Forking Paths

British maze designer Randoll Coate produced this tribute to Jorge Luis Borges — a labyrinth of hedges shaped like an open book and spelling out the author’s name. (The original maze is in the writer’s native Argentina; Coate donated the copy above to Borges’ foundation in Venice.)

“Five years before Borges died, I had a dream in which I heard that Borges had just died,” the designer recalled. “And I thought to myself, I must make sure that Borges is not memorialized with one of those terrible statues — a depiction of angels or something. He has to be honored with something truly Borgesian, in other words, a labyrinth. That’s when I began to design it and think about it and dream up a shape for it — an extraordinary labyrinth for a man with an extraordinary mind.”

(From Francesca Tatarella, Labyrinths & Mazes, 2016.)

11/29/2017 UPDATE: Coate’s design is more sophisticated than I’d realized — from reader Daniël Hoek:

“The maze also contains a tiger, a walking stick, a question mark, the initials MK of his wife, and two hourglasses that spell the number of years Borges lived (’86’). After some effort I think I found all of those (the tiger is very cool once you find it –– you need to rotate the plan as in the attached image)”:

“PS. Another interesting tidbit: the maze in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ has the feature that you can make it through by going left at every turn. Starting at the top entrance and discounting any forced turns, that is also true of this maze, although that is a boring route that takes you around the maze and not through the center.”

| Art · Literature

Good Boy

Elisabeth Mann Borgese taught her dog to type. In her book The Language Barrier she explains that her English setter, Arli, developed a vocabulary of 60 words and 17 letters, though “He isn’t an especially bright dog.” “[Arli] could write under dictation short words, three-letter words, four-letter words, two-letter words: ‘good dog; go; bad.’ And he would type it out. There were more letters but I never got him to use more than 17.”

She began in October 1962 by training all four of her dogs to distinguish 18 designs printed on saucers; Arli showed the most promise, so she focused on him. By January 1963 he could count to 4 and distinguish CAT from DOG. Eventually she gave him a modified typewriter with enlarged keys, which she taught him to nose mechanically by rewarding him with hamburger. “No meaning at all was associated with the words,” she writes, though he did seem to associate meaning with words that excited him. “When asked, ‘Arli, where do you want to go?’ he will unfailingly write CAR, except that his excitement is such that the ‘dance’ around the word becomes a real ‘stammering’ on the typewriter. ACCACCAAARR he will write. GGOGO CAARR.”

(And it’s always tempting to discover meaning where there is none. Once while suffering intestinal problems after a long flight Arli ignored his work when she tried to get him to type GOOD DOG GET BONE, and then he stretched, yawned, and typed A BAD A BAD DOOG. This was probably just a familiar phrase that he’d chosen at random; Borgese estimated its likelihood at 1 in 12.)

Arli did earn at least one human fan — at one point Borgese showed his output to a “well-known critic of modern poetry,” who responded, “I think he has a definite affinity with the ‘concretist’ groups in Brazil, Scotland, and Germany [and an unnamed young American poet] who is also writing poetry of this type at present.”

| Literature · Oddities · Science & Math · Technology

That Explains It

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1795 a 56-pound meteorite fell in Yorkshire, a few miles from the village of Wold Newton. No one was hurt, but several people saw it land, and it was still warm and smoking when curious witnesses reached it.

That got Philip José Farmer thinking. In his 1972 book Tarzan Alive, the science fiction author revealed that seven couples and their coachmen had been riding past the village when the meteorite struck only 20 yards away. “The bright light and heat and thunderous roar of the meteorite blinded and terrorized the passengers, coachmen, and horses. … They never guessed, being ignorant of ionization, that the fallen star had affected them and their unborn.”

The coach passengers included:

  • John Clayton, 3rd Duke of Greystoke, and his wife, Alicia Rutherford
  • Sir Percy Blakeney (The Scarlet Pimpernel) and his (second) wife, Alice Clarke Raffles
  • Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife, Elizabeth Bennet
  • George Edward Rutherford (the 11th Baron Tennington) and his wife, Elizabeth Cavendish, ancestors of Professor Challenger
  • Honoré Delagardie and his wife, Philippa Drummond, ancestors of Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond
  • Dr. Siger Holmes and his wife, Violet Clarke, ancestors of Sherlock Holmes
  • Sir Hugh Drummond and his wife, Lady Georgia Dewhurst, further ancestors of Hugh Drummond

The coachmen included:

  • Louis Lupin, ancestor of Arsène Lupin
  • Albert Lecoq, ancestor of Monsieur Lecoq
  • Albert Blake, ancestor of Sexton Blake

The radiation caused a genetic mutation in all of them, endowing them with extremely high intelligence and strength and producing a family tree of 92 people whose deeds have been documented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jules Verne, and others.

Farmer died in 2009, but he’s credited with pinpointing “the single cause of this nova of genetic splendor, this outburst of great detectives, scientists, and explorers of exotic worlds, this last efflorescence of true heroes in an otherwise degenerate age.” The work of uncovering the links among these remarkable people is carried on by an avid community of researchers.

| Literature

False Alarm

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When William Makepeace Thackeray was five years old, his aunt was alarmed to discover that his uncle’s hat fit him.

“Don’t be afraid,” the doctor told her. “He has a large head, but there’s a good deal in it.”

| Literature

Horizons

holmes circles

I say that conceit is just as natural a thing to human minds as a centre is to a circle. But little-minded people’s thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes’ conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even if it have the third vowel [‘I’, the first-person pronoun] as its centre, it does not soon betray it. The highest thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does not obviously imply any individual centre.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858

| Literature · Science & Math · Society

Misc

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  • In 1898 Sam Clemens signed a hotel register “S.L. Clemens. Profession: Mark Twain.”
  • Jonathan Swift invented the name Vanessa.
  • How many outs are in an inning of baseball? Six.
  • Isaac Asimov’s collected papers fill 71 meters of shelf space at Boston University.
  • “He is greatest who is most often in men’s good thoughts.” — Samuel Butler

After starring as the title character, Anne Shirley, in the 1934 film Anne of Green Gables, actress Dawn O’Day changed her stage name to Anne Shirley and used it for the rest of her career.

| Entertainment · Literature · Quotations

Podcast Episode 176: The Bear That Inspired Winnie-the-Pooh

harry colebourn and winnie

In 1914, Canadian Army veterinarian Harry Colebourn was traveling to the Western Front when he met an orphaned bear cub in an Ontario railway station. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the adventures of Winnie the bear, including her fateful meeting with A.A. Milne and his son, Christopher Robin.

We’ll also marvel at some impressive finger counting and puzzle over an impassable bridge.

See full show notes …

| History · Literature · Podcast

Early Adopters

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Mark Twain was an early proponent of the typewriter — in 1905 he claimed that “I was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature. That book must have been The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

Actually the evidence shows that Life on the Mississippi was the first book submitted to a publisher as a typewritten manuscript, which means that Twain had a surprising competitor in Friedrich Nietzsche, who tried out a Hansen Schreibkugel, or “writing ball,” for a few weeks in 1882, hoping to reduce demands on his failing eyesight.

“Hurrah! The machine has arrived at my house,” Nietzsche wrote to his sister on February 11. He typed poetically:

THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME:
MADE OF IRON YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS.
PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED IN ABUNDANCE
AS WELL AS FINE FINGERS TO USE US.

Unfortunately he found his fingers weren’t fine enough, and he gave it up in March. Twain submitted his manuscript a few months later.

| Literature · Technology

Daddy!

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In Rex Stout’s mystery novels, detective Nero Wolfe maintains that he was born in Montenegro, but the stories give conflicting evidence, and after careful study historian Bernard DeVoto concluded that he was really born in the United States sometime between 1892 and 1896, having been conceived in Montenegro between March 1891 and March 1895.

Now, Sherlock Holmes had his climactic battle with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Fall at the beginning of May 1891, after which he disappeared into shadowy wanderings until 1894. Writer John D. Clark notes that Holmes could easily have visited Cetinje and remained there for several months, long enough to meet Irene Adler, whose fragile marriage would by then have broken up, sending her back to an itinerant life as an opera singer. The two would naturally have fallen in together, especially as English speakers were relatively rare in Montenegro, and an eventual affair was inevitable.

When Adler became pregnant she would have returned to her parents in New Jersey and given birth there. Nero Wolfe was born in New Jersey in late 1892 or early 1893, six months after Adler would had left Montenegro. She would then have returned to Central Europe, where her son grew up, just as he states. Clark concludes, “Whether Wolfe ever condescends to admit it, or whether he remains forever silent, his parentage can no longer be a matter of conjecture, nor can there be any doubt as to the source from which he inherited his remarkable talents.”

In 1955 Clark put this case to Stout, who responded with this note:

I am obliged to you for sending me the ms. for perusal, and I admire the finesse of your suggestion that ‘censorship’ by me might be desirable and acceptable. As the literary agent of [Wolfe’s assistant] Archie Goodwin I am of course privy to many details of Nero Wolfe’s past which to the general public, and even to scholars of Clark’s standing, must remain moot for some time. If and when it becomes permissible for me to disclose any of those details, your distinguished journal would be a most appropriate medium for the disclosure. The constraint of my loyalty to my client makes it impossible for me to say more now.

He never fully denied the theory. He died in 1975.

(John D. Clark, “Some Notes Relating to a Preliminary Investigation Into the Paternity of Nero Wolfe,” Baker Street Journal, January 1956.)

| Literature

Efficiency

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Benjamin Franklin and Sir Francis Dashwood once set out to shorten the Book of Common Prayer. Noel Perrin writes in Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy:

Franklin and Dashwood had made contact while each was a postmaster general, and found themselves agreeing that the great trouble with church services is that they are too long. They then put out their anonymous Abridgement of the Book of Common Prayer (1773), in which the communion service takes about ten minutes, and a funeral six. (‘The Order for the Burial of the Dead is very solemn and moving; nevertheless, to preserve the health and lives of the living, it appeared to us that this service ought particularly to be shortened,’ Franklin wrote jauntily in the preface.) The book could be called expurgated only in the sense that Franklin and Dashwood both disapproved of Old Testament ideas of vengeance, and therefore omitted the service of Commination and all psalms which contain maledictions.

In 1785 Franklin wrote to Granville Sharp, “The Liturgy you mention was an abridgment of that made by a noble Lord of my acquaintance, who requested me to assist him by taking the rest of the book; viz., the Catechism and the reading and singing Psalms. These I abridged by retaining of the Catechism only the two questions, What is your duty to God? What is your duty to your neighbour? with answers. The Psalms were much contracted by leaving out the repetitions (of which I found more than I could have imagined) and the imprecations, which appeared not to suit well with the Christian doctrine of forgiveness of injuries and doing good to enemies. The book was printed for Wilkie, in St. Paul’s Churchyard, but never much noticed. Some were given away, very few sold, and I suppose the bulk became waste-paper. In the prayers so much was retrenched that approbation could hardly be expected; but I think with you, a moderate abridgment might not only be useful, but generally acceptable.”

(Richard Meade Bache, “The So-Called ‘Franklin Prayer-Book,'” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 21:2 [1897], 224-234.)

| History · Literature · Religion