Times + Baskerville + Holmes

The Derby Mercury newspaper of 1817

But this is my special hobby, and the differences are equally obvious. There is as much difference to my eyes between the leaded bourgeois type of a Times article and the slovenly print of an evening halfpenny paper as there could be between your negro and your Esquimaux.

The detection of types is one of the most elementary branches of knowledge to the special expert in crime, 

though I confess that once when I was very young I confused the Leeds Mercury with the Western Morning News. But a Times leader is entirely distinctive, and these words could have been taken from nothing else. As it was done yesterday the strong probability was that we should find the words in yesterday's issue.

The Hound of the Baskervilles | Chapter IV

Seeing

It's not what you look at that matters,

it's what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

Audience as fiction

Drawing by Walter Ong from The Walter J. Ong Collection

Whereas the spoken word is part of present actuality, the written word normally is not. The writer, in isolation, constructs a role for his "audience" to play, and readers fictionalize themselves to correspond to the author's projection. The way readers fictionalize themselves shifts throughout literary history: Chaucer, Lyly, Nashe, Hemingway, and others furnish cases in point.

All writing, from scientific monograph to history, epistolary correspondence, and diary writing, fictionalizes its readers.

In oral performance, too, some fictionalizing of audience occurs, but in the live interaction between narrator and audience there is an existential relationship as well: the oral narrator modifies his story in accord with the real-not imagined-fatigue, enthusiasm, or other reactions of his listeners. Fictionalizing of audiences correlates with the use of masks or personae marking human communication generally, even with oneself. Lovers try to strip off all masks, and oral communication in a context of love can reduce masks to a minimum. In written communication and, a fortiori, print the masks are less removable.

from Walter Ong´s famous text, "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction" (PMLA, Vol. 90, No. 1 (Jan., 1975), JSOR)

Scott McCloud´s Right Number

Scott Mc Cloud has an interesting experimental "online graphic novella" called The Right Number.

The Right Number is a projected three-part online graphic novella about math, sex, obsession and phone numbers presented in an unusual zooming format.

This "zooming format" is promissing but the unusual motion may make some people a bit dizzy at first. The Right Number is a great little story about probability.

I was dead for millions of years...

I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.

Mark Twain (attributed: source unknown)

2 + 2 = 5

Cover by Germano Facetti

The New York Times, reported that hundreds of customers awoke to find that Amazon remotely deleted books that they'd earlier bought and downloaded. Apparently, the publisher determined that it should not offer those titles, so Amazon logged into Kindles, erased the books, and issued refunds. This was aptly compared to someone sneaking into your house, taking away your books, and leaving a stack of cash on the table. (found here)

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were among the wiped books...

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." 1984, part 1, chapt 1.

Ask a toad what is beauty…

photo by Jason Cross. Kermit... the frog... ok, not a toad.

Ask a toad what is beauty… He will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back.

Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1794