, his badinage almost rescues the occasion: it would have been even more cringeworthy with Yer Average vapid quiz-show host quipping his way through such ritual exchanges. Anna puts on a brave face, right up to Groucho’s final question “What kinda fruit do you use in a peach pie?”
* * *
Just around this time J.D. Salinger was elaborating the precocious, mystically-inclined child characters of the Glass family, whom he portrayed as making long-term appearances on the radio quiz show It’s a wise child from 1927 to 1943. And John Cage‘s 1959 appearances on the Italian TV show Lascia o radoppia (“Double or quit”) were based on his serious sideline as an erudite mycologist.
All this was long before politicians learned that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, submitting to ritual humiliation by trying in vain to Get Down with the Kids (think Anne Widdecombe, George Galloway—actually, no, don’t).
And it almost makes the various Monty Python spoofs (like this, with Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara, and Mao struggling over questions on football and pop music) seem perfectly plausible.
But actually, why the hell not? The music of Anna’s own father is testimony to the synthesis of high and popular art (cf. Alan Bennett, in coda here; What is serious music?!; Dissolving boundaries; and Strictly north Shanxi Daoist ritual). [Well, I gave that a trial spin, but I still listen to the show peering through my fingers from behind a sofa.]
* * *
Apart from her stone sculptures, Anna’s work included busts of Berg, Schoenberg, Furtwängler, Klemperer, and Walter, as well as Schoenberg’s death mask.
So as an antidote to You bet your life, we can recover with Anna’s exquisite 1954 film A stone figure (do watch here), made over several months, in which she not only provides the instructive voiceover but also plays Bach for the soundtrack—somehow one feels a deep connection with her father (for his relation with Bach, see here).
“Talking of Michelangelo” (and Groucho knew T.S. Eliot! I rest my case), I remain fond of the apocryphal comment on how to create a sculpture of an elephant: “Just chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.”
In dhrupad renditions the nomtom syllables tiddley-pom and poppadom are prominent. As to arohana and avarohana patterns, whereas in ascent flat and natural re, ga, dha, and ni, natural and sharp ma may be sounded interminably and apparently at random, in descent all notes are avoided entirely. In the gat, a common phrase—alluding to rāg Madhuvanti, * and later adopted by Henry Mancini—is
The character of Chang also features in 
The roster of early American humorists commonly begins with 
Cesti’s opera was premiered in Vienna; the composer died the following year, and I haven’t yet seen evidence of further performances—staging it would have been a massive undertaking. So audiences in Italy may even have been denied the opportunity of a good giggle, although word must have spread. Still, in Italy, over a century after the tomato was first recorded there, one might suppose that the word pomodoro (the pomo referring generally to fruit, not to the apple) at least had become part of the vocabulary of the elite who were the audience for such spectacles. But then, they would also be familiar with the ancient story—although from the simple synopsis one might not imagine that it called for elaborate stage machinery to depict tableaus like shipwrecks and collapsing towers:
“What shall we do with all these balls?”
Radio 4 listeners, bless their cotton socks, defend the ritual fiercely: there was a “national outcry when the BBC had the temerity to change the time of the late-night broadcast, moving it back by a mere 15 minutes (‘People went ballistic’, according to a Met. Office spokesman).” When the name of sea area Finisterre was changed to FitzRoy, “Anyone would think they’d tried to change the words of the Lord’s Prayer!”
Anna Mahler. Source 
Stephen Jones: a blog 