The Monkey's Marginalia, No. 1

I have decided to collect random notes and internet wanderings that are too small for their own blog posts (at least for now) into fewer, larger blog posts. (edit, I suspect that most of these may be wagtails, but they are fun, too!)


1.  On page vii, Eric left a penciled note that Caldeira may have been schizophrenic as per "Bolton (1957)."

Bolton may refer to:

• Herbert Eugene Bolton, American historian who originated the Bolton Theory in which the United States cannot be studied without considering its relationships to its neighbors. He served as chair of the history department at University of California, Berkeley for 22 years.  Despite his death in 1953, his work appeared in books published in 1957. 
• Walter James Bolton was executed in 1957 for poisoning his wife.  He was the last man executed by the New Zealand penal system.  He was 68 years old. 
• Bolton Wanderers, UK football team during the 1957/1958 season.

2.  Eotvos appears in several places (Eotvos wheel & Eotvos Syndrome).   

Baron Loránd Eötvös de Vásárosnamény was a physicist known for his experimental work with gravity.  He worked at the University of Budapest until the end of his life.  The University of Budapest was renamed the Eotvos Lorand University.  His father, Jozsef, was poet, writer and politican. 

3.  Defenestration or the act of being thrown out of an open window is reoccurring event and mentioned a few times as being the mode of death for some of Straka's peers. 

4.  Prague, where it may have all begun, actually has two events in history known as First and Second Defenestration of Prague.  You can read about the events on wikipedia here. 

5. Coriolis is the name of one Straka's books.  It is also the name of the mathematician and mechanical engineer who first described the Coriolis Effect.  

6.  Footnote 2, Chapter 1 (page 8) talks about the fictional prize the Prix Bouchard and Straka's refusal of the prize in 1912 via monkey.  I surprised that no one has mentioned Alfred Nobel, whose primary business was in munitions.  Two companies still bear his name, Akzo Nobel and Dynamit Nobel.  In 1912, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Gerhart Hauptmann (whose novel Atlantis was published in 1912 and later made into a silent film in 1913). 

Only one person ever refused the prize, Jean-Paul Sartre.  Sartre never accepted any official prize or honor.  

7.  Eric noted in pencil about the celebration of the first street lights in Miracle at Braxenholm.  In Edison, New Jersey, Christie Street was the world's first street to be lit with incandescent lights on New Year's Eve, 1879. 

References: 

Hubert Eugene Bolton:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Eugene_Bolton

Walter James Bolton: 

http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/culture/the-death-penalty/the-last-execution

Bolton Wanderers: 

http://stats.football.co.uk/results_fixtures/1957_1958/bolton_wanderers/index.shtml

Baron Loránd Eötvös de Vásárosnamény: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lor%C3%A1nd_E%C3%B6tv%C3%B6s

Gustave Coriolos: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaspard-Gustave_Coriolis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_Effect

Alfred Nobel: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Nobel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates

Gerhart Hauptman: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhart_Hauptmann

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis_(1913_film)

Jean-Paul Sartre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre

Thomas Edison

http://www.menloparkmuseum.org/thomas-edison-and-menlo-park

http://dailykenn.blogspot.com/2013/12/december-31-1879-edison-demonstrates.html

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

The Straka in Sherwood Anderson

It started as I looked into the feuds that Hemingway had with a number of other writers. He and Faulkner got into one starting around 1947.  Hemingway called John Dos Passos  a "pilot fish" in A Moveable Feast; the term was not meant to be complementary.  Hemingway and Dos Passos had a falling out after the death of Jose Robles.

Wallace Stevens intensely disliked the literati that started flocking to Key West, his long time hangout.  He got into a drunken fist fight with Hemingway;  which Stevens promptly lost (by way of a broken hand).  And Robert Frost forever earned Stevens ire by insisting that Stevens poetry "...purports to make me think." Which is an insult no matter which definition of "purports" you use.

Hemingway wrote The Torrents of Spring as a satire of Anderson's Dark Laughter.  It was Hemingway's satire that then caused his falling out with longtime friend Gertrude Stein.

But it was Sherwood Anderson that caught my eye.  His collection of loosely connected short stories in Winesburg, OH is considered his greatest work.  Published in 1919(!), the collection of 22 stories deals with the encroachment of industrialism and class on the fictional Ohio town of Winesburg.  In Ship of Theseus, Straka's novel Wineblood's Mine becomes a critique of unbridled capitalism.

In Anderson's short story Paper Pills, Dr. Reeky:

"wore also a linen duster with huge pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper. After some weeks the scraps of paper became little hard round balls, and when the pockets were filled he dumped them out upon the floor. For ten years he had but one friend, another old man named John Spaniard who owned a tree nursery. Sometimes, in a playful mood, old Doctor Reeky took from his pockets a handful of the paper balls and threw them at the nursery man."

Later, it is noted that:

"On the papers were written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts."

And...

"During the winter he (Dr. Reeky) read to her all of the odds and ends of thoughts he had scribbled on the bits of paper."

Dr. Reeky marries a girl already pregnant, but she dies from illness within a year of their marriage.  Previously, her two primary suitors before her marriage were a jeweler with white hands and "a black-haired boy with large ears." (Not unlike the black haired sailor with bat wing ears on the ship?)

This caught my eye as S. finds himself in strange city with a sludge of paper with only an ornate "S" discernible.  Much later, he goes to retrieve the piece of paper only to find "...tiny, brittle wads sticking to the seam inside."

Also are the mention of apples which is evocative of the scene in which S. and his cohorts find some late season apples as they to try to escape from the brown coats.

"One nibbles at them and they are delicious.  Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all its sweetness.  One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them  Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples."

I was also struck by Anderson's use of birds and the titles of some of his other short stories.

The Man in the Brown Coat is about a professor of history who has been able to live a very comfortable bourgeois existence.  The narrator keeps seeing visions of his wife's face floating in front of him even as he acknowledges that he knows so very little about her.

Unlit Lamps concerns a dying doctor and his daughter's attempts to connect emotionally before it is too late.

Out of Nowhere into Nothing is the story of a girl who has come home for a visit at a critical point in her life.  "Rosalind thought he looked like a gigantic bird, an aged wise old bird, "perhaps a vulture" she thought."

The Lost Novel, in which an author finally inspired to write his second novel and does so.  But when he goes back to the pages, they are blank.

Death in the Woods, although presumably about the death of an old women, it's also about the fluid nature of narratives.

I must admit that some of the original passages by Anderson that concerned birds elude me in a cursory search, but as I find them again and additional connections, I will continue to add them here.

And I welcome the thoughts and inputs of others who may see connections and affiliations I have missed.




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

Lenten Reading, a Wagtail?

It's official. Doug Dorst may be having a bit of fun with us.  I was unable to find the original reference ad for The Light by Stefan Tate that was part of the review that Dorst tweeted on December 19, 2013.  (Note: In the fictional world of Straka, this review was probably published sometime before February 22, Ash Wednesday in 1950.)

All I did find was a current publisher, Two Shoes Publishing started by author Audrey Mckay to distribute her books which are contemporary Christian fiction. (Just a reminder, McKay's was the name of magazine in which the review appeared.)

Stefan Tate appears as characters in two books.  Embrace of the Sun: In Shadows, by Daimon Price is another work of Christian fiction, this time with vampires.

Schoolfrenz, by Ray Crowther also features a character by the name of Stefan Tate, but as far as I can tell, this is straight fiction without religious affiliation.

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

Enforced Silence, or some thoughts on a mouth sewn shut in history and literature

In Ship of Theseus, S. sails on a ship with sailors whose mouths are sewn shut.  Eventually he joins them and undergoes the procedure himself.  It is a continuous motif in SOT and appears several times. 

Typically a mouth sewn shut is a motif more at home in the horror genre, body modification enthusiasts, and more recently as a form of actual political protest as google brought up several pages of such events. 

Loki may be the first victim of this practice.  Loki had his mouth sewn shut with wire after loosing a bet with some dwarves.  He had wagered his head in the bet (which Loki then lost), but refused to let the dwarves take his head if they couldn't remove his head without leaving his neck intact.  Instead, the dwarves sewed his mouth shut for his slick way with words.  According to wikipedia, this myth is the basis for the logical fallacy "Loki's wager," which "is the unreasonable insistence that a concept cannot be defined, and therefore cannot be discussed." 

The next instance is found in Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes.  The first installment, published in 1605, is considered one of the world's great masterworks.  At one point in the book, Sancho tells Don Quixote, "Senor Don Quixote, give me your worship's blessing and dismissal, for I'd like to go home at once to my wife and children with whom I can at any rate talk and converse as much as I like; for to want me to go through these solitudes day and night and not speak to you when I have a mind is burying me alive. If luck would have it that animals spoke as they did in the days of Guisopete, it would not be so bad, because I could talk to Rocinante about whatever came into my head, and so put up with my ill-fortune; but it is a hard case, and not to be borne with patience, to go seeking adventures all one's life and get nothing but kicks and blanketings, brickbats and punches, and with all this to have to sew up one's mouth without daring to say what is in one's heart, just as if one were dumb."

In 1827, it appears again in the Atheneaum.  The piece is titled Painters-Authoresses-Women, but it is not attributed to any author.  "It was easier to look in the glass than to make a dull canvas shine like a lucid mirror; and, as to talking, Sir Joshua used to say, a painter should sew up his mouth." 

In the Encyclopedia of Superstition, the practice is a symbolic act of protection. 

There are also several mentions of the practice in funerary procedures and in the descriptions of the creation of shrunken heads. 

Perhaps most interesting, I found a reference in the book The Madonna of the Hills by Arthur Guy Empey, American author of pulp fiction and screenplays. 
  "..."The other way is to promise him a pardon in a few months' time if he pleads guilty and keeps his mouth shut.  Then railroad him to Sing Sing for the limit and I can fix it so he never will be heard from.  Do you want to double cross him or are you on the square with him?  
       "I don't give a damn what happens to him," returned Davis, "just so we can sew up his mouth. The sky's the limit. Croak him if necessary.""

edit: corrected image for the Encyclopedia of Superstition.




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

Daring, Vivid, Exciting! and another T.S. Eliot reference

Edit: I have a cold today and it's muddled my head.  I listed the wrong magazine as the source of the original reference ad.  The magazine that should have been listed is The Saturday Review and has been corrected in the text below as well.

On December 19, 2013 Doug Dorst uploaded two pictures of the Ship of Theseus review by Edsel B. Grimshaw. Geekyzen and Mystimus both written excellent blog posts about the review. 

I was intrigued by the ad next to the review (2nd page) for the fictional book Moonlight.  @0bFuSc8 on twitter found links to additional ads and posted them on twitter and in the comments of the SFiles22 blog.

Here is the ad as it appears in the review: 

Asking the google, I was able to find the original ad that was adapted for use in the review.  It comes from the August 26, 1950 edition of The Saturday Review.

"German general kidnapped from Crete by Englishmen and partisan guerillas..."

It's interesting in that the ad gives another us another link to Greece (Santorini Man) and the author also wrote a book titled Bats with Baby Faces which is reference taken from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.  I was unable to find any additional information on the book other than it was published by Harlequin Books (1951) and appears to be pulp fiction.  I welcome any additional information that readers may have to offer. 

(Fair use under U.S. Copyright law allows for the use of copyrighted works for non-commercial educational purposes)

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

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)

Dos Passos and the Devil (tying up a loose end)

In the early 1930's Passos wrote, but didn't finish, the screenplay for the film, The Devil is a Woman.
Starring Marlene Dietrich and directed by Josef von Sternberg, it is the story of a woman who damages the men who love her.  The film was based on the French novel La Femme et le pantin by Pierre Louÿs.  I found a very good plot description here. Some of the plot elements will not be unfamiliar to readers of S., but as far as I can see, there is only a glancing resemblance.

Even more interesting is the Turner Classic Movies website states that Louis Bunuel used the same source material for his film That Obscure Object of Desire.  I am including the movie poster here as I find it relevant to the conversation. (note, the image was obtained from wikipedia.org and I believe it can be considered fair usage as the image is relevant to one of the central themes of S.)

Not sure I need to say anything more, but it would appear Dos Passos is important in any discussion of S.


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