[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":251},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-the-little-man-in-the-velveteen-jacket":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"date":239,"description":240,"edited":239,"extension":241,"meta":242,"navigation":243,"path":244,"seo":245,"stem":247,"tags":248,"__hash__":250},"stories\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-little-man-in-the-velveteen-jacket.md","The Little Man in the Velveteen Jacket",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":235},"minimark",[9,14,18,21,33,49,56,59,66,76,106,117,120,123,126,129,132,135,138,141,144,157,162,171,176,181,186,191,196,205,210,215,220,225,230],[10,11,13],"h1",{"id":12},"the-little-man-in-the-velveteen-jacket-an-incident","The Little Man in the Velveteen Jacket-An Incident ",[15,16,17],"p",{},"Mr Farley paused and looked back down the slowly falling hillocks over which he had walked. He enjoyed the slight pant of his breathing, proof of his effort. With he applied his handkerchief to a rolling bead of sweat, in repeated, rather pedantic movements. He inspected the linen as if expecting the residue to be of some unusual colour. He folded and smoothed his handkerchief, before neatly placing it into his top pocket with a lozenge shaped tail left poking out. He took some deep inhales through his nose to recover his wind, and rounded his lips rather on the exhale, as if about to whistle. Farley was an unfit but enthusiastic walker of about 45, with a promising paunch.   Placing both hands over the crook of his walking stick he lent his head at an angle and stared, like a child at the end of the school day, lulled by their teacher’s golden words.",[15,19,20],{},"He saw the green shock of trees at the foot of the valley. He traced the gentle progress of the path which led to the cottage where he was holidaying and followed its contour over the curves and folds leading to his present spot. The temperate hours of the morning had been spent in measured ascents and declines as he made his way over the dales. Behind him, and he was postponing the delicious moment when he clapped his hands and pressed on into its depths, was the mouth of a large cave, teeming with geological promise, which had been the purpose and goal of his journey. The great orifice beckoned, as the ruddy gums and lapidary teeth of a favourite patient summon a cooing dentist. Sun beams glinted on the back wall, whisking up thoughts of obscure and delectable minerals. Perhaps even a “Farleyorum.” A footnote in the textbooks edged itself in his imagination. Needed some work certainly, certainly it did, but it would do.",[15,22,23,24,28,29,32],{},"He would postpone his afternoon’s pleasure a little longer and savour it all the more when it came. Refreshing his brow with his handkerchief one more, Farley eyed a small and conveniently placed depression, with a gently sloping rock on one side to stand in for a table. Geology had provided again! This would be the ideal spot for the consumption of sandwiches, cake and tea. It would also provide shelter from the wind, which blew sporadically but cold, in spite of the midday warmth. Leaning his stick against a small boulder, Farley squatted to interrogate the contents of his rucksack, his recalcitrant knees saluting he did so, and his back registering its standing twinge. Nestled preciously on top of his navy pullover was a small geological hammer in a calves’ leather case. The red-brown wood of the handle was richly oiled and the head thoroughly polished. It would not be untrue to say he loved this hammer: he venerated it as a cherished ikon of quiet study. It gave Farley a frisson of thrilling pleasure to take it from its case, to test with a surgically clipped thumb nail, the bite of it’s He patted it gently and moved on. Wrapped tightly in brown paper were Eccles cakes, beef sandwiches spread generously with horseradish and in a flask, earl grey with a suspicion of scotch. These were the lunch items of a man with mild scholarly manners but with none of the timorous or fussy elements that might have stemmed from an abiding interest in old rocks. The same held for his clothes. His trousers were of Harris tweed, still gently redolent of peat from his fire. The leather of his boots was waxed to a high sheen and laced tightly with draftsman’s precision. The socks were thick and deeply green with a bold weave. Socks of the type which many a hardy chap had pulled up before summiting some jagged crag or setting off from a remote camp. The shirt was so crisply tucked as to look freshly laundered despite the walk, and the jacket teemed with pens, pockets, sweets, and oddments. In this array practicality was deftly courted by questions of taste and tone, one could tell from a perfunctory glance this man was an amateur in the finest English tradition. Other items included a geological guide to the region, committed largely to memory but brought along to propitiate charges of hubris. But most significantly for this episode was a tenderly thumbed copy of “The lives and sayings of Filber Crane",[25,26,27],"span",{},"[1"," ], Geological Anthropologist and man of genius ",[25,30,31],{},"[2"," ].”",[15,34,35,36,39,40,44,45,48],{},"Rising with rucksack in hand Mr Farley trotted swiftly down into the depression with a few short steps. He removed his lunch items and arranged himself with back and head against the slope of the declivity and with one leg drawn up against the other. Supine and composed he began on his lunch in a manner neither languid or rushing, neither indecently savouring or drily neglectful. By god that man knew how to eat a sandwich, a real joy to watch, crust held gently between thumb and forefinger as molar, canine and incisor leapt and darted in their merry dance. A polished performance from start to finish, not a crumb displaced. Masticating gently upon asoupçon of Eccles cake, the rich perfume of tea and finest Islay curled upwards, the perfect marriage of occident and orient. Farley opened his copy of Crane to glean some pithy apothegm or salutary maxim as was his mealtime wont. ",[25,37,38],{},"[3"," ] What precisely Crane had meant by “Geological Anthropologist” is a matter which standing pools of ink have long been spilt. The arresting and somewhat disturbing conclusion which scholars of the “vivarary” school have come to is that Crane had regarded geological formations as possessing a social life. That is to say they were, in some admittedly opaque sense, alive. The other school hold that Crane was a craven huckster and simpering cretin, and loudly berated the “vivarary” crowd for wasting time on so clear a wool puller. Such are the dark clouds which befog on occasion the dreaming spires of the academy. ",[41,42,43],"em",{},"Sic transit gloria mundi",". They point with great fervour to the passage of “the lives and sayings” in which Crane describes in reverent and theosophical tones his “road to Damascus” moment regarding his theories. Having consumed four or five bottles of Bordeaux Crane had taken a nighttime perambulation to a particularly beloved cave system. Many an hour had been spent here declaiming his own verses loudly and at length and Crane had taken the step of installing a trouser-press, mangle and bathtub therein. ",[25,46,47],{},"[4"," ] Working himself up into towering passion of the muse he leapt towards the ceiling and was struck soundly on the head by a heavy stalactite-",[15,50,51,52,55],{},"“On awaking I saw with new eyes the mouths and limbs which protruded from the nude elemental rock, I danced and conversed in the language of ages with my igneous brethren, I carolled with granite and cavorted with quartz I drank deep from the delights of the seam.”",[25,53,54],{},"[5"," ]",[15,57,58],{},"It continues at length in this vein. Needless to say, critics of Crane read this as a clear account of petty drunkenness, deserved brain injury and resulting mania and find the whole passage rather sordid and disturbing. One struggles to find fault with this analysis.",[15,60,61,62,65],{},"Anyhow this is neither here nor there but perhaps more there than here so we shall leap back to Farley. The passage of Crane which struck his roving eye was from the controversial and recondite passage on the religious beliefs of metamorphic rocks. “The prevalence of mole hills in proximity to rocks invites, nay proclaims, that the mole enjoys the status of totem or deity in the metamorphic polity.”",[25,63,64],{},"[6"," ] Crane continues-",[15,67,68,69,72,73,55],{},"“I have it firsthand from a sagacious lump of Carrara marble, interviewed in a Naples taverna with classical pretentions, that the mole is known as the “little man in the velveteen jacket” by the priestly and aristocratic class of metamorphics. The etymology stems from a lay belief that moles skin their dead and wear the pelts as a winter coat.",[25,70,71],{},"[7"," ] His cardinal attributes are the trinity of pipe, porter glass and fez, and he is called on to bring fecundity to barren crags and as an apotropaic deity invoked against the crawling threat of lichen. Reciprocal offerings known as ‘emolements’ are placed into the proffered pipe and glass of small mole statues which litter the caverns of the pious.” ",[25,74,75],{},"[8",[15,77,78,79,82,83,86,87,90,91,94,95,98,99,102,103,55],{},"Mr Farley digested this passage ruminatively. He had discovered the writings of Crane in his early youth during a series of seaside holidays with his late grandmother. Perhaps inevitably he had formed something of an emotional attachment to the texts. Of course, Crane’s suggestion that conversational relationships with rocks could be attained was of obvious interest to the budding geologist",[25,80,81],{},"[9"," ]. Crane insists that ‘foliation’, the formation of metamorphic rocks into layers, betrays itself through its nomenclature as the sister process of the generation of new leaves and shrubs. Rocks sit somewhere below trees, trees below animates, ",[41,84,85],{},"ispo facto"," rocks have the quality of ‘dilute intelligibility’. ",[25,88,89],{},"[10"," ] He interposed a new taxonomic kingdom of “",[41,92,93],{},"minerata",".” This was the seminal moment with sparked his career long study of the social lives of rocks and was his stated justification for conducting thousands of “field interviews” with geological formations. ",[25,96,97],{},"[11"," ]   Like many a staunch believer Farley’s personal failure to verify, observe or replicate any of Crane’s theories or experiments was no great deterrence, he merely put it down to disparity of genius between acolyte and master. ",[25,100,101],{},"[12"," ] God knows Farley had spent many an hour, megaphone to his straining lips and wireless receiver clasped in his clammy hand, interrogating stubbornly inarticulate boulders throughout the Northern counties. One can perhaps then begin imagine in some timid way the emotions of Mr Farley, when as he lowered his copy of Crane to chew his lip deliberatively,   a mole clad in a finely cut velvet jacket of lush burgundy hue, yawned loudly and stepped out from behind a small rock some two feet in front of him, at the very centre of the depression. But it would be too much to even seek to dream of the thoughts which burst across his brain as he wonderingly took in several details which precisely replicated the passage of Crane. The mole wore a richly patterned fez and held in one set of claws a softly smoking pipe. With the other he delicately wiped from his snout the cream left by a long draw on his pint of porter. ",[25,104,105],{},"[13",[15,107,108,109,112,113,116],{},"Mr Farley gulped ominously. The mole eyed him languidly. Farley, eyes nailed to the mole, sought succour from the scotch and tea, holding the flask in shuddering hands.",[25,110,111],{},"[14"," ] The mole drained his porter with aplomb, placed his glass behind the rock and drew on the pipe,   fixing Farley with profoundly brown eyes. The pipe drew with a sizzle and he blew from his snout two tight coils of smoke vertically downwards. The mole reached behind the rock and removed a now full porter glass, Farley struggled down another gulp, his trachea appeared to be contracting at pace. Crane’s words made flesh, porter, pipe, apparent provision of emolements. ",[25,114,115],{},"[15"," ] The mole held his glass aloft and half sang-",[15,118,119],{},"“Mrs Port-er and her daught-er they wash their feet in sodah wat-er” Fan of the old T.S.E? Fan of the old Eliot? The Wasteland eh? Just the stuff, just the stuff. Mrs Porter. If Porter was a Mrs, I should marry her. Marriage made in heaven. Seraphic stuff this porter, gratis for moles, a granite gratuity hahaha! Pretty good, pretty good, pretty good.”",[15,121,122],{},"Farley managed something like a grimace, he scrabbled inside his head for some glint of a precedent or experience which might avail him now. His brain was unapologetically vacant. The mole eyed him expectantly. No answer came. The mole sighed and took another singeing drag on his pipe. As he exhaled no smoke left his snout. Rather two circling helices of the stuff rose from under the fez and propelled it rapidly aloft to a height of some meters, very quickly, then slower, then it stopped and the smoke whisked away, the fez falling precisely back onto the moles head. Mr Farley turned sallow, then really quite grey, then he adopted the pallor of a man recently exhumed.",[15,124,125],{},"He managed quietly but desperately to say,",[15,127,128],{},"“if you do something like that again I shall probably be ill.”",[15,130,131],{},"The mole winked as if acknowledging a common objection and smoked his pipe snoutwards as before.",[15,133,134],{},"Farley realised he was still lying down; this did not seem like the appropriate position to deal with the apparition of a talking mole. Equally assuming the vertical would have required the cooperation of nerves, sinew, and tendons all of which seemed to be suffering from an out of body experience. He felt he really should address the situation immediately before things got further out of hand. Farley began to form an exclamation relating to the statistical likelihood of his meeting a talking mole. He then considered doubting out loud the believability of his senses and the soundness of his mind. Perhaps he could manage a comment on how even he, devoted disciple, had find not a glimmer of corroboration for any of Crane’s theories ever before. But then given that the mole had not only talked, but quoted T.S. Eliot, not only stood before him, but did so in a snappily tailored velvet jacket, not only suggested Crane but mirrored him in every aspect rendered these theoretical objections somewhat insufficient.",[15,136,137],{},"  Questions or objections paled in the face of the pipe trick. Farley ran. The mole sighed the sigh of a man who is disappointed,   but not exactly surprised,   and meditatively raised his glass of porter up to the sunlight.",[15,139,140],{},"--- Unknown node: hardBreak ---",[142,143],"hr",{},[15,145,146,148,149,152,153,156],{},[25,147,27],{}," ] Self-published by Crane, errant use of capitalisation reflects the title of the text as produced. Those critical of Crane have fulminated at length on his self-categorisation as a genius. Those who knew Crane at his preparatory school said he was so fantastically poor at books and games that the headmistress refused to included him the school photograph, substituting a straw doll instead. His English mistress provided the following account to the Lancashire evening star: “After one assignment, I asked Crane whether the dog had in fact ",[41,150,151],{},"done"," his homework, so poor was his submission in conception and design, rather than having ",[41,154,155],{},"eaten"," his homework, as he had told me the last five weeks on the trot. He told me calmy he didn’t have a dog. I began to pretend he was invisible from then on, which suited us both very well.”",[15,158,159,161],{},[25,160,31],{}," ] What on Jehovas’ merry green orb he sought so suggest by the use of ‘lives’ in the plural is best left entirely unexplored in the view of this author. Those unfamiliar with Crane’s academic reputation should note that he is the only man known to have been publicly traduced for the plagiarism of a forgery of which he himself was the author. In the words of his most charitable biographer Tander “Sidcup” Montmorency “Crane lacked the patience and soundness of mind for quiet study, and it is quiet study that makes the geologist. That he produced such an expansive body of work is a testament to his fervid confidence in his own theories, in the face of, or as sometimes implied by his later work, because of, the near total lack of substantive evidence to support them. He was prone to shoddy errors of the most school boy sort. The reader will of course remember, the fiasco of the rubber hammer, or his early proposal for a graduate thesis on the tectonic formation of Brighton Rock.”",[15,163,164,166,167,170],{},[25,165,38],{}," ] Farley more or less wrote that passage and insisted I put it in with much tawdry threatening. I did so as I still owe him twelve pounds in outstanding badminton debts, but I will admit he is extremely adept with a crust. By the immaculate underclothes of the Virgin is the man a bore, but the famous badminton “pro” Lascaux St-John-St-Fritz, was Farley’s first love. This ",[41,168,169],{},"amour foudre"," cut tragically short by a Pastis fuelled dalliance in the wolf enclose at the Frankfort Tiergarten after the keepers had headed home for their pork knuckle. All they recovered of the sinuous athlete was a pocket watch and, rather shockingly, a set of false uppers. Farley’s time in Lascaux’s pupiledge left him with a scorching back hand and balletic command of the court, I will grant him that. F*** the sententious p*** with a barge****",[15,172,173,175],{},[25,174,47],{}," ] Crane claims the Bordeaux was prescribed by his doctor to alleviate an acute attack of gout. The biographer of Crane, A. Thomas St John, failed to clear up this point as the doctor in question immediately assumed a feigned identity of a Belgian road sweeper as soon as the name of Crane passed his lips. Needless to say Crane’s gout alibi has raised eyebrows to an acute height the world over, and seems like desperate blame shifting of the first order. See A. Thomas St John “Squeezing claret for crystal- dipsomania and the thought of Filber Crane” The Geological Review Vol. 34 Winter 1987.",[15,177,178,180],{},[25,179,54],{}," ] p. 37, Crane, F., ‘The Lives and Sayings of Filber Crane Geological Anthropologist and man of genius, Stork and Crane Publishing, 1949.",[15,182,183,185],{},[25,184,64],{}," ] This statement seems entirely redundant given the proximity of rocks to more or less anything. Crane’s argumentation here is typically bizarre and at best specious.",[15,187,188,190],{},[25,189,71],{}," ] This is perhaps one of the most ridiculous and enraging sentences in any printed material. It has the unique quality of seeming to be facile on more points than are actually expressed. One elderly geology professor of famed mildness was heard to actually scream aloud on the first reading and on the second was observed to attack the book with a poker in a manner normally associated with commando units far behind enemy lines. So benumbed were his senses that he dunked his tie into his tea and attempted to tighten his shortbread biscuit. Later the sorry professor was detained by special constables when discovered in Crane’s garden, disguised as a rather convincing gnome, pockets stuffed with hand grenades and a sharpened fishing rod in his hands.",[15,192,193,195],{},[25,194,75],{}," ] p. 37, Crane, F., The Lives and Sayings of Filber Crane Geological Anthropologist and man of no small genius, Stork and Crane Publishing, 1949. N.B review by L.V Crenshaw “Filber Crane, the case for rapid and permanent institutionalisation.” The Lancaster Herald May 1953.",[15,197,198,200,201,204],{},[25,199,81],{}," ] Crane posited in one article “Foliative Action and the Arboreal Thesis”, ",[41,202,203],{},"The Wisconsin Journal of Model Trains and Their Enthusiasts",", Vol. 3, Fall 1947, an essential affinity between rocks and trees, thrusting minerals into the evolutionary ladder. The academic reception of his theory is loudly indicated by the title of the publication which was happy to receive it. The Wisconsin Journal’s pool of normal contributors in the autumn of 1947 had been sadly decimated by a freak ‘Anderson’s 3-1 Metal Lubricant’ and turkey gravy mix up, an incident resulting from the rapidly deteriorating eyesight of one the member’s wives and the curiously avine aroma which lifelong users of Anderson’s have come to love so well.",[15,206,207,209],{},[25,208,89],{}," ] Ibid. This is the crux and central matter of Crane’s thought. The ‘vivarariasts’ hold this to be gnomic, deliciously opaque and occupying a point in the interstice of geology, philosophy, evolutionary biology, sociology and poetry (according to the more fawning.) The prevailing view however is that the syllogism (a generous term) is chicanerous, quite obviously spurious, hair wrenchingly stupid from fatuous start to hateful finish etc… ",[15,211,212,214],{},[25,213,97],{}," ] Crane conducted all these interviews absolutely solo with no printed elaboration on his method whatsoever, aside from the rather cryptic note in ‘I have found that gneiss speaks clearest in aniconic terms. Lipids are the obvious aid in this regard.’ Crane, F. “The Ontology of Foliate Inquiry” Stork and Crane Publishing, 1948.",[15,216,217,219],{},[25,218,101],{}," ] Indeed after 1949 Crane offered no written or verbal elaboration on his thought and methods at all. He responded neither to contumely or praise and spent his later life in silent contemplation at the end of the pier in Rabblethorpe, of his native Lancashire. Often surrounded by a buffet of disciples, interviewers and gulls (he plugged his ears with the interior parts of crabs) Crane would stare serenely over the foam breaking beneath him, “intractable and essentially unknowable like his companions the rocks.” Interestingly Crane’s wife and housekeeper have stated under oath that Crane could in fact sleep with his eyes open and had often lauded westerly sea breezes as narcoleptic aids. They allege Crane had in fact been asleep at the end of the pier for twelve-fifteen hours a day from 1949 until his death in 1958.",[15,221,222,224],{},[25,223,105],{}," ] Farley swears that the sweet skein of smells drifting from the pipe immediately placed it as finest Turkish shag and has even dared to name a brand to me on a previous occasion. He claims it brought him straight back to his time in Cairo in 1919. I do not believe him for a second, for starters he was twelve in 1919. The man really does read too much cheap wartime fiction for his own good and has taken to immoderate consumption of equally cheap and bellicose rioja. He should stick to eating sandwiches, he does this so well as you know, rather than inventing silly asides about tobacco brands. The man is trying to the point of sighs, but what are you going to do, he’s an old friend.",[15,226,227,229],{},[25,228,111],{}," ] Farley insisted I put “suspicion of scotch” earlier in the piece to describe his concoction, but the phrasing is laughable. Clear guilt should be read for ‘suspicion’, it’s a foul brew he drinks on those walks, just warm scotch, milk and a teabag in when you get down to brass tacks, the man is pickled like a cucumber half the time stumbling around up on the dales.",[15,231,232,234],{},[25,233,115],{}," ] The emolements are perhaps the most fantastical element in Crane’s mature work.",{"title":236,"searchDepth":237,"depth":237,"links":238},"",2,[],null,"Mr Farley paused and looked back down the slowly falling hillocks over which he had walked. ","md",{},true,"\u002Fstories\u002Fthe-little-man-in-the-velveteen-jacket",{"title":246,"description":240},"The Little Man in the Velveteen Jacket file","stories\u002Fthe-little-man-in-the-velveteen-jacket",[249],"Satire","gNnJTwisUZU7qXBhgPJfONxtm--oUYlAzligXUMMzRA",1793724018842]