The Journal of Provincial Thought

jptArchive Issue 6

luminance

________________________________________________

Shrdlu, born in 1891 in the fetid Brupp District of Stenchpuddle in lower eastern Unserbeenershire, grew up on the streets that quartered the district of squalid back-to-back/up-and-downer cottages erected in the 1820s by the coal and pork barons.  He was as underfed, dirty and bejabbered as any urchin of the day, but he had the astounding good fortune to be noticed by the Brownfrock Brothers who ministered to this cesspool.  He was taken to a day school, beaten soundly with a pandy bat, given 1 ½ square meals a day and taught his abecedarium with the aid of a cat o’nine tails, a primer printed in the XVIIIth century and a cataplasm of earnest prayer.  After years at Pucefriars School, young Shrdlu was urped onto the sidewalks of Glasgow with a gilt-edged certificate of education, a worn scholar’s robe and four wrinkled farthing notes.

            He was 15 years old, knew Greek, Latin, Olde Pharsee and a smattering of Patagonian, along with the Brothers’ standard curriculum of phrenology, numismatics, phlebotomy, funambulism, proctology and advanced logarithms.  From this humble entry into the great, bustling world, plucky Etaoin rose like a backwards meteor.  He learned to busk on the streets of Glasgow, playing a Northumbrian arse-flute, a one-lung bagpipe or a plain old E-flat velocipede.  Then he found he had a handy talent for making up lyrics to the music he was making up, and he graduated to playing and chortling in pubs for a gallon or two of heavy or a large bagful of pork scramblings.

            In a very few years he had met and bedazzled the stars of the Glasgow theatre world, such as Alfred Lord Fartch, Pearse O’Flatulla, Uwanda Godspeed and (of course) G.W. Zutrz, the great-grandaddy of Keltic Everything.  He found he could write verse in arcane rhythmic and stanzaic patterns without even knowing it, that scrawling a three-act parlor gambol was a doddle, that even weird song patterns involving banshees and ghoulies were music to his ears.  He began to claim that he was not (strictly speaking) Scottish but a rare combo of French and ur-Celtic stock, descended from the Goths that overran Gaul when the various decadent caesars made a pig’s ear of it all. He claimed close cousinship with Bonnie Prince Charlie, on the sinister side of the blanket. 

            Shrdlu was a devoted autodidactic student of such surreal history, and after festering in the British Library Reading Room for a decade, he became the most irascible and mongrelic author published by the major university presses, insisting on typesetting every jot, tittle, comma, accent grave, skyhook, umlicht and other bizarre need of Old Keltic dialects.  His thick, crumbly books moldered on remainder stands along the Bourse, but the besotted British academics slavered to publish his every dropping.  He had his portrait made by such sterling modernists as Augustus John and Modigliani (as a sensuous reclining nude shaped like a banana), appeared in one of Louis Buñuel’s more gruesome surrealist films (in a close-up, Shrdlu’s lips seem to be severed by a giant papercutter) and was memorialized onstage in Paris in the infamous brownshirt version of the Scottish Tragedy by enfante terrible Jeanne Coctupp.  In the dark 1930s, Etaoin was a puddle of glimmer like a small spotlight on that epoch.  He migrated to America to see if the streets were indeed made of angel food.

            Shrdlu’s star rose and glittered handsomely into the middle of the 20^th century, and he achieved a vast reputation as a fat-mouthed and disputatious, argy-bargy-prone pubcrawler with an eye for the main chance.  He outlived such arrant glow worms as Dylan Thomas, out-drank pusillanimous revelers like O’Starrygaze, out-felonized old lags like Behan and reached a mass audience through hard-to-obtain LP recordings of various poetry-and-song sessions captured by devoted followers on magnetic tape.  Shrdlu’s melodious baritone rang through suburban living rooms from Levittown to East Ashtabula, and cadres of college students played his albums while trying to learn erotic banjo fingering or how to weave a Celtic cylinder basket from old bassoon reeds. He was featured mistakenly in a Newsweek review of Our Glitzy Existentialists, included in a new Dictionary of Ephemeral Fame and featured on late-nite TV revues in the company of Alexander King and Zsa Zsa Gabor.  His self-regard swelled to gargantuan proportions, until he contracted gout and psoriasis, his fickle audiences turned their backs on him and the juggernaut 1960s rolled him into a small greasy puddle.

            This was, however, not the end of Etaoin Shrdlu, Bard of Iron.  He rose again in the benigner 1970s (except for Nixon, Vietnam, Ireland, Africa, Cambodia, etc.) and made his way from his SoHo loft to Madison Square Garden to MC a Kelto-Fest that ushered in the present age of universal celtomania.  It was a roaring success for everyone but poor Shrdlu, who unfortunately expired of a massive heart attack backstage, moments before the Giant All-Cast Hootenanny brought down the final curtain.  Although Shrdlu’s shocking death on June 31, 1979, was explained and diagrammed in the morning papers, the pathetic dead SuperKelt never lived down rampant speculations that he had simply died rather than face the adoring mob, one final churlish act of self-will and obstinate contrariness.  His fan clubs dissolved, the Etaoin Shrdlu Journal closed its doors, and all his LP albums were remaindered at shockingly derisory prices in drugstores and supermarkets.  His books remained fixed to library shelves, unopened, unread.  His hard-won reputation was as evanescent as the morning dew, one of his favorite lyric images, and thus an entirely fitting one to be pinned on him from here to eternity. ### 

jptArchive Issue 6

Copyright 2008- WJ Schafer & WC Smith - All Rights Reserved

by Wyoming Rictus