The Monkey's Marginalia, No. 2

1.  I forgot to include in my post about Sherwood Anderson a bit about his mental breakdown early in his career which mirrors the amnesia of S. in Ship of Theseus a little.  Also the mention of "fugue state" in the wikipedia article may be relevant as a clue.  According to wikipedia,

"On Thursday, November 28, 1912, Anderson came to his office in a slightly nervous state. According to his secretary, he opened some mail, and in the course of dictating a business letter became distracted. After writing a note to his wife, he murmured something along the lines of "I feel as though my feet were wet, and they keep getting wetter," and left the office. Four days later, on Sunday December 1, a disoriented Anderson entered a drug store on East 152nd Street in Cleveland and asked the pharmacist to help figure out his identity. Unable to make out what the incoherent Anderson was saying, the pharmacist discovered a phone book on his person and called the number of Edwin Baxter, a member of the Elyria Chamber of Commerce. Baxter came, recognized Anderson, and promptly had him checked into the Huron Road Hospital in downtown Cleveland, where Anderson's wife (who he would hardly recognize) went to meet him.
Even before returning home, Anderson begun the lifelong practice of reinterpreting the story of his breakdown. Despite news reports in the Elyria Evening Telegram and the Cleveland Press following his admittance into the hospital outlining the cause of the breakdown as "overwork" and mentioning Anderson's inability to remember what happened, on December 6 the story changed. All of the sudden, the break became voluntary when the Evening Telegram reported (possibly spuriously) that "As soon as he recovers from the trance into which he placed himself, Sherwood Anderson...will write a book of the sensations he experienced while he wandered over the country as a nomad."  This same sense of personal agency is alluded to thirty years later in Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs (1942) where the author wrote of his thought process before walking out, "I wanted to leave, get away from business...Again I resorted to slickness, to craftiness...The thought occured to me that if men thought me a little insane they would forgive me if I lit out..." This idea, however, that Anderson made a conscious decision on November 28 to make a clean break from family and business is unlikely.^"

2.  On 1/10/2014 @kmvastra made two tweets: 

• The constellations are clear this evening 
• L-749A-79-46

The tweets lead to a plane crash that occurred on October 28, 1949. The plane was travelling from Paris to New York with a planned stop in Portugal. The crash killed 48 and was attributed to pilot error when the plane flew into a mountain during approach to Portugal airport.

Among the casualities were Marcel Cerdan, world champion boxer, who at the time, was in a relationship with the singer Edith Piaf; and world class violinist Ginette Neveu. It should also be noted that "piaf" means sparrow, yet another bird reference. There is a wikipedia article on the crash here.

3. There is a discussion in the marginalia that S. may actually be a collective of writers, possibly writing under the name of Straka. If this is true, then Straka could be a literary heteronym.  

"The literary concept of heteronym, invented by Portuguese writer and poet Fernando Pessoa, refers to one or more imaginary character(s) created by a writer to write in different styles. Heteronyms differ from noms de plume (or pseudonyms, from the Greek "False Name") in that the latter are just false names, while the former are characters having their own supposed physiques, biographies and writing styles." (from wikipedia)

The heteronym was invented by Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet and writer. At last count, about 70 of his heteronyms have been identified. Other writers who have used heteronyms are Laura Albert (JT LeRoy), Soren Kierkegaard (12+), among others.

4. On page 10, Footnote 3 indicates that "Straka was attuned to the histories of places; he mentioned in a letter to me that he often had dreams that took place on several archaeological strata simultaneously."  For some reason, this reminded me of an archaeological palimpsest.  In looking up palimpsests, I found it can also refer to a state of amnesia.  Palimpsest also used to be title of the journal published by the State of Iowa Historical Society.  In addition a palimpsest may also refer to: 

• "The word palimpsest also refers to a plaque (in particular a monumental brass) which has been turned around and engraved on what was originally the back. This usage was coined by Albert Way in a paper published in Archaeologia in 1844."

• "In planetary astronomy, ancient craters on icy moons of the outer Solar System whose relief has mostly disappeared, leaving behind only an albedo feature or a trace of a rim, are also known as palimpsests or ghost craters"

• "In medicine it is used to describe an episode of acute anterograde amnesia without loss of consciousness, brought on by the ingestion of alcohol or other substances: 'alcoholic palimpsest'."

• "The term is used in forensic science or forensic engineering to describe objects placed over one another to establish the sequence of events at an accident or crime scene."

• "Several historians are beginning to use the term as a description of the way people experience times, that is, as a layering of present experiences over faded pasts.^"

• "Palimpsest is beginning to be used by glaciologists to describe contradicting glacial flow indicators, usually consisting of smaller indicators (i.e., striae) overprinted upon larger features (i.e., stoss and lee topography, drumlins, etc.)."

• "The term is also used to describe augmented realities brought about by the melding of layers of material places and their virtual representations.^" (from wikipedia)

The Chicago School of Media Theory has a good article on palimpsests and lists some additional types here. 

(7/31/14 edited for grammar and tags added)

The Violin Player, Notes on Footnote 6, Chapter 1 (page 26)

In my last couple of posts I briefly talked about the Lost Generation. Hemingway was in that circle, as was John Dos Passos and many others. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are often included in discussions of Lost Generation poets.

Ezra Pound was one of the premier poets of the period until he lost himself in a stew of racism and insanity. World War II had come around and Pound by this time had made over one hundred radio broadcasts in support of Hitler and Mussolini. Hemingway had made it clear in a letter to Archibald MacLeish that Pound deserved punishment, disgrace and mostly ridicule. Pound was fortunate, he was tried for treason, but sent to a mental institution. Although he repudiated his support of Fascism, he never lost his racist streak.

But I need to back up a bit. Although Pound was married to Dorothy Shakespear, he did have several affairs; his longest running affair was with Olga Rudge, which lasted 50 years.

Rudge was a world class violinist. She had spent World War I playing in concerts to raise money for the British and French war efforts. Eventually Rudge had made her way to Italy and met Pound in the early 1920's. This was still at Pound's peak, he was one of the luminaries of the Lost Generation and mentor to Hemingway. Around this same time, Rudge became acquainted with George Antheil, a young American composer.

Around this time, Pound was still promoting Vorticism as a style of poety. To Pound, Vorticism is described as "The image is a radiant node or cluster; it is ... a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." Pound worked with Antheil to develop Vorticism in musical compositions for the violin. Pound wrote Antheiland the Treatise on Harmony to help promote Antheil.

As an interesting aside, Antheil wrote the murder mystery Death in the Dark under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop. It was actually a collaborative effort including Antheil, T. S. Eliot, Franz Werfel, W. B. Yeats, and Pound.

Eventually, Antheil was forced to disavow Pound, probably in part due to Pound's increasing collaboration with the Fascists.

In later years Antheil made his way to Hollywood and scored several films, including The Pride and the Passion, starring Cary Grant and Sofia Loren.

On a side note, it was Antheil's pseudo-expertise in endocrinology that brought him in touch with the screen actress Hedy Lamar. Antheil and Lamar worked together on a way to encrypt radio signals to torpedoes to prevent them from being jammed. The idea used frequency hopping and the idea was based on the mechanics of a player piano. The idea was patented, but initially the Navy dismissed the idea. Eventually the technique was used by the U.S. military after the patent expired and frequency hopping is now widely used. 


(edited for grammar 7/31/14 and tags added)