Anyone reading these stories in canonical order should by now have a good idea of how they tend to play out. An aged antiquary finds or hears of the existence of a peculiar ancient artefact and in the course of further investigation, prompted either by avarice or simple scholarly curiousity, unwittingly awakens some eldritch horror who torments him, often to the death, either as punishment for his greed or out of mere supernatural malice.

On first approach The Tractate Middoth seems like it’s going to follow this pattern nicely. The title obviously refers to the artefact which will cause all the trouble, and it’s nicely esoteric and sinister sounding. And on the very first line our antiquary is introduced, a Mr John Eldred, elderly and male of course and sporting a fine set of piccadilly weepers (a wonderful term whose meaning is surely apparent even if you’ve never come across it before) and indeed seeking after the titular Tractate. But he is unable to procure it for someone else has got there first, someone perhaps of sinister aspect. Has Mr Eldred already unwittingly set malevolent forces in motion? Is there a ghoul in waiting for him?  However, our expectations are quickly upset. The person who has a nasty encounter with whatever supernatural bogeyman the Tracate has perhaps empowered is not Eldred but an innocent library assistant. Eldred is forced to leave the library empty-handed, and to confirm the deviation from normal form he also leaves the story for a while, and the action turns to the assistant, William Garrett.

After his nasty fright – of which more in a moment – Garrett has to take a little sabbatical in which he stumbles, with a coincidence (or is it?) that may cause us to raise an eyebrow, upon the real mystery of this tale. The mother and daughter he fortuitously crosses paths with, a Mrs and Miss Simpson, are trying to find a will left by the mother’s evil uncle, Dr John Rant, that leaves his considerable estate to her. In the absence of the document the estate has passed over to her cousin, by her account a rather mean fellow. It seems the will has been hidden in a book – and here I offer no prizes for guessing Mr John Eldred’s relation to Mrs Simpson, or why he is trying to get his hands on the Tractate. It’s the little setup with Garrett and the Simpsons which is most intriguing though, and where the true form of this story becomes apparent. It resembles less your average Jamesian tale of eldritch horrors and more an Agatha Christie mystery, with its wronged third parties and a cosy fireside chat where they put their problems to the sleuth who will set everything to rights. And crucially, as with many a good detective story there is a Macguffin. Not the will, since the specific nature of that document is rather critical to the construction of this tale, but the Tractate Middoth itself. This mysterious and eerie sounding text is utterly irrelevant to the plot, Dr Rant could have hidden the will inside a copy of The Boy’s Big Book of Hebrew Stories and things would have played out exactly the same. And in fact that’s more or less what he did – the Tractate Middoth might sound sinister but it is no Necronomicon. Middoth or middot means measurements in Hebrew, and it’s just a tract of the Talmud that deals with the measurements and customs of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. A drier, less occult text could scarcely be conceived. Have a read, it starts off pretty racy with the temple officer beating and burning the clothes of any guard asleep at their post, but it soon settles down into dedicated cubit-counting action.

As to the detective story, of course it leaves a lot to be desired, but James wasn’t really trying to become the new Conan Doyle. The mystery is set and solved within a couple of pages, and all that remains for Mr Garrett is a rather frantic race against time, for an outcome he is not even sure of – he has to get the book off Mr Eldred, but how? Fortunately despite its detective trappings this is still a ghost story, and the ghost does his work for him.

So, what of this ghost? For me the key feature of James’ stories, more than the academic attention to detail, the fondly drawn characters or the authentic settings, lies in the brief but precise moments of terror. There are rarely more than one or two per story, and they are often described in merely a line or two, but they are usually exquisitely chilling or even horrific. The shocks in this tale are not quite top five material, but effective nonetheless. The first is the appearance of the figure that causes Mr Garrett to have his little turn. He doesn’t take in the lower part of the face but the upper is “perfectly dry”, and the deep-sunk eyes are covered with cobwebs. Those cobwebby eyes are the main image you come away with and it’s wonderfully ghastly but I wonder if the first part of the description is on reflection even creepier. Why describe a face as dry? I start to think what once-human creature, dead for over twenty years, might have a face completely devoid of perspiration or errr grease, or indeed any means of producing it. And why take care to point out that he didn’t see the lower part of the face? Well it would be quite difficult to see something that wasn’t there in the first place…

The second, deadly, visitation is described in an even more circumspect fashion than the first. “Two arms enclosing a mass of blackness” envelop and smother mean Mr Eldred. Perhaps this isn’t an image to make us shiver before turning out the bedside light, not as much as the first at least, but that mass of blackness bespeaks ineffable hadean horrors. And it means that despite our subverted expectations, the aged antiquary does get his comeuppance at the end. But why, exactly? Comeuppance for what? The usual ambiguities and vagaries of intention are at play here. Dr Rant was a bad man, and Mrs Simpson said she thought he preferred her cousin, a similar meanie, although Rant told her himself he wasn’t very fond of him. And he told her he wanted her and Mr Eldred to start on equal terms in this little puzzle, yet with his knowledge of and dealings in books surely Eldred had the upper hand. Perhaps Rant feels he made things too easy for Eldred, and came back to even things out. And Eldred seemed to know who was after him, although he was less discomfited with this knowledge than the protagonists in other stories. What had or hadn’t he seen? Who were the witnesses to the will and what (if anything) happened to them? Questions abound, as always, but they merely add to the mystery. (However I was pleased when, after thinking it slightly suspicious that a train leaving around two and taking two hours might arrive as evening was drawing in, I turned back to the beginning and found the story starts “Towards the end of an autumn afternoon…”. Trivial, but it shows that you can’t blame loose ends on any woolly thinking of James.)

Finally there is a little surprise at the end, a secret kernel to the tale we don’t discover till the very last line – well, assuming you didn’t see it coming beforehand, the clues are there. Wrapped in the detective story inside a ghost story is, it turns out, a romance! A most unusual subject for James, but tackled in his usual fashion by leaving more – far more – to the imagination than is spelled out in the text.

Well good riddance then- corporate bookselling and corporate record chains that squeezed out the independents being killed off by even bigger corporate things. Awesome, now we can all ponce around pretending to buy things in idiot vanity projects like Lutyen and Rubenstein’s shop or whatever’s left of the independent record stores, whilst actually shuffling them all off Amazon. Brilliant, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing everyone can look forward to.

I can’t even avoid being sarcastic in the above three sentences of course. You know what’s going to really suck? Not having any bookshops in most small towns. Not having any record shops most likely, either. “Oh but it is all online, look at my oogly Kindle thing” you say- well, maybe, maybe, in ten years time but realistically it’s only now that physical music product is going and that’s a lot less tactile in its consumption anyway. Not to mention Amazon and Apple’s iBooks are hardly bastions of ethics for either the offer they extend to writers whose work they sell or the care they take for the books or their content.

Besides (and this is the big point) you might say “oh yes but this will lead to a rise of independent book/record sellers, The Man has fallen” but guys, no it won’t. If a big chain with big corporate credit can’t afford to keep a store open in your town, how is someone going to do it alone? The existing ones may stay open but there isn’t going to suddenly be a big surge towards them, anymore than there was when Borders closed. Even more fundamentally, if Waterstones/HMV group goes under then publishers will have to stop printing a great number of books; whether that number will be big enough that they have to stop entirely is a scary question and one I don’t want to see the grand experimental answer to. Kindle is coming but not that fast.

I’ll admit I’m massively biased here; I’m a former bookseller and of the two big corporate bodies I worked for, Waterstones was easily my favourite.* The one I worked in sits on the corner of Cornmarket and Broad Street in Oxford and is, to me, the platonic bookshop form. I spent hours poring over the contents of the basement children’s section as a tiny (when it had been a Dillon’s) and then later similar lengths of time haunting the sci-fi shelves as a young adult. When I got to work there it was the best and most awesome thing that had ever happened to my tiny book-obsessed mind and I think back on the time with a rosy-tinted belovedness that actually wasn’t probably the case as I mentally gnawed away at my Christmas temp’s minimum wage and fumbled copies of Robert Peston’s Big Book Of You’re Screwed.

If I was to feel conspiracy theorist about it (and since I’m clearly already in an occult mood why not) then I might say that damn right RBS and Lloyds Banking Group ought to give HMV/Waterstones a break. I realise this argument has been made with a million things since 2008 but when the banks failed due to ridiculous behaviour, we rescued them.

Waterstones and Borders did spend far too long trying to kill each other. After years of invader/encumbent joshing, half-pricing and 3-for-2-ing so much as to make it a staple they began, like all cold rivals, to look like each other. The number of times I was handed a Borders loyalty stamp card and had to politely inform the customer that they were in the wrong shop was proof if the increasingly similar merchandising, shop layout and even staff uniform weren’t blatant enough. Waterstones was acquiring small numbers of DVDs, selling Nintendo DSs and some classical music, while HMV at one point ran more profit on books than its literary sister and Borders started to be… well, less American. Shorter shelving, more popular history and science titles, fewer import magazines and even making an effort to push people off their trend-fixing settees after a few hours. Some publishers did well out of it- Tokyopop in particular found its manga translations in both chains up and down the country and sleb tie-in creators Ebury (publishers of things like Nigella Lawson’s cookbooks and most autobiographies circa Xmas) had far more front-of-house displays to fill by the square metre with their stock.

The basic transactional migration of staff between the chains (long-term Waterstones employees often told me of The Time Before Borders, an age of wonder and full staffing) showed up what was happening though. Neither budged but there’s never really been space or demand for a bookselling hyperpower.

No loyalty card had more interchanged stamps than poor Books Etc.; passed around with all the ceremony of its eponymous elipsis, eight stores bought by Borders in 2008 became eight stores bought by Waterstones as Borders UK faltered for the final time and began the inexorable decline of any empire. The stuttery little Tesco Express of bookselling, Books Etc. was never going to have a good time of it- its size was comparable to independents, its coding corporate but it lacked the familiarity of WH Smiths for even train-journey purchases; the two bigger chains picked it up like some sort of principle, though.

While an honourable move to preserve bookshops and jobs, acquiring more stores (especially London stores with high rent, relatively low reputation and former rivalry with Waterstones) was probably a stretch too far for the ailing HMV group. Hubristic though it is to try and make sure there’s a bookshop on every high street, next to the designer plastic tat shops and clothes shops flogging shirts made in appalling conditions overseas it feels like one worth at least a small amount of approval by even the most cynical onlooker, though.

Bookshops are important, you see. Not to get all wibbly at you but you can’t just be casual about something with that much STUFF in it. I find it worrying enough that there’s a possibility for books to actually be entirely destroyed (albeit I’d make the exception that in the case of Malcolm Gladwell he’s got it coming) but the idea that entire SHOPS of books can be destroyed, that that whole structure could be lost, is outright creepy. Call me superstitious but there seems to be something fundamentally wrong with pulling apart shelves and shutting down the order, dismantling these great cathedrals to knowledge. Accessible knowledge- maybe not free, like a library but you can walk in and you can look at things and admire both the pleasure of their structure and their sensuality** and the lush, myriad constructions of them, jewelled beetles with 3 for 2 stickers.

And yes, a lot of them are trash. Many of them are even by Jeremy Clarkson but would anyone really rather they weren’t there at all? Which is why of course I think you should go out this lunchbreak and support your local bookshop.

Sappy? Yes but not melodramatic. If Waterstones and HMV die it’ll have a knock-on effect on almost every high street up and down the country. No more excited teenage discoveries or idle wandering that ends up picking up seven books on cheese manufacture. Yes, there will still be bookshops but Blackwell’s small chain isn’t going to hold the quantity of stock the publishers need to turn over to keep going and there isn’t going to be one on every street. Hate The Man by all means but if your alternative is going to be Amazon or the iBooks store then that’s no victory for anyone.

*The other hot shelves I slaved over belonged (mostly) to Foyles, whose cockroach qualities will ensure they are still trading long after the nuclear winter has fallen. They were 100% less fun than Waterstones (who give booksellers control to do things like draw the displays, design promotions and make christmas trees out of old posters) rather than enforcing corporate standards. Yes I have written that the right way round.
**I’m willing to hedge a bet that a sizeable chunk of the population takes a book to bed or has at least a stack of them in their bedroom. Not that books are sexualised (apart from in specific and obvious cases, M. de Sade) but you can blearily prop yourself up on them on your morning commute, carry them around like an anxiety blanket all day and aside from a bedsharing significant other or particularly tenacious pet they’re often the last thing you touch at night.

Or at least here is a few pages of Wallace’s copy of The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe replete with inky marginalia. The notes at one point make referenc to someone called JC: WHO HE?

Stolen from io9, where you can also see some marginalia from a text of Carrie he taught from too. Carrie’s notes are obviously IN RED.

So the point is I can’t really objectively review a performance by a company who I’ve seen nearly twenty times when, in a way, they’re almost all a continuation of the same performance, it’s just sometimes they’re all sat down talking quietly and sometimes they’re all running about and shouting. I was talking to Tim Etchells, their director/writer/dramaturg/top lad afterwards and he said it’s like a very slow soap opera, and he’s right, the relationships between the performers evolve like those in a soap. It was fascinating watching Jerry being in charge and pushing the newbies about when it doesn’t seem so long since he was the debutante being abused. But still, Richard is the first to break from the initial structure, Cathy and Claire hold everything together and Terri is the chaos provider in the slightly shorter skirt, “what if heroin wasn’t addictive?”

This is, in my personal taxonomy of forced entertainment shows at least, a shouty show rather than a talky show, but it’s much better realised than the last couple of shouty shows, the music is much more sympathetic and less obvious (no 20th Century Boy here, just random Japanese lounge tracks). It’s knockabout, in a good way, not weighed down by Big Themes (although obviously it’s still all about death, as all Forced Ents shows are*). I wonder if the discipline of having to learn dances has made them really cut to the chase with the other bits, to be more focussed on what these characters are on stage for, which I thought World in Pictures (the last big shouty show from 2006) in particular was lacking. I was laughing throughout, although many of these jokes may have been only in my head.

What was fascinating was the number of walkouts. There’s always one or two who have seen a non-specific review or come along with their mates and expect A Play, which it isn’t, but there were probably twenty who were mainly, according to my sources, students from one particular performance course [cough]Sussex[cough] which I find mind-boggling. When we first saw forced ents in 92 (possibly 93) we spent the rest of our time at college shamelessly ripping them off because they opened so many new doors for us, so to walk out an hour in (the show was 100 minutes without interval) is, at its basest, to miss stuff you can nick. If there are more exciting and innovative companies out there I really want to know about them, is it just because the performers are mainly in their 40s now? That The Kids don’t get it? But really, who does theatre (-based performance, for want of a better phrase) better?

I keep on meaning to send Stewart Lee an email asking if he’s aware of them as large chunks of the philosophical parts of his (groundbreaking, awesome) book sound remarkably like Tim Etchells’ approach to performance, I wonder if this is part of the overarching “Mark E Smith is the centre of all that is interesting” theory as both Stew and Tim have confessed to early Fall performances having a big influence on their thinking…

The Thrill of it All continues at the Riverside, Hammersmith until 6 November, then Contact in Manchester, Rotterdam and Vienna!

Both photos by Hugo Glendinning.

*the 90s shows were about drinking, sex and death, but drinking and sex are less apparent now, particularly drinking

I like to browse charity shops in search of amazing books. As I’m a bookseller if not by trade anymore then by something possibly stronger than genetics or space-time, this is not necessarily just a case of being pleased to find an unproofed review copy of the new China Mieville six weeks before it’s meant to come out, since the YMCA clearly don’t check that sort of thing. No, it is not just good books that I am interested in. In fact, I think I’ve possibly passed some sort of event horizon where I no longer care about “good” books because all books are part of the whole sort of general bookish thing and so it’s beyond an investment in my own literary pleasure into an investment in this whole sort of general bookish thing. All books, especially the waifs and strays, are relevant to my interests. Especially, sometimes, the really, really bad ones.*

Which is how I found myself in the aforementioned YMCA shop, West Ealing, idly browsing the racks and happened across a spine that immediately set my ‘this is unlikely to have been nominated for the Booker prize’ senses tingling. ‘TYRANNOSAUR CANYON,’ t’was. I know, with the ambiguous quote at the top of this entry, you’re probably thinking that this book doesn’t sound very amazing at all. After all, if John Grisham wrote Jurassic Park there’d probably be a lot of courtroom drama regarding the massive number of personal injury claims possible if you’ve had your legs ripped off by a velociraptor and it wasn’t your fault and then some coffee-drinking. That, though, is because I’ve deprived you of the rest of the blurb, as in actual fact the book contains-

“A moon rock missing for thirty years…

A scientist with ambition enough to kill…”

BUT WAIT, THAT’S NOT ALL.

“A monk who will redeem the world…”

THE WHOLE WORLD.

“A dark agency with a deadly mission…”

YES. AND-

“The greatest scientific discovery of all time”

THAT’S RIGHT, THE ACTUAL GREATEST SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY OF ALL TIME.

I won’t spoiler anyone who for whatever reason hasn’t read this astonishingly brilliant work by the author who brought you ‘The Codex’ but I’ll just link you to this Wikipedia page and casually mention the phrase “Venus particles.”

*I actually find it difficult to think of a book as ‘bad,’ unless it has been written by James Patterson. Then it is bad. Most books are simply ‘esoteric.’

why YES, that’s right, I AM IN THIS YEAR’S SHOW! so if you would like to see it, the dates are:

5-14 August, GRV, 37 Guthrie Street, Edinburgh, MIDDAY
and
21 and 22 August, Camden Head, 100 Camden High Street, Camden, 8.45pm

Here are a couple of clips from our recent preview show in Lewisham:

The book contains 253 questions about all things Hanson. General band facts, who-said-what, questions about specific brothers and terminally dull co-writing credits – it’s got pretty much everything covered. In fact the compiler Matt Netter knows so much about Hanson that he’s already written another book, Zac Hanson: Totally Zac! And that’s not all – Matt’s friend Nancy has written Taylor Hanson: Totally Taylor! and Isaac Hanson: Totally Isaac! Anyway, back to business: each chapter has a little extra factlet underneath it, e.g.:

The combined ages of Isaac, Taylor and Zachary add up to about forty-four. That’s still younger than many of your teachers! It’s no wonder that, when it comes to Hanson, they just don’t get it.

Haha teachers are so mockable! A fine example of the charm and warmth emanating from each page. But the publishers have made a shocking error by giving some of the answers on the back page without any warning at all:

As well as straight-forward trivia like “What are Hanson’s parents’ names?” and “What date was the Christmas album released’, we have more open ended queries such as:

The “I Will Come To You” video is special for 2 reasons. What are they?

A quick squidge at said video makes me think the answers are likely to be that 1) Taylor has eaten his Reddy Brek 2) Isaac looks a lot like Chad Kroeger from Nickelback when he does his guitar solo, but apparently that’s not the right answer:

(1) Fans in the audience got to be in the video, and (2) it was part of a performance that was featured in Tulsa, Tokyo and the Middle Of Nowhere.

Oh dear. How about this one?

Which of the following bands did not join Hanson for the Y-100 Wing-ding benefit concert in south Florida:
a) Bush b) Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers c) 98° d) Duncan Sheik

Well it might be obvious to *you*, but it had me scratching my head! I guess I’d better get revising. I did a lot better in the final section, which is named “New and Upcoming” and features questions about stuff that HASN’T HAPPENED YET omg. Let’s see if you can answer the following questions correctly (I’ve written the answers in the white box below – highlight with your mouse to view – bear in mind this might not work in Netscape Navigator 3.0):

1) Will they make a movie about their lives?
2) Who is the movie’s producer?
3) Who has been signed on to write the screenplay?
4) Can we look forward to the sale of Hanson dolls?
5) Will any new Hanson merchandise be coming out soon?

I got all of the above right first time! How did you do?

After your brain has turned to mush the questions have finished there’s a chapter telling you how to calculate your score (“Fewer than 50 correct? You probably know a few of their songs, but they’re not your favourite group. Maybe the next album will get you hooked on Hanson!“), and then – this is the whole point of my typing this article in the first place – a full list of all websites about Hanson. ALL OF THEM. As well as the band and record label sites, there is a list of around 90 ‘unofficial websites’, most of which do not have the accompanying URLs shown.

I guess if we want to find Hanson and Metallica: Thinking Of You Nothing Else Matters on the world wide web, we’ll just have to bung it into AltaVista and take our chances. Luckily the book gives some comma-filled tips when searching:

Keep in mind, that if you use “Hanson” as a key word, you’ll call up some sites that have nothing to do with the band. One thing you’ll see pop up often is a Florida area real estate company. After all, the brothers are not the only ones with that last name! To avoid this problem, narrow your subject search to music only.

You may, at some point, check out the official sites and find that they have’t been updated in a while. This happens sometimes, because the creators of those sites work with Hanson and are therefore just as busy. On those occasions, surf over to Hanson HITZ for informative, up-to-the-minute Hanson news. If you’re a Mac user, however, one downside to this site is that the screen comes up with a blue background and can sometimes be difficult to read.

Hanson: The Ultimate Trivia Quiz Book also mentions the existence of 25 ‘anti-Hanson’ sites. As a newly-online teenager in 1999 I remember ‘anti’ sites well – made by equally fervid youngsters with Geocities accounts aplenty and too much time on their hands. Such bile! Such insecurity! I bet they loved Hanson *really* and were just jealous that The Hanson Power Page had an animated gif. Luckily there is an Official Anti Anti-Hanson page which cancels them all out! Thank heavens for that. I’ll leave you with some wise words from OAA-H creator Nick:

For the cool people out there, why don’t you visit these idiots’ sites, and send them email, cussing at them and telling them that they are really stupid!

The opening storyline was ludicrous, too. It starts with Yoshitsune telling his famous girlfriend that it is too dangerous for her to accompany him, as at this point he and his small band are on the run from a pursuing army. She refuses to leave him, so he ties her to a tree at the edge of the road down which the pursuing army are chasing him. Yes, that is how best to ensure her safety… The last sentence of the synopsis offered online proves this isn’t just an opening aberration: “A group of comical priests enter with the intention of capturing Yoshitsune, but the fox defeats them with his supernatural powers and joyfully flies off with the drum.”

The acting style is very strange, and covers a large range. It comes with all sorts of funny voices and bizarre poses: I was thinking at times that it almost looked like voguing. The fight scenes are even weirder – it makes the posturing in West Side Story look brutal and gritty. There’s almost no physical contact at all. I had no problem with the female roles being played by men: for the main one, I wouldn’t have been sure without the programme. Women are allowed in kabuki these days, but this classic, traditional troupe was all men.

This may all sound negative, and I don’t mean it to be: I like new experiences, and this was a fascinating melange of many such. I laughed at parts, with no idea whether this was an acceptable reaction, and I enjoyed a lot of the movement, but it took until the third and final big scene before I fell in love with the show.

Ebizo Ichikawa XI (young star of a line stretching back to the 17th Century) starred in three roles: a faithful warrior following Japan’s most loved tragic hero Yoshitsune (a real historical figure from the late 12th C); a mystical duplicate of same, who is on-stage the most; and the underlying magical fox who impersonated him. He switches between the three roles in the final scene, sometimes changing costumes and character at lightning speed, switching body language and manner and voice as swiftly as clothes. At one point the fake-warrior vanishes down a trapdoor, and after about a second charges out of a flap as the fox spirit. The most spectacular moment is when the fox leaps out of a flap about twelve feet above the stage, and turns the landing into a knee-slide to the front of the stage. His athleticism and dancing were absolutely extraordinary, and genuinely thrilling at the best moments.

It took me until this scene to decide that it was more useful to think of kabuki as a dance performance than a play. This isn’t to dismiss the worth of the play aspects, but the memes and styles of kabuki will take some getting used to; or that of the musical side, but it’s too alien for me to appreciate, so far. I loved a lot of the movement, posing and dancing, and it’s those things that would make me go again, though I imagine it will be a few years before another opportunity arises.

He joined the army in 1939 and his first St Trinian’s cartoon was published in 1941. The following year he was taken prisoner by the Japanese, and remained in their hands for the next three and a half years, much of it working on the so-called Death Railway in Burma. His great period was the 1950s, when the bulk of his St Trinian’s and Molesworth (this with Geoffrey Willans) material was published.

It’s easy to forget that most of his work has not been cartoon school humour: as well as countless other cartoons, he published his war drawings, and did a lot of other reportage and general illustration for Punch, Life, the New Yorker, plus some work in animation, sculpting commemorative coins, film design and credits, and many other areas.

In fact the only people who might be at all disappointed in the excellent exhibition would be those who are only interested in the St Trinian’s and Molesworth material, as there are only a few early samples of those on show. Personally, I am very familiar with all of that, so I was happy to see such a range of other material – 140 works covering the gamut of his career.

My first reaction was being struck by just how fantastic a draughtsman he is – I suspect the blown-up images at the entrance will impress others who are most used to little cartoons in paperbacks the same way: the compositional sense, the ability to draw anything well, the judgement in use of line and occasionally tone or colour are all masterful. Every line seems to have its impact, and an image of a crowded, gaudy LA is almost overwhelming.

This isn’t to imply that most of the works are serious – some are, some even grim, but so many benefit from his gift of making almost anything look funny. There’s a particularly good pig with what I think is a conjuror, and a wonderful dog buying a balloon. The exhibition as a whole is a delight to view.

There are bonuses too – a section devoted to satirical cartooning through the ages, with the usual suspects from Hogarth on, and a bunch of Searle tribute pieces by Scarfe, Steadman, Bell and a particularly charming piece by Posy Simmonds. Upstairs is the usual British comic art collection, featuring examples of the greatest comic book cartoonists the country has produced – Leo Baxendale, Ken Reid, Davy Law, Dudley watkins – and much else, including a couple of really beautiful painted pages by veteran John M. Burns.

Firstly, mostly to get them out of the way, two boring anecdotes.

Semi-irrelevant anecdote #1:
Once when I was working in Waterstones in Oxford, I sold lovely David Mitchell a book of M R James’ ghost stories. The end.

Semi-irrelevant anecdote #2:
I went to a supposedly haunted school. The school was in the Thames Valley, reasonably old although not much predating the 20th Century, at a guess (I’m sure I could find out but my interest is limited) and situated in some rolling countryside that I am sure I would have found impressive had I not been brought up as a yokel and thus seeing a massive field of oil seed rape as a massive field of oil seed rape, rather than a burning golden sea, etc. The school itself was in old farm buildings, the former barn and stables made a sort of three-quarters-enclosed courtyard, with an ancient, crippled weeping willow tree in the centre and this was where the junior school basked sunnily, the buildings whitewashed and their insides at least semi-efficiently converted to schooling purposes.

The senior school occupied the old farmhouse, which was at once more conveniently school-enabled and also completely ridiculous; the library was only accessible through the English classroom and the corridors were sharply-twisting, crowded things. Originally, the entire school had been in this building and the attic had been used as dormitories but had long since been abandoned, its accessibility being even more limited than the rest of the place, as a dumping ground for old play costumes and props. In certain conditions, light would shine through the attic windows and from the playground, you could make out a dress or a mannequin’s head and everyone would run round describing the fact they’d seen the ghost of the girl who’d killed herself out of the attic window. This girl had various different names, as far as I can recall but there actually had been someone who’d died (I think of TB) there and so there was a semi-taboo over the whole thing from the teachers, who considered it half-bad taste and half-hysteria, not incorrectly.

The attics themselves were fabulously creepy; I went up there possibly four or five times, usually to retrieve play costumes. There was no electric lighting up there, so we had to go in the afternoon when the light would be suitably angled as to illuminate the racks of mouldering furs and tea dresses and consequently, the rooms would be heated specifically according to the sunbeams, making some areas baking and stinking of dust and mothballs and others freezing and full of dank, a disorientating sensation to experience as you crossed a stooped, poorly-lit room and trailing rags brushed against your head and shoulders. This was fairly par for the course, however and since my own room in my parents’ house was similar it didn’t freak me out enough to overwhelm my curiosity about the costumes and the jewellery and the boxes of photographs up there.

What freaked me out utterly and completely and turned absolutely everyone into a screaming idiot, teachers included, was the rooms the other side of the hall. These were never lit up at the same time, due to the sun-angling lighting and so were in a sepia-darkness that made them seem timeslipped; old iron bed frames rested against the walls, never removed and they cast odd, long shadows, decaying leather straps that had once supported mattresses hung like torture-restraints and the paint was peeling off the ceiling in curlicues but there was no evidence of it hitting the floor, which was utterly black in a layer about an inch-and-a-half thick of dead or half-dead bluebottles. Thinking about those rooms now, well over a decade after I must have last seen them, I can feel the hair on the back of my neck standing up and hear the noise of these dying flies buzzing a steady, low drone that rose and fell. I never saw one airborne in there and I suppose that there must have been insecticides used by the caretaker to kill them but there were so many of them and in such drowsy, fitfully mortal states that it was like some overwhelmingly surreal, morbid scene from …well, I want to say a Hitchcock movie but I don’t watch films and don’t really know, so I’ll have to say one of those lasting images from M.R. James.

These rooms filled me with incapable, sick fear and seemed portentous but without reason; why were the flies there, why were they dying in such numbers and why were they always carpeting the room thus? Rather like the more terrifying bits of James, there wasn’t any explanation offered, merely the fact of their existence.

A School Story is one of my favourite of his stories, for this reason. I enjoy matter-of-fact ghost story telling, as James does it; there is little or no effort made to rationalise the events with supporting background stories, such as the vengeful ghosts you tend to get in supernatural mystery stories (although I like them, too, for B-Movie reasons) and there’s rarely a potential get-out for the victims of the tale. I particularly like that in this one, the narrator knows no way to make any sensible link between the events and so any and all conjecture about how things come to unfold is entirely our own. Like the rooms full of flies seemed to me, the narrator knows that the events are in some way portentous or significant and certainly frightening but without any ability to define why, each being seemingly innocent in isolation.*

The first ghostly or apparently significant incident occurs during the description of Sampson, a favoured tutor who had travelled the world and seems to have been a bit of a rogueish figure, in a disciplinarian manner, who had on his watch-chain a charm fashioned from a Byzantine coin. The narrator, possibly with retrospect, describes the tutor as having “rather barbarously” carved his initials and a date across the coin. This is pretty much a red herring, of course but James’ drawing the reader’s attention to it and indeed, the rare occasion of him describing something in detail (a paragraph ago he has dismissed bothering to describe one of the protagonists except to say that he was entirely unexceptional and Scottish) means that instantly this appears to be a hinge-point in the tale.

It is slightly offputting, then, that “the first odd thing” then happens a paragraph later in Latin class. Again, the Latin is a red herring; although, as it’s been noted before in this series, anyone who is anyone in an M R James story can speak Latin there’s no more significance than that to the setting, I suspect, although it works well with the Byzantine coin to throw suspicions off-kilter as the reader looks for a pieceable mystery.

McLeod, the unexceptional Scot, is delayed in delivering his Latin sentence using the verb “memini.” I have never learnt Latin and can’t read it in the slightest, so whatever memino librum meum means goes right over my head but is no doubt a hilarious error but apparently, this is “the sort of rot” that some of the boys will have come out with as they wait to pass in their sentences to Sampson. McLeod, seemingly in a dream-state, doesn’t fill his in until, berated by the rest of the class, he finally scribbles down a sentence he doesn’t understand but which seemingly Sampson very much does; “memento putei inter quattor taxos.”

Apparently inspired by a vision that popped into his head before he wrote it, McLeod says to the narrator that it means “remember the well among the four yews,” with a small discussion of which tree he is referring to placed prominently enough that the reader is led to dwell on the trees. And yews are sinister and conjure visions of churchyards, which coupled with Sampson’s spooking seems obvious that there is something unwholesome occurring and that this is a warning shot of some kind. It is not a particularly scary one, however, being too specific to be a common fear and too disjointed to be obviously leading and the boys seem to largely forget the incident as McLeod is taken to his bed for a month with illness and the nameless narrator only retrospectively sees it as suspicious.

The next event is also set in the dull surroundings of the Latin classroom, embedded amongst notes on grammar and a complaint against conditional sentences (which I won’t pretend to know the specifics of) and again an incident where Sampson is alarmed by a contribution to the boys’ testing. This time, our narrator steps in as a Boy Investigator and, after the teacher runs from the room, discovers the slip of paper which has alarmed him. The sentence, belonging to no one in the room according to their dying oaths and some weak CSI handwriting analysis, is innocuous enough that our narrator steals the piece, the paper itself obviously offering no sense of foreboding despite the decidedly sinister message of “If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you,” which is the sort of fantastically stalkerish thing that would unnerve anyone.

The disappearing ink is a weak way to make the paper seem unnatural; the fact of it existing is creepier and it annoys me to some extent that James uses that fact to confirm its supernatural origin. A paper that has appeared, written by no hand in the class, by no ink in the class and by an apparently extra person in the room, unnoticed, is much more alarming for its physicality and continued existence than otherwise and so the message disappearing after the narrator steals it is frustrating, especially given the next events seem to suggest something far more corporeal, if no less unnatural, going on.

The description of the thing which McLeod (although notably, not the narrator) sees at Sampson’s window is one of my favourite passages in any of the ghost stories; like a lot of the rest of the story, it is the mundane turned sinister by some creeping suspicion that, whilst unconfirmed, is bad enough in its suggestion. Originally describing the situation to the narrator as there being a burglar at the teacher’s window, visible from their dormitory, McLeod makes the bizarre excuse for not raising an alarm of not knowing who it is, as though burglars are generally known to the victim and something about this phrasing is obviously off-kilter enough to support the creep the narrator feels when, looking out to an empty courtyard and realising somehow that there is indeed something wrong afoot.

These suspicions are confirmed, when the boys begin speaking again, with McLeod’s description-

“I didn’t hear anything at all,” he said, “but about five minutes before I woke you, I found myself looking out of this window here, and there was a man sitting or kneeling on Sampson’s window-sill, and he looking in and I thought he was beckoning.” “What sort of man?” McLeod wriggled. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I can tell you one thing – he was beastly thin: and he looked as if he was wet all over: and,” he said, looking round and whispering as if he hardly liked to hear himself, “I’m not at all sure that he was alive.”

Insofar as a burglary is mundane, this is the inverse to most accounts of supernatural events in that McLeod at first claims to have seen a break-in, then post-rationalises it to be an incident involving the undead. Normally, we would expect him to start with the notion that he’d seen a zombie and then suggest raising the alarm in case of a break-in, whereas here terror actually seems to grow with distance and why not? The image is a disturbing enough one that even someone who saw it probably wouldn’t think of all they’d seen until a few moments later. Initially, you see a man breaking in, then you think perhaps he’s beckoning, then you think about how thin he was and his wetness and a dread that perhaps you have seen something more awful than you really want to think about sinks in.

The idea of faces at windows terrifies me. No, wait, right. There’s a bit in Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters, which was a staple of scaring the pants off me as a very small child, where Father Christmas wakes to find goblins have once more invaded his house. The actual description-

“One night, just about Christopher’s birthday**, I woke up suddenly. There was squeaking and spluttering in the room and a nasty smell – in my own best green and purple room that I had just done up most beautifully. I caught sight of a wicked little face at the window. Then I really was upset, for my window is high up above the cliff, and that meant there were bat-riding goblins about – which we haven’t seen since the goblin-war in 1453, that I told you about.”

which isn’t as earth-shatteringly terrifying as I remember it because a) I am now nineteen years older and b) at some point during those nineteen years I think I concocted an entirely different passage, which I believed I’d learnt pretty much verbatim from the book, enraptured by terror although after a quick investigation by Mark and I, I’ve realised is probably from a dream (there was a supposed accompanying illustration but I think I’d invented that as well, since it doesn’t follow Tolkien’s bright inks style) and which went as follows;

“One night I awoke to silence; there was heavy snowfall and it seemed the fire had gone out, making the room freezing and dark and at first I thought it was this that woke me. Crossly getting up to stoke the embers, if possible and cursing the Polar Bear for his choosing wet logs I smelt something wrong. There are plenty of smells here; soot from the fires and wood in the workshops and spilt ink and soap and the Polar Bear’s coat smells something awful when he hasn’t dried it properly but this was none of them and I began to be afraid that something dreadful had occurred. There was a soft noise at the window, settling snow dripping off the roof I thought and something made me turn to move the curtain where, pressed nearly against mine I saw a pointed little face and knew they were back.”

Which demonstrates an overactive imagination but is also one of the things that to this day utterly and totally terrifies me, despite being almost entirely of my own elaboration. The idea of the creature at Sampson’s window frightened me completely when I first read the story (aged about eleven, I think) in the same way the tapping of tree-things at a window in another ghost story I read around the same time (mostly forgotten and of infinitely lower quality than James’ but I was largely constricted by the school library) and the way the goblin at Father Christmas’ window had when I was four. My room, which occupied a peaked bit of the former attic of my parents’ house, had a window just behind where I slept, which I couldn’t see through from my bed but which, if something had been pressed against it, I could have noticed. I lived in the country and the bloodcurdling screams of mating muntjacks (which are genuinely awful noises, choking and howling like they’re dying) don’t wake me up, equally the busy cross-county main road that ran through the village ensured that there was a heavy enough stream of HGVs etc. to ensure the thing that really freaked me out was when I woke up to dead silence, presumably where the invented Father Christmas passage comes from.

Which is all a massive digression from M.R. James but one I think is necessary. The narrative of the A School Story begins with two men in a smoking room; I imagine them wearing particularly fine red smoking jackets, drinking port and looking like old MPs, which is to say fat and rendered red-nosed and tough-faced by years of pompous outrage. One begins by recounting (without the prompt for this anecdote being included) that at his school they had a ghost’s footprint. Whether this is in response to those ridiculous, soft-touch non-ghost-imprinted schools these days or not is never specified, however he does say that there was never any story behind it, merely that it existed as a quite unremarkable feature except that it was on a stone staircase. It’s discarded fast enough that whether it was an actual indent or merely a mark is never even specified.

The man continues by describing ghost stories told at schools, which is a standard enough thing; anyone who’s ever been in any educational establishment will have at least half a dozen fairly generic tales to recount that supposedly definitely really happened in some specific but varied spot not far from the school.

It’s a nice touch that the two men first rubbish these stories as ridiculous and almost certainly removed from literature; one suggests to the other that he write about it- “There’s a subject for you, by the way – “The Folklore of Private Schools” but the first speaker demurs on the basis of the scantiness of material on which to draw, “I imagine if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be highly-compressed versions of stories out of books.” M.R. James: early Lars Ulrich of the Intellectual Property world.

“Nowadays, the Strand and Pearson’s, and so on, would be extensively drawn upon,” -kids these days, eh? They’ll rip off any old sh1t. This is something I quite like about James, though; in discussing ghost stories within his ghost stories (and this is far from the only time it happens, often the characters pause to discuss the supernatural or are engaged in researching the very thing that comes to haunt them) he justifies his prose style, which is not on the face of it something to chill the blood. The way he recounts the stories, almost always through second-or-third party narrators, is (and excuse me whilst I stab myself in the face for my own pretension here but) Herodotian in its gossipy, editorial style. The oft-discarded characters (“and I shan’t bore you with a description,” ie: I can’t be bothered to write one, repeatedly features in one form or another) and the fact that we are hearing stories twice or thrice edited by their characters and then by James’ own, fictional researcher-author character means that the sparse style, retaining only the juicy bits or those that have been considered important adds to the apparent disparity of events’ significance. Which is possibly lazy writing but I take quite a lot of pleasure in authors who make their writing a character and so I find it quite charming.

It’s this editing that makes the creepy bits really creepy to me, too. The actual conclusion to A School Story is necessary but unfrightening. A third party in the smoking room discovers, by identifying Sampson’s Byzantine charm, that he was found dead in a well amidst a yew thicket in Ireland, with the body that presumably attacked him and dragged him back there “arms tight round” him. This is unnerving to the person who found the bodies but our distance from Sampson and the lack of any explanation of how events came to be this way means it strikes me as merely archaeological. Or possibly I’ve just watched too much CSI but nonetheless, the story at that point has taken on the same meaning as the stories rejected in the smoking room at the start; “a man was found dead in bed with a horseshow mark on his forehead, and the floor under the bed was covered with marks of horseshoes also; I don’t know why.” And neither does the reader really know why two bodies were found in a well in Ireland; Sampson had obviously feared it but no explanation for his knowledge is offered and the fact that he died is not especially frightening, given we know him by little more than the few token identifiers that allow the body to be named his.

Allowing my own fears to perhaps bias me though, the thing that frightens me about A School Story is the false clues, the strange feelings of dread and the lack of understanding. Nothing about the two incidents in Latin class suggests that a corpse will turn up at Sampson’s window, late at night (although Sampson himself presumably fears it) and although there is a little hint perhaps of something unspecified, when McLeod mentions that Sampson questions him about his origins it’s obvious that the coin and the old language are misleading. The thing in the well presumably has no classical significance or if so, is unlikely to be Byzantine in origin (although I suppose coins are flung into wells traditionally and Sampson’s tale about Constantinople could be a bizarre lie but I prefer the lack of explanation) and its link to its victim is inexplicable on the evidence we have.

And that’s what’s really terrifying and what, readers, has led to me having to recruit Mark to sit in the same room as me to finish writing this because the fireplace is making rustling noises and the window opposite is darkened and empty. The seemingly mundane turning terrifying is a common tool in horror; a glamourous young lady wakes in the middle of the night to a strange noise in the kitchen, potters down the stairs in her nightie to investigate if it’s the cat again, decides she must have imagined it and the next thing we see, she’s mostly dismembered behind a police line. I have no delusions that I will be killed in a glamourous nightie, being mostly found in flannel pyjama trousers and a Pantera t-shirt but the fear of Things At The Window makes my blood run cold still.

The significant events that lead up to Sampson’s disappearance are frightening for being apparently explicable, to at least some extent; boy daydreams in Latin class, writes something weird, annoys teacher; extra slip of paper is stuffed into pile by hilarious prankster (which is why the ink disappearing annoys me I suppose) and again, annoys teacher into having a migraine. Sampson’s fear up until that point is alien to me but in the conclusion as recounted by McLeod the idea that a thing he knew was likely coming, which had sent him warning shots, appears in the dark of night, silently. When he woke he must have felt terror, then perhaps a sense of brief reassurance that there was nothing immediately there until he looked to the window and the terror was all the worse for the moment of respite as the possibly-not-alive thing beckons to him.

In a brief “I have freaked myself out too much to continue writing” crisp break in the kitchen, Mark said that the thing that’s frightening there is the fact that this time, we haven’t seen any of this but imagine if the supernatural comes calling and we have to be the retelling witnesses to such. We’ve all had moments of suspicion about events that presumably turn out to be entirely mundane; there’s a rustling in the fireplace, it’s probably a spider and of course the window across the road is out, the occupants are probably down the pub like any sensible person at this time on a Sunday.

At my old school, the attic door was once open when I got in. I wanted to close it because I could hear the buzzing of the dying flies (or thought I could) and because at that time I arrived at school a good hour before most other people, it scared me to be the only one with this noise leading me, seductively fearful, to this place that scared me. I thought the caretaker might be up there though and didn’t want to lock him up there, so I steeled myself and got about seven steps up the stairs before I thought I saw something move (probably dust disturbed by my feet) ran back and slammed the door shut because the idea of seeing what made the dead flies pile up there, although it’s probably nothing more sensational than a can of Raid, was too sickening. The confirmations of our paranoia, irrationally displayed, are just too horrible; in A School Story there’s no sense of conclusion beyond the fact Sampson dies and there’s no assurance for the narrator or poor indescribable McLeod that what they witnessed was one thing or another.

The temptation, in a lot of horror movies or stories today, is to provide a motive or a cause (and James does that often enough; it’s apparent why, say, the bedcloth creature appears in O Whistle) and to rationalise it into a solvable thing, in order to give it some kind of narrative but James’ casenotes style in the ghost stories doesn’t demand anything more explanatory than a simple recount of events as they are known, the evidence not necessarily leading to anything more satisfying than an apparent occurrence and for a reader rationalising noises they can hear from where they sit or lie with the story, that’s much more a dread likely to make you unable to get up and turn the light off than any clarity could. James’ talent lies in giving just enough to activate one’s imagination but not enough to reassure you.

*Unlike a room full of dead flies, which is just fvcking creepy whichever way you look at it. But bear with me here.
**Sidenote: whilst looking for this passage, Sukrat and I also gleefully discovered a letter which ends:
P.S. (Chris has no need to be frightened of me -PAGING THE UNRESOLVED ISSUES POLICE.

But the Japanese comic market is completely different, and there I have found a few good comics aimed squarely at girls – and one masterpiece, actually aimed at young women rather than girls, which is what has prompted me to add to my series a year and a half later.

Ai Yazawa’s Nana is perhaps my favourite comic ever now, and I thank my friend Cis for pointing me at it. It’s about two young women who move to Tokyo for a new life, both called Nana. Nana K is sweet and rather naive – the punky Nana O calls her, in an exasperated temper, “puppy-dog-like”, and Nana K gets the happiest expression ever. Nana O is a singer, and it’s her band and that of her ex that provide most of the other characters, and the two bands are central to the developing story, which so far runs to 19 translated volumes of around 200 pages each.

I love everything about it: I could happily read another 10,000 pages about any of the major characters, and I feel for them very deeply, their joys and pains. This is partly because she creates them so superbly, with depth and multiple facets and unmistakeable feelings, capturing their speech beautifully, sometimes capturing them breathtakingly precisely with one line. She also develops their stories carefully, giving them good and bad times mostly from what they do rather than anything external happening to them, and including unusual techniques such as increasing use of flashforward sequences. I have particularly strong feelings about the relationship between the Nanas: it breaks my heart when Yazawa keeps them apart for long (sometimes she separates them for hundreds of pages), and I feel as if I could happily watch them together in their flat, at the table in the bay window, forever.

Besides the intelligence, sensitivity, maturity and honesty of the story, what turns this from a superbly written comic into an all-round masterpiece is her art. She switches styles from one panel to another: one might be gorgeously stylish, which comes partly from her fashion illustration background, and sometimes looks like Jaime Hernandez’s work with a touch of Guido Crepax; then the next might be broadly cartoony, somewhere between Osamu Tezuka and Charles Schulz. In nearly 4,000 pages, I don’t recall once thinking that she chose the wrong mode for a panel. I also don’t think any two pages have the same layout of panels: in this, she makes even Crepax look predictable. Every page seems as if it has been designed without preconceptions, to fit the needs of the story at that moment, and she never seems to put a foot wrong.

I can’t think of another comic I have ever read that is so strong in every area: character, story, dialogue, drawing, layout. It’s formally original and masterful, and a joy to read, very funny and immensely moving. I don’t think comic books get any better than this. I’ll also note that it is a huge hit in Japan: the latest book collection broke records by selling almost 800,000 copies in its first week there.

I’ll also mention the other series of hers available in English: Paradise Kiss is a 5-book story of a schoolgirl getting involved with some fashion students. It has a lot of the same qualities, though you do feel you are reading a single story rather than a serial starring some characters, and I think she has got much better in the later Nana.

In M R James’s universe everyone who matters is fluent in Latin. It’s not so for the modern reader – or at least this modern reader – and there’s an interesting gap left between the Latin that he so liberally scatters throughout his stories, and the translations we read.

The Treasure of Abbot Thomas begins with some big chunks of Latin, which our antiquarian protagonist – Mr Somerton – gets straight down to translating. What he ends up with isn’t immediately clear to him, either, but he follows up the clues within and is lured into a hunt for buried treasure, departing to parts foreign, and for now out of our sight.

Some interpretation – if not translation – is also needed for the missive that opens part two of the story; Mr Somerton, away on the continent, has gotten himself into a pickle, and his manservant writes to the rector for help. The grammar, spelling and punctuation of this letter are very much at odds with the careful and precise language elsewhere in the story; it jars. (I think there’s plenty of scope for looking at how servants’ speech stands out like a sore thumb in these stories, but that’s for another time.) The rector makes quick sense of the letter, hops on the next boat out, and arrives to find his antiquarian friend enfeebled and in fear of some yet nameless horror. Recounting the events that have so rattled him are beyond him, and he begs the rector to first carry out a task – kept hidden from the reader. That accomplished, he settles down to tell his tale.

What a romp of buried treasure it is! Coded messages in stained glass windows, and ciphers to be puzzled out, lead us at last to treasure buried down a well. Mr Somerton’s curiosity, and maybe a touch of avarice, ensnares him. He cannot resist it – who could? – and follows the trail to its moonlight conclusion, where at last we’re introduced to the villain and the monster of this tale. The treasure is guarded by a some supernatural creature. It slips its tentacled arms around the neck of our poor antiquarian, just as he’s reaching for his haul, driving him nearly insane with the cthulhuesque horror of it all.

The rector and the servant are dispatched to replace the treasure in the well. It’s back where it was, hidden behind a slab of stone and covered over with mud. The demon can cease to hound Mr Somerton.  All is well.

Or is it? The very ending of the story is in Latin, and leaves us straddling one of those little gaps of comprehension. The rector mentions – just mentions – that Somerton must have missed an inscription above the treasure-hole.

It was a horrid, grotesque shape — perhaps more like a toad than anything else, and there was a label by it inscribed with the two words, “Depositum custodi.”

And here it ends. The footnote, upon which my ignorant self depends for on-the-fly interpretations, translates Depositum custodi as Keep that which is committed to thee. How ambigious is that! What’s committed? To whom? Is the treasure committed to the tentacled, slithery guardian, and will it sleep easy now they’re walled up again? Or is that creature now committed to our unfortunate Mr Somerton. It – or something – has already been rattling the doors at night, and causing unpleasant dreams. Will there be easier sleep after the story concludes, or does the haunting continue after the book’s been closed?

The placing of this phrase at the end of the tale seems incredibly open-ended to me. I’m a dweller in the world of sequels, and of hydra-like monsters who rise again for one last attack just as the heroes have relaxed and turned their backs (walking away to wipe up the blood, patch themselves up). No twenty first century demon would let itself be walled up without a confrontation. But I think I’m reading too much into such a woolly translation of just two words. I do a quick trawl of a handful of online Latin dictionaries – and quiz a friend on what they remember of their long-ago GCSE Latin – and it seems to be that a clearer translation would be ‘Guard this thing I’ve left in your keeping’. That’s far less ambiguous. The demon’s the guardian of the treasure, and the treasure’s sealed up whwere it should be. The demon can kick back, relax, and get back to doing whatever it is demons like to do in dark dank holes.

Here monsters stay dispatched or dismissed, and if you’re alive at the end of the story – not everyone is – you’ve probably lived to tell the tale (from a roaring fireside, with a comforting glass of brandy to hand, on a dark and stormy winters’ night, no doubt). Mr Somerton might prefer to leave the stained glass windows for a while, and focus on pews, or baptismal fonts, or some other aspect of ecclesiastical architecture . I doubt he’ll sleep all too well for the next few months, but it won’t be supernatural scratchings that keep him awake. This tale ends here. There’s just the slightest whisper of sequel potential. The antique books and stained glass windows still exist, and the demon is back with the treasure, ready to wind its hideous tentacles around the neck of the next hapless treasure hunter.

His rant can’t have done any favours for the nerves of last night’s auditionees. (Yes, they all read Chortle.) (It is a weird business.) Yet it was the strongest group we’d seen yet.

Each of these hopefuls got just 5 minutes with which to make the judges remember them. And even if their act worked in the tiny upstairs of Hampstead’s Magdala (known as “The Alpine Club”), would it work in a 1000+ seat theatre? Compere Ross Ashcroft – who is very good at what he does – settled us in and we began.

• Chum Bucket (sketch) – negotiations w/Michelangelo over Sistine Chapel ceiling
• Liam Speirs – lame R&B clubs, dung beetles, pigeons eating a chip
• Val Lee – 60s-ish, dead lesbians in fleeces, unironic bathmats
• Hatty Ashdown – ashamed about going to Morrison’s, old mum
• Jody Kamali – Iranian, from Bristol, rugby fan banter
• Ariadne, the Greek WAG – Brits abroad, men are like taxis darlings
• Max Dowler – impressions, Alan Sugar, Christian Slater
• Richard Dellow – mushrooms, festivals, he shit in a Pringles can

INTERVAL

• Abandoman (sketch) – crowd-sourced freestyle rap
• Claire Stroud – “i’m a body double for Lorraine Kelly”, Primark dresses, farts on the Tube
• Dave Gibson – mustache, polyester suit, “getting mugged isn’t actually funny”
• Sonya Kelly – mom on Facebook, “i’m putting on a mixed load”
• Ryan McDonnell – fast talker, old people and public toilets
• Sir Harold Hackney (Alternative Mayor of London) – 78 y.o., sang Mares Eat Oats
• Simon Fielder – dating, “making love happen is like fighting terror”

I was astonished by Abandoman, who asked questions of two audience members and then sang a pop-rap love song about them, right on the spot, using all the details they were provided. And the rapping was actually good – twisted, complex and dense. When improv is done this well it feels like a magic trick – there must be something more at work here. But no, human brains really are capable of this.

Dave Gibson played an exaggerated version of a standup – bad suit, bad mustache, boundless self-regard. His material wasn’t memorable, but the persona and brio with which he invested it was.

Ariadne the Greek WAG wasn’t a particularly original invention but Alyssa Kyria did it very well; her hair in long black ringlets, her skin slathered with tanner, her contempt for Brits wrapped in a million fake smiles. “London men are like taxis, ladies. Oh yes. Most of them are dodgy, they usually have no idea where they’re going, and it’s usually best to get a big black one! And if you’re lucky he can take six of you at once.”

But my favourite was Val Lee. An older woman, she arrived on stage and with her quiet, strong voice simply commanded the room. Her entire act was based off the sweater she was wearing. It had belonged to her ex-lover. On whom she began to unload. “I hate your burgundy anorak. And I hate your blue bathmat in the shape of a foot. It was never ironic.” Suddenly we were somewhere else, we were with her in the very smallest, most private spaces of her life. She described going out to a lesbian discotheque after they had broken up. “You wouldn’t call it that here in London, but this was Eastbourne, so it was definitely a lesbian discotheque. Straight people can’t go to discotheques past a certain age, but lesbians can go until… well, until they die, really. You can usually tell the dead ones. They’re slumped over the table with their fleeces still on.” The specificity was killing us. We were helpless, in her power completely.

Lee’s act made me rethink Muldoon’s (and my own) narrow definition of political comedy. Wasn’t the 80s alternative comedy movement largely about imploding and reversing prior arrangements of public (political) and private (apolitical)? If we’ve gone back to thinking that Gordon Brown and the BNP are what counts as political, and penises and ATM paranoia are not, we’ve gone back to a pre-80s mindset, to a kind of ruined shell of a Habermasian public sphere. We all know it’s the very people who claim to “not be political” at all that have the most deeply embedded opinions. And somehow, an act that was all about the most specific images of a failed personal relationship felt the riskiest, the most liberating, and the most revelatory about life.

There was no roundup for Audition #5 because I couldn’t make it, and I can’t make the last one either so this is it, I’m afraid. I know you’re shattered. If you’d like to attend the final audition it’s next Wednesday at 8pm in Walthamstow, at The Plough, opposite Wood St. Station.

The actual finals themselves are at the Hackney Empire on Jan. 30, 2010. It’s the last big event there before the Empire goes dark for an indefinite period to give the Arts Council time to figure out how to complete their management takeover. It will be the last chance to see the refurbished Empire for some time.

Full images under the cut…

Roland Muldoon, the guy who occupied the Hackney Empire in 1985 when it had been abandoned by Mecca Bingo and left for dead by the borough council, picked it up, dusted it off, made it a base for his political theatre group C.A.S.T., and then transformed it into a base for popular low-brow theatre and “new variety”. Muldoon and his wife Claire remain the impresarios of New Act of the Year. He says comedians are “scared” of politics these days.

“There’s no Left any more,” he says. That may be, but surely this means politics is even riper than ever as the stuff of comedy? And not just the stuff done by politicians, but the stuff that prompts private seething resentment. Or rallies. Or a sense of betrayal. If us and them are no longer so clearly defined in traditional terms wouldn’t that be a good thing for comedy? Or does this particular comedic variant – standup – lean so heavily on established tribal assumptions that “post-ideology” really is a net loss for it? On the evidence of the last few days it looks like the latter.

Here then, were the decidedly apolitical acts of the evening:

• Luke Benson – “Today’s special.. yes it is”, Geordie, playing Medal of Honor with granddad
• Jo Selby – Vladivostok, “now I will tell you another joke”, hand puppet, Mr Twinkles
• Paul F Taylor – infantile, dog stroking, “this is the first time I’ve spoken today”
• Helen Arney – ukelele, osteopath sex
• Adam Tempest – tall, flatmates, South African accents aren’t sexy
• Norman Cho – Peckham, bald, suit, Chinese
• Mark Simmons – Funny hair, Folkestone, Chunnel humour
• Barnaby Slater – calm, Ikea like going on pull, Maddie humour

INTERVAL

• Richard Fox – synthesizer, “Meet the Fritzls”, “why is my beard ginger”
• Catie Wilkins – crap ghost rides, dirty talk, R. Madeley’s autobiography
• Martin Hall – neice wants to marry him
• Rob Coleman – big hair, puns, tasteless one-liners
• Andrew Ryan – Cork, Irish Dragon’s Den, lightswitch for handbag
• Lindsay Sharman – pathetic mom gossip, plummy, frantic
• Nish Kumar – Croydon, fast talker, sneaky knights, crap racists
• Angelica O’Reilly – anal bleach

This collection of comedians produced a surprising amount of pedophilia jokes. It’s essentially a capricious phenomenon – like putting a random piece of music on a random piece of film, moments of bizarre synchronicity will emerge. Last night it was pedophilia. (Not even my favourite act of the night, Martin Hall, could resist, but he was so guileless about it, and his five minutes were structured so well, that you almost even forgot that the heart of his material was the fact that his underage neice had decided she wanted to marry him.)

The other standout for me was Jo Selby, who is probably not Russian but convinced me otherwise for the first minute or two. “Bad” joke telling by cod-foreigners is pretty much the opposite of groundbreaking but she was so good at it that she won the room over completely. No movement was wasted – the whole act was put together like clockwork.

Muldoon says that although none of the audition acts have been political, no one does racist material on stage any more, and that’s a political achievement in itself. For my part, I think we will always laugh at people who are different from us, and ethnicity is one such marker. But when we can do that with affection, as in Selby’s Russian bit, it does feel like an achievement.

* Actually several of them are back around for their second or third try; some even using the same material…

If you see enough standup you’ll become a connoisseur of the quotidian observation. Where the casual observer might see a hopped-up loudmouth in an ill-fitting suit, you can distinguish the fine gradations of it all and appreciate the tangy bouquet of self-loathing overlaid on a peaty observation about Oyster Cards. This is not a good thing.

Here then are my notes on last night’s hopefuls at The Funny Side in Covent Garden. They were given five minutes each in which to imprint some humorous memory of themselves.

• Marc Burrows – moon-faced, fake urban legends
• Timmy Manners – high fiving a midget
• Paul McCaffrey – “brand new pizza”, ATMs, RAF ads
• Ben Van der Velde – Jewish Geordie, bungee humour
• Daniel Simonsen – Norwegian, shyness, why doesn’t Rocky protect his face?
• No Son of Mine (double act) – “father and son” team, gay Taliban, “magic hand trick”
• Darren Maskell – props, “the promise of a Parker pen”, horse kidnaping
• Sal Stevens – “the coil”, girlfriend jealousy
• Helm and Taylor (double act) – hairy lads, hectoring, “bad” one-liners

INTERVAL

• The Beta Males’ Picnic (sketch) – “take your tablets”, cravats, Shakespeare as irritating robot
• Gareth Kane – Kilburn, his estate, got dumped
• The Dog-Eared Collective (quadruple act) – “The Night Line” advice line, social misfits, Yorkshire
• Chris Dangerfield – new suit, crazy hair, sex with no-handed lady
• Rob Beckett – fast talker, cereals

A common thread has begun to show itself and that is that Russell Brand has a lot to answer for. More than half the acts here aped – knowingly or not – his breathless, pseudo-stream-of-consciousness speedfreak delivery. Some pushed it to the limit, basically assaulting the audience with lung power and speed, while others were content to maintain a low-level frenetic hum.

I suppose the idea is that “energy” on stage is a worthy goal in and of itself, that it will carry the act along if the material sags. But I just found it exhausting after awhile. The quiet, calm ones wound up standing out. That meant Paul McCaffrey – whose timing was tremendous, just letting jokes hang in the air while he paused stock still and let us roll it around in our heads – and Daniel Simonsen, the Norwegian, whose innocent complaints about the perils of shyness beguiled me.

Special mention should be given also to No Son of Mine, a putative father-son combo whose past spills out uncomfortably on stage. It wasn’t as smooth as it could have been, but it was a pleasure seeing a sketch actually acted – and affectingly – rather than simply shouted.

Tomorrow: Audition #4.

By the way, this was just so I’d remember who they were. I mean it’s brutal. They get 5 minutes each (8 minutes for double acts) and the judges have to decide on that basis, in a room of perhaps 30 people, whether they should do their act for a sold-out 2000-seat theatre. Which actually makes the decision quite simple. They have to competely knock it out of the park to stand a chance.

• Johnny Cochrane – big hair
• Alexandra Clarke – ukelele, X-Factor
• Jez Scharf – Tie, guitar, depressed, ex-girlfriend
• TOBY (double act) – “wib wobs”, treacle, Rohypnol
• Timothy Lock – Harry Hill, American
• Joe Roundtree – music genres, midget in suitcase
• Will Marsh – Wood Green, fireworks, headlines

INTERVAL

• Frisky and Mannish – glitter, piano, “question”, eternal flame stalker
• WitTank (sketch group) – posh, loud, “rim me, Hardy!”
• Darshan Sanghrajka – his neighborhood, Kipling rap
• Joe Lycett – middle class, Amazon reviews, X-Factor voice
• Claire Parker – transsexual
• Naz Osmanoglu – Bear Grylls, towel business
• Nathaniel Metcalfe – “he’s gonna make it”, barefoot executive
• James Mason – hipster saddo

The Freaky Trigger favorite might have been Frisky and Mannish, who performed a medley of songs that ask questions (punctuated with “question!” from “Independent Women”) and a brilliant version of “Eternal Flame” that brought the song’s stalker tendencies to the fore:

I believe -
It’s meant to be, darlin’..
I watch you when you are sleeping.. ;)
You belong with me!! :D
Do you feel the same??
Or am I only dreaming?????????????
Is this burnin’ an eternal flame????

Say my name!!!!!
(Sun shines through the rain)
Of all life SO LONELY…
And come and ease the PAIN!!!!!
I don’t wanna lose this feeling..

call my name
call my name
call my name
call my name
CALL MY NAME

SAY MY NAME

But as good as they were, and as imaginative as TOBY were, and as much as I liked what were in general very good-natured and generous performances, there was only one that really stood out. That was Nathaniel Metcalfe, an unassuming dude who had just one joke which he stretched out to five minutes, about the theme song to a movie called The Barefoot Executive, starring Kurt Russell and a monkey. It was a doozy. I hope he makes it.

Next week: Audition #3. (#1 is missing because I got the dates mixed up.)

AH-OO AH-OO AH-OO

We’ve even got a trailer this year:

As a special treat, Freaky Trigger viewers can get 2 for 1 at any show by using the sekrit password: TRICERATOPS

he’s been banned as a troll from crooked timber (tho i suspect he’s posting once more, under yet another name): on his own blog he’s furious, frustrated, isolated, relentlessly suspicious, oddly and unexpectedly generous… and consistently fascinating, because of rather than despite the cryptic incompleteness of his posted thoughts, on politics and art, reason and imagination and the self-absorbed rent-seeking intellectual classes:

“One of the many mistakes of the 2oth century was to imagine it might be possible to know without doubt which of our creations would avoid obsolescence. An art or society of ideas, a dream of scientific socialism or of the morality of technological progress, all are predicated on the same assumption, that modernity could mean infallibility, as if a cursory reading of Freud could render one immune to the effects of the unconscious. Such confidence doesn’t work now any more than it did 80 years ago. It doesn’t work for Donald Rumsfeld, or Steve Jobs, any more than it did for Lenin or Le Corbusier.”

However the vectors of the spread of a disease are nothing over the spread of jokes, memes and neologisms. So here are a couple of case studies for you to keep your eye out for.

A) WINE FLU: This would be an example of a joke disease which will burn out very quickly once everyone has heard it, but if Have I Got News For You or The News Quiz get it quick enough will get an OK laugh. The basic formulation is as follows:
“I woke up this morning with nausea and splitting headache. I think it might be Wine Flu”
Do you see? Its a play on words mistaking Swine Flu (actual disease) with Wine Flu, a made up term referring to a hangover.

THREAT LEVEL: High. Its a pretty simple joke after all. Luckily it should burn out by this time next week.

B) BADVOCACY: I came across this term on a website and wondered about the difficulties of the neologism coiner. It comes from Tom’s neck of the woods, looking at web and social media’s ability to spread negative perceptions around. For example #amazonfail is a perfect example of Badvocacy in action. Its clearly a clever mixture of BAD and ADVOCACY, and yet feels clunky.

You can check out The Ladybird Book Of Badvocacy, from Weber Shandwick, who are SHOCK, an advocacy firm. So you can see why they are keen on the term. But it seems a bit too glib to really succeed in the rough and tumble word of web neologisms. Nevertheless if you see it elsewhere, in particular in a headline, let us know.

THREAT LEVEL: Low.

Also let us know if you want us to monitor the pandemic levels of threat of other words – we have tendrils everywhere.

A couple of people were excluded for not fitting any reasonable definition of intellectual, and a couple more were excluded for being dead (also, if I’d put Ayn Rand in it would have been a one-horse race). Otherwise what you see is everyone nominated. So: VOTE! (For up to three people)