To mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth, we’re serialising The Pickwick Papers…

Thanks to our friends at Naxos Audiobooks, we’re exclusively serialising their abridged version of what is perhaps Dickens’ funniest work, The Pickwick Papers, read by Anton Lesser.

The latest episodes can be heard below. You can catch up on previous chapters here. Tune in next week for more…

Chapter 35: Mr Perker suggests a solution and Mr Winkle arrives

Chapter 36: More marriages

Naxos Audiobooks – The Complete Dickens

For Charles Dickens’ 200^th birthday, Naxos Audiobooks are completing their unabridged catalogue of all 16 of his major novels, with Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers and The Mystery of Edwin Drood released by May next year. See their website for more information.

Naxos AudioBooks are one of the leading independent audiobook labels, specialising in the classics. You can see the full range at www.naxosaudiobooks.com and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

You can buy the The Pickwick Papers abridged audiobook – currently being serialised by The Dabbler Book Club – here.

The sorry inheritance of a certain young Korean.

What would it be like to be told at age 27 that for the next four decades you were going to have to kill, starve and oppress millions of people if you wanted to stay alive? A strange question you may think, and yet not an unreasonable one. It is after all, precisely what happened to Kim Jong-un, the son of Kim Jong-il and now leader of the world’s most oppressive state.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, thanks to a clip I saw last week of a celebration on North Korean TV. The cameras were inside a huge hall, filled with rows of identically dressed apparatchiks who were clapping in unison. On stage, ancient generals and desiccated party figures stared directly ahead, stiff as mummies. Above them were huge images of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il – dead yes, but incredibly happy. And then, Kim Jong-un appeared. A general approximately three apples high and wearing a hat the size of a satellite dish held his chair as the fat and sullen “brilliant comrade” sat down.

It was what happened next that caught my attention. Kim Jong-il always gave the impression that he was delighted with himself as far as diabolical dwarves go. He was confident, cheerful… perhaps he actually enjoyed all that terror and violence. But as for Kim Jong-un, well, his body language tells a different story. As the zombies applauded, he sat slouched forward in his chair, leafing idly through some papers. He looked this way, that way, clearly wishing he was somewhere else. The question is: where? In one of his father’s pleasure palaces, surrounded by the cream of North Korea’s young females… or in an entirely different reality altogether, one where he is not the son of Kim Jong-il?

And thus I feel sympathy for Kim Jong-un. When I look at him on TV I see not only boredom, but also confusion, anxiety, and fear. Initially he looked stunned to be standing before crowds of thousands of weeping people. You could see him thinking: What’s going on? Is this all mine? How do I work it? What happens if I mess up?

Indeed, it was rather unfair of his father to drop this awesome responsibility upon him so suddenly, as Kim Jong-il himself was able to spend decades practicing his evil. He started with little murders, orchestrating car crashes for members of the party hierarchy who opposed the principle of hereditary succession, for instance. Thus by the time the 1990s came round, he had built up the experience required to sentence millions to death by starvation.

But the country Kim Jong-un has inherited is a much bigger disaster area than the country Kim Jong-il inherited from his father, so he will have to leap to mega violence very early on in his career. And while Kim Jong-il’s former sushi chef Kenji Fujimoto may say that the new leader is as ruthless as his father (“he knows how to be angry and how to praise. He has the ability to lead people… also he loves basketball, roller-blading, snowboarding and skiing… I watched him play golf once and he reminded me of a top Japanese professional.”) it takes more than mere ruthlessness and mad hoop skillz to survive as a totalitarian despot. You need to be cunning, a master of divide and rule, adept at generating fear and paranoia in your inner circle. There will always be somebody eager to kill you, to seize all that power, should you show signs of weakness.

Also, if I were Kim Jong-un I would be seriously contemplating the history of political dynasties. He is the third in line, following two world class monsters. And how often does that kind of talent, or indeed any talent, pass to the third generation without a diminution? Never.

Don’t take it from me. Kim Jong-un’s big (half) brother Kim Jong-nam agrees. In an interview with a Japanese journalist he confessed: “Jong-un might look like our grandfather (Kim Il-sung), but I’m worried how he can satisfy his people.”

In fact, Kim Jong-nam claims that Kim Jong-il was aware of the risks of passing power to the third generation, but members of his inner circle insisted on it. And this is very possible. For decades, North Koreans were told that Kim Jong-il was born on Mt. Baekdu, a sacred place in all Korean folklore, and that not only did a double rainbow appear in celebration, but a new star appeared in the heavens also. The Kim family are quasi-divine. How could the North Korean nomenklatura do otherwise than put one of the sons in charge?

And thus when I watch Kim Jong-un and the amassed generals behind him on TV, it seems clear that they too are trapped, all of them. Their gilded cages float atop an ocean of blood so deep and wide that the waves push them up against the roof of the sky, where the air is perilously thin. And if anyone dares to open the door and step outside, he will surely drown.

And thus if he is not yet evil, Kim Jong-un must fast become evil if he is to survive.

(RIA Novosti previously published a version of this post).

Pop this week, as Brit unleashes a quintet of songs in which everything is louder than everything else…

One recent Sunday morning I caught the above song by Ren Harvieu on Radio 2 (Aled Jones’ programme, I often listen to it on the way to my weekly 5-a-side matches, his mix of quasi-spiritual chat ‘n’ pop provides a nice counterpoint to the sweary violence of the football that follows (it’s Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs on the way back, and there, dear reader, I draw the line)) – and I instantly recognised Open Up Your Arms as one of those swooning showstoppers that Shirley Bassey would have bashed you to death with a stiletto for. It’s a one-listen job: halfway through the first chorus you’re wondering where you’ve heard it before, by the second you’re humming it, grip tightening on the steering wheel, and by the third you’re howling along as hot tears spurt.

Subsequent googling revealed this jackpot of a pop tune to have been penned by Dave McCabe, formerly of entertaining Scouse band The Zutons. He also wrote Valerie, smash hit for the late Amy Winehouse – she being at the raw end of a slew of British songstresses including Adele, Duffy and Florence, whose cross-generational success proves the enduring appeal of the gigantic soul song, of the swelling string section or the motown swing, of the vulnerable female vocal that can fill a concert hall. (Incidentally, Adele’s astonishing commercial success in particular surely blows out of the water the music industry’s complaint about the disappearing market for albums. It’s still there but it’s middle-aged, and the industry’s bone-headed tactics of aiming marketing efforts solely at penniless, pirating youths are the real problem.)

Doubtless Ms Harvieu and her producers were more than a little grateful when McCabe presented this composition, for songs like Open Up Your Arms don’t grow on trees and it must be said they’ve done it justice, with a proper Wall of Sound-style arrangement. The trick there is to do it straight: big, direct, unashamed drama with no chickening out and no irony. If the song’s right it will work every time. Consider the Ronettes…

Be My Baby (1963) can be considered the template for the Wall of Sound technique as devised by convicted murderer Phil Spector at his Gold Star Studios in LA in the 1960s (he being living incarcerated proof that an aesthetic gift does not necessarily bespeak a beautiful soul). It was essentially a studio methodology, which involved using big electric and acoustic ensembles captured by microphones and transmitted into a specially equipped basement echo chamber, the resulting sound fed back into the studio and recorded. Spector’s records, all mono (he hated stereo) sounded awesome on AM radio frequencies.

Spector was notorious for burying the lead solo vocal very low in the mix (it was said that he wanted the songs to be “all about him” rather than the performer). This was not true of subsequent Wall of Sound-style producers such as Jimmy Franz. But then when you’ve got a voice like Scott Walker’s at your disposal, you won’t want to hide it. Here’s one of my favourites from The Walker Brothers. First Love Never Dies (1965) is not one of their big hits, but the sound is magnificent and, like the best big numbers, it delivers a direct punch to the emotional solar plexus….

Spector and Franz’s Walls of Sound were very much studio edifices. Recreating the everything-louder-than-everything-else sound live while maintaining coherence is not so easy but nonetheless plenty of acts have had a go. I suppose in the heady, profligate boom years of mid-1990s Britpop, people thought nothing of hiring and rehearsing an army of musicians just to play a couple of songs on Jools Holland. That anyway is what McAlmont and Butler did. Bernard Butler, ex of Suede, is a songwriter steeped in the Spector sound (and is the man behind the success of Duffy). David McAlmont is a vocalist with a three-octave range, and therefore one of the few capable of belting out Butler’s swooping compositions. Pity they hated each other, having only two hits together plus an album of filler, before splitting. But what hits! Here’s the splendid Yes..

From Jools Holland to David Letterman. Montreal collective Arcade Fire are an interesting band, with an offbeat take on the live Wall of Sound. The stage is like the music room of a weird German Schloss – cellos, French horns, accordians, violas, glockenspiels – all blasting away at once to thrilling effect. From 2004, Rebellion (Lies)  is a song about (I think) children staying awake all night…

I’ve never understood how today’s multi-tasking mums manage to juggle children and household responsibilities with jobs, social networking, pets and Zumba classes. In the past we would have been dressed in a pinny, baking fairy cakes with the children, or (in a freshly laundered pinny) welcoming home our bread-winning husband, with a warm pair of slippers and a pipe to puff on in front of the TV before serving his lovingly home cooked dinner.

Having our roles clearly delineated at least gave us a sense of control over our lives. The problem with living in the 21st century is that we’ve let go of the reins. In the age of the portfolio career, the self-checkout and the DIY computer fix, we are expected to do everything ourselves – whilst funding others to lounge around on benefits. Apologies for having a bit of a rant, but it’s been a fraught week for me. I’ve been trying to get some work done at the same time as undertaking a bit of a spring clean…

I found some great Polish guys to paint my flat. They decorate in the evenings and at weekends to supplement their income. One of them has a degree in forestry and refuses to kill spiders. They work super-efficiently to Absolute Radio, so I felt it best to vacate the premises and leave them to it – returning only to the nauseating smell of freshly applied paint.

The upholstery cleaners were a different matter. They arrived the other morning (inconveniently shared with a visit by the gardener) – a sort of Hispanic version of Laurel and Hardy – with their large cleaning contraption. They proceeded to knock into furniture and spray soapy water liberally over the wooden floor. Until their steam cleaner broke down. They deduced that the plug must have fused and one of them disappeared – probably to B&Q. Meantime, in the absence of an internet signal, I realized that it was most likely a tripped switch in my fuse box. Problem solved, Stan dipped his arm down into the bowels of the machine and started dragging out large bits of treacly-looking gunk. Then Oliver returned with electrical supplies and a tool box and proceeded to dismantle the controls, leaving bits of chopped wire on the dining table. They finally concluded that the day’s work was done – they would have to return next week with another machine. So they left, leaving behind a scorched floorboard – and carrying the curtains and cushion covers of my £££ B&B Italia sofa away for cleaning in what looked like bin bags. I do hope I see them again (the curtains and covers that is).

Meantime, I therapeutically threw out my knackered old blinds without realizing what a struggle it would be to find someone to make up net curtains at short notice. My first port of call was Peter Jones. I went to the section with a large sign promising a 7 day make up service and stood around for a while. There were two assistants sitting at desks helping one couple with their order. A manager came over and said he’d send someone to attend. It must have been 20 minutes before I finally sat down opposite a man with a computer and a serious piece of ear-kit. The scene that unfolded was like a surreal combination of Are You Being Served and Little Britain: a farcically camp rendering of ‘the computer says no.’ I asked if he had a pen and paper – and, after a lot of prompting, he resorted to writing down my details and order for three voile curtains. But he said he’d have to call me back with an estimate, as presumably he hadn’t been trained to use a calculator. When he did eventually call back I nearly crashed my car at the ‘never knowingly undersold’ £889 quote – though I would have gone ahead if it weren’t for the fact that:

a) they couldn’t guarantee that the curtains would be ready by my deadline of 2nd June (they weren’t the right sort of curtains for the 7 day service), and

b) they said I had to go back to sign on the dotted line. But it had already taken forty minutes – plus and extra 10 minutes trying to find an assistant to help me locate the curtain wires…why couldn’t I just pay the money and be done with it?

On the way home I thought I’d try my luck at Chelsea Upholsterers. I wandered into an empty shop with a strong (home from home) smell of paint. “Hello,” I shouted into the fumes. A young man appeared with black paint all over his hands. He informed me they offered a curtain making service and could come to measure my windows and easily get the nets to me within two weeks. But I had to email him with the measurements and the type of fabric I was looking for – and pick up one of his cards as I left, as he was incapacitated by the paint on his hands… Alas, the following morning I received a response to the email saying that their seamstress was too busy to make my curtains.

With time running out, at the suggestion of a neighbour, I visited a needlework school called The Sewing Rooms. They were clearly busy, but I only had to queue for 5 minutes to inform a very officious lady of my requirement. “Our curtain making expert may be able to help,” I was informed, though unfortunately she was only in on Thursdays. Nevertheless, Ms Bossyboots (obviously trained at a school for doctors’ receptionists) would pass on my details. Or, better still, I could email her my details and she would forward those to the girl in question. So I’ve sent my email…but I won’t hold my breath.

I was planning to write something creative today, but my imagination has been somewhat stymied by the events of the week. Plus, downloading the latest version of Firefox has caused everything to run slowly, and my computer can no longer communicate with my printer. Oh, and my unrequested ‘free upgrade’ at Blogger means I’ve lost all control over my blog’s layout.

I’m so looking forward to making fairy cakes for the Diamond Jubilee.

A major new academic work on Wittgenstein reveals the human face of a brilliant but difficult man, finds Elberry…

In an age of meretricious academic nonsense, Wittgenstein in Cambridge is a professional, scholarly work. Professor McGuinness has collected and edited nearly 500 pages of letters between the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and various Cambridge luminaries, including Bertrand Russell and JM Keynes. In one sense it is an arbitrary selection – as if the target audience are Cambridge alumni associations. Yet it is a good enough limitation.

Wittgenstein, like many philosophers, distrusted academia. He was, however, involved with Cambridge University for over twenty years, first as a student and then as a teacher. The rest of the time he was in a deliberate wilderness, in the First World War (as a volunteer), then as a schoolteacher in rural Austria (he requested to work in the poorest villages); and after resigning his position at Cambridge he did his best work in Ireland, as a private citizen.

Wittgenstein in Cambridge sketches some of the tensions, and attractions, of academia. Most of all, in Cambridge he found people to talk to. As a young man he wore Bertrand Russell down with the prolonged intensity of his thought, and his tempests of Germanic fury; nonetheless, the affection, the need for friendship, is evident in these early letters. And equally evident is Wittgenstein’s inability to endure compromise. He formally broke with Russell in 1914; in Russell’s words:

I have had a letter from Wittgenstein saying he and I are so dissimilar that it is useless to attempt friendship, and he will never write to me or see me again. I dare say his mood will change after a while. I find I don’t care on his account, but only for the sake of Logic. And yet I believe I do really care too much to look at it. It is my fault – I have been too sharp with him.

Russell in many ways came to represent academic vice to Wittgenstein – a great mind turned to populist journalism and self-satisfaction. In 1911, however, Russell was still a great man, and he had opened a door in Wittgenstein’s life. Breaking with him was not so easy; from Wittgenstein’s letter to him (February 1914):

I shall be grateful to you and devoted to you WITH ALL MY HEART for the whole of my life, but I shall not write to you again and you will not see me again either. Now that I am once again reconciled with you I want to part from you in peace so that we shan’t sometime get annoyed with one another again and then perhaps part as enemies. I wish you everything of the best and I beg you not to forget me and to think of me often with friendly feelings. Goodbye!

One thinks of Wittgenstein as an engine with almost no tolerance – the slightest imprecision, mismatch, would threaten to tear everything apart. Thus later letters strike a similar note with Keynes and the great economist Piero Sraffa. This was inevitably exhausting for everyone. After visiting Wittgenstein in Austria in 1924, the mathematician Frank Ramsey writes to Keynes:

I’m afraid I think you would find it difficult and exhausting. Though I like him very much I doubt if I could enjoy him for more than a day or two, unless I had my great interest in his work, which provides the mainstay of our conversation.

From the evidence of his biographies, Wittgenstein didn’t really have friends – only disciples and intellectual antagonists. He evidently required a good deal of handling. After writing one of his characteristic letter to Keynes (“And what followed this [...] showed me what amount of negative feelings you had accumulated in you against me”), the economist replies, equably:

What a maniac you are! [...] No – it was not “an undertone of grudge” that made me speak rather crossly when last we met; it was just fatigue or impatience with the difficulty, almost impossibility, when one has a conversation about something affecting you personally, of being successful in conveying true impressions into your mind and keeping false ones out.

Over time, Wittgenstein seems to have understood the effect he had on others; and while he didn’t modify his behaviour (which would have meant changing his self), he was too intelligent not to notice the pattern. So, in 1946 he writes to the amiable philosopher GE Moore, after Mrs Moore asked to postpone their usual meeting a week:

I should like to know whether what Mrs Moore wrote to me was an honest to God invitation for me to come and see you on Tuesday, or whether it was a kind of hint that I’d better not try to see you. If it was the latter, please don’t hesitate to say so. I will not be hurt in the slightest, for I know that queer things happen in this world. It’s one of the few things I’ve really learnt in my life. So please, if that’s how it is, just write on a p.c. something like “Don’t come”. I enclose a card in case you haven’t got one. I’ll understand everything. Good luck and good wishes!

Of course he would have been very hurt, since he liked Moore. There is something rather painful about Wittgenstein, who would habitually crush and exhaust his interlocutors, supplying Moore with a postcard with which to reject him, and pretending to be calm and English about it. One has a strong feeling for his uncertainty in English society, as an Austrian first of all (my German students are likewise often either too direct, or far too indirect and polite, because they’ve heard the English find the Germans rude), and secondly as one raised in a kind of test tube, apart even from ordinary Austrians.

That the dons suffered Wittgenstein was in part for the sake of his remarkable mind, and perhaps partly because his rages and manias seemed the shadow cast by his own self-dissatisfaction. As he writes in 1913, to Russell:

Sometimes things inside me are in such a ferment that I think I’m going mad: then the next day I am totally apathetic again. But deep inside me there’s a perpetual seething, like the bottom of a geyser, and I keep on hoping that things will come to an eruption once and for all, so that I can turn into a different person. I can’t write you anything about logic today. Perhaps you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time – but how can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing is to come to terms with myself!

Philosophy, for Wittgenstein, was work on oneself. Beginning with hardcore logic (even Russell didn’t really understand the Tractatus, Wittgenstein’s first work), and ending in “speech therapy”, emphasising the ordinary foundations of all language, Wittgenstein’s philosophy tended from mathematics and abstraction, towards the particular and the human. In this regard, in 1938, he writes to Maurice O’Connor Drury (a student who became a psychiatrist):

The thing now is to live in the world in which you are, not to think or dream about the world you would like to be in. Look at people’s sufferings, physical and mental, you have them close at hand, and this ought to be a good remedy for your troubles. [...] Look at your patients more closely as human beings in trouble and enjoy more the opportunity you have to say ‘good night’ to so many people. This alone is a gift from heaven which many people would envy you. And this sort of thing ought to heal your frayed soul, I believe. It won’t rest it; but when you are heathily tired you can just take a rest. I think in some sense you don’t look at people’s faces closely enough.

One could say, this book takes a close look at Wittgenstein’s face; and whether or not this will interest anyone, he was nonetheless a human being and so it may have value.

Hitchcock showed unequivocally that birds are the enemy, making it all the more important to know their ways…

For many years I used to wake up screaming, having had nightmares in which the apocalyptic vision at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds came true. I took these terrors to be a warning, and a decisively personal warning at that. “Only you, Mr Key, and you alone, can prevent the otherwise inevitable vanquishment of human civilisation by our avian foes!” This was what I was being told, by whichever gods control our minds in the depths of the night.

Luckily, I realised that in order to prevent the inevitable etcetera etcetera, we had but to know the enemy. With a clear understanding of precisely what is going on in the innards of a bird, we could rally our defences and outwit the aerial fiends. To this end, and using a generic bird as my pattern, after long minutes of study I prepared the two helpful diagrams below. Armed with these, you need never fear a bird, ever again.

Click on the images, then click again, to enlarge.

This week Mr Slang is banished to Gobbler’s Knob…

We moved last week. Approximately 50 m. One side of the block to the other. So not far but still we moved and it meant a change of address – possibly harder for the recipient to absorb since all that has altered is the flat number – liquidation of cash reserves, a van and its team of strapping Aussies who will as happily – and efficiently – pack and shift a still smouldering fag as they will a sofa, various purchases that had hitherto seemed quite unnecessary, and all the rest. It was not helped by the previous day’s eye operation, thus rendering me a spectator, and barely that. It is done now even if the slang lexica, once so pluperfectly arranged, are still beyond any logical access.

We could have gone further. Much further. There are places, there are words. The concept of the back of beyond has been recorded since 1816 (Walter Scott) though I’ll bet the use is earlier and the concept undoubtedly must be. (Latin used Ultima Thule – the land of Thule being supposedly six days sail north of Britain and thus the northern limit of navigability– and Smollett Englished it in 1771). The OED defines it as a ‘humorous phrase’ and the image, however contrary might be the reality, remains so.

It helps if one’s own land permits of such projections. Australia and America provide for anglophone coinages. The UK is lacking – John O’Groats and Lands End are too parochial even if the root of ‘Welsh’ means ‘foreigner’ – and must borrow.  The great deserts presumably have their own terminology and the Sahara, of course, boasts Timbuktu, the daddy of them all, first recorded in this sense in 1863. A settlement had existed since the Iron Age: the perception of isolation is purely Occidental.

Timbuktu is real. So is Nar Nar Goon, a small town, pop. 1010 at last count, near Melbourne. The name supposedly means koala. Other Ozzisms are less so. Bullamakanka or Bullabananka has a tenuous link to Fiji bullamacow: bully beef, but it may be coincidence and there is no more such a township than there exists New Zealand’s Waikikamukau which needs to be pronounced slowly, i.e. ‘Why kick a moo-cow’, the physical manifestation of which is limited to a meat-free restaurant in Brighton, Sussex.  Oodnagalahbi  has been twinned with Ooodnadatta: a small town in Western Australia but the important syllable is the galah, both noisy bird and slang for fool. Slang’s many-headed lexis of stupidity also underpins Woop Woop, otherwise found as Upper Woop Woop, Oodnawoopwoop, or Wopwops. The woop is a peasant, with that species’ stereotypes. Both the human and the reduplicated metonym seem to have been born in the 1930s. Australia has also given Hay and Hell and Booligal, anywhere hot and uncomfortable and popularized by ‘Banjo’ Patterson’s eponymous poem. Hell is of the reader’s own definition but Hay and Booligal are actual New South Wales communities. Patterson targeted Booligal: the others get off lightly:

‘No doubt it suits them very well
To say it’s worse than Hay or Hell,
But don’t you heed their talk at all;
Of course there’s heat – no one denies -
And sand and dust and stacks of flies,
And rabbits too, at Booligal.’

Rabbits? Indeed. The First Fleet of 1788 brought rabbits as well as humans and by the 1890s they were serious, crop-ravaging vermin. A dingo fence had been completed in 1885; now the aim was to corral the bunnies. The fence was completed in 1907. The rabbits were undaunted (myxomatosis proved more cruelly efficient) but the equation of the boundary and desolation in the phrase beyond the rabbit-proof fence was in place as soon as were the wire and palings. The contemporary over the fence, playing the abstract role, means beyond the bounds of taste. Synonyms can be found in beyond the black stump, where the stump represents a symbolic marker that divides the ‘civilized’ world from the wastelands beyond; and in back of Bourke, celebrating a town in the extreme west of New South Wales which was the terminus of the railway line from Sydney and thus the start of the real Outback.

Outside Australia one finds the Caribbean behind the bananas and behind god’s back, meaning deep in the countryside and Ireland’s back of God-Speed, a place so very far off that the positive reinforcement of one’s wish of ‘God-Speed’ to a traveller will have faded away before they arrive.

In New Zealand the backwoods are the booai or booay which originates either in the Maori puhoi: dull, slow or Puhoi, a failed mid-19^th century utopian settlement. This gives up the booai: totally confused, absolutely wrong, of plans, ruined and of items wholly non-functional. Spelt Boohai, and here defined as ‘a fictitious river’, the phrase is also used to brush aside questions involving the word ‘where?’: the answerer explains that he is ‘up the Boohai hunting pukeko with a long handled shovel.’

America cuts, as ever, to the grosser aspects of the chase. B.F.E. and B.F.A. – butt fucking Egypt or Africa – stand for somewhere very far way. The place itself, coined by the military, is Bumfuck, Egypt, also known as Bumblefuck, Egypt, Butt Fuck, Egypt (and West Buttfuck), or Beyond Fucking Egypt. Sodomy is not mandatory: there is no suggested reference to either City of the Plain and Egypt seems to exist purely on grounds of assonance; Bumfuck, while when relevant set on foreign soil,  can be found nearer CONUS, in Iowa, or Wyoming. Nor need the distance be that great: the implication is simply of inaccessibility and inconvenience, be it of a parking lot or a restaurant.

America is also responsible for the seemingly obscene Gobbler’s Knob, but like certain Australian towns, the actual place exists, in this case a small town best-known for its hosting of the annual Groundhog Day ceremony. Other images of inaccessibility include Doo-wah-diddy, High Street, China and West Hell, which last is the antonym of the equally forlorn East Jesus. Black America offers its own subset. these include the nonsensical B. Luther Hatchett or Beluthahatchie, Ginny Gall, which refers back to the west African region of Guinea, and Zar, apparently eliding ‘it’s there’. The implication remains that of a place that is far away, unpleasant and culturally alien.

Finally, a hole in the wall, which comes either from the holes in the walls of English debtor’s prisons, through which the inmates could obtain supplies and money to alleviate their situation, or from the small shops and similar establishments found in the broad stone walls of fortified medieval cities. Hole in the wall became a generic, although the West had its Hole in the Wall, an outlaw hideaway that provided a refuge for Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid and the real-life Wild Bunch). Perhaps least savoury was the Hole in the Wall on Water Street, NYC, where c. 1860 its proprietor Gallus Meg (a monstrous Englishwoman) bit the ears off ill-behaved customers and preserved her trophies in a pickle jar displayed behind the bar.

image ©Gabriel Green

You can buy Green’s Dictionary of Slang, as well as Jonathon’s more slimline Chambers Slang Dictionary, plus other entertaining works, at his Amazon page. Jonathon also blogs and Tweets.

Spiritual enlightenment and the wisdom of the Zen masters – yours for only a penny!…

Keen Dabbler readers may recall my fondness for the joke about the man who has an orange instead of a head. In fact it is not a joke at all but a profound Zen parable. And though it is of course perfect and unimprovable in its form and content, if you were forced to add a line to it, the only possible one would be “At these words he became enlightened.”

This is a common punchline in the collection of excellent unjokes that is Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. You may well have a battered Pelican copy of Paul Reps’ compliation of Zen writings laying about your house somewhere, especially if you or perhaps an aged relative have dabbled in Eastern philosophy or violent martial arts. It may be in a box in the attic, or it might be handy on your bedside cabinet for nightly attempts to achieve universal Oneness before sleeptime.  If not, you can purchase a copy online for a penny, which seems a small but somehow apt price to pay for seven hundred years of Oriental wisdom.

First published in 1957,  it is actually four distinct works complied by Paul Reps, “an American deeply interested in bridging the understanding of East and West”, with help from  Nyogen Senzaki, a celebrated proponent of Zen in the US who as a Japanese infant “was left in a field and found by a Buddhist Monk”  (according to the book’s blurb  anyway; Wikipedia disputes) and who later became “a ‘homeless monk’ wandering over Japan and finally settling in California.”

The first section, 101 Zen Stories, is the best, containing such gems as this:

The Moon Cannot Be Stolen

Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing in it to steal.

Ryokan returned and caught him. “You may have come a long way to visit me, ” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”

The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.

Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he mused, ” I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”

Now you may have just become enlightened simply by reading the above, in which case you do not need to purchase the book or read any further. If not, try this one:

Everything is Best

When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer.

“Give me the best piece of meat you have,” said the customer.

“Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. “You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best.”

At these words Banzan became enlightened.

Still no luck? There are 99 more.

After the 101 Zen Stories comes The Gateless Gate, a series of problems traditionally set by Zen masters for their pupils, along with an explanatory commentary by ‘Mumon’ that frankly poses far more questions than it answers. Then comes Ten Bulls, a series of woodblock illustrations with supposedly meaningful captions.

In the final, very short section, Paul Reps provides two answers to the question “What is Zen?” Both are brilliant and quite astounding in their clarity, insight and brevity. However, I am not going to tell you what they are. You’ll have to buy Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. You won’t regret the purchase, it is a very short, funny book which will only take all the rest of your life to finish.

If you would like to recommend one of the thousands of great books that can be bought online for a penny, email your review to editorial@thedabbler.co.uk

It’s received terrific reviews. But what did Dabblers think of our latest selection? First, we hear from Dabbler Book Club Member and Scotland’s first soupmonger, Elaine Mason, then from Dabbler Editor, Gaw.

Elaine Mason: Some books you pick up as a distraction. Others are relaxing; an unwinding at the end of a long day. I find Kathleen Jamie’s two books of natural history essays* to have an atmosphere all of their own. I savour picking up her books, and relish her distinctive voice unspooling around me.

Her books are quiet. The essays meditate on a multitude of topics in a myriad of surroundings but at the centre of her writing is the skill of the watcher. She likes to look, to mull, to consider, and to look again. Whether her mindful gaze falls on bacteria seen through a microscope, a Bronze Age skeleton carefully unearthed in a thunderstorm, or considers the weirdly lit Whale Hall in Bergen Natural History Museum, her voice demands that you – the reader – slow down and listen. Listen to her. Give her time, and space, to think about the topic under consideration. Let her widen her scope, let her pan back and let the wider landscape be brought into focus. Let her teach you to look:

That’s what the keen-eyed naturalists say. Keep looking. Keep looking, even when there’s nothing much to see. That way your eye learns what’s common, so when the uncommon appears, your eye will tell you.

(Sightlines, p82)

Kathleen Jamie is the perfect essayist. The essays and meditations in Sightings are, I’ve found, the perfect companion on a journey. By the time I reach journey’s end I am ready to look afresh at the world, consider properly what’s in front of me and give it time to tell it’s story.

This is a book of wonders. Pick it up, slow yourself down and learn to look.

* Her other collection of essays is Findings (Ed.)

Gaw: Not the least enjoyment of this collection of essays in nature writing is the style. It’s something that’s been universally praised by reviewers. However, style is something of a will o’ the wisp. Happily there’s a description of the skeleton of a sei whale that sits at the heart of Sightlines that serves as metaphor: it’s “elegant…gracile…slim…feminine”, and yet it briskly supports a brute, even disturbing, power.

Perhaps, sublime is also an apposite word to apply. Certainly a thread of exhilarating terror runs through the book. We partake in the unfathomable – whales, cancerous tumours, the life of abandoned islands, the moon, neolithic tombs, cave paintings, wild coasts, icebergs – exploring the edges of our civilisation and beyond. But we’re never allowed to forget that these edges are at the centre of other worlds, that really we’re all of a piece, with no clear endings in time or place.

This is the main theme of the book. Nature, despite its often staggering sublimity, isn’t something apart from us; it is us and we are it. Inescapably so, death being a final and unarguable reminder.

Outside of a few sentences, Jamie makes her point mostly through relating her encounters, by showing not telling. It’s powerfully done – the essential nature of things is manifested a few times with the force of epiphany.

Her responses are sympathetic without ever being sentimental; the awe-inspiring is never entirely alien. In particular, there’s an unaffected, unforced feeling of being at ease with animals, a fellow-feeling.

Here’s a description of how she felt whilst trying to keep up with a group of killer whales as they patrolled around a remote Scottish headland:

Acid burn at the sternum, taste of blood, tussocky earth and sky flashing, and my heart pounding; suddenly I was reminded mine was an animal body, all muscle and nerve – and so were they, the killer whales, surging animal bodies, in their black and whites, outclassing us utterly.

“[T]aste of blood”: I’d previously had a physical awareness of this sensation – produced by acute exertion and adrenalin – but not a conscious one. In this remarkable book Jamie manages to raise from all sorts of deep places things that should be strange but are revealed to us as profoundly familiar.

Luke Honey writes about food, drink and the finer things in life over at his blog The Greasy Spoon. Today he veers away from victuals and reacquaints himself with a national institution…

We’ve just had a most entertaining half hour or so watching “The Sky at Night”, apparently the longest running television series in history.  Could this be the last bastion of English amateurism?  The BBC films the programme in sunny Selsey, West Sussex-  using the oak panelled dining room of Patrick Moore’s thatched and lattice-windowed cottage as a studio.  It’s terribly chintzy:  like a set from “The Mousetrap”, circa 1952.  Sir Patrick, now a splendid nonagenarian, cuts a dash in his egg-stained Air Force tie, monocle and clipped (albeit, slurred) tones amongst the spotty, bemused professional anoraks of the astronomical world.  His croquet lawn is littered with telescopes and observatories.  The low-budget lighting and shaky direction give the programme a certain je ne sais quoi:  it’s all slightly bonkers.

I like enthusiasts.  Why is that television presenters of this persuasion always seem to live in Sussex or, failing that, amongst the rhododendrons and silver birches of Surrey?  I’m reminded of the equally splendid Robert Alexander Baron Schutzmann von Schutzmansdorff, aka Bob Symes, the avuncular and tweedy presenter of the 1970′s series “Model World”, he with the buttery, exceedingly good voice, Tsarist beard and gauge one model railway running through the laurel bushes of his garden.  I seem to remember that his shed doubled as a signal box.

Several years ago, I was at a memorial service- for my great uncle, I think, and fell into a chat with some nice old buffer, who looked as if he could be a judge, or at least, if he wasn’t, should have been.  “Tell me, my boy”, he said, fixing a look at me over his half-moon glasses, “what are your hobbies?”  I was slightly taken aback, but it was a good question.  Do people have hobbies anymore?  I’m not sure that they do. Bird egg collecting and butterfly hunting are, of course, now taboo, and I suspect that today, any child of ten years old who collected stamps in a serious way, might be looked upon as slightly odd and even risk ostracisation in the playground.

But that’s the charm of “The Sky at Night”.  It’s not slick, it’s not contrived; it’s endearingly amateur-  and eminently watchable; even if those of us, of a non-scientific bent but seduced by the romance of astronomy, can’t understand a word of it.