Bookkake

If you are unaware of the existence of the fine and upstanding Last Tuesday Society, then you are probably innocently yet regretfully unaware that they recently opened a shop in Cambridge Heath, London. It is a strange and magical place, and we urge you to visit it.

And we are pleased to add further to your knowledge by announcing that as of today, the Last Tuesday Society Shop stocks the full range of Bookkake titles for your delight and edification. So there: hie ye to Mare Street.

If you wanted to get your hands on the really dirty stuff in the 19th century, you had to get it under the counter. But, you could usually get it from the same people you got your finer works from: private publishers and printers.

19th century society, and the laws in force, meant that printers had to leave out many of the saucier images from collections that had been published in their entirety in a previous era. And so it is believed to be with a collection of plates by James Gillray recently unearthed in the vaults of the Ministry of Justice:

‘The folio was carefully wrapped up alongside a collection of seized material that had been handed to the old obscene publications unit over the years. That material is fairly tame by today’s standards, but when I uncovered the folio it was clear that it was something a little out of the ordinary. Even so, after some research, I was amazed to discover it had such historic value and am pleased to now see the prints kept safe in a suitable home.’

Gillray’s drawings - including his more famous caricatures of the political figures of the time - were republished in the 1840s, but like his contemporary Thomas Rowlandson - of whom we have written before - Gillray also produced a body of work of an even more controversial nature.

It’s believed that this slim volume of ‘Curiosa’ would have reproduced those engravings excised from the main 1840 editions of Gillray’s work, and privately sold to the more curious collector. Some way along the line, it fell into the hands of the Victorian Vice Squad, but it has now, to much rejoicing, been presented to the nation, and appropriately to the Victoria and Albert museum, where it is viewable in the museum’s prints room.

We’re very grateful to the V&A for supplying Bookkake with a few images from the collection - tame by today’s standards, yes, but not without charm. And we’d love to know what else a clear-out of the old obscene publications store might reveal… (Click for much larger versions).

Fashionable Contrasts; or the Duchess’s little shoe yielding to the magnitude of the Duke’s Foot, 1792

Ladies Dress, as it soon will be, 1796

ci-Devant Occupations; or Madame Talian and the Empress Josephine Dancing Naked before Barras in the Winter of 1797, 1805

All images by James Gillray, © V&A Images, reproduced with permission.

Update: This newspaper is now for sale.

I have been somewhat obsessed with the eccentric figure of Walking Stewart for a number of years, since first encountering him in some dusty library, at the unpopular end of De Quincey’s “Collected Works”.

A strange, liminal figure, Stewart seems to stalk the margins of the Nineteenth Century, his own, multitudinous, works forgotten, but his footsteps echoing through the recollections of his contemporaries. I’ve wanted to do something with him for ages.

When Newspaper Club offered me another chance to make a newspaper - following the summer’s Book Club Boutique paper - I decided to attempt that something.

One of the odd qualities attributed to Stewart was his ubiquity: a perceived ability to be in more than one place at a time. Following a lifetime of walking across the known world, his final years in London were spent in seemingly unending peregrinations across the city, and more than one commentator recorded encountering him in impossible positions: sat steadfast upon Westminster Bridge, and minutes later, as steadfast upon a bench in St James’ Park. De Quincey himself records passing him at Somerset House, and then overtaking him again on Tottenham Court Road - despite having taken the shortest route through Covent Garden.

Drawing upon OpenStreetMap, styled with Cloudmade to resemble antique atlases, I collected these routes and anecdotes, and present them here in newspaper form. But the newspaper is a foldable, pliable thing, just as Stewart himself seemed to fold the cityscape around himself. And so we have maps that can fold upon themselves to delineate not only the narrator’s journey, but that of Stewart himself. Folded correctly, the maps reveal how Stewart breaks the margins of the map to travel, invisibly, through space and time.

There is also an introductory essay - a meditation on ubiquity, immanence and time travel, drawing on Stewart’s life, Jewish mysticism, Deleuzian metaphysics and special relativity - together with selected quotes and sources.

The first edition of the newspaper is produced in a limited run of five copies. Following investigation and use, there may be a second edition at some future point in time - or space…

Update: This newspaper is now for sale.

Full image set at Flickr →

Beavers - the aquatic, tree-felling, dam-building rodent - are currently being reintroduced to Scotland, as related in a long article in this Sunday’s Observer, and not without controversy. The article’s author, Tim Adams, notes that the anti-Beaver parties might take their rallying cry from Robert Burns’ 1792 call to arms Cock up yer Beaver.

A beaver in this context refers of course to a hat, probably but not exclusively made from beaver pelt. Burns’ air is an exhortation to the brave Johnie to set such a hat straight and have a go at the English, but it more than raises a smile on a grey Monday morning, whichever way you take it.

Cock Up Yer Beaver

When first my brave Johnie lad came to this town,
He had a blue bonnet that wanted the crown,
But now he has gotten a hat and a feather -
Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up yer beaver!

Cock up your beaver, and cock it fu’ sprush!
We’ll over the border and gie them a brush:
There’s somebody there we’ll teach better behavior -
Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up yer beaver!

Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796)

If you’d like to hear the poem in the original Scots, the BBC has a recording read, appropriately, by Alan Cumming.

Beaver shot by Paul Stevenson, used under Creative Commons.

I was recently listening to Thomas d’Urfey’s The Comical History of Don Quixote and one song in particular caught my ear. d’Urfey’s rather imaginative adaptation of Cervantes’ novel - think of Michael Winterbottom’s Cock & Bull Story as it emerges from Tristram Shandy - was originally performed in 1694 and comprises dialogue interspersed with songs by Henry Purcell, whose instrumental pieces I know reasonably well, but whose songs are a different matter entirely.

“The Anti-French Song”, as it is referred to in the play, was very much a staple of the time, and, again as in the play, was usually paired with a pro-British one - in this case, it’s swiftly followed by the even more patriotic “Genius of England”. But what makes the song rather wonderful is that it manages to combine England’s natural xenophobia with an explicit rejection of racism, running straight from Little Englander rallying-cry (”leave the cheese and wine on the beach and bugger orf”) to a celebration of miscegenation.

So, here’s an MP3 which you can listen to with the following player, and I’ve had a go at transcribing the lyrics below - with a few gaps if anyone can help me fill them in, or correct me. Enjoy!

You can never trust a Frenchman

You can never trust a Frenchman,
Nor any of their henchmen,
Or Germans or Dutch
Or the Belgians and such,
They’re as bad as lawyers and benchmen.

The grubby Europeans,
Sing their own praise in paeans,
But the Channel is wide
Let them stay on their side,
Where they’ve been for countless aeons.

Their language sounds like twitter,
All lips and teeth and squitter,
Their cheese and their wine
May be all of very fine.
But you can’t beat English bitter.

And French sophistication,
Just gives you constipation,
When they murmur amour
We are all dead sure
They’re the world’s least sexy nation.

So let us raise our glasses,
As England’s glory passes,
To aristocrats
And to middle-class prats,
And the glorious working classes.

The Scotsman has his sporran,
Snug in his Glasgow warren,
And the Welshman’s a lad
And the Irish are mad,
But none of us is foreign.

So praise our bastard nation,
An incredible creation,
Of Latins and Celts
And Saxons that melts
Into pure miscegenation.

And Welcome other races,
With different shades of faces,
Come and join in the song,
Sing it with us so long
As the French stay in their places!

(Corrected: Thanks to Max for the updates!)

The original full text of the play, as printed in 1729 without the songs, is available on Google Books.

Brought to mind by a recent court case, and with thanks to Julian at Sybawrite, Bookkake’s Dirty Monday Poem returns for a special one-off.

“City boss denies lewd latin claim” goes the BBC headline, but it’s hard to deny your intentions when the latin in question was “irrumabo vos et pedicabo vos”. “The phrase threatens a violent sex act” says the BBC coyly, but any serious classicist knows it’s a lot more fun than that. It is of course the first (and last) line of the sixteenth of Catullus’ Carmina, the “angry love poems”, in which he furiously attacks those who disparage his work. It is also a long time favourite of the more easily amused scholar - among whom we happily count ourselves.

A literal translation is supplied below, and you’ll probably appreciate Wikipedia’s notes on the language too.

Catullus 16

I will bugger you and face-fuck you.
Cock-sucker Aurelius and catamite Furius,
You who think, because my verses
Are delicate, that I am a sissy.
For it’s right for the devoted poet to be chaste
Himself, but it’s not necessary for his verses to be so.
Verses which then have taste and charm,
If they are delicate and sexy,
And can incite an itch,
And I don’t mean in boys, but in those hairy old men
Who can’t get their flaccid dicks up.
You, because you have read of my thousand kisses,
You think I’m a sissy?
I will bugger you and face-fuck you.

It is that time of the year again, and the Literary Review has announced its nominees for the Bad Sex award, given out to those authors who foolishly include “unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels” (the latter part of which is actually rather a compliment, albeit a backhanded one).

This year’s list includes a couple of Bookkake’s favourite novels from the past 12 months, including Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (”I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.”) and Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro (”he slips his hands under her wasted buttocks and enters her like a fucking pile driver.”).

The Guardian has the full collection, with extracts. Meanwhile, Boldtype magazine has compile its own All-Time Top 10, with perennial favourite John Updike topping the bill. (You may remember him being commended for lifetime achievement at last year’s Bad Sex awards.)

It’s a story you’ll struggle to find on any mainstream news service, so thank goodness that technologists tend to be generally liberal and sane as well as technologically knowledgeable and proficient.

The Register has a long report on ‘JFL’, the first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime. And he’s a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record.

There are a number of complications, and while it’s possible to read the entire history of the case (which you should) as the hounding of one man by security forces bent on conviction, whose prosecution finally succeeded only on the basis of the accused trying to avoid such harassment, we’re aware that the police are unlikely to simply walk away from a man behaving shiftily while bearing traces of high explosive; to do nothing was never going to be an option.

It’s the methods used, and the inferences drawn, that concern us. JFL was allegedly told, pursuant to demands that he hand over the keys to encrypted computer files, that: “There could be child pornography, there could be bomb-making recipes… Unless you tell us we’re never gonna know… What is anybody gonna think?” The presumption of innocence was a long way off.

The fact is, there were bomb-making recipes, and not in the computer files: the judgement also took into account a number of books in JFL’s possession: “on gun manufacture, a book on methamphetamine production and an encryption textbook” - all, apparently, available from Amazon. (We don’t know what they are, but this, this and this would all fit the bill - covers below.)

The Uncle Fester books in particular (Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture, above centre) have a long and dodgy history. A pseudonym of Steve Preisler, whose other publications include Silent Death (describing routes for manufacturing nerve gases) and Bloody Brazilian Knife Fightin’ Techniques - Fester and his publisher, the much-missed Loompanics, faced many legal challenges over the years, frequently cited in court cases. In 2007, a Denver bookstore successfully fought a court order to turn over purchaser details for one of Loompanic’s Fester titles.

The other book quoted in the Register article is Abbie Hoffman’s seminal Steal This Book, which the judge in JFL’s case described as “a book that detailed how to make a pipe bomb”. It does indeed - as you can see from this online version (Steal This eBook?) - although it also includes advice on starting a pirate radio station, living in a commune, preparing a legal defense, and obtaining a free buffalo from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Hoffman’s work too has a long history of controversy - not least frequent wrangling with bookstores unhappy that their copies kept going missing.

In the Legal Advice section of Steal This Book, Hoffman gives the following advice to those who find themselves in custody:

Any discussion about what to do while waiting for the lawyer has to be qualified by pointing out that from the moment of arrest through the court appearances, cops tend to disregard a defendant’s rights. Nonetheless, you should play it according to the book whenever possible as you might get your case bounced out on a technicality. When you get busted, rule number one is that you have the right to remain silent. We advise that you give only your name and address. There is a legal dispute about whether or not you are obligated under the law to do even that, but most lawyers feel you should.

It’s a shame to see that a book derided in JFL’s court has as much relevance today as it did in 1971. The defendant’s right to silence was the core liberty overridden by Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which came into force at the beginning of October 2007, nominally aimed - of course - at terrorism, but employed in this case despite the fact that all suspicion of terrorism was dropped long before trial and JFL was sentenced under RIPA Part III “as a general criminal rather than a threat to national security”. Furthermore, the judge diverted from normal court procedures because, he said, “I was satisfied you would not tell the Probation Service anything significant further that I saw no purpose in obtaining a pre-sentence report which is normally a prerequisite for someone of no previous convictions who has not previously received a prison sentence.” Such reports would have done much to explain JFL’s behaviour.

Hoffman would be unsurprised.

If you don’t follow Bookkake on Twitter, then you might have missed our pointing at an interview with Michael Butterworth over at Ballardian. It’s the first of a projected three-part series covering all aspects of legendary Manchester press, Savoy Books.

We’ve only written about Savoy before in the context of the Obscene Publications Act, Savoy having the dubious honour of suffering the last successful prosecution of literature for obscenity in these isles for Lord Horror - a book now so hard to get hold of, you might want to enter Ballardian’s microfiction competition, where an original file copy is first prize. If you’re not familiar with Savoy’s work, then that interview is a good place to start, as is Bookkake contributor Supervert’s introductory essay Horror Panegyric.

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From Ballardian wife-swappers to Updike’s nymphomaniacs, we’ve long known that the suburbs are hotbeds of sexual activity. Beyond the clipped lawns, net curtains, valances and ornamental water features lies a world of erotic clichés: bored housewives and hot handymen, car key parties and cross-dressing. So it comes as no surprise that a well-known Swedish furniture-maker has taken the opportunity to enter the specialist adult market, furnishing the adulterers of the green belt with the tools necessary for their pleasures.

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