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  Is the discussion of the above a tacit approval of the possibility of, at some point, an exculpability on the part of the rioters?

  Theoretical ethics being beyond the scope of this investigation, we leave the readers to their own determination, and return to the primum mobile of the unfortunate affair.

  The question, which the furor raised from the category of aesthetic to ethic, might, had the times been more leisurely or the populace that way responded, have been elevated to the level of metaphysics. (Though another might invert or rearrange the offhand (for which I beg the reader’s indulgence) hierarchy in which I have ordered them.)

  Right reason might say that those conversant with the gait of the skunk – that odd, disjunctive half-lope which, at speed, invites the viewer to consider it a progress “sidewise,” the hindquarters disposed not in line, but some 10 to perhaps 20 degrees out of the line of progress – required no gloss upon it, while those non-conversant might be better served by a straightforward note.

  And that the latter would, if executed frankly, have partaken less of the character of a digression than did the, we must say, coy attempt to sneak in the description as part of the burden of the piece.

  A stylistic solecism?

  Making an end, one must, I feel, say “yes”; a fatal disqualificative flaw, however? Under what possible Draconian, nay, psychotic, nay, incomprehensible system of values?

  Thus arising the question, and, thus, the popular unrest occasioned by the minor, momentary, pardonable (if other than worthy) jejunity, and its major, extensive, tragic incomprehensible outcome.

  Other Breeds

  Found in a bottle off the coast of Spain, 2123.

  At the Fish Orgy the Carp Was All Over the Plaice

  … devoid of manners, like the rich, that subhuman spawn, forever pushing in line or making war, or sophisticating the good brew of those stout fellows, those princes of Christendom, the poor, or working poor, or lower middle class, or great unwashed.

  But at the fish orgy

  The slithery-slimy half-deniable glance or wink

  Of the nictitating membrane – oh-so-saline –

  Tolled the tail.

  The rich ate fish eggs.

  The “great unwashed,” in this instance, could be said to be the crew of the Mandragora, inbound to Tenerife with a load of jute. This coaster was renowned for her part in breaking the blockade in the ’94–’99 unpleasantness – in her mad dash to Newcastle with a cargo of coal.

  Contemporary photographs show her funnel holed in several places, notably dead center of her corporate chop, the “terrier.”1

  Much has been written on the adoption by a Spanish company of the, finally, Celtic breed, in preference to the notably* Iberian “spaniel.”

  We will here occupy ourselves with two points of the argument: (1) whose business is it, anyway? and (2) perhaps they just “thought it was a good idea.”

  (1) Whose Business Is It, Anyway?

  This says a lot.

  For how much of our lives, if we think about it, comes down to just gossip? Most? All? Surely more than “some.”

  That being the case, wouldn’t it do to, once in a while, just “give it a rest”?; because, if we think about it, what difference does it make?

  It is just something that we do to feel important.

  (2) Perhaps They “Just Thought It Was a Good Idea”

  All of us have had this same experience.

  It is part and, one might say, it is the identifying part of being human – the capacity for ideation – the ability to “think,” to “project,” to “imagine,” to do this or that for “no good reason at all,” if the spirit moves us.

  For is it not, finally, the “spirit,” the “indefinable,” which gives to any art, to life, in fact, that “extra something”?

  I think so.

  And so the boat sailed on, its hold full of treacle.

  And the sun, rising, as per usual, in the East, glinted on the (clear?) glass of the bottle, and the note* was found.2

  The Dunes

  From “The American Traveler Series”, pamphlet #4:

  Motorcade – A “Picnic-on-the-Go”

  We have been told “Abraham Lincoln” wrote the Gettysburg Address on the back of an elephant.*

  Why have we been so informed?

  Cui bono, as the Latins said.

  Implicit, also, in the phrase, is the postulate, “‘Abraham Lincoln’ wrote the Gettysburg Address.”

  We do not know who wrote it.

  “Who would profit?” we must ask, from acceptance of the asseveration?

  All the principals are dead, and there is nobody here but you and me.

  More accurately, of course, there was nobody there but him. What is this schizoid bifurcation of the self into “Thee and Me,” speaker-and-listener (lion and tiger [disputed])?

  Is it the piprucuct† of that cruet‡ though accidental incarceration, or was that boo boo just the happy hook upon which propensity for chat was hung?

  What can it mean, this “you and me”? There was nobody there but him, and, it must have seemed to any but the most deluded mind,§ no possibility of any eventual discovery. For the Craft, the Capsule (was it not), having missed “rendezvous,” was inexorably bound beyond the Moons of Jupiter, bound into that which prior time, in charming ignorance, denominated “illimitless space.”1

  But, “How Mighty is Allah to Save!” – so wrote the ancient desert folk.

  And where is it found truer than in this extraordinary case? Nowhere.

  The Toll Hound

  [Here follows an interpolation of The Meeting on the Strand. Rabbi Zadok Ben Ezra (Zabazz) writes2 that the placement is mere accident, and that “accidents happen” – a phrase which has entered the language.]

  The Meeting on the Strand

  “Woof. Woof. Woof.” Pause.

  “Come along, Buddy,” said the boy. “Ain’t nothing but a squir’1, or chipmunk. ’N they’re more scarit of you then you are of them.”

  But the boy looked around, and realized there was no chipmunk, for the beach was wide, and they had wandered to the verge.

  The tide, receding, had left a good two hundred yards of smooth, hard-packed sand between them and the dunes. The moonlight showed that there was nothing between the two save him and his dog. He looked around and saw that, now, in fact, there was nothing but him. He saw the pawprints receding, back over the beach, and heard the last frightened vocalizations of the dog’s flight, and then he was alone, stopped by some force, some unassailable energy of anticipation – some deep-seated sense of …

  Then the moonlight showed red; the moonlight seemed, he would therever after remember it, as the source (imagined? physiologic?) of the carminization.*

  Was it his mind’s blood, obscuring his vision? Or, or could it have been Mars?

  Yes, he thought. Mars – coloring the very moonlight, asserting its sway, stating the theme, if you will, of all that was to follow.

  Yes, the moonlight turned red, in that instant, and, at once, he saw, in his periphery, that which, now save the waves, was the only motion in the still, still night.

  Upon the cliff, the Toll Hound. Dancing, leaping in the moonlight.

  To lure what? he thought. To attract what? For, certainly, the dog focused its efforts, as it was bred to do, upon the sea.

  As it was bred to do, yes, but there were no birds upon the sea, no birds there to lure. And never had the dog danced at night.

  Why, then, did it dance, and for what quarry? Jacob Cohen thought.

  His eyes turned seaward, less for information than for relief, as if it offered a blank vista upon consideration of which he could form his thoughts. And, so, he rested his eyes upon that which, he supposed, would offer the least distraction. What historic miscalculation. For, there, bobbing in the waves he saw, he was the first to see, the Capsule.

  Capsule Note

  Did it all “come together in the Capsule”?

  Did it all �
��come together on the Shelf”? May we allow ourselves the purely suppository hypothesis? The inversion, again, purely as a jest, or exercise, that the Shelf was not found in the Capsule, but vice versa – that the Capsule was discovered “on the Shelf.”1

  Bootsie and the Bootsie Clubs

  Bootsie and the Bootsie Clubs

  From Whippies

  The whippers-in had lost their respect for the Master.

  “How could one tell?

  One could tell from that, to the uninitiated, infinitesimal hesitation before their response to the horn. (To the Members of the Craft the gap was lengthy beyond measure.) How long ago that morning seemed.

  “D’ye ken John Peel?” they all had joyous sung, pledging their allegiance in that dawn “doch an dorris” of mulled wine – that frosty dawn, with all eyes turning to the Portal, whence would issue George Wilson Brentum MFH, the God of the Bennington Hunt. Renowned for his dramatic gestures, “Bootsie’s” invariable use was to appear at the close of the first verse, magnificent in his worn pinks, and cast his eye over the field, his myrmidons, from the right, then sweeping left over the huntsmen, whippers-in, boys, riders, grooms, well-wishers, over the whole of the County, come for the parade, for that panoply which was to each, in his way, England …

  And how they sang! Each with a voice which “had no bottom,” on their “view” of his beloved, craggy face.

  For who among them did not have his tale – of Bootsie’s humor, of his knowledge of the woods, of the fox, of weather, of that most prized and useful of understanding, Human Nature?

  [How Bootsie Lost His Voice”]1

  And here the voices slowed, stilled, and stopped.

  This one or that, involved with one last adjustment, one last needless tug on the stirrup or martingale, remarking the abrupt termination of the song, looked up, followed the eyes of the crowd to Bootsie, standing in the Portal; and, seeking the cause of what could only be understood as the crowd’s shock, found, at his feet, not the accustomed beagle, “Sally”, not a beagle at all – but a Toll Hound.

  The silence of the crowd was deep and wide and endless – not to be measured in time, but out of Time, as it were – as, for them, Time had stopped, and would not be set right again until they had received an explanation.

  And thus they stood. Until Bootsie, drawing himself up, let fall his hand upon the dog’s collar and spoke. “I don’t care,” he said. “I love him.”

  How Bootsie Lost His Voice

  “No, I am vile. And I am sick. I am a fornicator,” he thought. He stared at his bleary eyes in the cheval-glass, and he shook his head. Overcome by weakness brought on by this acute self-assessment, this self-loathing, he sank down on to the padded bench. His head hung down. His breathing became shallow, and his thoughts (if they could be called “thoughts,” for they were feelings, rather, an emission of that deepest part of the soul – of that pre-verbal knowledge which is the wisdom of the proto-being, of Adam before the Fall – which is, perhaps, knowledge of God.

  The knock came at the door and he hopped toward it, his tail fluffy and erect, his ears twitching.

  For he knew that this was Flora, with his plate of sprouts and leaves.

  The door swung open.

  “Oh, Bootsie,” she said. “Oh, my best wee darling. Is it hungry? Is it only the most famished little thing? Look what I’ve brought you!”

  She set the plate down upon the floor. And, as she did so, he spied on it his favorite treat: carrot tops! She had remembered!

  The Club

  For nothing can grow, save it

  grows in something.

  KRAUTZ

  I write of the Club, for it has been insufficiently written of. What were the Crusades, but the1 Field Days of a Club?

  What the great days of the Universities, their appurtenances, the cracked leather armchair and the meerschaum pipe supplanting the halberd, mace and sword of the preceding example?

  And the Masons of old, who designed the Pyramids, the cathedrals, and so on – that confraternity, known to “meet Wednesday” at that local eatery, and whose endorsement of the same betrayed generations of wayfarers into a gastronomic Bad Half-Hour – what were they but a Club?

  It is, I believe, not only a natural but an inevitable expression of the human need for companionship.

  No hermit forms a club. No. For, even could they overcome that antipathy which would seem to be the sine qua non of their profession, what would they discuss?

  No. For we see the essence of the Club is that most pleasant fiction: that its members have something in common.

  A strict analysis would, I am afraid, in most cases reveal that this common treasure (for treasure we must count it if it Grease the Ways of Fellowship) is, in most or many cases but a subscription to that pleasant fiction.

  But what’s wrong with that?

  Yes. It is a “device” – like marriage, education, like, for that matter, a toaster.

  Do they not all stem from the great consciousness, “the All,”* and to That Great End the identity of which eludes us?

  The Club, I say, that socio-anthropologic “campfire” – that meeting place, that better-than-home – for rather than the paradigm “a barn-yard in the rain,” or, better, of that sack containing monkey, chicken, snake and goat into which the convicted felon was sewn, which was than tossed into the Tiber – rather than the template or example, I say, of these, which we can recognize as the Type of the Nuclear Family, the Club typifies the “Waterhole,” where, we are told, the feuding beasts set quotidian, usual, nay, inherited antipathies aside, and drank.

  All* are different, and all are alike. They share (as above) a subscription to the ethos of the small, self-constituted tribe, and they share an objective: to make the members “feel good.”

  This goal, disguised, as in the more Puritan, confused or academic times it must be, is none the less found universally, and, should study not discover it, the object under observation cannot be a club.2

  The Bootsie Club existed to impart to its members a feeling of connection to the past, in studying the arcana, in trading artefacts, and in the search for relics, its members engaged in that benign and fond ancestor worship which, in its non-aligned, spontaneously occurring, individual expression, was known as “antiquing.”

  Let us examine the word. It is the present participle, or “gerund.”3

  The nominal form is “antique?” meaning “an object of antiquity.”4 Thus, the noun–verb form (qua verb)5 must mean “to look for antiques.” Considered as a straight-up present participle, however, its true meaning is revealed, for here we see emerge the sense “to make (or ‘to cause to appear’) antique”; i.e. to form into a simulacrum of the antique, to add provenance (or its appearance) to.

  We must, I feel, concede that this is the objective of many a member of a club.

  It certainly was the goal of Jacob Cohen, that spring day on Mars.

  The Bootsie Clubs offered to the youth of that day a sense that they were engaging in what used to be called “history,” and that, in so doing, they were fulfilling the wishes of their ancestors. This was the great attraction of the clubs.

  And it is this sense, this sense of calm, of purpose, of “connectedness,” which pervades Cohen’s writings. His ostensible subjects – The Old Wrangler, Pre-Martian Dendrochronology, The Fantasist, The Mall, etc. – are, of course, of worth and weight and importance to dispute which would, rightly, brand one as a blatant and jejune fool. And those looking for an endorsement of that unfortunate position will have to look elsewhere.

  But, I say, or, perhaps better, “and,” those writings have a secondary, or, perhaps, additional, or, better, alternative excellence: they each can be understood as a treatise on Club Life.

  Here, for example, is Cohen, in his Commencement Address to the Martian Dragons (the “doch an dorris”):

  … that farewell, that setting-off ceremony, which, as we “turn the tapestry,” we see speaks not of Adventure, but of its opposite
. Not of peregrinations, but of Domesticity?”

  Here, I believe, the point is made.6

  Gentlemen

  Generally identified as the “Married Gentlemen” of Section One (see page 111).

  Now, it is said the code of the Gentleman is never to tell a lie. The code, of course, did not extend to his dealings with the shopgirl he seduced, the tradesman he defrauded, the workers in his family’s enterprise he worked to death – but, to the members of his immediate class and caste, his small “tribe,” in effect, the fiction held he told the truth. He was free to represent to himself that he told the truth to all people as those to whom he lied, those outside his caste, were not, by his definition, “people.”

  Memoirs1 of a Man Who Ate Somebody2

  Bootsiana

  Source: Dornford Yates, The Muff Diver

  Is there life after birth1 [sic]

  Or is it just, not to

  put too fine a point on it,

  “a lot of nothing”?

  The First Mention of “The Capsule”1

  Weebut

  “Could Weebut Recall That Sweet Moment Sublime”

  See supra.

  But who was “Weebut,” when all was said and done; and, as importantly,* was all said and done? (For, must not a man make an end?)†

  Yes, we have “‘Robin Hood’ of the Old West,” and, on the other hand, Don ——, “who dared attack my Chesterton.”

  Whom do you like in a fair fight?

  In the words of Lady Astor, “Always bet on the one with the biggest butt.”

  In which case, there you are.

  A recurrence to the steatopygian, or is it just one of those cases where one hears a word for the first time in the morning, and, before bedtime, has heard it several times more? (Well, this is a fine way to “wish away” history, and, in fine, all knowledge – but why would one wish to?)1