I’m usually pretty dialed into this stuff, but somehow this one slipped by me last fall. During the Gangnam Style craze, MIT shot a parody video where Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics, made a cameo appearance. Maybe it slipped by me because the appearance is brief. About 5 seconds, starting at the 3:20 mark. We were on the ball enough, however, to spot another parody by Ai Weiwei and then we had Slavoj Žižek demystifying the whole Gangnam Style phenomenon, complete with wild hand gesticulations and frantic rubs of the nose. Anyway, one day this will make for some good archival footage — public intellectual meets international pop culture craze — so we’re adding it to the trove.
Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses is no walk in the park. Why else would so many people falsely claim to have read it. (See our post from last week, 20 Books People Pretend to Read.) But Finnegans Wake is a whole ‘nother deal. Joyce’s final work is considered one of the most difficult works of fiction ever written, and contrary to Ulysses, the novel “has some claim to be the least read major work of Western literature,” according to Joyce scholar Lee Spink. Put simply, people don’t even bother reading … or pretending to read … Finnegans Wake (unless, of course, they live in China, where the novel reached the #2 position on a Shanghai bestseller list earlier this year.)
But I digress: why don’t readers even give Finnegans Wake a shot? The illustration above perhaps says it all. The web site stammpunct.com has created a visual showing what happens when you run a page of the novel through a spell checker. It yields a lot of red, and then some more red. A framable print of this visual can be purchased at stammpunct for $35.
On February 7th, 1910, Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) and five of her Bloomsbury companions—painter Duncan Grant, Woolf’s brother Adrian, Anthony Buxton, Guy Ridley, and Horace de Vere Cole—boarded the pride of the British Royal Navy, the HMS Dreadnought, dressed in blackface and outlandish stage costumes. (In the photo above, from left to right.) In what became known as “The Dreadnought Hoax,” the six convinced the Dreadnought’s officers that they were the “Emperor of Abyssinia” (now Ethiopia) and his entourage, and they were received with high honors.
The hoax, masterminded by Cole, began when he sent a telegram to the ship telling the crew to expect a visit from some North African dignitaries. Once on board, the group spoke in accented Latin (quoting the Aeneid) and gibberish. Woolf kept quiet so as to disguise her gender. One of the officers on the ship was a cousin of Virginia and Adrian, but he failed to recognize them. It wasn’t a flawless performance on either side: at one point, Buxton sneezed and almost lost his mustache, and the Navy, unable to find an Abyssinian flag, flew the flag of Zanzibar instead.
The “princes” asked for prayer mats, presented the officers with fake military honors, and exclaimed “bunga, bunga!” each time they were shown some marvel of the ship. The Dreadnought was then, in the words of Woolf’s nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell, “the flagship of the Home Fleet, the most formidable, the most modern, and the most secret man o’ war then afloat.” (This incident is said to be the origin of the ludicrous phrase “bunga, bunga,” most associated with the exploits of the recently convicted Silvio Berlusconi.) The next day, Cole anonymously sent the photograph at the top to The Daily Mirror, revealing the hoax. According to Woolf scholar Mairead Case—who sees the incident as a precursor to Woolf’s gender-bending novel Orlando—the Mirror described the “Abyssinians” thus:
All the princes wore vari-coloured silk sashes as turbans, set off with diamond aigrettes, white gibbah tunics, over which were cast rich flowing robes and round their necks were suspended gold chains and jeweled necklaces … They also all wore patent leather boots which, Oriental fashion, tapered to a point, the ends projecting fully six inches beyond the toes. White gloves covered the princes’ hands, and over the gloved fingers, they wore gold wedding rings – heavy, plain circlets, which looked very impressive.
In a recently discovered letter, Cole wrote to a friend that the hoax was “glorious” and “shriekingly funny.” The group intended to mock what they saw as an outmoded Victorian imperialism, and they succeeded, at least in the popular press. The Mirror published the cartoon above and the Royal Navy was a laughingstock for weeks afterward. None of this pseudo-racist pranksterism (which reflected just as badly on the officers) struck the actual Emperor of Ethiopia—Menelik II—as particularly funny. When he visited England later that year, he was taunted in the streets by children shouting “Bunga! Bunga!” and denied permission to inspect the navy’s fleet for fear that his visit might cause further embarrassment.
You are? Wow! What luck! Apparently Recreational Mathemusician Vi Hart had the exact same kind of morning recently, and used it as the springboard for addressing the 12-Tone Technique originally devised by Arnold Schoenberg. Uninitiated philistines may want to double down on the caffeinated beverage of their choice, as this stuff is dense, and Hart talks the way a hummingbird flies.
But as she notes at the 15 minute mark, “Creativity means fearlessly embracing things that seem odd, even random, knowing that if you keep your brain open you’ll eventually find the connections.”
Ergo, those of us whose reference level (or, it must be said, interest) is no match for a 30 minute treatise on the history and logic of ordering the twelve pitch-classes of the chromatic scale into numerically designated sets should find something to chew on, too: copyright and Fair Use Law, for starters; the constraint-bound experimental fiction of French literary group Oulipo, not to mention Borges’ “Library of Babel” and the organized randomness of Rorschach blots and constellations; zombies… John Cage…
(Easy to imagine the sort of jacked-up, explanation-crazed, bed-resistant child she must have been.)
As ever, her sharpie-on-spiral stop-motion visuals add dimension, especially now that she seems to be experimenting with giving her on-the-fly stick figures a certain Hyperbole-and-a-Half exuberance.
In 1973, Dale Irby, a teacher at Prestonwood Elementary in Dallas, decided to wear a polyester shirt and coffee-colored sweater for school-picture day. Without realizing it, he wore the same outfit the following year. According to the Dallas News, Dale’s wife noticed the emerging trend and dared him to do it a third year. And then they figured, ‘Why stop?’ The tradition continued 40 years in total, until Dale and his outfit retired this year.
The likes of U2, Coldplay, and David Bowie can afford to hire producer, artist, and thinker Brian Eno to shake up their creative processes. You and I, alas, probably can’t. We can, however, afford to consult the Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards invented by Eno and painter Peter Schmidt in 1975. Each card offers, in its own oblique fashion, a strategy you can follow when you find yourself at an impasse in your own work, be it music, painting, or any form at all: “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” “State the problem in words as clearly as possible.” “Remember those quiet evenings.” “Once the search is in progress, something will be found.” “Work at a different speed.” “Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them.”
“The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when panic, particularly in studios, tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working,” said Eno in a 1980 radio interview, “and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach.”
Should you feel the need for just such a break with the obvious approach, you can track down one of the official physical editions of the Oblique Strategies deck. Or you can consult one of its many virtual versions available on the internet. Eno talks about how the deck of cards came into being. Vintage sets can be found on Amazon here.
I was born in the City of the Flowland People, made my way to Stink Onion upon reaching maturity, then onward to New Yew Tree Village where I have lived for the last 217 moons.
Look up some of your key co-ordinates in The Atlas of True Names and you too can have a personal history as mythic-sounding as mine. The maps—for the UK, USA, Canada, and World—replace modern geographical names with the original etymological roots of cities, countries, and bodies of water, translated into English. Their website picks the “Sahara desert” to illustrate the true name selection process. Their chosen label “The Tawny One” has its basis in es-sahra, translated from the Arabic as “the fawn colored desert”. It would be interesting to learn how many professional translators lent a hand with the etymological parsing. There are a lot of languages in this world and we all know the havoc Google Translate can wreak.
Married cartographers (and Lord of the Rings fans) Stephan Hormes and Silke Peust acknowledge that there could be alternates to their translations. This should come as a relief to the civic boosters of Philadelphia. Quibblers will no doubt enjoy taking issue with Hormes and Peust’s choices. Hopefully, any resulting internet brawls will take place on a higher—and dustier—plateau than those where vultures pick hapless celebrities to shreds.
Order one of these maps and pack it along on your summer road trip. Even if younger family members can’t be bothered to learn how to navigate without a phone, the narratively rich names are sure to leaven those long hours in the car. (How badly do you have to go, Jason? Can you hold out until Table or should Daddy pull over in the Valley of the Darkland Dweller?)
Last month we told you about The Strange Day When Bugs Bunny Saved the Life of Mel Blanc. It’s a true tale about how, back in 1971, Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny and other beloved Looney Tunes characters, got into a terrible car accident in Los Angeles and slipped into a coma. Blanc’s wife and son spent two long weeks in the hospital trying to revive him, but got no response. But then, one day, Blanc’s neurologist walked into the room and said to the patient: “Bugs Bunny, how are you doing today?” After a pause, a voice said, “Myeeeeh. What’s up doc?” You can get more on that story here. In the meantime, we’ll amuse you with another short story. Once upon a time, an ear-nose-and-throat specialist wanted to see how Mel Blanc (1908–1989) performed all of those Looney Tunes cartoon voices. So he took a fiber optic laryngoscope, stuck it down Blanc’s throat, and here’s what he saw. Watch above.
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