My novel “How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear” was pleasant enough in its vegetal form, but it was only pleasant. Lately it has transmogrifiled into a chronobrachious febrile porphyropotpourri of temporal transfigurements and intercerebral impertinenputations. History, as Henry Ford remarked, is bunk; the version you failed to memorize is but one concatenation of impluvious chortling fermions in a vast Neverchowder of incestuchrononic impesteribilities. You cannot mess up History, for it rearrangulates autostochastically on a midnite whim.

One did not know Lewis Carrol was a Jewish Polynesian polymath of the Middle Ages (the less remarkable rump end of that era called the Middling Ages) who wrote Alicia’s Adventures in Cranial Trigonometry while punting pensively a dugout barque twixt Oahu and Oooru, nor that the Byzantine Emperor Fred the Lesser conquered Zanzibar by surprising them with oliphaunts (to make the surprise better, he set their flameretardant pachydermises on fire first). Nor that England was once a floating isle until the Royal Navy anchored it to the carcass of the Heaviathan on the orders of Queen Chandragupta Smith IV . Have no fear, all this and more will become clear, in the revised, redacted, reiterated, remediated HOW PLEASANT TO KNOW MR. LEAR