TWENTY NOT OUT 

Five years, twenty issues, sixty six contributors, six hundred thousand words. What are we talking about? The Crazy Oik of course. It’s already longer than the first half of A la Recherche du temps perdu. What would you rather read? Join in our phone poll – to vote “Yis! Give me the Crazy Oik anyday!” dial 0808 675812; calls are free. To vote “No! You filthy pornographer! I much prefer an evening with Marcel” ring 0845 689743 (calls will cost £6.30 a minute and you may have to listen to the first act of Rheingold before being connected to the poll.) The results will appear in our next issue. 

Of course our typical subscriber reads both. Remember the Crazy Oik had the first ever English translation of a Proust pastiche by our distinguished French cultural correspondent Ron Horsefield. Ron actually knew someone who knew Marie Nordlinger – Proust’s English girlfriend who lived in Didsbury. He also supplied the picture on the back cover which he came across exploring the literary quarter of Lyons earlier this year. Another Francophile, John Lee, lives in la France profonde and describes its strange denizens in almost Proustian fashion in A Dordogne Idyll. We learn that one train can hide another – very gnomic. It makes you think. 

The Oik’s international reach is confirmed by another instalment of the life of the exiled Count Ivan de Nemethy. This tale gets better and better as we follow the old Count (Ivan’s dad) from the commie hell of Budapest 1956 to his last resting place in a lodging under a flyover in Blackpool. Where would you prefer to live? Do we need a phone poll on that? Perhaps the old Count liked candy floss. 

Scandi is another odd place. Nigel Ford’s Inspection Day tells all. Nigel lives on the west coast of Sweden. His Kafkaean account reveals that the locals ponce about utterly nekkid, even when prospective house-buyers turn up. There’s none of this in Borgen, but that’s Denmark, a much nicer place. I mean – who would you rather go on holiday with – Soren Kierkegaard or August Strindberg? Phone…er…well maybe not. 

Ireland too is abroad I suppose: the west coast certainly so. Wittgenstein spent time there to get away from it all (it being the maelstrom of Trinity college Cambridge). Martin Keaveney’s piece Last Order is a fine, atmospheric evocation of the rain-sodden misery of an old pisshead’s demise which recalls Flann O Brien’s The Poor Mouth. Some Irishness too in Bob Wild’s story of a transvestite and his dog. Bob has Irish antecedents and the transvestite is Irish. Bob assures me it’s all true. 

The home team turn in as usual. Jim Burns writes about Bohemia. He’d probably like Bohemian as nationality on his passport, but then he’d probably never get back in. Dave Birtwistle describes a Pennine Bohemia while Keith Howden, another Lancs patriot, has a go at LS Lowry and the decline of metaphysical horror; an idea explored in our commentary on the cover. His mouthpiece James Bird Horobin speculates on God – and asks what has he ever done for us. Tanner, a modern Bosch, reports on the lurid landscape of Liverpool. Abroad? It’s extra-terrestrial.  

Tom Kilcourse goes to work in a narrative I relish, restricting myself to read only the episode published in the Oik – saving the rest like a cherry on a cake. Kadison’s take on schoolboy oik culture fizzes with convincing demotic both anglo and paki. New contributor P.J. Fell acquaints us with the subculture of oik Cornwall. What rich git emerging from the Tate St Ives could possibly imagine the seething resentment and rage of the impoverished locals who can’t even afford a lock-up garage. The place is as weird as Romania and the Tate itself, a mad folly, is about as much use as Ceausescu’s palace in Bucharest.  

So where would you rather be? At home reading the oik in an armchair  or swanning round Cornwall in the middle of January looking for somewhere to park or even a decent chippy – somewhere you wouldn’t have your lights kicked in. Phone…. 

 

Ken Clay January 2014