The thirty-first of October, 2011: God preserve us from cheesy cant

Much of my time, lately, has been (willingly and happily) given over to various incarnations of the ever-expanding Liars’ League. This, coupled with the current Shakespearean exertions of leading Liar Ben Crystal, caused me to start (like a guilty thing/Upon a fearful summons) when, part-way through Anthony Burgess’ predictably virtuose 1964 novelisation of Shakespeare’s life Nothing Like The Sun (‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;/Coral is far more red than her lips’ red’ – Sonnet 130), I came across this:

WS said, bold cider-boy and crony of justices and scholars: ‘… As for acting, is it not all lies? A boy is made a woman, a short man will add a cubit with stilt-shoes – ‘

‘Chopines,’ corrected Master Woodford.

‘ – A living man will say he is dying. Now I grant that in Seneca there was none of this, for his plays were not acted but read aloud.’

‘Oh, God preserve us from cheesy cant,’ said Master Quedgeley. ‘That is Banbury talk … Life,’ so went Quedgeley on, ‘is in a sense all lies. We watch ourselves act every day. Philip drunk and Philip sober. One is inside the other watching the other. And so I am John Quedgeley and Jack Quedgeley and Jockey Quedgeley and Master Quedgeley, Justice of Peace, and all. It is all acting.’

And WS saw that this was true, revolving it in the murk of the bottom of his cider-tankard.

I think that Burgess – the hobbyist linguist who wrote the marvellous study of language and speech A Mouthful Of Air – would have loved to have seen (or, rather, heard) Hamlet in its original pronunciation, and that it’s rather a shame that he will be too dead to attend at Reno, Nevada, tomorrow.

The sixth of October, 2011: you play your fucking blues and I’ll play mine

Bert Jansch died yesterday. My childhood was accompanied – intermittently, but persistently – by my Dad’s unsuccessful attempts to master Jansch’s version of Anji. My adulthood has so far been intermittently yet persistently accompanied by my own unsuccessful attempts to do the same.

Here’s a story from Colin Harper’s masterly Jansch biography, Dazzling Stranger (Bloomsbury, 2001). In May 1964, Jansch was at a party with the American blues guitarist Walter ‘Brownie’ McGhee. After playing a few songs himself, McGhee urged Jansch to “play us a blues, man”. Jansch began to play, in his own idiosyncratic style.

“That ain’t the blues, man!” shouted Brownie. Bert lowered the guitar. “Listen, man,” he said. “You play your fucking blues and I’ll play mine.”

Another story mentioned in the book – that Jansch was the only man in the UK during the 20th century to develop scurvy – is one of those that comes under the heading Should Be True But Sadly Isn’t.

One more story, from Jansch’s drinking days (on which subject, by the way, one of Jansch’s ladyfriends delivers the final word in Dazzling Stranger:  ”Bert spent a lot of time in pubs. He was always a great observer”). This one’s recounted by Wizz Jones.

I remember on one occasion saying to someone at a hotel at about one in the morning, “Have you seen Bert?” and they said, “Well, the last time I saw Bert he’d just gone into the lift with a tray of drinks.” The last thing the guy saw was the doors closing, the lift starting and Bert toppling over with this tray of twenty or thirty drinks, crashing in a heap. I’d love to have been there at the other end when the doors opened.

Shouldn’t laugh, I suppose – but then, he made it through okay. RIP and all that.

The fifth of October, 2011: a nice colored tie to look at

“Everybody who comes to a scientific lecture knows they are not going to understand it,” wrote Richard Feynman, “but maybe the lecturer has a nice colored tie to look at.”

Feynman was just great: an incredible communicator, as well as a genius (I am not, of course, qualified to judge whether he was really a genius, but other geniuses are always saying that he was, and they‘ve been vouched for by other geniuses (it’s geniuses all the way down)).

Here’s a nice video, where Feynman comes across as a sort of juiced-up Carl Sagan, or possibly a sciencey Larry David. Brilliant.

The fourth of October, 2011: Bonnie and Clyde, and hedgerow salad

Being caught in a painful hail of wind-driven beechnuts (a scene reminiscent of the bloody climax of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie And Clyde (1967)) prompted further investigation. My foodie sister-in-law had demonstrated the edibility of beechnuts during a ramble around Hampstead Heath’s lovely and lonely pergola – edibility, but not tastiness. I wondered if anything worthwhile might be made from the things.

The Oxford Companion To Food notes that beechnuts (or beechmasts, or just ‘masts’) have been gathered by humans for food since prehistoric times – but that their main use has been as pig-feed.

In general, beech nuts have been regarded as food for humans in times of famine or scarcity.

Hmm. Economic downturn notwithstanding, I’m not sure we’re quite at that point yet. But the Companion speaks more positively about beechnut oil (“above average in keeping quality and flavour”), which I shall have to look out for.

Needless to say, there are plenty of hedgerow-munching wild-food enthusiasts on the internet who can’t get enough of the insipid beechnut. They probably eat little else. They probably subsist on beechnuts and conkers.

Actually, this is unfair. They’re really all about the beech leaves (try the Springtime Fritters, although personally I’d be wary of any recipe where the ingredients list includes the words “whatever is to hand”). Beechnuts only turn up as a possible substitute for hazelnuts in a Hedgerow Salad (it seems to me that, from a certain perpective, a hedgerow is already a sort of salad).

I would search further, but Cookipedia has brought me up short with a grave warning that beechnuts “contain organic substances which are slightly toxic (it has been reported that eating approx. 50 nuts may make you ill)”.

I’ve only eaten one or two so far but I’m not taking any chances.

In related news, I found great pleasure the other day in listening for the percussive kettledrum bong as a squirrel in an oak tree dropped acorn husks upon a metal bin.

The third of October, 2011: the twelfth of Vendémiaire, 220

I will be brief, today. I was wondering if you could still find clocks or watches that were made to tell the time according to the French Revolutionary calendar, which among other things attempted to decimalise units of time (imagine if they tried that here! We raise enough of a beef if someone tries to tell our market-traders to stop selling potatoes by the hundredweight).

It wasn’t popular among French clockmongers, as it completely jiggered their export trade.

Anyway, yes, there are plenty such dials extant. Here’s one.

A watch from the 18th century that looks like a watch from a parallel universe.

 

The thirtieth of September, 2011: God’s little chickens

A surprising autumn outbreak of God’s little chickens was visited upon my local park this week. And, by ‘God’s little chickens’, I mean ladybirds (the term is, I think, Chinese in origin). A stand of black iron railings beside a stand of oak trees was, quite literally, crawling with them.

Odd, that. Ladybirds normally pop out at the start of summer – but these seemed to have emerged from their pupal cases (many of which still adhered to the black iron) very recently.

I’m not sure which of the 53 (or 42 – my books don’t agree) British ladybird species these were (I hadn’t the time to count their spots, but each one  had a lot of them: 10, 11, 12, perhaps?). It’s quite possible that these were in fact Harlequin ladybirds – also known as EVIL LADYBIRDS. These distasteful invaders were introduced from Asia in the 80s to control aphids, but they went and escaped (I know, I know – who could possibly have predicted that?).

Now they rove the land in gangs, eating our good old-fashioned English ladybirds, ruining soft furnishings, shitting everywhere and squirting ‘reflex blood’ from their pestilential joints when you try and squish them.

And, slowly but surely, they’re heading north. They’re coming our way!

This will not stand. We have our best people working on the problem.

I’m now a bit depressed about ladybirds, so here is a lovely picture – lovely unless you’re an aphid, or number aphids among your friends and relations.

Run for your life, aphid! Run for your life!

The twenty-ninth of September, 2011: a cretic foot, a distal phalanx, and a cheese-and-onion crisp

Some quotidian prosody for you (I should say, rather than quotidian, trivial - as that word stems from trivium, a coming-together of three streets, and it is streets with which I am today concerned).

‘Oxford Road’ is, in prosodic terms, an amphimacer or cretic foot. Its rhythm is strong-weak-strong – dum-dum-dum, Ox-ford-road.

‘Oxford Street’, despite having the same number of syllables, is a dactyl. I like the origin of the word ‘dactyl’: it is Greek for ‘finger’, because a finger has one long joint and two short ones (the proximal (long), middle (short) and distal (short) phalanges, if you’re interested), and a prosodic dactyl has one stressed syllable (technically, in Greek, it’s a long syllable rather than a stressed one) followed by two unstressed ones. Ox-ford-street.

Interesting, that (and nice to have the proper words to express it). I think it is, anyway.

I suppose this is because ‘street’ is the default surname (you know what I mean) for a street. So when you say Ox-ford-road you’re sort of saying ‘Oxford – aha! you thought I was going to say street, but this’ll surprise you: I’m actually saying road!’.

Stephen Fry calls this “an oddity of English utterance”. Yes, I’m still reading The Ode Less Travelled.

It put me in mind of a similar oddity, delineated by Martin Amis in his Independent on Sunday review of the American writer Bill Buford’s Among The Thugs (1991), collected in The War Against Cliché (Jonathan Cape, 2001):

‘Among the Thugs’ is full of minor solecisms (Listen, mate… you might say THE Fulham Road but you never say THE  Fulham Broadway, okay?).

Of such thin stuff we build our local identities.

Again, there’s probably sound logic here. The Fulham Road is the road that goes to Fulham, regardless of what its actually called. In fact, ‘road’ might not even need a capital letter. Whereas Fulham Broadway is a given name, and must be used as such.

Incidentally, this same review was the one that got Amis in some hot water, as his description of fans at a football match – ‘the complexion and body scent of a cheese-and-onion crisp, and the eyes of pitbulls’, for starters – put intelligent football supporters like Nick Hornby on the defensive. But that’s a discussion for another Clutterbuck.

Clutterbuck, by the way, is also a dactyl.

The twenty-eighth of September, 2011: good morning, my name’s Cowdrey

A story from Rob Smyth’s very nice book The Spirit Of Cricket (Elliott & Thompson, 2010) makes me want to sink into a warm tub of distilled essence of John Arlott and not emerge until time has come full circle and we’re back safe and sound in the Good Old Days again.

Colin Cowdrey was 41 when he was recalled to the England Test side in December 1974. He hadn’t played Test cricket for nearly four years. England were 1-0 down in the Ashes series, and being battered by the Aussie pace duo Jeff ‘Thommo’ Thomson and Dennis Lillee. The second Test was to be played at the WACA in Perth, then home to most lethally quick pitch in Australia.

Cowdrey arrived in Perth after a 50-hour flight. When asked about Thomson and Lillee, he urbanely replied: ‘I can’t believe they are as fast as Gregory and McDonald in the twenties, and I played them.’

Here’s Rob Smyth’s account of his innings:

When he arrived at the crease in the first innings – ‘It was the signal for tears to prick the eyes of all but the stony-hearted,’ wrote Christopher Martin Jenkins – he walked up to Thomson, shook his hand, and said: ‘Good morning, my name’s Cowdrey.’ … Cowdrey got unflinchingly behind the ball, taking the inevitable blows without complaint and batting for more than two hours in each innings, even though England were again blown away.

Goodness. How can anyone not love Test cricket?

Appropriately, Cowdrey – later Baron Cowdrey of Tonbridge – gave his name to an annual ‘Spirit of Cricket’ lecture at the MCC; the lectures are, without exception, worth reading and/or listening to.

Speaking of ‘Lillian Thomson’, I’m very fond of Lawrence Booth’s provocative summation of the Aussie take on Bodyline in his book Arm-ball to Zooter (Penguin, 2006):

Fifty years on, [England fast bowler Harold Larwood] was still getting hate-mail. And Australians – the same ones who would chant ‘kill, kill’ as a rampant Dennis Lillee ran in to bowl – were still moaning.

One last cricket thing: you ought to read David Hopps’ excellent Guardian piece on British-Asians in English club cricket, and not only because it name-checks Hopps’ club Thorner CC and the Leeds district of Harehills (just up the road and just down the road from Clutterbuck HQ respectively).

The twenty-seventh of September, 2011: it is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays

There’s been a predictably pleased response to the first episode of Stephen Fry‘s latest TV programme for the BBC, Planet Word. If it’s okay with linguistic lord of the Internet Stan Carey, it’s okay with me.

The only things that unsettled me were (in increasing order of severity):

1. The number of corduroy blazers Fry seems to possess. I counted four (one sporting ill-advisedly garish elbow patches). And this was just the first episode!

2.  Fry’s increasing vocal resemblance to Professor Lord Robert Winston in avuncular Ruby-is-now-one-year-old-and-she-can-make-rudimentary-sounds mode. You may well have seen Fry and Winston in the same room together – but have you ever heard them in the same room together?

3. The comic sans. Stephen! What’s with the comic sans?

A fourth thing didn’t irritate me, but did make me think: here is an opportunity to share some trivia with the world, or at least with that small portion of the world that reads Clutterbuck.

The programme didn’t specify – and so many viewers may have wondered – where the spoofy Little Red Riding Hood story performed by the Little Theatre for the Deaf came from. It had an odd ring to it, with its anachronistic quips about Calvin Coolidge and the Metro-Goldwyn lion.

Well, I’LL TELL YOU. It’s by James Thurber, and it’s from The Thurber Carnival.

I can’t find my copy of The Thurber Carnival. And so ends another disappointing Clutterbuck.

No, wait! Luckily, someone splendid has scanned the story out of the book, so I don’t have to! Here it is:

Yeah. It’s not hilariously funny, is it? Ah, well. So ends another disappointing Clutterbuck.

The twenty-sixth of September, 2011: I have to write down almost everything I see

I have played this song to death. You can have it now.

 

I had better link to Emmy the Great’s website. Only polite.