In their 1943 handbook The Reader Over Your Shoulder, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge note that writers are prone to exaggerate descriptions of quantity and duration. “There should never be any doubt left as to how much, or how long.” They offer this quantified example:
(100%) Mr. Jordan’s fortune consisted wholly of bar-gold.
(99%) Practically all his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(95%) His fortune consisted almost entirely of bar-gold.
(90%) Nearly all his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(80%) By far the greater part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(70%) The greater part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(60%) More than half his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(55%) Rather more than half his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(50%) Half his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(45%) Nearly half his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(40%) A large part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(35%) Quite a large part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(30%) A considerable part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(25%) Part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(15%) A small part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(10%) Not much of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(5%) A very small part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(1%) An inconsiderable part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(0%) None of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
“This simple, generally accepted, scale is confused by writers who, for dramatic effect, try to make 5% seem more than it is.”
Say what you will about hell, it’s very well organized. According to the 17th-century grimoire Ars Goetia, the underworld is ruled by 72 demons, each with its own sigil (above) and served by a sort of infernal bureaucracy:
Aim (also Aym or Haborym) is a Great Duke of Hell, very strong, and rules over twenty-six legions of demons. He sets cities, castles and great places on fire, makes men witty in all ways, and gives true answers concerning private matters. He is depicted as a man (handsome to some sources), but with three heads, one of a serpent, the second of a man, and the third of a cat to most authors, although some say of a calf, riding a viper, and carrying in his hand a lit firebrand with which he sets the requested things on fire.
Wikipedia has a page explaining who does what.
Related: Belphegor’s prime, 1000000000000066600000000000001, is a palindromic prime number with 666 at its heart and 13 zeros on either side. It was discovered by Harvey Dubner; Clifford Pickover named it after a prince of hell responsible for helping people make ingenious inventions and discoveries.
Psychoanalyst Robert Lindner received a remarkable client at his Baltimore practice: “Kirk Allen” had read a series of science fiction novels and “In some weird and inexplicable way I knew that what I was reading was my biography.” (Lindner never revealed which series this was, but some have theorized that it was the Barsoom books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, which describe the adventures of an American Confederate veteran on Mars.)
Allen believed that he could assume his fictional identity at will and was spending part of his life on another planet. In an effort to understand his own history he’d compiled his life story, working from the books and supplementing the account with his own invented memories. Lindner asked to see this work:
There were, to begin with, about 12,000 pages of typescript comprising the amended ‘biography’ of Kirk Allen. This was divided into some 200 chapters and read like fiction. Appended to these pages were approximately 2,000 more of notes in Kirk’s handwriting, containing corrections necessitated by his more recent ‘researches,’ and a huge bundle of scraps and jottings on envelopes, receipted bills, laundry slips. There also were a glossary of names and terms that ran to more than 100 pages; 82 full-color maps carefully drawn to scale, 23 of planetary bodies in four projections, 31 of land masses on these planets, 14 labeled ‘Kirk Allen’s Expedition to –,’ the remainder of cities on the various planets; 161 architectural sketches and elevations, all carefully scaled and annotated; 12 genealogical tables; an 18-page description of the galactic system in which Kirk Allen’s home planet was contained, with four astronomical charts, one for each of the seasons, and nine star-maps of the skies from observatories on other planets in the system; a 200-page history of the empire Kirk Allen ruled, with a three-page table of dates and names of battles or outstanding historical events; a series of 44 folders containing from 2 to 20 pages apiece, each dealing with some aspect — social, economic, or scientific — of the planet over which Kirk Allen ruled. Finally, there were 306 drawings of people, animals, plants, insects, weapons, utensils, machines, articles of clothing, vehicles, instruments, and furniture.
To free Allen from his delusion, Lindner eventually entered it himself, validating the fantasy and repeating Allen’s ideas in the same language. This worked: After some time Allen confessed that he no longer felt that his alternate identity was real. Lindner published his account of the therapy in two articles in Harper’s Magazine in 1955 and elaborated them in his 1955 memoir The Fifty-Minute Hour. Allen’s identity remains unknown, but there’s some speculation that he was Paul Linebarger — who himself wrote science fiction under the name Cordwainer Smith.
Is Dracula Moriarty? Is Holmes Van Helsing?
In an article in the Baker Street Journal Christmas Annual of 1957, William Leonard points out that the events of Bram Stoker’s novel unfold between May and November 1890, a period in which Watson records only three cases with Sherlock Holmes. Stoker’s novel cites several news accounts about the growing mystery, which would certainly have attracted Holmes’ attention. In order to intervene, he would have had to hide his identity to conceal the danger that confronted the women in the tale, who Stoker tells us are in such fragile health that any shock might kill them.
Van Helsing arrives ostensibly from Amsterdam, an intrepid polymath with a poised head; a hard, square chin; a long, straight nose with sensitive nostrils; and brows that knit deeply over a problem. He is older than Holmes, but we know that Holmes can affect that appearance. Both investigators use the same methods, and both are expert housebreakers. Supposedly a doctor, Van Helsing does not appear to be acquainted with medicine (“the professor’s actions were certainly odd and not to be found in any pharmacopeia”). And, strangely, his inexpert English becomes articulate when he’s under stress: “You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you.”
As for Dracula, both he and Moriarty are tall, thin, pale, and gray-haired — Dracula has a “lofty domed forehead” and Moriarty a “forehead doming out in a white curve.” Jay Finley Christ writes, “Moriarty and Dracula were two names for the same man. Mr. Holmes had been after him for over three months and began to catch up with him in January. Moriarty-Dracula knew this all the time, but Watson didn’t get it. If he had, he probably would have told the world about it before Bram Stoker got round to it in 1897.”
The infinite monkey theorem holds that a monkey typing at random for an infinite amount of time will almost certainly produce the works of Shakespeare.
This may be true, but mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta of the University of Technology Sydney find that it would take an extraordinarily long time — longer, in fact, than the life span of the universe.
Assuming a typing speed of one character per second on a 30-key keyboard, they find, a single chimp has only about a 5 percent chance of typing BANANAS in its own lifetime. And even the entire global population of 200,000 chimps will almost certainly never string together the 884,647 words that make up Shakespeare’s works within 10100 years.
“There are many orders of magnitude difference between the expected numbers of keys to be randomly pressed before Shakespeare’s works are reproduced and the number of keystrokes until the universe collapses into thermodynamic equilibrium,” the authors conclude. “As such, we reject the conclusions from the Infinite Monkeys Theorem as potentially misleading within our finite universe.”
Speaking of Shakespeare: Grand Theft Hamlet is a British documentary about the staging of a production of Hamlet inside Grand Theft Auto:
Winner of the Jury Award for best documentary feature at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival, it will be released in the U.K. in December and globally early next year.
(Thanks, John.)
Richard Jefferies’ 1885 novel After London is one of the first post-apocalypse stories, an adventure tale set in a future England after an unspecified catastrophe has destroyed civilization, cut off communication with the continent, and set the surviving human population back to a quasi-medieval existence among the overgrown ruins of the “ancients.” The nature of the disaster is never explained, but it must have been prodigious — the interior of the island is now filled with an immense freshwater lake, and the old capital is now choked under poisonous vapors; one old house collapses like salt at the hero’s touch.
The first section, called “The Relapse Into Barbarism,” reads like a nonfiction natural history, describing in detail how nature reclaims the ruins in the decades after the conflagration. The longer second section, “Wild England,” recounts the adventures of the young nobleman Felix Aquila as he leaves the stultifying court life in which he has been raised and rows out onto the lake in a homemade canoe.
Why invent such a richly detailed future when the story is essentially a medieval romance? Why withhold the nature of the disaster? Felix’s adventures in this world seem to unfold as if unplanned, as if Jefferies invented it simply to explore it, to commune with his own creative faculty. He doesn’t seem to know what he’ll find in his own imagination.
The full text is available at Project Gutenberg and on Google Books, and there’s a free audio version at Librivox.
A pleasing little detail: In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1946 story “Rescue Party,” a federation of aliens visit Earth immediately before the sun explodes, hoping to rescue its inhabitants. To their surprise, they don’t find us (it turns out we’ve fled the planet), and they comb our deserted civilization.
The explorers were particularly puzzled by one room — clearly an office of some kind — that appeared to have been completely wrecked. The floor was littered with papers, the furniture had been smashed, and smoke was pouring through the broken windows from the fires outside.
T’sinadree was rather alarmed.
‘Surely no dangerous animal could have got into a place like this!’ he exclaimed, fingering his paralyzer nervously.
Alarkane did not answer. He began to make that annoying sound which his race called ‘laughter.’ It was several minutes before he would explain what had amused him.
‘I don’t think any animal has done it,’ he said. ‘In fact, the explanation is very simple. Suppose you had been working all your life in this room, dealing with endless papers, year after year. And suddenly, you are told that you will never see it again, that your work is finished, and that you can leave it forever. More than that — no one will come after you. Everything is finished. How would you make your exit, T’sinadree?’
The other thought for a moment.
‘Well, I suppose I’d just tidy things up and leave. That’s what seems to have happened in all the other rooms.’
Alarkane laughed again.
‘I’m quite sure you would. But some individuals have a different psychology. I think I should have liked the creature that used this room.’
No explanation is given. “His two colleagues puzzled over his words for quite a while before they gave it up.”
This just caught my eye: In his manuscripts and notebooks, Alexander Pushkin often sketched the characters he was describing, as well as friends, family, romantic partners, and other literary figures. One biographer calls the drawings Pushkin’s graphic diary. This page is from his 1822 poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus.
condisciple
n. a fellow student
precariat
n. people whose living standards are insecure
scripturiency
n. passion for writing
refocillation
n. imparting of new vigor
This brass plate is displayed at the corner of Drummond Street and South Bridge, near Rutherford’s Bar, in Edinburgh:
(Thanks, Nick.)
