William Guppy - Ha, Ha, Ha. Delightful.: Selected Epigrams

Copyright 2020 William Guppy
All rights reserved.

H A , H A , H A. D E L I G H T F U L.

WILLIAM GUPPY

HA, HA, HA. DELIGHTFUL.

SELECTED EPIGRAMS

Praise for Ha, Ha, Ha. Delightful.

I have not read this book. Nevertheless, I am assured by reputable sources that William Guppy is a young man of fine character and good morals.

Elijah del Mendigo

The thinking mans coffee table book.
WolfE

A coffee table book which - discreetly positioned - will make certain guests leave your house early.

Nicolas Hausdorf

Like a fetid Firbank, Guppy is the aphorist appropriate to our perennially rotting empire.

Yeerk P.

A delightful addition to the coffee table of any young gentleman of repute.
Unsinn
I showed my workmates the saucy sections.
Racine

William Guppy is a character entirely at home in paradox.

Lapsed Flautophobe
Mr. Guppy certainly is a clever boy.
Terry Cola
William Guppy does not exist. William Guppy was invented in the 1950s to sell nylons.
Randy

A lurid expos of what aphorism can be in the 21st century.
Malik the Mad

An entrancing romp through the arts and sciences. Bill Guppy's assertive wit guides the reader beyond prosaic Earth and through prosaic Heaven.
Meathead Goldwyn
Stopped me from committing suicide.

Coeur Vietnam

May he be saved from himself

Spigot

To Mother

P R E F A C E

The highest praise that the William Guppy account has ever received is that its tweets gives the impression of being extracts from some terminally unpublished comic novel, written by a muddy-minded, latently homosexual claustral monk.

This, or rather the hermetic, independent style which the comment suggests, has been more or less my intention, and in compiling this collection of epigrams I have held this hermeticism as a guiding principle, eliminating, where possible, references to the platform itself, to current events and to popular culture. I have chosen, from the almost twenty-thousand existing tweets, only those which I believe have some aesthetic or comedic value in their own right. I have ended up with three-hundred and fifty.

The selected epigrams, which I have not attempted to organise in any coherent way, may be characterised variously as reflections , anecdotes , micro-fictions and nonsense . I had considered sorting them into real and invented situations, but I thought that might give away too much about where the reality of William Guppy ends and where the fiction begins. Much of the fun, both for myself and for my audience, lies in the inability to distinguish fact from fiction, sincerity from irony, and in the apparent ambiguity of the authors intention. In attempting to organise these tweets along such lines, I found that I myself was unable to make these fine distinctions.

I would like to extend my thanks to Professor Justin Murphy for giving me some help on designing the cover of this book, to my fellow Importantist Phillip Blank for his constructive criticism, and to my friend Harry Lemon for always making me laugh.

William Guppy

Madrid, 2020

Ha, Ha, Ha. Delightful
SELECTED EPIGRAMS

1. The Professor locks himself in his study and inhales the smells from his backside, emits them again, inhales again, and so on forever, in this sacred dialectic.

1. Why on Earth would I take a stranger "back to my place"?; my place, where I keep my precious things: my crowns and pounds and rubies, and my shrine to Housman? Why should I let them in, I ask you?

1. We need more amateurs. Amateur artists, amateur poets, amateur philosophers, amateur doctors, amateur lifeguards.

1. Any effective political movement should start by convincing the man at the pub and then work outward from there.

1. My income is a steady supply of dead relatives.

1. I held a long-standing erotic correspondence with a mystery woman, mediated through scribblings we each left in a library copy of the Arabian Nights. Some years later, I discovered that only two people had ever rented that particular book: Myself and one Mister Quentin Flumps, 82.

1. If I had the nuclear button, I would tease my finger around it for the frisson. The great, red areola of annihilation.

1. ARTISTS! Stupid, fog-brained, un-academic, idiotic, english but inarticulate, able-minded and able-bodied but practically useless - Send us your portfolios! We aim to represent you in our special publication.

1. If you do not move out of your parents' house by five-and-twenty, you become a piece of furniture. This lovely, ornate vanity table used to be my sister.

1. My greatest ambition is to be the smartest man in the pub.

1. For twelve years I faked a severe intellectual disability in order to live in a care home. Eventually, by degrees, I found that I really could no longer read, write nor tie my shoes. What a relief it was to drop the pretence!

1. A good knowledge of philosophy is bad for poets, but a half-arsed, slipshod understanding of philosophy is ideal.

1. It is only worth learning about things in order to be able to mock them with accuracy.

1. An old cottage on a rainy day, dusty carpets, a cupboard full of old board games, two seats, one empty, and no-one to play with.

1. I am that "general reader"which they are always patronising.

1. What are you hiding in your wrinkled folds, old man?

1. "Us men are simply unworthy of you women" I say, as the candlelight cuts a caper round her plump blisters.
   
2. Living in a hermitage; dedicating oneself to intense study of the arts and sciences; acquiring several languages, both modern and extinct; becoming a compendium for esoteric and arcane knowledge; emerging after twenty-five years of solitude, unemployable.

1. Don't read what you don't want to believe.

1. It's not "nostalgic" to acknowledge that some things in the past were better, like sanitation and medicine.

1. A young man sees visions, babbles incoherently, is championed by a local art collective as this generation's Burroughs.The disease which produced the visions rots his mind completely and he is commemorated with a facebook post which receives 16 likes.

1. You study verse obsessively from childhood and, through an ingenious experimentation with meter and form, produce poetic works of unrivalled brilliance. Two-hundred years later, in a university seminar, a group of students discuss whether or not you were gay.

1. The Surprisingly Sordid Sex Lives of the Somerset Gamekeepers - a documentary in twenty-seven excruciating parts.

1. I met a 45 year old version of myself today; stepped out of my body (young, virile), entered his (flabby, balding), and watched death crawl across my face from the other side of the room.

1. In a remote Shropshire farm, not far from the river Severn, a country lad scribbles something on a piece of paper and ties it to the foot of his carrier pigeon. It flies away and arrives the next day at a press office in London. The Editor gives the weary bird some seed and removes the tiny scroll tied around its ankle before opening it. It reads Shepherd's Pie is racist now. The Editor shakes his head. He sits down at his desk and begins work. The next morning the headline begins: This is what liberals really believe.

1. The most beautiful car is still only an ugly soda can rattling through a garden.

1. The Chairman of the Young Conservatives Conference could not attend tonight due to a severe case of gout.