Wilhelmina Stitch on Blackgang

Reading Geoffrey Grigson's 1945 description of Blackgang Chine bazaar (see Blackgang: a whale of a chine), I assumed that his reference to "Fragrant Minutes of verse by Wilhelmina Stitch" was just a general example of the keepsakes sold there in that era. But no: it turns out that there was actually a specific piece of Blackgang Chine merchandise by this bygone inspirational writer.

Charles G Harper: journalist, artist, sexist

With International Women's Day forthcoming, and its particular focus on the centenary (more or less) of the women's suffrage movement, it seems appropriate to mention an egregious example of the kind of attitudes this movement had to contend with. After reading Charles George Harper's South Devon Coast, I was inclined to rate this artist and travelogue writer quite highly as a person, but my opinion plummeted on finding his Revolted Woman; past, present, and to come, a diatribe against women - writers, particularly - with social and career aspirations. Nor is my view much helped by his crass satire Hearts Do Not Break: a Tale of the Lower Slopes.

Aged Holmes stories

"Mr. Holmes"

My current reading ran into a couple of Sherlockian topics. In UK newspapers, it's been hard to miss the story of the discovery of a lost Sherlock Holmes story in a 1903 fundraising booklet, The Book o' the Brig, compiled in aid of a bazaar to raise money for the reconstruction of a Selkirk footbridge destroyed by flooding in 1902. I also just started Mitch Cullin's A Slight Trick of the Mind, which has been filmed as Mr. Holmes.

The Cricklewood Greats

This is a repost: but this evening BBC4 just repeated its wonderful spoof documentary The Cricklewood Greats ...

Peter Capaldi embarks upon a personal journey to discover the shocking history of the stars of north London's famous film studios. Including clips from rarely seen films and interviews with Marcia Warren and Terry Gilliam.

... a graphically and textually brilliant pastiche, written by Peter Capaldi and Tony Roche, telling the century-long history of a small London studio.

Expectations

I always like revisionist takes on classic literature, and among various books I'm reading at present, I just read Ronald Frame's Havisham, which is a prequel and parallel text to Dickens' Great Expectations.

"Cabbages" and other parodies

Having been put off Thackeray at school, by being made to read Vanity Fair before I was able to appreciate its sharp social satire, I wish I'd read more of his works, which often go into outright parody. A reference in The Primrose Way brought me to a Thackeray piece I'd never encountered: Cabbages, a parody on Letitia Elizabeth Landon's Violets apparently written when he was 14.

Beer pump artwork

Beer pump labels are a fine little genre of miniature artwork. I was struck by a couple this week:

Firstly, there was Tolchards "Devon Coast" (a pleasant hoppy beer made by Red Rock Brewery of Bishopsteignton). With its ocean vista, and foreground shed and path disappearing down into a cove, it's a nice example of a picture that fits Jay Appleton's "prospect-refuge theory": the claim that human aesthetic experience of landscape is based on perceptions that are evolved for survival (e.g. places to hide, escape routes, places with a clear view).. See the previous posts Landscapes in mind and Prospect and refuge in a beer glass.

And then there's the depiction of Lord Nelson on the label for St Austell's "Admiral's Ale".

detail from St Austell Admiral's Ale label

This deserves credit as a very sharp caricature of the classic Lemuel "Francis" Abbott portrait (currently hanging in the Terracotta Room of number 10 Downing Street).

As in other depictions, the red sash is borrowed from a different portrait by William Beechey. See previously: Nelson gets a facelift.

- Ray

Glue some gears on it ...

Just glue some gears on it and call it steampunk;
That's the trendy fashion nowadays!
A copper-painted chunk of some 1980s junk
Will fetch a pretty penny on eBay!
- Reginald Pikedevant

A few days ago Felix Grant sent me a clipping from the Independent on Sunday, Steampunk! Introducing Britain's latest fashion craze ("The retro-futuristic blend of Victoriana and sci-fi is the next big thing to hit the high streets, forecasters say"), and Time magazine just covered the same topic: Will Steampunk Really Be the Next Big Fashion Trend?.  Both articles draw on the same IBM news release based on its "Social Sentiment Index": IBM Social Sentiment Index Predicts New Retail Trend in the Making ("Analytics points to the 'Birth of a Trend,' steampunk aesthetic to pervade pop culture in 2013").

I immediately thought of Reginald Pikedevant's song (above), inspired by the category Not Remotely Steampunk on Regretsy, a site devoted to documenting examples of naff art from Etsy, a marketplace for "handmade and vintage items".

I do rather like the idea of steampunk becoming a fashion, but I agree with RP that studding retro clothing with non-functional gears is not what appeals to me about its possibilities; I want geeky retro-styled hardware that's functional. For example: for some years - despite varifocal glasses - I've been using a folding lorgnette to get higher magnification. It would be nice if steampunk glasses with a tidily-incorporated loupe become mainstream fashionable.

- Ray

The serpent that once corrupted man

 

Where's my card? 'Miss Sapphire — Poses with a Python'. Now don't get the wrong idea — it's right artistic. Costume-wise, I never wear less than the full three tassels, and between shows I am at that python with the Dettox and a damp cloth even if he haven't been nowhere.

Never watch Blade Runner — The Director's Cut after seeing Victoria Wood's sketch The Library (see 15:27).

- Ray

The Cricklewood Greats

Somehow I've managed to miss this on many previous showings, but tonight I finally caught BBC4's The Cricklewood Greats ...

Peter Capaldi embarks upon a personal journey to discover the shocking history of the stars of north London's famous film studios. Including clips from rarely seen films and interviews with Marcia Warren and Terry Gilliam.

... a graphically and textually brilliant pastiche, written by Peter Capaldi and Tony Roche, of the century-long history of a small London studio.

In 45 minutes, it takes us from the early days with Arthur Sim's Méliès-style The Flying Pie and his stock comic character "The Little Drunk"; the strange life of Florrie Fontaine, a Gracie Fields clone and Forces sweetheart who fell from grace by becoming a friend of the Nazi High Command; the King of Horror, the classically-trained Lionel Crisp, his role in the Quatermass-like Dr Worm (in which he undergoes a horrific transformation after being bitten by a radioactive worm), and his long career in Hammer-style horror; Jenny Driscoll, a glamour actress who appeared in the Carry On style "Thumbs Up" comedies; and final demise of the studio, brought down by disastrous financial losses during the filming of Terry Gilliam's lost Professor Hypochondria's Magical Odyssey.

The Cricklewood Greats is a gem of intelligent comic television of a kind we seldom see. If you're in a region where it's available, it's currently available on BBC iPlayer for the coming week. See The Cricklewood Greats.

- Ray

Fake prescriptive poppycock

Cosmo (a he-cat) and Phoebe (a she-cat)
- or, being neutered, are they both it-cats? -
are pissed off at my joke at their expense

Via a post by Geoff Pullum at Language Log - Newly invented fake prescriptive poppycock - a nice diversion from the Lingua Franca column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In honour of the long history of grammatical discourse being poisoned by bogus rules invited by peevologists, the MacMurray professor Allan Metcalf invites readers to come up with new but venerable-sounding bogus rules. See A New Contest, Centered Around Usage.

It's not great, but I came up with:

"He" and "she" are not appropriate as pronouns for animals; as they are of an entirely non-human class, all animals should be "it".

If it's necessary to specify the sex, use either the precise and long-standing term for the particular animal of that sex ("Where is Kittikins? The tom is on the mat") or expand the definition ("Where is Kittikins? It, the male, is on the mat" - or "The he-cat is on the mat").

I possibly could have woven into the yarn Cordwainer Smith's nice constructions to designate names of animal-derived underpeople in his Instrumentality mythos, where a prefix designates the animal origin: C'Mell is of cat stock, B'Dikkat of bull stock, and the eagle-derived E'telekeli.

Addendum: Ever since I posted this, I've had a horrible nagging feeling that my rule is stupid enough for someone to have actually proposed it in real life. A quick search of Google Book suggests not. But the sexist personification rules for animal gender in Richard Hiley's 1837 English Grammar and Style are almost as silly when you think them through:

c. When speaking of animals, the sex of which is not regarded by us, we frequently assign to them gender suited to their particular characteristic properties. The strong and bold ones being considered the masculine, and the weak and timid of the feminine gender; thus, we say of the horse, that he is a useful animal; of the hare, that she is timorous.
d. Insects, small quadrupeds, birds, and fishes, are frequently spoken of as neuter.

- page 21, Richard Hiley, English Grammar and Style: To which is Added Advice to the Student, on the Allainment and Application of Knowledge, 1837

The mind boggles at the semantic difficulties in deciding if a particular species of animal is macho enough to be a "he".

Hiley was a Leeds schoolmaster, with, like many authors of "me too" grammar books in the 1800s, no particular qualifications for commenting on English grammar other than wanting to correct what he saw as deficiencies in Lindley Murray's English Grammar. Although his aim was nominally descriptive, he nevertheless completely failed to understand fundamental linguistic points such as the inevitability of usage change. This led him to diss the grammatical correctness of earlier highly-educated and well-known writers, rather than recognising them as data points for the mainstream correctness conditions of their time, a century or more before Hiley was writing.

But, if a knowledge of Latin and Greek does induce a habit of correct English diction, how comes it to pass that the writings of many distinguished classical scholars of the last century are lamentably deficient in grammatical accuracy? Dr. Bentley is a well-known instance. Nor will it be difficult to point out numerous violations ot grammar in the pages of Addison and Swift. Who, in these days, would admire, as specimens of graceful composition, the once reputed elegant pages of Locke, Barrow, and Tillotson? Yet these men had, in addition to their classical attainments, frequented the best company, and had attended, as far as the low state of grammatical knowledge would then allow, to correctness of expression.
- preface, page v, English Grammar and Style.

- Ray

A Barnstormer in Oz

1982 Berkeley trade p/b cover

I mentioned Philip José Farmer's A Barnstormer in Oz briefly before, alongside Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (see Keith Laumer ... and Oz, Sept. 2007).

Both are revisionist views of L Frank Baum's Oz mythos. I read Wicked a few years ago, and despite the rave reviews, I found it very ponderous. Its central thrust is that the Wicked Witch of the West (called Elphaba by Maguire, after "LFB") is a more complex character, driven into the role of wickedness by resistance to the Wizard's tyrannical policies concerning the rights of sentient animals in the world of Oz. Even though I like the Oz books and films, I didn't find much connection with them, because the majority of the events in Wicked are a prequel to the arrival of the well-known Oz characters. The whole handling seemed to me a very dull polemical exploration of the portrayal of good and evil, and the problems of Animals (sentient animals) vs ordinary animals, all countersunk by a study guide at the end posing various questions on the moral issues raised. Wicked just drips with its own sense of Significance.

A Barnstormer in Oz, which I finally read today, is completely different in tone. It's essentially a hard SF take on fantasy, whose central premise is that Oz is far more complicated than the Baum portrayal (within the book's mythos, it's written by Baum after interviews with Dorothy, but spun for the children's market).

Dorothy's son, the stunt pilot Hank Stover, flies through a mysterious green cloud and lands in Munchkinland. He's initially detained - for reasons of disease quarantine - and immediately finds the place to be a complex and sophisticated culture. The Munchkins are not infantilised dwarfs, but pygmy descendants of Ostrogoths who passed through a dimension portal to the Oz analogue of Earth, Ertha; they speak a slightly Latinised Germanic language, which he has to learn. The country is run as a benevolent dictatorship by the centuries-old Queen Glinda the Good, with some democracy at a regional level, and is a bizarre mix of cultural features: for example, there are strict rules for population control via a herbal spermicide, but the same spermicide allows wide pre-marital sexual freedom (Hank, though he yearns for Glinda, rapidly forms a relationship with the blonde guard Captain Lamblo). Despite the mediaeval formality, Munchkin culture has extremely syncretic Christian / Norse / pagan religious practices, some of which Hank finds abhorrent, such as its primitive tribal funerals with painted naked mourners and ritual bloodletting. The issues of sentient animals are addressed in far more concrete details than in Wicked, such as the taboos on killing sentient animals, and the accommodations that let sentient carnivores indulge their instincts under certain circumstances.

Hank, as a pilot with wartime experience and an armed Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" biplane, rapidly finds himself involved a key player in two conflicts that are brewing, both involving territorial ambitions. One involves an invasion of Erakna the Uneatable, a new Wicked Witch with armies of sentient hawks and flying monkeys. The other is an attempt at invasion by the USA, which in a project instigated by Warren G Harding has discovered how to open the portal to Ertha, and sends in an expedition force ostensibly seek diplomatic contact to "protect" Oz (an offer that Hank knows will rapidly repeat America's exploitative history when the US visitors realise Oz's wealth of precious stones and metals). Despite his loyalties as an American, Hank takes the side of Oz. This is helped along by his plans to marry Lamblo, and the friendly but cynical manipulation by Glinda, who spots him as a powerful wildcard who is free to use guns and explosives that would be taboo for Oz inhabitants.

During the military campaigns, which involve an undercover attempt with a couple of folksy rogues to assassinate Erakna, Hank encounters more mysteries about Oz. The chief one is his attempt to understand the nature of 'firefoxes', a form of ball lightning that possesses animals and inanimate objects with sentient intelligence (hence the lion, scarecrow and tin man) - in a thunderstorm, the same happens to Hank's biplane Jenny. He concludes that firefoxes and anomalous creatures such as the flying monkeys are the creations of the "Long-Gones" (reminiscent of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones), the original inhabitants of the Oz dimension.

The US invasion is forestalled first by Glinda's devastating attack on the ill-equipped military expedition - as this is 1924, an era before large-capacity passenger air transport, the US sends a small suicide mission arriving through the portal in a multifarious collection of co-opted commercial aircraft. Although further missions seem inevitable, the US is ultimately warned off by a terrifying demonstration of Glinda's ability of precise magical teleportation from Ertha to Earth. The book ends with a magical battle to the death between Erakna and Glinda, who Hank ultimately concludes would be better named "Glinda the Ambiguous".

The Wikipedia article mentions critical disagreement:

Inevitably, critics have disagreed on the value of Farmer's contribution to the literature of Oz. Jack Zipes called the novel "splendid," while Katharine Rogers considered it "revision to the point of debasement."
- A Barnstormer in Oz, retrieved 27 Sep 2012

I go with the "splendid". It was an enjoyable and intelligent afternoon's reading, with interesting footnotes on Farmer's ideas about the evolution of the Munchkin and Quadling languages mentioned in the book, as well as an analysis of the flora and fauna of Oz in terms of other Earth regions and cultures scooped up in the dimensional warp.

See the Official Philip José Farmer Web Page for other reviews, some of which mention other Oz adaptations. The Royal Timeline of Oz also has an extensive collection relating to the literary history of Oz and its various spinoffs, both faithful and revisionist: see, for instance, The Dark Side of Oz and Beyond the Deadly Desert.

- Ray

Beatles Complete on Ukulele ... nearing completion

I mentioned a while back The Beatles Complete on Ukulele, the excellent project by the artist and music producer/writer David Barratt to create cover versions of the entire works of the Beatles (defined as the 185 original compositions produced between 1962 and 1970).

The project, begun on January 20, 2009, is now up to the 180th composition, and is due for completion on July 31st 2012, the eve of the London Olympics.

Done to a punishing schedule of one a week, the tracks all feature ukulele in some capacity: but this is often minor. It's a fascinating range of sympathetic and creative adaptations by artists in a variety of genres, performed largely by little-known musicians. All the tracks are accompanied by slightly off-the-wall companion essays about the making and inspiration of both the original and new versions. The list is highly worth exploring.

A brief sampler:
18, a vintage-bluesy Lady Madonna with Amanda Homi;
21, Papa Dee's reggae version of Blackbird;
57, an orientation-switched Yesterday by Colton Ford;
80, a remarkable adaptation of Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da as an anguished monologue by Victor Spinetti in the style of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.
81, a charmingly simple acoustic version of All You Need is Love with Nikki Gregoreff;
82, a very bright and upbeat cover of I Should Have Known Better featuring Samantha Fox;
84, When I was 64, spoken by the 100-year-old Dr Harry Steinberg;
108, a neat Motown version of Ticket to Ride by Jenny Dee & The Dreams;
119, Gerald Ross's gentle instrumental of Penny Lane on solo ukulele;
126, Lauren Molina giving a complex viewpoint spin to She Loves You.

The lineup has changed a little since I first encountered the project. The Flash player version below has some other tracks that I particularly liked the first time round, including Bruisercharles' joke-horror version of Maxwell's Silver Hammer ("The atmosphere is one of Tim Burtonish dread"); and Deni Bonnet's  plaintive Klezmer-style minor-key gender-reversed Please Please Me.

- Ray (Sorry about the whitespace below - it seems to be an artifact of the player embedding code).

Addendum: I just had a helpful comment from the organisers to a detail I hadn't spotted:

To download everything with one click, go to:

The Beatles Complete On Ukulele » Podcast Feed

Thanks!

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The Hound of the D’Urbervilles

This has been a busy couple of months, and - partly due to a vow not to read it until finishing my tax return - I only just got around to reading Kim Newman's new novel Moriarty - The Hound of the D’Urbervilles (Titan Books, 2011, ISBN 9780857682833) that I bought mid-November.

The novel is essentially a dark mirror of the Sherlock Holmes mythos, with Holmes and Watson replaced as protagonists by a pairing of Professor Moriarty and Colonel Sebastian 'Basher' Moran (who is employed as a hit man for Moriarty's organisation). Newman isn't the first writer to tackle Moriarty (John Gardner's Moriarty novels, Michael Kurland's Professor Moriarty series and, especially, Neil Gaiman's Cthulhu mythos story A Study in Emerald spring to mind). However, this book brings to the mix Kim Newman's characteristic brand of highly literate intertextual pastiche populated with historical and fictional characters.

The novel consists of a cycle of seven linked stories - in part a paste-up of stories that have appeared elsewhere - told by Moran through the vehicle of their alleged discovery in a despatch box in a London "criminal bank". A Volume in Vermilion sets the scene - the first meeting of Moran and Moriarty is excerpted on the Titan books website here - then tells of Moran's first assignment involving the Mormon-linked feud from Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet. A Shambles in Belgravia is a pastiche of A Scandal in Bohemia involving Irene Adler (Moran writes: "To Professor Moriarty, she is always that bitch") and a blackmail plot involving the royal family of Ruritania (i.e. from Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda). The Red Planet League tells of Moriarty's convoluted plot, involving Martians, to discredit an egotistical Astronomer Royal who has dissed his Dynamics of an Asteroid monograph. The title story, The Hound of the D'Urbervilles, retells The Hound of the Baskervilles in Thomas Hardy's Wessex, in which Moriarty is hired by an emigree American robber baron to dispel myths of the giant hound that are interfering with his plans to squeeze profits from the D'Urberville estate. The Adventure of the Six Maledictions uses as starting point J Milton Hayes's music hall monologue The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God (concerning "Mad Carew", who steals a cursed gem) and follows the mayhew that arises when Moriarty, for reasons of his own, decides to start collecting cursed objects. The Greek Invertebrate is a steampunk thriller that takes Moriarty and Moran, along with a cast of characters from Arnold Ridley's The Ghost Train, to "Fal Vale" in Cornwall to investigate sightings of a sinister "white worm". The Problem of the Final Adventure goes to Europe and, inevitably, the Reichenbach Falls, interweaving the events of Conan Doyle's The Final Problem with Moriarty's final encounter with his own nemesis (perhaps surprisingly, not Sherlock Holmes).

For the most part, this is extremely well done. Colonel Moran, as a narrator, strongly resembles a nastier version of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman - a debt acknowledged by Newman - and proves similarly sympathetic; he has a vestige of honour (he admires courage), is aware of his own failings, and is far too interested in people and their motives to be the complete cynic he professes to be. Likewise the relationship between Moran, the adrenalin junkie ex-soldier, and Moriarty, the unfathomable intellectual, is well-developed as a parallel to that of Watson and Holmes (where Holmes keeps bees, Moriarty keeps wasps; and his "methods" are contrary to Holmes' deduction; Moriarty does the Victorian equivalent of Googling it).

If I have a criticism, it's of Newman's handling of the intertextualism. He can do it seamlessly, subtly and pertinently; and he can go into an "everything but the kitchen sink" mode, throwing in large numbers of out-of-mythos characters and allusions that make you lose suspension of disbelief. The best story of the collection in my view is The Red Planet League, and that does it exactly right; it's a tightly-done skit on alien invasion literature and film - chiefly HG Wells's The Crystal Egg and The War of the Worlds ...

Yet across the gulf of the lecture hall, a mind that was to Stent's as his was to the beasts that perish, an intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded the podium with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew his plans against him.

... but also with hat-tips to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, and even briefly to Alien. But in the otherwise excellent The Hound of the D'Urbervilles, Newman starts bringing in out-of-mythos characters, such as Desperate Dan and a character who is clearly Klaus Kinski. And The Adventure of the Six Maledictions is in full-on kitchen sink mode, complete with the Hoxton Creeper (as played by Rondo Hatton in The Pearl of Death), the Maltese Falcon, and a whole cast of criminal masterminds from book and film, who appear again in The Problem of the Final Adventure. They're still good stories, but you can see the wheels working.

This really is a book where you need to read it once, read the footnotes and Google a bit, then read again, then Google again. There are any number of interesting-looking works referenced that I'd never heard of, such as William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories. And it's often very difficult - a sign of good pastiche - to distinguish fact from invention on first reading. For example, Newman's learned footnote about "quap", "a form of pitchblende used in turn-of-the-century patent medicines", looked thoroughly plausible until I found it come from HG Wells's now little-read semi-autobiographical satire Tono-Bungay. I enjoyed Moriarty - The Hound of the D'Urbervilles a lot, and will no doubt be pursuing the threads for a while to come.

- Ray

Comic Grammars

Frontispiece: The Comic English Grammar

I mentioned a few months back - see Henry Sweet - the phenomenon of 19th century grammar books, a huge market - Ian Michael, referenced below, counted 856 - driven by the continuing growth and social anxieties of the middle class that gave rise to English prescriptivism in the first place.

Most grammars of English published in Britain during the 19th century are dull ... There were a great many grammars, issued in very large numbers. They were repetitive; many were merely commercial ventures, scholastically naive ... The vast number of grammars contrasts with the uniformity of their contents. Of all the subjects in the school curriculum English grammar was the most rigid and unchanging ... Teachers had insisted, for two centuries, on writing grammars which added little or nothing to what had gone before.
- Michael, I. (1991), "More than enough English grammars", in G. Leitner, English Traditional Grammars. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 11-26.

One of the most influential - and most reprinted well into the 19th century - was the 1795 English Grammar by the American ex-patriot Lindley Murray.  As described in this review - Two Hundred Years of Lindley Murray - it was classically prescriptive, based on the practice of the best writers (in Murray's view), and appeals to logic, clarity of communication, and aesthetics (again in Murray's view). Much of it comes across as highly pompous and deeply subjective.

It's pleasing to find that even in the 19th century, some readers found Murray's approach ridiculous, and I just spotted David A Reibel's 1996 compilation, Lindley Murray's grammar in caricature: four parodies, which introduces a set of more or less barbed ripostes to Murray. They are: The Comic English Grammar: a new and facetious introduction to the English tongue (1840, Percival Leigh, illus. John Leech); The Illustrated English Grammar, or, Lindley Murray simplified (c. 1843, Anon.); The Comic Lindley Murray; or, The Grammar of Grammars (1871, Anon.); and The Pictorial Grammar (1842, "Alfred Crowquill").

I couldn't find The Illustrated English Grammar online, but the other three are. The Pictorial Grammar (Internet Archive pictorialgramma00crowgoog) is a nice little book, not exactly a parody. It's a perfectly straight grammar, written and illustrated by the Punch contributor Alfred Henry Forrester, but one given a pleasantly droll spin by the drawings - dignitaries, matrons, degenerates and eccentrics - accompanying each example. For instance, "Each of his brothers is in a pleasant situation" has a picture of two criminals in the stocks. The Comic Lindley Murray (Internet Archive comiclindleymurr00dubliala) I found a little laboured; Dublin-published, it's a self-mocking Irish take on English grammar.

The Pluperfect Tense represents a thing as doubly past; that is,
as past previously to some other point of time also past; as,
"I fell in love before I had arrived at years of discretion."
The Comic English Grammar.

But as Reibel's Introduction says, the highlight of the bunch, also written and drawn by veteran Punch contributors, has to be The Comic English Grammar (Internet Archive comicenglishgram00inleig). Part of the joke is that it closely emulates Murray's book, but with a Sellar & Yateman style mixing facts with pseudo-facts and jokes, and partly extends the analysis to a variety of social classes: Cockney, genteel, servants, rustics, and so on.  While it could be accused of classism in mostly holding up the language of the lower classes to ridicule, it's generally an affectionate ridicule, and doesn't omit the affectations and social mannerisms of middle and upper-class speakers. And the cartoons are great fun!

See the following post for More on Lindley Murray.

- Ray

Vampire Poets!

It's Charles Babbage's 220th birthday today, and if you want a spot of relevant, erudite and heavily-footnoted post-Christmas steampunk webcomic entertainment, I recommend Sydney Padua's website 2D Goggles, where you'll find the continuing saga of Babbage & Lovelace as 19th century crimefighters. Their current adventure involves Vampire Poets. Read on (the strange numbering is, I assume, intentional):

Vampire Poets, Prologue (in which the shade of a Gothic poet arises to set the scene, and we get examples of real-world bad Victorian poetry featuring the protagonists).
Vampire Poets - Part One! (in which Babbage, collecting statistics on window-smashing, encounters a mysterious young woman high on maddening draughts of Hippocrene; she later disappears, and her sisters - she is in fact Emily Brontë - enlist Babbage's help in finding her).
Vampire Poets Part the Third (in which Babbage introduces the sisters to Lovelace, whose hereditary temperament has acquainted her with the dangers of poetry. We see a spot of Byronic/Holmesian target practice, and get no explanation from Babbage as to why he thought he would have been a poet if he had been blind).

Here's the index to all the stories. And there's a great list of primary documents.

- Ray

"God bless us, every one!"

I'm in a bit of a "Bah, humbug" mood at the moment, having caught a rotten cold a few days ago. It's not quite flu, but it's causing a high enough fever to be distinctly hallucinogenic. I wrote the previous post in the middle of the night because I had to get up; every time I shut my eyes I got a continuation of a strange half-dream that I had to use some kind of Enigma or Turing Bombe machine to solve Kai's mirror puzzle from The Snow Queen (we watched the 2002 TV movie earlier in the week).

So, no deeply meaningful meditations on Christmas: just a repeat recommendation of Louis Bayard's 2004 novel Mr Timothy, a fine Dickens pastiche that brings Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol into early manhood, now cured except for an occasionally painful leg and slight limp. Scrooge's new-found benevolence hasn't been entirely a positive influence in Tim's life; the philanthropy has been omnipresent to the point where Tim is at a loose end, resenting his lack of financial independence. The book finds him trying to escape this heritage, after the death of his father Bob Cratchit, by disappearing into the London underworld. He finds lodgings in a brothel, in exchange for teaching the mistress to read and write; and finds work with the cheerful Captain Gully who plies the Mayhew-esque trade of fishing corpses from the Thames to recover the contents of their pockets. The story takes an even darker turn with the discovery of the corpses of two 10-year-old girls branded with a "G", and Tim finds himself on the dangerous trail of high-society conspiracy and serial murder.

It's definitely worth checking out: the crime mystery runs parallel to the more existential story of the problem of breaking away from the roles we're assigned in childhood, in Tim's case that of the wimpy little crippled boy who says "God bless us, every one!" There's an online January Magazine review by David Abrams - Tiny Tim Sings a New Christmas Carol - and Google Books has a preview of the novel: Mr Timothy.

And best wishes of the season to all readers of JSBlog!
except the comment spammers who think I won't spot the Japanese spamlinks at the end of any number of "ooh, how interesting" comments

- Ray

My Jolly Sailor Bold: update

A pointer to an update. On further reading, I have a theory that the previously-mentioned shanty My Jolly Sailor Bold (documented in 1891, and featuring in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) is actually a London-tailored ripoff - quite probably a late 19th century one - of the traditional Irish ballad The Banks of Claudy, since the first verses have close textual similarity. See the addendum to My Jolly Sailor Bold, 1891.

- Ray

A Happy Working Song

Skip straight to song.

A Happy Working Song from the Disney film Enchanted. I didn't think much of the movie overall, but the high point was this Disney self-parody (of the Whistle while you work scene from Snow White and A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes from Cinderella) in which Princess Giselle, transported to modern New York, enlists the help of the available wild creatures to clean the apartment where she is staying.

We adore each filthy chore that we determine.
So, friends, even though you're vermin,
We're a happy working thro-ong!

- Ray

It's Friday ... and Ern Malley

A post at Language Log - Gang Fight - just featured one of any number of parodies of Rebecca Black's much-ridiculed teen stream-of-consciousness It's Friday; with Gang Fight, this was done by lip-reading the song, and then redubbing with the garbled lyrics. However, there are many more: three of my favourites are the purported Bob Dylan original and Meat Loaf cover (both of which rise above their parodic origins to give surprising sensitivity to completely banal lyrics), and Handsome Mike's Acting Masterclass (in itself ridiculing an acting style all too common in bad productions of Beckett monologues).  There are some fine parodists out there.

On the subject of parodists, Language Log also just featured a passing reference to Ern Malley.  Malley was the Impostures Intellectuelles  of the Modernist poetry circuit in 1940s Australia: a fictious poet created by the writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart as a hoax on the modernist magazine Angry Penguins.

The poems comprised a sequence of seventeen by an "Ernest Lalor Malley", sent to Max Harris, the editor of Angry Penguins, by Malley's also-fictitious sister Ethel, starting with:

Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495

I had often cowled in the slumbrous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters –
Not knowing then that Dürer perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men's dream,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
The black swan of trespass on alien waters.

Harris was taken in, but on publication, the hoax was rapidly exposed. McAuley and Stewart explained how they had put the poems together in an afternooon by a process quoted in Michael Heyward's The Ern Malley affair:

with the aid of a chance collection of books which happened to be on our desk; the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a Collected Shakespeare, Dictionary of Quotations etc. We opened books at random, choosing a word or phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove them into nonsensical sentences. We misquoted and made false allusions. We deliberately perpetrated bad verse, and selected awkward rhymes from Ripman’s Rhyming Dictionary. The alleged quotation from Lenin in one of the poems, ‘The emotions are not skilled workers’ is quite phoney. The first three lines of the poem ‘Culture as Exhibit’ were lifted, as a quotation, straight from an American report on the drainage of breeding-grounds of mosquitoes.
- requoted from Marvellous Boys, Mark Ford, LRB, Vol. 15 No. 17, 9 September 1993.

The whole thing turned rather sour when some of the Malley poems were - incredibly, now, but this was hardline wowser era - included in a prosecution of Harris for obscenity, such as

Night Piece

The swung torch scatters seeds
In the umbelliferous dark
And a frog makes guttural comment
On the naked and trespassing
Nymph of the lake.

The symbols were evident,
Though on park-gates
The iron birds looked disapproval
With rusty invidious beaks.

Among the water-lilies
A splash — white foam in the dark!
And you lay sobbing then
Upon my trembling intuitive arm.

But ultimately Mcauley and Stuart had apparently made their intended point - to prove that a Modernist editor couldn't tell good poetry from bad - and the cause of Modernism in Australia was set back decades. And yet, 65 years later, Malley's poems are more remembered and reprinted than those of his creators, and not always for absurdity value. The critic Robert Hughes wrote:

The basic case made by Ern's defenders was that his creation proved the validity of surrealist procedures: that in letting down their guard, opening themselves to free association and chance, McAuley and Stewart had reached inspiration by the side-door of parody; and though this can't be argued on behalf of all the poems, some of which are partly or wholly gibberish, it contains a ponderable truth... The energy of invention that McAuley and Stewart brought to their concoction of Ern Malley created an icon of literary value, and that is why he continues to haunt our culture.
- quoted in The Ern Malley Affair, 1993.

In short, rubbish deliberately concocted by good writers - as with the modern Wergle Flomp entries - has a habit of being better than it sets out to be.

The official Ern Malley website is at www.ernmalley.com.  There's also a good account, mostly previewable online, in the chapter The Ern Malley Hoax in Where fiction ends: four scandals of literary identity construction (Therese-Marie Meyer, 2006).

- Ray