Going Places
From the Strand, May 1899:
Our next photograph is a facsimile of an address on a letter that found its way from Spain to the G.P.O., St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Remarkable as it may seem, this specimen of handwriting was deciphered by ‘the blind man of St. Martin’s,’ and the letter safely reached its destination. It is addressed to the ‘Spanish Ambassador (or Embassy), London.’
(The “blind men” were “the decipherers of illegible and imperfect addresses” in the returned letter office of the General Post Office. Further examples.)
Rapid Transit
A striking technology described in Strand, April 1899: The speck is a bundle of hay descending along a wire over a lake in Western Norway.
The Norwegians, who live for weeks and months in the summer on the great heights on either side of their beautiful valleys, send down milk, cheese, hay, etc. to the farms below by suspending them on inclined wires fastened at one end firmly to the ground and at the other to some point on the rocks above.
The snap-shot shows a bundle of hay on its way from a great height on one side of the lake to the farm on the other side. It sped along, the friction causing it to shed sparks in all directions, and was timed to take forty-four seconds.
The editors add: “If the bundle be closely examined the constriction caused by the cord holding it together is distinctly visible.”
Zeckendorf’s Theorem
Every positive integer can be represented uniquely as the sum of one or more distinct Fibonacci numbers in such a way that the sum does not include any two consecutive Fibonacci numbers.
Above, 51 = 34 + 13 + 3 + 1.
Discovered in 1952 by Dutch mathematician Gerrit Lekkerkerker (and remarked 20 years later by Edouard Zeckendorf).
Variations
Illusion Diffusion uses Stable Diffusion to produce illusion artwork.
The image above was produced by uploading an image of the Mona Lisa and specifying the prompt “colour photograph of an Italian city in the Renaissance” (illusion strength 1 and seed 0).
Below is Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring modified with the prompt “Amsterdam canals in 17th century” (illusion strength 1.8 and seed 0).
In a Word
scribacious
adj. fond of writing
moiler
n. a toiler; a drudge
demiss
adj. downcast; humble; abject
guerdon
n. a reward, recompense, or requital
By the end of the 1960s, William Gaddis had secured an advance and an NEA grant that allowed him to work full-time on the novel J R.
“Even then, however, Gaddis would be so in need of money that he would ghostwrite articles for a dentist in exchange for root canals. His son recalls one day happening to find his checkbook, and noting the balance, meticulously calculated, of twelve cents. This was at the time when Gaddis had just won the 1976 National Book Award.”
From Joseph Tabbi’s introduction to Gaddis’ “Treatment for a Motion Picture on ‘Software'” in The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings, 2002.
Grammar
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WILL NOT, AND OTHERS MUST NOT, PICK THE FLOWERS.
— Notice, Woodenbridge Hotel garden, County Wicklow, Ireland, 1919
First Person
Once a woman, speaking to me of love’s delight, said: It begins with a thrill like that of a hot bath, delicious; but we desire a deeper intensity, and there comes a feeling of melting as if all the knots were loosening, and this is followed by a tearing till soul and body are about to part. We know not whether it be pain or pleasure. … A moment comes of madness, so acute that we feel we cannot live through it. We do, somehow. Afterwards, the blood weighs heavy, as if it were lead, and then comes long voluptuousness; the brain is overwhelmed in it: a throbbing ecstasy, a pulsing beat.
— George Moore, Conversations in Ebury Street, 1924
Visitor
Master of Number, a collage by Gianni Sarcone presented at the Museum of Illusions in Kuala Lumpur in 2001.
Rewards
Sydney Smith said that Henry Luttrell’s idea of heaven was eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.
“My idea of paradise is a perfect automobile going thirty miles an hour on a smooth road to a twelfth-century cathedral.” — Henry Adams
“Perhaps in the next eggzi stens you and I and My lady may be able to sit for placid hours under a lotus tree a eating of ice creams and pelican pie with our feet in a hazure coloured stream and with the birds and beasts of Paradise a sporting around us.” — Edward Lear, letter to Chichester Fortescue, Aug. 16, 1869
“He [Boni de Castellane] once stated that his idea of heaven on earth was to live in a palace whose furnishings and decor would be in a continual state of change and replacement, while outside in formal gardens would be rare fountains and ancient statues, also being constantly moved about.” — Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, 1962
“Many years before, it is true, on a visit to the poet laureate, Alfred Austin, as they sat with others on the lawn in the afternoon, it was suggested that each person should tell his idea of heaven: ‘Austin’s idea was to sit … in a garden, and while he sat to receive constant telegrams announcing alternately a British victory by sea and a British victory by land’; ‘mine’, said Blunt, ‘was to be laid out to sleep in a garden, with running water near, and so to sleep for a hundred thousand years, then to be woke by a bird singing, and to call out to the person one loved best, “Are you there?” and for her to answer, “Yes, are you?” and so turn round and go to sleep again for another hundred thousand years’.” — Edith Finch, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, 1938
See Writers’ Fancies.