I thoroughly enjoyed Pinky’s recollection of meeting Rupert Pole, Anais Nin’s husband and caretaker, while canvassing door to door in Los Angeles 16 years ago.
Serendipitous
The Oracle at Google, or Bible Dipping for a Disenchanted Age
As anyone with a Gmail account knows, to send or receive an e-mail through Google’s electronic mail service is to have the impression that someone else is reading your mail. Mention the military in an e-mail – even disparagingly – and you will see, in the sidebar, beside the composition window, an ad for GoArmy.com. Mention Premier League football and you’ll get links to a panoply of stores selling Newcastle and Arsenal jerseys. This feeling of being watched and plied with goods and services that someone or something thinks you are likely to desire is rather odd at first (perhaps even creepy in a post-Patriot Act era). But it abates. You become a jaded “old boy” and don’t even notice the sidebar ads attempting to draw you in by ‘reading’ your missives. (Except, perhaps, for the odd time when, in writing to a student about plagiarism, the Google sidebar offers you a variety of online warehouses apparently chock-full of the same sort of stolen merchandise you are attempting to rail against.)At least until recently. A few weeks ago I began sending myself pieces of my dissertation as a means of backing them up. The sidebar’s offerings were unremarkable for several weeks (so unremarkable that I do not remember them and so cannot share them with you so that you too might remark on their unremarkableness).But this past weekend, something changed. As before, I attached the chapter, a Word document named Chapter 2, and wrote “Charke” in the subject line. (“Charke” refers to Charlotte Charke, a notoriously outlandish eighteenth-century actress famous for cross-dressing on and off the stage, whose autobiography is the subject of my chapter.) I pressed send. And suddenly my sidebar was INNUNDATED WITH ALPACAS: “How to get free Alpacas,” “Alpacas for fun & profit,” “Are Alpacas profitable?,” “Enjoy an alpaca lifestyle!”In that moment (a moment that has been repeated now several times – every time, in fact, that I send the Charke chapter to myself again), my whole concept of Gmail changed. I believe that Gmail is trying to tell me something about my future, and that future involves alpacas. What that future seems not to involve is recuperative literary analyses of neglected autobiographies by marginal eighteenth-century actresses.In that moment, I realized that the Gmail sidebar might be much more than we all thought it was. It might, in fact, be just the thing to fill those gaping holes in our post-modern psyches. Like the oracle at Delphi, haruspication, and all of the other delightful methods of divination devised by the Greeks, bibliomancy in the Renaissance and 18th century (aka “Bible dipping” for those of you familiar with Running With Scissors), seances in the 19th, and the Magic 8 Ball in the eighties and nineties, (not to mention tea leaves, crystal balls, Jim’s hairball in Huckleberry Finn…), the Gmail sidebar might just be the medium – I mean the clairvoyant medium – of our age. And it’s so much tidier than haruspication.I’ve got alpacas (free alpacas no less!), how bout you?
Potter-madness Approaching Full Froth
It’s not just July, it’s the “Harry Potter month” to end all Harry Potter months. With book 7 coming out on the 21st, the frenzy will be ramping up over the next couple of weeks.Amazon has been doing its best to stoke the flames (recall the Harry-est Town in America promotion). A new press release from the online bookseller is breathless even by the form’s loose standards. “Harry Potter Mania Reaches All-Time High on Amazon.com” it proclaims, and I imagine millions of foaming clickers rampaging through Amazon’s digital halls and tearing the place to pieces. Alas, by “mania” Amazon means pre-orders, which at last count are approaching 1.6 million, eclipsing the record total set by book 6. Amazon continues to incite the madness, however, with its new offer of a $5 “promotional certificate to spend in August” for customers who pre-order the new book. Go crazy, Harry Potter fans.
Literary power couples
I’ve been getting emails extolling the virtues of Nicole Krauss’s new novel, The History of Love lately. She, by the way, is also known as the wife of Jonathan Safran Foer, and there has been some suggestion that her new novel suspiciously resembles his. Seems like sour grapes to me, but it did get me thinking about contemporary literary couples, and how it seems like there’s a lot of them. There’s Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt. And then there’s the couples where the woman is the bigger star like Zadie Smith and Nick Laird (he’s a poet… does that even count?) and Alice Sebold and Glen David Gold. There must be others… writers attract writers it seems.This, of course, is not a new trend. Here’s a list of some of history’s literary power couples that I borrowed from a UPenn english department Web site: Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, and Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson.
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The Smithy Code
Can you handle another Da Vinci Code story? It has just emerged that Justice Peter Smith, who presided over the Dan Brown plagiarism trial, embedded a secret code within his ruling that refers to both The Da Vinci Code and Holy Blood, Holy Grail, whose authors sued Brown. In the first 13 and a half pages of the 71-page ruling, a handful of italicized, boldfaced letters are embedded, that when combined, spell out “Smithy Code.” But there’s more. A further jumble of italicized, boldfaced letters have yet to be deciphered. In her New York Times piece, Sarah Lyall describes a series of “brief and ultimately frustrating e-mail messages” in which she tried to pry the solution from Smith, to no avail. She also relates Smith’s dismay when, for the first couple of weeks after the ruling was released, no one noticed the secrets that lay within: It has been nearly three weeks since he handed down the ruling. Probably disappointingly for Justice Smith, nobody seemed to notice anything unusual about it when it was first released. But he alluded to the possibility that there was something more soon afterward as a throwaway line in an e-mail exchange with a reporter for The New York Times, saying, “Did you find the coded message in the judgment?”It’s silly, but I admire Justice Smith for his cleverness. After all, a blogger can’t exactly look down on someone for grasping at his 15 minutes of fame.Update: From the comments, a mysterious anonymous commenter has provided us with the code. It starts out “smithy code” and from there, the jumble of letters is “Jaeiextostgpsacgreamqwfkadpmqzv”.Anybody want to take a stab at it?Update 2: Judge Smith has released some clues.Holy Blood, Holy Grail refers to the Dossiers Secret and the hidden message. It is revealed by spotting that certain random letters appear to be different in form from the majority of the text.Applying that to the judgment reveals the following highlighted letters: SMITHYCODEJAEIEXTOSTGPSACGREAMQWFKADPMQZVZ (the first part reveals there is a message)There is no significance to the placing of the letters in the text.Da Vinci Code also uses codes. The most liked one is apparently a numerical one (p.255 The Fibonacci Sequence). In the book it is changed.The correct sequence up to 21 is: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21The code is created by letter substitution.The letter change is creating by applying the Fibonacci Sequence numbers above letter by letter.The relevant number shows where you start for each letter to substitute. Thus the first letter is identified by rewriting the alphabet stating at the first letter in the alphabet ie for the first letter A A. The second letter is also started at 1; the third at 3. When 21 is reached the code reverts back to 1 etc and repeats that until all the letters are substituted. A message ought then be revealed (there is a deliberate typo to create further confusion). The message reveals a significant but now overlooked event that occurred virtually 100 years to the day of the start of the trial.The preparation of the Code took about 40 minutes and its insertion another 40 minutes or so.I hate crosswords and do not do Sudoku as I do not have the patience.Update 3: The Smithy Code has been cracked.
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The Blow-Up
Following the lead of powerhouses Bookforum and The New York Review, the interdisciplinary magazine BOMB appears to be in the middle of a major project to make a lot of its content available free, online. This should be a boon to highbrow bibliophiles. For years, BOMB‘s author interviews have offered deep perspective on the state of the art, while its monthly publication schedule has indemnified it against the faddishness that characterizes so much cultural coverage. Visitors to the new version of www.bombsite.com can browse interviews with the likes of Peter Nadas and Roberto Bolano (archived from 2001)… as well as the current cover-story: a conversation with Kate Valk, my favorite actor in New York and “a national treasure.” Be sure also to peruse the BOMB’s excellent literary supplement, First Proof.
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Salinger on the Web
I know this is the sort of thing that threatens to erode our moral fabric and turn us all into communists, but I thought you might like to know that much of J.D. Salinger’s published work, including many hard-to-find uncollected stories, is available for free here. So hurry and take a look before this website is shut down by a blizzard of threatening letters from angry intellectual property lawyers. Also of note: I posted this link at Metafilter a few days back and it generated a rather lively discussion.