The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm

After last week, some lighter fare was in order, and The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm delivers exactly what sets out to.

The Professor is a somewhat odd character; he primarily invents things, though on occasion he gives lectures. He's terribly absent-minded, and, for example, wears five pairs of glasses at all times (one for reading, one for writing, one for outdoors, one for looking at you over the top of, and one to look for the other pairs when he's misplaced them).

"He fumbled in his pockets, and then remembered he had left his matches on the bedroom candlestick. 'Tut, tut,' he said, 'what a nuisance.' Then remembering that his memory wasn't very good, he fumbled around a bit more and found he hadn't left them on the candlestick after all. They were in the lining of his waistcoat."

The adventures themselves are fairly varied. In the first, the Professor and his friend, Colonel Dedshott travel back in time using a machine of the Professor's invention to revisit a party the Colonel had once attended, but they overshoot and wind up in the middle of a war instead. Not one to not take things in stride, they decide to join in, and together kill pretty much everyone involved; excepting a few rebels who'd been hiding, who assume the Professor and Colonel had been on their side, and them dual presidents for winning the war. Needless to say, the war was supposed to have been won in an entirely different fashion (by the opposing side, no less), which causes untold havoc for the history book writers.

Other adventures are slightly less action-packed; the professor loses some library books, does some spring cleaning, and goes on a beach vacation. Even these still have their moments, but aren't the best of the lot.

With regards to the book itself, the writing, and particularly the narrator, is a bit strange at times, often breaking the fourth wall:

... an awful misshapen white sort of thing with squiggly blue marks all over it. Just like a severely enlarged grocer's bill, which is what it actually was, only you're not supposed to know yet.

or just relating things in a very strange sort of way:

On and on they whirled, and nothing happened. And it kept on happening over and over again, till everything was so nothing that neither of them could notice anything.

... he was going along in a nicely cushioned boat on a river of warm cocoa, accompanied by Colonel Dedshott, who was rowing with a frying pan and a cricket bat, and Mrs Flittersnoop dressed in a currant pastry of her own making; while tame fractions cancelled each other out with subtraction signs and well-behaved multiplication sums sang oboe quartets at them.

"It was like a machine gun but much more sploshy."

Regardless, if you're looking for an entertaining read, with no fewer than three houses being blown apart, look no further than The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm.

What to do till the messiah comes - Bernard Gunther

In 1971 Bernard Gunther had a dream, and that dream resulted in the finest hippie book I have ever read. It is chock-full of terrible terrible poetry and photos of some very stoned looking people.

Apparently Bernard "is one of the pioneers in the use of touch relaxation body awareness and nonverbal communication in the local growth process"... A field that died shortly after the "War on Drugs" began.

Without further ado I present the most wonderful material this book has to offer:

now
here
this


very
moment


you
are
life

...and here I thought I was dead all this time.

non drug ways
to grow flow on

... I'm pretty sure drugs were involved in writing this book.

meditation breathing fun
laugh for 1
or 3 or 5 minutes

... but not 2 or 4!

experience in detail
a special
refreshing place
in the mountains
or at the sea shore
your own island
planet or heart cave

... wtf is a heart cave?

every letter
on this page
is by itself
yet each exists
in relation to
words
sentences
paragraphs
individual letters
form a related whole

... it's amazing what seems relevant when you're hopped up on drugs!

non-verbally drink
your coffee

... verbally drinking your coffee is an option?

chewing is basic
aggression
de/struction
in the service
of self preservation
con/struction


if you do not
use it
to destroy food properly
it will create a
dis/sadist/faction
that will manifest itself
against you and others

... who knew chewing was so dangerous?

REMEMBER


you are the ring master

... now where did I put my clowns?

some people suffer


just for the hell
of it

... yeah! shut up sick people! stop whining!

it's true
insomnia is a
problem
but it's certainly
nothing to lose
any sleep over

... now he's making fun of insomnaics

the mind is like
a drunken monkey
that has just been
bitten by a scorpion

... buuhhh???

I am an impure thinker - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

I am an impure thinker is a collection of essays, lectures and interviews by the social philosopher, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. As such, the content varies greatly from chapter to chapter, though there are some common themes throughout.

The title comes from the notion of purity in the sense of a school of thought, and that as an impure thinker, Rosenstock-Huessy defies a single classification. Indeed, throughout the book he decries idealism, existentialism, naturalism, science, economics, art, classicism, and likely a dozen other -isms; though in so doing, he often uses elements of the schools of thought he recently derided.

The book is a fairly dense read, although slim. The forward, written by the famed poet W.H. Auden (one of Rosenstock-Huessy's greatest supporters), had this to say:

I should warn anyone reading him for the first time that, to begin with, he may find as I did, certain aspects of Rosenstock-Huessy's writings a bit hard to take. At times he may seem to claim to be the only man who has ever seen the light about History and Language.

When that's the first thing you see getting into a book, you know you're in for a long ride.

In plain terms, Rosenstock-Huessy's main philosophy seems to be that the only truth in the world is the human condition. To speak to one another, to feel, to be Christian. All else is illusion or fabrication. He deems all non-educational pursuits (excepting being a soldier, something he also was during the first World War) as juvenile. The tone of the book is best summed up by choice selections of his own words; physics is denounced as the root of all evil, for example:

... The four-hundred years' dominance of physics inevitably leads up to the social revolution of the "It's," the "quantity" into which the workers are degraded by a mechanistic society. The politics and education of the last centuries proved a disaster whenever they tried to establish the abnormal and most inhuman extremes of Ego and It as norms.

Naturalism prompts:

Here, I forego the temptation to accuse the naturalists of robbery and plagiarism. I could accuse them of having embezzled all our terms of the Spirit's life, presence, future, heredity, survival, history, acquired faculties. Originally, all these terms of Darwin hail from the Bible. Because only God can be present. Only the children of his inheritance can have a future, only the fruits of the spirit can survive in death. And only the apostles can succeed in transmitting the newly acquired faculties of our Savior. But I shall leave it to you to draw these conclusions yourselves.

and

Descartes is a gigantically expanded adolescent, full of curiosity, loathing his mental childhood, and frustrating his mental manhood.

Creativity is described thus:

The term "creative" nowadays is the fashion. It is meaningless, as we certainly are not God almighty, but very mortal, very corrupt and terribly stupid.

The remaining pages fill up with various theories, Latin terms and lists of elements of he invents for some aspect of human nature (e.g. the Four Phases of Speech, the Twelve Tones of the Spirit, and so forth. He seems terribly fond of making arbitrary lists of things and saying each element is essential and inexpandable.) Most of the text looks a lot like the following excerpt.

We know of time only in the form of twofold time - we distinguish before and after, and we know space only in the form of duplicate space - we distinguish inner and outer. These four units, two times and two spaces are the four phases of the total experience ... Hence, all men always have known of their quadrigeminal existence, as otherwise grammar's dramatic cycles of "go, let us go, we have gone, going," this unity in diversity, could never have been created.

It's not all doom and gloom though, there are moments of humor, though all thoroughly unintentional.

The United States of America did not exist before they were called the United States of America. This remains ununderstandable to a Greek mind.

Our children play hopscotch. This is a play which imitates the serious procession of the dead through heaven and hell, when they are brought before their judges in the after-life as we were taught by the Egyptian priests.

and my favourite:

Perhaps I am too childish and primitive myself, but the fact that two and two are four really and always still stirs my imagination.

There are a few other interesting moments. Apparently the direct cause of the first World War was that parents in the early 1900s stopped giving their children biblical names, a half-an-essay dedicated to why incest is a bad idea, a completely out of nowhere paragraph about a gymnasium full of "naked, beautiful but inexperienced boys" for some reason, and a truly bizarre rant about the value of acronyms (hint: it's not at all what you expect).

To sum it up, it's fairly clear why Rosenstock-Huessy never became a household name in philosophical circles, but the book is an interesting, if odd, read nonetheless. In closing, I'll leave you with a phrase Rosenstock-Huessy seems to know all-too-well.

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur

Colombo's Names and Nicknames - John Robert Colombo

I picked this purely based on the mental image of it being based entirely on the Peter Falk character; sadly, it was not to be.

The book is authored by one John Robert Colombo (a.k.a the "Master Gatherer"), and is composed entirely of nicknames, pen-names, stages names, aliases, and other pseudonyms of various Canadians of note (at least, ones alive before the 1978 publication).

Half of the book is a list from nickname to name, and the other half is the reverse. It basically reads like a giant Wikipedia list. Indeed, I suspect that had Mr. Colombo been born some 40 years later, he would be MasterGatherer385, Wikipedia editor and reclusive shut-in extraordinaire; compiling lists upon lists that shortly thereafter get marked for deletion due to irrelevance.

On the plus side, the book is a quick read, and has a few notable nicknames.

Alex Samuel Chapelski - a.k.a Lumpy Willie, a.k.a the Ugliest Man in Canada

Note that his actual name has no relation to William or Bill whatsoever, leading one to wonder about the first nickname.

William Gates, the Knight of the Golden Omlelet

The Knight of the Golden Omlelet - Sketch by  Tigh Tiefenbach

Lorne Green, the Voice of Doom

W. T. R. Preston, a.k.a. Hug-the-Machine

Patrick Straham, a.k.a The Ravished Buffalo

William Jones, a.k.a. Lawrence of Yugoslavia

This one in particular evokes images of that iconic music playing, a slow pan down from a blazing sun to a Soviet-Bloc-style neighborhood, with a caravan of men riding atop Yugos moving slowly down the street.

There's even a few with multiple, seemingly contradictory nicknames. Take for example

Albert Belanger, a.k.a The Canadian Tadpole, a.k.a The Canadian Wolverine, a.k.a Frenchy

The Canadian Tadpole/Wolverine a.k.a.  Frenchy - Sketch by Tigh Tiefenbach

or better still

Joseph Howe, a.k.a Old Man Eloquent, a.k.a. Rambles

A Diplomat in Carpet Slippers - Jay Monaghan

A Diplomat in Carpet Slippers

I picked this book up off the cart without the faintest clue of the subject matter. There was just something comedically wonderful about the title.The cover proclaimed that "this book fills the most notable gap on the Lincoln bookshelf." I wasn't even aware the gap existed!

"A Diplomat in Carpet Slippers" proved to be a treasure trove of visual metaphors:

Russel could stand no more. History was not taught that way in monarchical England. His old turtle head was extended on the extremity of his wrinkled neck.

Lincoln was eager. "Let me have it," he said, reaching his long arm and fingers towards the pompous figure, who hesitated, reluctant to part with the letter. Chase wished to say something further but Lincoln did not wait and hastily broke the seals. Reading the contents, he said with a triumphant laugh and a glance toward Welles, "This cut the Gordian knot."

Seward looked over the document. He had disagreed with Lincoln on the whole colonization policy. He considered the contract a mistake. Seward called a clerk. In a jiffy the paper was carried away. Then Seward turned on Kock like an angry cockatoo.

Napoleon's mustache twitched eagerly, but his absent-minded eyes saw visions of Europe in chaos.

Napoleon's mustache twitched eagerly - Sketch by Tigh Tiefenbach  

Lincoln studied the records of half a dozen men. One of them appealed to him--Joe Hooker, a tall military figure with grand fighting head and grizzled russet hair.

The spectacle thrilled sixteen-year-old Julia Taft with conflicting emotions. A friend of the Lincoln family, nicknamed "the Flibbertigibbet who flies when she walks," Julia saw everything with her bright eyes.

Flibbertigibbet who flies when she walks - Sketch by Tigh Tiefenbach  

Horse and horseman raced down the midnight road. Turning in at the Home gate, Lincoln galloped up to the porch, dismounted and stamped up the steps laughing about his mad ride. He had lost an eight-dollar hat, he said. Lincoln's friends insisted that a guard must ride with him henceforth.