Tales and Tails

Last night at The Crippled Bee I urged my companions to bring forth beer, and then, in turn, the very best of their writer and pet related stories.

Why so? After all, I care not for pets myself. Why people will insist on wandering around our beautiful parks and woodlands accompanied by a yapping, hairy, four-legged professional-shit-depositor on a lead has always been a mystery to me. A goldfish in a bowl? Unless it’s nestling on a bed of salad, with a fig-flavoured balsamic dressing, it’s not for me. A rabbit in a hutch? I don’t think so. Bunnies belong in Hades’ lair.

Still, one must appreciate that, beyond my own (clearly) superior tastes, there are other points of view. Writers and artists have, throughout history, frequently turned to animals – as inspiration, as part-time companions, as – dare I say it? - close friends. Like it I don’t, but pets abound in the annals of obsure european literature. Who can forget Hector Spinkel’s Bornean Whoolah Bird, or Louis Marchant’s monkey-faced owl? Literary history crawls with animals: lambs lightly leap, moles courageously dig and cheetahs simply wizz through its never-ending pages.

So, I hear you say, isn’t it time someone created some sort of ‘Pet’s Corner’ for fans of obscure european literature? Perhaps you’re right. In any case, though I wouldn’t go so far as to predict that this will be a regular feature (what ever happened to my daily routine series after all?), I hereby announce that I will, over the coming weeks and/or months, be sharing a few of those aforementioned writer and pet-related stories with you.

Meeow.

Lobster Walking and the Like

‘Almost the only thing that everyone knew about him was the famous, and perhaps apocryphal, story of how he used to go for walks in the parks of Paris taking a live lobster with him on a leash’ (Richard Holmes on Gérard de Nerval)

A live lobster on a leash? How very tame. Eccentricity at its most conservative. Pyetr Turgidovsky used to wander around St. Petersburg with a dead lobster on a chain.

More on writers, animals and leashes later.

I Think (We’re in Trouble)

Yesterday I posed a question: why did Koira Jupczek make me think of Jens Klofferson (other than the fact that, as I have just this moment noticed, their names both involve the letters ‘J’ and ‘K’)?

The answer lies in one of Klofferson’s famously tiny tales, which goes a little something like this:

‘You’ve heard of people thinking themselves out of holes?’
Max wasn’t sure he had – so he nodded.
‘Well,’ she said: ‘Daddy thinks himself into holes’.

(Holes by Jens Klofferson, translated by Piers Röelberg)

An unconscious plot summary of Jupczek’s new(ish) novel, Sad Professor?

So it would seem…

You say Klofferson, I say Stofferson

To all those who wrote in following the previous post (my wife included) I offer this reply. I opened by saying that Henrik Stofferson was the ‘disputed master of the short-short story’. Was this a grievous error? Did I mean to say, you all asked, Jens Klofferson? Klofferson, Stofferson, Stofferson, Klofferson. It’s easy to get muddled.

Nevertheless, let’s straighten out a few facts. First up, we must remember that both Klofferson and Stofferson wrote short-short stories. To say that Stofferson was a master of the form, therefore, is – whilst open to debate – a perfectly pertinent point. Note that I wrote ‘disputed master’, after all.

As for Klofferson; well, I am aware that, in most people’s opinion, his prowess on the field on which we speak is, generally speaking, very well known. I am equally aware that he, more than Stofferson, is the name to which we turn when we speak of ‘masters’. Stofferson may have given his name to a prize (the aforementioned Henrik Stofferson Award for an Autobiography of No More than Five Sentences”) but Klofferson has won all the plaudits there are to win.

In the name of gracious honesty, I am also faintly aware that, though I maintain it fair to call Stofferson a ‘disputed master’, I may have confused him, at one point or another, for his almost-name-sake. This, no doubt, is because I had cause to mention Stofferson one post previously. Nevertheless, it was an error. It was Klofferson and not Stofferson that made me think of Jupczek. Tomorrow, maybe, I will reveal why…

Sad Professor

Speaking of Stofferson, disputed master of the short-short-story, I am reminded of the news that Koira Jupczek, mistress of the dark-dark-novel, has a book coming out this year. This truth is twisted: the book in question actually appeared four years ago, but the transition from Czech to English (otherwise known as a translation) has taken some time.

But fear ye not: Sad Professor, the ‘tragedy of a man whose cheap anxieties pushed him over the edge’ is definitely on its way, all pretty and Englishified. And, having read the novel in the original language, let me be amongst the first to say that fans of Jupczek’s masterpiece, Death Charts, will not be overly disappointed. Sad Professor is crammed with cliches, granted – but it’s also tremendously good, sinister, fun. In Professor Schulz, the eponymous academic, Jupczek has created a truly memorable character: a worthy addition to that grand old tradition of the ‘lovable idiot’.

Needless to say, there will be more on this later.

Important

‘I don’t know: it seemed important at the time’. (Claude Schüntz)

(Claude Schüntz is this year’s winner of the “The Henrik Stofferson Award for an Autobiography of No More than Five Sentences” – previously awarded to Oa Aayorta.)

The Name of the Novel (2)

Boris Yashmilye’s fourth novel, Out, Damned (reviewed here) takes its title, as you will know, from Shakespeare. Although the name seems obvious for those who know the content of the novel, Yashmilye was actually half way through the book before he thought of it. The original title? Puss Mountain. I do not lie.

Lucky for us, perhaps, that he turned to the bearded bard for inspiration. Or was it? Truth be told, Shakesperean allusions have been done to death when it comes to book titles, as a new study – My Kingdom for a Name: The Complete Concordance of Shakespearean Book-titles – reveals.

To say it is an interesting read would be, I confess, unfair. In the main, the very sight of the book sickens me. But, beneath the topsoil of trollop, a handful of intriguing facts can, yet, be unearthed.

Who knew, for instance, that Ik Nunn once wrote a novella named Give Me My Robe? Or that there are, on bookshelves somewhere, novels called He Wore His Beaver Up, Cudgel Thy Brains and, most curiously, The Elephant Hath Joints, But None for Courtesy? It is a strange world we live in, that the stray words of an Elizabethan playmonger should have provided a lucky dip for desperate novel namers. But so, it seems, they have. How else can one explain Marc Safferini’s Frozen Bosom of the North?

One book missing from this concordance is, of course, Egor Falastrom’s Beauty’s Tutor, which will be published later this year. The allusion in this case is, I believe, to Love Labour’s Lost. More interesting than that, however, is the fact that Falastrom has chosen to depart from a particularly lazy vein of book naming. His last three novels, you may remember, were called Dark Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher, Further Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher and Still More Dreams of a Delirious Dog-Catcher. Can we presume, therefore, that Beauty’s Tutor won’t feature his usual hero, the infamous dog-catcher? On the contrary, says his publicists: this book merely continues the series.

The rest is a bemused silence.

The Name of the Novel (1)

Following last week’s revelation that Boris Yashmilye’s second novel, The Musala Affair, went through forty-one different working titles, I have received much correspondence (well, two postcards), querying the availability of his discarded names and pondering whether his other novels (he has written five) went through similarly torturous titling trauma.

In response to the first of these wonderings, I can only say that I find it highly unlikely that Yashmilye has any sort of copyright over the forty-one unused names. Which is to say, should you wish to pen a novel yourself and give it the title The Snow in Summer Falls with Grace or, alternatively, A Tale of Toupees - you are most welcome. Raid the writer’s scrapbook, why not? (I might add that this is mere conjecture. In reality, copyright and I get on like Buddhist and a French chef, and any advice I give regarding its operations should be taken lightly, very lightly indeed).

As for the second issue, I have made some calls and come up with the following information. Yashmilye’s first novel, Flashes at Midnight had the same name from beginning to end. The same applies to his most recent offering, The Bastard. Interestingly, however, both titles have suffered greatly from translation. Flashes at Midnight, as I have long argued, ought to have been called Flashers at Midnight, whilst The Bastard would have made more sense had it been called The Mongrel.

Meanwhile, his third novel Nuts, Nuts, Nuts underwent just the single change. Right up until publication it was known as The Posthumous Experiments of Professor Neils Bohr, but – under publishing house pressure – it suffered a last minute change. Yashmilye claimed, later, that this was a deliberate move; fearing they’d never accept Nuts, Nuts, Nuts, he attempted to soften the effect by comparison. If this was the game he was playing, it worked. One suspects, however, that it was not.

Which leaves us with his fourth work, Out, Damned…

(more on this later)

Is it? (Answer 9/9)

Question: Is it, when, and how much?

Answer: I will accept one of the following two answers: 1.) Yes it is, August, £4 a head, or 2.) It isn’t anywhere or anything. The only thing that is everywhere is nothingness. The world is a void and life is essentially pointless.

All questions have now been answered. May I extend my thanks to all those who entered this quiz, including those (numbering in the hundreds, no doubt) who chose to answer only in their heads (the act of typing being, as I know full well, a tremendous strain on one’s all-too-delicate fingers).

Normal (by which I mean, of course, abnormal) service will now resume.

Strange Bedfellows (Answer 8/9)

Question: ‘Catholicism and science fiction are not strange bedfellows, not in my book. As a child, I was barely able to tell them apart. I remember being shown a fifteenth century illustration of Gideon and the Fleece and thinking it was a still from the new Doctor Who. Having an angel appear to you and being abducted by an alien must be relatively similar experiences’. Who said this?

Answer: Ciambhal O’Droningham, of course.

More on him here. And here.