tell me about a complex man (13. 615)

Instead of the usual fare of the podcast and talk-show publicity circuit, we really appreciated The Daily from The New York Times—introduced with appropriately Homeric epithets—had an enthusiastic panel discussion just ahead of the release of Christopher Nolan’s cinematic adaptation of The Odyssey with scholar and translator Emily Wilson (whose work I’ve been meaning to read for some time now and whose take on the first line of the epic poem, “Sing, o Muse” above inspired the director, with a penchant for complicated and flawed protagonists, to assay the project) and author and classicist Madeline Miller, who wrote Song of Achilles and Circe. It was a fascinating panel discussion about the characters, language, tradition and themes of wandering, homecoming and hospitality of the timeless and endlessly interpreted tale. Through the lens of detractions by purists and pedants and provocateurs, attacks that the authors are well-accustomed (Wilson’s website has three contact forms: Interviews/Speaking Requests, General Inquiries and Misogynistic Trolling) and currently applied to Nolan’s work with casing choices (these same people got very upset about a Black Little Mermaid) they arrive a genuinely insightful look at the narrative, academic honesty and conclude that whatever choices that a version makes (in a long-lineage of adaptations and critiques), omissions, Hollywood-endings that one cannot hurt Homer, that the story is invulnerable.

a syntopicon (13. 581)

Coined especially for the two volume with the Neo-Latin term meaning a collection of topics, the two volume register of one hundred two great ideas of the Western canon, was compiled and catalogued by philosopher and professor Mortimer J Adler, published by Encyclopaedia Brittanica Press in 1954 as an index to accompany the fifty-four library of Great Books of the Western World, covering literature and though from Homer to Freud. I can recall seeing these books near the circulation desk at my alma mater as well as the shelves of the volumes in was made to guide at home, though I don’t think I was tempted to consult it to investigate how the individual works corresponded and overlapped, which is a bit of travesty considering the amount of effort and hours of reading it took to synthesise the writing of some seventy authors and something I will have to peruse. Like a Wikipedia gloss, it is a footnote and a hyperlink, and not just a cross-reference of themes or concordance but rather an instrument of liberal education itself for discovery and research and finding the unity in ideas that sometimes can be muddled and masked by language, examining each entry from multiple different angles, breaking each into several sub-topics. Afterwards, Adler edited the single volume Propædia or “Outline of Knowledge” as an appendix for the venerable encyclopaedia marshalling human knowledge into a logical frame work from 1974 to 2010, when the last print edition was issued.

synchronoptica

one year ago: unblogged Breton (with synchronoptica)

two years ago: Lago Delio 

three years ago: assorted links to revisit plus a registry of Americana

four years ago: more links to enjoy

five years ago: your daily demon, Mario theme inspiration, the year’s midpoint, a banger from Tracy Chapman plus a visit to Oberwaldbehrungen

six years ago: even more links, Airplane! (1980) plus the US Civil Rights Act (1964)

qanoon-e-islam (13. 577)

Among the first attempts by the British to give an ethnographic account of the customs and observations of the denizens of Colonial India, particularly the the Muslim population of the southern portion of the subcontinent and reminiscent of the I-Ching and other auspicious augury, the supposed translation (the original lost to time) published by East India Company surgeon Gerhard Herklots, a hefty and encyclopaedic volume covering all aspects of life in Madras, food, language, clothing, superstition and folklore, contains only a small appendix on setting the optimal itinerary for a journey, direction, date of departure. This guide to propitious days for embarking on trade and travel, however superficially appropriated or re-approrriated (see above), gains a purchase on the thought and tradition underlying it, informed by astronomy, astrology and currying divine protection and intercession. Much more from Public Domain Review at the link above.

synchonoptica

one year ago: the commune of Belz (with synchronoptica) plus the city of Vannes

two years ago: the castles of Bellinzona plus the US supreme court grants presidents blanket immunity for official acts

three years ago: more venerable publications going out of print 

four years ago: and then they came for me (1937) plus Scottish devolution (1999)

five years ago: Julie Moon (1970), children’s author Dodie Smith, assorted links to revisit, a banger from Grandmaster Flash (1982) plus being well-read in Antiquity

six years ago: slavery abolished in the Netherlands and its colonies (1863), police crackdown in Hong Kong, America’s entitled class, US Homeland Security tasked with protecting statues plus the licence plates of Palau

9x9 (13. 570)

general magic: an ambitious project to create the smart phone (see below) in the early 1990s failed over lack of constraint and too much freedom, not lack of vision, talent or technology

odyssey: charting the great journeys of fiction—see also  

humphrey’ executor: US supreme court strikes down federal laws that prevent the president from firing heads of (some) independent agencies—see previously  

don’t swear jerry—and don’t bleed in the sink, i’ve just cleaned it: actor and comedian Penelope Keith has died, aged 89  

🧸: Nuigurumi Jinja (Plushie Shire) dedicated in northern Kyoto for honouring beloved stuffed animals—see also here and here 

keedoozle: the grocery store vending machine of the 1930s 

 île de peliz: the solitary natural islet of Lake Geneva, with room for a plane tree  

hypergraphia: history’s most prolific writers 

how about this: 1960s housewife and the pocket phone of the future

synchronoptica

one year ago:  a walk along the beach at Gârves (with synchronoptica) plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: a visit to the Rocco di Caldè 

three years ago: animatronic Trump, an updated We Didn’t Start the Fire plus US supreme court strikes down affirmative action for college admissions

four years ago: goodwill ambassador Samantha Reed Smith 

five years ago: cartoonist Thornton Hee plus a record-setting Van Gogh auction (1987)

six years ago: Quo Vadis,  the feast of SS Peter and Paul, the debut of the iPhone (2007), a chiptune classic, exotic crisps plus Japanese train station jingles

9x9 (13. 539)

criterion collection: a roundup of dirigible-themed movies, featuring, among others, Fay Wray and Ronald Reagan as secret agent Brass Bancroft  

the camelot of africa: a tour Ethiopia’s Gondar castles 

binomial coefficients: some numbers in Pascal’s triangle make very few cameos and no one is sure why  

lost world: museum docent Louis Gratacap pioneered the genre—see previously  

fast-track enlargement: talks begin for EU accession for Ukraine and Moldova  

ger:gre: Monty Python’s Ancients v Moderns football match  

planetary-mass companion: the famous Pink Planet may be a failed binary star system  

a tisket, a tasket: an update on the headquarters building of Longaberger baskets—see previously  

sac pour mal de l’air: a collection of air sickness bags from a variety of airlines

you made this? (13. 530)

Knowing it was ongoing project, I was not completely surprised to see references to John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows circulating on the internet but we did not realise that the revival was not due to a reissue or a follow up edition by the author but rather an act of wholesale plagiarism. Whilst nonsensically including the entire text of the book and all his neologisms for universally felt emotions that we don’t have the words to express (not the best marketing strategy to sell a book), the slick impostor website, which includes blurbs and a biography and links to purchase the dictionary, absent were any of the illustrations to accompany the definitions, instead replaced with unpolished AI-generated images and a feature to gin up a new sorrow with the help of GPT-4—which seemed pretty off-brand for the writer and the attempt to limn lacunas of human experience. Every submitted sorrow is a bit rubbish and unneeded with fussy and overcomplicated etymologies and pronunciation guides (see also). Andy Baio of Waxy got in touch with Koenig and tracks down the mystery of this unauthorised “tribute” site. Vibe coded, I suspected that this might have been a case of spontaneous generation but arguably more tragic, malicious and pervasive, the bootleg site siphoning off profits from another’s creativity is a marketing agency feeling entitled. There ought to be a word for this sad state.

someone like you (13. 515)

Published posthumously as a collection of YA short fiction from the author’s adult corpus among The Umbrella Man and Other Stories, problematic fav Roald Dahl in The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1954) deals with a mechanically-minded engineer (named Adolphe Knipe, almost certainly a lightly-veiled reference to Dahl’s own US publisher, Alfred A Knopf, who reasons that the rules of language are fixed by certain mathematical principles, like the advances in calculators he has recently delivered on commission for his employer, and applies this exploit by creating a mammoth machine able to create a best-seller (see also) in fifteen minutes. Ending on a cautionary note, writers from around the world are left with no choice but to license their authorship, and by extension, human creativity, to the machine, spurned by the industry that rejected his moonlighting endeavours and taking his revenge by making all writing mediocre and formulaic at best, acknowledging that quantity bested quality in the final reckoning.

11x11 (13. 450)

o’dark ocho: an interesting linguistic coincidence  

wildlife gusher: a mysterious structure found in the middle of nowhere—click through to read some delightful and illuminating explanations, via Miss Cellania  

thomas jerome newton: a rereading of the novel The Man Who Fell to Earth in preparation for a rewatch of the David Bowie film  

富くじ: Present /&/ Correct’s collection of Mid-Century Japanese lottery tickets—see also 

spook hotel: the de facto capitol of US administered Venezuela  

kleptocracy: Trump drops his ten billion dollar lawsuit agains his internal revenue service and department of commerce in exchange for a two billion dollar slush fund to award loyalists and exempt himself and associates from future tax audits—via Kottke  

œnology methodology: the study and enjoyment of wine—see previously  

special envoy: Trump sends governor of Louisiana to Greenland to make “friends”  

night nurse: the forgotten author Dora Macy behind the Barbara Stanwyck classic  

public health emergency of international concern: World Health Organisation declares west Africa outbreak of ebola viral haemorrhage fever highly dangerous with the US CDC still not allowed to communicate with the UN body  

cowcumbers: the courgette was previously called so as they were only considered fit for bovines

the navy vs the night monsters (13. 446)

Produced by Jack Broder and Roger Corman (see previously here and here and here) and starring Mamie Van Doren, Billy Gray and Anthony Eisley, the B-movie on the trailing end of a spate of films about botanical beasts premiered in theatres on this day in 1966. The plot involves an expedition returning from the Antarctic with samples of ancient flora, stopping off a remote US navy weather station in the South Pacific for refuelling—the thawing cargo awakens as nocturnal, motile trees that decimate the crew of the station.spewing acid on their victims. Once communications to the outside world is reestablished, the handful of survivors are rescued when napalm is dropped on the island. Whilst not faring well with contemporary audience nor upon reevaluation, not amounting to anything like a cult classic, cast and crew in part were persuaded to take part in the project on the credentials of the author of the sci-fi novel that the movie was based on—albeit it loosely and considerably padded post-production to get it to ninety-minutes in length—and almost quit en masse upon learning the title and that the US military would be the calvary. Adapted from the 1959 The Monster at the Earth’s End by prolific writer Murray Leinster, reviving the trope of what’s frozen at the South Pole is best left frozen there, Leinster’s catalogue of plot devices and imagination mark the first instance of the use, with enduring influence, of several standards of the genre: first contact (over which the writer’s estate tried to sue Star Trek), universal translators, parallel universes and timelines, a networked computer that would provide a media for communication, commerce and entertainment—the terminal called a logic and servers called tanks—orbiting space stations, tractor beams, terraforming, panspermia as well as the television series Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants.

powers of darkness (13. 424)

Though we couldn’t quite place the memory at first something familiar about this intriguing side-quest from the Allusionist hooked us immediately with a literary mystery regarding the Icelandic language version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (see previously, see also) discovered more than a century after its publication, first serialised in the magazine Fjalkonan (The Mountain Lady) by Valdimar Ásmundsson in 1900—three years after the original, was determined in 2014 not to be the translation of the novel it purported to be but rather a work of fan-fiction that took several liberties with the plot. A third of the length of Stoker’s work, Makt myrkanna did not preserve the epistolary format and is by degrees raunchier, racist and political, and—moreover—was itself found to be an almost direct adaptation of a Swedish serialisation, Mörkrets Makter, authored by an anonymous individual going by the initials A.—E., with both Nordic vampires championing social Darwinism and leading an international conspiracy to take Great Britain down a notch as the world power and undermine Western democracy as degenerate for not recognising those on the fringes of society as the true leaders. Listen to the first chapter from our dungeon-master and guide Helen Zaltzman (with excellent plot synopses and fun insights) at the link above and take many different tangents on the esteem of the fanfic genre, the shadowy business of editors and popular fiction and monsters as a vehicle of allegory.

storia di un burattio (13. 415)

Originally a satirist poking fun at the Italian state of disunity and fractured governance, that is until his newspaper, Il Lampione, was censored at shutdown by the Grand Duke of Tuscany after the Italian Wars of Independence, Carlo Collodi turned to authoring children’s stories as the newly unified Italian state was subsidising school readers and the commissions, now serialised in another publication he founded in 1853, Lo Scaramuccia, provided a steady source of income whilst also being a vehicle for continued lampooning under cover of allegory. Pinocchio, originally published in fifteen instalments ending in 1881 with the puppet dead, strung up in the branches of an oak tree, by Fox and Cat—far weirder than the Disney version and akin to a more classical fairy tale with his cricket conscious killed with a hammer by his own hand but returning as a Force ghost, the puppet’s feet burned away, the transformed protagonist in asinine form, injured and rendered useless to his owner, drowned, devoured by a shark, disgorged and skinned so his hide can be used to fashion a drum, the corpse Blue Fairy, etc, etc—and fine. Due to overwhelming demand by his readership, Collodi is compelled to continue the story with more volumes. Whilst united, only a small vanishingly small percentage of the population spoke standard Italian, the diglossia of dialects mutually unintelligible, Pinocchio written in the language of the central region of Toscana and championed as the standard, with simple sentence structure and vocabulary, widely popular and accessible, the motivation behind commissioning children’s reading material, helped to a large and under-appreciated extent to create a common tongue.

bug (13. 394)

 

Pronounced “boog,” we joined our neighbours for a long Labour Day weekend on a colourful campsite just south of Bamberg on an island in the river Regnitz at the mouth of the Aurachtal. 

Though the retreat made no pretensions of being an artists’ colony, there was a surfeit of paintings and statuary everywhere, first discovering the art in the restaurant, converted from the former studio and dance hall of the camp’s founders, Fritz and Else Hoffmann-Bug (the nobiliary particle adopted for the couples’ adopted residence and long-term project) who began the campgrounds after the war in 1952, exhibiting his own works and chairing the first professional visual artists’ association for Upper Franconia.

We were going to order wine with dinner, but then remembered how Bamberg is famed for its beers, and had a Rauchbier (the flavour won from toasting the malted barley) that paired well with the smoked trout, with a distinctive taste like s’mores and campfire. The restrooms for the campers were rather vaulted affairs themselves, outfitted as a gallery of paintings and murals and a singular experience to pass through and assuredly much appreciated by guests—the camp remaining in the family over the subsequent generations and maintaining the showcase and artistic spirit of the establishment. The village was until recently also host to the museum and publishing house for the adventure franchise of Karl May before being repatriated in 1995 to the writer’s native Radebeul.

 

9x9 (13. 382)

aegis: a unique monumental statue of Athena uncovered in western Türkiye (ancient Laodicea) whose breastplate is follows the description of Book VIII of Virgil’s Aeneid  

alien abduction: conspiracy theorists connect spate of missing US nuclear scientists to UFOs—see more  

big tree stories: a hunt for the world’s tallest firs and imagining prehistoric forests studded with such giants—via MetaFilter  

₂he: although the second most abundant element in the Cosmos, the noble gas is hard to come by on Earth—via Web Curios  

frozen conflict: like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Trump’s war of choice likely to be a simmering, unresolved stalemate 

wishful hinking: an 1987 edition of the Collins Dictionary contains a trap word (see also), presumably to counter plagiarism 

paper theatre: home entertainment flourished during the Regency Period for lack of sufficient live venues  

νεῶν κατάλογος: golden tongued (so they can speak in the afterlife) Roman era mummies found in Egypt’s Minya governorate, whose tomb contains a manuscript of Book II of Homer’s Iliad, the Catalogue of Ships—via Kottke

8x8 (13. 372)

first flush: Shizoka region’s campaign to reclaim its status as the world’s number one tea producer

tippy the turtle and cubby the bear: the long history of drawing short-cuts before AI  

portraits of population: in 1971 and 1981, the Indian government conducted a people’s census with accompanying illustrated volumes to explain the motivation for collecting data—via Quantum of Sollazzo 

top of the hour: programming schedules and regular segments for a veteran blogger influenced by a career in radio  

the books are open: following a distressed shoe company’s pivot to LLMs, pasta sauce maker Prego releases a table top device to record family dinner conversations to cherish for all time—via Super Punch  

extrapolated futures: a reverse look-up archive of speculative fiction to explore how science-fiction authors of the past assay a real world scenario of the present—via Kottke  

the edge of sentience: the theory of mind, our history of underestimating the internality of others and how we might be diminishing the conscience of the machine  

hanami: Kyoto gets a new caretaker for the records of cherry tree blooms (see previously) that goes back to the ninth century, one of the oldest, continuous archives of climate data in the world

azimuth (13. 369)

Tip of the hat to Language Hat for bringing resolution to an ongoing investigation to discover the meaning and inclusion of a puzzling glyph on the Unicode block of Miscellaneous Technical symbols, U+237C, called Angzarr (⍼), and not the logogram for the character who left his race of Muggles to do wizarding in the 1984 fantasy series by author Nancy K Stouffer whom JK Rowling allegedly plagiarised from. After nearly four years of research, Johnathan Chan discovers that the character represents azimuth (اَلسُّمُوت, the directions) the vector from the observer to target or point of interest, used for star charts, navigation, cartographical projections and in ballistics. The symbol itself seems to represent the way a beam of light passes through a sextant to measure an angle.

8x8 (13. 360)

what1tune: a musical address regimen to geohash the globe with simple melodies—see previously 

neon colour spreading: a compelling optical illusion—see also 

imperial megalomania: Commodus ordered the entire city of Rome named after himself, executed anyone who mocked him, dispatched and quick subject to damnatio memoriae 

measure for measure: the religious hypocrisy (and ignorance) on display in the Trump White House with attacks on the papacy and crusader mentality through the lens of Shakespeare’s play  

proleporn: AI slop in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—see previously  

on the clock: Maarten Baas studio recruits a thousand volunteers to represent the hands of time at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport—see previously 

hollyworld: filming location substitutes in California

9x9 (13. 350)

reference desk: harness Google’s secret card catalog—via Kottke  

nitrate divas: a remarkable 1928 amateur film adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” 

📍: a Scrabble Map commissioned for the word play game’s (previously) international commemoration, celebrated yesterday  

middle powers: Carney’s Liberal Party secures supermajority in parliamentary special elections  

print gallery of an artist: an MC Escherque exploration of recursive spaces—via Waxy 

infallibilità papale: ally Meloni (previously) breaks with Trump over criticism of Pope, cancels security arrangement with Israel  

dutch cartocubism: an overlooked approach to simplify mapping from the early 1930s from the figures behind ISOTYPE—via Quantum of Sollazzo—see also  

connie converse: rediscovering the forgotten folk-music genius 

огас: the 1960s proto-internet that the Soviet Union passed on—see previously

trust in chariots (13.348)

In a semi-annual tradition, a consortium of international literary bloggers gets together online to champion books published in a given year—this time for the class of 1961, a pivotal range that bridges the transition from relatively conformist writing of the 1950s and anticipate the coming counter-cultural movements of the decade ahead. Neglected Books features an array of titles from the club for one’s reading enjoyment and edification, but not the necessarily the timeless classics, which also might merit reevaluation and reflections through a fresh reading, like JD Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey,” Solaris by Stanislav Lem, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Gabriel Garcia Márquez’ No One Writes to the Colonel, etc, and rather the more obscure and forgotten ones, like the titular work by Thomas Savage, a later travelogue by acclaimed the acclaimed author of The Power of the Dog, whose prose was sadly only afforded the moment before consigned to obscurity to be revived as a belated cinematic adaptation—the story informed Annie Proulx’ Brokeback Mountain. Though not a part of the webring myself, if I were to nominate a title for the book club, maybe I would choose the novella The Curious Sofa by Edward Gorey (published under the anagrammatical pseudonym Ogdred Weary) and subtitled as “a pornographic illustrated story about furniture. Whilst portraying nothing explicit, there is a great deal of suggestive innuendo, in turn inspiring other fictions with a kernel of truth. The German translation was banned in Austria on the grounds that it promoted lustfulness and misleading sex-drive for youths. What titles would you recommend from 1961? More at the links above.

7x7 (13.326)

a look at books: some new highlights from old library archives  

putt, putt to the pizza hut: though Gorbachev’s circumstances were quite different, the empire-ending spokesmen only to be believed in hindsight  

edinburgh of the seven seas: the very busy, remote settlement of Tristan da Cunha—see previously—via Nag on the Lake  

master editor: the inevitable ubiquity of AI writing 

koyaanisquatsi: a new visually stunning music video, Pattern Index, by Max Cooper—reminiscent of the subtitle  

whitey’s on the moon: we want to be excited about the return trip around the lunar surface but are thinking a lot about that poem and sentiment from the late-1970s and how everything’s propaganda and grift layered on heavily to get to the science  

unknown artist: a collection of Mid-Century Modern ephemera from Zara Picken—via Things magazine with much more to click through and enjoy

10x10 (13. 316)

carry on patriots: US secretary of war Hegseth nullifies probe into unauthorised helicopter fly-by and salute of Kid Rock  

feiqian: centuries old networks of underground banking provide the freedom from government oversight and privacy that crypto has failed to deliver  

road-trip: after a two year hiatus, Tom Scott returns to YouTube  

der orchideengarten: the first horror and sci-fi magazine—see previously 

the c-word: US scientists are speaking in code, the so-called “climate hushing” to continue their research 

general ledger accounting codes: an appreciation of Excel and how the spreadsheet reshaped business  

laudatio canis: a late fifteenth century testimonial about the virtues of dog-ownership—see previously  

mergers and acquisitions: Larry Ellison’s Oracle lays of thirty thousand workers in a cold-call dismissal after Paramount takeover of Warner Brothers leaves parent company in debt and without backers  

påskekrim: the Norwegian tradition of settling back with crime novels over the Easter holidays  

send in the flying monkeys: a music video with elements of Monty Python and Hieronymus Bosch that addresses the current US state of the union