Xuriosa Nine, #s 7 & 8. Out Today.

As with the previous volume, copies are free by contacting this office. Editions of 8 copies of each issue. Once the erratum slip for #12 has been printed, and the volume is complete, the price of a volume rises immediately to £100. COpies of Xuriosa Volume 8 still available at £100 per volume. Also copies of Hegelians #s 44–46, £30 a set.

"Curiosa Eight Exists But No One Knows."

"Got Curiosa Rubberlineana Volume Eight If You Want It!"

 "Do YOU have a Curiosa Rubberlineana Volume Eight in your attic?"

NO! YOU DON'T!

Know why? Because they have only just been issued from the same press that brought you so many smiles, half-smiles and outright non-smiles –– the opposite of smiling which is to say a miserable expression. 

Eight copies of four lime–green issues –– already called "The Jade Quartet" by the collector scum, the doomscrolling trolls, the fratres ignorantes and the chatroom wits–– only were produced. 

     8 x 4 = 32

Two go to the author's own "private stash," one to the British Library –– a pathetic vanity BTW –– which leaves only five more available.

"And to the Deuce the hindmost."

There is only one way to get it.

There is only one way to receive enlightenment.

There is only one way to get into Heaven.

Put on dem silver slippers.

You must ask Rubberline ("Eloise Nebula") directly by whatever means are at hand.

Electronic mail, telephone, carrier pigeon or you may try sending a goose, a pelican, a spoonbill or a shoebill.

You might refer to it and he will blank you
                                        he will claim to not understand you
                                        he will claim to be another than who he is
                                        he will not receive you
                                        he will not allow entry to his door
                                        he will shun you in your steps
                                        he will leave you hanging in the most desolate streets
                                        he will take an alternative bridleway to evade you.

The author is they say a solitary man.

In many ways he is socially unsophisticated.

In other ways he is quite adroit.

It depends on when you catch him.

That's true of many people though.

Some people are only unsophisticated.

So it could be worse.

     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     

See Elias Nebula's "Youtube channel" for more infomration about the only way to get YOUR copy.

That's right, I said "infomration".

On purpose. 

(Or as I originally wrote "On pirpose.")

"Leonardo Was Overrated."

Talk about hataz. I was idling in Sainsbury's –– by the way, why is everybody suddenly calling Sainsbury's "Sainsbury"? –– and when I was finished looking at the Lego and the crisps multi-packs I wandered to the magazine racks. Why are there about twenty magazines about "coarse" carp fishing?

A real impulse buy –– don't you want

to read about "perch on worms"?

When we were moving our stuff into my current residence, I was talking to the movers. I had boxes marked "statuary" and "brickettes" –– and I very sheepishly admitted that they actually contained Star Wars figures and Lego kits. One of the movers was just eighteen and had only started tentatively watching the Star Wars films. I was counseling him about navigating the prequels ("the one with the long scene in the library is good") without going into slagging off Jar Jar Binks too harshly. Why bother after all. And the "gaffer" of the bunch said, "I hate Star Wars." Then unprompted, and defiantly, he added, "I also hate football."

"Whaddaya like then," I asked. 

I willed him to say "Silver age Phantom Stranger comics."

He said, "Angling."

I guess there is an underground of this –– like Trump voters and neo-Nazis. You never meet them maybe, except in Didcot car parks, but they are out there and they are multiplying. 

Is this already a joke?

Should I even be commenting?

That is not my subject. My subject ––  as I started to say –– is those hataz who do everybody down out of bitterness and self-disgust at their own awful failure at the game of life. Like the readers of All About History magazine, who take some solace in the suggestion that Leonardo was "not all that":

Fuck Leonardo, his flawed inventions and his abandoned art! 

So what if he invented helicopters in the sixteenth century.

I wonder what appetite this cover article serves: "There's a real demand out there to see the Western canon dragged down and beaten up by mediocrities and hacks."

"Next issue: Was Shakespeare a total dunce?"

"I Am Not Curious, Orange." Or, "Trump L'Oeil."

I get the feeling Trump has been stung more than a leetle by the harsh words of the "Press" –– the "Media" –– that amorphous awful hydra that of one mind crawls across the Republic like a many–armed leech.

Poor guy! I say this because he was on TV yesterday and I said to my wife, "Is there something wrong with the TV? Or am I dreaming? Trump isn't orange."

I started thumping the TV in time–honored fashion, even though it is a flatscreen. I sort of batted at it.

Trump was pink with almost white hair. He was the colour of a heart attack waiting to happen.

He looked like the brother in Trading Places that is not Don Ameche.

Yeah –– Randolph Duke.
Remember how he ended up?

"I don't think Hillary's fit for office!"

Trump looked like a classic old Republican!

He'd had a do–over.

"He must have really been stung by those Cheetos placards on the marches," I mused. "Trump is no longer the new orange."

Poor guy's awfully thin–skinned. Unlike an orange!

He's more like a nectarine.

His hair remains a foul four-dimensional enigma.
His hair is an M.C. Escher trompe l'oeil, pun intended.
Has this pun been used yet? Can I copyright it?

All the criticisms leveled at him, all the awful things they have said about him, all true, and the worst one for him was that he looks like a Cheeto. "They can call me a steaming turd and a Nazi, but when they say I look like a Cheeto it's too much."

MELANIA: Donaldt, dolink, come on back to der sunbed Gott in Himmel vey ist meir.

"Grapefruit."

Recommend to me the man who can get any pleasure –– or sense –– out of a grapefruit.

Preparing (or assembling) a grapefruit is like hard time done in the salt mines.

Eating it is like thirty years in the gulag archipelago!

"Two Score of Jests" / "Vale"

My Final "Jests"

1. "Entertainment Crackers"

Crackers that are so nice they are called "entertainment crackers." 
Perhaps you have heard of them. 
I think that their reputation rather proceeds them. 
They are opposed to their confreres in the biscuit tin, the miserable "water cracker" -- so named because it tastes like water. 
"Bread and water." 
They should call them prisonhouse crackers. 
Poorhouse crackers.
Penitentiary crackers. 

2. I misremembered the name of the dog from Downton Abbey. I called her "Ibis" ("Ibex") when her name is "Isis". 

________________________________________________

Here endeth my excellent run of jests, which ran rather like that peculiar figure Emerson describes in "Experience" - that "train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus."
I do not believe I am being grandiloquent when I make the comparison.
I do not believe I am being pretentious when I make the allusion.
The better-loved, more beautiful beads, it seems, were the least-loved among ye. 
You my readers who it seems pine for chintz and paste trinkets!
Ye came to me to read of Storage Wars, of Market Warriors, even of Dog the Bounty Hunter. 
My own humble prattle about the daily goings-on in my days when I reflected amicably on life in a district of Brooklyn town seem to have amused few among ye. 
Shall you recoil from me once more if I draw on another figure from the American Renaissance, now recalling the words of Longfellow as I describe my actions?

And the night shall be filled with music,
    And the cares, that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
    And as silently steal away.

When I published my squibs exclusively in pamphlet form, in the previous century, I used to round off each volume with a vow that the next volume should not be offered to the former subscription list; that I would leave copies only in hedgerows, in huckleberry bushes, in ditches, in dead letter boxes, in drop-points, secreted in the almshouses of Abingdon and the charity shops of Norwich's St. Benedict's Street. The municipal hutches for cats at the top of Long Island; Commercial Street between Box and Clay?

These threats were empty vessels and I'd routinely return, like a drinker from LETHE's waters, to the fray of publishing my own jokes and tirades.

These days I have had the petulance scoured out of me, and instead withdraw my gaming pieces with that sort of playful misanthropy that has become my signature on this site. 

I say, I -- who so gamely threw myself into the "great game" -- I withdraw my dies and counters respectfully from that humiliated bandshell the public arena, and fold myself up, mummy-like, in the shroud of my former showman's tent.

Got metaphors if you want 'em. 

The next time I feel compelled to write a new rumination on the subject of Market Warriors or Top Chef or Chef Race, I might conceivably resume posting my findings somewhere "online" where the mysterious hundreds who read those posts will easily find me again. 

Under what name I shall discourse, I do not say. 

I prefer to ask, what name did Achilles travel under when he went among the women? 

As for the more personal ("bitter, dreary") entries, these shall return to the printed page eventually (sold on the streets of Brooklyn) or they shall perish - as they should - in an old-fashioned diary I have.

That said, I might equally exit, folding my puptent like the Arabs as I goe, with the winking recommendation that you regularly check your local lychgate for chapbooks and "little magazines". 

You never know what you might find in the hawthorn among the huckleberries!

[Unctuous smile.  Exeunt.]