Book:Maskerade/Annotations

p291, Corgi PB (British) The bowl of caviare flew out of his nervous fingers and caused a Fortean experience somewhere in the stalls.

Fort was an American journalist who made a lifetime's study of weird and strange events, searching newspaper archives in both the USA and Great Britain for anomalous stories that could not easily be fitted into any known category. He started out merely suspecting, but later came to believe, that contrary to what we are all continually told, science cannot explain everything that happens, and quite often, the scientific explanation for a strange event, when analysed, will be as full of holes as a Swiss cheese. One of the earliest newspaper clippings that confirmed his belief that weird, random, and seemingly impossible things happen, and the explanations advanced to explain them can often be less than convincing, is the one described as the Phantom Fishmonger of Cromer.

One day in 1897, the good folk of Cromer, Norfolk, were awoken by the steady patter and rattle of what felt like hail. To their consternation, a steady fall of whelks, mussels, prawns, crabs and some lobsters was apparently coming out of the sky, as the out-of-plaice seafood was rattling on roofs and falling from the roofs into the street.

As Cromer is a fishing port with a speciality in shellfish, the first explanation advanced by Authority was that a fishmonger had taken leave of his senses, and in a temporary madness had been running the streets of Cromer throwing his stock up onto peoples' roofs, with such intensity that many slates were broken and caused to fall. But nobody had seen this mad fishmonger, and in any case, the sheer volume of shellfish was too much for one man to carry. and as Fort pointed out, all the fishmongers of Cromer were hard-headed and very sane small businessmen, who would not have dreamt of disposing of valuable stock like this. When an alternative was proposed, that a freak tornado might have begun out in the North Sea and passed inland, disgorging the sea life it had picked up as its intensity faded, this was laughed at as being utterly incredible... despite the fact East Anglia is England's answer to Tornado Alley in the USA. (British tornados are smaller, slighter, and more genteel)

The term "Fortean Experience" has, since Cromer, passed into the vocabulary largely to describe mysterious rains of fish from the heavens... mysterious rains of fish also occur in Jingo and Good Omens.

When Death is trying to persuade the reluctant swan to sing just once - everyone knows the well-known fact that a swan will sing only once in its life, just before it dies (hence swan-song, a last defiant flourish of life just before The End. Not just a shout-out to the ballet Swan Lake, but take a closer look at what the swan actually sings translated out of Überwaldean.

Schneide meinen eigenen Hals

Or: I'm cutting my own throat.....

Also of interest: the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about the swansong with these lines:-

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing Should certain persons die before they sing.

Does this subtly presage Christine? Or the whole general area of death at the Opera?

The character of Christine - an appalling opera singer who can get nothing right and who is convinced of her own talent, despite sounding appalling - may be based on American socialite Florence Foster Jenkins, a rich but untalented amateur who used her money and connections to rent the Carnegie Hall to prove her ability to a sceptical world. [[1]] describes her as an American amateur operatic soprano who was known, and ridiculed, for her lack of rhythm, pitch, tone, aberrant pronunciation of libretti, and overall poor singing ability.

The Opera, as was, ends with Agnes Nitt's last defiant song of rage that effectively discharges the accumulated almost-magic and sets the stage for a new era of light operetta and musicals.

It ain't over until the fat lady sings....

Just a thought here on a visual gag. Nanny Ogg as ballerina. On the Muppet Show, wasn't there a running gag where Miss Piggy would insist on the prima ballerina spot, and as "Ballerina Pig" would act as much the same sort of highly visible sack of bricks in a tutu?