gratuitous picture of my grandfather being a bad-ass

it has happened again: my grandfather has turned another year older and in commemoration, i have decided to post another gratuitous picture of him being a stone cold matinee idol. to aid him in staring deep into your soul, he has enlisted the help of an adorable moppet (my moms) and a (presumably) magical pipe. happy 97th grandpops!

the first bloom(sday)

bloomsday, the ancient celtic fertility festival, has not always been about watching theatre majors strut around in period sportswear, or listening to music majors strum the celtic harp, or (worst of all) enduring english majors as they grab you by the shoulder and tell you how to read ulysses is to see the face of god. indeed, bloomsday used to be about lowbrow carousing under the pretense of discussing highbrow literature. take for example this account of the first bloomsday:

The day was 16 June, 1954, and though it was only mid-morning, Brian O’Nolan [Flann O’Brien] was already drunk. This day was the fiftieth anniversary of Mr. Leopold Bloom’s wanderings through Dublin, which James Joyce had immortalised in Ulysses .

To mark this occasion a small group of Dublin literati had gathered …just below the Martello tower in which the opening scene of Joyce’s novel is set. They planned to travel round the city through the day, visiting in turn the scenes of the novel, ending at night in what had once been the brothel quarter of the city, the area which Joyce had called Nighttown.

Sadly, no-one expected O’Nolan to be sober…The rest of the party, that first Bloomsday, was made up of the poet Patrick Kavanagh, the young critic Anthony Cronin, a dentist named Tom Joyce, who as Joyce’s cousin represented the family interest, and John Ryan, the painter and businessman who owned and edited the literary magazine Envoy.

Kavanagh and O’Nolan began the day by deciding they must climb up to the Martello tower itself, which stood on a granite shoulder behind the house. As Cronin recalls, Kavanagh hoisted himself up the steep slope above O’Nolan, who snarled in anger and laid hold of his ankle. Kavanagh roared, and lashed out with his foot. Fearful that O’Nolan would be kicked in the face by the poet’s enormous farmer’s boot, the others hastened to rescue and restrain the rivals.

With some difficulty O’Nolan was stuffed into one of the cabs by Cronin and the others. Then they were off, along the seafront of Dublin Bay, and into the city. In pubs along the way an enormous amount of alcohol was consumed, so much so that on Sandymount Strand they had to relieve themselves as Stephen Dedalus does in Ulysses… Eventually they arrived in Duke Street in the city centre, and the Bailey, which John Ryan then ran as a literary pub.

They went no further. Once there another drink seemed more attractive than a long tour of Joycean slums, and the siren call of the long vanished pleasures of Nighttown.

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from: flann o’brien, an illustrated biography by costello and van der kamp (1987)

pictured above on the first bloomsday: john ryan, anthony cronin, brian o’nolan (flann o’brien), patrick kavanagh & tom joyce; (1954). source.

telegraphic codes now for google calendar

aficionados of telegraphs, dates and secret codes,

i have hacked together a gmail calendar that has each date labeled with its telegraphic code name. you can view it (and copy it over to your own google calendar) here. i look forward to using this to set up our own series of clandestine meetings.

code words for the days of the year

way back in the 18-whatevers when sending a telegram cost a charwoman’s daily wages, some enterprising telegraph operator found a loophole in the telegraph pricing scheme. yo realised that telegraph senders charged per word rather than per character—thus transmitting “it is on” would cost the same as “raynor is maschalophilous.”

anywhoosies, the telegraph operator then went on to invent code words for common telegraphic phrases. morisco refers to “money no object.” crisp is short hand for “can you recommend to me a good female cook?” flank means “a fire is raging here. please send engine,” which is a convenient abbreviation because when a fire really rages, one hasn’t much extra time to waste on frivolous wording when telegraphing for an engine. the resulting book is a real gas. you can peruse it here.

but what really floats my tugboats is that this book offers a code word for EVERY SINGLE day of the year, including leap year. here are some highlights:

• today (june 9) is joker
• may 29 is merkin
• leap day (february 29) is fictitious
• january 20 is <ahem> jaculatory
• the day that i crawled out of my mother’s weeping womb is jester
• and you? what is the code word for your birthday? is it oddness, fiasco, or octogamy?

nonsense is the fourth dimension of literature, duh

happy april fools’ day from gelett burgess and your dear friend raynor effing ganan.

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from: the burgess nonsense book (1901).

april tomfoolery

when i was just a wee raynorling, i was reading a stack of games magazines and came across this remarkable cartoon by robert leighton. in the subsequent twelve panels, purtle mcweeny falls victim to four more pranks. all are grand but it is the last one that, all these many years later, i still have not been able to shake from the wrinkles of my brain. (click through to read in high def)

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source: games magazine april/may (1989).
note: we are taking a momentary break from the rhapsodic thrills of gelett burgess week to observe april fools’ day.

Today is also Evacuation Day!

It is with an unleavening sense of disappointment that I must tell you there is nothing inside this book that comes close to the across-a-crowded-junk-shop impact of its front cover. Professor Arnold Ehret’s mesmeric (and slightly frog-eyed) gaze, his cuspidate mustachios, the careful separation of “paper” and “back”, that delicious shade of not-Penguin orange, and above all, the rhythmic slitheriness of “mucusless”: to be fair, it’s an awful lot for one small volume to live up to. One exception is the clear small statement on the back cover that “This book has never before been available at this price”. Another is the motivational rah-rah-rah, peppered with exclamation points, of the publisher’s frontispiece introduction to this 1972 facsimile.

Beyond the cover, the book is fairly standard bowel-blasting stuff, taken up with XXV Lessons which should, if you follow them faithfully, leave you fully evacuated and decongested, a metabolic ubermensch ready to take on the world armed only with the diet of a fruit bat. It’s a pity Chairman Mao didn’t have a copy.

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the content and capital letters of this post have been brought to you by the ever plucky ramona ranchera.

let us revel and rejoice

for on this day in 1869, parliament (and george clinton) repealed the duty on hair powder act of 1795. because of this, you and i and lady gaga no longer have to pay the man™ when we want to powder our outlandish wigs with lavender-scented finely ground starch.

141 years ago today, we™ changed the world forever—just as lady gaga sings in her song, bad romance, “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

p.s. did you notice in the picture within a picture above that one monkey is powdering the wig of another monkey? haha…monkeys in powdered wigs, now i’ve seen everything.

for those that observe the julian calendar: happy new year!

one of my 62 new, new year’s resolutions is to be more open about myself on the information super highway. this means posting more pictures of myself (even if my eyes are overly bloodshot and my meth teeth are unseemly). so here is a picture of yours truly ringing in the new year, rocking out hard on the top the sphinx. in the end, it was a pretty meh experience because one of the lasers burned a small hole in my new nine inch nails t-shirt. thanks for nothing, egyptian ministry of culture.

the jack-o-lantern map of boylan heights

in the 1970s, radical cartographer, denis woods started an nontraditional atlas of his neighborhood in raleigh, north carolina. this image is his attempt at mapping the locations and faces of decorative gourds. the other maps are also worth a looksy.

the image is from dancing and singing: a narrative atlas of boylan heights, unpublished (ca. 1975).

you can read more about this ferly project here and listen about it here.

on halloween and how it factors into my nightmares

every year at midsummer, i throw a yard game decathlon party for family and friends. on account of a successful combination of hefeweizen, kansas city burnt ends, house music, and kubb for the 4th annual tournament (2008), my parents later informed me that it was one of the top five parties that they had ever attended. obviously, this made me curious about what else was on their list:

• one of them was some idiot’s ridiculously overplanned wedding reception that did not at all go according to plan.
• one was a party in greece that they were erroneously invited to because my dad was accidentally wearing the colours of the local football team.
• their number two party involved game 6 of the 1980 world series and several thousand old city carousers.

all and all, it was a pretty tame list so i was eager to hear what they chose as their number one. it turned out that it was a halloween party WHICH THEY THREW. now wait just a second, i thought, one can’t put one’s own party on the list of all-time best parties—it’s poor decorum.

not so, argued my parents. it was a marvelous party: trick-or-drinking, bobbing for apples, animatronic zombies, and outlandish costumes—my mom had dressed up as wonderwoman and my dad was sherlock holmes.

“still,” i said, “it sounds kinda lame.”

“no,” they said, “it was spectacular. in fact, it was so spectacular that it was—as near as we can calculate—the night that you were conceived.”

so now, not only am i acutely aware of the circumstance in which my dad planted the candy coated seed that would later become yours truly—but i have an unshakable mental image of he (wearing nothing but a deerstalker hat) and my mom (clad in a glittering tiara and a skimpy leotard) having freaky cosplay sex with the savage furor of pagan gods. this is how halloween factors into my nightmares.

my grandfather looking totally badass in front of the ruins of angkor (1969)

today marks my 94 year old grandfather’s 95^th birthday. for those interested, he is the source of my predilection for poetry (particularly gerard manley hopkins and w.h. auden) curios (numismatic, philatelic, and archaic), and adventure. he is the exemplar of who i strive to be.