Wednesday, August the 25th, 2010

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The Hapless Bivalve!

Here is another example of the Incoherent Twaddle Generation Method. This also dates from 1987, and is again from a decisively out of print Malice Aforethought Press pamphlet, Forty Visits To The Worm Farm, a story which also appears in Twitching And Shattered (1989) and in This Fish Is Loaded : The Book Of Surreal And Bizarre Humour, edited by Richard Glyn Jones (Xanadu, 1991).

The glands of the investing tissue secrete lime and deposit it always submerged. These arrest the spat at the moment of emission. They detach with a hook the piles covered with fascines and branches, if we can use the term, buried in the sands or mud, their polypiferous portion sallying into the water. The raches, roughened and furrowed down the middle with pointed spiculae, or tubercular ramifications prolonged in a straight canal, the columellar edge sometimes callous—this is the critical moment for the hapless bivalve! He seizes it with a three-pronged fork, aiding also the functions of the stomach, filled with villainous green matter, which is conical, swollen in the middle, diminished, and tapers off, producing new beings, covered with vibratile cilia, furnished with two fins, limited only by the length of the stem, but in a moment beginning to dissolve its corporation, a soft reticulated crust, or bark, full of little cavities. The hinder ones loosen their hold, with four or six rows of ambulacral pieces designated by the names compass, plumula, bristling envelope, levelled bayonets, smothered. Last come the terrible and multiplied engines of calcareous immovable thread-like cirrhi with transverse bands, many of which crumble. Sometimes they are dredged.

ADDENDUM : I note that Amazon has copies of This Fish Is Loaded for sale from $0.47. Alongside Mr Key, the book includes work by Woody Allen, Mervyn Peake, Vivian Stanshall, Alfred Jarry, Bob Dylan, and the great, great Leonora Carrington (and many more, not least Yoko Ono's late husband).