Miami Vice

The massive increase in the circulation of the Nordic Cultural Newsletter means that Jorvik Stilten has to find new editorial premises. He eventually finds a splendid office in the building that used to belong to the local authority’s Seashore Protection Agency (SPA). Since their devolution from SPA to so-called Beach Teams, and their subsequent relocation to the beach huts renovated after the recent storm, the protectors have been nominated for the annual Canute Awards since the sea-water is now seeping into the Victorian sewers. At least this has effectively won the on-going struggle against the infestation of rats, who can’t bear the salinity and have vacated their favoured residences. Stilten is already working on the next issue of the newsletter.

Basil of Caesarea and Barbara Hepworth

According to the Book of Enoch demons are the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim. In 1467, Alfonso de Spina asserted that the number of demons was 133,316,666. The idea was that one third of all the angels turned into demons. Prigentia does not believe in demons, but she is worried by the change in the young Kimrock. She suspects that he has been affected by taking substances.  Basil of Caesarea who also wrote on demons, said that in order to materialize, they had to condense vapors and then enter the body of a person or animal as if it were a puppet to which they gave life. Henry More (1614 – 1687)  supported this idea, and he wasn't even a sculptor.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

Today is young Kimrock's birthday.  He puts money on a horse that comes in eighteen to one. It brings him no joy. He is going through adolescent angst. He looks at Prigentia who is strutting her brilliance, and thinks 'I could have been someone. Well, so could anyone.'  Over an extended cappuccino he scribbles his thoughts on a paper serviette. 'You took my dreams from me when I first found you. I kept them with me babe, I put them with my own. Can't make it all alone. I've built my dreams around you.'

At his Creaive Thuikning evening class he shows his writing to the teacher (Augustus Albi) who reads it and asks if he’s still singing ‘Galway Bay’.

What more proof do you need?

At the tender age of 14, the young Kimrock has started thinking. Prodded into precocious intellectual sensuality by Prigentia he is considering the nature of his own mind. Unaware of the thesis that consciousness is an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain (Godel, Esher, Bach and other flower remedies), he reaches the conclusion that there is no reality beyond himself. In this solipsistic stance he is probably right, so that the universe (or at least this one) is a figment of Kimrock’s disturbed imagination and we exist solely thanks to him. That is probably as close enough proof of the existence of a god as would meet scientific (though not mathematical) 60% proof absolut (like the vodka).

Yad Eliyahu and the mobile phones of Finland

The Seven Dials Community Police Sergeant Drublick is giving the regular road safety lecture at the Brick Factory Arts Centre.  She reports that on June 11th 2010 there was a traffic accident in Ma’anshan province in China, at Hubei East Road (湖北东路). The involvement of a government official who attributed blame to the victim, resulted in major riots.  Exactly 65 years (to the day) earlier, in 1945, the founder of the Haganah, Eliyahu Golomb (אליהו גולומב ) died.  The neighbourhood of Tel Aviv established in 1929 by Jacob Ben Sira, was named Yad Eliyahu as a tribute to Golomb who had once lived at Degania, the first kibbutz. According to Police Sergeant Drublick only the most select live in Yad Eliyahu.

Axiom of Choice (Music)

When Prigenitia tries to explain Russell's paradox to young Kimrock as he is being shaved by the local barber, he suffers a severe migraine, and she has to take him home to rest. Her mother, Grapella Colswain, is uncertain about allowing the boy to remain unchaperoned in the house with Prigentia, as she has a date with the ox-like electrician Ruham Alif, who is taking her out for a romantic meal followed by an informal talk on the need for Zemelo's Axiom of Choice in Tychonoff's theorem. The soundtrack at the restaurant that evening proves to be a southern Californian world music group of Iranian émigrés who perform a fusion style incorporating Persian classical music and modern Western musical concepts.

Quinta Ruban and Games Theory

This week's opinion column in the Nordic cultural newsletter has been penned by the editor, Jorvik Stilten, and looks at Games Theory, and the well-established problem of how to divide up an estate amongst various creditors.  Two thousand years ago, the sages of the Babylonian Talmud addressed this question in a mysterious way by offering a series of numerical examples with no hint of the general underlying principle. Their answer was so obscure that people assumed that the rabbis were mistaken. Recently however modern economic theory has confirmed the original elegant solution.  Today over a glass of Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban, Rabbi Oud Ramonides offers Stilten a complex solution for using the discarded branches of the Great Elm at Seven Dials. 

Canine Spatialisation

Leporello Swinson is the son of Wolfram Bettel's sister Agnieszka. Leppo (whose brother Antonin is a helicopter pilot) is currently in Dubrovnik studying "spatial music", music in which the location and movement of sound sources is a primary compositional parameter and a central feature for the listener. It may involve a single, mobile sound source, or multiple, simultaneous, stationary or mobile sound events in different locations. Leppo is collecting a range of everyday objects which when treated with either ultra-heat or acid-etching processing will produce sounds within a specific tonal range. The recently recycled dog waste disposal bins of Niova Mokošica have proved excellent for this. Leppo has written to Cortally Bakewell asking for a list of possible pen friends. 

The Brass Buddha

According to Jan Łukasiewicz the introduction of variables was one of Aristotle's greatest inventions (he used variable letters to represent valid inferences in Prior Analytics). According to Sister Veracitude the weather and the Scottish Independence Debate are variables (by which she means that they will affect her pension and her insurance premiums). According to Prigentia, Doctor Bakewell's attitude and ethics are variables, in that he changes his mind when he realises that the young Kimrock really does wish to purchase a present for his grandmother. The music box is out of his range, but he does see a beautiful brass smiling Buddha. Sadly he is unaware that Smiling Buddha was the codename of India's first nuclear weapon explosion in 1974.

A Few Notes

Wolfram Bettel writes to Cortally Bakewell to commend his nephew Leporello Swinson who is hoping to visit Seven Dials in the Spring. Leporello is a fan of 20th century music, in particular Karlheinz Stockhausen whose final piece of work was commisioned by the Mozart Orchestra of Bologna.  As he is penning his reply, Bakewell spots Prigientia and the young Kimrock browsing around the dusty alcoves at the rear of Zangwill’s Bazaar of Curiosities. They are examining a 19th Century Etouffoirs En Acier Swiss Music Box. It is priced at three hundred pounds. Prigentia urges the young Kimrock to put in an offer for two hundred. He nervously approaches Bakewell who actually suspects that the two youngsters are intent on shoplifting.

Before the massacre of the Vandals

When he was last in Rome, Malvolio Claxendell bought a clay pitcher that contained the holy relics of the Bishop of Terni (a city in Umbria) who had been beheaded for trying to convert the Emperor Claudius Gothicus. He had them ground into an exotic spice which he then sprinkled in special bars of chocolate, which he sold to Moudi who now serves them with Ahmed’s Tantric Iftar (a tisane of exotic herbs) to special customers.  Claxendell stores his supplies of what he calls ‘interesting spices’ in a bottle with a very narrow neck that he was given by a friend called John van Neumann. Claudius Gothicus died of the plague whilst preparing to do battle with the vandals.

Finest anchovies

Konstantin Pobedonostsev (Константи́н Петро́вич Победоно́сцев) was the "éminence grise" of imperial politics during the reign of Tsar Alexander III. He was the force behind the Manifesto on Unshakeable Autocracy that  proclaimed the absolute power of the Tsar in Russia, and like Julius Caesar he had the irritating habit  of trividing the world into three parts. Whilst writing a sardonic sonnet (for the Seven Dials Festival), claiming to praise Pobedonostsev, Rabbi Oud Ramonides discovers that the Tsar's old advisor had a penchant for Portuguese intense anchovies, and had, just before his death in 1907, sent a recipe for Gentlemen's Relish and anchovies with garlic bread to Lytton Strachey. The process involved heating the combination on a solid fuel heater. Quelle finesse.

The Lwow Masterpiece

Born in Lwow in 1921, the photographer Jorge Lewinski survived Russian forced labour in Siberia, and was sent by the Polish army to Britain in 1942 to join the RAF. He settled in England and developed a name for himself as a photographer of writers and artists in Britain (including Bacon, Lowry and Hockney). In Palmers Green his portrait of Stevie Smith is considered a masterpiece. Stevie Smith (who was born in Hull) wrote the poem 'In my dreams' which Prigentia now recites to young Kimrock as (truanting from school) they walk across the Downs to Telscombe in the footsteps of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Lewinski was married to Mayotte Magnus, and was not related to any White House interns.

The Unseason

The Seven Dials Emergency Flood Committee meets to discuss the problem of McGonagal's drains which, having been blocked by unseasonal leaf deposits, are draining into Zangwill’s Bazaar of Curiosities. The owners (Ferabdurus Lotus and Cortally Bakewell) are in conference with the local authorities who offer to slap a closure notice on McGonagal's Writers Cafe. Frab is wary, as he is fears that it will generate a wide-spread epidemic of hysterical writer's cramp. A compromise is reached when Rev. Lanzarotte's branch of the Toy Sprouts are called in to pump out the water, and unblock the drains. Unfortunately, Prigentia (for whom Frab is a Transcipient Rain God) now develops an emotional attachment to young Kimrock, the leader of the pack.  

Fin de Ciecle

According to Tom Purdue (who is widely known to be obsessed with Memory) our earliest experiences are locked deep within our hard drives (he is also a technology geek), and are mapped closely to their contemporary emotions. So encountering a close childhood friend activates both memory and emotion.  Underground strikes and other traumatic events can prove disruptive to memory and emotion and whatever is was that Tom was thinking about. As he stands watching the swollen breakers crashing down on the seashore, Tom suddenly remembers the strange conversation he was having with Prigentia who explained to him the crucial involvement of the Amygdala and the Hippocampus in memory functions. Turns out that despite her outrageous behaviour Prigentia is quite bright.

La Calinda

Yevgeny Huxtable is giving his annual Seven Dials Music Talk at the Old Chapel Arts Centre. He reads extracts from the Syntagma Musicum by Michael Praetorius. In this work, the composer described the claviorganum (also known as the claviorgan, or organised piano) which is a combination of harpsichord and organ (and has nothing to do with the French surreal writer Boris Vian). Its origin is uncertain, though a number of "virgynalls with regals" are mentioned in the inventories of Henry VIII. However in the middle of the talk, a hurricane wind sweeps away the rear extension roof of the Centre, and the audience takes shelter in McGonagall’s Writer’s Café where Huxtable performs a piano arrangement of La Calinda by Delius.

Thigmatropism or The Adaptability of Washing Lines

Was it thigmatropism or just lack or will-power, who knows? But when Prigentia stood glaring at Sister Veracitude , the ex-nun just gave up and turned away, defeated. So Grapella drags her daughter to Frab Lotus who has suggested a three-week course of Cognitive Reikarial Synthesis.  Prigentia (who is moonstruck with Frab) eagerly trots along to her initial session. Meanwhile, Kugarita Zinfandel is making good progress at the local thalassoclinic where she is now arranging a line dance marathon in which her fellow patients wear soft shoes in order to ensure that the ward floor is scrupulously clean as they dance around a maypole of oxygen tubes.

(Thigmatropism: The turning of an organism when in contact with a solid object)

Groundhog Day

Kugarita Zinfandel has returned from her wanderings around South America, having picked up an obscure rainforest respiratory infection. Today she is visiting Felix Karlosoroff to give him some rare silk-screen prints of the Codex Magliabechiano, the 16th Century glossary of Aztec cosmological and religious elements. These depict the 20 tonalpohualli  day-names, the 18 monthly feasts, and the 52-year cycle. Felix’s other half, Frab Lotus, is a trained  Reikarial Therapist so offers Kugarita a quick course of treatment.  As Felix later drives her off for an emergency admission to the local thalassoclinic, he  notices in his reverse mirror that the car behind is a Porsche being driven by Ecna Lubma, the omnipresent writer of the encyclopedic volume ‘Reflections on Health’ .

Groundhog Day

Kugarita Zinfandel has returned from her wanderings around South America, having picked up an obscure rainforest respiratory infection. Today she is visiting Felix Karlosoroff to give him some rare silk-screen prints of the Codex Magliabechiano, the 16th Century glossary of Aztec cosmological and religious elements. These depict the 20 tonalpohualli  day-names, the 18 monthly feasts, and the 52-year cycle. Felix’s other half, Frab Lotus, is a trained  Reikarial Therapist so offers Kugarita a quick course of treatment.  As Felix later drives her off for an emergency admission to the local thalassoclinic, he  notices in his reverse mirror that the car behind is a Porsche being driven by Ecna Lubma, the omnipresent writer of the encyclopedic volume ‘Reflections on Health’ .