Friday, March the 24th, 2006
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Due to hit the shelves of your local newsagent next month, What Ails Thee, Weeping Orphan? is a brand new weekly magazine, the brainchild of quondam poet Dennis Beerpint. It's a surprising move for the notoriously reclusive versifier, who until now has published only slim volumes of bafflingly obscure work We sent Hooting Yard reporter Fatima Gilliblat to find out what he was up to.
Gilliblat—There you are at last, you notorious recluse! I have been hammering on the door for about half an hour.
Beerpint—Your persistence has paid off, tearing aside the protective veil of my notorious reclusiveness. Come in and sit yourself down on this wooden stool.
Gilliblat—Do you not have a more comfortable seat?
Beerpint—Would you prefer a beanbag chair?
Gilliblat—I would, for a beanbag chair is like a modern update of the “Protean easy-chair” described in The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade by Herman Melville (1857).
Beerpint—Ah yes, where he writes of “a chair so all over bejointed, behinged and bepaddled, every which way so elastic, springy, and docile to the airiest touch, that in some one of its endlessly changeable accommodations of back, seat, foot-board and arms, the most restless body, the body most racked, nay, I had almost added the most tormented conscience must, somehow and somewhere, find rest”. Here you are.
Gilliblat—Thank you. Now that I am suitably relaxed, I want to ask why a pipe-smoking, frazzle-haired poet of unrelenting seriousness is braving the cut-throat world of weekly magazines.
Beerpint—The answer is quite simple. I began to wonder why it was that I could not look upon the shelves of magazines in my local newsagent without emitting a loud and long-drawn-out groan of despair. My brain fumed at being presented with endless variations of Celebrity Pap! and World o' Hateful Chavs. No one was producing the magazine I wanted to read, so I have had to do it myself.
Gilliblat—Hence What Ails Thee, Weeping Orphan?
Beerpint—Precisely. A weekly magazine in which the only illustrations are mezzotints depicting pallid wretches engulfed by misery, perhaps standing frail and woebegone upon a blasted hillside in the teeth of a devastating storm, hungry and hollow-eyed, abandoned by Fate to a cruel ruination. A magazine in which the text is set in very small type, so it has to be peered at, straining the eyes, and in which the stories are long and wordy and unremitting in their gloom and dejection.
Gilliblat—Well I shall be buying a copy! The slogan of Chat! magazine, as we know, is “Wit n' Grit n' Puzzles”. Is there a catchy tagline for What Ails Thee, Weeping Orphan? “Doom n' Gloom n' Recipes”, perhaps?
Beerpint—I was thinking it might be “Shrieks n' Sobs n' Mezzotints”, but that might be a bit melodramatic.
Gilliblat—It might. Have you signed up an astrologer? “Your Stars” columns are always popular with readers.
Beerpint—We're not necessarily courting popularity, but I take your point. We're not doing “Your Stars” as such, but “Your Biscuits” instead. Digestives, Rich Tea, Garibaldi, Cream Crackers…
Gilliblat—And will you be running exciting competitions for readers?
Beerpint—Indeed we will. In our launch issue there's an opportunity to Win A Winding-Sheet. For the chance to win your very own funeral shroud, and to have your portrait painted in it while you're still alive, just like John Donne, complete the following sentence: “The huge iron gates of the orphanage clanged shut, and tiny Prudence was left abandoned and…” When you have completed the sentence, add thousands more, until you have written a novel-length story of incalculable melancholy. The winning entry will be published as a supplement to the magazine.
Gilliblat—It all sounds very exciting, I must say. You're abandoning poetry, I take it?
Beerpint—Certainly not! Huge swathes of the magazine will be taken up with my largely unread verse, in a special section entitled “Page Upon Page Of Impenetrable Screeds”.
Gilliblat—Have you attracted many advertisers?
Beerpint—We have, though all the advertising space in the first issue has been taken up by David Blunkett with a plea of self-justification in an attempt to save his career yet again. It brought tears to his eyes, so let's hope it works its magic on our readers!
The launch issue of What Ails Thee, Weeping Orphan? will be available in two weeks' time from selected newsagents. Free gristle-rich bone for your dog with every copy.