The new blog holds wonders beyond your bean! Alastair Reid, Cardiacs, Edward Lear, and more.

Oi! Over to the new Jabberwokabout blog site, pronto!

I've posted about the recent goings on with the Gromboolia Anthology of Nonsense, including Alastair Reid, Cardiacs, and an older article on Edward Lear. You can find it all here. See you over there!

You're still here.

Nope. I'm not going to show you.
You have to go over to the new website to see the amazing cute animal videos, the jackass stunts, the boobshots, the wild conspiracy theories... all the usual stuff you tend to find on this blog.

Me. Mocking you.

Or, well, I promise you will see a very, very silly video of me performing the beginning of Kurt Schwitters' "Ursonate," along with my account of staying at the Eckerö Post and Customs House, on the Åland Islands.

Once again, I've moved the Jabberwokabout blog over to my new website. Please go there in the future and in the past, if you fancy that kind of thing.

Here's the new blog location:
http://www.nonsenseliterature.com/blog/

Here's the general website:
http://www.nonsenseliterature.com
This site has the Gromboolia Anthology of Nonsense and many resources in studying nonsense literature.

Don't make me stop the car again to tell you about the new site.
I'm warning you.

New website! Gromboolia is your one-stop nonsense-shopping megamall!

After many years, I've finally got the website up and running... and the Internets said It Was Good.
 Or at least I haven't been sued yet. And now, for the creative url!

Nonsenseliterature.com

My goal is to make a general nonsense resource for those who want to experience more nonsense art, and for those who are doing research into it. There are links to nonsense texts, music, video, and music. There are pages with primary and secondary bibliographies for the conkimplation and ejurification of nonsense of many varieties. Even a section that dares post various definitions of nonsense literature.

From now on, the Jabberwokabout blog will continue over there. There is also a section of the website devoted to me (ever so humbly!), called "Michael Heyman's Isle of Boshen."

This is just the beginning for the site... I'm hoping to make it a prime resource for all your modern nonsense living! Go there now, and buy, buy, buy! www.nonsenseliterature.com

Eckerö Eel and Bustards House

Perhaps it was being raised on the Swedish chef’s jaunty genius,

The Groke, observing the Eckerö Post and Customs House

or perhaps it is the perspicuous peaks and valleys of intonative incline; or perhaps it is the historical hiccups that created Swedish-speaking Finns (better than Fiendish-speaking Swinns, my Farfar used to say, and he knew a few swarthy Swinns in his day); or it could be the Lunatic Lund spirit, found seven years ago right under the nose of the Nose Museum and the highly- regarded PhD on Nosery; but it does seem that nonsense, slow like honey wrapped in a five pound note, comes with the slow spring, in the mossy forests’ underfoot crunch or the absurdly large bunnies, tempting one down a rabbit hole, of this island of Eckerö, in the Åland Islands, beTwixt and between like an early adolescent on beHalloween.

Whatever currents that brought me here, I find myself in an Artist Residency at the Eckerö Post and Customs House, built in 1828 to prongify the Swedes and the rest of the world, a kind of Pre-Putin shirtless horseback riding through the cutting Baltic wind to put a puffed up front on a crumbled empire.

My mission: to create, in this hybrid archipelago, some strange hybrid of sound poetry and literary nonsense, something that some adults will find terribly difficult, and something some children will find terribly funny and something most will just find terrible. It will happen by way of something like this—and so consider yourself fairly warned.

I would get to work if I could just find a tabell that wasn’t bustidd.

-->

My big head invades

My big head invaded The Indian Express around the time of Bookaroo in New Delhi. Here is the unfortunate and obstetric result:

Link to the Indian Express's Noted Devotion to Giant Heads

Nonsense translation at the Jabberwocky, that is, the Jagiellonian University, Krakow

Krakow  18 May, 2016

There is a gathering. There is a clustering, custarding confluence of nonfluence, here in Krakow. After the extraordinary efforts of Olga Howlonia and Agata Holobut (and please sprinkle a couple of inter-diacritical motes and specks into their names), I found myself back in our nonsense band, on a Mission from Scrod: Olga, Agata, Sirke Happonen, and Björn Sundmark—an alliance forged over continents, conferences, conifers, and scrapyard round-the-back plastic barchairs. Calgary, London, Frankfurt, Malmö, Boston, and forty ways farther yet. And here we all are, as young and as fresh as the day is long, to give a special nonsense panel at Jagiellonian University. We were joined by the chrazy talents of Elzbieta Chrzanowska-Kluchzewska, a Professor at the Jagiellonian, to complete the set, and to talk about nonsense literature in translation. “That’s impossible!” you say (why do you always say that?), but we say nay. Or I did anyway. As you might expect, I rode my Indian nonsense hobbyhorse yet again (with extra bobs and bibbins, and the aforementioned non-linear lollipops). We spoke of translation in Finnish, Swedish, Polish, Marathi, Bengali, and Svengali, all to a most fine-smelling and accommodating crowd of students, professors, and even some sugary owls and cows.

The cold Krakovian rain raved in envy, but we prevailed—huddling forth to a celebratory after-talk lunch in a local spot. The only doleful interloper being what looked like it might be a dessert--or an emo band.

 

Avoiding a sorrowful end, we made our way to the train station, and a cozy berth, where another joined the band, Karolina Rybicka (whom we thank with flippers, also, for organizing).  As the train chugged anti-Krakowards, we filled the compartment with Swedish and Finnish vocal/nose flute ditties and illicit zubrowka fumes (or perhaps it was vocal/nose flute fumes and zubrowka ditties?).

The old Swedish-Polish battlefields flew by, as we headed to the next and final stop of the Nonsense Tour, Wroclaw, and the Child and the Book conference.

Nonsense train to Poland!

It has been some time since the nonsense train boarded, but here I yam once again--and this time, after purchasing my long yellow leather slab ticket with a blue spanch across it, I'll ride the rails until they begin running in zigzags like one letter Z put next to another Z and the next and the next, until I get to Poland. Poland! Land of the mischievous anti-communist dwarves, of Stanisław Barańczak, Julian Tuwim, and a most remarkable tradition of limerick. You may recall, long-time fans, of two hapless hunks clunking through Poland, seven years ago... and we have the blog entry to prove it.

This time, though, I mean business, which means traveling in a Nonsense Posse, including Björn Sundmark, Olga Howłownia, Sirke Happonen, and Agata Hołobut--all forces of fierce and flamboyant flapdoodle. Our first stop is Jagiellonian University in Krakow, where we will discourse on nonsensical cutlery, taxonomic taxidermy, and tissues of nonsense translation. My focus will be on non-linear lollipops, as seen below:



Another zigzag railway will bring us Wroclaw, and the Child and the Book conference. Our panel there, ostensibly on "play," is a nonsensical frolic through different follyicular foci. I'll be talking about Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories, Paul Bunyan, and American nonsense (excluding politics, which is too sad to mention at the moment).


I'll check in along the way, but until then, on the train I go, to hear the steam hog's nose choked and spit pfisty-pfoost, pfisty-pfoost, pfisty-pfoost, as the train runs on and on to where the railroad tracks run off into the blue sky. Not even the Kings of Egypt with all their climbing camels, and all their speedy, spotted, lucky lizards, ever will have a ride like this.

*note bene: Sandburgian verbiage freely floated here, but I assure you no rootabagas were destroyed in the making.