The Easter Sunday Ishmael: Rejoice

 Vent Stack is launched!

from the desk of Editor mr verge:

ishmaelites who buy a copy of Vent Stack will see that it comes (blessed relief, etc) without the editorial essay that introduced its predecessor Honest, Not Invent. This is because I hope we got what needed saying said in the previous volume, and didn’t want to take up space in the shorter second book unnecessarily. Instead, there are opening and closing remarks gleaned from stanislav and ishmael himself (or themselves – I think it worked both ways, as we’ll see in a moment.)  One of these is what appears to be stanislav’s first comment, on order-order, in August 2007. Just a few months later he was posting Handel’s Plumber; our young polish friend’s fruition was an achievement as remarkable for its pungent brilliance as for being bang-on in-character straight out of the blocks. Readers loved it – or loved to hate it – and word quickly spread; I was amused to find the following hat-tip (posted December 14, 2007 – “Blog Review 446”) on the website of the Adam Smith Institute…

“…And finally, in the comments at Guido’s, Stanislav, a young polish plumber. Not PC, foul language and very, very funny.”  

 

(Younger readers may need reminding that we had a Labour government at the time, headed by stanislav’s special favourite, Gordon Brown. It is clearly no coincidence that Brown’s accession to the grubby fastness of #10 coincided pretty closely with the arrival of young stanislav, taking names & spitting fire.) 

 

And not just the Adam Smith Institute – this comes from an email written in February 2010 :

“mrs ishmael tells me that she heard someone on Radio 4 mentioning skymadeupnewsandfilth and yesterday I read of Mr Hague of JCB limited, a part-time MP, foretelling Ruin, should the Snotman not be banished. I do believe that stanislav, the young plumber, enjoyed, via Colonel von Fawkes, a parliamentary readership; I suppose the concept of Ruin is not unique to immigrant Polish artisans but it is nice to think that his spluttering commentaries were read and absorbed even by the halt, the lame and the disfigured, such as Bald Willie as he joshed, postprandially, with his useful wife Fffffffion, on ay matter, ay matter very dear to their hearts. And pockets…”

 

This penetration of Establishment awareness did not go unnoticed by the woke wing of British political bloggers. Writing in April, 2009, Paul Linford complained about the rocking-horse meme spawned by order-order, and castigated Guido Fawkes for having given “house-room to a sock puppet called "Stanislav" who suggested, in one particularly disgusting post, that the Prime Minister had been steadily driven mad by the strain of repressing his "homosexuality" over many years - part of a deadly serious attempt by the right to fix the idea of Gordon as a "weirdo" in the public’s mind.” 

 Fawkes himself then joined the thread, and wrote that the “rocking horse story and Stanislav are not my products. They appear in the comments - of which I am not the author (...) I have also said I do not believe the various versions of the rocking horse story. Stanislav the Polish plumber’s much missed streams of conscience were satirical. He wasn’t really a plumber by the way. He wasn’t me either.” (Think we might have worked that last bit out for ourselves, but never mind.) The following day, ishmael also chipped in, happily splitting his sense of self (illeism, innit) and cheekily blowing his own trumpet, though not like a certain PBC contortionist we shan’t mention, as follows :

call me ishmael said... perhaps if mr stanislav were to invade a sovereign nation and butcher its population, destroy its infrastructure, steal its natural resources, beggar the nation, short-change its armed personnel, mock truth and justice, promote the inept, safeguard the misfit and the degenerate and lie consistently to the entire world he might merit your opprobrium; as it is, his vicious lampoonery, often fabulously elegant, always rythmical, inventive and cultured and very often heart-stoppingly funny, is reposted all over the web, often by those whom you would consider respectable. mr stanislav’s crimes against humanity consist of cursing and damning the increasingly unaccountable, murderous power elites; he has never been known to deploy napalm or any of Mr Hoon’s delightful fragmentation bombs - infant dismemberment being a speciality of HM Government.

Mr Fawkes’ apparent solecism in describing mr stanislav’s “stream of conscience” writing is probably quite accurate. You should go and google The Melted Cavalryman, for instance, or else go and make your sockpuppetry claims at an army website, anonymously…

 

Speaking of Fawkes, and the mistaken assumption that stanislav was a right-wing attack-dog, it’s worth revisiting part of an ishmael post from June, 2016 (Bad Faith and Good Terms) :

 

This corner of Cyber Street is peopled by Marxists and Marx-haters, by Tories, active and passive, by statists and non-statists, by liberals and reactionaries; hedging my denominational bets, I have for a long time described myself as a Zen-Presbyterian-Marxist - shit happens, take what you have and give to the poor, and workers of the world unite; they all seem to coalesce quite nicely for me. When I occupied a space at Colonel von Fawkes’s Pizza House of Blood, the multitudinious audience of my friend, stanislav, a young Polish plumber, despite his clear, Leftish leanings, was largely what would then have been called right-wingers. I have never stopped puzzling about this curious, contradictory attraction; why did an old Lefty, such as young stanislav, resonate so clearly amongst so many old Righties; that’s the conundrum which I found myself articulating the other night, to mrs ishmael, on the subject of Candidate Trump; sometimes, I said, it seems the only way you can get to the left is by turning to the right…

 

If memory serves, that Pizza House of Blood moniker comes from an order-order campaign to crowd-fund take-aways for the IDF, and encapsulates the reason (well, that and moderation) stanislav abandoned the site; it may also explain why Fawkes - Paul Staines - fell silent after receiving his (offered, accepted, delivered & acknowledged) complimentary copy of Honest, Not Invent at the end of October last year. This is a pity, but not worth dwelling on now, not even with a hardback instead of a housebrick.

 Most of the material in Vent Stack is presented chronologically, and comes wrapped in the two parts of Gordon The Ruiner, written and posted in 2009 after the split with order-order and a couple of months before the first posts here on Call Me Ishmael.  I’m not entirely sure where it first appeared, as the interim blog stanislav’s blues was soon deleted (by its author) and little remains on the WayBack machine, but it was quickly and widely shared. It was by no means the last time he had a pop at Bruin, but it’s a kind of Invective Apotheosis, and clearly struck a chord at the time. 

 It was not just politicians who copped it, of course.  Stanislav was an equal-opportunity eviscerator and never held back (“Dear mr anonymous - fuck off English cunt”) though with fellow members of the commentariat he was probably dishing out abuse as a form of affectionate respect, which was not the case with #10 & MediaMinster. In early December 2007, for example, he picked up a gauntlet lobbed in his direction by Elby the Berserk.  It’s worth quoting in full, not least because of the pay-off generated by his remark at the end about being too modest for a blog of his own – two years later, after only 8 months hosting Call Me Ishmael, he’d already written well over 300 posts :

stanislav said...

Maybe Stanislav has been busy. Spying strangers. As for your finest insults, these will be the ones that go: you are a wanker, or, wanker, or, fuck off you wanker. The absolute elby tour de force is I’ll kill you you fucking wanker. This is heady stuff. What fun you and Mr Electric Kettle must have together, you being a six feet six vagrant with a Grade C O-level in English, and Mr Electric Kettle being so sensitive.

It is obviously hard for you, having to live in hostels, consumed by unfathomable grievance. Unfathomable means very deep, Mr Elby. Like what you’re not. So deep in fact that you can’t measure it. Best thing is go and get the last of the beans and chips before some other resident has them and pop over to Lillith’s. She’ll probably tell you about her best one hundred Boney M songs and Mr Electric Kettle’ll be there bleating about Mrs Electric Kettle and all the little Electric Kettles. How can he choose between them and his blogging mission to the world? If he’s not there you’ll find him down the Cenotaph, doing some weeping. For the country. Jesus, you people who speak English as a first language, do you have no shame over this warmed-up shit that you post, these empty cliches hoisted from magazines, this mindless unlettered ignorant targetless ranting? It’s no wonder that Hain and Co shit in our faces, if people like you are the opposition; how they must laugh. Down the house of commons: That numbskull Elby, he said wanker again. He said what? Never, he didn’t say wanker did he? Again? Fuck me, Sir Gus, Elby saying wanker, time to panic. And the awful thing is that Guido World sparkles with wit and erudition, with righteous anger, with painstaking, investigative citizen journalism and, especially on caption day, excruciatingly sharp one- and two-liners. And then, also, there is you. There are ranters here whose bile spills joyfully off the screen, hot and righteous; others wax bittersweet, sorrowful and lamentatious. And then, also, there is you, shouting wanker like a schoolboy. There is Patriotism outraged, Decency offended, there is incredulity and an urge to vengeance. There is the wry and the imaginative, the fanciful; the scholarly and the eloquent; lampoonery, spite and satire. And then there is you.

I must have missed all those friends of yours who - what was it again? - “twatted me off.” It will be, though, a long, cold day in Hell before you could string together even a tiny phrase that would ruffle the feathers of the humblest Polish plumber. You should treat this patient reproach as the first step in the education you so sorely missed. Print it up and stick it on the wall. Along with your pictures of Jordan and Kylie Minogue.

If there is a tide in the affairs of man I do hope you and yours are not it. There is one redeeming and darkly amusing feature to all this stupidity and that is the idea of somebody like Mr Electric Kettle having a blog; poor Polish plumber far too modest. And got job to go to anyway…

                                   *                    *                    *                 *

I hope their ears are still ringing, with pleasure as much as anything. Quite the honour, really. Once we’d got to know each other a little bit, through the comments here and also emails from time to time, I earned the occasional admonition (one filthy anagram too many, usually) but nothing quite like the bloggering quoted above. Lucky for some, I suppose, though I fancied I could hear a pipe wrench twisting in a calloused hand when I wondered aloud about calling the stanislav anthology Collected Sewage Treatment Works. I offered no title at all back in 2011, when the notion of a book came up in an email exchange. His reply is worth sharing:

I will think on about the young plumber, never hear his voice any more and he may as well be a stranger to me; he used to make me laugh so much that I felt like the BloodHousers, coffee
all over the keyboard and ferfucksake send for an ambulance before I die laughing. I don’t have much of the stuff, anyway, a few bits, and my initial thought is that it was only of its moment, invalid in these, the current HardTimes.

Reluctant, or hesitant, then, but not entirely against it. And happily a few of us disagree about its lasting relevance and value. A few months later, in 2012, he mentioned, almost in passing, something about his by-then bygone stanislavian working practice:

I did just write it down, just-so, there were never any drafts or anything. I knew it was funny, it made me weep. But though unstructured and spontaneous, there was always an awareness that I should not, too easily, do anything to reveal my identity to vengeful politicians.

Amen to that.  And one more, from 2013 :

Were I the last man alive I would still scribble, levels my head and eases my mind.

Well, these scribbles of his, sure they never ease mine. In the best possible way, of course.  One of the things I admire about stanislav is the way, collected as a body of work, the writing reveals that what we have is not just a glorious array of scurrilously lucid satirical rage, but also as fine a contribution to the tradition of experimental fiction as any from the last few years.  Stanislav’s rants are compelling and vivid and serious but (like that other great contrarian, Geoffrey Willans’ Molesworth, only with a bit more swearing) they also keep the reader’s mind on its toes by continuously forcing us to veer between corrective recognition of the mangled grammar and eccentric phrasing, and joyful, hilarious complicity with the unstoppable voice on the page. If he was close to possessed when he wrote it, we come just as close when we read. Anyway, I loved it from the first time I found him, and still do.

But that’s enough look at fucking belly button; is not critical literary arsehole here, good for fuck all, but decent fucking plumber.

thanks

v./

Easter Jive Talk

 Great Polish musician, Mr Handel, like stanislav, was a European who made his home in the UK (although not in Scotland, best part of England) writing music for an educated and enthusiastic audience and patronised by the Hanoverian Royal family.

 Premiered in the gracious city of Dublin in the eighteenth century, Mr Handel’s major opus, The Plumber, deals with the birth, the life and hard times, and the eventual murder and resurrection of a young itinerant artisan and preacher.  For Unto Us A Plumber Is Born; Worthy Is The Plumber That Was Slain; I Know That My Plumber Liveth; The Trumpet Shall Sound And The Toilet Fixed Shall Be are just some of the parts loved and performed all over the world to this day.

 Scathing about the Blairite-Ratzinger doctrine*, Handel’s Plumber tracks the cruel infamy of the ruling class, the parasite bureaucracy, the worthless, predatory, sermonizing priesthood and the penny-a-parchment scribes, exploiting for their masters the malleability of readers of the Hanoverian Sun-Guardian. Ultimately, though, it is revealed that The Plumber can, in fact, in a spiritual way, clean up the shit, shoulder the guilt of Everyman, but only if Everyman puts his hands up to it. The Plumber says My Yoke Is Easy, mate, and My Burden Is Light, but don’t give me none of that I-could-never-do-anything-wrong shit, ya fucking creepy little bastard. Is me, mate, they call the King of Glory, not you.

 (* This holds that it doesn’t matter how wickedly one behaves, how much of a thieving repellent bastard one is, because there is always some poor plumber, despised and tortured and nailed up on a tree, whose suffering absolves the most criminal of their sins, indeed permits them further malevolence, fashioning their wickedness on man and mother and child.)

Behold, I show you a mystery. No use dealing with the Devil and calling on the Plumber to keep your arse out of Hell. No use spending your nights in prayer and your days in shameless larceny and slaughter foul. The Plumber’s instruction was love thy neighbour  as thyself, even - especially - those defenceless roasted Iraqi babies, and not, as you interpret it: love thyself and shit, grinning, in everyone’s face. Come the Day, there’ll be some heavy shit coming down on your pointed little head; Plumber’s old man not lightly mocked, not by some cheesy little cunt like you. No use pleading for mercy while crewcut, psychobastard waterboarding Mormons from the CIA dispenseth it not. Lady Sir Michael Kneepads White’s* good opinion of you counts for nothing where I come from, Sweetheart. Plumber hope you can stand things hot. Fucking roasting hot.                          (* Michael White was The Guardian’s political editor.)                         

The choruses from Handel’s Plumber are particularly familiar; the whole world knows and loves the chorus, Hallelujah, The Plumber Has Arrived, King George himself leaping to his feet on first hearing it performed, yelling, This Hallelujah, The Plumber Is Here, Motherfuckers, this is far out. Too fucking much, get up off your poxed-up arses, loyal subjects, and give George Friedrich some respeck, innit.

 And to this day the opening notes of Hallelujah, The Plumber Is Arrived bring audiences to their feet. Sat at computer, stanislav listen on Windows Media and still jump up in fucking air and stand in attention. And stanislav is atheist and fucking anarchist.

But anyway. The final chorus in The Plumber is the best thing ever; consists of one word, over and over again, endlessly refreshed, restated, building, decaying, building again, voices and instruments all over the place but tethered at the limits of what the listener can amalgamate. Thundering basses, soaring sopranos and everything in between sing in mad, divine counterpoint, before the heavenly juggernaut of a full orchestral scoring, by turns sombre, joyful, reflective, quizzical, melancholy, martial. And just when you think there’s nowhere else for this one word to be taken to, it jumps to another continent of emotion, and then another, its mighty crescendo suspended in the echo of God’s harmonies before crashing, comfortingly, reassuringly to Earth, and then, once more, just to make sure.

 The single word, of course, stretched and bent by a hundred voices, amplified and underscored by a hundred instruments, is the last of all last words, Amen. They say it over you when you’re dead.

In Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew and Latin, Amen is affirmatory of what has been said and means: good shit, so be it, finally, in truth. A modern equivalent to Amen would be Right On; it’s a wrap; Job Done; job’s a goodun, or, I agree with what everyone else on the panel has said. But as Mr Handel made clear, the Amen moment - a declaration of final accomplishment, that through sin and guilt and struggle and redemption we come to the triumph of Good over Evil - is not arrived at without going through a whole shitstorm of grief. And, by Christ, that’s what we are in.

Never, in these islands, did a fouler, rottener bunch spread their canker into every corner of our lives. We live in a wilderness of mirrors and spin, lied to, stolen from, barracked, hectored, cajoled and bullied by the vilest, most obnoxious creatures. What a fucking crew. The unspeakable cunt Blunkett, just for instance, just for instance; the shameless PBC claiming tonight that, after just a few short months of Peacemaker Blair being on the case, the Bethlehem tourist business is rocketing. Honest, not invent.

 There may come a time when through relentless exposure, scorn, ridicule, mockery and unsubtle downright kick-in-the-balls personal abuse, we unseat the Horsemen of the Apocalypse - for that is what these criminals are. Terrorism and global warming are just further whips and spurs to our eventually unquestioning obedience. Or so they think.

 We must resist at every opportunity, we must chide and chastise them and bring them to court, we must expose for ourselves - for the press won’t - their personal venality. If they plunder us further in their salary claim we must take to the streets. If ever we could, we can no longer rely on politicians’ self-policing, nor on lobby correspondents’ scrutiny, desperate, in mutual admiration awards ceremonies, for lip-zipped access; all pimps and charlatans, haunting the same dingy brothel.

No, Smite them with a Rod of Iron. It is only by our own trials, our constant resistance, that we may, one day, be able to say Job done; Job’s a goodun; that’s them sorted; Done and Dusted.  Amen.

 Happy Easter off Stan  2007

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AffableBrilliantCruelDaemonicExperimental

FantasticalGraphicHilariousIntenseJudicious

KrakatoanLividManicNimbleOutrageousPolish

QuixoticRevolutionarySatiricalTransgressive

UnspeakableViciousWickedX-ratedYoungZen-like…

  

Vent Stack is  a  bookful  of stanislav, the young polish plumber.

 

Pre-publication Review of Vent Stack:

"...read stan in one shot - couldn't resist. So much good shit in this one. The dead fucking Oxbridge parrot, John Paul George and the stupid idiot with the big nose and rambling queen Brenda ... Absolutely brilliant. I even checked out Brown's nose picking on YouTube that I hadn't seen before."  Malcolm Mc Neill, author of Observed While Falling, The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here, and Reflux.

  

Vent Stack follows and complements Honest, Not Invent,  the 2020  stanislav/ishmael anthology. Eyes peeled for Ishmael’s Blues. A couple of reviews of H N I:

"...my ability to read the document was made difficult by the tears of laughter running down my cheeks. To return to the innermost thoughts of young Stanislav was a joy..." caratacus

" only one keyboard was harmed during the production of this review (nasal red wine snort). Brilliantly written – without a gift from God it would have been impossible to generate such style and power. " mr mike

 Vent Stack is now available in paperback - we've seen from our proof copies that, like Honest, Not Invent, the production quality is very good. For now, the book is only available from lulu.com. No one's billing or delivery address, nor any payment info, will be available or disclosed to the creator of the book; all this is securely handled by the publishing platform (paypal available).

 

Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy should follow these steps:

Please register an account with them first. This will save you a couple of quid, as going straight into the link provided below seems to make paypal think it's ok to charge in dollars, and apply their own conversion rate, which will put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow our link; a pop-up box asks for age confirmation - simply set the date to (say) 1 January 1960, and proceed. (If you type the title, the anthology will not appear as a search result until the "show explicit content" box - found at the bottom left by scrolling down - has been checked.  You may also see the age verification box, as above, at this point.)  In any case, Lulu's bookstore search box seems to be enfeebled at the moment, so our link is probably the easiest way to proceed.

 

 The full title is "Vent Stack love from stanislav" by ishmael smith, and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of Buster the Previous Blog Dog having a green thought in a green shade.  

Link for the paperback:

 https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/vent-stack/paperback/product-q8jzk2.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Or...

shorter link, which might make it easier if you wish to paste it into an email and tell a friend:

 https://tinyurl.com/naajavmu

At checkout, try WELCOME15 or TREAT15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage.  If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.  

With the 15% voucher, the book (including delivery to a UK address) should cost £10.89