Monkey's Marginalia, No 14

1. I am pleased to point out that Terry Priest has updated his great resource on all things Traven with some of his notes on S. and a comparison of of the two reclusive authors, Straka and Traven.

2. Geekyzen pointed out to me in the comments of an earlier post that another blogger has mentioned Stephen King in relation to S.  I am feeling a bit sheepish as I forgot all about it until after I had written my post on King.

3. I have found marginalia notes to support the alternate ending found on the Jen Heyward's tumblr blog.

• Filomela gives a sealed envelope to Eric and Jen.  According to Arturo, Filomela was given the envelope by a Frenchman (Desjardins, probably) in the 1970s and although it was in her possession, she never opened it.  (marginalia, pp. 422 & 452)
• Eric's note in pencil noting the shifting point of view from S to Vevoda VI.  Jen adds a coment about the monkey's vantage point. (marginalia, p. 343)  
• Jen also notes that this version gives her nightmares: "All those women..." which is a reference to S finding the three women dead along with a baby in Vevoda's cellar.  (marginalia, p. 452)
• Jen notes that the naval mines are not included in ending of the print book, and Eric notes that Filomela probably didn't know that Straka was going to include them. (marginalia, p. 455) 

4.  More fun and games with anagrams. The printing on the back of the photo of the mysterious arch can anagram to a number of things. Oh, btw, the arch is a blind arch as its purpose is decorative and is not supporting anything.  The wording on the back of the photo reads:  This paper manufactured by Spectra Photo.

• pirate treasure map
• suspect s estate map phony bouchard paris fr
• the postcards are not ciphers
• arch coordinates are by a sea (remaining letters PRMUFUCTPHT) 

5. And there may be a possible transposition cipher in Chapter 5, Down, and Out.  I put both paragraphs on a grid and left off the last part of the second paragraph which allows both pieces of text to fit on a 18x18 square.  Instead of putting the paragraphs on top of each other, I turned them so they are facing each other; because when you hold hands, it's the palms of the hands that face each other and touch.   As the number of characters in both text strings are divisible (50 & 49 characters) and therefore can fit onto a grid, they are good candidates for some sort of transposition cipher. 

AUREETKTEUNIEINEDWTETAYSHGOHOTHSPDAEOEMTEWHCBLTWAP

BTENHODHMMOHKGOHIOTYTEITEUEYEHUIDIDFLISOVAKOEGMEA

(8/17/14, edited for grammar and tags added)

The Monkey's Marginalia, No 9

These posts are about the various and sundry ideas, items and wagtails that are too short for their own blog post.

1.  The so aptly named Mississippi Muse commented recently on two of my blog posts and had some great insights.  Plus she is absolutely right that I should have included Gertrude Stein in the list of Lost Generation writers.  Her comments are below:

This maybe far fetched, but I think it is relevant. I know there are references to Hemingway early in the text. & the themes of being, "Lost", multiple characters, and this concept of "palimpsest" both pertaining to relationships and land/archaeology "histories of a place" reminds me of a quote Hemingway made about "The Sun Also Rises" (which bears the epigraph: "You are a lost Generation" --- Gertrude Stein) to his editor, Max Perkins that the "point of the book" was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever"; he believed the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost." Here is the Bible verse, Ecclesiastes 1:2-11 NKJV: Which has relevance and many themes pertaining to S. Verse 7. Which is similar to the quote: "What begins at the water shall end at there and what ends there shall once more begin" ..." & from the Book Trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWaAZCaQXdo) " This is what happens when men are "LOST", Men are erased & reborn."

Ecclesiastes 1:2-11 NKJV

"Vanity of vanities," says the Preacher; "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." 3 What profit has a man from all his labor In which he toils under the sun? 4 One generation passes away, and another generation comes; But the earth abides forever. 5 The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, And hastens to the place where it arose. 6 The wind goes toward the south, And turns around to the north; The wind whirls about continually, And comes again on its circuit. 7 All the rivers run into the sea, Yet the sea is not full; To the place from which the rivers come, There they return again. 8 All things are full of labor; Man cannot express it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, Nor the ear filled with hearing. 9 That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there anything of which it may be said, "See, this is new"? It has already been in ancient times before us. 11 There is no remembrance of former things, Nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come By those who will come after."

2.  In my last post, I mentioned the literary genre bildungsroman.  Goethe, who is considered the originator of this genre with his book, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship,incorporated a secret society into this work.  More to come on this one perhaps, but I have some reading to do.  I have added it to the list.

3.  The Desjardins letter. I'll admit I totally misread the forward to Ship of Theseus and for a few days was geeking out over the fact there were 20 Straka books before I realized my mistake.  Doh!  Back to the Desjardins letter: totally disgusted and a bit discouraged I started going back through the book.  And I think there are a couple of scenarios that fit for the letter.  Remember in the marginalia, Eric states that he thought Desjardins' english was pretty good but maybe it was worse than he remembers (page 87) and later that Desjardins had written a paper in 1982 stating that Straka may not have been as fluent in languages as had been thought and needed someone to help clean up his work (page x).

• The letter was written by Desjardins, but is a form of constrained writing. Constrained writing is an encoded letter in which the true message is hidden within a seemingly harmless text. 
• The letter was written by Straka or someone with a less than fluent grasp of English and was NOT written by Desjardins.  
• The letter was written by Straka and is also a form of contrained writing.  

If it is constrained writing, I haven't figured it out yet. 

4.  Nabokov, like many other authors, did use pseudonyms.  One of these was "Sirin."  Which bears a striking resemblance the Serin Group mentioned in the marginalia. 

5.  I have discovered there is an unpublished and fragementary autobiography by the anarchist, devout Christian and King of the Hobos, Ben Reitman.  The name of the work?  Following the Monkey. 

(8/17/14, edited for grammar/clarity and tags added)

I am Not-Being Aristotle

In footnote 2, page 71, Chapter 3 SOT:

Had Straka lived to review my final revisions of this translation, he likely would have quarreled with my choice to use oblivion here. His original phrasing translates directly as not-being, which I find nonsensical. How can one fail to be? If one is, one is. (Of course, the philosopher—and curiously popular Straka candidate—Guthrie MacInnes could no doubt fill up several volumes addressing such matters. I have concluded, though, that it is far better simply to be than to obsess over what, who, or even whether one is.)

"Not-being" must come from Aristotle's Theory of Act and Potency.  For Aristotle, "being" is the actualization of potential.  A monkey can be described as having fur and a tail, other creatures can have fur and tails. These characteristics have the potential for the monkey, but only once the characteristics are united to form the monkey does the monkey become actualized.

For Aristotle, potentiality is the possibilities that any given thing can be said to have, but he acknowledges that these possibilities are not all equal; some possibilities are more likely to lead to actualization. Potentiality may have a strong tendency to occur on its own or could be the result of chance. As described by Sachs: 

The man with sight, but with his eyes closed, differs from the blind man, although neither is seeing. The first man has the capacity to see, which the second man lacks. There are then potentialities as well as actualities in the world. But when the first man opens his eyes, has he lost the capacity to see? Obviously not; while he is seeing, his capacity to see is no longer merely a potentiality, but is a potentiality which has been put to work. The potentiality to see exists sometimes as active or at-work, and sometimes as inactive or latent.

I find it interesting that the Greek work for possibility is the root word for a number of other tantalizaing words.  It makes me wonder if the munitions explosion was the dynamite or impetus for an actualization of some sort.  I also wonder if Hobbes' and Locke's use of the word "power" is related in some way too in reference to "The Power 15" ad in the pages of the McKay's review.

Dunamis is the ancient Greek word for possibility or capability. Depending on context, it could be translated "potency", "potential", "capacity", "ability", "power", "capability", "strength", "possibility", "force" and is the root of modern English words "dynamic", "dynamite", and "dynamo".  In early modern philosophy, English authors like Hobbes and Locke used the English word "power" as their translation of Latin potentia.

Actualization is the process of becoming; it is the fulfillment of possibility; and within it exists a paradox. 

In a sense, a thing that exists potentially does not exist, but the potential does exist.

Actualization or a unity of possibilities is the expression of being for Aristotle.  Also interesting is Aristotle's idea of not-being.

If, then, some things are always combined and cannot be separated, and others are always separated and cannot be combined, while others are capable either of combination or of separation, 'being' is being combined and one, and 'not being' is being not combined but more than one. Regarding contingent facts, then, the same opinion or the same statement comes to be false and true, and it is possible for it to be at one time correct and at another erroneous; but regarding things that cannot be otherwise opinions are not at one time true and at another false, but the same opinions are always true or always false.

For Aristotle "'not being' is "being" not combined but more than one."  More than one? Could it be that we have just gotten a hint from Straka or Caldeira that there is no single person who writes under the identity of Straka?  A collective of possibilities that could also be a collective of writers?  Because what are writers?  In reality, aren't they truly the scribes of all possibilities, realities and worlds by actualizing potentiality when putting paper to ink?

(8/17/14 grammar edits and tags added)

Monkey's Marginalia, No. 3

1.  I am going through the book again as some of the avenues I want to follow are on hold until the books come.  I did notice in the forward that Caldeira lists SOT as Straka's twentieth novel; but there are only 19 that we know of.   So there is a hidden Straka novel?   I apologize if this has been touched on somewhere else.
(7/31/14 edited to note, there is NO 20th Straka novel. I misread a passage in the Forward of SOT in January.) 

2.  I also found the place in one of the postcards included in S.; it's an old photograph of the Botanical Gardens in Rio de Janeiro. (image courtesy of the SFiles22)

3.  Here is the image taken from Google Maps street view for comparison.  

4.  As I posted on twitter a couple of days ago, I found another reference ad for the Grimshaw review posted on twitter by Doug Dorst.   This one also comes from The Saturday Review (October 15, 1949).  

5. And an unrelated bit of minutiae, I did find a Scottish author, Helen MacInnes who wrote spy novels.