The Bronx Zoo unveiled a controversial exhibit in 1906 — a Congolese man in a cage in the primate house. The display attracted jeering crowds to the park, but for the man himself it was only the latest in a string of indignities. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll review the sad tale of Ota Benga and his life in early 20th-century America.
We’ll also delve into fugue states and puzzle over a second interstate speeder.
Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang contains no commas. (“I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.”)
Vanessa Place’s Dies: A Sentence is a single sentence of 120 pages.
Mathias Enard’s Zone is a single sentence of 517 pages.
Michel Thaler’s Le Train de Nulle Part contains no verbs. (“Quelle aubaine! Une place de libre, ou presque, dans ce compartiment. Une escale provisoire, pourquoi pas! Donc, ma nouvelle adresse dans ce train de nulle part: voiture 12, 3ème compartiment dans le sens de la marche. Encore une fois, pourquoi pas?”)
Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon is a “pragmatic lipogram” — all its verbs are conditional, future, subjunctive, etc., so that nothing is actually happening in the present: “I shall soon be quite redundant at last despite of all, as redundant as you after queue and as totally predictable, information-content zero.”
Adam Adams’ 2008 novel Unhooking a DD-Cup Bra Without Fumbling contains no Es.
My notes say that Iegor Gran’s Les Trois Vies de Lucie can be read straight through, recto pages only, or verso pages only, yielding three different stories, but I haven’t managed to find a copy to check.
High Noon unfolds in real time — the running time of the story closely parallels the running time of the film itself. Producer Stanley Kramer said that the filmmakers hoped this would “create a sense of urgency as the noon hour approached.” Director Fred Zinnemann wrote the word CLOCK next to many scenes in his script, and he prepared a list of inserts in which clocks would be prominently visible:
Scene 36 — Marshal’s Office — Clock 10:40 a.m.
Scene 60 — Marshal’s Office — Clock 10:51 a.m.
Scene 76 — Helen’s Room — Clock 10:55 a.m.
Scene 86 — Marshal’s Office — Clock 11:02 a.m.
Scene 96 — Helen’s Room — Clock 11:05 a.m.
Scene 101 — Marshal’s Office — Clock 11:07 a.m.
Scene 130 — Saloon — Clock 11:19 a.m.
Scene 144 — Mart Howe’s House — Clock 11:26 a.m.
Scene 231 — Saloon — Clock 11:44 a.m.
Scene 256 — Hotel Lobby — Clock 11:50 a.m.
Scene 303 — Saloon — Clock 11:59 a.m.
Scene 312 — Saloon — Clock 12:00 p.m.
An insert for Scene 294 was never shot — it would have started on a pendulum and panned up to show a clock with no hands, superimposed on a closeup of Gary Cooper’s Will Kane. Zinnemann said he’d got the idea from a handless clock he’d seen in front of a funeral home on Sunset Boulevard. He said it “would have intensified the feeling of panic.”
(From Michael Francis Blake, Code of Honor, 2003.)
The letters in OVERSUFFICIENTLY can be rearranged to spell the English number names for 1, 4, 5, 7, 10, 14, 15, 40, 45, 47, 50, 51, 57, 70, and 74.
The letters in A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING AND EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE can spell 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 17, 18, 19, 30, 31, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 47, 48, 49, 70, 71, 73, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, and 99.
And the latter can also spell 26 numbers in the form “one-and-twenty,” from ONE-AND-THIRTY to EIGHT-AND-NINETY.
(Rex Gooch, “Number Names in Words and Phrases,” Word Ways 34:4 [November 2001], 254-258.)
In the mid-1990s Jacques Jouet introduced “metro poems,” poems written on the Paris Métro according to a particular set of rules. He explained the rules in a poem:
There are as many lines in a metro poem as there are stations in your journey, minus one.
The first line is composed mentally between the first two stations of your journey (counting the station you got on at).
It is then written down when the train stops at the second station.
The second line is composed mentally between the second and the third stations of your journey.
It is then written down when the train stops at the third station.
And so on.
The poet mustn’t write anything down when the train is moving, and he mustn’t compose anything when the train is stopped. If he changes lines then he must start a new stanza. He writes down the poem’s last line on the platform of the final station.
Jouet’s poem was itself composed in the Métro, according to its own rules. Presumably this type of writing could be done in any subway, but Marc Lapprand notes that the Paris system supports it unusually well: It’s dense, with 368 different stations, including 87 connecting points (or 293 nominal stations, including 55 connecting points) and a fairly short distance between them (543 meters, on average). The average run between two stations in Paris is a minute and a half, which means the poet has to think quickly in order to keep up.
Levin Becker, who tried the technique for his book 2012 Many Subtle Channels, found it surprisingly challenging: “It constrains the space around your thoughts, not the letters or words in which you will eventually fit them: you have to work to think thoughts of the right size, to focus on the line at hand without workshopping the previous one or anticipating the next.”
In April 1996 Jouet wrote a 490-verse poem while passing through every station in the Métro, following an optimized map laid out for him by a graph theorist. “At the end of those fifteen and a half hours,” he wrote, “I was very tired.”
(Jacques Jouet and Ian Monk, “Metro Poems,” AA Files 45/46 [Winter 2001], 4-14.)
This is in my notes with the words “ridiculous escape”: An 1889 article in Charles Dickens’ All the Year Round tells how Italian humanist Celio Secondo Curione outsmarted the Inquisition:
In my new prison I had been confined for a week, with huge pieces of wood chained to my feet, where I was favoured with a sudden inspiration from Heaven.
As soon as the young man who acted as my keeper entered my chamber, I begged and prayed of him to release one of my feet from its encumbrances. It would be sufficient security, I said, that I should still by the other foot be fastened to an enormous log. As he was a humane sort of fellow, he consented, and set one foot free. A day, two days passed, during which I applied myself to work. Taking off my shirt, and also the stocking from the leg which was at liberty, I made them up into a dummy resembling a leg, on which I put a shoe. I was in want of something, however, to give it consistency, and was anxiously looking about in all directions, when I caught sight of a cane-stick lying under a row of seats. Seizing it joyfully, I inserted it into the sham limb, and concealing the true one under my cloak, waited the result of my stratagem. When my young keeper made his appearance next morning, he asked me how I was. ‘I should do pretty well,’ I said, ‘if you would be good enough to put my fetters on the other leg, so that each may have a rest in turn.’ He assented; and, without perceiving it, attached the log to the dummy.
“At night, when their loud snores informed him that his gaolers were asleep, Curion threw aside the false leg, resumed his shirt and stocking, and opened noiselessly the prison door, which was fastened by a simple bolt. Afterwards, though not without difficulty, he scaled the wall, and got away without interruption.”
During Henry Stanley’s 1886 Emin Pasha Relief Expedition to the interior of Africa, naturalist James S. Jameson allegedly paid a group of cannibals to kill and eat a young girl so that he sketch the act. According to his interpreter, Assad Farran, Jameson afterward took the sketches to his tent, finished them in watercolors, and then “showed these and many other sketches to all the chiefs.”
Jameson protested the accusation, but his own diary describes the killing:
I told him that people at home generally believed that these [accounts of cannibalism] were only ‘travellers’ tales,’ as they are called in our country, or, in other words, lies. He then said something to an Arab called Ali, seated next him, who turned round to me and said, ‘Give me a bit of cloth, and see.’ I sent my boy for six handkerchiefs, thinking it was all a joke, and that they were not in earnest, but presently a man appeared, leading a young girl of about ten years old by the hand, and I then witnessed the most horribly sickening sight I am ever likely to see in my life. He plunged a knife quickly into her breast twice, and she fell on her face, turning over on her side. Three men then ran forward and began to cut up the body of the girl; finally her head was cut off, and not a particle remained, each man taking his piece away down to the river to wash it. The most extraordinary thing was that the girl never uttered a sound, nor struggled, until she fell.
In his 1889 account of the expedition, Heroes of the Dark Continent, James William Buel presents the images above as copies of Jameson’s sketches.
Another of Stanley’s men claimed that Jameson had spoken freely of the incident at the time, and only realized “the seriousness” of his actions much later. “Life is very cheap in Central Africa,” he wrote. “Mr. Jameson forgot how differently this terrible thing would be regarded at home.”
In the February 2003 issue of Word Ways, Dave Morice nominates PEPPERTREE as the “holy grail” of wordplay. PEPPERTREE is a “pyramid word” — it contains 1 T, 2 Rs, 3 Ps, and 4 Es:
But it contains two shorter pyramid words, PEPPER and PEP:
Also:
Altogether, Morice lists 26 ways in which PEPPERTREE is notable for its letters, pronunciation, and meaning, making it “an evergreen of the most alphabetic kind.” The whole list is here.
(Dave Morice, “Peppertree: The Logological Holy Grail,” Word Ways 36:1 [February 2003], 3-5.)
In 1924 two British mountaineers set out to be the first to conquer Mount Everest. But they never returned to camp, and to this day no one knows whether they reached the top. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll review the case of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, which has been called “one of the greatest unsolved adventure mysteries of the 20th century.”
We’ll also learn what to do if attacked by a bear and puzzle over the benefits of a water shortage.
