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Here is a Sup—I mean 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.
I continued on that brilliant bastion of all that's good and kultured, WCLV's syndicated Weekend Radio on many (mainly NPRish) stations traditionally on the first and third weekends of the month, though weekendage varied, till the horror crept ever onward and that too was devoured (in August 2023, a date which will live in infamy or at lease mild irritation)... and only I remain, defiant though wimpering.
Richard Howland-Bolton
There are pop-up pics and links all over the place here. In text they are indicated by a double underline like this:
mouse-overing brings the pop-up up and clicking (usually) goes to the link |
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I'm sure that you, my listener, are certain to be numbered, along with that unknown tribe in the deepest Amazon and those guys doing that complete isolation experiment hidden away wherever it is, numbered among those who have not been bombarded for the last six months with special offers to pre-order the latest Hairy Pooter book at an amazing discount, and who then didn't, as a direct consequence of this, rush out at midnight (whichever day pre-ordering became, in the natural order of things, ordering) to get one, thus adding to the greatest event in publishing history and helping to countersink one of the more ultimate-ish nails in the coffin of literacy.
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As unluckier listeners will remember (because I told you last week) I've just been to England again, and whilst I was there me Mum told one of her many amusing wartime stories (and as an aside you should note that all of her wartime stories are without exception amusing, and I haven't yet been able to figure out if this is because, after all this time, it's a case of distance lending amusement, or if she really did have a very funny war) anyway this story involved, at one point, a reference to the forties fashion of wearing stockings with seams down the back and the perceived necessity of drawing artificial seams on bare legs when the exigencies of wartime deprivation rendered the acquisition of actual seams (and of course the stockings that supported them) impossible.
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"Ay"---as Will Shakespeare (or, if you're that way inclined, Francis Bacon) has young Juliet say, under totally different circumstances, so I don't know why on earth I'm bringing it up here and now---"me!". Though come to think of it I suppose the words "Ay me!", bereft of their Shakespearian (or, if you must be that way inclined, Baconian) context do rather fit this last week's dominant humour: and that's humour in the Early Modern, for example, Jonsonian sense (as in Every Man Out of His); rather than, say a more humorous not to say downright funny one, and anyway ultimately I suppose that my situation isn't much less tragic than Juliet's in the end and it did begin with less high hopes.
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I just got a memo this morning that claims to be "From the desk of… well never you mind, you know how I always try to avoid embarrassing people in these essays"---and fighting down, with amazingly mature restraint, my immediate reaction to reply "Dear desk, would you please tell your damned owner to send his own bloody memos, and while I’m at it, I rather resent being addressed in such familiar terms by inanimate objects, especially when they are collections of cheap tin, particle board and imitation formica held together with too few screws!"… when I suddenly thought: Why?
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Since I now seem write most of my essays in our local café; I have become, in a deeply existential way, Plano's answer to Jean-Paul Satre; but without the pipe and unfortunately, I note, without all the groupies either. (Because Simon could never be confused with Simone even in a really bad light.) And (I suspect less because of my location than my groupielessness) all of a sudden food tends to loom large in my philosophy and I suspect that the eaten food looms larger than the uneaten, especially that food eaten over the last few decades by most of the other patrons of the café. |
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As I've observed here from time to time, absolutely no one is any good at all at observing things. And they are especially bad when they enshrine their observations into a saying or aphorism or gnome (or even, for that matter, in an essay) you can bet that large sums of money can safely be wagered that the words 'diametric' and 'opposite' are much less included in that saying or aphorism or gnome or even in that essay than they should be.
Take the observation "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" espoused by Mothers, or at the very least by Grandmothers, everywhere.
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Even for me it is sometimes difficult to go that extra mile, or rather and to be more accurate, to go that extra four and three-quarter miles---and I hope it's obvious that I mean the four and three-quarter miles that I run before four o'clock every morning. (Well most mornings.)
Consider a morning last week, when I was girding up my metaphorical loins to make that final, or rather and to be more accurate, initial effort to leap out of bed and gird up my actual loins for a run, even though there was a fairly wild and (this being Texas) presumably wooly not to mention thoroughly wet and advisory-worthy storm sturming und dranging away for all it was worth outside, until a particularly loud and lightning-adjacent clap of thunder drew forth a terrified squeal11 from the next room, and by chance I suddenly remembered, at that very moment, the well-known health risks of too much exercise and so didn't leap, or gird, or run but merely turned over like the sluggard2, but without all the complaining and slumbered again.
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During the very first week that it came out I bought an iPod Shuffle---the more expensive and cooler one gigabite version of course---and for weeks afterwards people would gaze in wonder at the coolness of it, and even stop me in the street to ask me about it (they did! they did! and more than once!!) in fact I had hit the peak of cool! But, Oh Dear! from here on in this essay my coolness quotient is going to be seen to suffer a steep decline, because...
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I have long been accused of having a problem with obscure and irrelevant snippets of information---that I collect it (or more accurately them) almost incessantly and really obsessively; and then happily and needlessly regurgitate it (or more accurately them) in a horribly unstoppable way, just like a large, insistent and broody bird with an over-masticated bolus of worm-squashings and some poor, unwilling chicks.
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Friday saw my kids (in preparation for the weekend) all dressed up in their little threadbare monks' habits with their little peg legs and hooks poking out from various orifices and their eye patches all askew: munching on raw turnips and going down the street to school chanting "kyrie-eleison! Oh-arrr me hearties!" of course the other kids do tend to make fun of them, and occasionally throw things, but at least we're getting some momentum going here...
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