Once again, I've collected enough bits and pieces to create a new edition of The Monkey's Marginalia.
1. Ever wonder why "follow the monkey" sounds so familiar? It might be due to its similarity to the phrase, "follow the money,' which was popularized in the film, All the President's Men about the Watergate Scandal.
2. Amritsar, India (as in A Hundred Aprils in Amritsar) was the site of a massacre April 13, 1919 and may be a reference in itself to the century-long control over India held by the East India Company before control was turned over to the British crown and/or the almost century-long rule of India by the British Crown.
3. Geekyzen was on the right path with the morse code from the whoisstraka.com website, but I think her error was in adding too many dashes. I only added a dash when there was a space under a corresponding dot at the end of the lines of what we think is the encrypted message to get this: dot dash dot dash dash dash dot dash dash dot dash dash dot dash dash dot dot dash dot dash dash dot dash dot dot dot dash dot dash dash dot dash dash dot dash dash dot dot dot dash dot dash dot dot.
The only translation that I could get to work was: ROW AN MEET AT A STATE MAN INNE or ROW AN MEET AT A STATE MAN IN NE (New England). I think it's a reference to George Washington at the Delaware River. Washington would have been a "state man" in his support for the colonies' independence from British rule. At the time of Washington's crossing, the war was not going well for the colonies. The revolutionary forces were seriously demoralized from a series of crushing defeats by the British who had more men and better equipment. Washington's subsequent victories on the other side of the Delaware turned the tide for the American Revolution. There is also also an inn at the spot where Washington crossed which is known today as the Washington Crossing Inn, which makes sense; we know Dorst likes his layers.
One of the images on the website says, "safety in numbers won't keep you dry." According to one of the soldiers who crossed the Delaware with Washington, "It blew a hurricane." Facing rain, sleet and snow during the crossing, the revolutionaries were cold and wet having reached the other side.
4. Zorro first appeared in print in 1919 in The Curse of Capistrano. Written by pulp fiction author and screenwriter Johnston McCulley, who wrote under several pseudonyms, it was originally written as a one-off story. It was the silent movie version that prompted to McCulley to write additional Zorro novellas and short stories, causing some discontinuity problems with the original story and those following after.
Zorro is a composite of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Robin Hood, several real-life bandits, perhaps a guy named Lampton and maybe even a penny dreadful version of Spring Heel'd Jack, who instead of terrorizing London like he does in other versions, he is a nobleman/vigilante. Also interesting as some of these guys were real criminals, but the Scarlet Pimpernel was a a nobleman saving French nobility during the Reign of Terror; so their purposes and intents changed over time.
McCulley, creator of Zorro, also wrote a story featuring a bad guy known as the Spider. Many of McCulley's stories were printed in the The Argosy magazine founded by Frank Munsey. Several of his authors used pseudonyms and he was known to completely retool/rename his magazines, sometimes overnight.
5. Jorge Luis Borges continues to be fruitful in subtler ways. I bought an anthology he edited and one of the stories, Enoch Soames, features a "black wine" that is connected to a Mephistopheles-type character. I should note that Enoch Soames in the story wears a grey oil-cloth cloak and a black hat described as "clerical."
6. I suspect that Stephen King is the Nazca king. More to come.
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Saturday, May 3, 2014
I am Straka...?
The Desjardins letter has always bugged me. So I took another stab using word counts of 9 and 10 to equal 19 and using the words that fell in between. I had to move one sentence to near the end ("scrutiny, please and confident" I think was the hint to move the sentence) and one count actually came to 20 (Perhaps because the message was written with some urgency as Desjardins may have already been murdered?). I'm fairly confident this is the message:
I should also note, that I have gotten some interesting anagrams from taking the first and last letters of each line from the body of the letter. Mystery, MCrinitus, Curious and Bury are all anagrams that come from these letters, but attempts to try to decipher a message using a rail fence have been unsuccessful. Since some of the lines contained the same letter at beginning and end it seems the play fair cipher is not viable here for a solution, but I'll be the first to admit I'm not good with ciphers. So if anyone has thoughts on a possible cipher solution, please speak up!
"I am Straka and sure the moment when you contact me for clarity, I will be this careful." I dropped the letter into a spreadsheet to show the counts. Also note that the words in the close of the letter "stay careful" rhyme with playfair, as in the cipher.
I should also note, that I have gotten some interesting anagrams from taking the first and last letters of each line from the body of the letter. Mystery, MCrinitus, Curious and Bury are all anagrams that come from these letters, but attempts to try to decipher a message using a rail fence have been unsuccessful. Since some of the lines contained the same letter at beginning and end it seems the play fair cipher is not viable here for a solution, but I'll be the first to admit I'm not good with ciphers. So if anyone has thoughts on a possible cipher solution, please speak up!
Mulligan Stew, or It's All Burgoo to You, Part 2
The Hemingway hodgepodge
I know I've touched on Hemingway before; Hemingway is one of the handful of real persons identified in S. In Footnote 2, F.X. Caldeira describes Ernest Hemingway, though originally an admirer, as one of "Straka's harshest critics." In 1935, Hemingway was reputed to have given a interview to Le Monde stating his high regard for Straka. There is no way that Le Monde could have interviewed him in 1935 since Le Monde didn't exist until 1944. Le Monde started on December 19, 1944 using the same building, machines and masthead of its predecessor, the most circulated paper in France, Le Temps, which shut down after the liberation of France under accusations of Nazi collaboration.
It is known that Hemingway could be spiteful. I've talked about Dos Passos before, whose friend Jose Robles was most likely assassinated during the KGB purges that took place during the Spanish Civil War. David Burke, author of Writers in Paris called A Moveable Feast a hatchet job on the people he once associated with, not unlike the mythical A Swindle of Cowbirds by Guthrie MacInnes. And as Malcolm Cowley noted to the Paris Review:
Also interesting is the coded reference to the loss of Straka's valise which mirrors an incident in Hemingway's own life. Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, accidently lost a satchel full of his writings on a train in Europe. Hemingway was deeply upset with the loss and there has been much speculation that given Hemingway's personality, it was something he ultimately couldn't forgive.
In case you missed my earlier posts about John Dos Passos, his break from Hemingway occurred due to the murder of Dos Passos' friend, Jose Robles. Robles was Spanish and was the one who introduced Dos Passos to bull fighting, who in turn, introduced Hemingway to the spectacle. It was Robles who introduced Dos Passos to Spanish culture; and it was Robles who noted that the culture was static, unchanging, and stagnating.
Robles' death galvanized something in Dos Passos and marked the beginning of his political reversal into conservative politics. Dos Passos began to understand that revolution meant nothing without civil liberties, and that communism as administered by the Russians only replaced one form of repression with another. Dos Passos was understandably distraught from Roble's disappearance and when he sought help from Hemingway, was labelled a traitor to the communist cause by Hemingway and Gellhorn who felt that Robles was a fascist spy.
In page 6 of Ship of Theseus, Eric and Jen discuss the death of Amarante Durand, supposedly shot by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War after being thrown from a roof. Dos Passos, Hemingway and Gellhorn are mentioned in the marginalia as having knowledge of the murder. It is hinted that Dos Passos knew the full details of Durand's death. It's likely though, that Dos Passos never knew the full details of Roble's murder during his lifetime. According to the author Stephen Koch, Robles was killed because as a translator for the Soviets, he knew too much about their activities.
The Spanish Civil War is discussed again later in the marginalia by Eric and Jen, but the timelines are off from the actual events. Page 186 discusses the events again and mentions an October 1937, photo from the Hotel Florida in Madrid. From my research, I know that Robles disappeared in early 1937. Dos Passos left Spain in May 1937 with Liston Oak, saving Oak's life in the process. Hemingway and Dos Passos were both on their way back to the states later that month. And before Dos Passos left, he had an interesting and engaging conversation with the young man later known by his pen name, George Orwell, who had been on the front lines. Hemingway was a known admirer of Orwell, but it's very possible that the feeling was not mutual. Hemingway seemed to have a knack for self-deception and confabulation. Stephen Koch notes in The Breaking Point:
And Hemingway's perception of the war is distorted in For Whom the Bell Tolls according to Arturo Barea, who himself lived through the events in Spain (via The New Yorker),
Dates are off, perceptions are skewed, at times MacInnes seems to be analog for Hemingway with his A Swindle of Cowbirds, as is Amarante Durand for Jose Robles. But then MacInnes is listed separately from Hemingway and in his own context, and seems to include echoes of Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound with their love lives. The timing for Amarante Durand's murder is off from Jose Robles, who was a translator, professor, and revolutionary. Robles was from the Spanish aristocracy, but Durand was French. And there was the conversation that Mystimus and I had regarding Vonnegut.
And so we go back to burgoo. Even the theme of defenestration that appears in S. seems to be an allusion to layers, as the victims fall several stories, are they really falling through different books and/or authors?
I know I've touched on Hemingway before; Hemingway is one of the handful of real persons identified in S. In Footnote 2, F.X. Caldeira describes Ernest Hemingway, though originally an admirer, as one of "Straka's harshest critics." In 1935, Hemingway was reputed to have given a interview to Le Monde stating his high regard for Straka. There is no way that Le Monde could have interviewed him in 1935 since Le Monde didn't exist until 1944. Le Monde started on December 19, 1944 using the same building, machines and masthead of its predecessor, the most circulated paper in France, Le Temps, which shut down after the liberation of France under accusations of Nazi collaboration.
It is known that Hemingway could be spiteful. I've talked about Dos Passos before, whose friend Jose Robles was most likely assassinated during the KGB purges that took place during the Spanish Civil War. David Burke, author of Writers in Paris called A Moveable Feast a hatchet job on the people he once associated with, not unlike the mythical A Swindle of Cowbirds by Guthrie MacInnes. And as Malcolm Cowley noted to the Paris Review:
"Hemingway had the bad habit of never forgiving anyone for giving him a hand up."Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, T.S. Eliot, among others, became targets for his spiteful behavior.
Also interesting is the coded reference to the loss of Straka's valise which mirrors an incident in Hemingway's own life. Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, accidently lost a satchel full of his writings on a train in Europe. Hemingway was deeply upset with the loss and there has been much speculation that given Hemingway's personality, it was something he ultimately couldn't forgive.
In case you missed my earlier posts about John Dos Passos, his break from Hemingway occurred due to the murder of Dos Passos' friend, Jose Robles. Robles was Spanish and was the one who introduced Dos Passos to bull fighting, who in turn, introduced Hemingway to the spectacle. It was Robles who introduced Dos Passos to Spanish culture; and it was Robles who noted that the culture was static, unchanging, and stagnating.
Robles' death galvanized something in Dos Passos and marked the beginning of his political reversal into conservative politics. Dos Passos began to understand that revolution meant nothing without civil liberties, and that communism as administered by the Russians only replaced one form of repression with another. Dos Passos was understandably distraught from Roble's disappearance and when he sought help from Hemingway, was labelled a traitor to the communist cause by Hemingway and Gellhorn who felt that Robles was a fascist spy.
In page 6 of Ship of Theseus, Eric and Jen discuss the death of Amarante Durand, supposedly shot by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War after being thrown from a roof. Dos Passos, Hemingway and Gellhorn are mentioned in the marginalia as having knowledge of the murder. It is hinted that Dos Passos knew the full details of Durand's death. It's likely though, that Dos Passos never knew the full details of Roble's murder during his lifetime. According to the author Stephen Koch, Robles was killed because as a translator for the Soviets, he knew too much about their activities.
The Spanish Civil War is discussed again later in the marginalia by Eric and Jen, but the timelines are off from the actual events. Page 186 discusses the events again and mentions an October 1937, photo from the Hotel Florida in Madrid. From my research, I know that Robles disappeared in early 1937. Dos Passos left Spain in May 1937 with Liston Oak, saving Oak's life in the process. Hemingway and Dos Passos were both on their way back to the states later that month. And before Dos Passos left, he had an interesting and engaging conversation with the young man later known by his pen name, George Orwell, who had been on the front lines. Hemingway was a known admirer of Orwell, but it's very possible that the feeling was not mutual. Hemingway seemed to have a knack for self-deception and confabulation. Stephen Koch notes in The Breaking Point:
"He [Orwell] was not unduly impressed by the power of language to intoxicate. It was a little too close to the original sin of language: the power to lie. His supreme test for seriousness in any writer was whether she or he knew how to undo a lie."Also, it is mentioned in the marginalia on page 186 that Hemingway made a pass at Durand and she punched him out. Interestingly, I can't find any record of a woman punching Hemingway, although several men had the opportunity throughout the years, including the poet, Charles Wallace Stevens. Hemingway did return to Spain with Gellhorn a few months later and finished his play, The Fifth Column, in December 1937.
And Hemingway's perception of the war is distorted in For Whom the Bell Tolls according to Arturo Barea, who himself lived through the events in Spain (via The New Yorker),
“I find myself awkwardly alone in the conviction that, as a novel about Spaniards and their war, it is unreal and, in the last analysis, deeply untruthful.”And The Guardian reported that Hemingway was a failed KGB spy according to Stalin-era archives. Hemingway was a volatile braggart who Gellhorn called "...the biggest liar since Munchausen."
Dates are off, perceptions are skewed, at times MacInnes seems to be analog for Hemingway with his A Swindle of Cowbirds, as is Amarante Durand for Jose Robles. But then MacInnes is listed separately from Hemingway and in his own context, and seems to include echoes of Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound with their love lives. The timing for Amarante Durand's murder is off from Jose Robles, who was a translator, professor, and revolutionary. Robles was from the Spanish aristocracy, but Durand was French. And there was the conversation that Mystimus and I had regarding Vonnegut.
And so we go back to burgoo. Even the theme of defenestration that appears in S. seems to be an allusion to layers, as the victims fall several stories, are they really falling through different books and/or authors?
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