Author: mbheyman

Michael Heyman is a scholar and writer of literary nonsense and children’s literature, and a Professor of Literature at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he teaches courses on Children’s Literature and music, Poetry, Performance Poetry, Nonsense Literature, and Arthropodiatry. His articles have appeared in the ChLA Quarterly, The Horn Book Magazine, Words Without Borders, and The Lion and the Unicorn, where he was also a four-time judge for the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. He is the head editor of The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense (Penguin 2007). His poems and stories for children can be found in The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories (2005), The Moustache Maharishi and other unlikely stories (Scholastic 2007), and This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse (Scholastic 2012), the latter of which he also edited. More recently, he was a guest editor for the nonsense literature issue of IBBY’s Bookbird (2016). He plays the saxophone, tablas, flute, and the diddlemaphone.
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Gromboolia Anthology Recent Quackisitions, #10

Welcome to the decennial edition of Recennial Quackisitionals, wherein we shall dive into the oddness, blobness, and thrice-bouncingity of Dale’s Bits, the series of animated videos by Dale Crosby-Close that bound frequently into nonsensical nirvana. I had been planning on writing about this for some time but somehow had not found the gumption, my couch cushion crevices being stocked most recently only with grumption, on account of visions of impending idiocracy, not to mention the torturous process of bookcraft concerning our new edition of Alan Watts’ Nonsense. But more on that in the near future, wethinks. Today, I was positively provoked into inducting Dale’s Bits into the Gromboolia Anthology of Nonsense, with the bit titled, “Family boy.” Within the ostensible framework of the series “Family Guy,” the video is what I might call a nonsense parody, wherein the nonsense deflects any direct parodical parochialism and becomes something else entirely, its own gimbled gallimaufry. All of this is handilly-down-dandy, and well worthy of inclusion in the Anthology, but the provocation came in the form of this bit’s non-sequitorial detour into “Jabberwocky,” further enjambling this into nonsense canon. The whole run of videos, however, is deeply nonsensical. Some of the bits that fit best into the nonsense genre star Dean, a monkish, delightfully contrarian fellow with a crooked head and a hankering for sausages, sometimes ambient sausage rolls (these, I have learned, are not some kind of meaty electronica but rather are (or were) real. Around 2010 (yes, sometimes one can trust Dean), the Co-op grocery chain, in the UK, sold them—that is, room temperature sausage rolls. Scrod knows why that practice was discarded). Sometimes Dean delves into scents and perskins. Occasionally, as is inevitable, a whole hour is devoted to Matt Damon. Yes, you read that right. One day, other lump-headed Deans around the Deanship will be writing dissertations on this stuff. 

Crosby-Close lives in England and has created work for a host of publications, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and CNN. Here’s a good recent article on him. We have some doubts as to his being, as he claims, a “general human being.”

Check out more in: THE GROMBOOLIA ANTHOLOGY OF NONSENSE

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New Nonsense from Edward Lear–“Lays of the Octopods (The Last of the Octopods)” (1882)

A quick hello from the Gromboolian Plain, where a new Edward Lear poem has been unearthed. Raise your glasses of Ring-bo-ree! You’ll find it here: in Notes & Queries (2020), thanks to Amy Wilcockson and Edmund Downey. And our ever-gratefulgobness goes to Marco Graziosi for the finely attuned octopodometer that is his blog.

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Gromboolia Anthology Recent Quackisitions, #9

So long, so few, so faint, so true! Welcome back to the Gromboolia Anthology Recent Quackisitions!

We have a single bill this time, which is a kind of double bill singly. Or perhaps a bubble sill bingly. In the case of one or both, I present to you Bogey Beasts, a 1923 publication by Sidney H. Sime (1865-1941) and Joseph Holbrooke (1878-1958). Sime was an English illustrator of the odd, whimsical, and grotesque, but also a poet. In 1905 he published pairings of grotesque illustrations of fantastical creatures with his own verses (which, interestingly, he called “jingles”) to describe them.

A few years later, he asked his friend Joseph Holbrooke to compose musical pieces to accompany the earlier work, not as settings but as complementary to them. The result was Bogey Beasts, published in 1923, with illustration, “jingles,” and scores. The music is dramatic and prankish, adding a whole new approach to the creatures described. Click here for a reading of the texts over the music, which is not how we were supposed to hear this. Each element should be given its own space. Alas, for this shoddy world. Click here for the text.

Check out more in: THE GROMBOOLIA ANTHOLOGY OF NONSENSE

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Nonsense word generator

It has taken me some time to get over my bout of seasgouts so that I could expoon another batch of shmeash for you, but do not fear, I live, breathe, and quipmeomenner as in my youthful days. My birepuckless friend AC passed on this most practical and pussectionout website, the “nonsense word generator”:

https://www.soybomb.com/tricks/words/

It’s no-frills–but on command gives a long list of neologisms–new words–but these are not random. Apparently, this digital starry dynamo takes the most common English phonemes and puts them together into units that generally are morphologically correct, pronounceable, partially recognizable, even in terms of semi-semantics, to create non-words that pretend to be real words. This is a secret of good neologism creation, to keep the balance of meaning and non-meaning. Go there now unless you’re feeling a bit wardic or under the unworty.

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Leave: A play in five acts (with new video)

An update on yearly doings, for those who have noticed a significant absence of me-ity in classrooms across Berklee, netherworldly nonsense salons, and tippling stations throughout Camberville. I’ve been on Leave this year, working on a new edition of Alan Watts’ book Nonsense (1967) with glabrous Watts scholar Peter Columbus, with support from Mark Watts and Jeff Berner (original publisher, OULIPO poet, and nonsensical soul). In addition, I’ve done artist residencies on Cape Cod (Truro Center for the Arts), in Skagaströnd, Iceland (NES Artist Residency), and on the tiny uninhabited island (except for scroobious snakes) of Källskär, in the Åland Islands (Åland Arts Council Residency). I’ve written poems and stories, created soundscapes, performed didgeridoo with organ in an Icelandic church, and created an original performance poem (with throat singing), which can now be seen HERE. I also breezed through Malta, at the Child and the Book conference, where my talk on BreakBeat poetry for children (written with Joseph Thomas) was AI-translated into nonsensical subtitles. I’ll be back in the classroom in January, maskless and ready to rumble.

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Gromboolia Anthology Recent Quackisitions, #8

Guten diggity dag, dear nonsense naughtspeople! As we glide into the the summer here in this demihemisphere, with a semihemiquiver, we step into the current contemporaneous horror with our own weapons of contemplastic consiense! [The former sentence is your mantra, the former mantra is your sentence. Consider the gavel struck.]

Featured in this installment of Quackisitions is a newtcomer on the scene, a new kid on the tock: J. Rob Darcel. This nonsense prankster and rapper, a student at Central Michigan University, is lighting the social media world up with his koan-like rap, his tapping into impossibilia and topsy-curvy quick cuts with an equanimous earnestness earning him a few nonsense laurels. Here is his one music video, “Don’t Make Sense” (2021), and check out his prank videos wherein he asks for nonsensical weasel patties and worm knuckles at drive-throughs and Wal-Marts. Check him out: Instagram: @jrobdarcel TikTok: @jrobdarcel Snapchat: @jalen_rob

And for our featured writer… Stephen Mitchell is a poet, translator, and anthologist, not usually known for nonsense–but our crack staff at Gromboolia have the goods: it may come as no surprise that much of his work is related to mystical spirituality, which he began studying in the early 1970s, connecting him to Alan Watts and G. K. Chesterton. His 2003 book The Wishing Bone and other poems (Candlewick) made a few waves in the syllabub sea, garnering the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award. See his poem, “The Answer,” a brilliant version of the wise nonsense fool figure

That’s it for the moment! Hang in there, everyone, and proudly brandish your nonsense in the face of the fulminating futz! Check out more in: THE GROMBOOLIA ANTHOLOGY OF NONSENSE

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Gromboolia Anthology Recent Quackisitions, #7

Dear Citizens of Gromboolia, welcome to the long-awaited seventh installation of the Recent Quackisitions, now with bonus quack! When last we met, I was a good deal wiser and an ell and an aitch taller. But that was in another country, and besides, the inch is dead. Secretly, however, I have been twiddling away at the Anthology, and here I shall highlight the usual triumvirate of word, vision, and sound.

Fosco Maraini

As for word, please give it up for Fosco Maraini (1912-2004). Maraini was an Italian photographer and anthropologist, but for our purposes here, a theoretician of nonsense. He proposed “metasemantic poetry,” where nonsense words that sound like real words are used with a kind of syntactic correctness, while sticking to the usual semantic confusion, polysemy, and polyandry. In other words, he used non-words like words, to sound like words, to make you like words. Here is his most famous piece, “Il Ionfo,” from his collection “Gnòsi delle fànfole” (1978), with a parallel translation by Matilde Coloarossi. Part of the pudding here is the performance, and so here it is, performed by Gigi Proietti. 

For our musical selection, I give you the December 4, 2020 installation of “Crap from the Past,” special nonsense edition [click here]. This is a production of Ron “Boogiemonster” Gerber and is heard on 90.3 KFAI-FM, Minneapolis, and KFAI.org. Included are 27 tracks that focus on gibberish lyrics, with some old favorites (5, count ’em, 5 versions of “Mah na mah na”) and some that you didn’t know you knew, like the Banana Splitz theme, “Hubba hubba zoot zoot.” Because these are often simply gibberish or fake languages, they might not quite fit the stricter definitions of nonsense (forgive me, Wim), but they’re better than being attacked with a pointed stick.

Remember, let your wild prisencolinensinainciusol  flag fly! Check out more in: THE GROMBOOLIA ANTHOLOGY OF NONSENSE 

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Indian Nonsense Happenings: Sukumar Ray on the syllabus–and Three Rays, a new collection.

Sandip Roy gives us an excellent article in The Hindu (June 19, 2021), on the genius of Sukumar Ray’s nonsense and the new volume called Three Rays, which collects Satyajit’s translations of his father and grandfather, Sukumar and Upendrakishore, in addition to his own work. We, the collective Nonsensical Norns (for which I speak occasionally on the Abstemious Ass’s Authority), are delighted also to hear that Sukumar Ray continues to break into the typically conservative Literature canon bubble in Indian Universities and Colleges (or at least those in West Bengal). Satyajit’s translations, by the way, are not exactly translations. In the volume Nonsense Rhymes (1970), the first set of Sukumar Ray “translations,” Satyajit calls them “transcreations,” as they tend to take more liberties than a conventional translation, in the spirit of making them relevant, melodious, and playful–and also as a response to the difficulty of translation when dealing with his father’s nonsense, which is so language-dependent. On the title pages below, we see both the word “translated” and “transcreated,” in addition to a Very Serious portrait of the transcreator, “anno aetatis six months.”

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Gromboolia Anthology Recent Quackisitions, #6

Can it be so long, so soon, so often? Or as the ticket agent in Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories states, “So far? So early? So soon?”

Welcome to the GARQ #6, now with extra Q, and Q is for Quarantine, Q-bert, and the Quangle Wanquel Qweeque! A bit of a shame that it took the horrors of a deadly virus, an incoherent, ignorant, and malicious President, self-isolation, and a spring monsoon to bring us back to Gromboolia, but perhaps this is just what the planet ordered. I’ve always argued that nonsense would save the world, and I’m sticking to my buns! I mean, I’m bricking to my guns! I mean, I’m glicking to my suns!

I haven’t added to the Gromboolia Anthology of Nonsense in a while, but a little sample from my last additions should be edifactory to one and all.

Of note on the music front is Bill Wurtz, an American songwriter and videographer. I first found him via his popular “history of the entire world, i guess,” but only later learned that he wrote music. Silly music. Nonsensical music. You might check out this one on Sexy Pants. There are also many short videos, bibs and bobs of bizarre ideas, wee narratives, with micro-song clips, like this one on soap, or this one about tomato anxiety. See the Gromboolia Anthology for a few more choice choices, Chauncey! His website links to the many, many songs and videos.

On the literary front, we’ll feature one of those unfortunately rare beings, a female writer of nonsense. Oh, you say, there’s Anushka Ravishankar! Pawp, you say, there is Laura E. Richards! Spink, you say, there’s Doris Sanders (because, Clever Claudette, you’ve studied up on your Gromboolia Anthology)! Spadge, you say, there’s… oh have you run out? It’s not surprising. I have some ideas about why this might be, but that’s for another day. Meanwhile, to celebrate Margaret Mahy (1936-2012), prolific and crowned (with purplitude, as seen in this photo) writer for children. She’s a Kiwi, a treasure of New Zealand, but unfortunately not so well known outside of the antipodes. You might check out her book, Nonstop Nonsense, if you were so inclined. On the Gromboolia Anthology, I’ve posted a link to a short but fluffy documentary on her work.

Stay safe out there, Viral Vituperous Vultures! Check out more on: THE GROMBOOLIA ANTHOLOGY OF NONSENSE 

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Gromboolia Anthology Recent Quackisitions No. 5

Welcome to the GARQ #5, which I type as I listen to the insane laughter and whoops and scoops from Alan Watts’s This is IT, perhaps the first psychedelic recording, from 1962. But this isn’t about psychedelia, per se, or at least the pharmacological kind (though Watts did see some use to that brand of experience, too), but rather about not making sense in interesting ways, in spontaneous and unfiltered performances that tap into IT, as the album’s back cover explains, quoting from Watts’s The Joyous Cosmology (1962):

Back cover of “This is IT” (1962)

“If our sanity is to be strong and flexible, there must be periods for the expression of completely spontaneous movement–for dancing, singing, howling, babbling, jumping, groaning, wailing–in short for following any motion to which the organism as a whole seems to be inclined… The function of intervals for nonsense is not merely as an outlet for pent-up emotion or unused psychic energy, but to set in motion a mode of spontaneous action, which, though first appearing as nonsense, can eventually express itself in intelligible forms.”

The album, with Alan Watts, Roger Somers, Leah Ananda, Joel Andrews, Henry Jacobs, and William Loughborough, has seven tracks of chanting, gibberish, semi-spiritual susurrations, and a coherence that belies its claim of IT-ness, or at least that makes it an interesting listen. If you’re hearing pre-echoes of something like Frank Zappa’s “Return of the Son of Monster Magnet” off of Freak Out (1967), or Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma (1969), you clearly have two ears. 

from Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda

And for our bit of book this time, let me bring to the fore the rare book Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda (1958), written by Doris Sanders and illustrated by Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), who was well-known for the novel The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). It’s a testament to their brief relationship–and it contains a set of one-liners that mix creature with rhyming accoutrement. The effect is always silly–but the connections can be so tenuous and incongruent, yet made apt by the illustration, that they approach nonsense. This is also that rare example of nonsense written by women.

Lastly, a small tribute to a nonsense numen, Stanley Unwin (1911-2002). Unwin is the master of improvisational nonsense speech performance, as witnessed in his unending performances on the comedy stage, in film, and music. His was the narrative voice in the seminal Small Faces album, Ogden’s Nut-Gone Flake (1968) and he played the Chancellor of Vulgaria in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), among many other film roles in the 1950s and 60s that exercised his faux-academic leciturnage. His improvisatory nonsense style became known as “Unwinese.” Here is a talk on the intricacies of atomic energy. You’ll find more in the Anthology.


Cheerybunkbye for the endagiphone of this, our fifthian instickstallminimint.  Check out more on: THE GROMBOOLIA ANTHOLOGY OF NONSENSE