Dermott Hayes's Blog: Postcard from a Pigeon, page 37
October 2, 2016
Trumpet’s Challenge, Part II
Part 2 of a Dickensian style trilogy, The Rise and Fall of Donald Trumpet Esq.
………………………
Five generations of Thomas Wellspring’s family grew up on the shoreline of Failsafe . Wellsprings were fishermen, sailors and, for the last three generations since his grandfather, Benjamin, started his business, fishmongers. Indeed, until recent years, Wellspring’s Fishmongers and adjoining Cafe were not only the leading fish merchant in the town, they were the measure of all that was good, fresh and fishy in Failsafe.
‘Times change,’ his father said to him and to hear him say that, he who was once so proud of the family’s standing, took the wind from his sails and left him languish in doldrums, until, of course, his ageing grandfather, puffing furiously on his cob pipe, spluttered, ‘Bilge Water,’ before doubling over at the dinner table with a fit of coughing and then, recovering after a thirsty draught from his freshly charged schooner of sherry, ‘it grieves me to hear a tadpole speak,’ he said, casting a bitter and withering look at his only son, Thomas Senior, ‘it’s time that hairless peacock, Trumpet, was put back in his box. I’d fillet him for chum, I would, were I ten years younger.’
The affairs of the town’s Alderman and merchant tycoon, Donald Trumpet often arose over Sunday dinner in the Wellspring household and when they did, the women of the household, spotting Trumpet clouds on the horizon, withdrew to safer shores and the drawing room and left the men of the house to weather that storm together. Yes, a chat on the topic of Trumpet was always more than a squall and more frequently, a tempest.
In the five years since Michael, the junior, although head of the household and commander in chief of the good ship, Wellspring and all that sailed in her, returned from seafaring and took over control of the family business interests from his ailing father, the affairs and machinations of Alderman Donald Trumpet often clashed with their own and so were discussed and cogitated upon in some detail and no little agitation.
The topic of discussion today was Alderman Trumpet’s proposal to change the town’s name to Trumpet Cove, the latest manifestation in an ever lengthening list of the pompadoured poltroon’s forays into self aggrandizement. Many of these – like the statue of himself erected on the city’s dockside but beside the town’s wildest cathouse – were the source of much mirth and ridicule but others, like the banning of migrant workers, once the stalwart of the town’s seasonal trade, but now replaced by Trumpet’s own immigrants, for whom he’d wrangled legal papers and enfranchisement, thus swelling his own electoral support, were unsettling indications of his future intentions.
Everyone knew he was a bigger crook than his predecessor, Alderman Crook, but did or said nothing. They’d watched as many of the town’s most respected families fell on hard times and then their businesses and properties sequestered but, while some grumbled, nothing was done. began by acquiring a couple of street stalls, now he controlled the supply of mussels, clams and cockles and by buying out three of the Wellspring’s competitors and consolidating, become the single biggest fishmonger in the town.
But now his proposal to rename the town and, in the process, own the town, since the privilege to use his name was contingent with a new name tax on every citizen; every duty or licence paid and every permit granted by the town’s council, the numbers of which had multiplied since Trumpet’s election to the town council.
…………….
There are days when the sun shines and casts a sheen over Failsafe harbour, a balmy sea breeze wafts a sea scented freshness over the town and its people, then God’s in his Heaven and all is well with the world. Well, so it was for Alderman Donald Trumpet as he watched a team of city workers wash and shine his statue, divesting it of the coat of guano it attracts with worrying frequency.
Sitting at a terrace table of his own,happily sun drenched, dockside cafe, the Alderman felt the sun shone on him alone and anyone else who felt it, did so by his grace. So the sight of a liveried carriage and its passenger, a lady of such elegance and beauty, her pulchritude was so dazzling as to turn heads and put this summer’s day’s sunshine in the shade, well, his attention was instantly diverted.
Unheeding of the attention, the lady, dressed in a fashionably cut outfit of the finest cream silk, alighted, assisted by her liveried driver and strode with assurance up the steps to the door of La Confiture, an elegant Georgian building and the town’s biggest, best known and notorious bawdy house.
Donald Trumpet sat staring, mouth agape. Paying little or no attention to her destination, he turned to Bench, Crook’s old retainer and now his manservant, standing, attentive, two feet behind him, ‘Who is that?’ he asked, ‘find out who she is.’ he flicked his hand dismissively and Bench slid out of his view.
If he had been paying attention to her destination, La Confiture, he might’ve seen the resemblance between her and its recently deceased owner, the improbably named Madame Blanche Fontaine. But since his only contact with the town’s Madame was in his contentious efforts to shut her down, they’d never met and he was certainly no customer of her establishment. No, his efforts to shut her down were related to the success of her business and how much he wished to get hold and control of it. When she died, less than four days before, of apoplexy, he was hardly surprised, since it was he who issued the warrant to shut her down along with the well upholstered bill to cover the cost of doing so.
Donald Trumpet made a decision. He rose and strode from his sun soaked cafe terrace and strode down the street, confident, entitled. She would be his wife, the perfect complement to his own perfection.
…………..
‘He’s what? Challenging me, my council seat, Wellspring? How dare he?’
Bench often wondered why he’d accepted the position as the Alderman’s assistant and general factotum. He hated Trumpet ten times more than he ever hated Crook and he hated Crook so much he never washed in the hope that Crook might notice and send him on his way.
Donald Trumpet felt set upon. Bench returned with news that shook him to his foundations. First, he told him the vision in cream was Miss Fifi Fontaine, the Parisian courtesan and royal concubine and grandniece and sole heir of his deceased business rival, Madame Blanche. Second, because the good townsfolk of Failsafe had thrown up someone for the role of his political opponent and nemesis, Thomas Wellspring II.
CATCH UP: Read Trumpet’s Triumph, Part I of this Dickensian trilogy
Trumpet’s Triumph, Part I, a Dickensian tale
The Guardian plays catch up
Why the internet of things is the new magic ingredient for cyber criminals
John Naughton
Brian Krebs is one of the unsung heroes of tech journalism. He’s a former reporter for the Washington Post who decided to focus on cybercrime after his home network was hijacked by Chinese hackers in 2001. Since then, he has become one of the world’s foremost investigators of online crime. In the process, he has become an expert on the activities of the cybercrime groups that operate in eastern Europe and which have stolen millions of dollars from small- to medium-size businesses through online banking fraud. His reporting has identified the crooks behind specific scams and even led to the arrest of some of them.
October 1, 2016
Whose life is it anyway? Novelists have their say on cultural appropriation
Jonathan Franzen claimed he won’t write about race because of limited ‘firsthand experience’, while Lionel Shriver hopes objection to ‘cultural appropriation is a passing fad’. So should there be boundaries on what a novelist can write about?
The Guardian asked Hari Kunzru, Kamila Shamsie, Aminatta Forna, AL Kennedy, Philip Hensher and others give their point of view
September 30, 2016
testing…testing…1,2…1,2
It’s always a good thing to change what you’re doing every now and then and try something different. So, if you’re going to write 50 word stories in response to the daily post prompt, try something new. How about a story about Donald Trump as a Dickensian character? It’s a test.
Trumpet’s Triumph, Part I, a Dickensian tale
Picture credit: nymag.com
After posting a story yesterday,, reblogged from The Literary Hub , about the origins of some of those names so beloved of Victorian English writer, , it occurred to me that Donald Trump would’ve made an ideal Dickensian moniker. So I set about writing a Dickensian style tale with a character named ‘Donald Trumpet.’ Even further, it occurred to me this could be an ideal literary challenge to create a fictional story with a character named ‘Trump.’
It was one of those damp, dark and so dreary fog-rotten days, to induce dreams of a warm settle perch, the chirp of crickets, the ambrosial waft of turf in a roaring hearth and a rum toddy, cinnamon scented, and scorched by a red hot poker. It was not a day for standing, waiting and stamping feet while Alderman Sylvester Crook completed his creaking preparations and deigned to receive him.
‘Alderman Crook, your honour, I trust your night was good and your day ahead will be better,’ he greeted the hunched politician.
Donald Trumpet, respected merchant of the manor, felt his own teeth grind destructively, such was his grovelling obsequiousness. This did not please him, the teeth were just newly bought, fashioned from ivory bought at a discount from a scaly Chinese with whom he traded, for fish and opium. The Alderman is well named, he thought, Crook by name and so, by nature.
Now Crook shrugged off his greatcoat, taken away to hang in a closet by his elderly manservant, Bench – who smelled of mildew and old fish – straightened his wig in a looking glass behind the door, yanked the bunched seat of his trousers with one fist before farting, loudly and sat, in a high backed chair behind his wide, teak desk. He arranges items, a leather cuffed blotter pad, a goose quill and ivory inkwell before deigning to look at and acknowledge Trumpet’s existence.
This he does, head tilted, squinting down the length of his thin, aquiline nose before pausing to plunge one nostril into a pocket of sturdy miner’s snuff that left a thin brown thread, made him squint sharper and then sneeze, like a yapping lapdog. All this he did without losing his disdainful aplomb, as though possessed of a surplus pair of hands and all the while giving Trumpet the uneasy feeling he was something he’d trailed in on his boots.
And it was then, in this pause, pregnant with impatience and repugnance, he realised the Alderman was waiting for him to speak, to begin his entreaty. Trumpet needed labourers, a workforce of pliant toilers and he needed them cheap. The Alderman held the keys to Trumpet’s future or, at least, another fortune in Trumpet’s unscrupulous and trenchant march to the top of the mercantile ladder.
Trumpet was a tall man, taller than most and carried himself with an air of entitlement so entrenched, he was certain his own shit didn’t smell and his head, prematurely bald and covered with a perfumed wig, was an unseen rival’s evil plot.
First apprenticed to a local moneylender, Trumpet took to his trade with a gusto that expanded the coffers of his master while lining his own in almost equal and soon greater measure. Trumpet foreclosed on dockside traders faster than a clam could shut for business in shallow sand. Soon, he controlled the shellfish market for inns and alehouses, never mind the household orders and shorefront trade so he turned his attention to the clam surfers and cockle and whelk wranglers who he welched and cheated until they lost their boats, buckets, rakes, forks, shovels and nets in a mess of debt for which he owned their note.
Which was why he sat here now, not so much in the company of but the audience to the venerable local Alderman, Sylvester Crook who, with a stroke of his pen, could give leave and licence to him to explore and exploit a goldmine of vagrant labour, a colony of beleaguered immigrant tramps, the human flotsam of continental war, landed here as either a curse or Heaven sent manna and encamped on a corner of that very same shoreline where great profits were waiting to be harvested.
The ageing Alderman listened to Trumpet’s plea without responding, leaving the irritated merchant to fidget and wonder if the septuagenarian was either asleep or simply senile. Crook was slumped but still sat upright. His right hand clutched his soiled and snot sodden hanky, his right nostril had the brown smudge of snuff and there was an expectorant drizzle on the greying ruffle of his shirt but his eyes had sunk deeper and lower than a winter sunset. There was no light there, the old fart was dead.
Momentarily disturbed and discombobulated by the ailing Alderman’s effrontery, to die at such an inopportune time, it was, he thought, inconvenient and downright inconsiderate. He was about to make the old fart’s future retirement, comfortable beyond his wildest dreams or what penurious pension he might expect from his years at public service. The satchel of golden guineas that weighted his pants were a testimony to that.
Then it occurred to Trumpet, like all his financial bonanza thoughts had struck before, in his own pocket, this fortune sat safe and unspent and, while he was no nearer his goal, an opportunity now presented itself that, with brief reflection, fell to him like a natural birthright. He would bury the Alderman in the graveyard for local dignitaries for which he owned the burial rights, with full honours and at a discount rate, yet to be determined.
The burial, of course, would be an ideal platform from which to announce his own candidacy for the departed’s vacant seat at Council and, since every other councillor was already in his pocket, he would soon secure his position and, along with that, his licence to hire the immigrants and all this he would achieve with no cost to himself and, if possible, a substantial profit. It was sound business practice, he told himself.
In the seconds elapsed since he discovered the ageing Alderman not just unresponsive but dead, Trumpet mapped out his future and the future enlargement of his coffers and deemed them an inalienable right for which he was born to receive, not achieve, he never noticed the arrival of Crook’s manservant, Bench, until he smelled him.
The wizened retainer appeared to straighten when it dawned on him his master had departed this mortal coil then emitted a sound like a cackle of remorse or a chuckle of delight, he wasn’t sure and the intoxicating stench of Bench made him care less.
He barked an order at the offending lackey to clear the table and lay out his master and to go thence to Benjamin Grief’s, the undertaker and his employee, to procure him and arrange the funeral services. With any luck, he thought, he’d bury the old bastard, get elected and still have a jingle in his pocket by week’s end.
Trump’s Triumph, Part I, a Dickensian tale
Picture credit: nymag.com
After posting a story yesterday,, reblogged from The Literary Hub , about the origins of some of those names so beloved of Victorian English writer, , it occurred to me that Donald Trump would’ve made an ideal Dickensian moniker. So I set about writing a Dickensian style tale with a character named ‘Donald Trump.’ Even further, it occurred to me this could be an ideal literary challenge to create a fictional story with a character named ‘Trump.’
It was one of those damp, dark and so dreary fog-rotten days, to induce dreams of a warm settle perch, the chirp of crickets, the ambrosial waft of turf in a roaring hearth and a rum toddy, cinnamon scented, and scorched by a red hot poker. It was not a day for standing, waiting and stamping feet while Alderman Sylvester Crook completed his creaking preparations and deigned to receive him.
‘Alderman Crook, your honour, I trust your night was good and your day ahead will be better,’ he greeted the hunched politician.
Donald Trump, respected merchant of the manor, felt his own teeth grind destructively, such was his grovelling obsequiousness. This did not please him, the teeth just newly bought, fashioned from ivory at a discount from a scaly Chinese with whom he traded, for fish and opium. The Alderman is well named, he thought, Crook by name and so, by nature.
Now Crook shrugged off his greatcoat, taken away to hang in a close by his elderly manservant, Bench, who smelled of mildew and old fish, straightened his wig in a looking glass behind the door, yanked the bunched seat of his trousers with one fist before farting, loudly and sat, in a high backed chair behind his wide, teak desk. He arranges items on his desk, a leather cuffed blotter pad, a goose quill and ivory inkwell before deigning to look and acknowledge Trump’s existence.
This he does, head tilted, squinting down the length of his thin, aquiline nose before pausing to plunge one nostril into a pocket of sturdy miner’s snuff that left a thin brown thread, made him squint sharper and then sneeze, like a yapping lapdog. All this he did without losing his disdainful aplomb, as though possessed of a surplus pair of hands and all the while giving Trump the uneasy feeling he was something the Alderman trailed in on his boots.
And it was then, in this pause, pregnant with impatience and repugnance, he realised the Alderman was waiting for him to speak, to begin his entreaty. Trump needed labourers, a workforce of pliant toilers and he needed them cheap. The Alderman held the keys to Trump’s future or, at least, another fortune in Trump’s unscrupulous and trenchant march to the top of the mercantile ladder.
Trump was a tall man, taller than most and carried himself with an air of entitlement so entrenched, he was certain his own shit didn’t smell and his head, prematurely bald and covered with a perfumed wig, was attacked by an unseen rival’s evil plot.
First apprenticed to a local moneylender, Trump took to his trade with a gusto that expanded the coffers of his master while lining his own in almost equal and soon greater measure. Trump foreclosed on dockside traders faster than a clam could shut for business in shallow sand. Soon, he controlled the shellfish market for inns and alehouses, never mind the household orders and shorefront trade so he turned his attention to the clam surfers and cockle and whelk wranglers who he welched and cheated until they lost their boats, buckets, rakes, forks, shovels and nets in a mess of debt for which he owned their note. Which was why he sat here now, not so much in the company of but the audience to the venerable local Alderman, Sylvester Crook who, with a stroke of his pen, could give leave and licence to him to explore and exploit a goldmine of vagrant labour, a colony of beleaguered immigrant tramps, the human flotsam of continental war, landed here as either a curse or Heaven sent manna and encamped on a corner of that very same shoreline where great profits were waiting to be harvested.
The ageing Alderman listened to Trump’s plea, without responding leaving the irritated merchant to fidget and wonder if the septuagenarian was either asleep or simply senile. Crook was slumped but still sat upright. His right hand clutched his soiled and snot sodden hanky, his right nostril had the brown smudge of snuff and there was an expectorant drizzle on the greying ruffle of his shirt but his eyes had sunk deeper and lower than a winter sunset. There was no light there, the old fart was dead.
Momentarily disturbed and discombobulated by the ailing Alderman’s effrontery, to die at such an inopportune time, it was, he thought, inconvenient and downright inconsiderate. He was about to make the old fart’s future retirement, comfortable beyond his wildest dreams or what penurious pension he might expect from his years at public service. The satchel of golden guineas that weighted his pants were a testimony to that.
Then it occurred to Trump, like all his financial bonanza thoughts had struck before, in his own pocket, this fortune sat safe and unspent and, while he was no nearer his goal, an opportunity now presented itself that, with brief reflection, fell to him like a natural birthright. He would bury the Alderman in the graveyard for local dignitaries for which he owned the burial rights, with full hours and at a discount rate, yet to be determined. The burial, of course, would be an ideal platform from which to announce his own candidacy for the departed’s vacant seat at Council and, since every other councillor was already in his pocket, he would soon secure his position and, along with that, his licence to hire the immigrants and all this he would achieve with no cost to himself and, if possible, a substantial profit. It was sound business practice, he told himself.
In the seconds elapsed since he discovered the ageing Alderman not just unresponsive but dead, Trump had mapped out his future and the future enlargement of his coffers and deemed them an inalienable right for which he was born to achieve, he never noticed the arrival of Crook’s manservant, Bench, until he smelled him. The wizened retainer appeared to straighten when it dawned on him his master had departed this mortal coil then emitted a sound like a cackle of remorse or a chuckle of delight, he wasn’t unsure and the intoxicating stench of Bench made him care less. He barked an order at the offending lackey to clear the table and lay out his master and to go thence to Grief’s, the undertaker and his employee, to procure his services and arrange the funeral services. With any luck, he thought, he’d bury the old bastard, get elected and still have a jingle in his pocket by week’s end.
September 29, 2016
Bury My Heart at Standing Rock
Sep. 29, 2016 08:49AM EST
21 Arrested During Peaceful Prayer Ceremony at Standing Rock – WAR INA BABYLON
Dan Zukowski
The Morton County Sheriff’s Department, whose officers used mace and unleashed dogs on Dakota Access Pipeline protestors earlier this month, sent in armored vehicles and arrested 21 people Wednesday at two sites. But a video released by those at the Sacred Ground Camp shows unarmed protestors conducting a prayer ceremony involving the planting of willow and corn.
Read more at this link, too…video footage and photographs…
http://bsnorrell.blogspot.ie/2016/09/standing-rock-breaking-news-surrounded.html
10 Dickensian Character Names Deciphered
This article was in a recent edition of Literary Hub and it made me wonder if Charles Dickens was writing today, would Donald Trump be one of his characters? From Mr. Pumblechook to Mr. Pecksniff, the Meaning Behind the Monikers
By Bryan Kozlowski
You have to love Charles Dickens’ knack for naming characters. Who else could have come up with monikers like Mr. Sweedlepipe, Honeythunder, Pumblechook, and Squeers? And who, but Dickens, could make each name fit so well, like a tight literary glove, onto each character’s unique personality (of course Scrooge is a miser, could a scrooge be anything else?)
It was a talent that has kept readers chuckling for nearly two centuries. But time has left us modern, neo-Dickensians with a major disadvantage. We don’t see things in those names that Victorian readers would have easily picked up on, hidden 19th-century slang that would tell us something new (and often funny) about each character’s makeup. In short, we miss the brilliance of many Dickensian names because we rarely look beyond their appearance and sound. To redress that, here’s a look at ten of Dickens’ most beloved characters and what their names really mean.
Who Gets to Write What? – NY Times
September 24, 2016
When I was in graduate school, I remember a fellow writer bringing to a workshop a lynching scene. The writer was not black. He was, in fact, a Chinese-American man named Bill Cheng, who would go on to write a novel of the blues called “Southern Cross the Dog.”
In class that day, we hemmed and hawed over discussing the scene until our professor slammed the table and shouted at the room, “Does Bill have the right to write this scene?”
Postcard from a Pigeon
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