A Discreet Correspondence

In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom’s locked private drawer at 7 Eccles Street contains, among other things:

3 typewritten letters, addressee, Henry Flower, c/o P.O. Westland Row, addresser, Martha Clifford, c/o P.O. Dolphin’s Barn: the transliterated name and address of the addresser of the 3 letters in reversed alphabetic boustrophedontic punctated quadrilinear cryptogram (vowels suppressed) N. IGS./WI. UU. OX/W. OKS. MH/Y. IM …

This actually works: Quadrilinear means that the cipher is to be set in four lines; reversed alphabetic means that the key is a = z, b = y, etc.; and boustrophedontic is a term from paleography meaning that the writing runs right and left in alternate lines. So the cryptogram and its solution look like this:

N . I G S .
m a r t h a

W I . U U . O X
d r o f f i l c

W . O K S . M H
d o l p h i n s

Y . I M
b a r n

Apparently Joyce or Bloom forgot that the last line should run right to left.

(From David Kahn, The Codebreakers, 1967.)

| Literature · Science & Math

For What It’s Worth

In 1882 Anton Chekhov published eight “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician.” Here are the first three:

  1. I was chased by 30 dogs, 7 of which were white, 8 gray, and the rest black. Which of my legs was bitten, the right or the left?
  2. Ptolemy was born in the year 223 A.D. and died after reaching the age of eighty-four. Half his life he spent traveling, and a third, having fun. What is the price of a pound of nails, and was Ptolemy married?
  3. On New Year’s Eve, 200 people were thrown out of the Bolshoi Theater’s costume ball for brawling. If the brawlers numbered 200, then what was the number of guests who were drunk, slightly drunk, swearing, and those trying but not managing to brawl?

The full list appears in The Undiscovered Chekhov, translated by Peter Constantine (1998). No answers are provided.

| Literature · Science & Math

Origins

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dracula_vampire.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Henry Irving, actor-manager at the West End’s Lyceum Theatre, was powerful, imperious, self-absorbed, and manipulative — qualities that made a fateful impression on his theater’s business manager, Bram Stoker. University of California historian Louis S. Warren writes:

Scholars have long agreed that keys to the Dracula tale’s origin and meaning lie in the manager’s relationship with Irving in the 1880s. … There is virtual unanimity on the point that the figure of Dracula — which Stoker began to write notes for in 1890 — was inspired by Henry Irving himself. … Stoker’s numerous descriptions of Irving correspond so closely to his rendering of the fictional count that contemporaries commented on the resemblance. … But Bram Stoker also internalized the fear and animosity his employer inspired in him, making them the foundations of his gothic fiction.

The two worked together for 28 years. Warren writes, “Understandably, Stoker felt most secure when Irving took an interest in him personally, as he did in the early 1880s; and he became anxious and jealous when Irving turned his gaze to other men, as he did by 1885.”

One contemporary wrote, “To Bram, Irving is as a god, and can do no wrong.”

(Louis S. Warren, “Buffalo Bill Meets Dracula: William F. Cody, Bram Stoker, and the Frontiers of Racial Decay,” American Historical Review 107:4 [October 2002], 1124–1157.)

| Literature

Secret Message

Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella, a collection of 65 letters written to his friend Esther Johnson, contains some puzzling passages, such as this one:

“He gave me al bsadnuk lboinlpl dfaonr ufainfbtoy dpionufnad, which I sent him again by Mr. Lewis.”

How should the obscured phrase be read?

Click for Answer
| Literature · Puzzles

Reflections

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goethe_K%C3%BCgelgen.jpg

Maxims of Goethe:

  • When a rainbow has lasted as long as a quarter of an hour we stop looking at it.
  • Researching into nature we are pantheists, writing poetry we are polytheists, morally we are monotheists.
  • Considered historically, our good points appear in a moderate light, our faults excuse themselves.
  • To do well you need talent, to do good you need means.
  • For surely everyone only hears what he understands.
  • If you miss the first buttonhole, you can’t ever get fully buttoned up.
  • You really only know when you know little; doubt grows with knowledge.
  • People think one ought to be busy with them when one isn’t busy with oneself.
  • Acumen is least likely to desert clever men when they are in the wrong.
  • One doesn’t find frogs wherever there is water, but there is water where you hear frogs.
  • Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but not more interesting than contemplating.
  • Everyone manages to have just about enough strength left to act according to his convictions.
  • Let memory fail as long as our judgment remains intact when needed.
  • Dirt glitters when the sun happens to shine.
  • Beauty can never be clear about itself.
  • Mysteries do not as yet amount to miracles.

“There are people who ponder about their friends’ shortcomings: there’s nothing to be gained by that. I have always been on the lookout for the merits of my opponents, and this has been rewarding.”

| Literature · Quotations

Gold and Dross

https://www.pickpik.com/science-fiction-cover-forward-futuristic-spaceship-photo-montage-66842

It is in this vein that I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against the attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of sf is crud. The Revelation:

Ninety percent of everything is crud.

Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.

Corollary 2: The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field.

— Theodore Sturgeon, “On Hand: A Book,” 1958

(In a 1953 speech he’d said, “When people talk about the mystery novel, they mention The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. When they talk about the western, they say there’s The Way West and Shane. But when they talk about science fiction, they call it ‘that Buck Rogers stuff.'”)

| Literature

A Reckoning

In the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone,” the narrator declares that “Holmes seldom laughed, but he got as near it as his old friend Watson could remember.”

Is that so? In 1960, Charles E. Lauterbach and Edward S. Lauterbach compiled this “Frequency Table Showing the Number and Kind of Responses Sherlock Holmes Made to Humourous Situations and Comments in His 60 Recorded Adventures”:

Smile 103
Laugh 65
Joke 58
Chuckle 31
Humor 10
Amusement 9
Cheer 7
Delight 7
Twinkle 7
Miscellaneous 19
Total 316

In a 1964 issue of the Sherlock Holmes Journal, A.G. Cooper claimed to have counted 292 instances of Holmes’ laughter. The Lauterbachs suggest that Watson may have been deaf.

(Charles E. Lauterbach and Edward S. Lauterbach, “The Man Who Seldom Laughed,” Baker Street Journal Christmas Annual 1960, 265–271.)

| Literature

Policy

https://pixabay.com/en/mark-twain-vintage-author-humorist-391120/

Mark Twain received so many letters from would-be authors that he prepared a standard reply:

Dear Sir or Madam,–Experience has not taught me very much, still it has taught me that it is not wise to criticise a piece of literature, except to an enemy of the person who wrote it; then if you praise it that enemy admires you for your honest manliness, and if you dispraise it he admires you for your sound judgment.

Yours truly,

S.L.C.

| Literature

An Unexpected Party

J.R.R. Tolkien received this letter in March 1956:

Dear Sir

I hope you do not mind my writing to you, but with reference to your story ‘Lord of the Rings’ running as a serial on the radio under the item on the programme ‘for the schools’ Home Service once a week in the afternoons I was rather interested in how you arrived at the name of one of the characters named Sam Gamgee because that happens to be my name. I haven’t heard the story myself not having a wireless but I know some who have, one being my nephew, bearing the same surname, who is a school teacher and it caused a laugh among his class when it came on. Another, my great neice and the latter’s daughter 9 yrs of age a pupil at a different school, also heard it and caused some surprise among the class when it came on at her school. I know it’s fiction, but it is rather a coincidence as the name is very uncommon, but well known in the medical profession.

The above address is my brothers as I have no permanent address.

Yrs faithfully

Sam Gamgee

Tolkien wrote back, “It was very kind of you to write. You can imagine my astonishment, when I saw your signature! I can only say, for your comfort I hope, that the ‘Sam Gamgee’ of my story is a most heroic character, now widely beloved by many readers, even though his origins are rustic. So that perhaps you will not be displeased by the coincidence of the name of this imaginary character (of supposedly many centuries ago) being the same as yours.”

He later said, “For some time I lived in fear of receiving a letter signed ‘S. Gollum’. That would have been more difficult to deal with.”

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