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)

A Different Kind of Burden Shirt

I've been thinking for awhile now that the Belastunghemd (or burden shirt from Fn 5, pg 52) might be related to a couple of things.  In doing some research on types of fiction, sometimes references are only a close approximation to the object, idea or person being referenced. The specific example I found came from an academic paper (about Finnegans Wake), but unfortunately I can't find it again.  I have found a list of references to two characters in Finnegans Wake here to give you an idea.

To give you another example, I can create one using James Joyce, author of Finnegans Wake and Ulysses.  In Gaelic, his surname would be Seoighe (shoy).  Suppose somehow he is connected to archery, whether it be through word play or the sport.  Archer in gaelic is saighdeoir (sijue, long i).  The two words somewhat resemble each other but different enough that only someone who understands the connection that I am making would get it.  I suspect that there are these kinds of connections in S. that need to be found, too.

Back to the burden-shirt.  Mystimus and Geekyzen have talked about its possible connection to the shirt of Nessus. When I first came across the term, the first thought that came to my mind was the hair shirt worn by Thomas Becket, who was famously matyred when still wearing his (you can blame my high school literature teacher for this one), and the mystery plays of the middle ages.

The hair shirt or cilice, is an object worn by the faithful as an act of penitence or atonement; or as a way to assume some of the suffering of Christ.  The whole point of the garment is to make the wearer uncomfortable and/or to cause pain.  Although mostly associated with the Christian faith since biblical times, the practice has been traced to prehistoric cultures; the practice in Christianity comes from the biblical tradition of wearing sackcloth and ashes during mouring and debasement.  Related to this is the biblical tradition of rending one's clothes to expose a broken heart.  More recently, the hair shirt metaphor was applied to one of the Lost Generation writers; Virginia Woolf compared T. S. Eliot's wife, Vivienne, to "a bag of ferrets" worn around his neck.  It might also be that the burden shirt is a reference to five mourners; or to five sinners who need to atone for their sins.

It makes sense then that the play Belastunghemd performed by children is a morality play that takes place on Ash Wednesday.  Medieval European religious festivities at some point evolved into the formal dramas called mystery plays, using content taken directly from the bible.  They were sometimes performed around important holidays. Later, as mystery plays fell out of favor, morality plays became the form of entertainment popular in the 15th and 16th centuries.  Sometimes containing a moral or sometimes not, morality plays, often called interludes, were allegories in which the protagonist is encouraged to choose a Godly life through interactions with virtues shown in human form.

Using the same loose logic that I connected Joyce to the archer, I think Belastunghemd may also be a reference the literary genre bildungsroman, that originated in Germany in the 18th century from Goethe.  Goethe, who is probably most famous for his Faust (which also contains allegory), is credited for writing the first coming of age novel.  The term comes from the german meaning "novel of formation/education/culture"  Bildungsroman "is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood."  Which makes sense as becoming an adult comes with its own trials and responsibilities. In order to become an adult, one must give up childish things and assume the burdens or burden-shirt of maturity.


(8/17/14 edits for grammar 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)

The espionage of the Black 19?

One of the comments of Mystimus' blog pointed to Robert Ludlum.  It started as a joke, I tweeted a comment about Jason Bourne being a lot like our favorite amnesiac.  I thought it was a total wagtail.

Then I saw one of his books mention Salonika in the summary page on amazon.com. On a whim, I googled "robert ludlum dahomey" and got a hit.  And I kept getting hits for the most of the other locations. This list may be incomplete and some may be incorrect, please let me know if you see something I missed.

1. Dahomey- The Janson Directive
2. Salonika- The Gemini Contenders (another drifting twins reference?)
3. Calais (Pas de Calais)- The Gemini Contenders, The Tristan Betrayal, The Prometheus Deception, The Sigma Protocal
4. Ypres- no mention that I can find yet
5. NV- Nevada in The Aquitane Progression
6. Taranaki- no mention, but I did find a Ludlum's Valley in New Zealand.  New Zealand does make an appearance in The Matarese Circle
7. Odessa- The Odessa File
8. Galway- despite numerous mentions of Ireland and Irish in several of Ludlum's books, no action takes place there in any of his books.  Is that why nothing happened in Galway 1831? 
9. Bijapur- The Bourne Objective takes place in the capital city, Bangalore, of Karnataka.  Bijapur can be found in Karnataka, too 
10. Adana- no mention, but Turkey can be found in four of the Bourne novels and in The Hades Factor
11. Rio Negro- The Sigma Protocol 
12. Barkol- no mention that I can find yet 
13. Tangier-  The Janson Directive mentions Tangier Island, Virginia
14. B___-  mentions a "B-team" in The Lazarus Vendetta
15. Los Angeles- The Lazarus Vendetta
16. Tripoli-  The Prometheus Deception, The Hades Factor, The Janson Directive
17. Berlin/Danzig- Berlin in The Scarletti Inheritance
18. New York- The Ambler Warning (there may be others) and it should be noted that Ludlum was on the NYT bestseller's list several times. 
19. Toronto- The Lazarus Vendetta

(8/15/14 edited for grammar and tags added) 

Vevoda's Cellar or Events in Time and Space

Update: I think I have them figured out, I put Berlin/Danzig back together, took out Standefer and realized that there were two locations listed on the copyright notice page.  That makes 19 total. And after I updated this post, I remembered that geekyzen had found some additional info on Calais for me. That's been added too.


I know there had been some discussion as the whether the vintages in Vevoda's relate the Eotvos Wheel as a cipher.  Maybe they are, but it just occurred to me that all the wines of Vevoda's wine that we know start with word noir, or the french word for black, and there have been 19 of them possibly identified on the SFiles22 blog.  The first 11 come direct from Vevoda's cellar, but on page 262, Eric notes that the five cities and dates listed are similar to the markings on the barrels and Eric makes a note about "Standefer 2010" as a joke in relation to the other vintages.  Could these be related to Straka's novel The Black Nineteen in some way as also noted by MJCarp at SFiles22?

1. Noir Calais 1912: Fictional riot that takes place in 1912 at Calais, France in SOT.  Calais built the monument Le Pluviose in 1912 to commemorate the death of 27 when the steamer Pas de Calaise accidentally cause the submarine, Pluviose, to sink in May 1910, and the monument was not dedicated until 1913.  Per gz: Fourteen people were killed in a coal mine explosion at the Clarence Coal Company at Pas de Calais, France.
2. Noir Ypres 1915: Ypres, Belgium. Second battle of Ypres during World War I, notable because the it was the first time that the Germans used poison gas on a mass scale. 
3. Noir NV:  Still not sure on this one, as noted in the comments on the SFiles22, state codes weren't in use yet, so I haven't tracked this one down yet.  (edited to note: it was discussed in the comments that the NV might be an abbreviation to denote current events.  I'm not sure and would like to research some more before I come to a conclusion.)
4. Black Taranaki 1863:  The Second Taranaki War was a conflict between the Maori and New Zealand government. 
5. Noir Odessa 1871: The Odessa pogrom, one in a series of violence targeting the Jews in Odessa, a city in Ukraine. 
6. Noir Dahomey 1840: Dahomey was an African country ruled by a monarchy in what is now Benin.  Dahomey was involved in the profitable slave trade. In 1840, Dahomey attempted to take over Yoruba territory.
7. Noir Galway 1831:  This one is interesting doesn't appear to reference an act of violence.  The Wardenship of Galway was dissolved by the Church of Ireland in 1831.  Edmund Ffrench was the last warden.  Galway may also reference the tribes of Galway, a group of a powerful families that ran Galway until the late 19th century.  A magistrate does note that something was happening in Galway in 1831, but the details were not given in The Edinburgh Review.
8. Noir Bijapur 1791: Doji Bara famine in South Asia.  An El Nino event caused a drought in the area from 1791-1792.  In one estimate, famine and disease may have contributed to the deaths of 11 million people. 
9. Noir Adana 1909: The Adana Massacre occurred in Adana Province of the Ottoman Empire against the Armenian population there.
10. Noir Rio Negro 1879:  Basically a state-sponsored land grab from the indigenous populations, in 1878, a massive campaign started to clear the land between the Negro River and the Alsina Trench by armed forces. 
11. Noir Barkol 1756:  Refers to the Qing Dynasty's annexation of the area formerly controlled by the Zunghar Khanate. In 1756, the Chinese emperor ordered the death of all men in Barkol or Suzhou.  The murdered men's wives and children were given to soldiers in the emperor's army. 
12. Tangier (Jun) 1905:  The First Moroccan Crisis refers to Germany's support of Morocco as an independent state, but the support damaged Germany's relations with France and the U.S.  The crisis reached a peak in June 1905, and is considered a contributing factor to WWI. 
13. B___ (Oct) 1906:  Unable to locate, still researching. 
14. Los Angeles (Dec) 1910:  Llewellyn Iron Works bombing was preceded by a bombing of the Los Angeles Times in October and resulted in the arrest and conviction of labor leaders. 
15. Tripoli (Sep) 1911:  The Italo-Turkish war was Italy's attempt to assert it rights over parts of what is now Libya.  It marked the use of the first aerial bomb dropped from an airplane. 
16. Salonika (Thessaloniki) (Mar) 1912:  Geekyzen and Jillp have brought it to me that Salonika is an alternate name for Thessaloniki.   And in 1912 Greece sunk an Ottoman ship, the Feth-i_Bülend in the harbor of Thessaloniki.
17. Berlin/Danzig 1908:  The line from Berlin to Danzig(Gdansk) is a rough border for the Polish corridor.  The German Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia confiscated land and evicted the ethnic Polish population (although this was reversed in 1925). 
18. New York 1949:  (from the SOT copyright notice) Airplane crash on October 28th in the Azores.  The plane was headed for New York.  Also, the Peekskill riots happened in 1949.
19. Toronto 1949:  (from the SOT copyright notice) The SS Noronic disaster, a fire started in a linen closet and was fueled by the lemon scented furniture polish which led to several fatalities.  

(edit: minor grammar/spelling fix)
(1/27/2014 added additional places and dates)

Monkey's Marginalia, No. 8 or Books Uncovered and Masks Removed

1. On the Eotvos Wheel website, one of Guthrie MacInnes' books, A Swindle of Cowbirds (1966), is listed. The book is reputed to have been published in 1966.  It just occurred to me today why the title sounded so familiar.  Please let me direct you to A Confederacy of Dunces.  Written by John Kennedy Toole, it is considered a comic masterpiece (and by me, too).  Sadly, Toole did not live to see his novel's success.  Toole had been working with a publisher and after several revisions, the publisher rejected the novel.  Toole ended his correspondence with the publisher in 1966.  In 1969, Toole committed suicide.  It was the only due to efforts of Toole's mother that the book was published posthumously.

2. Essad Bey, this is one authorship controversy that Dorst has never mentioned (to my knowledge) but seems to be the stuff S. is made of.  Essad Bey is believed to be Lev Nussimbaum and according to Tom Reiss, author of The Orientalist, Nussimbaum probably used the pseudonym Kurban Said.  Nussimbaum, though prolific, liked to play fast and loose with the facts, so much so, that his non-fictions works are considered garbage today by serious academics.  All of them. There is also some question as to whether he enlisted the help of additional authors due to the large number of books that are attributed to him.

Another interesting thing of note is that he started using the name Essad Bey to write for Die literarische Welt (The Literary World) in 1926.  His politics were far-right; he was considered required reading in Nazi Germany until his Jewish heritage was discovered;  and he was even contracted to write a biography of Mussolini until the nature of his origins came to light.

3.  It was through Essad Bay and Tom Reiss' book that I came across another authorship controversy.  Ali and Nino (1937) by Kurban Said. The players in this drama are:

• Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels von Bodmershof.  Although her niece asserts the baroness's authorship, the baroness could have easily gained control of the copyright in Nazi Germany since Nissumbaum, as a Jew, would have had no legal right to assert his ownership of the book as its author. 
• The book is partially written by Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli with Nussimbaum filling the rest with passages cribbed from his prior writings. 
• The book is plagiarized from The Snake's Skin (1926) by Grigol Robakidze.  

4.  And finally, The Snake's Skin appears to echo the idea found in Borges' The Aleph, except the entire world is not found in space at the 19th step in the cellar, but within the book itself.  From wikipedia.org:

The novel The Snake’s Skin is about entire universe, where the space is complete and united. The scene takes place at the entire planet: the West and the East; Russia, Europe and finally Robakidze’s motherland – Georgia. Here one may also find an imaginary world of American billionaire living in his villa at Mediterranean Sea along with various prominent artists.
There is only one tense in the The Snake’s Skin – present, but it includes past and future as well. The main thing is reality, but myths and legends are part of this reality. The way of thinking is not only particularly human, but at the same time metaphysical and idealistic.
The personages of the novel do not live in the particular time period, or represent persons with concrete nationality. The author describes generalized citizen of the world that gets transformed into a particular person or in other words, returns to his roots (actual father, motherland), oneself, and the God. This is an adventure of Archibald Mekeshi’s soul taking place throughout the centuries.

Disappointingly, it appears that a English translation isn't available.

(8/9/14 edited for grammar and clarity, tags added)

Signe Rabe Spied?

I was playing around today, it kept twitching my mind the Hamlet line "king of infinite space" and the SOT chapter title "Birds of Negative Space."  I put the two lines one on top of the other and checked the letters that fell in between.

I was able to come up with the following:

• SFEE (as in S. feels?)
• OIS (O is..?)
• SOFIESE (?)

Despite the fact that perhaps I was on the right track, I wasn't able to continue the cipher in any meaningful way.  It then occurred to me that Signe Rabe could be found in the chapter title.  

The anagrams I came up with are 

• SIGNE SPIED VACATE FOR B(some as yet unknown location, perhaps Brazil, Brussels, Belgium, Britain?)
• SIGNE SPIED VACATE ORB F(ORB is an airport code in Sweden), so I am thinking it would read SIGNE SPIED VACATE ORB, F. 
• SIGNE RABE SPIED TO CAVE, F. 

I think the first two are the most plausible, but my brain hurts so I need to call it day. 

edit: sometime in January I commented on Mystimus' blog that it could also rearrange to:
SERIN 5(E) SAVED TIAGO, FC.  There were two left over letters, B & P, which when put together could be a reference to BP Oil.




(8/9/14 edited for grammar, updated with new anagram solution, and tags added)