waste

Vapid jews query tax of big schnoz milk

I am officially underimpressed with the characters in Ella Minnow Pea. (And with the amount of time it takes to read same: about an hour.)

(Let us be clear that the titular pangram is not actually nonsensical as long as you are willing to accept that "milk" is being used metaphorically for an actually nasal product and that it might be taxed.) ((Or one could simply write "Vapid Jews, big of schnoz, query milk tax".))

Chekhov's dumb

I recently read Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, and not only that—I also read the back. Here is a blurb!

Take one zippy, curious 21-year-old American named Sally Jay, just out of college. Drop her in the middle of Paris's Left Bank. Add an Italian diplomat, an American theatrical director, a couple of painters and a white slave trader. Mix until all bubbles. The result: A delightful few hours of sparkling reading entertainment. Summing up: Froth and frolic.

(It's the trade in slaves that really makes it frothy, I think.) Now as it happens the slave-trading aspect doesn't really come to the fore until quite late, though a more perceptive reader than I might have seen things coming. (On the other hand it's not really clear that "white slave trader" is the aptest description.) And since I had of course read the back before reading the insides, and even periodically in interludes while the reading of the insides was not actively pursued, I had occasion to wonder, as I approached the end of the book, when this final preordained plot element would come into play. (In fact I fell to wondering this at one point only a few pages before exactly that happened.) Because, you know, in a conventionally ordered book you can't effectively disguise that things must shortly begin to come to a close. The result of all this: nontrivial tension. A white slave trader is no small thing to just drop in the last, say, thirty pages! Or however many it was. (That to another it might not have been so abrupt a drop is immaterial.) One attends more closely to what's happening simply because it doesn't seem to lead in a promising direction. When's it gonna happen? becomes a thought practically unevictable from one's head.

One experiences (which is a way of saying that I have experienced) something similar at concerts, when a performer walks out with an multiple instruments (three clarinets! two saxophones! seventy-eight percussives!) or is present on stage without yet having done anything for a while. (Or when a short man in a white suit stands on your yard during a gang fight.) Sometimes—if the music will include improvisation, for instance—you just don't know whether everything brought out will actually be used. (Sometimes one gets the feeling in improv concerts that something is used just because it was brought out.) But that presumably doesn't happen with fully notated music, when the stage is cleared between pieces. You wouldn't bring it out if it weren't part of the piece. But sometimes it doesn't become part of the piece for a while, and, at least if the music hasn't got one's rapt attention, it becomes possible, then, to wonder, well, when's he gonna use that?

In my view, this should be exploited! If Alasdair Gray can design his own book jackets, surely he can have inserted into the jacket text false information about the contents of the book so as to manage his readers' expectations. And it would quite simple to instruct musicians to bring out, and laboriously arrange about his seat, many instruments which he will in fact not otherwise use. (Did this happen in the performance of Kagel's Atem I saw? I cannot recall.) Though it would be somewhat trickier to prevent the authors of reviews or program notes from giving the game away.

A completely nonsensical story with a wholly unrelated and pointless punch line is told ... when those in-the-know laugh, the suckers wonder what's wrong with their sense of humor

A classification for shaggy dog stories.

For each type classified a very short synopsis is given; naturally reading the synopses is no substitute for experiencing the fully drawn-out version of the joke, but (as I may not have related in this forum previously but have certainly observed viva voce on occasion) there's also something amusing about shaggy dog stories reduced to extremely telegraphic form, especially in their non-shaggy-dog-involving incarnations. Thus: B220.2. Horse Complains that his Feet Hurt. Owner says that there's nothing wrong with his feet., or The Mouse that Looked Jewish. A mouse can sing, play a piano, tap dance; but a theatrical agent will not book him. He looks a little Jewish. (this one also benefits from the extreme redundancy created when prefaced with the name the classifiers have given it), or The Dog Fight. Strong dog is beaten by a large yellow dog in a bar. Bartender says, You should have seen him before I cut off his long yellow hair.—and these are all from the early B group.

A later-grouped joke (B657. The Man who got Sick Riding Backwards. A man complains that riding backwards on a train has made him sick. He says he couldn't change with the person opposite because, There was no one sitting opposite me.) operates apparently on the same principle as the joke about the man in the cafe who couldn't get his coffee with no cream, since they were out. Under "impossible occurrences" we find B810. The Man who Bit Himself on the Ear. A man explains to his doctor that the wound on his ear (or forehead) is where he bit himself. He explains, I stood on a chair.. And so on. Heading C is where all the puns live.

Divining intentions

How would you translate the following snippet of Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, v1, §137?

Bin ich wirklich immer im Ungewissen darüber, ob Einer wirklich zornig, traurig, froh, etc. etc. ist? Nein. So wenig, wie darüber, daß ich ein Schreibbuch vor mir und eine Feder in der Hand habe, oder darüber, daß das Buch fallen wird, wenn ich es auslasse, oder darüber, daß ich mich nicht verrechnet habe, wenn ich sage 25 x 25 sei 125.

I'd assign it a namedo it like this: Am I really always in uncertainty regarding whether someone is really angry, sad, happy, etc. etc.? No. As little as I am regarding whether I have a notebook in front of me and a pen in my hand, or regarding whether the book will fall if I let it go, or regarding whether I have not miscalculated if I say 25 x 25 is 125. (The "regarding"s there represent a deference to the "darüber"s in the original which is probably excessive.) But how, one might ask, is it translated, that is, was it translated by Anscombe for publication? Thus: Am I really always in some uncertainty whether someone is really angry, sad, glad, etc. etc.? No. Any more than whether I have a notebook in front of me and a pen in my hand, or whether this book will fall if I let go of it, or whether I have made a miscalculation when I say 25 x 25 is 625.

Nature of my reply: Civil, perfunctory, uninformative

We are reliably told that [t]here’s kind of a neat debate in epistemology literature on disagreement about whether and why actual interlocutors have more epistemic force than equally reasonable possible interlocutors. Why would it matter if the position is really held or just possibly held?. It was to this assertion that my eagle-swift mind sped, and on which it pounced, gripping it sternly it its claws (which additionally resemble a steel trap), when I read the following, the work of Flann O'Brien:

‘Wanted, wife, copper-faced, any length, capable of being bent. Box—’

This is an advertisement that appeared recently in an evening paper. It is obvious, of course, that ‘wife’ is a misprint for ‘wire’.

To be honest for a change, I invented this advertisement out of my head. It did not appear in any paper. But, if any reader thinks that any special merit attaches to notices of this kind because they have actually appeared in print, what is to stop me having them inserted and then quoting them?

Nothing, except the prohibitive cost.

I can think of at least one explanation for why misprints of the sort that would be exemplified above had it actually contained one (or had in its original manifestation actually quoted one) which makes it completely unrelated to the first quotation in this post (something that does not bother me because the whole post is really just an excuse to quote O'Brien)—at its plainest this would merely say that it is pleasant to think that such amusing or seemingly significant things arise by chance; "special merit" attaches not because they've actually appeared in print but because they appeared thus without anyone's having thought of them. Really, a better article of comparison would be those compilations of goofs supposedly committed by high-school students in their essays (you know the ones I mean). Naturally interest in such a thing would decline if it were discovered that the purported errors were actually put there by a witting party specifically to amuse (even if that party were a student). It's not funny—or not funny in the same way—unless it arises ingenuously. Presumably this is because we think that the amusing mistake hasn't arisen in isolation or by chance from an otherwise well informed student; there's more to it than that. The transcendence of the funny error. It is a mistake to think that what amuses is simply the list of incorrect propositions.