Michael Praetorius, BA (Philosophy)
Over the years - and I say this modestly - my Pensive Quill column has, famously, influenced various humorists: Lenny Bruce; Mort Sahl; Woody Allen; and so on.
Less well known is its impact on philosophers. For instance, Bertrand Russell was a regular reader up until his death in 1970. He was always much amused by my satirical take on the absurdity of religion.
During an interview in 1968 he pointed to his bookshelves and remarked, There's a Bible on that shelf there. I keep it next to Michael Praetorius's Collected Quill Columns - poison and antidote, side by side ...
Who’s Susanna Clarke ... ?
J K Rowling ... yes, that one ... was so impressed by my measured, Homeric critique of that sanctimonious, but entirely bogus, bunch of snivelling pudknockers, Wild Youth, that she contacted me by pm, and later by phone.
She'd done her research, and my Pensive Quill columns came in for a special mention. Even Auberon Waugh, she opined, cannot equal you for sheer, splendid, partly informed invective. And, she added, I delight in reminding my friends that, while things might be dire here at times, at least we aren’t sandwiched between what Michael Praetorius calls 'a shower of retarded, Hun Orangemen and boney-arsed, culchie GAA bogmen.'
Peals of laughter from her.
So far, so good. What's not to like? Well ... she assumes that I've read and, like nearly everyone else, love her books ... ! Let there be no mistake: I will yield to no-one in my admiration for her and the stand she takes against what Posie Parker and the science of Biology correctly term 'a bunch of men in fucking dresses'.
But I have not, and never will, read the books, or go to the films. Nothing personal whatsoever. I mean, even Lord of the Rings ... Oxford Dons sitting around writing about elves and dwarfs and magic rabbits or whatever ... Dear God, shoot me now.
Naturally I couldn't say this to J K, nor anything about the books, since I've never opened one. I hummed and hawed. I blustered. I floundered and flapped. In extremis, I mentioned Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (the only contemporary novel about 'magic' that I've ever been bothered to read ... it was terrific, by the way); a wretched effort to pretend I'm into this kind of dreary genre.
All in all, I don't think I convinced her. Because she's sending me an autographed, full leather bound, Collectors' Set of the Harry Potter books, plus a signed photograph. And she says we'll chat again after their arrival, and get deeper into the thinking behind, and context of, and lessons to be gleaned from, the whole Hogwarts baloney ...
And there was me, about to settle down to Roger Casement's Black Diaries, because there's supposed to be some quare stuff in them unrelated to freeing Ireland ...
Jesus, Mary and Josef K ...
The Coronation diaries
03/05/23
Jean couldn't wait to tell me: RTÉ is showing 4 hours of live coverage from the Coronation ... !
And your wee man, the midget, is going ... ! she exclaimed.
President Higgins, I said.
Yes, she went on, maybe he'll wear a leprechaun outfit ... Darby O'Gill and the Little People at the Coronation ... Bejapers and begorrah ... !
Live your life, do your work, then take your hat
You and that ridiculous bucket hat, said Jean ... you're 71, not 17, for God's sake ... !
I replied, Listen, anybody who sees an oul codger like me wearing a hat is bound to say, There goes a chrome-dome trying to conceal it ...
But, she said, you aren't even bald in the first place ...
Ah, I said, but I do have slightly oily hair sometimes, not everyone's cup of tea, you'll agree ... so cute man that I am, I wear the hat, and, hey presto, the folks think there goes a pathetic oul bastard trying to hide his cue ball, never realising that what I am, in reality, is a pathetic, greasy-haired oul bastard ... ! Result ... !!
I believe I’ll dust my broom ...
I woke up early this morning. Jean was already awake.
The birdsong, she said.
You're lucky, I replied, I'm an Existential Nihilist, so, as usual, it was pitch-black, agonising, hopeless despair, and ice-cold, paralysing, grotesque angst, that woke me ...
And it's all over, I said to her later on.
What is ... ?
Me busking in Belfast, I said. I mean, I've been busking there for 7 years now, and I've never been discovered yet. Plus, in all that time, I've only ever been bought coffee three times, and two of those were by you.
So ... ? she asked.
Come on, I said, the votes are in, and, for the day that's in it, it's nul points. No gigs, no CD, no offers, no nothing. An empty vessel, a beaten docket, an ashtray on a motorbike, an uninhabited space, a hollow man, urinating into a gale, a turd in the gutter ...
Ok, ok, she interrupted, too much information there ... !
I used to be an English teacher, I said.
... somewhere else
So instead ... I went busking in Armagh.
And what do you know ... ? Within five minutes of starting, a woman said to me, You are absolutely brilliant, and the day you quit playing will be a sad one for music.
I replied, Listen, I appreciate it, but that's not really how it works, Jean ...
And away she went to Sainsbury's.
A while later a GAhAh man set up a kind of stall next to me, selling awful Orchardmen crap orange scarves, etc, for the match tomorrow.
People will think I'm endorsing that stuff, I told him.
Eh ... ? he said.
Turns out he's a bit deaf, and actually from Cookstown. In an hour he didn't sell a thing.
I don't really know much about Armagh, he admitted.
He'd given me a quid, so I pointed him to the Taig side of town, thinking he might do a bit better there. My contribution to Dev's Terminally Mediocre.
When we got home, Ivy was galloping noisily up and down the lane. Her owner had been trying to put the bold girl into our wee field, where there's lots of lovely unfertilised grass to munch, but she had scented Route 66 during the move, and made a break for it.
Finally, she was corralled. I gave her some carrots and an apple; poor consolation for imprisonment ...
If you’re going to take the Lord’s name in vain ...
Jean said to me the other day, Some atheist you are ... every second sentence, especially when you're anxious or cross, is prefaced by Jesus, Mary and Joseph ... !
It set me thinking. She has a point. That kind of talk could lead my fellow non-believers to conclude mine is a milk-and-water atheism, and that when the whip comes down I'll die roaring all right, but it'll be for a priest.
And that would never do. No. I saw the need for an exclamation that reflects the fact we are merely helpless, gormless pawns, forcibly detained here without meaning or explanation, at the mercy of sheer brutal chance, in an existential pit of catastrophic being, despair, grief, and nothingness.
So in future, and all the better to exhibit my nihilist authenticity, I will be exclaiming, Jesus, Mary and Josef K ... !!
[I'm sorry to say that to 'get' this you will need to be as well read as I used to be, or have awakened one morning to find yourself transformed in your bed into a giant cockroach.]
The Coronation diaries
05/05/23
To be a Quisling or not to be a Quisling. To protest or not to protest. These are the questions we anti King Tampon lads and lasses now face. Piers Morgan asks us, Why bother ... ? His jaded piece of journalese, though, has caused me to go deeper: why am I a treacherous anti-monarchist in the first place even ... ?!?
I was one year old when the last Coronation took place. Yet I have no recollection whatsoever of my father ever mentioning it. He was a farm labourer, fair enough, the lowest of the low, but there's no way he would have been oblivious to a momentous, life-changing, sacred event like that.
So how come ... ? Having mulled it over at length, I can offer only one plausible reason for that display of reckless, disloyal indifference ... He must have been in the IRA.
Furthermore, my father was no coward; all his life he gave as good as he got in mean world of men and work and poverty. Yet, when the Second World War broke out, and his younger brother (the uncle I'm named for) joined up, my father did not. Yes, my uncle was single, and my father married with an infant daughter, but that doesn't really cut the mustard when Mr Hitler is breathing down your neck.
No, if I'm right, and he was no coward, the simplest reason for his going AWOL when the Queen Mother needed him to die for her (as his brother did), can only be that he was working away with his chums in the IRA to blow up Nelson's Column, etc.
One more sinister thing. Growing up in the Failed Statelet, my father occasionally took us to the pictures. It was customary for cinema management, when the show finished, to blare out God Save The Queen. Oddly enough, I remember well how my father always quietly, but quickly and firmly, ushered us out before it began, so as we didn't have to stand there as a mark of respect to Queen and Empire until it finished ...
The Coronation diaries (cont'd)
06/05/23
World gone wrong. Jean the Prod refused point-blank to watch a second of it. Man dear, if you'd heard her giving off, too ... Close your eyes and it might have been a young Dolours Price giving you the lowdown on that gang of Jerry carpetbaggers.
Whereas I, when the Fair City Omnibus was over, and Ivy had been given her grub, settled down to show my pretense of respect for that part of the Failed Statelet's demographic termed (correctly) 'spongers' by Harold Wilson.
Appallingly dull, nauseatingly sycophantic, obscenely profligate, and a terminally tedious fest of redundant, antediluvian geriatrics, it certainly was. But at least I dozed through it. On the other hand, what the Hell will Jean do next ... ? Go to Mass ... ? Take up camogie ... ?
This is what I fear: the GAA made me a Prod; is the monarchy making her a Taig ... ?!?
Jesus, Mary and Josef K ...
Bonehead taxonomy
I was walking Miss Lotte Lenya on the Mall in Armagh. She was off the lead and running around a little. Near the War Memorial was a guy dressed up like one of Robin Hood's Merrie Men. He had about six posts stuck in the ground and on top of each post was an exquisitely carved wooden model of a different bird of prey, perfect in every detail.
Well, Lotte ran over to see, and with an immense squawking and screeching the 'models' took off in panicked flight ... They were real!
Little John rushed over to me, red-in-the-face livid.
What kind of fucking moron are you?!?! he roared. I was at a loss. Prior to this encounter I hadn't even known that morons were classified into different types.
Walking back to happiness
I've been asked seriously if the Armagh Lapsed Catholic Ramblers Club (ALCRC) really exists.
The answer is yes. We are a band of maladroit malcontents who roam the Mournes and Cooleys, verbosely aghast at the memory of priests and nuns flaying us alive back in the day.
Entry requires a nomination each from two existing members, then election at the AGM. Strict, but necessary, for we are determined to keep out agnostics (cowards), 'spiritual' blockheads, tree huggers, baseball cap wearing morons (sure to be fifth columnists from the GAA), 'arty' tossers, the tarot card numbskulls, and, of course, Protestants of any stripe, believers or not. Having given up one load of absolute shite, we are not about to embrace any others.
Admission criteria:
you have to be born and raised a Taig (up to the point when you swanned off in high dudgeon, that is);
you will swear that you lie awake most nights in a lather of remorse, self-blame, and regret, at everything you did or said that day, even though it's all in your imagination, and you were certainly no worse than anyone else. This suffocating tonnage of guilt is the true sign of a good Catholic upbringing, and it never leaves you, lapsed or not;
lastly, and ideally, it should be the case that your hopes, dreams, ambitions, etc. are fed daily into the grist mill of an indifferent universe and ground to smithereens. The authentic lapsed Catholic is well acquainted with failure on all fronts.
For further details, and an application form, contact ohlordwhyhastthouforsakenme@gmail.com
Nul points again
Many people have enthusiastically lambasted my rudimentary guitar playing, featured in a previous column. I say only this to the critics: All must have prizes.
Negative criticism is an attack on the integrity and uniqueness of my cloddish mediocrity, and could leave me with whatever syndrome currently explains why nobody has to take responsibility anymore.
I may not play well, but I adhere scrupulously to the Scriptural precepts of Our Lord, Mr Elmore James:
1)keep it short; 2) keep it rough and ready; and, 3) even if you are capable of it - which I'm not - absolutely nothing flashy.
If I ever have a CD, it will, of course, be a fiver.
The untethered soul in action
The Pope texted me a while back to ask if I could give him a heads up as to the average-lapsed-Catholic-in-the-bog's stand on the Consubstantiation/Transubstantiation debate, the Virgin Birth and the Trinity as Of One Substance. He had been reading Joyce's Ulysses, and knowing that I’d once been an English teacher, he wanted to know what was going on with Stephen Daedulus.
He asked specifically that I sound out some lapsed Catholics without degrees: he knew if he tried to he'd only get into a shouting match. I don't know any lapsed Catholics without degrees. Indeed if there are any lapsed Catholics without degrees, they are way out of their depth.
Anyway, I didn't need to do any research. I texted back to say I had been hill walking with the Armagh Lapsed Catholic Ramblers the weekend before and was told off by the group leader for dropping orange peel on the slopes of Slieve Lamagan; she said it takes orange peel more than ten years to biodegrade. After that I didn't dare produce my banana.
The point I was trying to make to the Vicar of Christ is that we lapsed Catholics have moved on from theology to the big questions of Ecology and Media Studies ...
Youth is wasted on the Wild Youth
I am a militant atheist. And proudly Irish.
But as I watched the first Eurovision semifinal I clutched my Rosary Beads tightly. Decade after Decade, Sorrowful Mystery after Sorrowful Mystery, I went hard at the Pater Nosters and Ave Marias.
I don't know about the effect of that. You'll have to be the judge. But my prayers were answered ...
That preening woke wanker Conor O'Donohoe and his band of right on tossers, Wild Youth, had their asses kicked out of the Contest, and all the way to Justin Trudeau's front door.
RTÉ's Marty Whelan was shattered. I'm not mad about older gentlemen in their underpants, he said, it’s not for me - but if you didn’t have that sort of daftness out there it wouldn’t be the Eurovision song contest. It’s all about sparkle and nonsense.
But then, Marty Whelan getting sour after Ireland fail to qualify for the final is the most entertaining part of Eurovision every year for true patriots like myself.
The elephant in the room was finally acknowledged by Ed Power in The Irish Times. Wild Youth were up against it, he reminded us, because they'd had to endure the 'wrath of J K Rowling'. The wrath of J K Rowling, we should remind Ed, consisted of her reminding Conor that a knife wielding rapist with a penis can, by no stretch of imagination or wishful thinking (never mind Biology), be a woman. So, yes indeed, they had a heavy cross to bear.
Conor, you see, saw a chance to garner a few votes by preaching woke, but it backfired on the wee, ludicrously catsuited bollix. Go woke ... ? Go broke ...
But, you say, what about their song ... ? Well, it was, as someone remarked, a grasping, aspirational hymn to togetherness, with lyrics Coldplay would have rejected for being too twee, and would have been better employed as the soundtrack for a Building Society advert.
The Pol Pot diaries (cont’d)
For the day that's in it (Victory Day), I headed to Armagh this morning ... wearing as close to authentic Soviet Union gear as I can get.
Later, on the Mall with Miss Lotte Lenya, a precocious lad noticed and said, You and Putin, for fuck’s sake...
Listen, I began, the Soviet Union was more than ...
Geriatric Edgelord, he interrupted.
Because I'm old and getting a little deaf, I initially thought he'd called me 'George Harrison', in which case I'd have been really annoyed.
I don't talk much about The Beatles these days. It's too risky. But, if anything, they once meant more to me than even the future Nobel Laureate. However, a quick look on the woke web tells the tale: Lennon and McCartney were a pair of talentless, egotistical bully boys, with one aim: to stymie, stifle and suffocate, at every turn, the real genius in the band - G Harrison.
Until recently I always thought of him as a mid-level kind of guy, talent wise - Old Brown Shoe notwithstanding. Philosophy wise, the type who, lacking a formal education - and thereby perhaps feeling a little inferior - is seduced by the thought of not having to do any of the real hard work of thinking, so cops out and buys into that I-can-understand-everything-without-leaving-my-armchair vibe ... via some ropey, lazy, bullshit, Eastern navel-gazing twaddle.
Not so, says Generation Woke. Here Comes The Sun and Something more significant than Strawberry Fields Forever, I Am The Walrus, Penny Lane, and Hey Jude put together. Interminable, padded out, tedious three disc album, All Things Must Pass, miles above and beyond Abbey Road and Revolver.
Intellectually, guru George now acknowledged to be on a par with Wittgenstein. A powerhouse of metaphysical pondering, chanting Hare Krishna in luxury while dismissing materialism.
However, since your man actually said, Geriatric Edgelord, I took no offence ...
⏩Michael Praetorius spent his working life in education and libraries. Now retired, he does a little busking in Belfast . . . when he can get a pitch. He is TPQ's fortnightly Wednesday columnist.
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