Afoot

In 2004, the world’s foremost scholar on Sherlock Holmes was found garrotted on his bed. Richard Lancelyn Green had been planning a three-volume biography of Arthur Conan Doyle but had had trouble gaining rights to the author’s private papers and manuscripts, which were scheduled to be auctioned at Christie’s. Lancelyn Green believed that Doyle’s daughter had wanted these to go to the British Library instead, but his efforts to stop the auction had been unsuccessful. In the weeks before his death he told friends that an unidentified American was following him and that he’d come to fear that his contention over the papers might have put his life in danger.

The coroner returned an open verdict. Lancelyn Green’s best friends said it was not in his nature to take his own life, but others wondered whether he might have arranged his death to cast suspicion on a rival, mirroring the Sherlock Holmes story “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” in which a jealous wife contrives her suicide to cast doubt on a woman her husband had been flirting with.

The case remains unsolved. “I think he wanted it to look like murder,” said James Gibson, who had edited a Doyle bibliography with Lancelyn Green in 1983. “He must have been planning it for days, giving us false clues. He created the perfect mystery.”

| Crime · Death · Literature · Oddities

Ha!

In 1722, Jonathan Swift published the “last speech” of one Ebenezer Elliston, “a malefactor executed for street robbery,” “published at his desire for the common good”:

Now as I am a dying man I have done something which may be of good use to the public. I have left with an honest man (and, indeed, the only honest man I was ever acquainted with) the names of all my wicked brethren, the present places of their abode, with a short account of the chief crimes they have committed, in many of which I have been their accomplice, and heard the rest from their own mouths: I have likewise set down the names of those we call our setters, of the wicked houses we frequent, and of those who receive and buy our stolen goods. I have solemnly charged this honest man and have received his promise upon oath, that whenever he hears of any rogue to be tried for robbing or housebreaking, he will look into his list, and if he finds the name there of the thief concerned, to send the whole paper to the government. Of this I here give my companions fair and public warning, and hope they will take it.

Did it work? Who knows?

| Crime · Hoaxes · Literature · Society

Riding Along

https://www.flickr.com/photos/vanamonde81/15628715671/
Image: Flickr

A striking observation in Far From the Madding Crowd:

To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement. The sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past earthly objects, which is perceptible in a few minutes of stillness, or by the better outlook upon space that a hill affords, or by the wind, or by the solitude; but whatever be its origin, the impression of riding along is vivid and abiding. The poetry of motion is a phrase much in use, and to enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilised mankind, who are dreamwrapt and disregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars.

“After such a nocturnal reconnoitre it is hard to get back to earth, and to believe that the consciousness of such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame.”

| Literature · Oddities

A Little Help

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jack_London_young.jpg

Jack London used to buy story ideas from the young Sinclair Lewis. He blamed his “damnable lack of origination”: “I’m damned if my stories just come to me,” he wrote. “I had to work like the devil for the themes.”

Of the 55 plots that Lewis sent him, London bought 27, paying $137.50. Of these, London used five: three for published short stories (“When the World Was Young,” “Winged Blackmail,” and “The Prodigal Father”), one for a novelette (The Abysmal Brute), and one for a novel that he never finished (The Assassination Bureau).

He once wrote to Elwyn Hoffman, “expression, you see — with me — is far easier than invention.”

| Literature

Misc

  • The newsletter of the Procrastinators’ Club of America is called Last Month’s Newsletter.
  • Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary defines dross as “the recrement or despumation of metals.”
  • A sphere of radius n kilometers has almost exactly the same volume as a cube of side n miles. (Randall Munroe)
  • Cookie Monster’s real name is Sid.
  • “Henry James chews more than he bites off.” — Clover Adams

“There exist only two kinds of modern mathematics books: ones which you cannot read beyond the first page and ones which you cannot read beyond the first sentence.” — Physics Nobelist Yang Chen-Ning

| Entertainment · Language · Literature · Quotations · Science & Math · Trivia

Inksmanship

The most prolific author in history may be Charles Hamilton (1876-1961), who could turn out 80,000 words a week writing long series of stories with recurring casts of characters, often set in boys’ public schools. Hamilton wrote under a variety of names and occasionally employed other writers to help with the work, but his own lifetime output has been estimated at 100 million words.

In his 1940 essay “Boys’ Weeklies,” George Orwell writes, “The stories in the Magnet are signed ‘Frank Richards’ and those in the Gem, ‘Martin Clifford’, but a series lasting thirty years could hardly be the work of the same person every week.”

He was forced to add a footnote: “This is quite incorrect. These stories have been written throughout the whole period by ‘Frank Richards’ and ‘Martin Clifford’, who are one and the same person!”

| Literature

Overtime

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:All_you_zombies_timeline.png
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Robert Heinlein’s 1959 short story “–All You Zombies–“ accomplishes a kind of narrative hat trick: All the major characters turn out to be the same person, who takes on different roles through time travel and sex reassignment. The main character is his own partner, mother, father, and child.

Though it contains a number of paradoxes, Princeton philosopher David Lewis judged it to be a “perfectly consistent” time travel story. Ironically, Heinlein had written it in a single day.

| Literature · Oddities

Infinite Digest

https://samizdat.co/digest/notes/

To mark the 30th anniversary of Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s sprawling 1996 novel, Brooklyn-based data visualization artist and design professor Christian Swinehart is creating a graphical companion to the book.

Infinite Digest is a series of interactive visualizations of the novel’s plotlines, characters, and self-referential structure. The first two installments, exploring the book’s timeline and its many footnotes, are currently live, and more will appear over the next few months.

(Thanks, Christian.)

| Art · Literature

Testimonial

The gift which I am sending you is called a dog, and is in fact the most precious and valuable possession of mankind. For while other animals are each of them of use to us in virtue of one particular quality, and possess a special and distinguishing excellence, this one animal is responsible for greatest and highest points of excellence. A lion excels in courage, an ox in reliability and adaptability to agriculture, the horse in intelligence and speed, the ass and mule, as is stated by the poets, in patience and hard work; and other animals have other good points: this one animal combines the excellence of all others without one exception. He is naturally, suitable for war work and the pursuits of peace, and equally fitted to be of use and to be a pleasant companion. It would not be easy, as you will believe, to enumerate all the excellences and all the services to ourselves of this animal.

— Theodorus Gaza, Laudatio Canis, 1482

| Literature

Selflessness

Carol Shields’ 2000 short story “Absence” does not contain the letter I:

She woke up early, drank a cup of strong, unsugared coffee, then sat down at her word processor. She knew more or less what she wanted to do, and that was to create a story that possessed a granddaughter, a Boston fern, a golden apple and a small blue cradle. But after she had typed half a dozen words, she found that one of the letters of the keyboard was broken, and, to make matters worse, a vowel, the very letter that attaches to the hungry self.

She resolves to write about it: “‘A woman sat down and wrote,’ she wrote.”

| Language · Literature