Category: Words

A Wilde ghost story

A seasonal tale by Oscar Wilde, via Standard Ebooks.

The Canterville Ghost
A Hylo-Idealistic Romance

I
When Mr. Hiram B. Otis, the American Minister, bought Canterville Chase, everyone told him he was doing a very foolish thing, as there was no doubt at all that the place was haunted. Indeed, Lord Canterville himself, who was a man of the most punctilious honour, had felt it his duty to mention the fact to Mr. Otis when they came to discuss terms.

“We have not cared to live in the place ourselves,” said Lord Canterville, “since my grandaunt, the Dowager Duchess of Bolton, was frightened into a fit, from which she never really recovered, by two skeleton hands being placed on her shoulders as she was dressing for dinner, and I feel bound to tell you, Mr. Otis, that the ghost has been seen by several living members of my family, as well as by the rector of the parish, the Rev. Augustus Dampier, who is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. After the unfortunate accident to the Duchess, none of our younger servants would stay with us, and Lady Canterville often got very little sleep at night, in consequence of the mysterious noises that came from the corridor and the library.”

“My Lord,” answered the Minister, “I will take the furniture and the ghost at a valuation. I come from a modern country, where we have everything that money can buy; and with all our spry young fellows painting the Old World red, and carrying off your best actresses and prima donnas, I reckon that if there were such a thing as a ghost in Europe, we’d have it at home in a very short time in one of our public museums, or on the road as a show.”

Continue reading “A Wilde ghost story”

Frieren and the Wolfe

A couple of items that might be of interest to some visitors here:

You can preorder a 2027 calendar of Frieren at the Funeral. It’s in the “B3” format, so each of the two-month pages is poster-sized.

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Humble Bundle is currently offering 38 books by Gene Wolfe in EPUB format for $20. Kindle editions of individual volumes generally run between $10 and $15 apiece; if you have any interest in one of the best writers of our times, this deal an obvious bargain. I have nearly all the books already, but mostly as cheap pocket paperbacks which are increasingly tiring to read. Having them in electronic format means I can adjust the type size as necessary for readability.

Update: The offer ends tomorrow, October 22, at 11 a.m. central time. It’s been extended for five more days, as of October 24.

Crazy in the right kind of way

Literary notes:

Ted Gioia recommends seven novels by Philip K. Dick. It’s a good list, though I would have included Martian Timeslip and added a collection of his short stories.

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JMSmith seeks to enlarge your vocabulary:

“Unctuously rectitudinous” means “too damn nice.” It means what Sam Francis meant when he called the ineffectual gentlemen of American conservatism “beautiful losers.”

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Question and answer with Clayton Barnett:

Q. If you could have lunch with any deceased writer who would it be, what would you eat and what would you talk about?

A. I would invite Descartes, Locke, Voltaire, and Kant. I would be late as I am calling in a tactical nuclear strike on these morons who pulled the so-called Enlightenment out of their nether-regions.

An excess of heat

The weather this weekend reminded me unpleasantly of the summer of 1980. It also reminded me of this old story.

August Heat

by W. F. Harvey

PHENISTONE ROAD, CLAPHAM.
August 20th, 190–.

I have had what I believe to be the most remarkable day in my life, and while the events are still fresh in my mind, I wish to put them down on paper as clearly as possible.

Continue reading “An excess of heat”

Notes from the Department of Circular Communications

A query about “armchair paleontology” in the Halupedia led circuitously to an entry about Auguste Dubois-Lacroix (b. 1842, Paris; d. 1907, Pont-de-Chéruy), “an individual whose primary professional skill was the avoidance of notice.”

… a highly unremarkable civil servant whose posthumous notoriety arose from the ADLB, a complex and ultimately unsuccessful initiative he spearheaded during his tenure at the Ministry of Applied Obfuscation.1

… The stated objective of the ADLB was to enhance the clarity and efficacy of government communications by making them deliberately more difficult to understand. The underlying philosophy, according to contemporary documents attributed to Lacroix, was that true administrative efficiency lay in preventing unauthorized comprehension.

… Under Lacroix’s direction, the ADLB developed a series of groundbreaking techniques. These included the systematic introduction of non-sequiturs, the invention of new verb conjugations requiring three or more preceding subordinate clauses for correct interpretation, and the mandatory inclusion of obscure references to the Catalogues of Unnecessary Objects. The notorious Protocol of Ten Thousand Delays, a prime example of ADLB’s methodology, became legendary.

Roadrunner with flying armadillos

An inquiry about the flying armadillos of west Texas led quickly to the Archives of Misplaced Endeavors, the Project to Quantify the Weight of Apathy, and the Ministry of Futility Studies. Further research touched on the Treaty of the Fourth Dimensions Annexation, Viking Pineapple Relocations circa 975 CE, the Society for the Advancement of Spurious Mathematics, Chronometric Discontinuity, and many more remarkably obscure topics.

So it seems that not only can AI assemble listenable songs, realistic photographs and incalculable reams of prose of many kinds, it is capable of passable satire as well. (The entire prompt for the top illustration was “Ministry of Applied Obfuscation.” GPT added all the verbiage, not me.) I still prefer the scholarship of Will Cuppy, Alan Coren and Henry Beard, but as an occasional satirist myself, I find Halupedia disquietingly competent. Has AI developed a sense of humor?

Today’s proposition

Devon Eriksen (via Nicholas):

Heinlein was one of the 20th century’s greatest authors, if not THE greatest, and he was also the 20th century’s greatest philosopher and it’s not even close.

Is this defensible? I’ve read an immense amount of science fiction but little Heinlein2, and what Heinlein I have read didn’t particularly impress me. Are there depths to Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress that are missing in what I have read?

Update from Robbo: “I’d have sent Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Portis, and Plum Wodehouse into the lists, but I’m not sure what the rules of engagement are.”

Pixels and letters

Let’s compare apples and oranges. Here’s a poem by William Carlos Williams you might know:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

I fed the poem into Z-Image Turbo and requested a watercolor. This is the result:

Which is better? (Count the chicken toes before deciding.)

2
Which is better?

Blackbirds

I was of three minds

It’s the second day of February, when I and perhaps a few other bloggers post a favorite poem. Here’s some easy Wallace Stevens.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Gyneco-Obstetric Algebraic Didactics and Post-Partum Group Theory

According to a recently published paper,

A case study with pregnant mathematicians and aspiring gynecologists demonstrates that integrating the Fibonacci sequence into labor progression charts induces spontaneous appreciation for abstract algebra and mild cravings for prime numbers. These findings challenge the traditional boundaries between prenatal care and set theory, suggesting that mathematical didactics and obstetric gynecology, when merged, can birth new paradigms in both fields. Further research is encouraged, especially in the context of cesarean matrices and post-partum group theory.

(Via Eugene Volokh.)

Not quite as impactful as Alan Sokal’s classic paper, perhaps, but much more efficiently created. As the author notes, “All procedures followed the principles of academic transparency and surreal humor.”

Today’s quote: classical edition

Victor Davis Hanson:

What Padilla further fails to understand is that classical scholarship’s fascination with the Greco-Roman world rests upon that subject’s singular self-criticism of its own standards and values. The tools of mockery that Padilla employs—caricature, cynicism, parody, sarcasm, and satire—all derive from classical roots, which is to say that they were invented by the very Greeks and Romans he dismisses. Many of the Western pathologies that Padilla cites—class privilege, the “establishment,” male dominance—were long ago objects of criticism more virulent and yet more sophisticated than Padilla’s adolescent rants.

Misogyny? Read the Antigone, Medea, and Lysistrata.

Slavery? “No man is born a slave,” wrote the fourth-century polymath Alcidamas. Aristotle’s argument for natural slavery acknowledges a host of critics who felt otherwise. Slaves in drama from Aristophanes to Plautus often appear smarter than their masters.

The poor and the oppressed? From Solon to the Gracchi, there is plenty of classical admiration for the efforts of the underclass to get even with their exploiters.

Rather problematically for Padilla, the whitest people whom the Mediterranean Greeks and Romans met were often the most negatively stereotyped—whether the savage, milk-drinking, tree-worshiping Germani; the wild, tattooed, and red-haired Britons; the supposedly pathologically lying white-skinned Gauls; or the purportedly innately savage Thracians. In contrast, Homer names as the noblest of foreign peoples the black Ethiopians—a race Herodotus thought the tallest and handsomest.

Settler-colonialism? Recall what Tacitus had his Scottish leader Calgacus say about how the historian’s fellow Romans make a desert and call it peace. For all the “settler colonialism” of Alexander the Great, his ideas of race might be better described as “assimilationist” or as a sort of proto–melting pot, accomplished by forced Persian–Macedonian mass marriages to pave the way for his dream of a brotherhood of mankind.

Cops, a guinea pig and a zither

Here’s a ghost story — sorta — by James Thurber

The Night the Ghost Got in

The ghost that got into our house on the night of November 17, 1915, raised such a hullabaloo of misunderstandings that I am sorry I didn’t just let it keep on walking, and go to bed. Its advent caused my mother to throw a shoe through a window of the house next door and ended up with my grandfather shooting a patrolman. I am sorry, therefore, as I have said, that I ever paid any attention to the footsteps.

They began about a quarter past one o’clock in the morning, a rhythmic, quick-cadenced walking around the dining-room table. My mother was asleep in one room upstairs, my brother Herman in another; grandfather was in the attic, in the old walnut bed which, as you will remember, once fell on my father. I had just stepped out of the bathtub and was busily rubbing myself with a towel when I heard the steps. They were the steps of a man walking rapidly around the dining-room table downstairs. The light from the bathroom shone down the back steps, which dropped directly into the dining-room; I could see the faint shine of plates on the plate-rail; I couldn’t see the table. The steps kept going round and round the table; at regular intervals a board creaked, when it was trod upon. I supposed at first that it was my father or my brother Roy, who had gone to Indianapolis but were expected home at any time. I suspected next that it was a burglar. It did not enter my mind until later that it was a ghost.

Continue reading “Cops, a guinea pig and a zither”

Golf and rewolwers

I’ve been reading Paul Johnson and P.G. Wodehouse, who go unexpectedly well together. See, for example, Wodehouse’s 1921 story “The Clicking of Cuthbert,” in which a Russian novelist is on a lecture tour of England:

The latest news which Vladimir Brusiloff had had from Russia had been particularly cheering. Three of his principal creditors had perished in the last massacre of the bourgeoisie, and a man whom he owed for five years for a samovar and a pair of overshoes had fled the country, and had not been heard of since. It was not bad news from home that was depressing Vladimir. What was wrong with him was the fact that this was the eighty-second suburban literary reception he had been compelled to attend since he had landed in the country on his lecturing tour, and he was sick to death of it. When his agent had first suggested the trip, he had signed on the dotted line without an instant’s hesitation. Worked out in roubles, the fees offered had seemed just about right. But now, as he peered through the brushwood at the faces round him, and realized that eight out of ten of those present had manuscripts of some sort concealed on their persons, and were only waiting for an opportunity to whip them out and start reading, he wished that he had stayed at his quiet home in Nijni-Novgorod, where the worst thing that could happen to a fellow was a brace of bombs coming in through the window and mixing themselves up with his breakfast egg.

Upon discovering that one of the attendees at the dreary reception is a golfer, he cheers up:

“Let me tell you one vairy funny story about putting. It was one day I play at Nijni-Novgorod with the pro. against Lenin and Trotsky, and Trotsky had a two-inch putt for the hole. But, just as he addresses the ball, someone in the crowd he tries to assassinate Lenin with a rewolwer—you know that is our great national sport, trying to assassinate Lenin with rewolwers—and the bang puts Trotsky off his stroke and he goes five yards past the hole, and then Lenin, who is rather shaken, you understand, he misses again himself, and we win the hole and match and I clean up three hundred and ninety-six thousand roubles, or fifteen shillings in your money. Some gameovitch! And now let me tell you one other vairy funny story——”