Arrival in Cape Town

Cape Town, South Africa
Monday, 5 July, 2010


Welcome! It has been a long time, almost a year ago, since Kevin and I brought you the stylings of our nonsensical peregrinations. For those of you who may be new to this blog, you might want to peruse the entries for July through September 2009 to see our last major excursion into the Fields of Nonsense (Elizabeth Sewell notwithstanding). Last summer and fall we traveled through Eastern, Western, and Northern Europe where we met with a full host of nonsense ministry: scholars, librarians, stenacious stentorians, and artists willing to help us find, translate, and transubstantiate nonsense literature, and our rectory has since been overflowing.

Of course, we have not been entirely idle since then, as you can see from the various and sundry postprandial-peregrination blog entries. We met some fellow nonsense searchers, such as the Most Noble and Magnifulgent Juana Inés Dehesa Chritlieb, whose knowledge of Mexican nonsense was one small force in baffling and snaffling the Redneck Brigade Patriotic Brotherhood whose erstwhile gunslinging still echoes in amber waves of pain across our southern borders. And then there was the most delightful Nonsense Tour of Harvard (which, to my discredit, couldn’t hold a dandle to the nonsense tour of Lund given to me by Frederick Tersmeden) with Daniela Almansi, a not-quite-tonsured nonsense non-monk who breezed in from London, and who has opened doors French, Russian, Italian, Zingbangian, Zoroastroturfian, and possibly other Z-languages in her ample bouquet. Our working manuscript has swollen to over 150 pages thanks to the kindness of all of those willing to selflessly fling themselves like the Dart of Harkness into the Anthology of World Nonsense.

It is time once again to shake the dust of the West off our shoes, to pursue the Land of Snod and the ever-elusive Moustache Island (despite my no longer being a member in good standing-on-end)—this time, in Africa. Thanks to the Newbury Comics Berklee Faculty Fellowship, I am able to spend the last gasp of my sabbatical here, in Africa. Unfortunately, Kevin is not able to join me, and he will not only be much mussed but also mulch missed. I begin here in South Africa, mosey on over to Kenya, and end in Uganda, which will take me to the very end of July. As I mentioned in my last entry, there are some incredible nonsense adventures awaiting me, and I will faithfully be blogging with my regular irregularity.

Late last night I arrived in Cape Town and shall spend the next week poking asnout in libraries, having meetings with local looninaries, including Niki Daly, Gus Ferguson, and Philip de Vos, some of the brightest nonsense stars of South Africa, and assiduously avoiding the footballie follies. My hotel is a vuvuzela’s call away from the stadium here, and come Tuesday night I expect the vuvuzela flock to descend fully upon my window sill. Until Wednesday, then, I shall be keeping under cover, scouting out the less-flocked features of this fair city. Stay tuned!