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Here is a repository of the texts of my together with some readings of them. The essays were broadcast by WXXI 91.5 Classical of Rochester, NY on Salmagundy each Saturday at 9:35am Eastern Time, from the beginning of time (1985) till May 2009 when Entropa (evil Goddess of Change-for-the-Worse-or-Possibly-the-Worst) troubled the minds of the WXXIites and they retired Simon and Salmagundy, and Rochester went into a terminal decline---for ever.
But I do continue on that brilliant bastion of all that's good and kultured, on WCLV's syndicated Weekend Radio on many (mainly NPRish) stations traditionally on the first and third weekends of the month, though your weekendage may vary, (these are archived for a couple of months). Richard Howland-Bolton |
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 The other day Georgia: you know Georgia, girlfriend Georgia, or rather (for reasons that will perhaps become apparent in a moment) what we should call Georgia-on-my-mind Georgia. Yes that Georgia! Anyway, Georgia recycled a little sticky labeley bit from a sort-of-customisable-ish popup greeting card thing, after we sent the rest of it off to a relative of mine who apparently broke her arm at the seaside while wrestling with rocks, or dolphins or, for all I know, with the vast and ungovernable Sea itself and so was feeling poorly. Georgia recycled it by sticking it on the mirror in my bathroom (the sticky bit of the card, not the vast and ungovernable Sea itself).
The label says ‘Thinking of you”.
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| Up until a few year ago I regularly played at the football---and of course I don’t mean that rather weird perversion of Rugger they play here, with all the padding and the guys measuring everything in sight, and the all-change calls every few minutes where they seem to have entirely new teams coming out on to the field as though they were playing two games in parallel. No I don’t mean that, I mean the beautiful game, the game that almost everyone else in the entire world watches, and presumably loves. |
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 On the 16th of May in the Year of Our Lord 2009 (a day that will live in infamy) Simon, his scintillating Sunshine Show and Salmagundy, the Show for Working People were brutally hurled onto the trash heap of history. We, his hangers-on and toadies, of course immediately joined him there. To celebrate this so-called Morning of the Long Knives, we his hangers-on and toadies, were 'encouraged', by means the like of which has not been seen since Dick Chainey1 had to give up waterboarding2, to contribute memori... I mean testimonials to him, sort of like at the end of Beowulf.
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I've been back home in England for a few weeks: of course at work they tease me by always claiming that I do it merely to work on preserving my accent, which seems a strange thing to say (especially in jest), since I don't even have an accent (speaking as I do the perfect accentless received pronunciation of English) but be that as it may or may not, I have yet again been there (and anyway even if they were right, there's no one now left in England who can even approximate to proper English---now-a-days they all mumble some sort of vile lumpenproletarian Estuarine ugliness that's totally unqueenly and even worse than Teyuxian into their mobile phones whilst driving, in spite of the Law, and usually (as far as I can tell from loads of coverage in the news) into other people .
Yup I'm the only one who can still speak it and I'm usually over here not there---so there!
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Our story opens to the sounds of macho Nihongo stuff:
[sucking sound]; Katana; Wakizashi; Bokken etc. [a deep hoarse O-o-o-o]
"Sumimasen, Kojiro san: kaisuiyoku ni ikimasen ka?1" as Miyamoto Musashi once said to Sasaki Kojiro on Ganryûjima . Oh sorry, sorry I'm sure you don't have the faintest idea what that's all about, and that's simply because you probably don’t realise this is the famous, or at least infamous Talk Like a Samurai Day---I mean I suppose you wouldn’t really since I’ve only just invented it.
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Having heard her alibi; that, at the exact moment that her boss was beaten to death with a halibut, she was home in bed with a bad cold, the detective couldn't help thinking the whole tale was a tissue of lies and that there was something fishy going on. Then of course the case broke and then she learned that the Scales of Justice were nothing to be sneezed at, when investigation of her boss’s main rival, the Dutchman Hans Boomp-Zeedazi, revealed that her name was not Anne Bloater, nor was she pregnant (merely a bit bloated), and that behind a string of ingenious aliases---Anne Drogenous; Anne Aconda; Anne Onymous to mention but a few--- that he was her uncle, so she was really Hans niece, Anne Boomp-Zeedazi!
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Typical bloody Texas weather in February---it's been up in the 80s and really, really spring-like, and you know what they say (or at least what Tennyson said, or rather wrote ) don't you "In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of..." well you probably know what those thoughts are too, "In the Spring a young man's fancy..." and I might as well admit that my fancy turns there as well: in my case to thoughts of Georgia.
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People at work try desperately, and ultimately hopelessly, to humanize their workspaces; to add some vague, tiny, pathetic, whimpering hint of personality to their drab lifeless cubicles.
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The other week I ... I can hardly bring myself to tell you about it ... but ...but ...the other week I--I, I suffered an armed home invasion.
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I wish the Modern Age would make up it's bloody mind and stop giving me these damned mixed signals: on the one hand it scatters families and friends (like mine) to the four corners, so we can't talk or even meet (my kids are either physically, or in extreme cases mentally, still teenagers so, no, I didn't get that the wrong way round, I do know it's perfectly possible to meet certain people without talking) so as on the one hand it takes from us with scattering, on the other hand it gives us all this technology to communicate incessantly. I mean that's a Hell of a rude and insensitive way for any time-period to act, let alone a time-period as hip and trendy as the Modern Age.
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