Ade Ileke: How I Get Ideas

 The Library in the Drones Club

My crowd seems very eclectic, which is pretty much to my taste. If I do not have a variety of people to talk to, I would have nothing to say.
I've said that most of my ideas come from other people, and it's true. I just sit around reading The Times at the Drones Club until Jespersen glides in holding his silver charger with a small ivory envelope on it, saying that a Mr. Darn-Good-Notion awaits without. I crack open the note, take a gander, sniff a bit, then tell good old J. to show him to the billiard room, where shall have our tête-à-tête... with plenty of good stiff pool cues handy. My morning horoscope in the Sun had said that I should beware of a tall dark stranger.

"Jespersen," I say to the retreating morning coat.

"Sir?" he says, pausing in his tracks.

"This Mr. Notion... is he tall? Tall and dark, actually. Is he tall and dark?"

"Yes, sir." J. affirms.

The brow furrows under my delving thoughts.
"Uh, very much so? I mean, very tall?"

"Yes, sir. I would say almost 2 metres."

I pondered. "And dark... very dark?"

"Like a Gypsy, sir."

Since the banter had descended to stereotypical descriptions - and decidedly Victorian ones, at that - there was nothing for it but to trot off to the carambole room and meet the fellow. One never knows. Usually they're ne'er-do-wells, but ... sometimes... a great... Notion?

What I mean is, if everyone were in total agreement and in if, in our discussions, shades of meaning were totally beigey earth tones, then we would all be rather dull.

--
an apocryphal quasi-pseudo-rehash

Ade Ileke: Thomas Carlyle Meditates on Sartor Bis Resartus

reprint

Thomas Carlyle, Author of Sartor Resartus

While sitting at a dinner party at Cliveden... No, that's not quite true. We were not at Cliveden, and my gentleman's gentleman was not on the qui vive looking for a way to restore my uncle's memoirs - expurgated, to be sure - to the hall table, all of which my dear fiancee, Daphne, had put me up to. We were sitting at a dinner table, and having recently dined, talk rolled around to the various and sultry...err, sundry, that is.

This is not a Somerset Maugham novel - anachronistic scribbler! Toasts were made; great things and great men were hoisted up and flutes and goblets were drained. Now - and here's where the interesting part begins - a lady at my left said that I should make a toast to the younger crowd. She furthermore said that I had recently said something to her own offspring that she had found deeply moving. Now, you could not have knocked me over with a feather, for I had already passed out and hoped the medics were on the way. I was not aware that this particular individual had any use for any two consecutive words that had ever pushed and elbowed their way out of my mouth.

The Room Where Carlyle Wrote Sartor Resartus

I mean, my wife usually has me swear on the nearest holy text at hand that, upon going to some gathering, I shall not say anything controversial, personal, nor problematic. In short, mum's the word. There is a very, very short list of poses and postures I am allowed, most of them coming down to unobtrusively standing mute, but with a knowing smile plastered on my face like some hideous poultice for a scrofulous pimple. And if this does not work, if the effect of my oath wears off, and I find myself blurting out opinions, a swift, firm kick under the table usually serves to remind me.
Beyond this, I pretty much talk the way I write. I actually say things like "arduous", and "onerous", and "crapulous", words that usually make us wish we had a dictionary close at hand, preferably to "bean" me with.

I say things like "Obit anus, abit onus." and so on, laugh about Fermi's lab under the football bleachers at U. of Chicago, and tell jokes about G.E.Moore. So upon hearing that person X actually wants to hear something Y from my lips, you may imagine my surprise Z.
So I made a toast:  

Esteem Honor and Loyalty. Be fierce in Love and Friendship. Be firm in your commitments, be unswerving in your devotion, be truthful, be devout. Be all those things that have dropped out of fashion within my lifetime. Be real Men and Women, not mannequins of Materialism . 

Giorgio de Chirico presaged our generation in his enigmatic paintings: the faceless mannequins which conveyed a sense of desuetude and ennui. I feel like Winston Smith, standing before the infinitely reflecting mirror in his love nest in the proletarian section of the city: brief freedom... We are the living!... Only to have the Thought Police respond from behind the mirror: You are the dead! Escape, young people! Escape our castle enchanted by endless sleep! Escape from the cold marble of the winter cenotaphs we have laid over the Earth!

Am I Thomas Carlyle? Remade? From full clothe, yet twice? Or more?
--

Flash Fictions

I rattle off so many goofy things that I have forgotten most of them. I have, for example, forgotten my "Flash Fictions", which themselves sort of morphed from vague and indistinct short story-lines to an imitation of flash mobs.
I like both incarnations, and I reprint the two posts which incarnated them and I hope to do more.


**



Flash Fiction
03/02/2011

Kandinsky " The Blue Rider "

"I saw the Blue Rider go by today, up by the birch grove. He rode fast."

"He always rides fast in autumn," he said thoughtfully. "Spring and autumn, regular... regular... as a village square clockwork horse and rider tolling the hours."

She mused. "Hooves beating time like Magog 'n' Gog."

In autumn and in spring...


**

Flash Fiction 2
03/22/2011

             Ade Ileke - A Beaded Crown

 
I rather like this "Flash Fiction" thing.... where an army of literate chaps sort of pop out of nowhere at the local mall, and jointly recite "Evangeline" while the shoppers look on in consternation. I was in one myself yesterday. We had chosen a section of script from The King's Speech to declaim to the masses, and I'm quite sure all thought us mad. I mean, it is one thing to set aside disbelief and watch the British Empire on the silver screen with Helena Bonham Carter guiding one through the mystic rites, but it is all rather trembling and aghast and "what ho!??" when actually confronted with the spectacle of HRH stuttering in front of all and sundry.
It was, however, better than the time we did Mussolini's speech of February 23, 1941 last week:

"The Ethiopian war was hardly finished when from the other shore of the Mediterranean there reached us appeals from General Franco, who had begun his national revolution. Could we Fascisti leave without answer that cry and remain indifferent in the face of the perpetuation of the bloody crimes of the so-called popular fronts? Could we refuse to give our aid to the movement of salvation that had found in Antonio Primo de Rivera its creator, ascetic and martyr? No. Thus our first squadron of airplanes left on July 27, 1936, and during the same day we had our first dead...."

and people thought it was all about Libya, and came up and congratulated us "UN Firsters" and "One Worlders" for finally getting it right! Some thought the "New World Order" was getting a bit more like "New World Symphony", certainly high faluting and highly browed, but imbued with more of the common touch, and kicking ass in Africa was very much on the menu as Special of the Day!
Most odd. But, then, what could we have been expecting? The only thing worse could be next month's Flash The Tempest in the Mall of the Americas, when I shall be doing Caliban, and Tempestt from the Great Clips barber shop is doing the tempest itself! Brrr! Makes one reach for the old bumbershoot just thinking about it.

OK. Enough. That is not what Flash fiction is. It is actually mini-fiction: the impenetrable rain forest of wordy novels clear-cut and deforested down to a small verdant space. Miniatures, cameos, gems of Lit 101.

I like it. I need my own name for it. The future belongs to Funes the Memorious, where even the Numbers have individualized names: 20 is "archimedes" and 26 is "homeric hymns" so great is our blogospherical memory!
Mary Ellen had "Stones", which I tried. It reminds me of "lapidary" and the polished phrasings of Herakleitos. Ruth has "Nouvelle 55", stories in 55 words.
Hmm....  "ileke"  which is Yoruba for "bead"; a bead in a rosary of stones, a necklace, a bracelet... a continuum of small small.
A collection of ileke is an ade ileke, a beaded crown.

**

So there are 2 distinct types of thing here: a fiction and a crowd-event.

Ade Ileke will be reserved for fictions, and Flash Fiction for the crowd-event-thingies. I mean, I really like being in a public place and talking like FDR myself. In fact, I do it often.

 Unfortunately, it looks more like Guy Caballero. Here I am doing my "The only thing we have to be afraid of is... being... afraid... of something... or other... ITSELF!"
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