Miscellanea

[undyingking]

• "It was only when he did not get up to take a bow that anyone realised something had gone wrong."
  This is the sort of story that if you put it in a murder mystery game, it would be dismissed as too absurd. Well done, Mr Hoevels, especially for coming back on the following night.

• "Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was the broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around."
  Mark Twain was an excellent writer himself, and a still more excelent journalist. Here he demolishes a considerably less excellent pen. This really is a supreme hatchet job; thanks to sturgeonslawyer for the link.

• "Using a variety of store-bought teddy bears as ‘species’ source material, I am reverse-engineering what their skulls look like and the differences and similarities between ‘breeds.’ My approach is to make up evidence and document, present, and interpret that evidence in a formal manner."
  I can't remember now where I heard of this artist who makes peculiar sculptures out of felted wool. More power to her needling elbow, say I.

• "fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cthres.ykor.sholdy
  sory.cthar.or.y.kair.chtaiin.shar.are.cthar.cthar.dan"
  I've been doing some reading recently about the Voynich manuscript, that most intriguing document. I hadn't realized that there had been so much respectable textual analysis of it. One day I'll work out a way of using this and other such cryptic artefacts in something creative, but for now it's just interesting to follow the existing delvings int it. (Former UNEXPLAINED players will note that this site is hosted in Nauru, of all places...)

Comments

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

The first one is quite absurd and excellent (not for the actor involved, obviously).

The best thing about the teddy skull is that it has ears. :oD

I actually hadn't heard of the Voynich manuscript. How wonderful! Even if it's an elborate hoax, it's awesome.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I was wondering about the ears! I guess they would have just looked like generic animal skulls without; bears' ears are pretty characteristic.

[theo]

I agree that the point would be lost without the ears. Making 'accurate' felt skulls would be too subtle without textual exposition that would undermine the effect.

[hatmandu.livejournal.com]

Just in case you haven't seen this Voynich site (using genetic algorithms to analyse it): http://pcbunn.cacr.caltech.edu/Voynich/default.htm

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

That's pretty good! A bit dry for my purposes, but all grist to the mill.

[hatmandu.livejournal.com]

A bit dry

Well, indeed. A while back I had the idea of writing a nocel using all the Voynich images exactly as they are, but with readable text of course - possibly even with the crazy formal constraint of each word being the same length as the original. Hm, not a job for while we have a baby, methinks...

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

In a few years he'll be able to help you.

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

Ooh, someone I helped with a TV interview at the museum has done work on the Voynich MS. Don't know anything about it, but his website is http://www.nickpelling.com/

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Aha, yes, I know of him. He wrote a book on it, which I haven't read but it looked like a nice summary.

[mr-malk.livejournal.com]

Wow. Now that's criticism. I have never read Deerslayer, (nor am I likely to) but that is a serious flaying. I don't know if Twain was as harsh in normal circumstances, but I would pity anyone who got on the wrong end of that pen.

"It was only when he did not get up to take a bow that anyone realised something had gone wrong."

Haha! We used that in the Baroque Picture Horror Show at 1897! Aubrey Beardsley got murdered by the actress playing Dorian Gray, (when his character, Basil Hallward was meant to be being murdered). We dragged him off-stage and only realised he wasn't hamming when he missed his curtain call!

(There was a certain amount of suspended disbelief at work here I admit, as neither I (Oscar Wilde) nor the murderess wished for the play to be cut short, just because one of the actors had been murdered).

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Excellent, life imitating art in such a way always nice to see.

I get the impression Twain partly earned his readership, living and reputation by piling in pretty vigorously when he saw a suitable target. I suspect he would have been a blogger today. He didn't dent Cooper's popularity significantly, but I don't suppose that was the point.

Slashed throat

[theo]

This is the premise of the second Inspector Barnaby novel Death of a Hollow Man. It was later adapted for an episode of the television series Midsomer Murders.

Re: Slashed throat

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Hmm, so all we have to do is get the list of subscribers to whatever obscure cable channel broadcasts that show in Austria, and we've done half the Viennese police's work for them.

Mark Twain

[theo]

I read The Deerslayer about ten years ago without noticing the logical inconsistencies that Mark Twain identifies so cogently. I did find the reported speech to be clumsy but I confess that I ascribed that to the style prevailing in that time and place. Twain's attack casts doubt on this although he was just six years old at the publication of Cooper's novel. Forty years and hundreds of miles may account for the difference of language but I imagine otherwise.

Re: Mark Twain

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

We need an angry contemporary defender to set against Twain, I think.

My only Coopering was in starting Last of the Mohicans and giving up mired in the prose, which is quite unusual for me, but I put it down to evolving pains of US novelistic style.

Re: Mark Twain

[theo]

I think that part of Cooper's huge appeal lay in the lack of competition at the time. In the early nineteenth century there had been few truly American novels: that is, books written by Americans in an American idiom about American subjects. By Twain's time there was a substantial corpus of such work and the bar was raised accordingly.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Wow, Voynich is amazing. Real shiver-down-the-spine stuff.