Three Exciting Pieces of Humument News

I just found out three exciting pieces of Humument news!

— News about what now?

A Humument.  A Humument is a book by artist Tom Phillips  Kinda.  Maybe it's three books.  Or not a book.  It's a something.

...Let me start over.

Once upon a time, there was a novel by one W. H. Mallock (1849-1923) called A Human Document (1892).  It came out, was presumably read by someone at some point, and then was completely forgotten, until an artist named Tom Phillips (b. 1937) found it at an old store when he was looking for a book to alter, to treat, to change, as part of an artistic project.  He bought it and began to alter its pages.  He crossed out, painted over and drew on each page — leaving, however, some words to make up a new (hidden, revealed) story running through the art.  The first edition — which was unnumbered, but which given subsequent events should perhaps be considered edition zero —came out, from a small press, in 1970.  A edition came out from a larger publisher, Thames & Hudson, in 1980.  (It is considered, I believe, the "first" edition, although so far as I know it isn't formally numbered.)

But.  Phillips continued to work on it.

He'd altered the entire book into a single, amazing artwork. But he kept altering pages — replacing old ones with new versions.  And then he'd publish a new edition with the new pages substituting for the old versions.  (Thus each edition is slightly different.)  The second edition (so-called, actually third) came out in 1986; the third in 1998; the fourth in 2004.  I own the fourth, having read it (Browsed it?  Looked at it?  What does one do with A Humument, anyway?) from the library.  Apparently Mr. Phillips's ambition is to replace every page from his original 1970 edition.  With a new version.

I understand that.  The various pages from the original edition is simply not as rich, not as wonderful, as the pages from the later editions.  Here, see for yourself: here is the third page from the original (1970) edition, paired with the current (AFAIK) page three:

You see what I mean.

On the other hand, sometimes he replaces a page I really like.  For instance, I really like both versions of p. 15:

And of p. 20:

So the process of replacement is a loss, too.  At least sometimes.

Not all of the replaced pages are originaly from the 1970 edition; some pages he has replaced more than once.  So far as I can tell (I don't have access to all the editions) these are often great pages replacing equally great pages (or nearly so).  (I should say at this point that not all of Phillips' treatment of this book is even part of the Humument project.  He's done altered pages of Mallock's novel separately, as part of other projects, e.g. as part of an illustrated version of Dante he did.)  What's really wanted is A Complete Humument, with all the versions of all the pages included.  Perhaps someday someone will publish one.

In the meantime, it's a marvelous book, highly, highly recommended.

Which leads me to the first of the three pieces of exciting Humument news.

1. The Fifth Edition of A Humument Has Been Published

Two years ago (why does no one tell me these things?) Phillips published his Fifth Edition (not counting, as always, the original, small-press, Zeroith edition.  So you can go buy it & read it.  It's great.

But what if you don't want that book?  That leads us to...

2. A Humument has an Ap (= an Ebook version)

Yes, there is an iPad — and iPhone — version of A Humument.  It seems to be based largely on the Fifth Edition (op. cit.), but also has brand-new, never-before-seen pages.  — Actually, I haven't checked out the iPhone version, but given Phillips's record, I have no confidence that the art in the two Aps are at all identical.

I just downloaded the iPad version.

It has one feature — an "not-too-serious oracle", which displays two paired random pages (a feature which Phillips seems very taken with) — not in the book, although I suppose you could flip through the book and pick two pages.  Or roll a 367-sided die, twice.  Or something,

It also has one flaw: it doesn't seem to remember your place if you close & reopen the ap — there's no bookmark function.  (It does, fortunately, have a "go to" function, albeit not one with the easiest to use UI.)  Or maybe I've just missed it so far.

But mostly it's the latest version of A Humument, with all the astonishing brilliance that implies, as an ebook.  (And about 1/3 - 1/4 of the price of the paperback.)  So go ahead and get that, too.

Still, it would be nice to see various versions of a single page, wouldn't it?

Which leads us to...

3. A Humument had an art show, and it's now online.

Through most of 2013 — and I really rue that I only found this out in 2014 (why does no one tell me these things?) — there was a show of A Humument up at the Mass MoCA museum in North Andover, Massachusetts.  The show displayed two versions of each page (it doesn't seem they ever included more than two, which is a pity).  They also presented the unaltered version of Mallock's book along with them.

Yeah, it's over.  It sucks.  But: they now have an online gallery of it.

With three versions of each page: Mallock's unaltered, and two by Phillips.  (A few of the latter versions — maybe 1/10? — are missing, perhaps to encourage you to buy the book and/or ap, which you should do anyway.)  But it's A Humument.  Twice.  Online.

'Nuff said.

Go see it. It's one of the great books — great art projects — great nested collection of various related....

Aw hell.  Who knows what it is.  But whatever it is, it's one of the great ones of our time.

Update:

Here are some Humument-related links from my bookmarks folder.

• The introduction to the fifth edition, from the main Humument page.
• A set of essays on A Humument, from ibid.
• You got the part where two complete versions of A Humument are online, right?
• Review from the Boston Globe.
• Review from the London Review of Books.
• LRB's interview with Tom Phillips.
• Review from The Kenyon Review.
• Kenyon Review's interview with Tom Phillips.

Enjoy.

Recursive Conspiracy Theories

From Justin Gills at the New York Times (via):

Dr. Lewandowsky’s survey results suggested that people who rejected climate science were more likely than other respondents to reject other scientific or official findings and buy into assorted fringe theories: that NASA faked the moon landing, that the Central Intelligence Agency killed Martin Luther King Jr., that the AIDS virus was unleashed by the government, and so forth.

This piece of research appeared in a specialized journal in psychological science, but it did not take long to find its way onto climate skeptics’ blogs, setting off howls of derision.

A theory quickly emerged: that believers in climate science had been the main people taking Dr. Lewandowsky’s survey, but instead of answering honestly, had decided en masse to impersonate climate contrarians, giving the craziest possible answers so as to make the contrarians look like whack jobs.

So, a paper about a tendency among this group to believe in conspiracy theories was met by … a conspiracy theory.

Words fail me.

But one further wrinkle occurs to me.  This is all a secondary finding of the initial study.  The primary finding was "that ideological belief in an unregulated free market tended to be a predictor of someone’s willingness to reject the findings of mainstream climate research." As Gills says, "no surprises there"; after all, that's a straightforward ideological pairing in a country where beliefs are more and more partisan (and the right has an echo-chamber devoted to spreading falsehoods).

But how do other conspiracy theories fit in?  Are they part of the right-wing nonsense machine somehow?  Does getting one's news from that machine simply predispose one to believing other conspiracy theories?  Are they somehow in sync with right wing beliefs?  Or are these two different groups -- a big group that deny climate science because of right wing beliefs, and another group that denies them because they believe other conspiracy theories?

Damn. Now maybe I'll need to read the #$%^& papers.  (Oh, and by the way: here's a link to the first paper, which spawned the conspiracy theories, and here's a link to (a preliminary draft of) a second paper, written about the response to the first one.)

Philosophical Anecdote of the Day

J. L. Austin in wartime:

During the war, Austin had been recruited to set up, and ended up heading, the "order of battle" section of what became SHAEF (the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force) under Eisenhower. The section was responsible for collecting and analysing information from a variety of sources, including the top-secret Enigma at Bletchley Park, but also through the developing art of aerial reconnaissance (which later became satellite imaging) and human intelligence from the resistance across Europe, in support of the war effort generally and to prepare for the D-Day landing. It is said that when the German army surrendered at Frankfurt, Austin was the only person amongst the Allies who knew where all of the German army was actually located.

And supposedly this helped shape Austin's postwar philosophy:

Returning to do philosophy at Oxford from this high-level Intelligence posting, it was natural for the young Austin to try applying this very special war experience in his resumed philosophical investigations. He set himself the task (again, as he preferred it, and had found more effective during the war, through team-work) of demystifying philosophical concepts in a somewhat parallel way, one imagines, to the manner he employed as scattered data (e.g., pictures) or separate pieces of information (e.g., a train movement) were painstakingly 'put to work' in order to interpret the data being gathered -- very much a bottom-up, piece-by-piece approach to finding out what these meant.

Hmm. Have to think about that one -- maybe even read the reviewed book (quelle idee!).

(Link via)

It Almost Goes Without Saying That This Is The Quote of the Day

Maude Lebowski: ...The word itself makes some men uncomfortable. Vagina.
The Dude: Oh yeah?
Maude Lebowski: Yes, they don't like hearing it and find it difficult to say, whereas without batting an eye a man will refer to his 'dick', or his 'rod', or his 'johnson'.
The Dude: Johnson?

-- The Big Lebowski

(Anyone wise or blessed enough to skip the news sufficiently that they don't get what this refers too, should click the first link. Life imitates art. Anyone foolish or benighted enough that they haven't seen The Big Lebowski should go watch it at once. If you're short on time, just skip the news enough to make up for it.)

Update: Tom Tomorrow's cartoon on this incident.

Clash of the Titans

I've seen this awesome anecdote sourced to places like Wikipedia (whose current page on the topic seems to have deleted it, presumably in keeping with their "make sure Wikipedia isn't cool or fun" policy), and even seen doubts cast on its veracity, so I thought I'd quote the incident, with sourcing intact. Besides, it's too fun & funny not to:

It was at another party, given a little later in the year by the highly fashionable clothes designer, Fernando Sanchez, that [then 77-year old British philosopher A. J. Ayer] had a widely reported encounter. Ayer had always had an ability to pick up unlikely people and at yet another party had befriended Sanchez. Ayer was now standing near the entrance to the great white living-room of Sanchez's West 57th Street apartment, when a woman rushed in saying that a friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. Ayer went to investigate and found Mike Tyson forcing himself on a young south London model called Naomi Campbell, then just beginning her career. Ayer warned Tyson to desist. Tyson: 'Do you know who the fuck I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world.' Ayer stood his ground: 'And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field; I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.' Ayer and Tyson began to talk. Naomi Campell slipped out.

-- Ben Rogers, A. J. Ayer: a Life (2002), p. 344

(The footnote on this paragraph, incidentally, is to John Foster, A. J. Ayer (1985), p. 297.) I just submitted this to Awesome People Hanging Out Together, but since it's prose, not an image, I'm not optimistic.

No, Tyson couldn't best old A. J. If you want to see Professor Ayer get slapped around but good, you'll have to look elsewhere.

The Headline All of Human History, Up To This Point, Has Been Leading To

"Gordon Ramsay's dwarf porn double Percy Foster found dead in a badger den in Wales."

- Source

(via Abi Sutherland at Making Light, who (correctly) notes, in the title-text, that "Like most strange and funny things, it's actually made up of deep sadness.")

This Post Intentionally Left Blank

Man, I'm messing up everything today.

Long Live Zhōu Yǒuguāng!

Googling something up, I clicked (at a whim) on the link for the Wikipedia page about one Zhōu Yǒuguāng (周有光), called the "father of pinyin"*... and saw that while it listed his birth date (January 13 1906), it didn't list the date of his death.

Frankly, I thought that this might be an oversight on the part of the Wikipedia hive-mind... but no, it seems that he's still alive and well and living in Beijing. He recently celebrated his 106th birthday. According to Wikipedia, he has an eight-year-old great grandson.

Here's a profile of him from two years ago (from which I took the above image). Here's a video profile from a year before that (via). The editor of the English-language site Pinyin.info met him a few years back. The same site has the table of contents of Zhōu's book, The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts, plus a few sample pages, such as this page on what pinyin is not (the "three nots" of pinyin), this page on homophones and (from an appendix) the rules of pinyin orthography.

He's lead quite a life. He was an economist, who returned from the U.S. to China in 1949 (the year of the founding of the PRC), convinced by his acquaintanceship with Zhou Enlai (no relation), one of the top people in the party, that it would be a democracy (he was not himself a communist). He was put in charge of the pinyin project thanks to that same acquaintanceship, despite protests that he was just an amateur linguist. And he, like so many intellectuals, was exiled to the countryside (away from his family & work) during the madness of the Cultural Revolution. But he survived, returned after three years, and kept working: and he's still doing fine. Writer and actor Stephen Fry interviewed him for a documentary last year ("Joy... never stopped laughing" Fry tweeted); here's a photo of the two of them.

A nice, happy discovery that a man who did great work is still alive & doing well at a pleasantly advanced age.

What can I say but Wànsuì Zhōu Yǒuguāng! (Although I guess he's pretty much got that covered, doesn't he.)

_______________
* Pinyin, of course, is the standard romanization for Chinese, adopted by the People's Republic of China in the 1950's, and by now adopted pretty much universally (e.g. even in Taiwan), which is why the city you used to see referred to as Peking is now universally known as Beijing: it's just a different way of romanizing the same Chinese name, 北京.

Quote of the Day: the Bureaucrat's Redemption

From Teresa Nielsen Hayden's lengthy and fascinating account of her excommunication from the Mormon church (officially, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints):

And there's one other thing, the official action that really and truly made me excommunicate: When the central organization of the church received word that I was out, someone formally went to the filing cabinet where my membership file was kept. And that someone, specifically and officially using red ink, took my folder and stamped across the face of it EXCOMMUNICATED. And do you know what? If I repent and am once more received into the church and my sins are washed away again, I will triumphantly be issued a new file folder. I thought this was wonderful, a sort of bureaucrat's revenge and redemption.

Read the rest if you want more odd details, like how the excommunicating church officers say goodbye by shaking her hand and saying "it was nice to meet you", which is pretty funny in and of itself.

The Other Life of Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk is best known as one of the intellectual founders of modern American conservatism; his best known work is The Conservative Mind, and it was one of the thirteen books I chose to assign in my survey of U. S. Intellectual History Since 1865 (we just had our discussion of it yesterday). It was far from his only contribution to this tradition, however: he also wrote a column in the National Review in its early years, edited his own conservative journal called Modern Age, and wrote a lot of other books on conservative thought, and so forth. Like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater, Kirk is one of the intellectual founders of contemporary American politics, of enormous influence.

But Russell Kirk was also a fantasy writer, specializing in ghost stories; reviewer Michael Dirda, who knows whereof he speaks, called Kirk "the greatest American author of ghostly tales in the classic style". And, as I found out when preparing my lectures for this week, his story "There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding" actually won the World Fantasy Award in 1977 for best short story (the same year Ray Bradbury got a lifetime achievement award). It's included in a collection of Kirk's short fiction called Ancestral Shadows, and also in David Hartwell's anthology The Dark Descent (which I've owned for years, and have read a lot, but not all, of -- and not this story, nor did the identity of its author ever penetrate my consciousness; this shouldn't have been a surprise to me -- but it was).

I'm fairly certain he's the only author we're reading this semester who won a major F/SF award. I wouldn't be surprised if he's the only person I'm so much as mentioning in the class who ever won a major F/SF award.

Strange world.

The Marvelous Mirthful Maddness of Harry Stephen Keeler

If you've never heard of Harry Stephen Keeler -- and frankly, there's no earthly reason why you should have --the best place to start learning about him is this introductory essay by William Poundstone. You may want to go read the entire thing, but just for context on what I'm about to quote, here's a bit of it:

In his time, [Keeler] was pegged as a mystery novelist who also wrote some science fiction. Today, if you've heard of him at all, it's as the Ed Wood of mystery novelists, a writer reputed to be so bad he's good.... his work bears no more relation to Christie or Hammett than does the phone book of Idiot's Valley. Although much of Keeler is steeped in the tradition of classical puzzle mysteries, woe to the reader who thinks he is going to guess the denouement... in X. Jones of Scotland Yard, the guilty party is not mentioned until the last sentence of the last page of this 448-page story....

Keeler created, and was seemingly the sole practitioner of, a genre he called the "webwork novel." This is a story in which diverse characters and events are connected by a strings of wholly implausible coincidences.... Keeler's narrative style is no less incredible than his plots. Indeed, the two can scarcely be distinguished, for his writing is essentially all plot. Characterization, description, dialog, and use of language hardly exist in the conventional sense. Every paragraph hits you over the head with new and implausible information. There is little room for anything else. In many of his later works, Keeler takes this daft aesthetic a step further. Despite this total concentration on plot, almost nothing happens within the time-frame of the narrative. It's all digressions about what happened off stage!...

In Agatha Christie at her sharpest, everyone is a suspect. In Keeler, everything is a McGuffin, that is to say, an essentially meaningless token that drives the plot. Because the webwork novel is so fundamentally phony, everything is, sooner or later, revealed to be irrelevant. A typical Keeler plot is a fractal shaggy dog story, filled with digressions, and digressions within digressions, that are themselves shaggy dog stories. As in a shaggy dog story, the truest synopsis of a Keeler plot is: Never mind.

...Much of Keeler's writing is genuinely hilarious. You are never given the luxury of being sure it is supposed to be.

Despite this rather odd approach to fiction, Keeler managed to publish a lot -- well over 50 novels, which just got stranger and stranger. (Some of his later work was published as trilogies just because it was too damn long to fit in a single volume.) Eventually his work stopped coming out in English; for a while his novels were first published in Spanish and Portuguese translation.* He left 16 complete unpublished books at his death. But fear not -- due to the magic of print-on-demand technology, nearly everything Keeler ever wrote is now back in print, for $18 a pop.

I haven't read any.

But in small bits, the man is absolutely, utterly hilarious. Here, for instance, are a few plot summaries, stolen once again from William Poundstone's essay:

A man is found strangled to death in the middle of a lawn, yet there are no footprints other than his own. Police suspect the "Flying Strangler-Baby," a killer midget who disguises himself as a baby and stalks victims by helicopter. (X. Jones of Scotland Yard, 1936)

Because of a clause in a will, a character has to wear a pair of hideous blue glasses constantly for a whole year. This is so that he will eventually see a secret message that is visible only with the glasses. (The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro, 1929)

A poem leads the protagonist to a cemetery specializing in circus freaks and the grave of "Legga, the Human Spider," a woman with four legs and six arms. Legga was born in Canton, China, and died in Canton, Ohio. (The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, 1934)

Every resident of "Idiot's Valley" is mentally retarded and packs a gun.** (Several novels; Idiot's Valley is Keeler's Yoknapatawpha County.)

[Footnote mine, not Poundstone's (or Keeler's).]

But somehow, those just seem to scratch the surface of Keeler's utterly luscious lunacy. Here, via a blog post by Roger Ebert, is a list of characters from Keeler's novel, The Iron Ring. Oh, and this is not some fan's summary; it's from a xerox of pages from the book. (Update: according to an anonymous but authoritative-sounding comment, this is wrong; this did start as a fan's summation, not Keeler's own character list. Ah well. Still fun.) This is pure Keeler, names, descriptions (and missing ones) and all:

• Margaret Annister (awaiting execution in 24 hours for murdering her sister Joline with a batch of poison fudge)
• Big Bella O'John (the prison matron)
• Mrs. Yerxa Indergaard (wealthy socialite)
• Orcutt Buffevant (hotel owner)
• Canace Procunier (comely blonde receptionist)
• Father Clanawly of the Church of the Inception (crooked priest)
• John Very-Bad-Man-Makes-All-White-Men-Tremble (Indian chief)
• Professor Adrian Summrescales
• Beany Rylander (professional age-guesser)
• Lettie Sydeaham (romance authoress)
• Barnaby Gundelfinger (owner of a chamber of horrors)
• Katy Miller (742 lb. woman)
• Harry the Pinhead
• Queenie, Tiniest Woman on Earth
• John and Simon May (Siamese twins joined at the thumb)
• Rodriguez, King of Sword Swallowers
• Bakerby Butterfant (lawyer in the London law firm of Butterfant, Birthwhistle and Thurnbwood)
• Nigel Wimpress (Junior lawyer in the firm of BB&T)
• Moses Gubb (ancient Negro)
• Roul de Sherbinin, Count le Mair
• Bessie Guth (old maid)
• Frank Welso (a crooked weasel)
• Rose Welso (the weasel's mother)
• Bull Buckdavis, Trigger Tatrini, Clubfoot Tatrelli, Guns Considine, Trigger Bozarth, Hoot Ivanjack (assorted gangsters)
• Ms. Hannah Ivanjack (Hoot's mother)
• Hurok Orcutt (handwriting expert)
• Ruth Alberta Frisbee, R.A.F. (glamour photo model)
• Mrs. Gerier (cleaning lady for mastermind criminal known only as "The Brain")
• Ichabod Tsung (popular Chinese radio xylophonist)

...and that's only about half of them (I plucked out my favorites). Go look at Ebert's site if you want the full list.

And, it turns out, the first chapter of The Iron Ring is online for free! Here's the first paragraph:

Margaret Annister, waiting death in the gas-execution chamber of Nevada City prison, yet innocent completely of the cold-blooded murder for which, within but a half-dozen hours now, she was to inhale deadly cyanide gas, had little hope whatsoever that her last desperate appeal to the governor for reprieve or commutation would succeed. For since it had failed utterly in the hands of her attorney—and why not, in view of her unanimous conviction on the very first ballot of that mixed jury!—and their unanimous decree of death on their second ballot?—and, even more, the refusal of the State Supreme Court to find any error whatsoever in that trial!—how else could this last and final appeal fare in the hands of her only friend, Yerxa Indergaard? But she would know soon now, Margaret realised—with Yerxa’s return and admittance to this place—so very soon!—any minute, in fact—and then—

If you haven't seen by now why I'm quoting all this, then you never will: it's not for everyone, certainly. Personally I find it so literally laugh-outloud funny that at some points I had tears in my eyes. But I will admit that I rather prefer Keeler concentrate -- the plot summaries, the character list, the selected sentences (below), then the actual paragraph just cited; once you add the water of actual writing it starts to seem slightly less funny and slightly more just, well, bad. But in desiccated form, it's pure genius.

All of which leads up to the following revelation:

Harry Stephen Keeler has a twitter feed.

Yes, some noble soul is posting select sentences from Keeler's work as tweets (plus updates on reviews, new publications, and so forth -- I suppose I can't begrudge them that, although the truth is I do). Here, stripped of the announcements and so forth, are the tweets currently on the front page of the feed:

It’s not me, b’God, who intends to worry another eleven years about a striped tom cat and a banana.

The train station was like an exploded atom--containing 3,491 electrons--scurrying around to prevent themselves being fused into uranium x.

A wonderful man, that old Socialist John Jones the first, considering that he lived in such a dark era as the twentieth century.

Well, she had to tap them on the head with an ax, and cut their heads off--to bring her love to a rounded and satisfactory conclusion.

As the fattest worm always covers the sharpest hook, so do many words in a letter always cover the worst news!

Corpses did not ever rise from their graves and accidentally leave festoons of their spiritual vertebrae hanging on trees or bushes!

The fact might have come out if Dr. Harrowell, an old shark in hangings, had been on the case, instead of that raw youngster Dr. Farxx.

"What does Mrs. Sprudelganger think of my hibernation?"

Not that white prynose, nay. For when he sniffs about, there is, rest assured, within some verdant bush about, a most mouldy bone.

The world of vagabondia must necessarily contain queer human flotsam, if not queerer!

That blooming, blinking, bloody, blatant Monte van Tine has tipped over the receptacle containing the legumes.

A mouse, drinking its fill from a river, gets as much as the elephant--doing the same.

"I know not the 7 and 70 Classical Fables," rasped Kung Mee.

The gal was bleary-eyed when she drooled it forth, but baby, here, had his ears as wide open as the end of the old LaSalle Street tunnel.

My chow dog hath eaten up thy hen.

It takes money to make a marriage happy; not love--nor brats--nor--nor even chickens!

Jesus, but you count your chickens before the rooster has even winked at the hen who's to lay the eggs from w'ich them chicks is to hatch.

Just now, you're nothing but a journalist, which means a newspaperman out of a job.

It disturbs me more than I can possibly express that I think that one of the above is actually a good sentence, and that one other is a sentence that, as a quote from a character in a novel, could easily be a good sentence (depending on the context).

If you find those half as funny as I do, you can find more by going to Keeler's twitter page and clicking "more" at the bottom, or (if it's been a while since I posted this) there might be new ones up top.

Because damn, he's funny.

Anyone got $18 they want to give me? Because I may need to buy a copy of X. Jones of Scotland Yard.

________________________
* Poundstone comments:

Did Keeler strike some responsive chord in the Iberian soul? Probably not. Keeler had been published in Spain and Portugal during his salad days. [A biographer] speculates that Keeler continued to be published there mainly through editorial inertia.

** No jokes about the Republican National Convention, please: it's important to respect our political opponents.

Did You Know That Henry James Participated In a Round-Robin Novel?

I didn't. But it seems he did: The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors (1908) includes a chapter by Henry James -- Chapter 7, "The Married Son". I wouldn't have guessed it.

(A round-robin story is a story written by multiple authors -- essentially a stunt, although there have been a fair number of them.)

Aside from James, the other author involved who's still read today is William Dean Howells, who wrote the first chapter, "The Father" (and seems to have conceived of the whole project). I haven't read it, but if you want to, you can find the book on Gutenberg. (Aside from Howells and James, the authors are, today, mostly forgotten.)

In other Jamesiana, Alice James, the diarist and sister of novelist Henry and philosopher & psychologist William, was born on August 7, 1848. This wouldn't be worth mentioning save that a surprising number of web sites -- PBS, and the "about" page for the publisher Alice James Books are two -- list her as born in 1850. I'm not sure how this alternative date got started. I'm pretty sure it's wrong, although both are quite prominently listed. (One telling fact is that the specific day is always associated with the year 1848.) Does anyone have any information on this? (To confuse things further, Alice was also the name of William James's wife; she was born 1849.)

Update: While I'm sharing stray oddities about the James siblings, I'll mention one more, which isn't widely known (although Louis Menand talks about it in his fabulous book The Metaphysical Club), which is that the third child of Henry James Sr. (after philosopher William and novelist Henry (Jr), but before diarist Alice) was Garth Wilkinson James -- called Wilky James -- who was one of the (white) officers in the (all-black infantry) 54th Massachusetts Regiment in the Civil War -- the regiment whose formation and attack on Fort Wagner is depicted in the movie Glory. Wilky James was wounded in the attack on Fort Wagner, and never fully recovered, suffering from various pains and ailments until his death at age 38.

Descartes's Robot; plus: Thomas Aquinas vs. Robot -- to the death!!!

The early prehistory of robots -- and inflatable sex dolls! From Stephen Graukroger, Descartes: an Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1995), p. 1:

Since the eighteenth century, there has been in circulation a curious story about Descartes. It is said that in later life he was always accompanied in his travels by a mechanical life-sized female doll which, we are told by one source, he himself had constructed 'to show that animals are only machines and have no souls'. He had named the doll after his illegitimate daughter, Francine, and some versions of events have it that she was so lifelike that the two were indistinguishable. Descartes and the doll were evidently inseparable, and he is said to have slept with her encased in a trunk at his side. Once, during a crossing over the Holland Sea some time in the early 1640s, while Descartes was sleeping, the captain of the ship, suspicious about the contents of the trunk, stole into the cabin and opened it. To his horror, he discovered the mechanical monstrosity, dragged her from the trunk and across the decks, and finally managed to throw her into the water. We are not told whether she put up a struggle.

Those who prefer that their great tales not be ruined by truth will want to stop there. Those who think that fiction survives a dusting of dull fact will want to read the next paragraph as well (pp. 1-2):

The story had a wide currency in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at one stage being taken as a theme for a novel by Anatole France. It exists in a number of versions, some of them explicitly fictional, some purporting to be factual, and the detail varies quite considerably from version to version. So far as I can tell, the story originates no early than the eighteenth century, and it received most attention in an era preoccupied with the theories of La Mettrie, the French Enlightenment philosophe who, in his infamous L'Homme Machine (1747), had extended the idea of animals being automata -- developed by Descartes in his L'Homme -- to human beings, offering a materialist account of the mind, and suggesting that Descartes himself had held such a view, but that judicious self-censorship had prevented him making the theory public. There is, in fact, absolutely no evidence that any version of the story is true. Its origins are rather obscure, but by the second half of the eighteenth century it was a propaganda weapon in the fight against La Mettrie's materialism, Descartes himself being seen as the ultimate instigator of this pernicious doctrine. Given this context, the story has all the elements of propaganda, including that favorite propaganda weapon, sexual innuendo, and I have little doubt that it originated as a tool of the eighteenth-century struggle against materialism.

And those with the spirit of a Sub-Sub Librarian, such as myself, will want to read the first footnote, so for your convenience I reproduce it here (from p. 418 of Graukroger):

I first came across this story in print in a recent book on the history of robotics, where it is presented as fact, although no references are given. Investigation showed the story to have had a wide currency between the late eighteenth century and the early decades of this century. For the different versions of the story and their sources see Leonora G. Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man Machine, rev. edn. (New York, 1968), 202-3, and the accompanying notes on p. 236. Descartes is not the first philosopher reputed to have constructed a mechanical companion. Albertus Magnus was said to have had a robot that could move and greet visitors with the salutation Salve! ('How are you!'). Thomas Aquinas, his pupil at the time, is reported to have attacked and broken the gregarious android when he came across it unexpectedly in the night. The story is reported, with references I have not followed up, in G. A. Lindeboom, Descartes and medicine (Amsterdam, 1979), 62.

How like a scholar to hide the Aquinas vs. Robot death match in a footnote like that. It should go in the preview, man: how else do you expect to get buts in the seats eating popcorn?

I'm disappointed that the footnote doesn't mention which of Anatole France's novels is on "the theme" of Descartes's robot (a quick googling indicates that none of his works seem to have been explicitly about Descartes by name). Does anyone happen to know?  [Update: A commentator comes through!  The novel in question is La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque (1893), translated as At the Sign of the Reine Pedauque (1922, available online at the link).  Thanks to B. McCarthy; see his comments below for more on this, as well as the Rosenfield book discussed below.]

Incidentally (more Sub-Subness here) the author of From Beast-Machine to Man Machine seems to have been Leonora C. Rosenfield, not G. as reported by Mr. Graukroger. A quick google indicates that seems to have published as Leonora Cohen Rosenfield (although Amazon, for no discernable reason, lists her as Leonora Davidson Rosenfield). Obviously, given the Cohen -> G. mistake, to say nothing of the obvious omission of the story of the golem from the aforequoted list of "philosophical robot" stories, the only possible interpretation is that Mr. Graukroger is a raving antisemite. These things don't happen by accident, you know.

At any rate, since neither google books nor amazon has a "look inside" feature for Rosenfield's work, my researches must stop here for the moment. Alas. If anyone has a copy of From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine handy, however, please leave any interesting tidbits in the comments.

Some People Are Really Just Overly Talented

Headline in the NY Times earlier this week: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated. (via) Some details:

Nabokov spent much of the 1940s dissecting a confusing group of species called Polyommatus blues. He developed forward-thinking ways to classify the butterflies based on differences in their genitalia. He argued that what were thought to be closely related species were actually only distantly related. At the end of a 1945 paper on the group, he mused on how they had evolved. He speculated that they originated in Asia, moved over the Bering Strait, and moved south all the way to Chile [...]

Dr. [Naomi] Pierce, who became a Harvard biology professor and curator of lepidoptera in 1990, began looking closely at Nabokov’s work while preparing an exhibit to celebrate his 100th birthday in 1999. She was captivated by his idea of butterflies coming from Asia. “It was an amazing, bold hypothesis,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, we could test this.’" [...]

Dr. Pierce and her colleagues concluded that five waves of butterflies came from Asia to the New World — just as Nabokov had speculated. “By God, he got every one right,” Dr. Pierce said. “I couldn’t get over it — I was blown away.”

-- Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, January 25, 2011

This is just breathtakingly cool. Now, I've loved his fiction for years (I first read Pnin in high school, then took a course called "Nabokov" back in college), so I'm wildly biased. Still... breathtakingly cool.

Someone needs to update this book.

Publish and Perish, or, The Strange Customs of Foreign Peoples

Oxford had a long tradition of not publishing during one's lifetime, indeed it was regarded as slightly vulgar to publish. People who did publish a lot, like A. J. Ayer, were regarded as remiss for having published too much too soon. As far as having a career and making a reputation were concerned, the attitude in Oxford was that the only opinions that really matter are the opinions of people in Oxford, and perhaps a few in Cambridge and London, and they will know about one's work anyway. One does not need to publish. What one does not want is a lot of graduate students somewhere, picking over one's half-backed publish texts and -- horror of horrors -- finding mistakes.

- John Searle, "J. L. Austin", in A Companion to Analytic Philosophy, ed. Aloysius Martinich & Dzvid Sosa (Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), p. 227

Exchanges You Don't Expect To See In Interviews With Distinguished Elderly Philosophers

The late Dr. Marjorie Grene -- a distinguished (if fairly obscure to non-philosophers) American philosopher, one of the (if not the) founders of the sub-field of the philosophy of biology, the first woman to be featured in the Library of Living Philosophers (which had previously featured notables such as John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, Sartre and Quine) -- in an interview with Believer magazine:

Believer: You know, I forgot to ask about philosopher of science Imre Lakatos—
Grene: I didn’t kill him!!

...I kinda couldn't get over that one. Shades of Kinbote (so to speak).

The entire interview is kind of a hoot, although nothing is quite up to that. Still, a few more of my favorite tidbits. The magazine on what it took to get an interview with her:

After convincing her that the Believer was not religiously affiliated—which required three verbal assurances, two hyperlinks, and finally a hard copy of the Ice Cube issue—we met in her office...

And then, three bits of a series in which the interviewer starts asking about her opinion of various philosophical and scientific writers (a series in which the Lakatos question occurred). First, Michael Ruse:

Believer: Before we started, you said something about Michael Ruse. What’s wrong with him?
Grene:: What’s wrong with him? He’s totally uninteresting.

And on Richard Rorty:

Believer: ...about Richard Rorty. You’re friends with him, though you don’t agree with his philosophy?
Grene:: We are friends, but you can’t agree with his philosophy. It doesn’t exist! He’s a wit! He should’ve lived in the eighteenth century. He just makes clever remarks that don’t mean anything.

And on Darwin:

Believer: Do you like Darwin?
Grene:: Like him? What a stupid question. How can anybody say that? How can anybody not like him? What do you mean?

...the bit about the 'stupid question' was hardly the only such comment, and made me feel a bit sorry for the interviewer.

Anyway, it's all sort of fun, although I must admit you don't get much sense of her actual, y'know, philosophy (although you do get a sense of what she wrote about, at least).

Oh, and Lakatos? Here's the complete exchange:

Believer: You know, I forgot to ask about philosopher of science Imre Lakatos—
Grene: I didn’t kill him!!
Believer: Why does everyone say you had a part in it?
Grene: Because once he helped me out of a taxi in London and he hit his head on the door. And I didn’t kill him! He died soon, and I don’t know if it was the head bump. But it wasn’t because of me! [Laughing heartily]
Believer: OK, we won’t get into that.

...for which you can hardly blame the poor interviewer, I think.

Links of the Day

Charlie Stross: we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion! (via)

Paul Krugman: dude, that all happened, like, back in the 60's, man. Catch up.

(Note: these are not SF stories they're talking about. This is nonfiction about politics.)

Fair Results From a Biased Coin

This is brilliant:

To obtain a fair result from a biased coin, the mathematician John von Neumann devised the following trick. He advised the two parties involved to flip the coin twice. If it comes up heads both times or tails both times, they are to flip the coin two more times.

If it comes up H-T, the first party will be declared the winner, while if it comes up T-H, the second party is declared the winner. The probabilities of both these latter events (H-T and T-H) are the same because the coin flips are independent even if the coin is biased.

For example, if the coin lands heads 70 percent of the time and tails 30 percent of the time, an H-T sequence has probability .7 x .3 = .21 while a T-H sequence has probability .3 x .7 = .21. So 21 percent of the time the first party wins, 21 percent of the time the second party wins, and the other 58 percent of the time when H-H or T-T comes up, the coin is flipped two more times.

-- John Allen Poulos (via)

The rest of the article is fun too -- it includes another way to get fair results from a biased coin, a method for attaining a 1/3 chance from a fair coin, and other fun coin tricks.

The Problem With Research is That Sometimes You Get a Null Result

I put some effort into researching this on a statistical basis. To cut it short: I can show you nothing. For whatever I looked, the picture is always the same: No development, no trend, no correlation. It is presented below, since I had done it. But the worth is dubious, you may as well skip this section. Quite depressing for one who set out to discover hidden wonders in the world of numbers.

-- "Robert", analyzing the footnotes in the work of Terry Pratchett

BDFIJLRTU, or, One-Letter Book Titles

My unsolicited email (not quite "spam" I suppose since I did buy something from the company once) was uncannily on-point today. The web site ABE books sent me a link to this page of theirs celebrating one-letter book titles. Their occasion for this is that one of the works just shortlisted for the Booker prize is C by Tom McCarthy. So they list twenty others, plus some near-misses.

As it happens, I had some time ago stumbled upon John Burkardt's list of one-letter book titles, and quite enjoyed it -- I even suggested a few new ones, and Mr. Burkardt was kind enough to mention my name. I wonder if ABE's spam searchbots saw that? Or is it just coincidence? (I actually suspect the latter).

Not surprisingly, the 21-title list of ABE books and the 23-title list of John Burkardt are pretty similar. By my count, ABE caught only one book that Burkardt missed (the recent C) while Burkardt found three that ABE didn't (two earlier C's, plus Leacock's Q).

Merging these, I present for posterity (or spambots) the following list of 24 26 one-letter titles:

• a, Andy Warhol
• C, Maurice Baring
• "C", Anthony Cave Brown
• C, Tom McCarthy
• c, Thomas Sowell
• E, Matt Beaumont
• F: Hu Feng's Prison Years,  Mei Zhi
• F, Daniel Kehlmann
• G, John Berger
• H, Elizabeth Shepard
• H., Lin Haire-Sargeant
• J, Howard Jacobson
• K, Mary Roberts Rinehart
• K., Ronald Hayman
• M, John Sack
• N, Louis Edwards
• O, Omari Grandberry
• P, Andrew Lewis Conn
• Q, Luther Blissett
• Q, Stephen Leacock
• S, Harry Mathews et. al.*
• S., John Updike
• V, Thomas Pynchon
• W, or the Memory of Childhood, Georges Perec
• X, Sue Coe
• Y: the Last Man, Brian Vaughn et al.
• Z, Vassily Vassilikos

Subtitles are included only for the Perec, the Zhi and the Vaughn, although more have them (often "a novel" if nothing else), but in each case the one-letter title is clear, at least to my mind (and, it seems, to others').

I'm not sure about that Sowell title, however... a quick google doesn't turn it up. Does anyone have a reference for that?

Where their pages differ, not surprisingly, is the category that Burkardt calls "Close but no cigar" and that ABE calls "Books that almost made the cut". There I definitely prefer Burkardt, where nearly all his near-miss books catch the spirit of the list, whereas ABE just lists a bunch of books with short words as titles. The two-book overlap between the near-miss lists are definitely the most relevant of the bunch, however:

• N or M?, Agatha Christie
• U and I, Nicholson Baker

-- but again, I think that Burkardt's near-miss list is mostly relevant -- unlike all the other entries on ABE's near-miss list-- so, if you're silly and obsessive enough to have enjoyed this list thus far, you should click on over for the rest of his titles. (On the other hand, you might say that of course I would consider his list better since I suggested several of the titles on it.)

In fact, one item that Burkardt lists in the "near miss" category is actually one I would argue belongs on the list proper is

• ∈ by Jacques Roubaud

That's not an "E" however, although some references list the title that way: instead, it's "the mathematical symbol used to indicate that an object belongs to a set" (in Burkardt's phrasing) or -- as it's called in French, "Signe D'Appartenance" (that, in parentheses, is how it's listed sometimes in search engines). Still, even though not an E, it's a one-character title, so personally I'd count it, making 25 such titles in all.

Despite there being 25 such titles, however, overlap in usage (no less than four "C" books, assuming the Sowell is legit) means that a fair number of letters are still up for grabs. Writers of the world, take note! The following books remain to be written:

• B
• D
• I
• L
• R
• T
• U

Abe books does note that "authors and publishers would be wise to move away from this trend as the influence of the Internet continues to affect book-buying. Single letter titles are not particularly friendly to Internet search engines that thrive more detailed data than just A or B." So perhaps those nine will remain un-penned. (Although if we're discounting subtitles, then that's always an option for making a title googleable.) I hope not, though. I'd like to complete my set.

(The other obvious extension here, I suppose, is to numbers. But so far as I can tell, there aren't any books titled 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9. It seems if books wish to be a single-digit number, they spell it out (e.g. One). There are some films -- the one's I've seen in a brief search are 1, 3, 4, 8 and 9 (again, discounting films like Seven that spell it out). And album titles positively abound in single-digit numbers: there are multiple albums called by each of those eight titles, and for some there are a great many indeed. But it looks like these are, literarily, uncharted territory.)

Unrelated postscript: anyone who's read this far will probably also like John Burkardt's marvelously idiosyncratic list of Hapax Leomenon. (What would the plural be of that anyway?) And probably also his list of multiple homonyms (i.e. homonyms with three or more words in the set not just two).

Update, Years Later: Added two new titles, F and J, and removed those letters from the list of ones yet to be written.  Now, at the end of 2014, the title of this post should be BDILRTU.  But I'll leave it as is.

Update, More Years Later: I won't be updating this post any more, because others have it covered.  See, for instance:
• One-letter titles at TV Tropes
• Single-letter titles at goodreads
• One-letter movie titles at IMDb
• And one at the blog The Modern Novel

________
* This is the English translation of a book written partly in English and partly in French, by seven authors, with the French title Semaines de Suzanne.