The book fair proved to be happening in Hamilton House’s upper bowel or duodenum, this accessible only by a central staircase thronged with a multitude of ragged philanthropists, all pierced, inked and unwashed, and exuding the perfumes of controlled herbs and diverse fermented liquors. Manifesting some signs of dismay, the avian party halted. —
Hamilton House
“Show us yer knickers!” screamed the budgerigar, and flapped her wings, causing the egg to wobble in its nest. —
Egg
They at length found themselves in a large room or small hall, in which malodorous crowds milled between trestle tables laden with all manner of radical reads: purist tomes of the severely rouge, stringently noir and ascetically vert tendencies, jostled with tomes manifesting adulterations of these hues, the rouge compromised by the noir, the vert corrupted by the rouge, the noir contaminated by the vert, and vice versa in each case, and also revoltingly harlequin tomes manifesting putrid admixtures of all three hues. Voices were raised in this hall or hell, or possibly pandemonium. Anarchists and radical libertarians strove to overmaster the vanguardism of the Leninists in their midst and the intellectualism in their own breasts. For their part, the Leninists loudly disparaged the hopeless disorganisation of the anarchists and the capitalist lackeydom of the radical libertarians, and joined in the general execrations of the Trotskyites on account of their dogmatism and their Stakhanovite exhibitionism. These latter in turn heaped opprobrium upon the avatars of the Vert Rouge and the Blood & Soil Association, whom they considered to be etiolated landlordists and eco-la-la crypto-fascists. These last wished a plague upon the houses of all their persecutors, withal reserving their most toxic venom for the Stalinists whom they regarded as guilty of the most heinous sin of all, viz. industrialism. Moreover, all joined in execrating the Maoists and the St Marks Road Comrades of the Sendero Luminoso on account of their simple-minded agrarian primitivism, except for the Vert Rouge and Blood & Soil Association toffs, who - rather sheepishly - held aloof from this particular hue and cry. —
Leninists, Anarchists
Now it chanced that such conversation as there was in that desiccated company revolved around the vindication of the rights of inherently oppressed women who were said by those present to be suffering under the hegemonic scourge of the patriarchy. The budgerigar had evidently not undertaken more than the most cursory exploration of the coils and bifurcations of the impenetrable thicket of gender theory, for she singularly failed to engage with the dialectic of the theoreticians in that assembly, rather contenting herself with the idle repetitions of a portion of a phrase which she must have heard in some parlour or zoo and half-misremembered, this being —
Hegemonic Scourge of the Patriarchy, Patriarchy
“Up to you, really,” said the sensible gentleman, “I’ve been doing behavioural research with them. Pity about the guineafowl, actually. They’re quite tasty, apparently, so they say. Rather like pheasant.” —
The Sensible Gentleman
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