Dreadfully Poor Publishing Co. front page

Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland,
looked out across the Cheviots —
bleak, barren country running on into Scotland.

He had done as the Prince-Bishop asked
and raised a small church at Cornhill-on-Tweed.

It was not a fine church.

Were dimension a necessary criterion for the ecclesiastic designation,
it might not have qualified as a church at all.

The Duke of Lancaster had suggested watering it;
Percy doubted anything would grow on ground so poor.

The Northern Marches were so inhospitable to crop and kine,
King Robert II often wondered aloud why his reivers even bothered.

Sir Tristan the Taintless: a knight adorned in silver —
no, make that a knight made of silver —
allied in argent, unalloyed in spirit,
undefiled in aspect, and undefeated in battle.

Coin-hungry tournament challengers were quick to calculate
the worth of a pure-metal champion such as Sir Tristan,
but rarely the cost of testing his mettle.

Even King Richard the Iron-Hearted — crowned in gold,
dressed in steel, and yet low on magnesium,
per his latest checkup with the alchemist —
would not bet a single copper from his coffers
against this fine, refined foe.

It is said by reliable cowards that, after the Battle of Sterling,
Tristan lingered beneath Abbey Craig,
looking into the waters of the River Forth,
reflecting upon his victories, as well as the sun,
and forcing other knights to lower their visors
before doing battle with Sir Tristan’s mirror-bright glare.

Eternal youth, infinite passion, wild joys and wilder pleasures
(a state of unalloyed desirousness) are worth pursuing —
partly because they are unconditional conditions available to you,
and partly because they do, once you get through them,
free up the afternoons considerably.

The literature on libertine youth is unanimous in its promises.
It seems a right proper way to shag one's way
through one's formative years.
The literature declines to mention
whether anyone has read the contract,
which is, in fairness, rather long.

The scholarship further declines to address —
and one has consulted the relevant volumes,
and the illustrations (especially the illustrations) —
the drollery that sets in, quite reliably, afterwards.

Many of these youthful indiscretions become cautionary tales,
small parables of error that one cannot correct,
but can be taught as instructive, unavoidable misadventures to avoid.

Among them, there is often a good story or two worth embellishing
for your tired old friends.

What is said of accounting departments — that Receivables is more diligent than Payables — has always seemed to me to require examination. Because of what, exactly?

Cash. And the flowing of it, naturally.

Believe me, I know a lot about not having a lot of cash, having spent it all on my friends and their ever-flowing pastimes.

In my early submission days I submitted with considerable frequency and no particular selectivity. The publications that paid in cash were numerous, being largely the kind that did not last long enough to develop a cheque-issuing protocol.

One handed in copy at the door. One received, shortly thereafter, a sum in notes.
I spent it the same afternoon — diligently, in the sense that I applied it promptly and without hesitation to whatever the afternoon required.

Care and concern always came after.

The same could not be said of cheques. Well, it could be said,
I suppose, but would it be truthful? What is truth? What is...

Anyway, a cheque arrived in an envelope.
The envelope required opening.
The cheque required endorsing — and transporting to a bank,
which required a journey,
which required a reason to make that particular journey
on that particular day rather than some other.

It's all very tiring.

The reason was, in my experience, slow to arrive.
I would sit. The cheque would sit. I developed a mild affection for the cheque,
as one does for familiar objects — for things that have been on one's desk long enough to seem like furniture. Like my elbows. More cheques would arrive and they would become friends.

But I would never name those cheques bearing my name.

Several editors, I am told, because they told me,
enquired after their payments.
I had not, in most of these cases, failed to receive payment.
I had merely failed to confirm it. But that cannot be confirmed.

There is a distinction. Or the perception of a distinction.
Sometimes it's so distinctly indistinct,
It's difficult to discern the difference.

I was a misfit growing up — an old codger in young skin.

I pestered and harried my instructors from Martley to Malvern,
including Prof. Harry, a hands-off composition master who,
likely as not, grew up listening to the bells of St Mary-le-Bow.

Harry assigned essays and expected us to think and write our own way through them.

I once asked the professor about Cicero’s De Senectute, and he replied,
“Well, it’s all in the dialogue, ain’t it?”

A symposium, a chance meeting, and a card — summer 2000

I had been in Stratford to deliver a paper at the Shakespeare Institute — one of those August symposia in which a dozen of us took turns elaborating on a problem each had agreed in advance was small enough to warrant elaboration.Mine was the bookkeeping of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: how many heads, exactly, the florin throws across the run of the play, and whether the count was what it not ought to be.Sir Tom himself had addressed the question, in a programme note I had read one golden afternoon in the Bodleian, under the title On the Probable Inadequacy of Probability, with Particular Reference to a Sequence of Heads that Persists Beyond the Patience of Most Witnesses.

The published play, Sir Tom Stoppard reminded the reader, tots up to ninety-two by the final curtain; the film, which he had directed in 1990 and was therefore at liberty to revise, takes the matter up to one hundred and sixty-eight.He gave no defence of the inflation beyond the observation that what is improbable on a stage is merely ridiculous on a screen, and that ridiculous scales, not unlike a pangolin.Sir Tom’s programme note also included an assertation from American actor Richard Dreyfuss, who had no hand — nor even thumb — in the coin-tossing process, and whose opinion on the matter was therefore considered unreliable. Let it further be known that not a single florin was tossed during the events of Hamlet, not even in Branagh’s full-text Hamlet of 1996.I had presented these discrepancies to the assembled crowd, suggested two additional readings and one more viewing, then caught a late train.

It was a chance meeting at Moreton-in-Marsh, on the down-platform, in the heat of August. Her name was Abigail. She had been to a matinée of Henry IV, Part Two at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre — Michael Attenborough’s production, with Desmond Barrit as Falstaff, the one in which Falstaff’s rejection lands like a dropped tray.We talked, all the way back through the Evenlode valley, about Falstaff. She held him a coward and a sponge, justly dispatched: Hal had at last become a king, and a king cannot drink with a thief. She had read her Johnson.I cited Bradley’s Oxford Lectures, in which the rejection is taken rather harder — the fat knight being the one character in the histories who knew the histories for nonsense, and the sending of him to the Fleet an admission that Bolingbroke’s son could not carry his own conscience in motley. The sheep paid us no attention whatsoever.

“Abby” complimented me on my riveting conversation, observing that my silver tongue was nearly as impressive as my argentian beard, though the truth would tell things differently about my conversation and my tongue.She suggested we exchange information, and perhaps go for tea back in London, to which I happily agreed.She handed me a card, kissed me on the cheek, and bid me parting is such sweet sorrow. I wrote down my addresses in Bloomsbury and Toronto, Canada.I read her card on the platform at Paddington. It contained her first name, her age, her shoe size, a list of her favourite English writers — Austen, the elder James, Spark, Pym — and, at the bottom, of the other side, three of her hobbies, and a proper sketch of her family’s cocker spaniel, Mr. Tilford, leaving no space for contact information, I suppose.

It is generally agreed by most scholiasts that, after the engagement with the sirens, there followed additional trials for the oar-worn Odysseyians, numerous afflictions of the ear — the extraction of beeswax having been, in those years, a labour worthy of Heracles himself, even with recourse to the most modern of medical practices, namely fingers, sticks, and seawater.The otological case of one Tinnitus of Cephallenia, an oarsman of the highest order from the lower bench, is preserved by Hellanicus:

the sufferer is reported to have complained that the sirens’ echoes rang in him still, after the most vigorous shaking of the head, on multiple occasions.

Tinnitus was eventually sent home on a raft.

No sooner had the song-spinning Sirens fallen silent than upon the wine-dark did later come a god-sent mist, a god-swirled whirlpool, and a god-knows-what — a multi-headed Scyllaean serpent of inconsiderate disposition, perhaps a teratological plaything of Amphitrite, the moist queen herself.Such was the much-suffering Ithacan king’s Trolley Problem: his swift black ship the trolley, his — “But trolleys didn’t exist,” I hear you screech, like a whiny siren bitch who hasn’t tasted sailor since the fall of Troy.How can one honestly test the deontological ethics of death-doomed mortals when Circe is trotting about the ancient world pulling on divine, dilemma-spoiling trolley levers? When the gods transform toil-worn human problems into prudence, they are turning trailers into spoilers, which is still, more or less, a lesser evil.