Ruham Alif's Boustrophedon

To some extent Ahmed’s pacification strategy works. It is May, the sun shines, and the crowds are out and about in Seven Dials. Festival-goers mingle with hen parties from London, writers and artists prepare for coming glory,  and part-time gardeners venture out to survey their dandelioned lawns. At the Old Chapel Arts Centre Writing Exhibition, an ancient boustrophedonic text is on display. On loan from Mandible Winkworth, it is his prize possession.  Many ancient scripts, such as Safaitic and Sabaean, were  written boustrophedonically, that is in both directions, alternating lines, left to right and right to left. Ruham Alif (the handsome electrician, locally known as 'the ox') stands and gazes at the wooden incised artefact for it represents his heritage.

Chairman Mao's Hypothetical Graviton

It is suppertime at the Quinine residence. Child-genius, Kolya is working out whether he should favour a force mediated by a hypothetical graviton, or a discrete structure of spacetime (as in loop quantum gravity) while his grandfather (Samuel) tries to solve a more taxing problem -  how Jorvik Stilten can produce 36,811 copies of this week's Nordic Newsletter for the Chinese market. It is Leporello Swanson who rides to his rescue. His Shanghai friend's grandmother made her fortune in the 1970s printing several million copies of a 'Lin Biao endorsed' edition of Mao's Little Red Book. She retired in 1986 to raise satin Angora rabbits, but her press is still in operation printing poundshop catalogues, and it has spare capacity.

The care of Kolya Quinine

If you’ve been puzzled by the appearance from time to time of Kolya, grandson of Samuel Quinine (proprietor of Yifitsin Print Bookshop) and wondered what his parents are doing leaving him so frequently with the somewhat aloof grandfather, the family set up needs to be explained.   Samuel’s only son, Lustral (named after Samuel’s own father who had once been engaged to Missikin Yentol, in the days before she became a nun) is a very quiet scholar, researching Magyar Literature whilst his rather errant wife, Sonia (nee Labrador) travels the world promoting her fashion business (she designs trendy ‘supportwear’ for the fashion-conscious over eighties).  So Samuel takes on the care of Kolya, who has just managed to clone a digital neurometer.

Hot Gossip

Sevalanz Grimble gets a text message from Lazarus Colswain. He is worried about the rumours of his daughter’s well-being. He asks Sevalanz (an old flame) for any news. Sevalanz is taking tea with  Milton Ridley who repeats the views of the locals about Prigentia. He suggests that she has a split personality, and is therefore not fantasising at all. If there are two personalities, he explains, then it follows that there must be two real experiences of life.  They chew this one over for a while, and Sevalanz sends a reply to Lazarus telling him that everything is fine. In the corner, Kolya, the young grandson of Samuel Quinine, for whom Sevalanz is babysitting, is playing with a circuit board.

Photofit

Nowhere in the area has there been any sign of Prigentia. She was last been seen wearing an outrageous eighteenth century outfit which she has hired from a fancy dress shop in Hove. The local police are issuing idisyncratic photofit images drawn up from reports by her nearest and dearest. The young Kimrock is, of course, beside himself. He was hoping that she would accompany him to the family Passover seder meal. Meanwhile Hamentash Yumble has been planning to take her to visit Verona, and Leoprello Swanson is hoping to impress her with his CD and accompanying newly-bound thesis on Hyoaxic spatial music. Escorted by Ruham Alif, Grapella Colswain is giving the police full details of her daughter's appearance.

Lines on Tintern Abbey

Sometime at the start of 1300, "midway along the road" Dante was lost in a dark forest. To survive this ordeal, he had to visit the three realms of the afterlife, accompanied by Virgil who suggested that first they stock up at the local Aldi. Eight centuries and a bit later at Vevgeny Huxtable's Art Studio in a Hove mews, Lucien Jung is supervising the ten week art course. Kugarita Zinfandel is painting a rural landscape in which, inexplicably, a leopard, a she-wolf and a lion are lurking in the woods beyond a ruined Gothic castle. Sister Veracitude is also painting, but her images are more abstract. Her water-colour portrait of a mid-century Archbishop of Canterbury looks like a monkfish.

Soul Music

19th century convicts were allowed to stop on their way to the scaffold and pray for their souls in front of a statue of the Madonna known as the Refugium Peccatorum, a title used for a painting by the Turin-based painter Luigi Crosio, whose daughter Carola in 1887 married the Italian mathematician and teacher of infinitesimal calculus, Giuseppe Peano.  He introduced modern symbols for union and intersection into set theory, and the standard axiomatization of the natural numbers is named after him. He believed that  to encourage mathematical knowledge one had to speak in Latin. Augustus Albi, who has problems with English, thinks this is an excellent idea (excellens cuius ideam). However Peano died of a heart attack in 1931.

Continental Drift

Following the success of the latest evening class on Tectonic Plates at the Old Chapel Arts Centre, Samuel Quinine, at Yifitsin Print Bookshop, is stocking up. Browsing through Wegener’s ‘Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane’ he realises that he has found an explanation for the geological underpinnings of Seven Dials, where the chalk downland slope and ridge is capped with the sandy clays of the Woolwich and Reading Beds. He sticks a photocopied extract in his window, but it only attracts Mrs. Grimple who is looking for a new mattress and is unsure of the location of the Woolwich and Reading Beds shop, and Prigentia Colswain who is looking for a book on Electronic Pilates to help young Kimrock’s migraines.

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.

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.

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’ .

Norwegian Wood

Today comes the news that Malvolio Claxendell is collaborating with Yevgeny Huxtable by writing the libretto for his colleague's opera based on Ibsen's newly discovered comedy 'The Wild Enemy of Count Arthur Strong, Masterbuilder'. The musical extravaganza promoted by the Director of Global Brickworks, Lucien Jung, is expected to be the centrepiece of this year's Seven Dials Festival. Ibsen wrote the play when his wife, Suzannah Thoresen,  suffered exogenous depression after losing twenty kroner at Valhalla Bingo. To cheer her up he then performed the piece with a specially constructed puppet theatre. In the 1960s Ingmar Bergman adapted it for the big screen, turning it into a searing existential tragedy on the theme of death, misdirected metempsychosis and eternal virginity.

Metempsychosis

Until the barbarian depredations, the City of Mediomatrix was one of the principal towns of Gaul. It was the birthplace of Freda Weekly (born Emma Maria Frieda Johanna Freiin, Baroness von Richthofen.)  She was an inveterate walker, translator and novelist. For a time she lived at the Tinner’s Arms in the village of Zennor in Cornwall, not far from St Senara's Church where she saw a carved bench-end depicting a mermaid.  Her lover, the radical psychoanalyst Otto Gross, championed an early form of anti-psychiatry, sexual liberation and depth psychology all of which have influenced Ferabdurus Lotus, Reikarial Therapist, and part-owner of Zangwill’s Bazaar of Curiosities. Freda Weekly died in Taos in 1956. (She was also a friend of David Eder).

Such stuff as dreams are made of…

Years ago Rev. Lanzarotte invested all the church funds of St. Scruples (C-of-E) in a high interest speculation which offered a massive rate of return. In the early years he eagerly watched the funds grow, offering dreams of repairing the church roof, landscaping the subsiding graveyard and taking the local wrinklies on day-trips to Bournemouth. However just when he planned to withdraw the money, the Bernie Madoff scandal broke. Suddenly there was no money left in the church funds. Ever since he has pedantically reminded those who misquote Prospero in The Tempest that Shakespeare was no friend of the swindling financier and would not have written about the dreams of Madoff. 

‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on.’

Tomasi's Mother and the Analyst

In this week's Nordic Cultural Newsletter, Jorvik Stilten, is reviewing the Psychoanalytic writings of Alexandra Wolff von Stomersee. After growing up in the court of Czar Nicolas the Second in St. Petersburg, Alexandra married the Sicilian Prince of Lampedusa and Duke of Palma di Montechiaro in 1932 (though she didn’t like his mother). After much procrastination the Prince (Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa) wrote his masterpiece 'Il Gattopardo' (in English this is known as The Leopard, though in fact the word means Ocelot). After di Lampedusa’s death Alexandra became a key figure in the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. The Ocelot is similar in appearance to a domestic cat, and Yevgeny Huxtable’s late Ukrainian Levkoy cat, Charisma, was once mistaken for a Leopard.

Goldberg Variations

While the residents of Seven Dials begin to recover from the weather, it falls on the Rev. Lanzarotte to intercede in order to stop the Claxendell-Huxtable confrontation. He visits each in turn and explores, cajoles and explores.  No, the cat is still alive – just a little shorn. Yes – the ladies from Featheral Upholstering will replace the damaged drapes. Maybe a conversation is possible. Luckily water damage from the leak at the Regency Pile is attracting most of Claxendell’s attention and he is prepared to yield. Lanzarotte invites Huxtable to perform the Goldberg Variations before the church Music Society, if he would find himself able to scribble a short note of apology. Sadly the next day the cat is run over.

Silken mushrooms

Every year on January 11^th, to commemorate the death in 1874 of Gail Borden who developed condensed milk (to which he is addicted) Yvegeny Huxtable, noted pianist, holds a formal dinner party for eight people.  This year he has invited Felix and Frab, Samuel Quinine (owner-manager of Yifitsin Print Bookshop), Kugarita Zinfandel (daughter of Rabbi Oud Ramonides) who is writing a biography of Borden, Tabitha and Hedre, and Sister Veracitude – ex- Mother Superior of the Cruxicogentes Convent of Theodora. He is preparing an ethnic Lithuanian meal featuring three varieties of mushroom soup, and potato monstrosities called Cepelinai. The ritual involves all the participants giving an account of themselves whilst downing shots of iced vodka. He spends today preparing the soup.

Nestor the Chronicler was buried in the Near Caves (Ближні печери)

This week Stilten’s Nordic Cultural Newsletter publishes an old research paper by Malvolio Claxendell about Kiev.

According to Nestor the chronicler, ‘Kiovia’ was founded by a Slavic tribe leader Kyi, together with his sister Lybid, and brothers Shchek and Khoryv. Nestor who died in 1114, based his writings on Byliny (били́ни) - traditional East Slavic epic narratives.  Claxendell has discovered a Bylina that tells of a hero taking leave of his mother, galloping off to brag before the council of elders, before leaping over the city walls, to charge into battle and taunt his enemy, and then begging for mercy. The stuff of every day life.

The other article in the newsletter was about the price of cheese at Waitrose.

CoXiX - עד מאה ועשרים - tails worth telling: the new 120 by 120 word blog.

In many ways Jorvik Stilten could be a veteran resident of Seven Dials, but in fact he only arrived recently - as editor of the Nordic cultural newsletter. He is also a practicing chiropractic, and researches the coccyx. In humans and other tailless primate (since Nacholapithecus) the coccyx is the remnant of a vestigial tail, but it’s not entirely useless. Together with the the ischial tuberosities and inferior rami of the ischium it  is  part of the weight-bearing tripod structure which acts as a support for a sitting person. The ischial tuberosities will play an important part in our story, but meanwhile events start on New Year’s Day, when the Residents assemble for the annual Winter Trek across the Downs.