The acronyms are different but they still mean the same

Wears many hats

Frank Serpico has a blog.

Words I Don't Like #001

Chassy.

Nude! Girls! But it's very artistic, I swear

McSweeney's today published my entry into their Convergences contest. I don't know why I'm writing this here -- I emailed almost everyone I know and the only person who reads this blog is Ted.

A Brief Respite from this Overlong Amateur Hour

Nabokov describing a street in The Gift:

... it rose at a barely perceptible angle, beginning with a post office and ending with a church, like an epistolary novel.

Nothing new

From "Walking on the Rings of Saturn," the final profile in Paul Collins excellent book of "people who didn't change the world," Banvard's Folly:

To [18th century Scottish astronomer Thomas] Dick, the massive workings of the skies were a means to a magnificent and inscrutable end. For it to be otherwise, a means without an end, would reveal our Maker to be a cruel existentialist. The universe would be, as his book The Sidereal Heavens claims, "one wide scene of dreariness, desolation, horror, and silence, which would fill a spectator from this world with terror and dismay ... without one sentient being to cheer the horrors of the scene." This was clearly unacceptable in a Christian god, as was the "wild hallucination" that our own life was an accident of primordial chemistry. We did not exist as a result of fortunate material reactions--it existed to please us, a conceit now known as the Anthropic Principle. "Matter," Dick insisted, "was evidently framed for the purpose of mind."

It also followed that having matter anywhere without a sentient being for it to serve would be pointless. Therefore every celestial body must be inhabited. Intelligent life was more than a mere accident of our planet, or of perhaps one or two others: it was the natural state of the universe. To believe otherwise was "impious, blasphemous, and absurd." Writing like Celestial Scenery are thunderous on this point: "Let us suppose for a moment that the vast regions on the surfaces of the planets are only immense and frightful desires, devoid of inhabitants--wherein does the wisdom of the Creator appear in the supposition? Would this be an end worthy of infinite wisdom?"

Thomas Dick eventually used his theory to prove life on the moon (specifically 4.2 billion lives).

Sayonara, biblioteca

I was reading Kathryn Davis' The Thin Place. The first twenty or so pages were excellent and then I think I lost the book (the library's book) while camping in Vermont. Maybe the creepy pack of quite-possibly-but-probably-not rabid skunks we saw in the Berkshires followed us past the green mountains and up to Quechee Gorge, waited patiently and stole the book just as we were packing up our gear? Because they don't give library cards to skunks.

Fraud?

Last year, I read Great Exploration Hoaxes, a so-so book, where I learned about "Madagascar; or Robert Drury's Journal, during fifteen years captivity on that Island," which claims to be memoir of a shipwrecked sailor who, during his 15 years on Madagascar, completely forgot the English language. Achieving a small popularity in the early 18th century, the book was the sole primary resource detailing life in Madagaascar at that time. It was until the end of the 19th century that scholars began to argue the book was a fiction written by Daniel Defoe, inspired by a newspaper account of a Robert Drury who was lost at sea for 15 years but suspected of being a pirate. Those novels of Daniel Defoe's which are his most famous -- Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Journal of the Plague Year -- all pretend to be nonfiction memoirs. Robinson Crusoe is "The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner ... Written by Himself." "Moll Flanders", too, is a false autobiography. Six years ago, a researcher authenticated much of the book and it is now believed to be the true journal of Robert Drury. A compromise-of-sorts between the believers and skeptics suggest that Defoe served as the often-referred-to editor of the book and perhaps wrote Drury's story with the man at his side.

More info at The Guardian and The Museum of Hoaxes.

Close to Home

For his short story "Signs and Symbols", Nabokov invented referential mania:

[...] the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy - because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. Some of the spies are detached observers, such are glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others again (running water, storms) are hysterical to the pointof insanity, have a distorted opinion of him and grotesquely misinterprethis actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings - but alas it is not! With distance the torents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up in terms of granite and groaning firs the ultimate truth of his being.

The New Yorker published the story in the late 40s -- though they misunderstood it as a parody of psychological fiction. (Yagoda, About Town. See below.)

Zembla, the website of the Nabokov Society, has an overenthusiastic anti-deconstructive essay about the story, in which the author, Alexander Dolinin, announces, "Those who refuse to look for a hidden closure beneath the deceptive openness of "Signs and Symbols" are more guilty of a 'referential mania' than their opponents because they, like the insane boy, believe that everything in the world created by Nabokov refers to them and they are free to project their own doubts, uncertainties, and fears upon it."

On the subject of invented diseases, a bunch of science ficition writers contributed to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, which looks just fantastic.