Sunday, February the 28th, 2010

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Boogie Woogie

One of the most common difficulties facing newcomers to the teachings of Trebizondo Culpeper is the complete absence, anywhere, of boogie, coupled with the almost terrifying prevalence, throughout, of woogie.

In his magisterial if incoherent Syncretic Glossary Of The “Way” Of Trebizondo Culpeper, J K Pox devotes some three hundred pages to what he calls “the boogie-woogie conundrum”. One can argue that there is no conundrum, but that doesn't stop Pox harping on about it. As ever, he is flamboyant, and one must admire his refusal to define his terms, as if in doing so the magic, if magic it is, would leach out of them.

“When thunder claps and wolves howl,” he writes, “When the sedge is wither'd on the lake, and gigantic mutant crustaceans come a-clattering on to the sandbanks, then, then! my sweet dear ones, is when we are most tempted to admit into our souls some sort of boogie. Squash the very thought underfoot, as one might a fig during a fig-glut. No, there is not and never has been and never will be boogie, if we follow the Way with eyes bright and brows clean. There is only woogie, blessed, blossoming and blanketing, at once tough as nails and chewy as the king and queen of toffees. So we are taught by Trebizondo Culpeper and so we have embroidered upon our pullovers. Link arms and sing, as snow falls and tinkly things tinkle. Sing!”

Pox does not go on to say what song it is his readers and students should be singing. To do so may have been psychologically impossible for him, for as we know he was, when young, expelled from the Conservatoire before his studies had properly begun, following the incident described in pages 45 to 64 of Pebblehead's bestselling paperback The Gummed-Up Tuba And The Worm-Eaten Spinet.