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Dead Letter

Last year Grant Maierhofer published Ebb, a novel written entirely without the letter A:

Ben went to school, worked in the Co-op, tried to write some but liked to be close with his friends. His friends comprised this kind of collective, this unity of spirit. Ben studied history. His friends studied too, some music, some writing, some science. They didn’t hope to extend their lives beyond this though, which left them odd. People who study, who hope to write, who hope to sing, who hope to push something through of their spirit, they often wish to flee, to go to New York, somewhere more, somewhere living, somewhere electric. These friends though they’d decided to let this be enough, their little communion with themselves, their communion of the work, which Ben enjoyed endlessly.

To describe the project, he wrote a thousand-word essay, itself without the letter A:

Why write the book? Good question. Possibly to try something out. To see where something brings you, then the things beyond this something. People write things. Sure, of course they do. People write things frequently. I write things, hm, since I like to figure the writing out. I bring problems on myself, then figure some route out of the box. The box? Stupid. Out of the box, outside the box? So stupid. Then how would you put it? The problem could be this cell, this thing you built surrounding your work. The problem could be the cell, then your working through it could be the tunneling out. This is nice. This is the thing, sure.

The essay and a longer excerpt are here. See The Void, The Great Gadsby, and Dead Letters.

| Language · Literature

Comment

Preparing a time capsule in 1939, the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company asked Albert Einstein to compose a message for the people of AD 6939. He sent this:

Our time is rich in inventive minds, the inventions of which could facilitate our lives considerably. We are crossing the seas by power and utilize power also in order to relieve humanity from all tiring muscular work. We have learned to fly and we are able to send messages and news without any difficulty over the entire world through electric waves.

However, the production and distribution of commodities is entirely unorganized so that everybody must live in fear of being eliminated from the economic cycle, in this way suffering for the want of everything. Furthermore, people living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals, so that also for this reason any one who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror. This is due to the fact that the intelligence & character of the masses are incomparably lower than the intelligence and character of the few who produce some thing valuable for the community.

I trust that posterity will read these statements with a feeling of proud and justified superiority.

The message was recorded on microfilm and resides 50 feet below Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in New York City.

(“Book of Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy,” 1939.)

| Society

Inspiration

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Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Cask of Amontillado” is regarded today as a testament to his imagination, but in fact it was inspired by a feud with a literary rival. Poe and Thomas Dunn English had been friends, but they had a falling-out that descended into a fistfight in which Poe claimed to administer “a flogging which he will remember to the day of his death.” Thereafter the two caricatured one another in their writings — Poe even successfully sued English’s editors at the New York Mirror for libel in 1846.

In English’s novel 1844, the character Marmaduke Hammerhead is a veiled dig at Poe — he’s a liar and drunkard who is said to be the author of “The Black Crow” and uses phrases such as “Nevermore” and “lost Lenore.” It was in response to this novel that Poe wrote “The Cask of Amontillado” — the story mentions a secret society, a signal of distress, and a particular coat of arms because they all figured in English’s book. The very setting of Poe’s story derives from a scene in English’s novel that takes place in a subterranean vault.

But these associations have now been forgotten, and Poe’s story is remembered as a tale of the fantastic.

| Literature

Private Collection

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Woman-Ochre.jpg

In November 1985, a couple walked into an art museum in Tucson, Arizona. While the woman chatted with a security guard, the man disappeared briefly upstairs, and then the pair departed. Then the guard discovered that Willem de Kooning’s painting Woman-Ochre was missing — it had been cut out of its canvas.

More than 30 years later, in 2017, retired New York speech pathologist Rita Alter passed away in the little town of Cliff, N.M., five years after her husband, Jerry, a former schoolteacher. In their bedroom was the missing de Kooning, in a position that was visible only when the door was closed. The painting appeared to have been reframed only once in the 31 years it had been missing, suggesting that it had had only one owner in that time.

Had the Alters stolen the painting? They were admirers of de Kooning and had been in Tucson the day before the theft. But such a crime seems vastly out of character for the retiring couple. “[They wouldn’t] risk something as wild and crazy as grand larceny — risk the possibility of winding up in prison, for God’s sake — they wouldn’t do that,” Rita’s sister told the New York Times.

Had the pair then bought the painting from a third party? That seems impossible too — it was worth an estimated $160 million. Perhaps the painting’s authenticity had been forgotten by the time of the transaction, so that both buyer and seller thought it was a copy? How could that have come about?

Jerry Alter once published a story in which a woman and her granddaughter steal an emerald from a museum and keep it on private display, “where two pairs of eyes, exclusively, are there to see.” Is that a coincidence? A veiled admission?

We may never know. The FBI’s case remains open.

(Thanks, Daniel.)

| Art · Crime · Oddities

Notice

Letter to the Times, June 23, 2000:

Sir, The shortest ambiguous sentence I have come across is a road sign found everywhere in New York. It consists of three words: ‘Fine for Parking.’

But I would not like to argue the point with a New York traffic cop.

Yours faithfully,

Millett
House of Lords

10/16/2023 UPDATE: From reader Brieuc de Grangechamps:

schrödinger's dumpster

| Humor · Language

Nice Try

In 2021 Denmark’s Kunsten Museum of Modern Art engaged artist Jens Haaning to recreate two of his earlier works, An Average Austrian Year Income and An Average Danish Annual Income. Those pieces had presented framed piles of kroner and euro bills to represent the sums indicated in their titles, so the museum gave Haaning 532,549 kroner for the purpose.

Instead, he delivered two framed blank canvases. The title of this new work, he said, was Take the Money and Run.

“This is only a piece of art if I don’t return the money,” he told the New York Times. “I believe that I have created a good and relevant piece of artwork, which could be hung on the wall.”

It didn’t work out that way — on Sept. 18, a Copenhagen court ruled that he must return the money.

Haaning acknowledged that he hadn’t fulfilled the commission, but “I completed something else,” he argued. “You’re asked to show a 10- and a 12-year-old work, and suddenly you have a better concept.”

(Thanks, Sharon.)

| Art

Missed Connections

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Nineteenth-century personal ads from the New York Herald:

WILL THE YOUNG LADY WHO ACCIDENTALLY fell while dancing at Barnum’s Museum, on Monday evening, address a note to Interested, Herald office, as a gentleman would like to make her acquaintance, if perfectly agreeable to her? (Jan. 22, 1862)

NIBLO’S, MONDAY EVENING — OCCUPIED adjoining seats in parquet; repeated pressure of arm and foot and hands met when separating. If agreeable, address Bruno, box 211 Herald office. (July 17, 1867)

“WON’T YOU LOOK IN THE HERALD TO-MORROW?” — Will the young lady to whom the above was addressed appoint an interview with the gentleman wearing eyeglasses? Address A.B., Station D. (Dec. 17, 1867)

WILL THE YOUNG LADY, WITH CURLS, WEARING a straw bonnet, and I think plaid shawl, and who carried a Herald in her hand, and who came down Park row to Broadway, and down Broadway to Dey street, turning into Dey street about 11 o’clock yesterday, and who in Dey street met and spoke to a gentleman and then went into a fur store in Dey street, near Greenwich, oblige the gentleman who stood on the opposite side of Dey street, as he very much desires an acquaintance? Address T., Herald office. (Feb. 18, 1862)

AN INTRODUCTION IS EARNESTLY SOLICITED OF the young lady or her friends or family, by the gentleman and his mother who stopped their carriage Friday morning to assist a young lady who had jumped from a stage she had just entered, corner 5th av. and 39th st., to rescue the old gentleman who had fallen in the roadway. The young lady is about 20 years of age and very beautiful; wears her hair in large brown waves; has rosy complexion and soft blue eyes; wore Persian gilt walking coat and muff. We desire her acquaintance and to present her in our family. Address MOTHER AND SON, Herald Uptown office. (Feb. 8, 1880)

(From Sara Bader, Strange Red Cow: And Other Curious Classified Ads From the Past, 2005.)

| History · Society

Second Thoughts

https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/gutenberg.org/3/8/0/3/38035/38035-h/38035-h.htm#page_071

Literary scholar Robert Hauptman calls this “marginal emendation run amok” — it’s a page from Henry James’ 1877 novel The American as James revised it anxiously for a new edition in 1907. He had decided the plot was unconvincing and asked for so many changes that two copies of the book had to be inlaid page by page on larger sheets to give him room to mark all the revisions.

On the last page, above, “James has partially or fully crossed out 16 of the 19 lines and rewritten the text for the definitive New York edition in the margins and at the foot of the page,” notes Hauptman. “His scrawling alterations cover virtually all of the generous white space and must be inserted in at least three different locations in the original text. Words are blotted out or struck in the new version, and as he approaches the bottom of the page, the lettering diminishes in size, because he realizes that he will run out of room.”

“The work on the earlier novels has involved much labour — to the best effect for the vile things, I’m convinced,” James had written to Grace Norton that March. Modern critics generally disagree — most editions today use the original version.

(From Robert Hauptman, Documentation, 2008, and Harvard’s Marks in Books, 1985.)

| Literature

Living Memory

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Image: Flickr

Part of New York is standing still. In 1978, artist Alan Sonfist reclaimed a rubble-strewn lot on the corner of West Houston Street and La Guardia Place in Greenwich Village and re-established the vegetation, soil and rock formations that had existed there before the Western settlers arrived.

“As in war monuments that record the life and death of soldiers, the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers, springs and natural outcroppings need to be remembered,” he wrote in a 1968 manifesto proposing the project. Interestingly, he’d hoped to do even more than this: “On Canal Street I propose to create a marshland and a stream; on Spring Street I propose to restore the natural spring; in front of City Hall I propose to restore the historical lake. There are a series of fifty proposals I have made for the City of New York.”

Only this one, called Time Landscape, has been realized. But it’s still growing after 44 years, a tiny piece of history that Sonfist says helps the city remember its heritage.

| Art · History

Toeholds

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

Set into the corner of Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street in Manhattan’s West Village is a triangular plaque reading PROPERTY OF THE HESS ESTATE WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN DEDICATED FOR PUBLIC PURPOSES. The “Hess triangle” is a remnant from a property dispute that unfolded here 100 years ago: The city was claiming eminent domain in order to demolish hundreds of buildings and expand the subway, but surveyors overlooked this 65-centimeter triangle, owned by Philadelphia landlord David Hess. Hess, outraged at the loss of his five-story apartment building, refused to donate the triangle to the public and added the plaque as a sort of existential revenge. In 1938 it was sold to the adjacent cigar store, and today it’s owned by a local realty corporation, the smallest plot of land in New York City.

Related: In 1973, artist Gordon Matta-Clark bought 13 unused pieces of land that were left over when property lines were redrawn in the borough of Queens. He paid between $25 and $75 for each. The sites are often irregular or isolated, located where other properties meet in a block, some measuring as little as 2×3 feet.

“When I bought those properties at the New York City Auction, the description of them that always excited me the most was ‘inaccessible’,” he said. “They were a group of fifteen micro-panels of land in Queens, leftover properties from an architect’s drawing. One or two of the prize ones were a foot strip down somebody’s driveway and a square foot of sidewalk. And the others were kerbstone and gutterspace. What I basically wanted to do was to designate spaces that wouldn’t be seen and certainly not occupied. Buying them was my own take on the strangeness of existing property demarcation lines. Property is so all-pervasive. Everyone’s notion of ownership is determined by the use factor.”

(Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, Land & Environmental Art, 2005.)

| Oddities