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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 burbles 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

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.

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

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.

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.

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