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.

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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.

A Guide to Practical Nonsense--a SCBWI India event

A Guide to Practical Nonsense--a SCBWI India event

with Michael Heyman, Colonel of the 5th Nonsense Brigade 

Thursday, May 21  

5:00pm - 6:00pm

Max Mueller Bhavan, 3, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi, India 110001

Literary nonsense has a long tradition, going back to Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sukumar Ray, all of whom have proven the nobility of this serious and silly, rebellious and strict form. Yet, whether we as writers and illustrators strive to work solidly in the tradition of nonsense, or just want our work to shine a little with the tradition, there are many simple techniques we can use to throw a little, or a lot, of nonsense into our books for children. In this talk, Michael Heyman gives a guide onwhat nonsense is and how to use it.

A blodacious blog on my visit to SDSU

The degree of my slithiness is still a matter of conjecture, this recent blog from Meg Mardian, about my trip to SDSU for nonsensical Carrollian conversation, only adding to the controversial and convivial conflagration:

San Diego State University Children's Literature blog...

SDSU Children's Literature: Beware the Nonsense, Dear Reader: Dr. Heyman’s Presentation Recap

Blog summary of Dr. Heyfrog's Alice in Wonderland 150th Anniversary lecture at SDSU

“Ladies and Gentle Frogs,” an expression taken from Dr. Michael Heyman’s opening address to Wednesday’s presentation, is being recycled here to re-invoke the proper tone that is needed to cover the topic of nonsense. It is indeed curious and peculiar to identify and question, how and why Alice has become a name and a figure recognized through several generations.  To answer this question, Dr. Heyman evoked the spirit of Charles Ludwig Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) and took the audience down the rabbit hole with his “Magic Lantern Show.” [Click here to read the rest!]

SDSU Children's Literature: Beware the Nonsense, Dear Reader: Dr. Heyman’s Presentation Recap

Alice Turns 150! Public lecture on Alice and nonsense at San Diego State

Michael Heyman

Public Lecture

Alice in Wonderland One Hundred Fifty Years Later: A New Magic Lantern Phantasmämphigory

March 4, 2015

5:00PM- 5:50 (followed by questions and discussion until 6:30PM)

Love Library, SDSU

Leon Williams room (LL 430-431)

The National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, with support from the Instructionally Related Activities fund, the Departmentof English and Comparative Literature, and the SDSU Library, is happy to announce a lecture by Professor Michael Heyman, noted poet, scholar, and musician. Michael's lecture concerns Lewis Carroll’s Alice and his Alice books—the first of which, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is celebrating its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary this year!

Michael Heyman travels to sunny San Diego all the way from Boston, where he is a professor at Berklee College of Music. At Berklee, Michael teaches courses on Children’s Literature, Poetry, Arthropodiatry, and Nonsensical Nunchaku. When not teaching, he writes poetry, plays saxophone, and carries out scholarly investigations in various areas of esoterica—including the parararational, pataphysical, and nonsensical). 

Professor Heyman is a world-renowned scholar and writer of literary nonsense and children’s literature. He has edited The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense (2007), and his poems and stories for children can be found in The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories (2005), The Moustache Maharishi and other unlikely stories (2007), and This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems andWorse (2012), which he also edited.

Of his talk, the good doctor writes: “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland lives one hundred fifty years after its publication not because Alice is a princess in a literary fairy tale, not because of our own flirtation with Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, and not because Alice has become embedded in our culture as innocent, vixen, or queen of psychedelia; rather, Alice in Wonderland lives because of its uneasy balance of all of these things and more. Its genius lies in what it does more than what it is. And what it does is nonsense. This talk, part magic lantern show and part paean to Lewis Carroll’s nonsense literature, does the unthinkable: it separates analysis from interpretation, it values the cart over the load. It offers the greatness of Alice as a teasing and tempting nonsense process, in its ability, like Humpty Dumpty, always to leave egg on our faces.”

The lecture is open to the public and we encourage students, community members, and faculty to join us!

Indian Nonsense Tour Ticking Away

My dear Jabberwokaboutnicks!

Just a note to let you knote that I'm blogging away at http://tenthrasa.blogspot.com.
I'm past the midpoint of my India tour promoting This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse (Scholastic 2012).  It's been a wunnerful whirlwind of school visits, a lecture, a book festival, and much nonsense being made.  See you over at tenthrasa...

This Tour Makes No Sense: Indian Nonsense Tour!

I shall be off soon to Parts Semi-Known, Subcontinentally, to fling my nonsensical wares at all warewelcomers and wellwarecomers. In other words, I'm headed to India Friday to promote my new book. I'll be in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Calcutt

a, speaking/performing at the legendary Bookeroo book festival and at various schools in all of these cities.

I'll be blogging when I can from my olde standeby: 
http://tenthrasa.blogspot.com/

Head over there soon to follow me...

Huzzah!

The book just called you a grouch!

It stuck its toe in your ear!

It just waved its pants at you!

It threw a protopappadum at you!

Yes, it's here!  Or, well, it's there! It all depends on whether you're standing here or there, I suppose, but as long as you're on your feet, chances are you're one or the other.  After so much time, so many promises of bountiful baskets of bosh, after teasings and queasings, I give you:

This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse, edited by Michael Heyman, with Illustrations by Priya Kuriyan.

---Out from Scholastic (India) right... now!

It features a tumble of oddball superheroes (and their superdog), mudpie masters, tree-climbing buffalos, a galloping Wollop, and pesky disobedient pants.  The Old Masters are here, like Sukumar Ray, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mangesh Padgavkar, but also the shiny new voices of contemporary nonsense writers: Anushka Ravishankar (whose Just Like a Bug has also just arrived), Sampurna Chattarji, Samit Basu (he of the recent Turbulence fame! Swoon, ye flighty and Despair!), and even a special guest appearance of JonArno Lawson, the Canadian poet of extraordinary vim and vichtenstein (whose new Old MacDonald Had Her Farm continues in lipogrammatical lunacy).  Kaushik Viswanath adds a hilarious short story about disobedient pants, and I also hucked a few pieces in there, in addition to a brief introduction that defines nonsense by way of juggling--and an Appendix that teaches all the little peepers how to write nonsense (and you too!)--through a mash-up Alice in Wonder(out)landish tale that includes nonsense heroes from around the world.  Wrap that up in masterful illustrations by Priya Kuriyan, and you're got a real hum-dinger, bum-swinger, numb-finger-flipping book!

If all goes to plan, I'll be at Bookaroo in New Delhi in November, and then a tour of schools in a few other cities.  Details to follow...

Here is the link to it on the Scholastic website.  You lucky Indian souls with soles and souls in India, you can order directly from Scholastic.  More sellers in India will join soon.  As for those outside of India, you're out of luck for the moment, but I'll let you know when it will be available.

Alleged second printing of The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense

It's 2011 and you're not sure where you left the can of whatsit. Don't worry, though, because World Nonsense will always be there for you--and now with added whatsit!

It has certainly been a long slime since my last update, and I regret to say that I didn't complete the Africa trip blog--though I was very close. I hope to get to that soon.  This entry is about the ur-Anthology of World Nonsense, The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense.   And while I won't bore you with pulling out every item stuck in my slime, I should inform you of two flings:

Fling One:

I am hoping to create a children's nonsense anthology that will include material from The Tenth Rasa but also (hopefully) a few new things (depending on whether the folks whom I've commissioned will actually write something--you know who you are!!), including a guide for children on how to write nonsense.  It will be fully illustrated and sanctified by the Nine Vestal Vultures.  I'm currently talking to the folks at Scholastic about this... and I shall certainly keep you informed on developments.

Fling Two:

I recently had to replenish my stock of The Tenth Rasa (aside from providing "pure reading pleasure,"™they also serve as analgesics, fodder, and bituminous bumf), and so yesterday I received a brimming boxfull.  When I inspected the included volumes, I immediately noticed a change on the back cover.  The ISBN patch is all tricked out now, and lo and behold, the price has gone up from Rs 295 to Rs 399! This in itself is not so extraordinary (for the volume is worth its weight in bumf), but what IS extraordinary is that it seems we are now into a second printing!

The new printing (left) and the old (right).  Also, for sake of scale, a ruler and a lollipop.

Upon closer inspection, I also discovered that the volume is now printed in Navi Mumbai, rather than Noida (where it was originally done)--also now noted on the page that notes such things.  Of course, you are witnessing my clever deduction from the presented evidence.  I have heard no word from Penguin about such printerly activities.  Regardless, though, I'd say it's high time that all of you fans out there order an edition from the alleged second printing, because even though the content is exactly the same, there is that highly collectible new ISBN patch on the back.  Also, when do you ever get a chance to buy an "alleged reprinting"?  It's worth every paise of that extra 104 rupees!  Don't miss out!