In a Word

janua
n. an introduction to some branch of learning

In Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), two publishers propose a School of Comparative Irrelevance that teaches “useless or impossible courses,” such as Urban Planning for Gypsies, Aztec Equitation, and Potio-section.

‘Potio-section, as everybody knows, of course, is the art of slicing soup. No, no,’ he said to Diotallevi. ‘It’s not a department, it’s a subject, like Mechanical Avunculogratulation or Pylocatabasis. They all fall under the heading of Tetrapyloctomy.’

‘What’s tetra …?’ I asked.

‘The art of splitting a hair four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We’re not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it’s the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn’t seem completely useless.’

Overall, the school’s aim is “to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.” “The Tetrapyloctomy department has a preparatory function; its purpose is to inculcate a sense of irrelevance. Another important department is Adynata, or Impossibilia. Like Urban Planning for Gypsies. The essence of the discipline is the comprehension of the underlying reasons for a thing’s absurdity. We have courses in Morse syntax, the history of antarctic agriculture, the history of Easter Island painting, contemporary Sumerian literature, Montessori grading, Assyrio-Babylonian philately, the technology of the wheel in pre-Columbian empires, and the phonetics of the silent film.”

(Thanks, Macari.)

| Language · Literature

DIY

Financial publisher Gilbert Kaplan fell so in love with Mahler’s second symphony that he bought the manuscript, paid musicians to teach him to conduct it, rented Avery Fisher Hall, and led the American Symphony and the Westminster Symphonic Choir through a performance of his own in 1982.

The orchestra had requested that no reviews be published, but the Village Voice published one anyway — and it was favorable. So Kaplan conducted the symphony another 100 times throughout his life and recorded it twice, with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. Opinions were mixed, but he did receive some discerning praise. Of a 2008 performance with the New York Philharmonic, Steve Smith wrote in the New York Times:

That Mr. Kaplan is no professional conductor was immediately apparent. Square-shouldered and stiff, he indulged in no flamboyant gymnastics. He conducted from memory, beating time proficiently and providing cues as needed. Only in a few passages, like the pages of heavenly bliss just before the first movement’s tempo-sostenuto conclusion, did a curl of the lip suggest that he was swept up in his work. His efforts were evident throughout a performance of sharp definition and shattering power. From the acute punch of the opening notes, every detail of this huge, complex score came through with unusual clarity and impeccable balance. Every gesture had purpose and impact, and the performance as a whole had an inexorable sweep. … It seems likely that no one is better equipped to reveal the impact of precisely what Mahler put on the page.

But trombonist David Finlayson called the same performance a “woefully sad farce,” and Kaplan wasn’t asked back. “I don’t think anyone will confuse me with Lorin Maazel when it comes to technique,” he said, “and I may need to speak more than somebody who is more skillful, like Lorin, but I do get the results I want, and I did get the results I wanted that night. If some people are displeased, I can’t help it.”

| Art

Last Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Avro_Avro_691_Lancastrian_3_G-AGWH_cn_1280_%27Stardust%27_BSAA_(British_South_American_Airways)_(15215624954).jpg

In August 1947 a British South American Airways airliner en route from Buenos Aires to Santiago crashed into Mount Tupungato in the Argentine Andes. The wreckage wasn’t located for 50 years, but it’s believed today that, hindered by the jet stream, the pilots had started their descent before they’d cleared the mountaintops and crashed into Tupungato.

The last Morse code message received by the Santiago airport was “ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC.” The operator didn’t recognize the last word and asked that it be sent again. The flight transmitted STENDEC twice more and then was lost. The meaning of that last transmission is unknown — despite much speculation, it’s never been definitively explained.

| Oddities

Top Dog

A dominant male long-tailed manakin acquires a team of subordinate males to help him woo females. “It’s the only example of cooperative male-male displays ever discovered in the entire animal kingdom,” writes Noah Strycker in The Thing With Feathers.

It’s common for male animals to cooperate to impress females, but typically each of those males is hoping to mate. Among manakins the eldest male gets this right, and the others defer until they succeed him.

Strycker writes, “A pair of male long-tailed manakins may work together like this for five years, building up their jungle reputation as hot dancers, before the alpha male dies and the backup singer takes his place with a new apprentice.”

| Science & Math

Insight

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Platonic_Solids_Transparent.svg

Conducting a workshop on paper folding and geometry for a group of gifted 10-year-olds in 1977, Santa Clara University mathematician Jean Pedersen passed around a collection of polyhedra and asked the students which shapes they’d classify as “regular.” To her surprise, the only one who chose the five platonic solids was Peter Wilson, a blind student.

The others immediately responded, “That’s not fair, Peter’s blind!” So Pedersen agreed to let them try again, this time feeling the models with their eyes closed. Now every student chose the five platonic solids.

“I’m not sure what all the ramifications of these events are,” Pedersen wrote in a letter to the Mathematical Intelligencer, “but begin with this: we can perceive things with just our hands that we miss when we use both our eyes and our hands. Sometimes less really is more.”

(Jean Pedersen, “Seeing the Idea,” Mathematical Intelligencer 20:4 [Fall 1998], 6.)

| Science & Math

For Short

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:General_Henri_Gatien,_count_Bertrand_by_Paul_Delaroche.png

Henri Gatien Bertrand, Napoleon’s companion during his exile on Saint Helena, kept an impenetrable diary. The entry for January 20, 1821, reads:

N. so. le mat. en cal: il. déj. bi. se. trv. un peu fat; le so. il est f.g.

It’s not code, just extremely abbreviated French. Interpreter Paul Fleuriot de Langle referred to his work as “translating from French into French — the singular sport and strange pastime.” He rendered the passage above as:

Napoléon sort le matin en calèche. Il déjeune bien, se trouve un peu fatigué; le soir, il est fort gai

Or “Napoleon goes out in the morning in a carriage. He lunches well, finds himself a little tired; in the evening, he is very gay.” Not very incriminating — perhaps Bertrand was just trying to save paper.

(From David Kahn’s The Codebreakers, 1967.)

| Language

Memorial

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wien_-_Holocaust-Mahnmal_(2).JPG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In Vienna’s Judenplatz stands a construction of steel and concrete that takes the shape of a library turned inside out. Its walls are filled with books, but the spines are all turned inward, so the knowledge they contain is inaccessible. It bears two large doors, but these do not open.

It is a memorial to the Austrian victims of the Holocaust. Artist Rachel Whiteread said, “It was clear to me from the outset that my proposal had to be simple, monumental, poetic and non-literal. I am a sculptor: not a person of words but of images and forms.”

At the unveiling, Simon Wiesenthal said, “This monument shouldn’t be beautiful. It must hurt.”

| Art · History

Efficiency

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fiat_Lingotto_veduta-1928.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the 1920s, Fiat’s car factory in Turin, Italy, contained a spiral roadway — raw materials went in at ground level, and the cars ascended as they were assembled. At the top they emerged onto a test track on the roof.

Lauded at the time, the factory was eventually outmoded and has since been remodeled into a hotel and shopping mall, but the test track remains and is open to visitors.

| Technology

“She Was as Cute as a Washtub”

Raymond Chandler similes:

“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”
“She looked almost as hard to get as a haircut.”
“The smell of old dust hung in the air as flat and stale as a football interview.”
“Her face fell apart like a bride’s pie crust.”
“This car sticks out like spats at an Iowa picnic.”
“I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.”
“A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.”
“Then she straightened the bills out on the desk and put one on top of the other and pushed them across. Very slowly, very sadly, as if she was drowning a favorite kitten.”

“If you use similes,” he once suggested, “try and make them both extravagant and original.”

| Literature

Over There

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Watson_Lake_Signpost.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1942, homesick GI Carl K. Lindley was ordered to repair a local signpost in the Yukon. He decided to add an indicator pointing to his hometown: DANVILLE, ILL. 2835 MILES. Others began adding their own signs, and today the “Sign Post Forest” holds 80,000 signs. It’s actively accepting more — you can bring your own or make one at the visitor information center.

| Oddities