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 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:

"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?

The Monkey's Marginalia No 12, The Mom Edition

Does it make me a bad daughter that I have gotten my own mother interested in S.?  Her answer might vary depending on the day.  She was the origin of the phrase, "Ask not at whom the monkey laughs, he laughs at us."
Because I have been rather busy with the release of the Chapter 10 alternatives, I have been ignoring her emails about S.  I going to remedy that right now by sharing some of the bunny trails she has been following.  I realize that some of these things have already been discussed by the other bloggers, but I'm including her more interesting thoughts here.

1.  The coriolis effect that causes distortion in airplane travel north to south or vice versa is also responsible for causing start of hurricanes which go back to the Poe Maelstrom illustration and the storm in SOT. 

In Bucket class we talked about the meridian and England wanting Greenwich and France wanting Paris. Fascinating fact that two guys, Delambre and McChain actually physically measured distances to determine. They did it by actually measuring and in instances they couldn't, they did it by measuring two sides of a triangle and figuring out. I believe this was in the 1700's. A couple of books were written about this and I think would make good reading. The end result was within only a very few feet of GPS. Different meridians have been used at different times and different maps or charts would use these different ones. Using the meridian at El Hierro would suggest that it was prior to any discovery of islands or lands beyond that western most known point at least before Columbus. But Portugal had a very robust trade and the most advanced maps for at least a good part of this time and each country had their own preferences.

The advent of modern science with standard measures, scientific methods, consistent verbiage (Latin) and categorization started with Francis Bacon and within the next century was put in place so all knowledge could be accessed on an equal basis thus the reason for having only one Meridian.

So, the question I have is whether or not the longitude and latitudes derived would vary or not based upon which chart using a different Meridian was used. Just a thought.

2.  Another story by Poe, a story within a story (like tales told in cave) was derivative of another work but was also used
as the basis for works by other authors.
I was struck by the beginning discussion of the main character who was injured and seeks refuge, sees a painting and reads from a book.

3.  She wonders if the island of El Hierro is the axis mundi and the basis for the obsidian island.  And Poe's work Descent into the Maelstrom mentions a cistern which is a primary feature of the island.  

4. Okay, so in the copy of The Birds (by Aristophanes) we have, on the bottom of page 40 Syracusius is introduced as " the magpie". There is a city in Greece named Syracuse with a lot of history and I found an article which mentioned Syracusan democracy. At one time the country's populations were resettled and split up to maintain the hold of the tyrant rulers. It didn't work.
A Greek myth is the one of Cupid and Psyche. C. S. Lewis wrote a different version of this in Till We Have Faces (Cupid of course is portrayed as an archer and the stories in Ship of Theseus are love stories.

5.  There was a  K R Simmons in Chapter 10 (p418) and though this is spelled differently, I came across a poem titled "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" and it starts with:  

O water, voice of my heart, crying in the same,

All night long crying with a mournful cry

He was also a critic and wrote a book The Symbolist Movement in Literature.  [Also note, Zola (as in Emile Zola) is] Close to Sola - political writer, in critiqued in Symons book. Nominated for Nobel Prize 1901 and 1902.

6.  Okay so following the rabbit, p259 Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Oscar Wilde was buried there.
He wrote Salome in 1891 and there is a note about quarreling with his translator (and lover) Lord Alfred Douglas because of his poor command of French and therefore a bad translation. Does that remind you of anything?   :)
Many dirivative works, one in 2009 by Tale of Tales is a computer game Fatale. And multiple paintings, plays, music contain references (Smashing Pumpkins!?!)
Wilde also wrote Portrait of Dorian Grey which is a derivative of another author - Poe I think. Anyway - ebedee, ebedee, that's all folks (for now). 

7.  Okay, so this is connections again.   They talk about Lewis Looper. This might be a nod to the movie "Looper" which came out about the same time a year before this book.  It deals with a time traveler which "loops". Wells goes back to wells in El Huerro etc. and the picture related to Maelstrom could be a hole or well as well.  But, the main interesting thing is that going back to the thread about Greek gods, the first version of this story was published as "The Chronic Argonauts." And, of course, we know argonauts were archers, Calais and Heracles were both argonauts. 

8. Quote from the 1939 prize winning novel Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck:

"This is the beginning--from "I" to "we". If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I" , and cuts you off forever from the "we"."

The S[traka] book Wineblood's Mine may be relating to Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. In a way you could say that Grapes of Wrath could be a synonym for reaping the reward for actions sewn. The quote could be a very modern observation about the 1% vs we the 99%. 

9.  The viewpoint in the poem is that of Tiresias who was born male, made female, (original manuscript 19 pages), given ability to understand birdsong, died drinking tainted water and wounded by Apollo's arrow.
Quote from Wikipedia:

The text of the poem is followed by several pages of notes, purporting to explain his metaphors, references, and allusions. Some of these notes are helpful in interpreting the poem, but some are arguably even more puzzling, and many of the most opaque passages are left unannotated. The notes were added after Eliot's publisher requested something longer to justify printing The Waste Land in a separate book.Thirty years after publishing the poem with these notes, Eliot expressed his regret at "having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail".

 (And then she added)

• Anyway useful things - Protagonist point of view is that of Tiresias - again
• Quite a few allusions to other authors the first Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
• and Chaucer had written something about the 1381 peasant's revolt.
• I skimmed the tales but found nothing really helpful.
• Refereced RW Emerson's Threnody a poem about his son that died, mentions of birds in poem.
• Allusions to Lincoln's death, various royalty including Ferdinand's death by the black hand, and Shakespear's Ariel's Song from the Tempest which references the drowned Phoenician sailor (Phlebus?) and I will follow that up plus a couple other minor things. 

And a fourth version appears of Chapter 10....

Mystimus, Jillaggie and Osfour have received yet another version of Chapter 10 from our winged benefactor.  They can be found here, here and here.

And now for something completely different or another Chapter 10?

Zort over at SFiles22 has received yet a different version of Chapter 10 which can be found here. Perhaps it be the same feathered friend who delivered one to me?

Another Alternative Chapter 10? Words are a gift to the dead....

I received this from a mysterious "S"tranger via flying courier.  Two other bloggers received the same chapter as well.  They can be found here and here.

Scrutiny, please and confident. 

Warbles of a Different Color?