The Medusa Frequency, thirty-five years on : Some musings for Autumn 2022

The Medusa Frequency, thirty-five years on : Some musings for Autumn 2022

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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4 October

The Medusa Frequency, thirty-five years on : Some musings for Autumn 2022

Not that novels such as Pilgermann (1983) or Fremder (1996) aren't also great - the dance of those themes is as much in or around them (or Riddley), too, with waves that are particles or fragments or remnants, and particles that are also waves and seas and all varieties of water.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 4, 2022

More to come...




































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Hoban at 95 : An ongoing tribute to - and update of - Hoban at 80*

Hoban at 95 : An ongoing tribute to - and update of - Hoban at 80*

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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19 January

Hoban at 95 : An ongoing tribute to - and update of - Hoban at 80*

After moving to London in 1969, Russell Hoban ('Russ') was to live the rest of his life in his adopted city, which informs his novels.

Wishing all who participate* a happy and fruitful @sa4qe !

* Or who might, if they knew what it was - for which see :https://t.co/MyaZGyM8SZ

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 4, 2021

Well, as Emmae Gibson points out, Russ was born in 1925, so - on 4 February, the day of SA4QE**, when people remember him (now and in his mortal years) - it will be Hoban at 96.

I suggest that we respond withGnome at her***, since time is an illusion, and - as Russ himself, at least twice, said in print**** - Nothing is forever. [Nothing, except love, as the waves and particles of Russ' novel Pilgermann, as Emmae has reminded me, suggest... ?]

The birthday of novelist Russell Hoban, who has also written and / or illustrated children's books, such as Jim's Lion, The Mouse and his Child, or 'the Frances books' (e.g. Bread and Jam for Frances) :https://t.co/cbJGdx1fnR#CelebrateHobanAt95 pic.twitter.com/LTzY3skdOb

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 20, 2021

Did anyone say 'puppets' ?

If people have read any novel by Russell Hoban, it's Riddley Walker*, here reported on as adapted for theatre in a celebrated show :https://t.co/FgjipRZSya#CelebrateHobanAt95

* Published by Jonathan Cape in 1980.

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 24, 2021

End-notes :

* This Tweet refers to where material from the original hoban2005.co.uk can now be found :

The site is now at https://t.co/WRvsUzhUzx

— RussellHoban.org (@russellhobanorg) February 4, 2021

** The Slickman A4 Quotation Event, named after its initiator, Diana Slickman, and during which [on (or for ?) 4 February] a distribution of quotations from the works of Russ is made.

Depending on the assiduity of the participants, the 4ations (as they are called) are usually shared via http://www.russellhoban.org/sa4qe, on or after that date.


*** Those who have read Hoban's second novel Kleinzet (1974) may have indulged a fascination for atrocious puns, or what - on Twitter - this writer collects as #Homophones.

**** The same (exactly ?) long paragraph appears in the consecutively published novels The Medusa Frequency (1987) and Fremder (1996).


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It wasn’t just Russ, with his exobrain…

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13 October

Google and the World-Brain (2013) gave me a first notion – I believe – of what H. G. Wells looked and sounded like, a man so set upon technological development that he seemed almost blind to morals, with what he conceived as The World-Brain, and relatively dismissive of human worth when all that we needed was a big machine to determine what we should do

There the comparisons with Google Books have to end. However, as I find myself having mentioned in connection with reviewing The Taste of Money (2013), nothing in this documentary made clear how Google Books persuaded some libraries to allow it to scan works still in copyright, whether the libraries received a fee, or why anyone was so blind – into many millions of such scans – that anyone’s rights (the copyright-holder’s) were being infringed. And so, when the copyright-holders found out, and brought class-actions in the States (and in other jurisdictions), the whole question had first come before a US judge.

When I asked Ben Lewis, the film’s director, in the Q&A, did Google Books do as it did, did he think, to present the world with a fait accompli, he did not appear to disagree. Are things as they should be, in pursuit of some well-meaning higher ideal, if people’s statutory rights are compromised, because this case has highlighted the issue – and since people now, other than Google Books (some of whose scans were actually or virtually worthless on account of the quality), are scanning works in the aim of information-sharing on a global scale, but more linked to the libraries (rather than, say, selling print-on-demand copies made from scans) ?

All that I say about the idea of reading everything into a machine is largely this : read Jorge Luis Borges The Library of Babel, a story about a seemingly infinite library in which Borges foresaw the problems of the Internet, i.e. that it may be there, but, amongst everything else, how does one find it ?

And, also from that story, does the sum of all printed writing actually achieve beyond (although worthwhile in themselves) accessibility, and the prevention of a devastation such as occurred with The Library of Alexandria ? If Plato writes x is true, and then Aristotle writes y is true, where the two statements are inconsistent, what possible software can construe what each writer – in the original Greek text, which we do not have, only later copies – meant and what it – and we – should ‘think’ ? How construe, then, a writer whose work survives in fragments, such as Heraclitus ?

As vain a dream as The Singularity, which the film touched momentarily on, and for which there has been the sort of special pleading usually reserved to criticizing (or making) the claims of religion. (Some may judge that my personal view is closest to that of Internet analyst Evgeny Morozov, who also appeared in the film, and, when edited appropriately (which was lacking on one or two occasions), was able to make some very relevant points.)

This, though, is not just a documentary about books, words, but those in the field who work with printed materials and who have been affected by what happened :

* Calm director of the library at Harvard (Robert Darnton) and the former director of The Bodleian Library (Reginald Carr) – neither, as I recall, said they allowed copyright books to be scanned

* A slightly more excited US lawyer (Mary Sue Coleman, who is the President of Michigan University), who informed us about the progress of the case

* An impassioned Frenchman (Jean-Noël Jeanneney, who, at the time of the events that he relates, when Google Books made an overture, was director of La Bibliothèque Nationale Française, and started the counteroffensive)

* A knowledgeable and uncompromising German scholar (Roland Reuss, Professor of German Literature at the University of Heidelberg), insistent that what Google Books had done was wrong

Plus the people at Google itself (not Google Books, except for a very short clip of Luis Collado, Head of Google Books in Spain and Portugal), such as Sergey Brin and David Drummond, who talked about worthy aims in a somewhat too enthusiastic way to be aware of real-world limitations (see above)…

A film that informed me, and made me reflect. Most of all, I wondered at Google Books, breaking faith with all those people who believed in copyright law, and a judge who might, in his final ruling, determine that those whose rights were ignored are fixed with a bargain that is likely to affect not just them, but the whole world of copyright.


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Confusions and confabulations

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27 February 2013

Are you up Ship Creek without a handle, or otherwise struck with the word-blindness of such as Dogberry and Mrs Malaprop ?

After I had bothered to buy myself a nice copy, Joyce put me off reading Finnegans Wake (famously lacking an apostrophe) by the appalling pun egg and beacon, and I resolved to read no more and sold it again. However, in common with those as distant in time as Laurence Sterne and John Lennon (his Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write), I have an interest in how words are power, words can urge and rouse (the famous example in Julius Caesar, but also give the game away that some who profess things are little better than parrots, in the vein of Harry Enfield's series of sketches about what the bloke down the pub said.

Some writers (the likes of Russell Hoban in Riddley Walker and Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, with his Russian argot) have imagined the language of a future age, and, with a public heading to lower levels of literacy, it is quite conceivable that an aural understanding of language will lead people more astray, as with the example that I gave previously on these pages of I can't be asked. But can we predict them... ?

Can we set computers to work out what will sound so like something else that people will, at least, be uncertain, as with It was off my own back / bat (where the latter is more likely to be right)? Or, with a tone-deaf sense that says that Adele's Skyfall song (and its execution - it's well and truly dead, but, sadly, a zombie), will it be somewhat contrary, so that people think that x is the right course of action in the last risotto ?

Whatever happens, whilst there is life in me, I will fight that panino is the singular, and that adding a second plural ending - I would have had us do as we do with cappuccino, and treat it as an ordinary anglicized word that I order more than one of by adding the ending -es, so I would want And two ham-and-cheese paninoes, toasted, rather than the smart dick who confused everyone with the unnecessary introduction of panini. I wait, a hope as yet unsatisfied, for coffe-houses to be offering me tramezzini...


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The Vermeer girl

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27 January (updated 10 February)

When Russell Hoban published his novel The Medusa Frequency in 1987, the dust-jacket bore an enhanced version of Vermeer’s painting Head of a [Young] Girl, as here

The painting was not referred to as Girl with a Pearl Earring*, because it was not called that then – Tracy Chevalier did not publish her novel, using that description, for another twelve years – but so popular has the title become since the book (1999) and the film (2003) that even the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where the painting ‘normally’ hangs (it’s not there when Hermann Orff, in the novel, goes to see it), is using it in favour of the name employed by Hoban (or Girl in a Turban and variants thereof, although Orff also does call her The Vermeer girl.

Looked at objectively, yes, the earring is there, but to assume (as the description does) that it is not one of a pair seems over-precise or even fanciful (as if the other side of the girl’s head-dress or even head may not be there, because we cannot see it), and, in comparison with the turban, the earring is not the most obvious thing in the painting, unless you are Chevalier and want to make it the centre of a mystery and a story concerning it, of course. (And several easily available images show her wearing earrings (plural), too.) Historical novelists do such things, after all.

Of course, a model for the painting might only wear the earring that can be seen, but I’d be surprised if she didn’t hold out to wear them both – just this once. I forget what Hoban has Orff say about the painting, but it is notable, amongst Vermeer’s work (it is thought to date to around 1665, ten years before his death), not only for not having a background, but also for having the face and upper body appear in complete darkness, save the light that we can see reflected from the young woman.

However, other models appear with not just jewelry, but pearls, such as the Woman with a Pearl Necklace (thought to be slightly earlier), which she seems to be holding out for someone the other side of the window to see (unless she can see her reflection in a mirror to the left), who also has earrings

So does the Portrait of a Young Woman (thought to be a couple of years later), but she has more elfin-like features than our Scarlett Johannson lookalike (but the same dark background)

Other than cashing in on notoriety, then, is there any real reason to have renamed with a title that does not exclusively describe the Hoban / Chevalier portrait, just because the latter writer gained attention by using it ? Could we imagine retitling the later works of Gorky to which André Breton helped him give names – I think that One Year the Milkweed and The Liver is the Cock’s Comb might have come out of that collaboration, but maybe they did not know best, and some marketing people could find even better names, which would have people search out these canvases worldwide.

We already have Duchamp’s La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même more conveniently known as The Large Glass, and then existing in multiple forms thanks to Richard Hamilton’s work and Duchamp’s endorsement.

On that precedent, artists who have sometimes used names, as Roni Horn has for drawings, that do not say very much, or others who, worse, insist on pieces being just Untitled, could have official titlers who go around after them, fixing them with names for good PR…



Post-script

Of course, it has been known to be done before, but not in this Chevalier-type way :

1. The sitter is Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of Francesco

2. Thus the punning Italian title, La Gioconda (which is La Jaconde, in French), because the feminine form of the surname means one who is jocund

3. The form of address 'my lady', madonna, came, at that time, to be contracted to mona (though, nowadays, monna)

4. Therefore Mona Lisa - and not a historical novelist in sight, coming up with a new name, based on earrings...



End-notes

* Though, rather foolishly (I feel), the official Russell Hoban web-site does use that name.


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Blighter's Rock

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17 October

Russell Hoban wrote a short piece, included in the collection of various bits and pieces The Moment under The Moment, of that name, and elsewhere, in his novels, gave characters that Spooneristic phrase to describe their predicament.

I have always inferred, since first reading the words, that they were, if not dear to Russ' heart, then at least acknowledged as part of his own experience: I find that he is a writer who does not keep you at arm's length, in that way, from what he has known or seen, and I see The Medusa Frequency, in 1987, as having come out of a very particular encounter with Medusa's powers, for ill and good. The previous novel, Pilgermann, had come out in 1983.

The fact that there was another such long gap and then, instead of a novel to follow Medusa, Moment came out in 1992, suggested that something had happened, and that the volume attempted, by bringing various things into one place, to maintain an interest / following. The next novel, Fremder, was not published until 1996*.

Although, for my money, both Medusa and Fremder are flawed by their ending, they are, nonetheless, masterpieces, linked by containing the same piece of text about occulting views and the rate at which the retina refreshes, making films possible, because of the persistence of image. Fremder, especially, though both books are short, is costly on dedication to read. It seems to me that the road to these novels had been a hard one, and likely that there had been prolonged stays on Blighter's Rock, before and after Moment.

What is characteristic of Russ is that he creates something out of the impossibility of creation, converting the self-pitying writer's block (being 'blocked' doesn't sound good) to something that happens to blighters. In other words, not taking himself or it too seriously.


End-notes :

* Data courtesy of http://www.ocelotfactory.com/hoban/, known as The Head of Orpheus.


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NHS carrier-bag slogans

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17 October

Inspired by Hobanesque influences such as The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz and Kleinzeit, here are some slogans, for NHS carrier-bags, dreamt up to (try to) amuse @jakkicowley, the starting-point being:

Why wld a hospital feel the need to give carrier bags with 'PATIENT PROPERTY' emblazoned on them. Plain 'confidential' ones not do same job?

— Jacqueline (@jakkicowley) October 17, 2012

* CONTAINS BAGS

* BAG NOW EMPTY, BUT WILL SOON BE FULL

* AVOID THIS BAG - DIRTY SMALLS!

* THIS BAG CONTAINS 1.257 KILOS OF SMACK

* BAG WILL BREAK AT 2.36PM

* THIS BAG CAN DISGUISE A SEVERED HEAD

* CARRY THIS BAG, AND FEEL LIKE A QUEEN

* THE QUEEN CARRIED THIS BAG PREVIOUSLY

* BAGS LIKE THIS DON'T GROW ON TREES

* SAVE A TREE - DIG IT UP, AND CARRY IT HOME IN THIS BAG

* NOT REMOTELY PATIENT PROPERTY - OUTTA MY WAY !


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Fly Australian Airlines to nowhere

This is a Festival review of Holy Motors (2012)

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This is a Festival review of Holy Motors (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

If you want to see Kylie play a cameo as an airline hostess*, you’re clutching at straws, and would be better off queuing for one of her stage-shows than watching Holy Motors** (2012): if you watched the film first, you’d have no desire to hear her version of any other song. The other song was just mawkish dross about time, regret and the past – or was that Kylie’s song instead / as well, and trauma has bereft me of remembering ?

I have Tweeted that Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and Subway (1985) meet in a mortal embrace, and it is a fight that kills off the best of both, leaving a facile scene in a warehouse-sized garage at the end that was apt to make the ritual close of t.v.’s The Waltons seem profound. It did not even visually convince that so many similar vehicles had been assembled, not least since they insisted on drawing attention to their artificiality by flashing their brake-lights.

Could anything worthwhile have preceded such a banal ending, little better than imputing significance to the fact that the vital club in Enter the Void (2009) is called – wait for it! – The Void? A few moments did, but only a very few in the whole 115 minutes, comprising : an erotic dance; a building that I could swear owes something to the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright (but I could not spot it in the credits); the bizarre pastiche of a beauty, a beast and a photographer; the first of several humorous grave-stones; and a terrific interlude (called such), in which a gathering group of musicians, centred on an accordion ensemble, processed around a large church.

After then, and despite some intrigue concerning a crime and its ritualized repetition, it was a decline, not just musically, as a continuation of the episodic. Simply put, there was simply almost no interest in how (or even why) it all hung together, and it became, if possible, less and less significant. It was as if a premise of The Matrix (1999) that, when plugged in, Neo, Trinity and the others, can enter the machine-world had been stretched out to become some sort of secret, kept to the end.

I would happily have walked out of Holy Motors, at around the point that I describe, but, as my friend did not evince the desire to leave, I stayed so that we would have both seen all of it to discuss afterwards. He thought it a sort of purgatory for M. Oscar, I thought it a purgatory for me in this parade of the pointless, and that any notion that it meant more than the following quotation*** was vain speculation (though I was, also, reminded of Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd):

As the gom yawncher man passed me I recognized him as the man in the broken-rimmed hat who'd spoken to me in the underground when I was on my way home from Istvan Fallok's studio with electrodes all over my head.

'Hello,' I said.

'Nimser vo,' he said.

'You weren't talking like that the other day. How come?'

'I must've been somebody else then.'

'How's that?'

'Economy. You have a little chat with a stranger now and then, right? So do I, so does everyone. How many lines has the stranger got? Two or three maybe. There's really no need for a new actor each time, is there?'

'So you play them all.'

'The same as you.'

'What do you mean?'

'Yesterday you were the conductor on the 11 bus and you also did quite a nice little tobacconist in the Charing Cross Road. Actually London hasn't got that big a cast, there's only about fifty of us, all working flat out.'

'Are you writing a novel?'

'Novel-writing is for weaklings,' he said, and moved on.



After which, not only go to [to come], for an unfavourable comparison with The Night Elvis Died (2010), but here for a further conceit



End-notes

* I have never heard the male equivalent called ‘a host’.

** Surely a take-off of the Batman dialogue.

*** From The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban, Pan Books (Picador), London, 1988, p. 56.

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Russell's Pate and degenerate languages

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2 March

Of course, the apostrophe is slowly, itself, in danger of slipping into oblivion, but it is only there to make the point:

We do not live in very literate times, and much is passed (or, as some would write, past) on by word of mouth* (a strange phrase, if one stops to think about it), so what is envisaged by the argot (call it what you will) in which the novel Riddley Walker's author has a future time and its notion of its past related is a disjunction between some sounds and what saying them has come to mean.

Apart from the immersive feel of impenetrability that the language seems to give until you have a chance to hear even Will Self himself read a section of it - which you may be able to do on one of the web-sites dedicated to the late Russell Hoban (sa4qe.blogspot.co.uk is as good a place as any from which to find some of the others) - and then realize that there is a way through (other than gritting one's teeth) and there is so much more besides to explore.


End-notes

* Even a very good announcer on Radio 3 talked about, very recently, Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale: I have said elsewhere that the same unstressed dead vowel in a and the can make them sound indistinguishable (which is because the 'th' sound is the unclear one of the pair, unlike the one in that).


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What satisfaction does a good - or better - novel give?

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11 March

Of course, start by defining your terms - is On Chesil Beach (which Philip French probably thinks is a palaeontology manual) a novel or a novella? Maybe, just maybe, it depends - in part - on what the author calls it.

That said, I have a lovely red pepper sitting in my kitchen (well, it's on top of a mug), but, if I called it a novel, I doubt that anyone would approach it as one, but rather with a knife and / or some cheese, mushrooms and breadcrumbs.

So, peppers and McEwan (or even McEwan's lager) apart, you are reading this book, and a bit as if it's a lover keep wanting to spend time with it, and its takes you not quite where you wanted, but where you were content to be taken (because of the dialogue, the descriptions, the ideas, the characters...), right to the final word.

Is that better than when, as with Das Schloss (The Castle), that novel of Kafka's allegedly snatched from the fire to which he had mentally consigned it, there is no ending, as he did not finish it (although I think that it is Max Brod, the man who refused to destroy it and other works, who reports that Kafka had something in mind, and says what it is)?

Probably a pig to read it to that point - in whichever of numerous editions / translations comes one's way - not knowing, but would one, say, with Gogol's Dead Souls curse God and Man on finishing what we have and learning that there is no more, because - if we believe the story - the wrong MS, that of the reworked later part, was thrown into the fire?

Do things have to be wrapped up by the author, if he or she can, so that we can put the book down with a sigh of satisfaction, or can we declare, as I do with The Medusa Frequency and Angelica's Grotto, that the books are still great, even if it is clear enough - as debated elsewhere - that the books terminate with what, in musical terms, is a final cadence, but one that, for its formally ending, nonetheless smacks of an ending to be done with it as none other promoted itself in the mind of Russell Hoban.

And then, with that idea of an end to a symphonty* or like, we steer dangerously close - and so pull back, pretending that we touched the leg by mistake - to the labours left unfinished of Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler and the like (not to mention Fartov and Belcher).


End-notes

* I'm keeping that in, and I shall write to Peter Maxwell Davies, urging him to abandon the symphonic form (he's written at least four, after all), and compose a Symphonty instead!


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Allegedly, Katy Perry unfollows Russell

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21 January

And I doubt that it's Grant of that name (or Hoban), I like the verb (even if it relates asuredly to disengaging from someone presence on Arsebook, that even more potent waste of time than blogging), and here the woman is again miraculously, just days after (supposedly) being 'slammed' by Dim Sum, I mean David Cameron.

Whatever next in the autonomous world of my AOL sign-on page (where I never know whether it will be the angry bearded man or the girl with the copper hair and appealing green eyes, both trying to interest me in its product System Mechanic)...?


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Let me dress you like a Hero!

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18 January

Having sensed, not strongly, but sufficiently, that things punk are coming back in fashion, what with all that post-Potter Bonham Carter look, I have prepared and am about to announce my new Kleinzeit range of bondage gear.

Even lords and ladies will feel terribly out of place if they don't have one of my Hypotenuse corsets, to be worn over a suit, dress or separates, and, with every one purchased, there is a free five minutes' worth of ripping, slashing and general tugging at the seams of two garments.

Then with the Zonk hat, a ball-bearing the size of Sweden has to be carried around, so it needs to be screwed to the head in five places - get your co-ordination wrong, and the spring that houses the bearing might just behave unpredictably and smash you one in the face.

Those who like to keep things simple will adore the Plain Deal restrainers, lengths of pure Norwegian heartwood that are bolted from the back to halfway down the calf, rendering movement much more painful, if achievable at all - a whole new dimension on popping down to the shops, and cutting out all of that unnecessary sitting behind a steering-wheel.

The Glockenspiel manacles offer all the restriction, plus, of course, chafing that you would expect from a quality accessory, plus they give you a significant discount (we dare not say how much, as initial supply is likely to be outstripped by demand, as one would want with such bijou purchases) on the Nurse charging-unit .

On a rolled-steel harness, which is again guaranteed to dig and rub, and in a pure titanium housing, the unit is capable of delivering shocks of up to 100V at currents as high as 10A (thrilling, eh!), depending on where you are from A to B. Trigged by a special Swiss sensor, it detects any, even the smallest, deviation from Kantian moral principles and shocks you - and anyone nearby - into obedience. Strict doesn't come close to it!


And those are just a few of the most exciting articles in this extensive range, which personally excite me greatly and have given me pleasure to design.

(As I say, initial supply will be limited - just that little business of being sued about the Philosophical Investigations underwear, which I swear had nothing to do purchasers starting to issue instructions to others to pick up and move blocks of masonry...)


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Russell Hoban topped up my anti-freeze last night

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17 February

Other people will tell you things like this, which, I agree, you may find unlikely:

Samuel Beckettt cleaned and polished my windscreen two days ago


However, what I have gathered through a mate of mine in the trade (he owns GY Motors) is that those who, on our view of things, appear to have died during their literary career (such as Russ Hoban last year) have instead really just no longer found themselves drawn as they always were to everything about writing.

Yes, they may still be found, over coffee, reading a column or two in The London Review of Books, but what energizes them now is no longer producing and spreading their writing. We have misinterpreted as their death the greater pleasure that they take in doing, as a favour for someone else, that little thing that keeps being forgotten about:

The one that niggles every time the driver is about to get into the car, and, again, there isn't time to do it and be in Northampton on time


That recurrence of need is what these working on our cars seek to remedy - that needless feeling of being screwed up that the wiper-blades still haven't been cleaned, or the washer-bottle filled.

My contact tells me that he can't be any more specific than that, but that this pattern is what he has gathered from Tweets that he has seen.

He doesn't know whether it's just novelists (and, as he says, Stevie Smith wrote a novel, so who is a novelist?), but he says that it's clearly just minimal maintenance jobs, so don't expect Thomas Hardy to do your 12,000-mile service, or you'll have a long wait!


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Crypt in Canterbury

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6 January

I quote from the Hoban 2005 web-site. Can anyone else spot the relational error?:

After viewing the painting, a service began in the main part of the cathedral, so the group was led downstairs to the crypt, where no photography is allowed.


A clue. It resembles the one in these lines from a song by Chris de Burgh:

Rolling through the countryside,
Tears were in my eyes.


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A survey / summary

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22 December

Whether it really means that they were of interest (or someone just told someone else to look), I have no idea, but the list of postings with the most page-views (since the blog's inception) is:


No. Posting

90 Dimensions: Through the looking-glass of time? (2)

75 Unlimited dimensions

57 Nicola Malet at The Tavern Gallery (Meldreth)

41 The man who believed in flicker-drive

9 The Physics of Poetry

6 A tribute to times past

6 An appreciation of L'enfance du Christ

6 New dimensions on Dimensions

5 Blogging at the Tate (from 4 September)

5 Dimensions to-night


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The Truth about Russell Hoban (according to Hermann Orff)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

22 December

Those who know Russ Hoban's work well (although he is also author of A Practical Guide to Wood-working, and a number of spin-off titles such as A Practical Guide to Working with Live Maggots on Film-sets) will not be surprised by the revelation, cannily made to-day by one-time shrinkhead and writer for the breakfast-cereal market Hermann Orff, that the person who has died recently was not really Russ at all.

Let me (with the benefit of what, courtesy of Hermes Soundways®, I have understood about the whole Hoban Morphing Project - Humph for short - in the last few crazy days, when sleep seemed a luxury, not a necessity) try to explain:

* Orff first got it from a cabbage that wasn't really a cabbage, but a tip-off that domestic intelligence was getting wise to the whole Hoban vibe, that things were not as they seemed.

* He, being a crazy son of a bitch at the best of times and, like the prophets of old, not one to do what he was damn'd well told, tried to turn the mission down (as if we Agents have any choice, any right of veto, say, about being despatched to Connemara with god-little notice to obtain Yerk's tie-pin (by fair means or foul)!

* So he buggers off to Antibes, and starts hanging out with set there, saying that, despite his thick Rhine accent, he is a Plaid Cymru councillor turned t.v. evangelist who has been working wonders in Mold and even as far as Chester...

* Anyway, the short of it is that he gets zapped in quite the sort of way that he's making out the hand of God is whipping his flock into divine order, because Youdi visits him personally (but in a dream - some of your mystic apparition stuff) and tells him that if he doesn't fry his backside pronto and get back to Blighty, no accrued pension rights (deferred or no) for him.

* Orff falls in line, and goes on the snoop like a good member of the agenthood. Truth is, MI5 has by now got the whole scam, so pretending to date Stella Rimington by overpraising her latest ouevre brings him enough Gewissheit to blow the gaff and, on the pretext that he is a demented collector of plastic figures from the packets of those puffy little boulders of sheer sucrose that Orff himself had been wont to scoff at breakfast as a boy, secures the whole Hoban files.

* On Youdi's orders, this time communicated through that rather bored and, if not world-weary, then rather mundane bearer of tidings Gaber, he legs it with the dossiers, leaving behind a dented metal globe and some electrodes (some trip Kraken had been on made him think that it would be a red herring), and pores over the whole caboodle down at The Cheshire Cheese.

* I see him there, think to myself I wonder what the schlemihl's up to this time with his conspicuous Bogart gear (hat and all), and, sidling up, start plying him with double pink gins, for which he has an insatiable fondness. Well, he's got the fondness, but he hasn't got the stomach to go with it (and is toping on a near-empty stomach), so, on his sixth, he's suddenly belly side up on the floor, and I'm legging it with the Hoban papers.

* I go to a location that Lola told me about, some weird sort of castle place off the south coast that she liked (it was nice, with the ribbons and banners and all that), and master the whole scheme in a matter of hours, plied by a dram or two from the Sound of Islay, before getting the nub over to Youdi on the old handheld (had to stand on one leg, though, facing the wind to get a signal when it came to transmit).

* Message back from Youdi, via a vision of a bus about to plunge off the edge of a nearby cliff and the assorted screams of the no longer would-be passengers, to make a posting here.

* So, the real Huss Hoban (christened Russell Idaho Obama) first saw the light of day the day that Christ died at his parental home in Foxrock nearly 55 years ago. Unaccountably, though the ostensible child of a god-fearing Protestant Irish couple called Becquet, he was black, and it does not require a genius to work out that he was destined for the care of the Sisters of Mercy.

* All in all, he quickly had a new home in Brixton, and grew up, not knowing otherwise, as if South London were his natal home, and the immigrant Borges family, who adopted him to overcome childlessness, were his parents.

* When it came to know better, he didn't care to, being too much engrossed in learning the business of being an illustrator to care much about how he was conceived or who gave him birth. However, he did execute a deed to change his name, because he had resolved to overcome the stigma that it was obvious that would detract from his work, if, as he fancied, he branched out into writing.

* In a place as huge and populous as the States, finding someone with the same name who would settle in the UK and front as him for as long as was convenient was not difficult.

* Both men quite enjoyed their respective roles, one with full licence to embellish any aspect of his life that would enhance the quirky, out-of-the-groove market that his accomplice was seeking to appeal to, who was, in turn, freed from the demands on him to do other than write, without the need to present a front.

* The rest is history. Van Morrison, more obviously, did the same thing when he appointed Brian Kennedy as his public mouthpiece. Those, however, who really believe that Naomi Campbell authored a novel about a swan have wasted precious minutes that could have been spent reading The Daily Mail instead - sorry to have intruded on those endless stories of doom and disaster!

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