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a quarterly of art and culture Issue 33 deceptIon us $12
c a quarterly of art and culture Issue 33 deception US $12 Canada $12 UK £7 cabinet 181 Wyckoff Street Brooklyn NY 11217 USA tel + 1 718 222 8434 fax + 1 718 222 3700 email [email protected] www.cabinetmagazine.org Spring 2009, issue 33 Editor-in-chief Sina Najafi Senior editor Jeffrey Kastner Editors D. Graham Burnett, Christopher Turner UK editor Brian Dillon Associate editor & graphic designer Ryo Manabe Art director Jessica Green Managing Editor Janani Sreenivasan Website directors Luke Murphy, Ryan O’Toole, Kristofer Widholm Editorial assistants Joshua Bauchner, Alexandra Cardia, Kaitlin Pomerantz Editors-at-large Saul Anton, Mats Bigert, Brian Conley, Christoph Cox, Jesse Lerner, Jennifer Liese, Frances Richard, Daniel Rosenberg, David Serlin, Debra Singer, Margaret Sundell, Allen S. Weiss, Eyal Weizman, Margaret Wertheim, Gregory Williams, Jay Worthington, Tirdad Zolghadr Contributing editors Joe Amrhein, Molly Bleiden, Eric Bunge, Andrea Codrington, Pip Day, Charles Green, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Dejan Krsic, Roxana Marcoci, Phillip Scher, Lytle Shaw, Cecilia Sjöholm, Sven-Olov Wallenstein Cabinet National Librarian Matthew Passmore Cabinet is a non-profit 501 (c) (3) magazine published by Immaterial Incorporated. Our survival is dependent on support from foundations and generous individuals. Please consider supporting us at whatever level you can. Contributions to Cabinet are fully tax-deductible for those who pay taxes to Uncle Sam. All donations are acknowledged online. Donations of $25 or more will be noted in the next possible issue, and those above $100 will be noted for four consecutive issues. Checks should be made out to “Cabinet” and sent to our office address. 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No paper submissions, please. $5,000 – $9,999 Suzy Coue-Wilson & Edward Wilson The Danielson Foundation Epson America, Inc. $1000 or under Elizabeth Arndorfer & Clint Smith Foundation for Contemporary Arts Martha & Thomas G. Armstrong $500 or under Spencer Finch Jim Hodges Brett Littman & Kara Vander Weg Paul Ramirez Jonas James Siena Chris Vroom $250 or under Ann & Jim Chamberlain Fred Clarke James D. Cox Jane Crawford Jeffrey Cunard Eshrat Erfanian $100 or under Mark Allen David Altman Defne Ayas & Christoph Loeffler T. C. Carothers Eileen Carr Brian Cohen Stephanie Joson James Katzenberger Garrison Keillor Paul McConnell Bradley Moore Scott Owens Lynn Phillips Kaye Reeves Alison Rossiter Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria Yael Meridan Schori Laura Tatum Pamela Tibbetts Michael Trader Noel Vietor Marina Warner Kathryn Wink Cover: Peacock in the Woods, by Abbott Handerson Thayer (assisted by Richard S. Meryman), 1907. Version reproduced here is the frontispiece of Gerald H. Thayer and Abbott H. Thayer’s 1909 book Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom. Page 4: Memento mori, from a series of Italian copper engravings attributed to Giuseppe, ca. 1700. The Italian text beneath the bearded man translates as, “Poor and naked goes Philosophy: And this is precisely my disgrace.” The text beneath the skeletal woman translates as, “The old woman is despised by all: Better to die than to live in despair.” Contents © 2009 Immaterial Incorporated and the authors and artists. All rights in the magazine reserved by Immaterial Incorporated, and rights in the works contained herein reserved by their owners. Fair users are of course free to do their thing. The views published here are not necessarily those of the writers and artists, let alone the con artists who edit Cabinet. columns Main 7 Inventory / My Rock is a Purse Susan Greenspan Geological fallacies 21 Head Trips Jordan Bear & Albert Narath The social inversions of the comic foreground Ingestion / The X Factor D. Graham Burnett Professor Pettenkofer’s miasmatic gamble 28 Artist Project: The Grey Unknown Justin Storms 30 The Gothenburg Leviathan Cecilia Grönberg & Jonas J. Magnusson Into the belly of the Malm Whale 10 13 16 Colors / Porphyry Catherine Hansen Blood from a stone Leftovers / Dinner with Kant Christopher Turner The taste of disgust 37 Rain and Rainfall—Great Britain— Periodicity—Periodicals Edward Eigen The quest for a “perfect patterne” 44 A Case of Erotic Engineering Thomas A. P. Van Leeuwen Looking for Gustave Eiffel in the lingerie department 48 Let’s Make a Deal Herant Katchadourian The protocols of haggling Deception AND 53 The Crucial Moment of Deception Hanna Rose Shell Abbott Handerson Thayer’s law of protective coloration Postcard / School of crock James Hogue’s Ivy League con 61 Mark of Integrity Jonathan Allen A brief history of card tricks Bookmark / BOOK MARK Like we said 66 The Golden Lasso Ken Alder Wonder Woman and the birth of the lie detector 69 Deception as a Way of Knowing: A Conversation with Anthony Grafton D. Graham Burnett The cops and robbers of history 77 Artist Project: Meanwhile in Nigeria… Julieta Aranda 82 Brotherly Deception Jeffrey Croteau The Album of Masonic Impostors 87 Slettemark / Nixon Mats Bigert I’m not a crook, I’m an artist 88 The Fall and Rise of Ernest Lalor Malley Christine Wertheim The poet who wasn’t 95 Artist Project: All Work and No Play Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin 100 The Perfect Crime Brian Dillon An open letter to the editors of frieze magazine 103 In the Orchards of Nostalgia George Makari Hiding in plain sight Contributors Ken Alder teaches history at Northwestern University. His most recent book is The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (Free Press, 2007). Jonathan Allen is a London-based artist and writer. He was the Arts Council England Helen Chadwick Fellow for 2007–2008 at the University of Oxford and the British School at Rome, and is currently co-curating a Hayward Gallery National Touring exhibition with Sally O’Reilly. For more information, see <www.jonathanallen.info>. Julieta Aranda is a Mexican artist working in New York and Berlin. Her last solo exhibition in New York, “Tools for Infinite Monkeys,” was held at the Fruit and Flower Deli gallery in 2008, and in 2009 she will have solo presentations at the Guggenheim Museum, the Puerto Rico Triennial, and the Ljubljana Graphic Triennial, among others. Jordan Bear is American Council of Learned Societies / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow in the Department of Art History at Columbia University. He has worked in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he writes regularly about photography for publications including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and History of Photography. Mats Bigert is an editor-at-large at Cabinet and one half of the Swedish artist duo Bigert & Bergström. Life Extended, their new film on the utopian quest for immortality, recently had its worldwide premiere at the “Documentary Fortnight” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin have been working together for over a decade and are still friends. Their books include Ghetto (Trolley, 2003), Chicago (steidlMACK, 2006) and Fig. (steidlMACK, 2007). For more information, see <www.choppedliver.info>. D. Graham Burnett is an editor of Cabinet and teaches history of science at Princeton University. He is the author of several books, including Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest (American Philosophical Society, 2005). His study of the trial of the nineteenth-century American mapmaker Robert F. Pinkney, “Hydrographic Discipline Among the Navigators,” has just been published in The Imperial Map, edited by James Akerman (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Jeffrey Croteau is a writer and librarian living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work has recently appeared in the Paris Review, Fence, and Library History. Brian Dillon is UK Editor for Cabinet, and a Research Fellow at the University of Kent. His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, frieze, Art Review and Modern Painters. He is the author of a memoir, In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005); his Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives will be published by Penguin in September 2009. Edward Eigen is assistant professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture. His forthcoming book, The Anomalous Plan, examines the architecture and geography of nineteenth-century French science, with specific reference to experimental laboratories. He is currently planning a conference on the history of accident. Anthony Grafton teaches European intellectual history at Princeton University. His books include Defenders of the Text (Harvard University Press, 1991), The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1998), and What Was History? (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He is coauthor of Obelisk: A History (forthcoming from MIT). Susan Greenspan is an artist based in Cleveland, Ohio. She is an adjunct member of the faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Cecilia Grönberg is a Swedish photographer. She is the co-author of Leviatan från Göteborg (Glänta Produktion, 2002), Omkopplingar (Glänta Produktion, 2006), and Witz-bomber och foto-sken (Glänta Produktion, forthcoming). She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Gothenburg University, working on a dissertation on photography, montage, layers, and copying. Catherine Hansen is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Princeton University. She is currently engaged in research on the French and Romanian literary avant-garde. She has published in L’Esprit Créateur (Winter 2006). Herant Katchadourian is emeritus professor of psychiatry and human biology at Stanford University and former president of the Flora Family Foundation. His book Guilt: The Bite of Conscience is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Jonas J. Magnusson is a Swedish writer and translator. His books include Jag skriver i dina ord (Lejd, 2000), Leviatan från Göteborg (Glänta Produktion, 2002), Omkopplingar (Glänta Produktion, 2006), and Witz-bomber och foto-sken (Glänta Produktion, forthcoming). He is one of the editors-inchief of the Swedish magazine OEI <www.oei.nu>. George Makari is a New York psychiatrist, historian, and writer. He is the author of Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (HarperCollins, 2008). Albert Narath, currently based in Berlin, is a doctoral candidate in modern architecture at Columbia University and a Paul Mellon pre-doctoral fellow with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. His writings include “Modernism in Mud” (Journal of Architecture, 2008) and he is completing a dissertation on the neo-Baroque in Germany. Hanna Rose Shell, assistant professor in the Program in Science, Technology & Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a Boston-based historian of science, media artist, and filmmaker. Her book Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography and the Media of Reconnaissance is forthcoming from Zone Books (2010). Her recent shows include collaborations with Machine Project in Los Angeles (2008 and 2009) and screenings at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. For more information, see <www.mit.edu/~hrshell> or <www.secondhandfilm.com>. Justin Storms is a Texas-based artist who recently exhibited his work at Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawings (Berlin), Preview Berlin, and New American Talent 23 in Austin, Texas. He is the current artist-in-residence at AKKU Atelier in Uster, Switzerland, and has upcoming exhibitions at Zeughaus, Uster, and at Shooting Gallery, San Francisco. For more information, see <www.justinstorms.com>. Christopher Turner is an editor of Cabinet. His book, Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came To America, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Thomas A. P. Van Leeuwen was professor of architectural history, cultural history, and art criticism at Leyden University for many years. He presently teaches at the Berlage Institute, Rotterdam. His books include The Skyward Trend of Thought: Metaphysics of the American Skyscraper (MIT Press, 1988) and The Springboard in the Pond: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool (MIT Press, 1998). These studies are part of a tetralogy with each volume centered on the relationship between architecture and one of the classical elements. In preparation are Columns of Fire: The Un-doing of Architecture and The Thinking Foot: A Pedestrian View of Architecture. Christine Wertheim teaches at the California Institute for the Arts. She is the author of +|’me’S-pace (Les Figues Press, 2007), and co-editor of two experimental writing anthologies, Séance (Make Now Press, 2005) and The /n/oulipian Analects (Les Figues Press, 2007). She is co-director of the Institute For Figuring, located in Los Angeles and at <theiff.org>. columns “Inventory” is a column that examines a list, catalogue, or register. / “Ingestion“ is a column that explores food within a framework informed by aesthetics, history, and philosophy. / “Colors” is a column in which a writer responds to a specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet. / “Leftovers” investigates the cultural significance of detritus. Inventory / My Rock Is a Purse Susan Greenspan In 1996, my friend V —— gave me a rock that looked like a tiny purse, one with a thin metal clasp at the top, the sort you might carry when you dress up to go out at night. V —— had found the rock in the mid1970s during a vacation to Pantelleria, the volcanic island between Sicily and Tunisia. At the time she gave it to me, I was building a collection of things that looked like other things—a potato chip that looked like a heart, a piece of white bread that looked like a T -shirt. We put the rock that looked like a purse on a piece of crimson velvet and took pictures of it. Since the rock-purse gift, I have been searching for more rocks that resemble other things. I found the majority of my current collection (about twenty in number) at the beach. Most of the “meats” (bacon, pancetta, tripe) were found in and around Santa Cruz, California. The bean and the macadamia nut are from Fetiye, Turkey. The egg and the black-and-white cookie are from Cape Cod. Bean Bacon strip Purse (day bag) Small intestine Egg Pancetta Milk Dud Leftover salmon Cactus Gorgonzola Sirloin tip roast Guitar pick Large intestine Froot Loop Tripe Black-and-white cookie Purse (evening bag) Raw sausage Sponge Macadamia nut INGESTION / THE X FACTOR D. Graham burnett The second half of the nineteenth century saw the heroic rise of modern bacteriology, a new science that promised to save humanity from the age-old curse of epidemic disease. Generations of debate about the causes of fatal plagues (were they the product of divine spite? infelicitous astrological conjunctions? fetid emanations from the center of the earth?) fell by the wayside as the original “microbe hunters,” Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, leveled their microscopes at the true culprits: tiny one-celled organisms called germs. Successful in tying specific micro-organisms to specific maladies, Pasteur and Koch laid the groundwork for the biomedical study of infectious disease and thereby took up places of honor in the pantheon of scientist-gods. In the winter of 1901, one of the last hold-outs against this world-view, the aged and leonine Bavarian chemist-apothecary Max Josef von Pettenkofer, pressed a small revolver to his temple and ended a distinguished career. Born in 1818 in the Danubian marshes as the fifth of eight children to a modest customs officer and his wife of peasant stock, Pettenkofer acceded by his native brilliance and fanatical hard work to the highest ranks of the European scientific professoriate, publishing widely on organic and inorganic chemistry, materia medica, and public health. Mercurial and romantic, he drifted in and out of favor at the court of Ludwig I, avidly pursued his lovely cousin Helen, dabbled in art restoration, penned a volume of peculiar sonnets, and found time to moonlight in the demimonde of the Augsburg theater under an assumed name. It was this last activity that stood him in good stead in later life, as he made a memorably melodramatic last stand against the triumphant microbial theories of Pasteur and Koch. Pettenkofer bridled at what he took to be their overly simplistic notion that germs alone caused sickness. What about when they did not? While he is mostly now remembered as a quixotic defender of miasmatism (the idea that diseases arise from swampy emanations, from “bad air”—the original meaning of mal-aria), Pettenkofer in fact adopted a more sophisticated and interesting position on the problem, particularly as evidence mounted that micro-organisms of some sort did appear to be involved in many disease processes. As the text below explains, Pettenkofer ultimately settled on a multi-factor analysis: disease happened when an x factor (the germ) intersected with a y factor (some miasmatic condition of the region) and a z factor (some 10 susceptibility on the part of the individual). Looked at charitably, this can be understood as a strikingly forward-looking insistence on environmental, hygienic, nutritional, and immunological conditions. Looked at uncharitably, he wound up on the wrong side of history. Not that he didn’t try to alter the course of that history. In 1892, to confound his adversaries, he notoriously drank, under elaborate experimental conditions, enough pure cholera bacteria (known as the “comma bacillus” or “comma vibrio” at the time, for its shape) to kill a village. And he lived. His point? Germs alone do not cause disease. The whole episode represents an unlikely intersection of the modern laboratory and the medieval trial by ordeal. The text below is a report of Pettenkofer’s selfexperiment as published in the British Medical Journal of 19 November 1892. ••• We are indebted to the courtesy of Dr. B. Spatz, editor of the Münchener medicinische Wochenschrift, for advance proofs of an address on Cholera with Reference to the Last Epidemic at Hamburg, delivered by the veteran hygienist and epidemiologist Professor Max von Pettenkofer, on November 12th, before the Munich Medical Society. the cholera equation He said that the only question now appeared to be how the comma bacillus was to be destroyed, or at any rate prevented from multiplying. He recalled that many years ago he said that the etiology of cholera was an equation with three unknown quantities, namely, x, a specific germ, disseminated by human intercourse; y, a factor dependent on place and time, which he called “local disposition”; and z, the individual predisposition. The simplicity of Koch’s theory commended it to those who only looked at the individual patient, and not at the course of a long series of epidemics. Places as well as persons often enjoyed immunity, and places which opposite: Portrait eines Cholera Präservativ Mannes, artist unknown, first half of the nineteenth century. This satiric prototype of a cholera-preventing outfit includes a face-mask, a bag of warm sand worn on the chest, camphor-soaked cotton balls stuffed in the ears, a nose-mounted smelling-bottle of vinaigre des quatre voleurs (vinegar compounded with garlic, rosemary, sage, mint, rue, and other herbs), a calamus root sprig held in the mouth, a shirt and vest infused with chlorinated lime, stockings marinated in vinegar, water pots strapped to the calves, ipecac root and thistle root and chamomile oil stored in the pockets, and a hat topped with a tureen of boiling barley soup. The supplies in the cart include a small bathtub, a steambath apparatus, several rolls of flannel, bricks, and a “comfortable” stool. “Thus accoutred is a man protected against cholera,” reads the caption. Indeed. Courtesy the National Library of Medicine. 11 suffered at one time remained free at another, even when two of the factors x and z were present. The determination of y was not so easy as that of the others, and the speaker could only say that the nature and degree of moisture of the soil had an important influence. The constant occurrence of the comma bacillus in the excreta of cholera patients indicated that the microbe had something to do with the process, but it was still open to question whether it alone was the cause of the disease. personal experiments with the comma vibrio Professor von Pettenkofer had made some experiments on himself with bacilli obtained from Hamburg. Several of his pupils offered themselves as subjects in his place, but acting on the principle Fiat experimentum in corpore vili, he thought he himself—74 years old, glycosuric, without a tooth in his head, and with other infirmities of age—was the fittest person to run whatever risk there might be in the experiment. From pure agar cultures of the comma bacillus made by Professor Gaffky, a bouillon culture was prepared in the ordinary way by Drs. Pfeiffer and Eisenlohr. Gruber having shown that fresh cultures are more active than those which had been kept for some days, Professor von Pettenkofer chose one which had not been quite twenty-four hours in the incubator. A plate culture of this showed that one cubic centimetre even of a thousandth dilution contained numberless comma bacilli, far more than could possibly be conveyed by a man’s hand to his mouth. As Koch has shown that the gastric juice was capable of killing even a large number of comma bacilli, Professor von Pettenkofer was careful to take his dose of microbes two hours and a quarter after a light breakfast, when, according to a calculation made by von Voit, there could not have been so much as 100 cubic centimetres of gastric juice with 0.3 per cent of hydrochloric acid in his stomach. In order to neutralise even this small amount of acid, however, he took 1 gramme of bicarbonate of soda dissolved in 100 cubic centimetres of Munich conduit water. He then measured out one cubic centimetre of the fresh culture, swallowed it at a draught, and washed out the glass with 50 cubic centimetres of water, which he also swallowed, so as to ensure the ingestion of as many bacilli as possible. This was on October 7th. His temperature was then 36.7° C.; his pulse 86. On October 9th severe colicky pains and moderate diarrhœa came on, and did not entirely cease till October 15th. During that time the urine was normal in amount, and contained no albumen. He took no medicine whatever during the attack, but took his customary food with good appetite, and pursued his usual avocations without any interruption, feeling perfectly well except for the 12 symptoms mentioned. While the diarrhœa lasted the stools were examined bacteriologically by Drs. Pfeiffer and Eisenlohr, who found them swarming with comma bacilli. Professor von Pettenkofer asks rhetorically how many milliards of these microbes there must have been in his intestines during these eight days, and yet he had no symptoms of Asiatic cholera. He thinks, however, that his experiment might have had a fatal result if it had been carried out in Hamburg, where not only x but y was present in full force. An exactly similar experiment was made on himself by Professor Emmerich on October 17th, with much the same result, except that the colic and diarrhœa were much more severe; otherwise he felt perfectly well. conclusions According to Professor von Pettenkofer, these experiments show conclusively that the comma bacillus during its sojourn in the intestine does not produce the specific poison which causes Asiatic cholera, and they agree with the results obtained by Bouchard, who was able to induce the symptoms of cholera in rabbits by giving them the excreta (alvine or urinary) of human cholera patients, but not by giving them pure cultures of comma bacilli or their metabolic products. Anticipating the possible objection that both he and Emmerich had suffered from an attack of genuine cholera, though very slight, he brings witnesses to the contrary in the persons of the well-known physicians Professor Bauer and Dr. von Ziemssen, both of whom have had considerable experience of cholera. Professor von Pettenkofer, while not denying that the comma bacillus has some etiological importance, says he cannot believe it is the x which, without the assistance of y, can cause epidemics of cholera. He reiterated his well-known views on the influence of the soil, especially in connection with the rainfall. His practical teaching may be summarised in the formula that it is the y, that is, the local physical and sanitary conditions, that must be attended to; each place must, in short, be made cholera-proof by sanitation. Colors / Porphyry Catherine Hansen An etymological descent into porphyry begins with no more than a casual wade. Barely ankle-deep, one already discovers its kinship with purple: Latin, like one of the gods of myth, made two amorous raids upon the Greek word porphuro, which then bore the lexical twins porphyrites and purpura. A few steps deeper in, and this original Greek word pulls up a netful of Tyrian murex shellfish which, slit along their feeble bellies, weep purple blood used to dye royal cloth for more than 3,600 years. This was, however, a purple quite distinct from the royal blue of crushed hexaplex snails, or the violet purple of poison aconite (first seeded by the spittle of Cerberus), or the lighter mauve of chaste-tree flowers, or, to be sure, from the scarlet produced by mashed planthoppers—the color of blood first shed. The color porphuro —what would later become known as the color of porphyry—was the darker, earthier red-purple of blood already clotted. We are now swimming in waters somewhat over our heads, but no deeper than the length of rope used to lower a bucket of murex bait, and still quite littoral. Whenever it was that the Greeks first encountered that Phoenician shellfish (perhaps around the eighth or ninth century BC , when they adopted the Phoenician alphabet), they adapted an existing word—porphuro— to designate them and the color they produced. But what exactly was this word, deemed worthy of naming the new color? What did it designate before? In the Odyssey a certain fixed expression appears several times, translated by Richmond Lattimore as “my heart was a storm in me as I went.” Here, the storm translates a grammatical form of porphuro. In the Iliad, this porphyry is the color of death, particularly when it falls down over the eyes like a veil: porphureos thanatos. As for its precise shade, Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (7th edition) has nothing more definite than the color of the sea, “as when the great sea heaveth darkly with a soundless swell”—the dark, swollen gliscence of a wave that does not break. Cunliffe’s Homeric Lexicon, upon encountering porphyry, yields the following near-poem: of disturbed water, gleaming, glancing of the disturbed sea, to heave to the sinister gleam that plays on the mist of death to the lurid gleam of the rainbow set against a storm cloud to the warm hue of blood of the heart, to be troubled, moved, stirred 13 We have now left the sunny waters where the murex live; the bottom now lies many fathoms below our feet, and a storm threatens. ••• In some places, one reads that the Romans were the first to quarry extensively from the mountain known as the Father of Smoke (Gebel Dokhan) in Egypt’s eastern desert, which was and still is the only place in the world to find imperial porphyry. A Roman field geologist discovered the site in 18 AD , a decade before Rome’s official transition from republic to empire. The rich and the regal alike were delighted to discover that this geologically unique rock resembled in color the murex blood used to dye their robes, and began to import it for use. Caligula, for one, could now be tickled by the sight of his image sculpted in purple blood. Convicts and Christians were sent to the desert to heave blocks of imperial porphyry over the sand, wasting their flesh to build purple sarcophagi for emperors, and dying so that Byzantine scions could be born in purple chambers. It wasn’t until the fall of the Roman Empire that the porphyry quarry was abandoned, and soon afterward the road from the city of Qena to Gebel Dokhan was lost altogether. In other places, one reads that, well before the Roman excavation period, the Egyptians made extensive use of imperial porphyry. This contradiction becomes more interesting when one considers the huge lost labyrinth of Egypt, near the City of Crocodiles, said by some to be Daedalus’s model and inspiration, and of which no archaeologist has yet discovered the unequivocal ruins. This labyrinth, which Madame Blavatsky reports to be about five million years old, was—any quibbles about dates notwithstanding—once visited by Pliny. Inside, in the dark, among statues of monstrous beings, he found columns made of imperial porphyry. Blavatsky mentions this fact in The Secret Doctrine but refuses to elaborate, saying that certain kinds of knowledge are only for the highest initiates. She adds that on Gebel Dokhan, there are also quarries of black porphyry, of incalculable value and great hidden power compared even to the purple; in the eighth-century Fleury Gospels, images of the evangelists are framed by imperial porphyry columns, but the hand of God, representing his Word, emerges ablaze from a column of black porphyry. ••• We are no longer concerned with moving back shoreward toward the littoral; adrift, we are far from any of those facts to which a straight expositio littoralis might lead. In the third century, a certain disciple of Plotinus—nicknamed Porphyry in his youth for his Tyrian parentage—wrote a commentary on a passage in the Odyssey which concerns a cavern where naiads weave webs of purple on beams of stone. As Homer describes it, the cavern has a double entrance, one for the ascent of gods, another for the descent of men. Within the neo-Platonic allegory that Porphyry sets forth in this commentary, a careful reading uncovers many of the insights that would eventually lead this disciple-exegete to the peak of the Father of Smoke, with its black and its imperial quarries. Although it was clear to him that the ancient inventor of the double cavern did not know of the actual Egyptian site, the pilgrim reader sensed the poet of poets had seen a truth, and had cunningly woven it into a fiction. It is, as Porphyry knew, through a process akin to wine-drunkenness that every ethereal soul finds the body to which it is destined. As it first falls within the gravitational field of matter, the soul loses control and begins to spiral in tightening circles, with all of the potential elements and particles of its body in a storm and tumult about it, and, becoming more and more drunk with matter, it begins to forget its previous luciform being, and the elements harden about it into fragments cemented together in the humus of earthly substance. Homer had chosen to symbolize the soul’s acquisition of its vestment of matter by the weaving of purple garments on stone, just as flesh is woven over the bones and suffused with mortal blood. Blood is what ties a soul to the earth, and it is also what produces and contains earthly memory. For this reason, at the end of that long drunkenness known as life, the matter that the soul acquired at the beginning, along with the blood that animated it, must be discarded. When it comes time for a soul to leave its body, the composite being passes through a set of gates and falls away into subterranean tunnels, the rocky walls of which rasp and scrape away any adhering particles of matter; but the blood, which has become nearly one in substance with the soul, remains. The soul must therefore undergo what is called diagenesis—a dissolution and recombination of its elements. This is accomplished when, at the end of its subterranean journey, the soul passes through a second set of gates, made of a stone that is said, in the sources that describe it, “to catch and contain the final rays of every setting sun”—which is to say, it catches and contains those last particles of blood and memory which the soul leaves behind as it is released into the panthalassa of the Milky Way. Now, souls in this final, unencumbered state have no concern for earthly things, and are as dreams 15 or shadows compared even to earthly dreams and shadows. But what Porphyry suspected, in fits and starts of insight, was this: just as these souls have left behind their memory along with the blood of their bodies, they can recover memory and return to earth if they can recover the blood, which is kept, frozen and archived forever, in the gates of stone. Although the reasoning that led him finally to journey from Rome to Gebel Dokhan in the eastern desert would be difficult to reconstruct, it is clear enough that the problem that concerned this fastidious, erudite, and ambitious man was how to travel to the underworld, and then not to lose his terrene memory, but rather to recover it and return. As he stood by night at the entrance to the imperial quarry, all about him lay russet fragments of stone chipped from its walls, the scattered, addled memories of those thousands upon thousands who had failed to return, and did not care to. How to recover his blood, once it had been captured by the stones? Was it possible to carry it with him instead, and let it guide him home as a lodestone? And if not, how would he recognize his own, alloyed with the blood of all the others? One can only guess if he asked himself these particular questions. Neither can one do more than speculate as to whether, when he returned to his body, he returned with his own memory, or with the earthly memory of a Shasu nomad, or of a Kamboja of the Hindu Kush, or of one of the Carpians of the Carpathian mountains. We do know that, after he returned, he married and lived a quiet village life until his death. ••• Long after the road from Qena to Gebel Dokhan was lost, Napoleon went with his armies to hunt the purple quarry, but never tracked it down, and he had to be buried in red quartzite instead. When the mountain was discovered again later in the nineteenth century, the wife of an oil magnate secured a porphyry sarcophagus for her husband. It wasn’t much longer still until the allterrain traffic from the Red Sea resort at Hurghada, only a few kilometers away, brought adventurers who began the long process of picking the place clean. opposite: Porphyry, the coveted igneous rock. Leftovers / Dinner with Kant Christopher Turner Distaste or disgust involves a rejection of an idea that has been offered for enjoyment. —Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 1798 In the Norwich Castle Museum in England, there is a painting by William Hogarth of Francis Matthew Schutz in his bed, pale-faced and vomiting into a chamber pot. On the wall behind him, a quote from Horace is inscribed above a lyre—the instrument that the poet symbolically hung up in the Temple of Venus when he stopped playing the field. It reads: Vixi puellis nuper idoneus (“Not long ago I kept it in good order for the girls”). A parody of the sickbed portrait, the painting was commissioned by Schutz’s new wife as an admonishment for his gluttony and debauchery; according to Hogarth’s biographer Jenny Uglow, it was intended “to fill [Schutz, who was third cousin to the Prince of Wales] with disgust for his debauched bachelor days.” Schutz’s heirs evidently didn’t want to be similarly reminded. After he died in 1779, aged forty-nine, his only daughter had the chamber pot and vomit painted out. Until the painting was restored in the early 1990s, Schutz was seen reading a newspaper in bed, but at an awkward angle, as though without his glasses. The desire to substitute words for vomit, logos for disgust, was more than an act of simple, Protestant censorship; it unwittingly struck at a knotty problem at the very center of the emerging philosophy of aesthetics, the so-called “science of taste.” Eighteenth-century philosophers and critics such as Gotthold Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich Schlegel, and especially Immanuel Kant were much preoccupied with the problem of disgust because, unlike the ugly, the evil, and the sublime, the disgusting was deemed to be unrepresentable in art. “One kind of ugliness alone is incapable of being represented conformably to nature without destroying all aesthetic delight, and consequently artistic beauty,” Kant wrote in the Critique of Judgment (1790), “namely, that which excites disgust.” It was thought that a disgusting object could not be redeemed or made beautiful by being painted, that its image would assault the viewer just as the object would in reality. The disgusting, for these philosophers, became an indigestible block, an unwelcome leftover that returned to worry and unsettle all their attempts to police it. 16 The attention devoted to disgust, even as it was prohibited, revealed a secret fascination. Philosophers tried to outlaw the representation of disgust because there was already an appetite for such images. Schlegel, writing in 1795, moaned that the contemporary fetish for the disgusting was “dying taste’s last convulsion.” (He would no doubt have interpreted Hogarth’s sickbed portrait against the backdrop of these death throes.) An understanding of what Kant and others meant by aesthetic “taste” (gustus) is necessary before we can understand why “distaste” (dis-gustus) was so offensive to their philosophy of art. ••• It seemed paradoxical to Kant that taste, one of the least valued senses, should be used to designate an aesthetic pleasure that is primarily visual or aural. Kant thought that the “subjective” senses of taste and smell were inferior to the “objective” senses of sight, hearing, and touch because they don’t put us in relation to an outside—they operate “chemically,” within the body. Tastes and smells appear to be inside us, they seem to have already been absorbed, and that is why they had a privileged relation to nausea for Kant; fetid smells and unpleasant tastes provoke violent vomiting as the stomach tries to turn the intruder out. Kant came up with his own ingenious solution as to why we praise someone for his good taste when referring to his aesthetic judgment, even though taste is related to the same lowly, digestive function as smell. He called smell “taste at a distance”; it gives us a “foretaste,” which is useful in warning us about what to avoid. The nausea it inspires keeps us from breathing noxious gases and from eating rotten food. But, although in this respect smell is preliminary to taste, Kant considered taste to be the more productive sense because it interferes less with our individual freedom. Tasting is a deliberate act; you can choose what you put in your mouth, but smell is intrusive and unavoidable, “less sociable than taste.” Scent is forced upon you whether you want to smell it or not. Taste, Kant wrote, also has “the specific advantage of furthering companionship in eating, something the sense of smell does not do.” It was around the dinner table that Kant stumbled across the answer to the question of why aesthetic awareness is called taste. In the Critique of Judgment and later Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, in a manner more suited to an etiquette manual than a work of philosophy, Kant laid down fastidious rules about how such social occasions should be conducted. William Hogarth, Francis Matthew Schutz in his Bed, ca. 1755–1760, repainted version. Schutz reads a newspaper. Courtesy Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery. In so doing, he found himself having to theorize the opposite of taste: disgust. ••• In 1786, four years before he wrote his famous treatise on taste, Kant hired a cook and began to give dinner parties at his new house in Königsberg. These took place at lunchtime, as was customary in Prussia at that time, but it was said that “Kant could sit till seven or eight in the evening, if only someone stayed with him.” Kant was in his mid-sixties; he was a hypochondriac, and suffered from heart palpitations, poor digestion, and seasickness (even on lakes). Despite these sensitivities, he liked to swap recipes, choose ingredients, and plan meals, and, in his later years, when his mind was going, he would digress and start writing menu plans in the middle of his philosophical manuscripts. 17 One guest, privileged enough to have been invited by the famous philosopher, remembered the dinners fondly. They were rather formal affairs: One sat down without ceremony, and when someone was getting ready to pray, [Kant] interrupted them by telling them to sit down. Everything was neat and clean. Only three dishes, but excellently prepared and very tasty, two bottles of wine, and when in season there was fruit and dessert. Everything had its determinate order. After the soup was served and almost eaten, the meat—usually beef that was especially tender—was carved. He took it, like most dishes, with English mustard, which he prepared himself. … He preferred that the mealtime was devoted to relaxation and liked to disregard learned matters. At times he cut off such associations. He most loved to talk about political things. Indeed, he almost luxuriated in them. He also wanted to converse about city news and matters of common life. For Kant, the ideal dining companions were men of taste, “aesthetically united,” and not only interested in “physical satisfaction—which everyone can find for himself—but also social enjoyment for which the dinner must appear only as a vehicle.” The guests, “no fewer than the number of the Graces, nor more than that of the Muses” (between three and nine), should not splinter into small groups based on proximity but instead address everyone. There must be a “covenant of security”—a “certain sanctity” and “duty of secrecy”—at the table to ensure that there are no limits to the freedom of the conversation. Chatter should never come to a standstill. Nothing should allow “deadly silence to fall.” Kant provided advice on how the host of such a tastefully arranged dinner could keep the conversation easy and uninhibited. It should begin with narration (of news), continue with reasoning (in which it is hard to avoid a variety of judgment), and end in jest (as laughing aids digestion). Food lubricates the wheels of free and general conversation, and the guests leave having “found culture of the intellect—one wonders how much!—in the purpose of Nature.” Theodor Hippel, the mayor of Königsberg and one of Kant’s friends, recorded some of these conversations for use in his novels; he also joked that “sooner or later [Kant] would be writing a Critique of the Art of Cooking.” ••• Kant’s remarks on arranging the perfect dinner party privileged speech over the bodily function of eating. Taste, in Kant’s view, was a gregarious and discursive act in which one speaks with what he called a “universal voice.” The subject feels an irrepressible urge to communicate his experience of beauty, and it is only the immediacy and vivacity of the voice that can provide the basis for this aesthetic intersubjectivity. That is why all the fine arts were ranked by Kant in the Critique by analogy with speech and language, and why poetry was privileged over painting as the art capable of producing the maximum of “disinterested pleasure”—the philosopher’s definition of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic taste transcends the sensory pleasures of eating and is communicated in language. By contrast, the disgusting constitutes an appetite, and Kant reasoned that the aesthetic attitude cannot survive its instinctual force. In a section of the Critique titled “The relation of genius to taste,” Kant affirmed 18 the seeming paradox of a beautiful ugliness, but the disgusting marked for him the limit to representation—the borders both of the legitimate and the possible—that even the genius cannot transgress. For Kant, it was one of the attributes of genius to be able to represent “negative pleasures” by incorporating into the artwork “things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing.” A skilful artist could incorporate ugliness by sweeping it into a powerful and strained totality to create beautiful representations of ugly scenes: “The furies, diseases, devastations of war, and the like.” However, the disgusting remained the species of ugliness that defeated Kant’s genius: For, as in this strange sensation [disgust], which depends purely on our imagination, the object is represented as insisting, as it were, upon our enjoying it, while we still set our face against it, the artificial representation of the object is no longer distinguishable from the nature of the object itself in our sensation, and so it cannot possibly be regarded as beautiful. The disgusting object annihilates the distancing power of representation and, in Kant’s words, “insists on being enjoyed” in its crude materiality, both as an image and in reality. Kant puritanically turned his head away from the paradoxical, hedonistic, and formless intensity of disgust’s pleasures, which threatened to smother him. By the time he wrote the third Critique in his midsixties, Kant was obsessed with the state of his bowels: “He is the most careful observer of his evacuations,” a friend wrote after visiting him in 1783, “and he ruminates often at the most inappropriate places, turning over this material so indelicately that one is often tempted to laugh in his face. … I assured him that the smallest oral or written evacuation gave me just as much trouble as his evacuations a posteriori created for him.” But it was to exactly these confusions—the way vomiting portends the failure of language and speech, thereby confusing the oral with the anal—that Kant (and Schutz’s descendents) objected. Speech was the medium on which Kant sought to build his idealized community of mankind, but he found the disgusting unspeakable and indescribable. Disgust, and the vomit it causes, open the mouth up to the excremental function, sullying the purity of speech and staining the transparent and impressionless medium with a viscous materiality. The disgusting was the repressed leftover—always threatening to return—that aesthetic philosophy couldn’t hold. William Hogarth, Francis Matthew Schutz in his Bed, ca. 1755–1760, original version. Schutz, not in a reading mood, vomits into a pot. Courtesy Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery. 19 MAIN Head Trips Jordan Bear & Albert Narath For more than a century, any promenade down a seaside boardwalk has required a stop at an apparently nameless apparatus: a painted wooden façade featuring a colorful character in an outlandish situation with a hole where its head should be. A tourist playfully inserting his or her head into the cartoonish scene is then recorded for posterity by a professional photographer. The genre has its favored iterations, from the weightlifting hulk to the bathing beauty, the swimmer perilously clenched in the mouth of a shark to the novice aviator nervously clutching the controls of an airplane. As one of the omnipresent features of visual mass culture in American life since the end of the nineteenth century, these façades offer the possibility of radical transformation in the guise of carefree recreation, a chance for the working-class beachgoer to become, safely and fleetingly, someone very different. As with any element of quotidian experience that seems always to have existed, the photo-caricature or comic foreground (two names given to the innovation by its inventor) does in fact have a genealogy—a complex one that winds its way through the rise of modern culture. Comic foregrounds were but one of a series of contributions to mass culture by the polymathic Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1844–1934), who also gave the world the now-canonical “dogs playing poker” paintings and a comic operetta about a mosquito invasion in New Jersey. By the time Coolidge applied for a patent on comic foregrounds in 1874, his fertile imagination had begun to generate an astonishing array of scenarios for his invention. Buried for many years in the basement of cultural obscurity, along with the reputation of their author, Coolidge’s recently rediscovered sketchbooks are alternately whimsical and morbid, serving as a laboratory for his ambitious plan to be the exclusive fabricator and distributor of comic foregrounds to the burgeoning class of low-end photographers who competed with sideshow barkers for the beachgoer’s spare coins. In this trove of over two hundred drawings, we see a few discernible patterns in the transformations that he imagined the leisurely stroller might be enticed to undergo. The animal kingdom proved to be a popular source of inspiration. In one sketch, a man’s head is drawn on the body of a monkey accompanied by the wry caption “The missing link,” while in another, a photograph of a head (Coolidge’s own) in a boater hat is collaged onto a drawing of a man riding a goose above a sketchily 21 rendered marsh. Playing with scale was also a reliable source of humor. In one of Coolidge’s advertisements for his invention, a tiny body holding a glass of champagne in one hand and a bottle in the other is combined with an oversized photograph of a smiling visage, again Coolidge’s own. “A Happy New Year!” the text proclaims. “Now is the time to order Coolidge’s comic foregrounds for making holiday post cards!” Coolidge would also fashion foregrounds that playfully thematized the very illusion on which they relied, namely a head disassociated from its real body. His sketches are populated with a cavalcade of severed heads, among the most memorable of which is one being served on a platter for the epicure’s consumption. The symbolic decapitation effected in the comic foreground playfully echoes the brutality of the stories of Medusa, Judith and Holofernes, David and Goliath, and John the Baptist, all of which had helped to insinuate the motif of the errant head into art history. Caravaggio, for instance, wielded his brush in execution of all four of these tales. But visual culture lost its above, overleaf, and page 27: Images from Cassius M. Coolidge’s sketchbook, ca. 1890. Courtesy Jordan Bear. 22 23 James Gillray, The Blood of the Murdered Crying for Vengeance, 1793. Courtesy the Trustees of the British Museum. 24 A sampling of the twenty-six-card deck for the game L’Habit forme l’ homme (The Clothes Make the Man), ca. 1820, artist unknown. Courtesy Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art. head over decapitation at precisely the same moment as Louis XVI , when the House of Bourbon fell with a less-than-regal thud. From 1793 on, beheading signified violent revolution, transformation radical enough to bring a monarch to his knees and elevate a diminutive Corsican to the rank of Emperor. That year, the acerbic satirist James Gillray, observing the scene from across the Channel, produced a colorful print depicting an “exact Representation of that Instrument of French refinement in Assassination, the GUILLOTINE .” Here, the decapitated body of the king slumps on the wooden platform, his severed head issuing a stream of vaporizing blood on which Gillray’s royalist message is inscribed. The nature of Gillray’s oeuvre, which ranged from cheap trade cards to highly finished academic engravings, suggests the extraordinary mobility of this motif and its migration into increasingly popular visual media. An exercise in traditional caricature of a political milestone, the print nevertheless reaches a level of gleeful gore seldom seen in the work of Gillray’s contemporaries. The uniquely transgressive pose of the supine body separated from its head made a clear appeal to the popular taste that was beginning to supplant the academy as the arbiter of artistic fortunes. The revolutionary possibilities embedded in the image of the wayward head migrated readily into Victorian instructive games, those rational amusements that sought to reconcile didacticism with the insatiable appetite for play harbored by the working and middle classes. One example is a game titled “The Clothes Make the Man,” consisting of cards illustrating what the explanatory text called “The Ranks and Dignities of British Society.” The cards features hand-drawn figures 25 representing each of the ranks, from King, Duke, and Marquis to the lowly Scottish Highlander. A small hole cut into the figure’s face allows another card—depicting a beggar in his tattered rags, walking stick, and upturned hat poised to receive the charity of passersby—to be aligned behind it. Thus, the visage of the tramp melds seamlessly with the grand accoutrements of the aristocracy in a Dick Whittington-like rise from poverty to prestige. One could interpret the political thrust of the game as implying that social rank is merely a matter of trappings, and that meteoric social mobility is a possibility in games, if not in life. However, it may be more precise to consider this artifact in relation to one of the few sanctioned spaces for ribald recreation in early modern Europe: that of Carnival, the pre-Lenten festival in which all standard hierarchies and ordering systems were temporarily transgressed or inverted as a safety valve for class tensions. The heritage of Carnival focuses our attention on the transience of the beggar’s identities. His mobility will not lead to a secure position among the landed gentry; in fact, like Carnival, which reduces social pressures only to allow for the continuation of the dominant order, the game works to reinforce the hierarchical rigidity that it temporarily overturns. This carnivalesque space is not too conceptually remote from the later space of mass culture, one in which lowbrow amusements, such as Coolidge’s, would also release class tensions through similar forms of temporary social inversion. Unlike the peasant at Carnival, however, Coolidge’s working man does not even achieve the title of King for a Day; King for a Few Seconds would have to suffice. While the comic foreground was the culmination of a long trajectory of visual metamorphoses, it also registered the birth of a very different sensibility. For all of its emancipatory magic, it was the commonplace that was ultimately the countervailing realm of Coolidge’s invention. For what escapist liberty was achieved by a scene of wading in the tide, precisely the recreation that the boardwalk photographer’s patrons could engage in just a few feet away? What urge was satisfied by paying to see oneself represented in a simulacrum of a quotidian, readily available experience? In many of Coolidge’s sketches, the scenes depicted are simply vignettes of everyday modern life: driving in an automobile, dancing with a partner, or stepping up to home plate to swing for the fences. The success of Coolidge’s contrivance, then, was not exclusively—or even predominantly—based on the imaginative setting into which the customer might be inserted. Rather, it was the possibility of memorializing the act of being represented itself—of recording one’s own re-creation as an image—that seems to have captured the imagination of the photographer’s clients. The desire for a souvenir photograph of oneself participating in this facsimile version of experience is an eloquent articulation of the conundrum of hyperreality. This logic, and the particular innovation of mass visual culture that helped to express it, gives us a telling glimpse into the contours of our own experience, in which the copy precedes the original, and the meaning of transformation becomes ever more indistinct. 26 27 artist project: the grey unknown justin storms I know it’s the Sabbath but..., 2008. Tug O’ War, 2008. It’s hard to find a home when the world’s the color of bone (detail), 2008. Whaling and moaning, 2008. The Gothenburg Leviathan Cecilia Grönberg & Jonas J. Magnusson No family of mammals is more difficult to observe or more incompletely described than whales, wrote zoologist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier in The Animal Kingdom (1817). And even Cuvier, who for a long time dominated the fields of classification and comparative anatomy, could only offer the following partial definition of the creature: “Cetacea consists of animals without hind-limbs.” Cuvier’s assertion about the extraordinary difficulty of describing whales could serve as an epigraph for one of the most remarkable, but today largely forgotten, books in the history of both Swedish zoology and photography—Monographie illustrée du baleinoptère trouvé le 29 Octobre 1865 sur la côte occidentale de Suède (Illustrated Monograph on the Balænoptera Whale Found on the West Coast of Sweden on 29 October 1865) by August Wilhelm Malm. This lavishly illustrated 133-page folio, published in 1867, documents the killing, towage into Gothenburg, scientific The Malm Whale upon arrival in Gothenburg. Plate from Monographie illustrée du baleinoptère trouvé le 29 Octobre 1865 sur la côte occidentale de Suède, 1867. The photographer was most likely J. P. Peterson, owner of Göteborgs Musei Fotografiska Atelier. Courtesy National Library of Sweden. 30 measurement, and preservation of the seven-monthold, sixteen-meter blue whale that beached outside Näset, south of Gothenburg in 1865. Malm, with great difficulty, transformed this whale into the renowned Malmska valen (“The Malm Whale”), a unique construction that is still the jewel of the Gothenburg Natural History Museum and one of the most popular museum artifacts in Sweden. The Malm Whale is the only stuffed blue whale in the world, and the only one that—thanks to a moveable upper jaw that is still flapping 137 years after the animal’s death—allows the museumgoer to enter the whale’s belly and visit a lounge furnished with benches, red carpeting, and walls lined with blue muslin and decorated with yellow stars. (When the museum commemorated the whale’s hundredth birthday in 1965, more than 11,000 people visited it during the ten-day celebration. The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported that American tourists were especially interested, entering “the belly of the whale for religious reasons—they want to follow in the footsteps of the prophet Jonah, and they have their pictures taken when deep in prayer.”) Monographie illustrée was a deluxe edition that Malm, curator and taxidermist at the Gothenburg Museum from 1848 until his death in 1882, hoped would secure his reputation in the annals of science. The cost of the book, printed in fifty copies on the finest possible paper, was defrayed by state grants, but Malm, also eager to educate the public, had already published a thinner “people’s version” in 1866 at his own expense: Några blad om hvaldjur i allmänhet och Balænoptera carolinæ i synnerhet (Some Notes on Whales in General and on Balænoptera carolinæ in Particular). This popular handbook sold for only twenty-five öre when the whale was exhibited in Gothenburg and Stockholm, and a German version was produced to accompany the international tour that was planned for Copenhagen, Hamburg, Berlin, Paris, and London among other cities, but which ran aground in Germany. In Några blad, Malm describes his whale as belonging to a “previously unknown species,” and christens it Balænoptera carolinæ after his wife. What Malm does not know is that the whale is not a new species, but simply a young blue whale (Balænoptera musculus) whose body and skeleton have not yet undergone the dramatic changes in proportion that occur with maturity. Malm is mistaken about the whale, but at the same time he becomes the originator of a historically singular creation, a taxidermically unique specimen. His outsized vision—of salvaging not only the skeleton, but the entire whale—requires that Malm risk everything, privately and professionally. As he himself puts it, rather immodestly, in Några blad om hvaldjur : Despite the favorable location of the whale, I immediately realized that little was to be harvested for science or for the museum, if the work was undertaken in situ. For me, such a procedure would however have been more convenient, considering my certainly not strong constitution; and if I would have contented myself to salvage as much as my predecessors had rescued, which, in case I would have wanted to proceed on such a path, easily would have been possible to do already on the first day, by means of chopping off one part or another from the body. But I was not going to content myself with such trifles, even if the value of what was salvaged could have amounted to 4–6 times the cost of the purchase. No, no matter what the cost, I would have the colossus, still un-mutilated, up on shore! It was not until then that I ... would be able to claim to “ have the entire whale in my power.” Not until then would the whale be fully available to science; 31 of value for an attempt to reproduce the animal in its entirety.1 In his popular handbook, Malm, as the title suggests, wants to move from the general to the specific, from talking about whales in toto to exclusively talking about one whale, the one that ran ashore outside Gothenburg in 1865. This is the whale of his life, and in Monographie illustrée Malm gives in to his obsession and treats this lost creature with a thoroughness that defies all expectation, resulting in a descriptive excess that becomes a piece of involuntary literature. ••• The story told in Monographie illustrée begins with the fisherman Olof Larsson, who is hunting small game outside the village of Näset on a windy Sunday morning in October 1865. Around nine, he catches sight of “something unusual” not far from the shore. At first it appears to be the remains of a wrecked ship, but when he reaches the shore where the object lies some forty meters out in the sea, he discovers a live animal, visible about twenty-five centimeters above the surface and struggling to get loose. Larsson has never seen a whale before, but nevertheless he recognizes the creature. He hurries to fetch his brother-in-law, Carl Hansson, who lives two and a half kilometers away, and returns directly to the whale. Two days later, when Malm arrives on the scene, Carl Hansson explains what happened next: Since my brother-in-law said that “the whale was lying there struggling with all its strength and loudly spouting water high into the air,” and since I, on my travels on the North Sea, had seen a couple of these dreadful beasts, I chose a large boat thinking that if the whale wanted to swallow it, it would not succeed. … We approached by tacking toward the monster until we were eighty to ninety feet from it, so that we could observe it. … Olof then saw something shiny on the side of the whale’s head, two inches above the surface of the water. Occasionally the whale moved this shiny thing, in the same way a human would. It was obvious that it was the eye. The whale was blinking its eye, and we decided to poke it out so it would not be able to see us. After that we reckoned we would succeed in killing it. The knife was stuck in and the boat hook [to which the knife was attached] sank in two feet. The blood was gushing a couple of inches above the surface of the water; it then poured like this for half an hour, in the same way as when one punches a hole in a barrel of beer. … With the help of harpoons and rope, we managed to attach one end of the hawser to the skin on the side of the head of the beast. In this way we held the whale back when it tried to get loose, and I believe this contributed to bringing it even closer to the shore. … I then climbed up on its enormous head, and with an axe I cut a gash behind the two holes it was breathing through. … The whale was very slippery to hold on to, and since it was twitching violently, … I had to get back into the boat again on several occasions. … I cut it like this with the axe from ten o’clock until half past three in the afternoon. … Now it was evening. We returned home, but did not tell anyone about our find. … When we arrived … the next morning, the water had sunk considerably, so that the whale was visible more than one foot above the surface of the water. … I stabbed it with a scythe deep in the eye and belly. … It was easy to see that the whale was losing more and more strength. … It was eleven o’clock in the morning. The whale was immobile, and still bleeding at three in the afternoon, but then it gave us dramatic evidence of its strength. Suddenly it raised its body, leaning on its head and tail, like an arc, altogether over the surface of the water. It then threw itself back on the bottom, so that the water was divided with a terrible rumble. Due to this motion the whale moved another eighteen feet closer to the shore; and then it did not move any more.2 After this follows Malm’s report of his own encounter with what he has been led to believe (based on a description supplied by Carl Hansson, who was looking for a buyer for his find) is a minke whale but which, to his great joy, turns out to be a “colossal Balænoptera.” He examines, measures, and makes drawings of the still fresh animal and registers that it has, in addition to the cuts and wounds inflicted by the brothers-in-law, also been manhandled by spectators who have taken “souvenirs” home. He finds one of its eyes in the sea, whose icy temperature (in combination with the fact that “the blood had been pumped out, just as the intestinal canal had been emptied during the long death struggle”) had contributed to slowing down the process of decomposition. Malm decides to purchase the colossus and visits the Gothenburg magnate James Robertson Dickson in an attempt to obtain the 1,500 crowns that its killers are demanding. In the evening, he performs a microscopic investigation of samples of skin, muscle fiber, blood, and other elements that he has brought home with him. The day after, November 1st, the deal is closed, and Malm immediately gives an engineer at Lindholmens 32 Mekaniska Verkstad the assignment to “take all necessary measures to pull the whale loose, transport it to the city, and haul it up on the Lindholmen slipway.” Two steamboats and two coal barges are sent to the place, but it is not until two days later, with the help of a third and more powerful steamboat, that they finally succeed in getting the now stinking whale afloat. It is towed into Gothenburg and arrives, followed by hundreds of curious onlookers in small boats, at Lindholmen at two in the afternoon. Encouraged by the enthusiastic public, Malm climbs up on the back of the carcass and gives a short lecture on the most important episodes in the history of whales, seizing the opportunity to illustrate his speech “with the aid of the colossus itself.” Early the next day, Malm begins to study the whale in earnest. There is no time to waste, since the curious crowd will be back in an hour or two. With the aid of a goniometer and other instruments, he measures every part of the whale. Around ten, the photographing of the whale begins, and it continues as long as the light allows. The day is coming to an end, and it is high time to quarter the animal (the abdomen and lower part of the head are already swollen as a result of decomposition). Malm is, however, content to open the body in different places in order to release gas and water mingled with blood; the smell is unspeakably sickening, and for a moment makes the pressing crowd withdraw. Darkness falls, and everyone, except for the hired watchmen, leaves for home. The following day, Malm is back early, followed by “ten strong butcher’s assistants and more than twice as many other workers,” in order to “cut up the magnificent beast before the decomposition progresses further.” It is now Sunday again, one week after the discovery. Malm and his “army,” which has been promised free access to distilled beverages, is faced with the problem of how to cut the animal up. Malm knows very well what he must do, but where should he begin? It is on this decision that “the richness or poorness which will be harvested for science depends.” It is above all a question of the skin, “shining like a mirror and beautifully marbled.” At first, Malm intends to take only a couple of feet of the skin to preserve a memory of the exterior of the whale, but at the very last moment, standing on a ladder between the back of the whale and the left fin, he makes a fateful decision—to preserve everything. Malm himself makes the first incision with a scalpel, and then the butchers take over with their big knives. The skin-blubber mass, with a thickness ranging from124 to 298 millimeters, is quickly removed, and the butchers then work their way smoothly inwards The Malm Whale being moved from Ostindiska Huset to its newly built premises at Naturhistoriska Museet at Slottsskogen, 1 November 1918. Photos Elisabet Petersson. 33 34 (along the spine, the warm meat has the consistency of purée). The intestines are removed and cleaned with a fire pump, and after this follows a pause for half an hour while the internal parts of the whale are photographed. Then the knives are taken up again. Around three in the afternoon, an exhausted Malm is overcome by severe nausea. After supervising one last photograph, he is compelled to leave the scene—an absence that proves fateful. It is now that several parts of the whale disappear, never to be found again. On the whole, these are small losses, but painful for someone who wanted everything. To keep the onlookers, who have paid twenty-five öre each to be there, at a respectful distance from the whale, Malm has put up posters, but neither they nor the police on the scene are capable of preventing thefts of pieces of bone and skin. The crowd approaches the whale for other reasons as well. Two ladies throw themselves forward, “driven by an uncontrollable desire to verify if the passage of Jonah through the throat of the whale was actually possible.” A candidate in theology questions whether it is appropriate to be working on a day of rest; Malm, aware that cutting up the animal could not have been postponed, can only answer “Yes.” By now, night has fallen, and the remains of the whale are loaded onto barges in the dark. The long strips of skin and blubber are transported, along with the tail, arms, and intestines, to the Gothenburg Museum (the intestines are kept in barrels in the yard, where the tail and fins are arranged on stools and boxes and photographed). Parts of the whale, including the heart, one eye, larynx, rectum, and parts of the intestines, are preserved with glycerine and alcohol. The pieces of skin are stored on the floor according to an elaborate system, while the skeleton is being boiled at another location. Back in the museum, eight fishermen remove 3,400 kilograms of blubber from the skin, which is hung up on wooden frames. The skin is then treated with specially manufactured brushes (“a radical way to make the skin evenly thick and to tear away the cellular tissue and remove a large part of the oil, without causing the skin to lose anything essential of its strength”) to reach a thickness of roughly a centimeter—a process that will take almost three weeks. Simultaneously, an equal number of fishermen are working in the yard of the museum to clean the boiled skeleton. Every part is labeled with copper and brass pins so that it can be put back in the right place. In the museum, the baleens are salted while waiting for the wooden jaw in which they will be mounted. A sculptor produces a tail and fins of wood, which are dressed with the processed version of 35 the skin. This initial phase is completed on the evening of 22 November. Using the numerous measurements, photographs, and sketches that he has made, Malm makes a 1:10 scale drawing of the animal and then, working for three weeks with an engineer and a sculptor, produces a model in clay. In the middle of December, Malm orders a workshop to use the model to produce the smithwork necessary for an actual-scale frame to be built out of spruce; the patched-up skin is then to be drawn over this construction. To facilitate future transport of the reorganized whale, this construction is made in four detachable sections (ranging from three to five meters in length). The head is a veritable sculpture, to which the baleens have been attached. The neck is equipped with hinges, allowing the jaw to be opened “so that one can approach and closely observe the baleens from the inside, as well as the rest of the interior of the mouth.” And, “since many people might find it interesting to advance all the way into the belly, which is three meters high, some decorations and installments are made for the comfort of the visitor.” The skin, which over the winter has been processed with salt, fat-absorbing sawdust, and pulverized pipe clay, is rinsed with water, coated on the inside with a saturated arsenic solution, and finally fixed to the wooden frame with the aid of 30,000 zinc and copper pins. By mid-April, the skin has begun to dry, and it is coated with arsenic. As the crowning glory, an additional layer of mercury chloride is added, and then a layer of transparent copal varnish. In order for “persons who are not initiated in science to see what is false,” Malm chooses to replace the parts of the skin that have been ruined by Larsson and Hansson (as well as by “the animal itself during the struggle,” the process of getting it afloat, not to mention indiscreet bystanders) with wood, instead of a more skin-like material. This decision might make Malm seem radical for his time, but it could have simply been a maneuver to divert attention from the real crack in the construction, something that Malm simply mentions in passing as “a small strip of wood” on the belly of the whale. Malm attributes this to the fact that the skin “had shrunk a little, … so that it was only by applying force that it would have been possible to bring the pieces together.” This is a qualified truth, for in fact it seems that dressing the whale with skin, which Malm presents as a more or less smooth process, is actually a source of huge friction. Malm certainly measures the opposite: Detail of skin from the Malm Whale, 2002. Photo Cecilia Grönberg & Jonas J. Magnusson. animal minutely, but since it is not possible to turn the giant around, the girdle measurement can only be taken on one side, from the center of the back to the center of the belly. This should give half the circumference. But the whale has flattened on the underside and swelled on the upper side, possibly due in part to the gases released by putrefaction. The half-girdle measurement is thus a little too big. Nobody reflects upon this when the armature is later built. But when this expensive wooden construction, on which the processed skin will be mounted, is finally set up, the whole project almost sinks. Malm starts to attach the skin, but it then turns out that the fin on one side is situated far too low, while the other fin appears far too high up, on its back. The body is too wide over the abdominal part and the skin does not suffice. Malm despairs and gets a fever. But then A. J. Malmgren, a practical fellow who is a taxidermist at the museum and a former seaman, asks if he can give it a try. He starts out from the center of the back, which indeed causes the fins to sit a little high, and leaves a gap, five meters long and sixty-five centimeters wide, under the belly between the skin on the left side and the skin on the right. But on the whole it looks symmetrical, and the slit in the belly is then filled with paneling. This gap can be easily seen even today; all the more peculiar, then, that newspaper reports from the time about the preparation of the Malm Whale are so reticent regarding the error in the construction. “All measurements,” Norra Hallands Tidning declares on 21 March 1866, “were so precisely taken and the model executed with such precision, that when the skin, which first went through a tanning process, was put over the wooden frame, the dimensions corresponded completely.” This amounts to a veritable “cover-up”—in reality there is still this undeniable black rift, a crack of darkness through which all the light leaks into infinite abysses. This article is a revised excerpt from Leviatan från Göteborg. Paracetologiska digressioner: Malmska valen, Göteborgsvitsen, Jona-komplexet och Moby Dick (Glänta Produktion, 2002). 1 August Wilhelm Malm, Några blad om hvaldjur i allmänhet och Balænoptera Carolinæ i synnerhet (Gothenburg: self-published, 1866), pp. 16–18. 2 August Wilhelm Malm, Monographie illustrée du baleinoptère trouvé le 29 Octobre 1865 sur la côte occidentale de Suède (Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söner, 1867), pp. 1–3. All further citations are from this book. 36 Rain and Rainfall—Great Britain— Periodicity—Periodicals Edward Eigen Oft expectation fails, and most oft there Where most it promises. —William Shakespeare, All’s Well that Ends Well (Act II, Scene I) About the title. It is drawn from the subject heading under which, in the catalogue of the New York Public Library, appears a single and singular item: the periodical British Rainfall. Issued by the Meteorological Office, this “regular annual publication” was devoted to the study of the “distribution of rain in space and time over the British Isles.” The Meteorological Office—imagine musty chambers in which masses of data are sorted and shuffled in search of a governing rule, a perfect patterne —was the successor to the still more augustsounding British Rainfall Organization. Established in 1858 by George James Symons, an exemplar of the Victorian obsession with statistics, the British Rainfall Organization made the British Isles a realm of watchful, patchily distributed observers. What was the weather like, say, on 1 December 1860, the date Charles Dickens—who all but invented London’s fog—published the first installment of Great Expectations in All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal? (In London: barometric pressure 29.66”, temperature 45˚, wind from the east, overcast. That is, about what you would expect.) Rain and Rainfall—Great Britain—Periodicity—Periodicals. What kind of subject is this, so tightly corseted by inflexible hyphens? Does it yield to the smoothing and curve-fitting techniques of the mathematician? Or is it an irregular conjunction of things, somehow fixed in time, the meaning and sense of which only the poet can hope to scan? That it answers to neither and both of these descriptions will be shown in the following attempt to coax from it, however improbably, a thesis on history. Our focus will be upon a group of mid-1920s papers, culled from journals on meteorology, statistics, and geography, whose authors were testing new methods for spotting undetected periodicities in time-series (sequences of observational data). Thus we will be on a “muddy road,” retracing the steps of these seekers of order—or of the screwily ordinal nature of data—as they plotted what all signs had led to them believe was the sinusoidal shape of time. The question such inquiry poses is whether there is a (straight, curving, zigzag, broken, continuous) plot to history and if so, how it 37 should be limned. The reasoning runs as follows: in the recorded history of rainfall, made up of countless particulars which seem not so much to depart from as never care to approach the general reason of things, is written the prospect of a future regularity. This tenuous connection, between the once was and the not yet, breaks down not only of its own accord; it is uninterruptedly available to external disturbance. Model that disturbance and win the day, and days past, and days to come. What we shall consider is a once seemingly possible merger between the Meteorological Office and that of the historian. Records were their common stock in trade. Time, order, and causation were the stuff of their shared meditation on before and after, on the consecution of tenses. Where the historians and meteorologists failed to come to terms was with what appeared likely in the unapprehended relations of things. Confronted with a tumultuous mass of facts, the historian loses sight of the presumable shape of time; the meteorologist finds in it a latent pattern. In his essay “Hypercritica, Or A Rule of Judgment For Writing or Reading Our Histories” (ca. 1618), Edmund Bolton writes, regarding varied opinions about how Britain came to be named Britain, “[I]f anything be clear in such a Case, or vehemently probable, it is both enough, and all which the Dignity of an Historian’s office doth permit.” Could students of the constitutively inconstant weather ask for any greater degree of certainty? It seems so. They heard secret harmonies, periodic rhythms repeated years on end. A final preliminary word about periodicals. They appear weekly, fortnightly, quarterly, or at some other nominally regular interval. Except when they fail to do so. Particularly with laboriously tabulated meteorological data, the attempt to keep up with the present often proves the source of delay. Symons placed the blame for the chronically late appearance of British Rainfall on the negligence of his correspondents and on the time needed to correct errors in the records they eventually submitted. Better late than never. “Gave up hope of more,” reads the note appended to the catalogue entry for the Supplement to British Rainfall (1961–1965). A break in communication, a dry spell, a printers’ strike, the inexhaustible logic of the supplement? How do we read this desperate note? Was the cataloguer’s darkening hope that this regular annual publication would complete its run, the distribution of rain in space and time ever tending to norm? Or was it that the regular annual publication would merely resume, if only for appearance’s sake? Certainly there is always rain on the way. But what proves more difficult and correspondingly more rewarding to bring into line, editorially and 38 otherwise, is that which is most subject to precipitate change: the past. Correction: make that history. The relevant clue to the method of history’s productive unmaking, indeed the very model of a purposefully “roving and unsettled” discourse, is to be found in Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal-Society of London (1667), where also may be consulted Robert Hooke’s synoptical “Method For Making a History of the Weather.” We refer specifically to Sprat’s description of the Fellows’ manner of compiling their Registers, so that they might be “nakedly transmitted to the next Generation of Men; and so from them to their Successors … without digesting them into any perfect model: so to this end, they confin’d themselves to no order of subjects; and whatever they have recorded, they have done it, not as compleat Schemes of opinions, but as bare unfinish’d Histories.”1 Evidently to learn from the past is as much a matter of saving its lessons from as saving them for an uncertain posterity. In this garden of the text, the nakedness of history is a manufactured state of grace, the better to weather the storms of time. Here, at last, is the argument: “in his bare was,” the historian “is so tied, not to what should be, but to what is, to the particular truth of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence.” And the philosopher, for his part, in his “bare rule,” gives the precept for what should be, without convincingly showing why it is so. The argument, such as it is, comes from Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (published 1595), whom we have been ventriloquizing all along: the perfect patterne, the general reason of things. Here is another flower: The mathematician might draw forth a straight line with a crooked heart.2 Sidney was legendarily a fatal victim of the weather, about which destiny more below. Though what made him a mantic poet of rainfall are his reflections on how to “coupleth the generall notion with the particuler example,” the philosopher’s precept with the historian’s example. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be “The search for cycles of weather is as old as history,” write C. E. P. Brooks and J. Glasspoole in their British Floods and Droughts of 1928. Is this search the appointed task of history? Brooks and Glasspoole’s study of “recurrence,” which followed the examples of Sir Francis Bacon’s “Of Vicissitude of Things” (1625), in which the arch-inductivist toyed with the possibility of a thirty-five-year weather cycle, and Luke Howard’s A Cycle of Eighteen Years in the Seasons of Britain (1842), appeared in the wake of a “fatal visitation”—the Thames flood of 7 January 1928. For comparison’s 39 sake, one may consult the diary of Samuel Pepys on the Thames flood of 7 December 1663, of which, he duly notes, “there was a great discourse.” The inky attractiveness of such catastrophes is evident in the long record of annals, chronicles, and column inches digested by Brooks and Glasspoole in their analysis of bygone seasons wet and dry. But theirs was a product of its time, a moment when long-accumulating data newly promised insight into the future as well as the past. The present tense of the weather had ostensibly been mastered in the Rainfall Atlas of the British Isles (1926), published under Glasspoole’s direction. A collection of richly colored maps indicating average annual rainfall over a thirty-five-year period from 1881 to 1915, it represented the epitome of the research “published from year to year in British Rainfall.”3 The problem was to find regular patterns of correspondence between the years. A specialist in prehistoric meteorology, Brooks was as well versed in the documentary record of the weather as in physical traces of climates past, including tree rings and varves (from the Swedish word for a cycle, varves are annual sedimentary layers used by geochronologers to establish glacial time-scales). But how to detect cycles from something as fleeting as the rain? So variable is the weather of the British Isles, Brooks and Glasspoole write, that it is aptly described as made up of instantaneous “samples.” One possible response is to slant the significance of variation in favor of constancy. The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century meteorologist Eduard Brückner observed that while weather connotes instability, climate implies stability, with conditions changing from place to place (most notably orographically) but not over time. Time, which is said to flow, percolate, eddy, and swirl, thus appears a medium of constancy. Brückner’s subsequent analysis is notable for his attempt to gerrymander the boundaries of variation. He noted that for as many regions experiencing regular oscillation in rainfall, temperature, and atmospheric pressure, there were also numerous “regions of permanent exception,” and still others which for a time followed a regular pattern only to suddenly depart from it; these he classed “regions of temporary exception.”4 Brückner’s more or less well-documented expectation was that after long observation these temporary exceptions would ultimately yield to the norm. And so it was that what remained unruly in the distribution of rain in space and time became the crucial object of analysis. Working from records spanning more than one opposite: Illustration from the 1926 edition of Rainfall Atlas of the British Isles, published by the Royal Meteorological Society of Great Britain. Varved sequence from the bed of Elk Lake in west-central Minnesota, at a depth of 49.55 meters below the water surface. The slab, ca. 10,400 years old, is striated with calcite and iron-manganese. hundred years, Brückner found telling indications—neither rigorously uniform in duration nor in amplitude, but nonetheless notable in their number—of cycles with an average duration of about thirty-five years; indeed, the same time-span (or “prime”) mentioned by Bacon. Yet Brückner’s plot of the time-series yielded disturbing visual results. He notes, for instance, that “when temperature variations are placed along a graph, the result will be an irregularly shaped ‘zigzag’ line.” These were not nicely rounded cycles, and this outcome was not simply an artifact of faulty data collection. In The Combination of Observations (1917), meteorologist David Brunt addressed the Gaussian law of error, along with the theory of generalized frequency curves and new methods for investigating hidden periodicities. But his chief contribution to the discussion of climatic cycles was to attack the underlying assumption that nature works according to harmonic sine curves.5 As statistician Maurice Kendall writes, “Nature does not seem to have 40 studied the mathematical theory of harmonic analysis nearly so thoroughly as she ought.”6 Perhaps the fault does lie in the stars. How ought nature to operate? The 1884 publication of economist W. Stanley Jevons’s Investigations in Currency and Finance, particularly the chapter “The Solar Period and the Price of Corn,” in which he developed his famous “sunspot” theory of business cycles, amply stimulated the search for ever more occult correlations between celestial, terrestrial, and socio-economic data. The periodic variation of tropical harvests is connected with the solar period, Jevons claimed, and this harvest variation operates so as to determine the naturally rhythmic fluctuations of European trade.7 Upon this literally far-flung reflex arc depended the fortunes of an empire on which, it was once said, the sun never sets. Jevons found one source of confirmation for his theories in physicist Arthur Schuster’s observation that the years of good vintage in Western Europe have occurred at intervals approximating eleven years, the average length of the principal sunspot cycle. Schuster, who innovated methods in the harmonic analysis of time-series, had his own doubts. In his 1906 paper “On the Periodicities of Sunspots,” he called into question the “vogue” for correlations between solar and terrestrial phenomena. But it was the vogue itself, and its interpretive vagaries, and not the reality of periodic phenomena, that troubled him. As Schuster readily admits, while his periodogram—a diagram representing the intensity of periodic variations—presents statistical information in a readily apprehendable form, there will always be cases in which “interpretation is difficult.”8 The resulting curve represents the magnitude of any regular or irregular change in a time-series. The difficulty of interpretation consists of winnowing true periodic changes from other variations, which during short periods of time “simulate periodicities.”9 Such is the nature of simulation that the law-like appearance of “accidental” periods casts doubt upon the original attempt to detect oscillatory movements within observed time-series. Schuster developed probabilistic models to filter the random elements, errors of observation, and statistical irrelevancies that were presumed to be superposed on the harmonic scheme (or, as one observer aptly put it, to separate the wheat from the chaff). For indeed, the most comprehensive application of Schuster’s method was Sir William Beveridge’s econometric study of 1922, “Crop Yields and Rainfall in Western Europe,” in which he claimed to reveal nineteen distinct cycles, with lengths ranging from 2.735 to 68 years, from a series of wheat price indices extending over three hundred years.10 Beveridge’s study is now best remembered for the example statistician George Udny Yule made of it in his 1926 paper, “Why Do We Sometimes Get Nonsense Correlations Between Time-Series?” Beveridge in fact anticipated some of Yule’s objections. Responding to criticism leveled by the improbably named Mr. Flux, Beveridge allowed, “I certainly do not wish to assert that the whole of the weather can be reduced to a series of cycles. The cycles which I have found may, I think, ultimately be found to account for 30 per cent., or 50 per cent., or possibly even 75 per cent. of the weather. … But I do not in the least know what this proportion is, and I know still less what may be the law governing the balance.”11 As Yule saw it, however, the task was not to set the balance right, but to recognize the chaotic agency that held the balance in sway. The problem of periodogram analysis, according to Yule, was its “tendency to start from the initial hypothesis that the periodicities are masked solely by such more or less random superposed fluctuations—fluctuations which do not in any way disturb the steady course of the underlying periodic function or functions.”12 “Many series which have been or might be subjected to harmonic analysis,” Yule observed, “may be subject to ‘disturbance,’ and this may possibly be the A depiction of periodicities in English rainfall, from C. E. P. Brooks & J. Glasspoole, British Floods and Droughts (1928). 41 source of some rather odd results which have been reached.” Beveridge’s analysis is here implied, as is Schuster’s work on sunspots, which Yule revisited in a paper of 1927 entitled “On a Method of Investigating Periodicities in Disturbed Series.” There, Yule sketches, not altogether whimsically, a thought-experiment on the nature and source of disturbance: If we observe at short equal intervals of time the departures of a simple harmonic pendulum from its position of rest, errors of observation will cause fluctuations. … But by improvement of apparatus and automatic methods of recording, let us say, errors of observation are practically eliminated. The recording apparatus is left to itself, and unfortunately boys get into the room and start pelting the pendulum with peas, sometimes from one side and sometimes from the other. The motion is now affected, not by superposed fluctuations , but by true disturbance, and the effect on the graph will be of an entirely different kind.13 No doubt these were Alan Bennett’s redeemingly unruly history boys. “How do I define history?,” one of them asks, but not without prompting. “It’s just one fucking thing after another.” Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde “The touchstone of the historical sense is the future,” writes philosopher R. G. Collingwood. We call attention to Collingwood in an attempt to derive an historical lesson from the above-mentioned claim that the search for cycles of weather is as old as history.14 In quantifying “raininess,” the definitive quantity in their history of floods and droughts going back to Romano-British times, Brooks and Glasspoole adopted a mathematical approach to the extant meteorological record. Their calculation of raininess R = 100 + 2 marked a migration of “arithmetical manipulation“—as Sir Napier Shaw, longtime director of the Meteorological Office, approvingly described statistical methods of treating time-series—into the handling of the documentary sources of history.15 But what cannot be discounted from the equation is the considerable extent to which the search for cycles was undertaken in the desire to “forecast the weather for long distances ahead.”16 Thus we come to Collingwood’s prediction of what disturbances await the researcher. “The historian who tries to forecast the future is like a tracker anxiously peering at a muddy road in order to descry the footsteps of the next person who is going to pass that way.” So Collingwood writes in an essay of 1927 entitled “Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles.”17 To imagine the past, Collingwood asks the historian to look to the future, “the infinite well-spring of those events which, when they happen, become present, and whose traces left upon the present enable us to reconstruct them when they are past.”18 Is it a muddy road, and not carefully drawn curves, that squishily connects the future and past? In “Who Killed John Doe?,” the detective story Collingwood included in The Idea of History, a sudden rainstorm provides a timeline with which to reconstruct the night of the crime. The absence of mud tracked into John Doe’s study exculpates Richard Roe, one of Detective-Inspector Jenkins’s likely suspects. For Maurice Kendall, writing of the pitfalls of detecting hidden periodic movements in economic, meteorological, and geophysical time-series, the chief suspect in any such mystery is the method of detection itself: The plain fact is that an investigator into oscillations in time-series nowadays is very much in the position of the detective in the modern crime novel. By the time he arrives on the scene to inspect the corpse, so many feet have trampled all round it that he can easily find a 42 footprint to fit any suspect he likes to choose. The main difference is that under the rules of criminal fiction the detective must not be the culprit. In the theory of timeseries he frequently is.19 So much for following the rules. The evidence is compromised. The methods are suspect. The only thing lacking is malicious intent. In the thirteenth edition of An Introduction to the Theory of Statistics, Yule and Kendall cast doubt upon the final commensurability of things. They write, “Many people, in fact, have been led by their enthusiasm for numerical data to regard knowledge of a nonquantitative kind as hardly deserving the name ‘knowledge’ at all.” The implication is that they have been led astray down a straight path. The poet alone “coupleth the generall notion with the particuler example,” wrote Sidney. Is it possible Yule had a similar vocation in mind for the statistician? “When we find that a theoretical formula applied to a particular case gives results which common sense judges to be incorrect, it is generally as well to examine the particular assumptions from which it was deduced, and see which of them are inapplicable to the case in point.” Yule had the good sense to seek the order of things in the nature of disturbance. Sidney hazarded circumstance, bravely or foolishly it is not for us to say; what we do know, and that only very indistinctly, is the bare was of his demise in combat. In his essay “Weather in War-Time,” Richard Bentley, President of the Royal Metereological Society, relates that during the Netherlands War of Independence, Elizabeth I sent troops under Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Philip Sidney’s uncle, to aid the Dutch rebels. Leicester intercepted word that the Spanish were to send a relief column and supplies to the city of Zutphen. English troops under command of William Stanley and John Norris were stationed on the road to intercept the Spanish. On the morning of 22 September 1586, “there fell a great and thick mist that you might hardly see a man ten paces off,” under cover of which the enemy advanced. Suddenly the mist lifted, and the astonished Englishmen found themselves in the very teeth of an entrenched body of three thousand of the enemy. They charged, and Sidney’s horse was killed under him. He mounted another horse and joined in a second charge. Reinforcements galloped up and a third charge was made, during which Sidney received his death wound.20 Had Sidney seen further into the obscuring mist, perhaps things might have ended differently for him. But again, that is only for the poet to say. The historian is rather more constrained, for at best he might argue that “because it rained yesterday therefore it should rain today.” The past as prologue? And what of the long-term prospects of knowledge of the qualitative kind? Brooks and Glasspoole write that a large number of periodicities had recently been discovered, “but in this country at least they do not amount to a great deal.” Meteorologists were still a long way, in their estimation, from deriving reliable forecasts on periodic phenomena. Far from indulging in a conceit, these two custodians of the recorded history of rainfall were finally bemused by the dawning recognition that periodic phenomena “are not only small in comparison with the accidental or irregular variations; they are not even entirely regular and permanent.” Real and accidental periodicities coupleth in a most promiscuous way, and only seldom as future history foreordains they should. How bright the future might appear if only it could be uncoupled from our halting efforts to remake the past. 1 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London, For the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London: 1667), p. 115. 2 Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London: William Ponsonby, 1595), n.p. 3 Hugh Robert Mill, “Introduction,” Rainfall Atlas of the British Isles (London: Royal Meteorological Society, 1926), p. 6. 4 Alfred J. Henry, “The Brückner Cycle of Climatic Oscillations in the United States,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, no. 17 (1927), p. 61. 5 David Brunt, “Climatic Cycles,” The Geographical Journal, no. 89 (March 1937), p. 215. 6 M. G. Kendall, “On the Analysis of Oscillatory Time-Series,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, no. 108 (1945), p. 96. 7 W. Stanley Jevons, Investigations in Currency and Finance (London: Macmillan and Co. 1884), p. xxxiii. 8 Arthur Schuster, “On Periodicities of Sunspots,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, no. 206 (1906), p. 71. 9 Arthur Schuster, “On Sun-spot Periodicities—Preliminary Notice,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, no. 77 (1906), p. 141. 10 William H. Beveridge, “Wheat Prices and Rainfall in Western Europe,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, no. 85 (1922), pp. 412–475. 11 William H. Beveridge, “Supplementary Notes,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, no. 85 (1922), p. 475. 12 George Udny Yule, “On a Method of Investigating Periodicities in Disturbed Series, with Special Reference to Wolfer’s Sunspot Numbers,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, no. 226 (1927), p. 268. 13 Ibid. 14 Brunt, “Climatic Cycles,” op. cit., p. 225. 15 C. E. P. Brooks & J. Glasspoole, British Floods and Droughts (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1928), p. 191, where R is raininess, d droughts, w wet years, and n the number of meteorological records. Sir Napier Shaw, Manual of Meteorology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), vol. I, p. 254. 16 David Brunt, “Periodicities in European Weather,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, no. 225 (1926), p. 247. 17 R. G. Collingwood, “Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles,” Antiquity, no. 1 (1927), p. 320. 18 Ibid. 19 Kendall, “On the Analysis of Oscillatory Time-Series,” op. cit., p. 58. 20 Richard Bentley, “Weather in War-Time,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, no. 142 (April 1907), p. 104. 43 A Case of Erotic Engineering Thomas A. P. Van Leeuwen Porte-jarretelles, known in the US as a garter belt and in the UK as a suspender belt, is a machine of modest dimensions, designed to hold up women’s stockings that reach above the knee. Suspended from a belt that runs around the waist are four strips of elastic fabric, one on either side of each thigh, that reach out to grab both stockings by the cuff. For a secure connection to be made, however, an intermediary connective device had to be invented, one that could hold a soft, fragile fabric that was sensitive to strong tensile forces. This challenge was one of the most vexing that late nineteenth-century engineering had to meet. The solution would be an ingenious clasp known as pince-jarretelle or, simply, jarretelle. The problem was complex and multifaceted. Stockings made of silk were extremely delicate and would fare badly if attached to a rigid device. Additionally, there is much stretching and friction in that particular region of the human body, not to mention the considerable strain caused by the independent movement of the legs. In order to reduce the strain, two separate elements had to be brought together: highly elastic straps and a point of attachment that was both firm and supple. Rubber, the only material up to the task, first became available in the 1850s, when latex-based products, such as bicycle tubes, waterproof boots, and condoms, above: Small-scale engineering. Photo Ryo Manabe. 44 began to appear on the market. Furthermore, the whole ensemble had to be detachable. In theory, the garter belt could be left on the body for an indeterminate period, but the stockings had to be taken off at least once every twenty-four hours. As a result, a point of attachment had to be constructed that provided both a secure grip and an easy-to-operate release mechanism. In the world of lingerie, one would have traditionally relied on laces, ribbons, or buttons. But this time a completely different trajectory was chosen. Time, rather than comfort, was at stake; therefore the clasp’s engineer opted for a quick-release mechanical solution. The resulting device consisted of a bottom plate covered with elastic cloth; at the tip of this plate sat a small button, over the top of which would slide a gynomorphic steel-wire clasp. The idea was that the cuff of the stocking was pulled over the button, and that the button in turn slid into the loop of the clasp, following the principle of beginning wide and finishing narrow. The stocking was now secured, and by reversing the process it could be released without the fabric being damaged. The cloth for the clasp came in three colors: white, black, and pink. In deluxe models, a satin ribbon was folded over the mechanism, mainly for aesthetic reasons, but also to prevent overlaying clothing from getting entangled. This solution was a piece of engineering so brilliant that later connoisseurs of fashion and historians of engineering and technology reasoned that only the greatest engineer of them all—Gustave Eiffel—could have been its inventor. Admittedly, this was a wild guess, but in the serious world of engineering, an object of such lively hermeneutics only appears once in a lifetime. Moreover, legs fully rigged in porte-jarretelles do resemble the truss of a bridge, a pylon, or a tower—perhaps even the Eiffel Tower itself. It was therefore not surprising that Eiffel was thought a likely candidate, and rumors of his involvement were in fact in circulation “in various books and magazines” by the early twentieth century.1 The story went that Eiffel, despite the massive amount of work he expended on his tower and on countless bridges in France, Africa and the New World, not to mention the Statue of Liberty, still had time to ponder the structural problems posed by a minute accessory of the lingerie industry. After all, the man was a bridgebuilder, a “pontifex,” somebody able to produce a work of enduring stability that spans the distance between two opposites. It was also characteristic of a truly great man that he would be able to divide his time between grand and small works evenly, depending on the challenge of the problem to be solved. Therefore a story, as unimaginative as it was apocryphal, began to circulate: First known sketch for porte-jarretelle, 1876. that Eiffel’s wife suffered from sagging stockings and that the great man, in a moment of marital understanding, sat down at the kitchen table and drew a sketch of a new device—a garter belt designed around the famous slip-clasp. In France, Eiffel stands for all things brilliant, and so the story held up for a long time. The problem, however, is that this case of une belle mécanique was not in Eiffel’s style. It simply did not correspond with his sturdy, nineteenth-century overengineering. On the contrary, porte-jarretelles is anything but sturdy. In fact, it is as sturdy as a Citroën 2CV or a Voisin biplane. Une belle mécanique embodies “the economy of means”; where one bolt will do, only one bolt will be used. The windscreen wipers of the original Citroën 2CV only worked when the car was moving, and the oil cooler of the Voisin racing car was propelled by a fan fitted on the hood that started to turn when the car was 45 at speed. This kind of minimalist thinking was alien to Eiffel but not to Ferdinand Arnodin (1845–1924), Eiffel’s contemporary who, like the legendary engineer, was also a builder and rebuilder, and is now best known for his work on bridges. Though his earlier inland bridges were very much like Eiffel’s, it was his invention of longspan transporter bridges over waterways that earned him his reputation. Unlike inland bridges, transporter bridges were devised to span the estuaries of busy ports such as Nantes and Marseilles. In the days before steam, the masts of sailing vessels were so tall that a fixed bridge would need to be very high, necessitating miles of approach ramps and tons of steel and concrete. Arnodin’s solution was as simple as it was improbable. Two tall, slender, trussed pylons on either side of the river were connected by a horizontal beam, from which cables were suspended carrying a small platform that above and opposite: The Arnodin-designed transporter bridge of Marseilles, completed in 1905. The platform ferry, which moved a few meters above the water, was suspended more than fifty meters below a trolley that ran across the horizontal deck. The bridge was demolished by German troops in 1944. These images appear in Sigfried Giedion’s book Bauen in Frankreich (1928). resembled a small section cut from a fixed bridge. The platform, which hung very close to the surface of the water, moved from one side of the estuary to the other, allowing people and vehicles to cross without obstructing shipping. Sigfried Giedion, eminent propagator of Modernism, selected Arnodin’s wacky ferry-bridges as the epitome of modernist design strategy. They were in all respects new, and what was more, they were the opposite of the old: “Everything is based on mobility. ... [They] strive to overcome the old sense of equilibrium that was based only on fortress-like incarceration.”2 The bridges’ lightness and unusual operation also made them a popular subject for avant-garde photographers, like Germaine Krull, László Moholy-Nagy, and Giedion himself. The transporter bridge was not a thing that inspired a sense of security. On the contrary, it invited the curious and the adventurous. Arnodin preferred free-moving cables—he called them câbles a torsion alternative —to stationary mass. To invoke LaFontaine’s fable, Arnodin preferred the reed to the oak. Giedion was ecstatic about the bridges’ demonstrative frivolity and proclaimed it a highly attractive example of how a truly modern construction was able to connect stationary elements with 46 mobility. A caption for a photograph that he took of one of Arnodin’s bridges reads: “Graceful combination of stationary and moving parts.”3 It was the porte-jarretelles of bridges, and a simple comparison between it and our clasp makes the identity of its true inventor incontestable: Arnodin. ••• Alas, at the end of the day, all fantasies and speculation must give way to history. In this particular case, the unwelcome “accountant’s truth,” as Werner Herzog would call it, is that the creator of the original portejarretelles was a certain Féréol Dedieu, who patented his invention in 1876.4 Arnodin, who should have been its inventor, will be remembered only for his bridges, the large-scale equivalent of this tiny, ingenious device. 1 Lili Sztajn, Histoire du Porte-Jarretelles, (Boulogne: La Sirène,1996), p. 12. 2 Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich (Leipzig: Klinkhard & Bierma, 1928). The English translation used here is from Sokratis Georgiadis, ed., Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete (Los Angeles: The Getty Center, 1995), p. 147. 3 Ibid., p. 146. 4 Lili Sztajn, Histoire du Porte-Jarretelles, op. cit, p. 15. 47 Let’s make a deal Herant Katchadourian “There is no point haggling with the Hong Kong Chinese,” advised my friend, “You might just as well pay what they want and not waste your time.” “If what you say is true,” I replied, “there must be no Armenians living in Hong Kong.” At the time, I was a brash young man, proud of my Armenian bargaining genes further honed by my upbringing in Beirut. It was the early 1960s and we were on an ocean liner approaching Hong Kong, a shopper’s paradise where you could have a suit custom-tailored overnight. My friend wanted to buy a Nikon camera, but despaired of the bleak prospect of getting a good deal. I told him to leave the haggling to me. All I needed from him was to find the same camera among the passengers and borrow it for an hour. Armed with the borrowed Nikon hanging conspicuously around my neck, we made our way into the warren of shops crammed with photographic equipment. I told my friend to keep quiet and act indifferent. We settled on a store and I stood in front of the owner, looking casually at the rows of cameras while he made futile attempts to engage me in conversation. Finally, I saw the Nikon we wanted, but moved my eyes languidly past it to one of the most expensive cameras and inquired about the price. With a bright smile at the prospect of a big sale, the owner pointed to the price tag. I told him I could read the sign myself—what I wanted to know was what he would actually take for it. “This very good camera,” he started expansively. “Yes, very good camera,” I agreed. “Japanese, very clever. Make good camera.” “Yes, Japanese very clever,” I agreed, “but Armenians more clever.” He did not get the joke, but suppressed his bafflement to stay on target. So he moved from one tack to another to soften me up: the rent of his shop was killing him; he had six needy children to look after; his mother-in-law was sick, and so on. I let him do all the talking, except for asking after each sally, “How much?” When he countered with a lower price, I would say, “Too much.” (I learned this tactic from a friend of my father who bought textiles in Manchester for Beirut tailors. He spoke no English except for “How much? Too much.” He drove the English dealers to distraction until they capitulated and wrote down a figure he would accept). I kept up the haggling until the poor man appeared to be on the verge of tears. It was time to strike. I pointed to the Nikon, as if I had just noticed it, and asked in 48 exasperation, “Okay, how much for this camera?” He had, no doubt, noted the camera hanging from my neck and assumed that I was not about to buy another one—it must be a trick to gauge his prices. So he came up with a ridiculously low offer for the Nikon. After a pregnant pause, I said, “Fine. I will take it.” He was stunned, but recovered his wits enough to hand me the Nikon with a rueful look of resignation. I told my friend to pay him what I thought would be a reasonable price, rather than the absurd figure the owner had just offered. We shook hands, and parted friends. ••• This interchange may sound like a shameless contest in deception, but actually we were engaged in an honorable ritual with its own rules and protocols. Thus, while we dissembled furiously and tried to cajole, seduce, and bully each other into compliance, neither of us actually lied. The tale of my opponent’s woes was pure theater and we both treated it as such. Haggling is a voluntary exercise. Buyer and seller can break off negotiations at any time, but they do share a common goal. One has something to sell that the other wants to buy, so it is in their mutual interest to reach an agreement. Their interests diverge only when it comes to setting the price, hence the need to haggle. Let us assume that the merchant and I both wanted a fair deal rather than to rob each other. What is a fair deal? Is it simply a matter of profit margin? Should that be a fixed percentage in order to be fair? What if the merchant has bought the goods on the cheap? Does that obligate him to sell it below market price? What if one seller is prosperous and another on the verge of bankruptcy? Or one buyer is rich and another poor? Should such personal considerations matter? Most Westerners would think not, whereas non-Westerners are more likely to think they should. This is part of a more basic difference in making moral judgments. Western moral rules tend to be impersonal, objective, and absolute— one size fits all—whereas in cultures in Asia and Asia Minor, “right” and “wrong” are more subjective, interpersonal, and conditional—they depend on circumstances. Many Westerners are exasperated by haggling; a bad odor clings to the very word. Bargaining, on the other hand, does not carry such a burden, and negotiation is positively dignified. The OED defines haggling tersely as “dispute as to terms” and equates it with wrangling, which involves “angry, noisy, and prolonged dispute.” The earliest use of haggler dates to the early opposite: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Le Marchand de tapis au Caire, ca. 1887. 49 seventeenth century and refers to a person who “stickles in making a bargain or coming to terms.” Bargaining is an older word, going back to the fifteenth century, and is also defined in pejorative terms (“…built your house with beggary, bargenyng and robberye”). The early uses of negotiation link it with trade. Its modern meaning is, “To hold communication or conference … for the purpose of arranging some matter with mutual agreement.” If these three words essentially refer to the same process—discussing the terms of a purchase or contract—how do we explain their hierarchic distinctions? Why does negotiation invoke images of diplomats discussing treaties and financiers brokering complex business deals, while haggling is what swarthy, sweaty rug dealers do in the bazaar? Is it a matter of cultural prejudice? The Turkish word for haggling/bargaining is bazarlek—the way business is conducted in the bazaar. Turks make no distinction between the two terms. Are their transactions fundamentally different from Wall Street wheeling and dealing, or is the difference mainly one of style? Americans’ avowed abhorrence to haggling does not mean that there is no haggling in the US . There is an active corps of American hagglers who, according to a recent New York Times article, manage to bargain their way to lower prices on their cars, credit card rates, hotel rooms, electronics, appliances, medical services, and even hot dogs.1 What is different is the protocol. American hagglers do not dicker aggressively for a lower price; they ask for a discount because they are good customers, or they appeal to the seller’s goodwill. The operative phrases are, “Can you help me?” or “What can you do for me?” They invoke special circumstances: “It’s a birthday gift for my son, can you give it to me for less,” or, “It’s our wedding anniversary, can you upgrade the room?” By saying “I’d be grateful,” you cast the seller in the position of a magnanimous soul. And as with all forms of haggling, you create a personal bond in order to break loose from the impersonal lock of the fixed price. The selling of merchandise at fixed prices—the antithesis of haggling—is now taken for granted in the West, but it is a relatively new practice. Traditionally, people have conducted their business through negotiations of one sort or another. The idea of fixed price marketing started with the development of department stores. Traditionally, shops specialized in one type of product: you bought your shoes in shoe stores that sold nothing else. Public markets were segregated as well, with particular areas dedicated to shops selling the same goods. But by the 1850s, Aristide Boucicaut’s Bon Marché store in Paris had evolved into the first depart50 ment store, displaying a wide variety of goods in various “departments” under one roof. And everything had a fixed price, a model that first appeared in the United States in 1861 at John Wanamaker’s Oak Hall store in Philadelphia. I have lived in the United States for fifty years, and as I have grown older, I have lost some of my taste for haggling. I will still haggle if I have to, but I no longer do it for sport. Given the enormous discrepancy between the standards of living in America and the Third World, it seems greedy and selfish when traveling to haggle over a few dollars. I saw the most egregious example of this when I was on a trip in the Middle East with an affluent American group. A little girl began to follow us around selling scarves for a dollar each. One of the women wanted me to bargain with the girl to get two scarves for a dollar. When I refused, the woman said defensively that it was “not the money but the principle” she cared about. But what is the principle that justifies haggling with a child who is trying to eke out a living? Despite long experience, I have had my own mishaps with the ethics of haggling. On one occasion, I found a pair of carpet-bags in the provincial Turkish town of Malatya. The owner wanted $40 for each. I offered $20. “You came from Istanbul,” he said, “and you know what these sell for. Are you doing this to break my heart?” He was right. A few days earlier, I had bought several of these bags from a wholesaler friend for $100 each. I apologized and paid the man what he wanted. On the other hand, what are the alternatives? One option is to haggle only when the time and effort are worth it, for instance, when you are buying a thousanddollar rug, not a one-dollar scarf. Or you can make a take-it-or-leave-it offer and walk away if it does not work. Do not bluff and do not go back. It is demeaning. The downside of this is that you may lose the chance to buy what you wanted. (And if you are like me, you will regret it for the rest of your life). If you are going to haggle, then at least do it right. There are no hard and fast rules to follow, but there are some useful general guidelines. Like all rules, they work best if they are true to your own style of dealing with others, not imitative.2 There are certain key assets that seller and buyer bring to the bargaining table. The seller knows what he paid for the merchandise and the profit margin he needs to make it worthwhile to sell it. Your strength as a buyer is knowing how much you want to buy the item and how much you are willing and able to pay. You cannot read the seller’s mind, but you should be able to read your own. Remember that unless you really like or need it, nothing is a good bargain, no matter how cheap it is. The more you know about the object you are buying, the more effectively you will be able to bargain. Do not buy the first rug you like in the first shop you enter. Look at other rugs, check other shops. Think of it as going through a museum, looking at paintings. Take your time. Effective haggling cannot be rushed. Give the merchant a chance to speak his piece (including his fabricated tales). However, you must also maintain a certain tension by hinting that your time is limited. (Look at your watch, even if you know what time it is). Respect the seller and he will respect you in return. Don’t argue, raise your voice, or challenge the veracity of what he says. Establishing the truth is not the point. Never denigrate the quality of the merchandise. If you think the rug is a piece of junk, you should not be buying it. Avoid getting into technical arguments. If you say, “That red color looks chemically bleached,” the seller will refute it. If you say, “I don’t like the red,” he cannot do so. Most importantly, get into the spirit of the occasion. Haggling is part of the local culture, no less than the exotic food you eat. That will require that you set aside your preconceptions and prejudices and lose yourself for a short while in a novel world. That is what makes the experience priceless. 1 Alina Tugend. “Shortcuts for Champions of Haggling, No Price Tag Is Sacred,” The New York Times, 19 January 2008. 2 The following is based in part on John B. Gregorian, Oriental Rugs of the Silk Route: Culture, Process, and Selection (New York: Rizzoli, 2000). 51 deception 52 Abbott Thayer’s sketch for a textile and uniform design based on disruptive patterning, ca. 1915. Courtesy Abbott Henderson Thayer & Thayer Family Papers, Smithsonian Archive of American Art. THE CRUCIAL MOMENT OF DECEPTION Hanna Rose Shell On 11 November 1896, an American painter known for his society portraits and demure landscapes made an unusual appearance at the Annual Meeting of the American Ornithologists’ Union in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Abbott Thayer arrived at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology on Oxford Street bearing a sack of sweet potatoes, oil paints, paintbrushes, a roll of wire, and two new principles of invisibility in nature that together formed his “Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration.”1 In his afternoon open-air lecture, Thayer argued that every non-human animal is cloaked in an outfit that has evolved to obliterate visual signs of that animal’s presence in its typical habitat at the “crucial moment” of its utmost vulnerability. According to him, all animal coloration was a function of this need to hide in the environment. Thayer identified two visual phenomena undergirding this invisibility: “obliterative countershading” and 53 “disruptive patterning.” In the first, animal skins achieve an illusion of monochrome flatness via coloration darkest in sunlit parts and lightest in areas generally bathed in shadows: examples include the light bellies of otherwise dark rabbit coats or the silver undersides of sharks. The resulting visual compression of a three-dimensional form produces an illusion of monochrome flatness. The second principle takes this illusion to the next level of protective concealment: mottled patterns corresponding to the animal’s habitat disrupt the contours of its flat silhouette, resulting in an impression of not being there.2 An example is the coloration of bullfrogs. Natural selection, continued Thayer, favors individuals visually expressing one or both of these traits and constructs a world of momentarily evanescent animal objects. This protective coloration was, claimed Thayer, related to a notion of concealment specific to a particular instant snapped out of a continuum of time. As he would later write, “At these crucial moments in the lives of animals when they are on the verge of catching or being caught, sight is the indispensable sense. It is for these moments that their coloration is best adapted, and when looked at from the viewpoint of the enemy or prey as the case may be, proves to be obliterative.”3 For the assembled audience of scientists, bird enthusiasts and interested passers-by, Thayer introduced his law as a scientific discovery of great importance, uncovered through the workings of an artistic mind. He then used his props to present a disappearing act with painted and posed sweet potatoes, making ones that had been painted lighter on the undersides—“countershaded”—disappear from view.4 Unpainted monochrome specimens, meanwhile, stood out like sore thumbs against the dirt. “The effect was almost magical,” recounted one audience member.5 This game of hide-and-seek was no joke. By 1896, Thayer was increasingly inserting himself into what was a longstanding debate over the origins, effectiveness, and pervasiveness of protective concealment in the natural world. After the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, animal coloration—both its origins and its role in animal behavior—had become a key locus of debate among natural historians, artists, and the lay public. Prior to this period, naturalists had noted instances of animals’ blending in with their backgrounds. It seemed remarkable that God had “dropped” them into place just so—“nature by design.”6 By contrast, in an evolutionary model, there was a gradual “fitting together” over time. Evolutionary theories, both Darwin’s and that of his colleague Alfred Russel Wallace, presented a range of explanations for animal colors. Darwin emphasized interrelations between the sexes as the cause of the showy coloration found in the male of many species; females chose the more colorful males for mating. Wallace, meanwhile, thought color was better understood as the result of strictly environmental pressures. Studying the colors of many insects, he interpreted bright hues and complex patterns alike as either warning signals to potential predators, modes for assimilation in the environment, or mimicry of other, more dangerous, species. Thayer’s interest in nature’s visual illusions originated in his hobbies as a birdwatcher, hunter, and amateur photographer, as well as in his classical training as a painter. He kept a journal of bird sightings from the woods surrounding his summer home in Dublin, New Hampshire, and collected dead birds to skin for visual analysis and three-dimensional modeling, becoming “an excellent taxidermist through his inborn sense of form and gesture.”7 In the 1880s, he became a reader of Darwin and Wallace, as well as of later biologists inspired by them to focus on the evolution of color. 54 Within a culture generally fascinated by deceptive visual fields, bird study became a vital link between the concerns of natural science and those of representational art making. Philosopher-psychologist William James, a friend of Thayer’s and a fellow birder, discussed the experience of bird watching in his 1890 Principles of Psychology, describing the study of illusions, or so-called “false perceptions,” as critical to efforts to understand sensations related to depth, color, and movement perception. In the section on illusions, James brings to his readers’ attention the following anecdote recounted by a colleague: A sportsman, while shooting woodcock in cover, sees a bird with the size and color of a woodcock … but through the foliage, not having time to see more than that it is a bird of such a size and color, he immediately supplies by inference the other qualities of a woodcock, and is afterwards disgusted to find that he has shot a thrush.8 James extended examples drawn from hunting to the world of men at war with enemies within and without: “as with game, so with enemies, ghosts, and the like.”9 The interest that visual disappearance and identification held for natural historians, psychologists, artists, and militarists was transformed in the 1870s wih the advent of instantaneous, quick-exposure photography. New portable cameras had come to market, and ornithologists quickly perceived how the devices could stop live animals in their tracks. If bird watching was to some extent a game of hide-and-seek, the photographic apparatus became an exciting new player. The new technology was as crucial as taxidermy for Thayer’s study of birds: photography for its indexical relationship to its referent, and taxidermy for its ability to document and freeze time. By 1894, Thayer’s taxidermy workshop and backyard had become his laboratory, with his camera serving as technologist. Taxidermy and photography became media interwoven for the purposes of discovery, proof, and performance of the “crucial moment” of invisibility achieved through strategic coloration. In his art projects, Thayer sought to replicate the experience of looking at this defining moment in the life of an animal—and, furthermore, learning how to become an invisible animal. The canvas served as Thayer’s laboratory for representing this perceptual experience, and evolution by natural selection was perfected through the collages he made in his studio. Even if animals didn’t always appear to disappear in the real world, they could do so very well in his assembled version of that world. Thayer’s New Hampshire summer home, to which he and his family relocated around 1900, was transformed into a year-round laboratory for studying protective coloration. Soon, his wife Emma, son Gerald, and daughters Mary and Gladys joined him as fellow investigators, technicians, and artisans. Between 1901 and 1909, their generative theories were built up into a universe of paintings, photographs, collages, stencils, and essays. Each format addressed the enigmas of coloration and invisibility in different ways. In some collages, Thayer mounted actual bird skins and feathers on panels, thus calling attention to the animal as pure surface; for others, he created photographic collage “quilts” that combined small fragments of larger photos, developing his idea of nature as a two-dimensional “media environment” where a living body could be made to stand out or disappear as easily as an inanimate pattern. Thayer was simultaneously producing, witnessing, and documenting the processes of a living being’s Wallpaper birds created by Abbott Thayer for Alfred Russel Wallace, 1905. Courtesy Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Alfred Russel Wallace Archive. 55 assimilation into its habitat. In the early 1890s, Thayer had begun to think about silhouetted animal forms through the production, installation, and distribution of stencils—literally, cut-outs of bird, snake, or human forms. These were perceptual tools for “painting out” real objects, for making them both appear and disappear. Stencil constructions became site-specific installations. For example, he cut the silhouette of a woodland duck out of rigid canvas, and took wood planks and a tool-kit into the field, where he nailed the fabric, now with a void in the middle of it, onto wooden beams attached at crossed angles. He then wedged this structure into the earth at the edge of a streambed. The hole, in the form of the duck’s silhouette, provided a window into the world behind the canvas; the photograph of this scene documents how a viewer would perceive a woodland duck if it were in precisely that position, and perfectly invisible. Thayer also encouraged others to develop their perceptual skepticism through the use of homemade stencil sets that could be cut out of a range of materials, A copperhead snake hides in the centerpiece of Gerald and Abbott Thayer’s Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909). including wallpaper and shoe leather. He sent stencil kits, complete with instructions for use, to Wallace, to color biologist Edward Poulton, and to painter John Singer Sargent. For one kit, Thayer cut a duck silhouette out of floral wallpaper, pasted the remaining wallpaper to a sheet of watercolor paper, and then attached the duck cutout to a string. As Thayer advised Wallace: All brilliant birds are precisely related to their habitat, as the enclosed wallpaper bird is to the wallpaper he fits in and … there is no such thing, save in a cabinet, as a conspicuous bird. This wallpaper bird, or any socalled conspicuous bird is, even without regard to his background, less conspicuous than if he were monochrome, being cut into separate entities, and when he gets into the place you cut him out of, he is gone! 10 The duck cutout is a vision, and a material instantiation, of what a duck would look like if it happened to be a perfect wallflower. The stencil served as a visual tool and a field kit in one; here, the user was not simply a consumer of illusionistic models, but through the process of consumption produced his or her own revelation of concealment. Thayer also made models that likewise gave viewers the opportunity to actively manipulate animals in 56 their surroundings. In one of these, a countershaded model duck hung suspended in a four-sided glass case lit from above, as in nature at mid-day. The model rotated as the participant turned a hand-crank, making the duck appear and disappear. Thayer designed many such “disappearing exhibits” for museums, universities, and private homes in both Europe and the United States; one installed at London’s Museum of Natural History remained there until at least 1925. Part of the history of both illusionism and dioramas, these exhibits were considered innovative tools of museum pedagogy, and were among the first “hands-on” science exhibits to be used in natural history museums. Many of Thayer’s projects were collected in the massive and profusely illustrated 1909 publication Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, a collaboration with his son Gerald. The book solidified the relationship between pattern, hole, and silhouette that the elder Thayer had been developing since the 1890s. The layout of the book itself expressed a unique approach to object-based learning as visual training; its centerfold was a snake-shaped stencil overlaid on a painting of a copperhead concealed in the foliage. A broad spectrum of scientific, artistic, and popular journals reviewed Concealing-Coloration. Nature, Science, the Nation, and the New York Times all gave the book positive reviews, praising it for its innovative approach, popular appeal, and more-or-less scientific basis.11 Edward Titchener, protégé of Wilhelm Wundt, founder of the first experimental psychology lab in the US , promoted Concealing-Coloration in the American Journal of Psychology as an important contribution to the field, and described Thayer’s illustrations as valuable optical training devices.12 The book sold well, yet had its skeptics. Some biologists, including those initially supportive of Thayer’s work in the 1890s, were quick to point out that many animals use their coloration to become more visible, as when trying to attract the attention of a potential mate or to ward away potential predators. Thayer flatly denied the relevance of both explanatory frameworks. One of the most vocal critics was none other than ardent hunter Theodore Roosevelt.13 In his book African Game Trails, an extended account of his post-presidential safari expedition between 1908 and 1910, Roosevelt devoted an entire appendix to his criticism of Thayer’s work, lambasting his attempt to apply universally the law of protective coloration to all non-human animals.14 The Dial also criticized Thayer’s universalizing approach, though assenting that in this, “its very faults may prove stimulating.”15 Others noted that Thayer’s model of concealment implies a static environment; organism and habitat are fixed in place by necessity. If the warbler shifts position, or the branches lose their leaves, the illusion of “not being there” would be shattered. As Thayer had stated: The theory of natural selection is based on the belief that organisms are susceptible of modification limited only by the duration of the circumstances causing it, or by the attainment of ultimate perfect fitness to the environment.16 And in Thayer’s account, the “perfect fitness” aimed at by protective coloration resulted in picture-perfect, even stencil-like, concealment of each individual of an animal species. This concealment, however, was not for all time. In fact, concealment didn’t even last all season or all day. Rather, it pertained only to a single, and therefore privileged, “crucial moment.”17 According to Thayer, nature’s stitches in time were not all equal; some moments in an animal’s life, especially those at which it encountered its most vicious predator, mattered more than others. The dappled clothing of the peacock, the hot pink of the flamingo, and the yellow splotches of the warbler were each, according to Thayer, associated with a specific moment in time and position in space. In the 57 case of the flamingo, for example, the “crucial moment” occurred when an alligator sought out its prey, looking out toward the hot pink of a Florida sunset. But what about the moment before concealment? And what about the moment after, when the animal moves out of the photographic instant for which its concealment had seemingly been constructed? As Roosevelt wrote: “The idea set forth in the picture is shown to be foolish by a moment’s consideration of the fact that neither the oryx nor any other antelope stands motionless at a watering hole. The very fact of coming down to drink implies motion, and motion in such a case instantly takes away all concealing power from any coloration.”18 Roosevelt took issue not only with Thayer’s fetishization of the photographic instant as a unit of analysis and visual interaction, but also with his lack of hands-on experience of his subjects: “Remember that he has never studied flamingoes in their haunts, he knows nothing personally of their habits or their enemies or their ways of avoiding their enemies.”19 Thayer responded in kind with a series of articles published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History and letters to the editors of the New York Tribune and the New York Sun. A paragraph from his article for Popular Science Monthly sums it up: No amount of reiterating that you have seen the poacher not poaching or the bank-note counterfeiter not counterfeiting, or this newly discovered animals’ costume-scenery-counterfeiter not counterfeiting is any step at all toward finding out whether all three do at certain times perform their tricks.20 And yet, even as he fought his critics, Thayer himself had a sense that there was something else at stake in his work than creating a mimetic facsimile of nature in action, or an argument about the direction of evolution in nature. In those cases where he seemed to be reaching beyond the bounds of accepted understanding of perception in nature, he was laying the groundwork for the application of his ideas to engineering practices in the human sphere. For example, in 1912 he drew on his theory of countershading to explain the invisibility of the iceberg that caused the Titanic disaster, suggesting a way to create spectacles to reverse the effects of obliterative countershading and thereby enable the detection of dangerous obstacles at sea.21 Around the same time, systematic, quasi-scientific application of visual concealment principles to human and non-human objects began to emerge within the theater of war: it was given the name camouflage. Thayer had argued that ultimately every animal worth its pelt intended to disappear at a crucial moment, and what moment was more crucial than that of extreme vulnerability in battle? After war broke out in 1914, he suggested that disruptive patterns and countershading might be applied to battleships and merchant vessels to great effect.22 He soon turned to productive concealment of the human self. By 1912, Thayer had already begun investigating how—as he understood it—humans had historically created their own modes of “protective coloration” through technologies of adornment, the effect being similar to those principles he had discovered in nature. His armchair anthropology consisted of the study of photographs of indigenous people and the comparison of their appearance to human-shaped stencils cut out of the photographs’ backgrounds. Tattooing and decoration practices, he posited, might be best understood—from an evolutionary point of view—as technologies of protection and invisibility. Western people, Thayer noted, avoided such concealing costumes in favor of traditional monochrome dress, as in the case of the soldier in gray shown in one of his illustrations. This was a mistake, he asserted. The twentieth-century soldier, like the primitive warrior, should find a way to hide through an alteration in dress. Thayer pursued these themes in “Tree Man” and “Stone Man,” photocollages in which he dressed people in the photographic skins of the environment within which they are hidden. In 1915, Thayer sent versions of these photocollages, along with instructions for viewing them, to John Singer Sargent. Best known for his society portraits and paintings of military figures, Sargent had just been appointed as an official war artist by the British government. A year earlier, Thayer had in fact contacted the British War Office directly to discuss the mass production of camouflage jackets and pants, but his approach had not met with any response. Thayer hoped that Sargent’s new position would help him arrange a meeting this time around. His note to Sargent read: I am enclosing a simple but wonderful device for absolutely ascertaining exactly what any object would have to look like to be wholly invisible against any particular background. You will see at a glance that in this particular picture nothing could so entirely efface the soldier I have cut out as for him to wear the pattern which constitutes his portion of this very picture.23 Thayer’s enclosed sketch for a sniper suit showed a pattern of bright yellow, red, and green splotches onto 58 which he had traced silhouettes of trousers and overcoats. Thayer’s model for such a jacket, which he went on to propose as a new uniform for the British infantry, was a second-hand hunting coat—gifted posthumously by William James in 1910—that he had turned into a prototype sniper suit. Thayer, long known for his odd clothing and assortment of modified jackets, wore James’s hand-me-down constantly; it became his sartorial second skin, practical for painting in the studio and trekking through the outdoors alike. The coat quickly grew threadbare, acquiring a patina, and James’s son later recalled with pleasure witnessing “this familiar garment on the back of my dear old ‘Uncle’ Abbott” and watching it “grow shabbier and more and more covered with paint as time went on.” Thayer attached pieces of variably dyed and painted rags and fabric swatches to the old overcoat, breaking up the outline of his own silhouette and making him an undetectable presence in the bushes behind his own New Hampshire home. He wore it in his workshop as he composed responses to the criticisms he received for Concealing-Coloration and wrote letters to members of the American government and British Army. At last, with the help of Sargent, he arranged a trip to London to meet with Winston Churchill, then the British Secretary of War, to show the politician his work. But once in London, Thayer grew inexplicably nervous and contacted Sargent to say that he could not go through with the meeting. Sargent agreed to deliver the suitcase that Thayer had brought with him for the presentation, and which, in addition to examples of painted fabric, collages, wallpaper swatches, and stencil sets, also contained several letters with suggestions on camouflage design. The reaction was not what Thayer had anticipated. From his perspective, the suitcase held a Great Work; all the War Office could see was a pile of rags. Sargent recalled that the suitcase “contained some drawings and an old spotted brown jacket with rags pinned to it”—James’s overcoat as defaced by Thayer. Years later, the philosopher’s son reflected to Thayer’s biographer that “this was evidently the last appearance of my father’s brown coat.”24 Like the coat, many of Thayer’s experimental assemblages and artworks of effacement have vanished from the material record, leaving behind only textual traces. The duck models, feather paintings, and rag-doll decoys were scattered far and wide, and eventually lost. Thayer’s premise of universal protective concealment in nature, with its disregard of sexual selection and its curiously over-inductive method, became a pedagogical method for camouflage training and implementation Abbott Thayer, Monochrome Soldier Exposed, Concealed — Disruptively Patterned Native Woman Concealed, date unknown. Courtesy Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Abbott Thayer, Stencil Installations as Windows into Nature, date unknown. Courtesy Smithsonian Archives of American Art. 59 during the two world wars, although he never received the official affirmation he craved. The painter Barry Faulkner, a student, former taxidermy assistant, and old family friend, wrote from New York in 1917: Uncle Abbott’s theories have been used to an amazing extent by the English and French in concealing guns, buildings and every conceivable thing. I’ve got hold of some of the material and sent it to high personages in Washington. … In case of war this concealing work has real importance and artists are the best people to do it.25 American, British, and French military officials, alas, did not agree, favoring the schemes proposed by those from an engineering background. Nonetheless, Faulkner and another Thayer student, Homer Saint-Gaudens, both ended up fighting with the camouflage units of the American Expeditionary Force, whose methods were inspired by some of Thayer’s principles for concealment of trenches, supply depots, and infantry at rest.26 In his waning years, Thayer, while continuing to write and paint between increasingly frequent spells of nervous exhaustion, submitted several other unsuccessful proposals to the British and American governments, also contacting Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other members of the US Naval Board directly.27 Thayer died on May 29th 1921, shortly after he delivered a lecture in Cleveland on camouflage dioramas he had designed with his son—his last noted disappearance. 1 “Fourteenth Congress of the American Ornithologists’ Union,” The Auk, no. 14 (January 1897), pp. 82–86. 2 Abbott H. Thayer, “The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration,” The Auk, no. 13 (April 1896), pp. 124-129. 3 Abbott H. Thayer, “An Essay on the Psychological and Other Basic Principles of the Subject,” in Gerald H. Thayer and Abbott H. Thayer, Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom—An Exposition of the Laws of Disguise Through Color and Pattern: Being a Summary of Abbott H. Thayer’s Discoveries (New York: MacMillan, 1909), p. 4. 4 Frank Chapman, Autobiography of a Bird Lover (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933), pp. 78-79. 5 Reported by A.O.U. secretary J. H. Sage in “American Ornithologists’ Union,” Science New Series, vol. 4, no. 102 (11 December 1896), pp. 868–870. 6 Muriel Blaisdell, “Natural Theology and Nature’s Disguises,” Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 15, no. 2 (1982), pp. 163–189. 7 Barry Faulkner, Sketches from an Artist’s Life (Dublin, New Hampshire: William Bauhan, 1973), p. 19. 8 William James, Principles of Psychology [1890] (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), pp. 95–96. James is quoting George John Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals: With a Posthumous Essay on Instinct by Charles Darwin (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1884), p. 324. 9 William James, Principles of Psychology, op. cit., p. 96. 10 Abbott H. Thayer to Alfred Russel Wallace, 22 July 1905 (Alfred Russel Wallace Archive at the Oxford Museum of Natural History). 11 Louis Agassiz Fuertes, “Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom,” in 60 Science: New Series, vol. 32, no. 823 (7 October 1910), pp. 466–469. See Book Review Digest: Sixth Annual Cumulation of Book Reviews of 1910 in One Alphabet (Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson Company, 1910), p. 392. 12 E. B. Titchener, “An Arraignment of the Theories of Mimicry and Warning Colors: Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom: An Exposition of the Laws of Disguise through Color and Pattern, Being a Summary of Abbott H. Thayer’s Discoveries,” in The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 21, no. 3 (July 1910), pp. 500–504. 13 For a nuanced analysis of the debate between Thayer and Roosevelt, see Alexander Nemerov, “Vanishing Americans: Abbott Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Attraction of Camouflage,” in American Art, vol. 11, no. 2 (Summer 1997), pp. 50–81. 14 See Sharon Kingsland, “Abbott Thayer and the Protective Coloration Debate,” in Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 11 (1978), pp. 223–244. 15 T. D. A. Cockerell, “Nature’s Game of Hide-and-Seek: A Review of Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom,” The Dial (July 16 1910), p. 33. 16 Thayer & Thayer, Concealing-Coloration, op. cit., p. 5. 17 Ibid., p. 4. 18 Theodore Roosevelt, “Revealing and Concealing Coloration in Birds and Mammals,” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 30, article 8, p. 226. 19 Ibid., p. 228. 20 Abbott H. Thayer, “An Arraignment of the Theories of Mimicry and Warning Colors,” Popular Science Monthly, vol. 79 (1911), p. 26. 21 Barry Faulkner, Sketches from an Artist’s Life (Dublin, New Hampshire: William Bauhan, 1973), p. 21. 22 Abbott H. Thayer, “Patterns and White,” a letter to The New York Sun, ca. 1915. Thayer also wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1914, 1917, and 1917 advising that boats should be painted white, not gray (Abbott Handerson Thayer and Thayer Family Papers, Archives of American Art). 23 Abbott H. Thayer to John Singer Sargent, ca. 1915 (Abbott Handerson Thayer and Thayer Family Papers, Archives of American Art). 24 Nelson White, Abbott H. Thayer: Painter and Naturalist (Hartford: Connecticut Printers, 1951), p. 51. 25 Barry Faulkner to his friend “W. B.”, ca. 1917 (Barry Faulkner Papers, Archives of American Art). 26 Roy R. Behrens, False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage (Iowa City: Bobolink Books, 2002), p. 63. See also Behrens, “The Theories of Abbott H. Thayer: Father of Camouflage,” in Leonardo, vol. 21, no. 3 (1988), pp. 291–296. 27 Director of Equipment Stores to John Singer Sargent, 10 January 1916, London; J. Stevens, British War Office, to Abbott H. Thayer, 14 August 1916, London (Abbott Handerson Thayer and Thayer Family Papers, Archives of American Art). Mark of Integrity Jonathan Allen In the preface to S. W. Erdnase’s classic treatise on “professional” card handling, The Expert at the Card Table (1902), the author suggests that the volume may “inspire the crafty by enlightenment on artifice” and enable someone “skilled in deception to take a post-graduate course in the highest and most artistic branches of his vocation.”1 Stated more clearly, the volume is a practical guide for card cheats. Erdnase’s identity remains to this day a matter of controversy, but what is certain is that the book’s author knew the world of fin de siècle card-sharping intimately, and had strong opinions about what he had seen.2 The Expert focuses on “card mechanics,” the physical mastery of card manipulation. Shifts, culls, and blind riffles are dealt out in functional detail alongside jogs, slides, and false shuffles. Erdnase sharply contrasts these and other “artifices” with what he condemns as “advantages without dexterity,” examples of which include collusion at the card table, the employment of doctored playing cards, and the use of “hold outs” (cumbersome mechanical gadgets that enable useful cards to find their way secretly into the operator’s hand). The distinction he draws—between enlightened professionals and artless amateurs, whose “skill, or rather want of it,” requires the use of such inexpert methods—lends the book its sardonic edge, since its rhetoric never fully conceals the fact that no matter how elegantly he might conduct his art, the “professional” is just as much of a crook as his amateur counterpart. If we set aside, however, a hierarchy of deception based on methodological differences and stylistic proclivity, we are free to consider in greater detail one of the “advantages” that Erdnase dismisses and to observe a history of deviousness that, far from wanting in dexterity, simply demonstrates its application in different, if not more subtle, ways. The history of the marked playing card, perhaps as old as the playing card itself, is a miscellany of inventive guile. “The systems of card-marking are as numerous as they are ingenious,” wrote John Nevil Maskelyne in 1894. “Card doctoring,” to use Erdnase’s term, covers many forms of subterfuge, but in the brief survey that follows, we shall focus our attention upon what might more usefully be termed the “language” of the marked card. One of the many early documents to describe card marking refers to a system in which cards are divined not by a visible mark but through touch. In his recent commentary on Horatio Galasso’s Giochi di carte 61 An ink-filled ring (known as a trépan), used for secretly marking cards during open play. From Sharps and Flats: A Complete Revelation of the Secrets of Cheating (1894) by John Nevil Maskelyne. Courtesy The Magic Circle Library. bellissimi di regola e di memoria (1593), historian of magic Vanni Bossi describes Galasso’s methods: “The secret involved is the covert marking of cards by nailnicking or punchwork (using a metal point: un punctal de strenga). … By dealing through the deck, the performer can, with ‘the fleshy tips of the fingers,’ tactilely locate the marked cards without looking at them.”3 The rudimentary punched cards described by Galasso in late sixteenth-century Italy had become les cartes pointées (pricked cards) by the time they were documented by Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin in Les Tricheries des grecs dévoilées in 1863. The term grec (Greek), used as shorthand for “card-sharp,” draws on a long history of prejudice which Robert-Houdin reflects in his description of “Greeks [who] improve on this method by splitting apart the corner of the card, making the puncture from the inner surface, and afterwards pasting the two surfaces together again. In this way, nothing is to be seen but a slight roughness on the back of the card, which, should it ever be remarked, would pass for a mere defect in the card-board.”4 Sometime during the same century, card pricking became further codified in the hands of an enigmatic French card-worker known simply as Charlier.5 The “Charlier system” allowed piquet cards to be read through a sophisticated code of ponctuation (punctuation) set out clearly by Professor Hoffmann, magic’s most influential writer of technical manuals, in More Magic (1890). The Magic Circle in London has in its archives a deck marked by Charlier himself, a personal gift to Hoffmann from the Frenchman, who vanished in London in 1882, never to reappear.6 Nailing and punching (later known also as blistering or pegging) continue, with mixed success, to evade detection to this day, both in the theatrical magic world and general card play. As for visual card marking, the simplest and most widespread method is probably daubing, which does not require advance access to the deck: the adept merely smudges the back of relevant cards with a tiny indicative speck of ash or dirt as play unfolds. It was partly in order to combat the ability of early card-sharps to daub plain or simply patterned card-backs that complex back designs flourished. But these new designs, while rendering the dauber’s mark less legible, ushered in card marking’s golden era by providing innovators with a vast range of figurative and abstract geometric decoration upon which to practice their art. Although the subtle alteration of card-back design features in many of the earliest accounts of card mischief, the most comprehensive treatment of this form of marking can be found in Sharps and Flats: A Complete Revelation of the Secrets of Cheating, published in 1894 by magician John Nevil Maskelyne.7 In a section whose pages could be mistaken for those of a neoclassical decorative arts manual, Maskelyne shows how miniscule adjustments to the motifs found within the card-back designs of his time allow their face values to be determined at a glance. Two main stylistic groupings emerge: shading and tint-work, and line-work and scrollwork. Shading involves the almost imperceptible darkening of a tiny selection of a back’s design, whereas tinting amounts to shading-in-reverse, whereby the entire card-back is slightly darkened except for marked sections. Line-work and scrollwork take advantage of the rococo ornaments common to many back designs by selectively adding to, or otherwise altering, curlicues, fronds, and other compliant motifs.8 Maskelyne spends considerable time discussing decks that are marked during manufacture but, in keeping with later commentators, notes that mass-produced marks become common knowledge too rapidly to sustain their effectiveness.9 A “paper-worker,” according to Frank Garcia in Marked Cards and Loaded Dice (1962), prides himself on the secret markings he has personally applied; indeed, another term used to describe a paperworker is “painter” because the latter prefers to “paint his own paper.” To this day, card-sharping instruction includes detailed advice on inks, brushes, solvents, and varnishes to uphold the card-sharper’s motto, “Art is to conceal art.”10 However, even the most proficient card-painter becomes vulnerable to detection if the deck is riffled, whereupon the changing marks can be seen to move about as in a miniature flick-book animation; this interrogatory process is known as “watching the movies.” Just as cinema finally loosened painting’s hold on Ten Knave Club King Heart Ace Spade Queen Nine Club Heart Spade Eight Eight Ace King Nine Ten 62 Knave opposite: Four cards from a deck of Bancks Brothers Late Hunt playing cards marked personally by Charlier (ca. 1870s–1880s). The intersections of the lines suggested by the arrows indicate the locations of the tiny pin-pricks that would allow the card-sharp to determine by touch the suit and value of each card. Courtesy The Magic Circle Museum Collection. Queen above and right: The Charlier System of card marking, showing location of pin-pricks indicating suit and card values. Sevens and diamonds have no mark; thus, the seven of diamonds is the only unmarked card in the deck. Illustrations adapted from Professor Hoffmann’s More Magic (1890). Courtesy Scott Penrose. above: Back of a playing card marked using “shading” technique on leaf motif. below: Code for system used to mark card above. Images on this page from Sharps and Flats: A Complete Revelation of the Secrets of Cheating (1894) by John Nevil Maskelyne. Courtesy The Magic Circle Library. 64 representation at the beginning of the twentieth century, these miniature “movies” diminished the card-painter’s presence at the game table, thus curtailing card marking’s most representational, if not baroque, era. Card marking’s more recent époques have been characterized by the pursuit of even greater deceptive invisibility. Three earlier systems that employed quasiabstract methods have passed into gambling folklore. “Sunning the deck” involved marking high-ranking cards by leaving them in harsh sunlight to yellow slightly, while the simple process of spilling water on selected cards during play (producing extremely faint drying marks) had the additional advantage of a credible alibi if discovered. “Ironing the deck” involved just that—using sufficient heat to dull the varnish luster of selected cards. But if these methods tend toward the mundane, then some variations in the last quarter of the twentieth century have compensated with a distinctly otherworldly character. “Luminous readers” are cards treated in such a way that pale green ink traces become clearly visible when viewed through red-filtered spectacles or contact lenses. The technology caused alarm upon its discovery but, due to its limited effectiveness and its reliance upon somewhat vampiric eye adornment, has remained more of a popular novelty than a serious subterfuge.11 “Juiced cards,” on the other hand, do not need lens-based viewing, instead requiring the reader to defocus his or her eyes and spot liminal fluid-residue marks on an opponent’s distant cards (juiced cards are also known as “distance readers”). To many players, juicing, and its recent high-tech offshoot, “video juicing,” are the most effective real-world card-marking system available, and the considerable price of the closely guarded fluid recipe and application technique reflects this growing reputation. With the advent of online gambling, card marking’s passage into abstraction was complete: a digital deck cannot be marked. Or can it? The software that has replaced the physical playing card has turned out to be as vulnerable as its material antecedent. When mathematically minded players on the UltimateBet gaming site noticed in early 2008 that account holders such as the now infamous “NioNio” were winning hands at rates sometimes ten times beyond standard deviation, the owners of the site were forced to concede that some players did enjoy an unfair advantage secured through “unauthorized software code that allowed the perpetrators to obtain hole card information [the identity of face-down cards] during live play.”12 In a scandal that continues to shock the online gambling community through its wide-ranging network of suspected collusion, it has emerged that the software in question was designed several years previously through a consultation process with high-ranking professional players whose expertise was sought in order to develop online gambling sites that were “true to the game.”13 1 This book was originally published in 1902 under the title Artifice, Ruse, and Subterfuge at the Card Table: A Treatise on the Science and Art of Manipulating Cards. The original binding bore the title “The Expert at the Card Table,” by which the book is now commonly known. 2 Reversed, S. W. Erdnase spells E. S. Andrews, a realization that has triggered a number of countering claims upon Erdnase’s true identity. Martin Gardner, David Alexander, and Richard Hatch have made cases for the following identities, respectively: Milton Franklin Andrews, Wilbur Edgerton Sanders (W.E. Sanders is an anagram of S. W. Erdnase), and Edwin Summer Andrews. The literal German translation of erdnase is “earth-nose,” which some have seen as significant. Most controversy, however, focuses on the erudite literary style of the book, which contrasts with the levels of literacy more common among cardsharps of the era and has led to suggestions that a ghostwriter was involved. The Expert at the Card Table was central to A Man in a Room Gambling (1997), a sequence of five-minute texts with music by composer Gavin Bryars and artist Juan Muñoz. 3 Vanni Bossi, “Commentary on Galasso’s Giochi di carte…e di memoria,” in Gibecière, vol. 2, no. 2 (Summer 2007), p. 166, translation of Galasso from Italian by Lori Pieper. The title of Galasso’s book, published in Venice in 1593, translates as “Most Beautiful Card Games Based on Rules and Techniques of Memory.” Bossi speculated that punchworked playing cards might have played a part in the evolution of Braille. Following this speculative line, one might ask whether Charles Barbier de la Serre (a key figure in Braille’s history) encountered a pricked deck amongst his fellow soldiers during the Napoleonic Wars, leading him to develop his dot-and-dash-based “night writing.” The latter was a Braillelike script designed to prevent soldiers from rendering themselves vulnerable to opportunistic gunfire as they used lamplight to read tactical missives. Magician, writer, and historian Vanni Bossi, who contributed personally to the evolution of this article, died in December 2008 and will be greatly missed. 65 4 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, Card-Sharping Exposed (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1890). The use of the term “greek” to describe a card-sharp may have its origins in stories of a renowned and highly successful Greek card cheat, Theodoros Apoulos, active during the reign of Louis XIV. The more longstanding prejudicial labeling of a deceitful person as a “greek” may also reflect Schistic animosity between the Orthodox eastern Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic western Empires. 5 See Sydney W. Clarke, The Annals of Conjuring, edited by Edwin A. Dawes and Todd Karr in collaboration with Bob Read (New York: The Miracle Factory, 2001). 6 The paper wrapping in which the deck was delivered to Hoffmann was signed “To Monsier J A Louis Advocat,” an ironic reference to Hoffmann’s professional status as a lawyer. Hoffmann’s real name was Angelo John Lewis (1839–1919). 7 An early account of card marking can be found in Gilbert Walker’s A Manifest Detection of the Most Vyle and Detestable Use of Dice Play from 1552: “Lo is there much discept in it, some play upon the pricke, some pinch the cards privily with their nayls, some turne up the corners, some mark them with fine spots of inke.” And the uncredited Hocus Pocus Junior–The Anatomy of Legerdemain from 1654 states: “Moreover for the Cards there are divers other tricks, of which those that are cheaters make continual practice, as nipping them, turning up one corner, marking them with little spots, placing glasses behind those that are gamesters, and in rings for the purpose, dumb shows of some standers by.” 8 Card marking’s vast and fugitive lexicon signals an educative endeavor among a community united in secrecy. Other terms include “block-out work,” “edgework,” “humping,” “white-on-white,” “sandwork,” and “crimping,” to name just a few. Frank Garcia, author of Marked Cards and Loaded Dice, uses the terms “chemists and cosmeticians” since some techniques use mildly odorous materials. A term in current use online is “inking.” 9 While individual examples exist of decks marked during manufacture and distributed to gambling houses, there is a recurring grand conspiracy theory that all cards are marked in production, thus “revealing” a pan-global conspiracy between card manufacturers, gambling companies, card-sharps, and financial institutions. 10 John Nevil Maskelyne, Sharps and Flats: A Complete Revelation of the Secrets of Cheating (London: Longmans Green, 1894), p. 25. In contrast to the permanent deceptions (from the Latin verb decipere, to ensnare or cheat) of the card-sharping “painter,” the theatrical magician employs the same methodology to different aesthetic ends by instigating an essentially ludic encounter with the audience (illusion, from the Latin verb ludere, to play). For the magician, like the artist, deception remains in the service of the production of the conditions of propositional illusion. 11 In February 1961, the New York State Commission of Investigation reported on syndicated gambling in the state, and revealed a growing market in luminous card reading accessories such as “New Improved Triple Curved Contact Lenses.” See Frank Garcia, Marked Cards and Loaded Dice (New York: Bramhall House, 1962). 12 Mike Brunker, “Poker site cheating plot a high-stakes whodunit,” <msnbc. msn.com/id/26563848/>. Accessed 18 September 2008. 13 Max Drayman, “UltimateBet Online Poker Interview,” <winneronline.com/ interviews/ultimatebet.htm>. Accessed 9 February 2009. In the interview, the spokeswoman for ieLogic, the software developers of UltimateBet, boasted that “UltimateBet is lucky to have so many world poker champions choose to be a part of our project. ... [They] have helped us develop a site that is true to the game.” The Golden Lasso Ken Alder Wonder Woman was born fully armed, like Athena, out of the head of a man. But even though William Moulton Marston gave birth to Wonder Woman in an instant—on a dare, really—he armed her with attributes drawn from his lifelong experience. Throughout his hop-scotch career—as a dissident psychologist, frustrated lawyer, movie-tester, advertiser, novelist, advice columnist, and comic book author—Marston toyed with America’s penchant for self-deception. The nation, in his diagnosis, suffered less from cognitive dissonance than from an emotional disconnect. But in 1941, with the nation about to engage a power-mad foe, Americans would have to submit to proper emotional guidance if they wished to remain free. Marston created Wonder Woman, with her golden lasso and sexual allure, to compel our loving submission. Twenty years earlier, while still a Harvard undergrad, Marston had hit on the novel idea of ascertaining a subject’s honesty by measuring his or her blood pressure, on the theory—suggested by his wife-to-be—that the accompanying emotional duress would be revealed by the heart. It was the first lie detector, and became Marston’s all-purpose gauge of emotional truthfulness. Marston and his wife were collaborating on his doctoral research when they made the further discovery that subjects responded differently to his questions than to hers. He followed up on this insight at Tufts University, where, with the aid of a student named Olive Byrne, he tested sorority sisters during a hazing ritual in which sophomores compelled first-years to dress in baby clothes and obey frivolous commands. The ritual, he noted, gave intense pleasure to both master and slave, despite assertions to the contrary. Marston’s conclusion: most people wish to submit to a superior power, and women are the superior sex because they willingly submit to love. He publicly predicted that within a hundred years “the country will see the beginning of a sort of Amazonian matriarchy.” And he preached this message in every conceivable medium—while seeking to make the media themselves more emotionally authentic. Marston worked for Universal Studios, monitoring the audience’s physiological responses to films, which were then edited to calibrate their emotional pitch. He labored on Madison Avenue, testing ads and vouching for products. He preached emotional honesty in women’s magazines and in his clinical practice, where he used his lie detector to free men and women from “twists, repression and emotional conflicts.” By 66 then, Olive Byrne had joined Marston and his wife in a ménage à trois. It was by all accounts a harmonious arrangement, with each woman bearing two of Marston’s children. Then, in 1939, Charles Gaines, the publisher of such titles as Superman, co-opted Marston (a sometime critic of the comics) onto his board at All-American Publications. Once inside, Marston boasted that he could create the first female superhero. The editors were dismissive, but Gaines gave him a year. In February 1941, he delivered the first script for “Suprema, the Wonder Woman.” Marston called her golden lasso, which draws out the truth, a symbol of “woman’s love charm and allure with which she compels men and women to do her bidding.” The Amazonian bracelets symbolize her submission to the Goddess Aphrodite: she can use them to deflect bullets, but loses her strength if a man attaches chains to them. (Apparently Olive Byrne favored bracelets of this sort.) In early issues, Marston set Wonder Woman’s cheeky sexiness against the sexual power-worship of Nazis and Japanese militarists. He also highlighted America’s relatively positive attitudes toward women, without neglecting their struggle for equality at home. In the panel opposite, Wonder Woman battles the fiendish Doctor Psycho, a stunted, misogynistic psychologist who has become a showman-prestidigitator in the mold of Thomas Mann’s “Mario the Magician,” deploying America’s most trusted icons to convince the nation that women are undermining the war effort. The plot warns us to mistrust appearances, and that freedom lies in the submission to benign authority. Psycho, using his hypnotic powers, has compelled his former fiancée Marva to marry him. He then enslaves her as his psychic medium, enabling him to assume any bodily form he desires. Initially, he becomes Mussolini, but soon conjures up George Washington himself. By tricking the female workers at the munitions factory into hiding secret documents in their undergarments, Psycho wins the trust of Wonder Woman’s boyfriend Steve, whom he then ensnares and impersonates in order to lure Wonder Woman into his trap. She too is bound, and it is only thanks to the intervention of her sorority sidekicks that she is able to liberate herself, her boyfriend, and Marva, whom she frees by interrogating her on a lie detector and then with her golden lasso. The episode ends with the sorority sisters chasing Psycho with a giant paddle. “Catch him kids, give him the Lambda Beta treatment!” Now there’s an all-American cure for liars and self-deceivers alike. Excerpt from “The Battle for Woman Kind,” Wonder Woman, no. 5, June/July 1943. 67 Deception as a Way of Knowing: A Conversation with Anthony Grafton D. Graham Burnett Anxiety about deception runs deep in the philosophical and religious traditions of Europe, and new techniques for mastering this fear mark episodes in the history of the modern world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, both the playfulness and the peril of deceit came to be distanced from the sphere of rational inquiry: the sciences ceased to have much use for legerdemain; metaphysicians lost interest in the theater. But it was not always so, as the conversation below with Anthony Grafton suggests. Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University and the author of a shelf of major works on the Renaissance, classical scholarship, and the history of science, including Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton University Press, 1990). D. Graham Burnett, editor at Cabinet and also professor of history at Princeton, sat down with Grafton to discuss his work on deception and forgery. Tony, let’s play name that tune. “We have also houses of deceits of the senses, where we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures, and illusions…” I have a feeling you’ll recognize this wonderfully strange passage from one of the hallucinogenic masterworks of the early modern period. I do indeed. In The New Atlantis, written around 1624, the English prosecutor-cum-epistemologist Francis Bacon dresses up his new theory of knowledge as a sensational travelogue, in which a shipload of Englishmen, having gone astray somewhere in the vast reaches of the southern Pacific, find themselves towed into the harbor of a mysterious island... And they discover a kind of utopia there, a community built around the continuous pursuit of power over nature. At the center of the life of the island is a huge quasireligious institution called Salomon’s House where a priestly caste of investigators pursue mastery of natural forces in a suite of dedicated laboratory-like spaces. Readers today are often amazed by how much Bacon seemed to foresee about the world of modern technoscience: genetic engineering, robotics, voice synthesis, and so on. But this passage, where the master of 69 Salomon’s House describes the “houses of deceit,” has long stuck out as something of a stumper. Why would a bunch of guys pursuing truth want to erect a deception laboratory? Yes, sometimes you are just reading along in an old book and wham, it’s like you sat on a cat! Something squirms up from under you. Something you were not expecting. Here is one of those moments. I want to talk with you today about this cat! I want to talk with you about deception as something like “a way of knowing.” The Bacon passage seems to suggest a world in which it was possible to think along these lines. Tony, you are a serious student of this problem: your remarkable book Forgers and Critics took up the changing relationship between deception and knowledge production in the Renaissance, and recast the history of learning as a kind of arms race between deceivers and un-deceivers—an arms race where the two sides shared many weapons in common, and where they gradually bootstrapped each other’s capacities. So let me put some questions to you: Has deception always been the simple enemy of veracity? Is it possible to imagine theories of knowledge in which illusion and deceit are understood as integral to the pursuit of truth? It’s a great problem. Not least because several of our most cherished stories about the origins of modernity involve techniques for revealing and transcending crucial deceptions. Take for instance the story of Lorenzo Valla and the Donation of Constantine. The Donation was an important ecclesiastical document, dear to the heart of late medieval popes, since it laid out the legal basis for papal authority over the whole of the Western part of the Roman Empire, which is to say, over Europe. The Donation basically tells the story of how the fourth-century emperor Constantine got a nasty case of leprosy, which the pope cured. The text goes on to explain that Constantine was so grateful that he gave him half the known world and then buggered off to Constantinople, never to return. Voilà, the Catholic Church is in charge forever… Bingo. But, as you know, it didn’t quite work out that way. In the early fifteenth century, an exceedingly learned Latinist, Lorenzo Valla, rolled up his philological opposite: Hans Franck, Hexen, 1515. sleeves and red-penciled a copy of the Donation. “Wait a second,” he says, “this doesn’t look to me like the kind of Latin they were writing in the fourth century!” And he amasses this magnificent demonstration that the Donation could not have been written when its author claimed. They just didn’t use the language of the document in those days. Now, people had argued about this text since forever, but everyone before Valla had basically been preoccupied by its juridical elements (as in, exactly what implications did it have for the proper relationship between emperors and popes, etc., etc.). Valla bracketed those thorny legal questions and went after the document in a different way. He went after it historically. Yes, philologically. And to do that, you really have to have a very deep sense of how language works, to be sure, but you also need to have an equally deep sense of how time works; you need to understand that a given period has a style in everything that it does, from plumbing to personal relations, and that any product of the period has to show the traits of that period and style. You have to understand the distance between now and then. Exactly. G. K. Chesterton has a wonderful explanation of this. His Father Brown says, “Tell me the devil is sitting in the belfry of the church next door howling hava nagila, and I’ll say, could be, might not be. But tell me that Gladstone walked into Buckingham Palace, slapped Queen Victoria on the back, said ‘Hi Vicky!’ and lit a cigar, and I’ll tell you, no, that could not have happened. In that time and place, it was impossible.” And that’s an insight, one that we like to think of as fundamental to modernity: it has been presented as nothing less than the “discovery of the past.” Yes. The insight is itself a rupture, even as it is an insight about ruptures —it is the discovery of temporal discontinuity. That sense of rupture has been central to so many narratives of the origins of modernity. And various ruptures can be made to stack up in the mid-fifteenth century. Valla’s revelation—that we live at a fixed distance from the past—bears a striking resemblance to the realization of his contemporaries, those first modern painters, who deployed linear perspective to show that we live at a fixed distance from objects. Just as we take our stand and we see the object in the 70 world as it really is, we take our stand and we see the past as it really is; we can identify a bad perspective construction or a bad historical construction. This analogy between philology and the visual arts—between the sense of history and the sense of perspective—was formulated by Erwin Panofsky in the middle of the twentieth century in a set of books and articles that shaped me as a young scholar. Odd then that you did so much to muddy these waters in your own work. Or maybe not! Yes, it is true that I loved these heroic narratives of the break to modernity. And as something of a philologist myself, how could I not love a script that gave the philologists the star role? But the deeper I dug into the classical tradition, the less satisfying the whole thing started to feel. Look at book six of the Aeneid, for example, where Virgil sets up the contrast between the Rome that isn’t there yet for Aeneas (he himself is going to set the foundation stone, of course) and the glorious Rome of Virgil’s own time. I mean, you can hardly argue that there is anything but an acute sense of historical distance here. And it became clear to me, as I taught in courses with classicists and learned their ways of reading, that my Renaissance humanists did not really invent a new sense of history; they found a new sense of history in the very ancient texts that they applied it to. And they found new tools for understanding the past in those texts as well. Take Valla himself. He was a distinguished student of ancient rhetoric, and this gave him a powerful technology for thinking about history, since the basic exercise of the rhetorician is to help an orator give a speech. But that speech has to fit a time, a place, a persona, an audience. How did one practice and teach rhetoric? You gave an assignment: “For Wednesday, prepare the speech that Alcibiades should have given to avoid being exiled during the Peloponnesian war.” You can see very quickly that this sort of thing is a perfect school for historicist thinking! And for forgery, as it happens. Quite right. When I sat down to write Forgers and Critics, what I wanted to do was think my way through the long tradition of reasoning about the coherence and character of the past, but I ultimately came to a slightly disturbing conclusion: forgery was deeply rooted in this tradition, as deeply rooted as ways of thinking about the past that we might now call historical or philological. After all, that notion of the integrity of an historical Scene from the fresco cycle of the Donation of Constantine, thirteenth century, artist unknown. Basilica of the Quattro Santi Coronati, Rome. epoch—that sense of what is possible and impossible in a given period—is literary as much as it is historical. Critics like Valla could spot inconsistencies, but in many cases it was the forgers who took on the most ambitious projects of historical recovery. They were the ones who were trying to make the past live again, to animate, to resurrect the lost worlds. They had to steep themselves in these worlds enough that they could actually inhabit them creatively. The most radical version of this claim is fantastic: the forgers are the first real historians, since it is they who genuinely want to bring the past to life! Yes, and in many cases there is a sense that these sorts of forgeries are not an effort to falsify the past, but in fact to rescue it. The truly passionate historical forger of the Renaissance was often saying something like, “I really 71 know what was going on back then. I know how this tradition in antiquity worked. I know what the record ought to show, and if it’s not there in our crappy manuscripts, well then, dammit, I’m going to put it there!” Right, and in doing so, I am just going to be doing justice to the past (and to my knowledge of it), using these techniques that we all share in order to create something worthy of being a part of the historical tradition—even though it doesn’t actually happen to be in the record that we have! And this sets up a kind of dialectic, a game of cops and robbers. Some philologists are busy tuning up their skills in order to sort out the genuine wheat from the forgers’ chaff, and others are tuning up their skills at making chaff pass as wheat! And plenty of guys, like Erasmus, played both ways, depending on the situation. I started off my research with the cops like Valla as my heroes, but you know how it goes: the robbers are always a little more fun, and by the time I finished writing the book, they had sort of won my heart. It is such a remarkable idea. I can’t resist pushing it. Go back to Valla and the Donation of Constantine again for a moment. If from him we inherit the story of a kind of Apollonian modernity, a modernity that knows about boundaries, then perhaps from the forgers we can construct a story of Dionysian modernity—a modernity that wants to enter the dance, sing the song, be consumed by its object. If the former is what we call history, the latter might come down to us as ethnography. The latter has always made people more nervous. Ventriloquizing the dead is a touchy business. Take the great example of the historical Faust. Not Goethe’s Faust, but the actual German conjurer and itinerant magician of that name who studied at the University of Heidelberg and wandered around the inns and towns of central Germany in the 1530s. There is a story that when he was teaching temporarily at Erfurt, he stood up at a school banquet and offered to bring back the lost Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence. What fun, right? Nope. Apparently the faculty got up in arms about the proposition. Why? They feared that the Devil might well have interpolated all kinds of horrible, scary, dangerous things into those texts, and that if Faust brought them back to life, he’d be revivifying these satanic elements. That’s crazy! Well, it shows that the idea is out there: the humanists are resurrectionists of a sort, and the issue of deception is never far away when one is talking about textual recovery. This isn’t about garden-variety forgery and deception, either. Here we catch a glimpse of the Deceiver-witha-capital-D: the actual Devil. The story suggests that what is dead or lost is subject to diabolical power in a very particular way. Absolutely. You can’t forget that every baby in this period was exorcized as part of the baptismal ritual, because it was assumed that every baby came into the world in the power of the Devil. And there was a general sense 72 that nearly all the dead not actually in hell were lodged in purgatory, where they remained subject to dark powers. This certainly puts the idea of resurrection in a very different light. It raises the stakes a great deal if bringing things up from the dead can mean serving as a midwife for demonic agents. You bet. And this sort of thing quickly brings to the fore some very disturbing questions about the Bible itself. After all, the “Old Testament” was basically lost during the exile, and then, according to Ezra and Nehemiah, it was really kind of written again (by Ezra) once the Jews were restored to the land of Israel and rebuilt the Temple. Now, you can read those passages as saying something like, “There were these old scrolls kicking around, and Ezra sat down and did a bit of copywork, and maybe a little editing.” Or you can interpret them as saying, “This guy named Ezra sat down, rubbed his neck, and wrote out the Old Testament.” If you go with the latter, then it isn’t all that big a leap to claim that, in a way, Ezra himself was a kind of forger. The historical Faust said as much. Eeegaads! That’s terrifying. And in an age of panEuropean confessional conflict too. Stuff like this worried the Catholics a lot less than their new Protestant brethren. The Catholics never put too much stock in the Bible per se, since what mattered was the magisterium of the church, the tradition of the teachings of the church fathers, and so on. But for the Protestants, who wanted to put the biblical text at the center of a life of conscience, the idea that diabolical forces might have insinuated themselves into the very heart of Revelation was an exceedingly troublesome notion. If one couldn’t trust Scripture, then what could one trust? That sort of paranoia makes me think of the other great deceiver that looms over early modern theories of knowledge: Descartes’s “Evil Deceiver” of the Meditations. If ever the idea of deception played a critical role in epistemology it was here, since Descartes set to the task of regrounding philosophical inquiry precisely by imagining that some sort of evil genie had insinuated itself into the core of his being. Descartes wants to know if it is possible to establish anything as “true” if we consider a worst-case scenario: a Mephistophelean Wizard of Oz who orchestrates the theater of our sensory life, a demon who can conjure everything that seems to us to be reality—what we see, what we touch, what we hear, all of it might be a diabolical puppet show. How would we know? Does the very possibility of certainty wither in the face of this hypothetical? Descartes thinks that the only kind of knowledge we could feel confident about would be knowledge that could face down this nightmare possibility. It is a very odd way to think about thinking. But is it? On the contrary, Descartes’s idea was in the air all around him in the early seventeenth century. It is we modern readers who are really deceived. We read Descartes, we read Galileo, and we think, “This guy’s really one of us. He’s a modern.” I mean we can imagine having a conversation with Descartes in a way that we probably can’t imagine having a conversation with, say, a rather overzealous chap like Martin Luther. There is only a century between them, but Descartes feels much more like our contemporary. But don’t fool yourself! Descartes’s Evil Deceiver isn’t a philosophical heuristic, it’s the basic anxiety of a late fifteenth-century Dominican! Right! There is a one hundred percent, bona fide Evil Deceiver around every corner. You bet. Descartes’s “hyperbolic doubt,” his histrionic concern about deception, is the standard operating procedure of Descartes’s theological contemporary: the witch-finder. From the late Middle Ages—and more and more intensely from the late fifteenth century on— Christian theologians had elaborated the doctrine that the world is permeated by the work of the Devil and that the Devil recruits human help from witches. Now there had been conjurers and “cunning” men and women in every village since forever. These were the folks who could do your simple kinds of magic: charming off warts, telling you who stole your cow, finding your lost colander—that sort of thing. Some of them probably did rather darker things, or claimed they could do rather darker things, but all of this was seen in the early Middle Ages as relatively minor business. Starting in the fourteenth century, though, a doctrine is elaborated that any kind of conjuring or divination—basically any effort to manipulate the universe—is the work of people who are in league with Satan against humanity. And they lurk in every village. That’s exactly the trouble. They are everywhere, but now their work is understood in a newly expansive and 73 frightening way. From the pulpit you hear that these people are always looking to stir up trouble. Their job is to call down a hailstorm to destroy the corn just as it ripens. Their job is to take a newborn baby and say an incantation over it and condemn it to death, or condemn it to possession by an evil spirit. So the whole human race is actually divided, and the Devil has his agents among us everywhere, working mayhem and recruiting new slaves to the army of evil. These agents look like human men and women, but they aren’t. Their bodies are made of tightly packed, compacted air, which feels rather like cotton when you push on it; they have an imitation voice-box which enables them to make the sound of speech, though they don’t have the internal organs that make speech possible in humans. They can, in the form of women-like succubi, receive the semen of men, and then turn themselves into incubi, male demons, and deposit that semen into sleeping human females, having infected it with an evil spirit, so that the child that comes forth will be possessed. I am kindling a large fire here for all these Satanists… You and a fair number of early modern prosecutors. These folks, with their great witch-finding handbook, the Malleus Malificarum, exterminated some 50,000 to 70,000 victims in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It’s a pretty extraordinary number. Suffice it to say that this was a universe in which the Devil was pervasive, omnipresent, and continuously working to deceive us. You never know whether the person you are talking to is your friend Graham or Amalek pretending to be Graham. Reading Descartes against this social history of demonology is wonderfully disorienting. Suddenly it becomes clear that Descartes is taking a basic problem of civil and religious administration and turning it into the point of departure for a new theory of knowledge. He takes that pervasive anxiety of early modern village life—which is that I don’t know whether you’re Anthony Grafton or a giant airball speaking Mephistophelean parrot talk—and he sublimes it, pushing it deeper even as he makes it more abstract. What is strangest, perhaps, is that he tries to solve the problem on a radically new plane. After all, we peasants from Languedoc have a basic repertoire for overleaf: Leaves from an almanac of black magic, 1896, author unknown, from the collection of the French exorcist Pater Avril, who practiced in Bordeaux. The text, an artifact of more modern transactions with the occult, contains invocations for the conjuring of demons. 74 75 dealing with the giant airball problem: we can cross ourselves, sprinkle a little holy water, mumble paternosters, wave a crucifix around. These are practical techniques for escaping from the Deceiver. Descartes refuses all help. He goes into a small overheated room and thinks his way down to a claim he can make regardless of all impostures: cogito, ergo sum. And then he starts to claw his way back up, working from this toehold, restoring God, the world as we know it, and finally the adequacy of our minds as instruments for knowledge of that world. Why did the old techniques no longer seem reliable? Why not go into that small overheated room waving a crucifix? Well, those prosecutors were waving crucifixes as they lit the pyres. For a certain line of humanists, that technique had been compromised by the early seventeenth century. Montaigne and other anti-absolutist philosophers with the tools of ancient skepticism at their disposal had found their own ways to resist the world-view of the witch-finder. But their tactics were a little more ad hoc, a little more case by case. They asked questions about evidence: “Hmmm, we are torturing witnesses here, and getting accusations that violate all common sense—that people are flying, that they are eating babies. I’m skeptical.” Montaigne more or less says, “I just think it’s giving my conjectures too high a value to burn old ladies for them.” But this is not much of a philosophical position. It makes the whole thing into something like a matter of taste. Descartes wants more. He wants a way out of that whole universe, and it is this that makes him feel like a new kind of person. The fear of pervasive diabolical deception can be put behind us. It’s not just that, with Montaigne, we wrinkle our noses; it’s rather that, with Descartes, the whole thing is an error. One is still left with sort of a funny conclusion, though. If we put Descartes at the end of the sixteenth century, rather than at the beginning of the seventeenth, we’re left with something like “the birth of modern philosophy” as the product of a gigantomachy—an actual giant-slaying, something like single combat with the great Deceiver. This doesn’t look like the birth of modernity; it looks like a scene from Highlander! Or better, The Matrix! Which raises a serious question: Who actually won? After all, many contemporary philosophers find Descartes’s arguments wholly unsatisfactory. Indeed, by our standards it does look rather like he “waved a crucifix at the problem,” if you like, since he 76 gets to a proof for God in a hustle after the cogito, and that loving God then does a good deal of work for him as he goes about constructing a new theory of knowledge. It’s funny, but I never really thought of Descartes’s Evil Deceiver and Bacon’s “houses of deceits of the senses” in parallel, but they are almost exactly contemporary efforts to lodge the problem of deception at the heart of a new theory of knowledge. Yes, though they are structured rather differently: one you go visit, the other you try to escape! Where did they go? What happened to these ways of thinking about deception as the helpmate of truth? Maybe they didn’t go anywhere: the Cartesian project is psychologized and becomes Freud; the Baconian project is commercialized and becomes cinema, right? Artist project: MEANWHILE IN NIGERIA… Julieta Aranda promises of poor people, by money that never existed in the first place. The circulation of the counterfeit money can engender, even for a “ little speculator,” the real interest of a true wealth. Counterfeit money can become true capital. Is not the truth of capital, then, inasmuch as it produces interest without labor, by working all by itself as we say, counterfeit money? Is there a real difference here between real and counterfeit money once there is capital? And credit? Everything depends on the act of faith and the credit we were talking about. — Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money Meanwhile in Nigeria …. Somewhere in America … What we all know: since the stock market was turned into a “free zone” in the 1990s, the effects of the changes that occurred in the financial system in the 1970s have been massively amplified. There has been no gold standard in operation in the world since 1971, and almost every country now operates under the system of “fiat money,” defined as “money that is intrinsically useless” and used only as “a medium of exchange.” No treasury vault anywhere can back up the money currently in circulation; money is now structured as credit. Credit in turn is the generation of a debt and the promise that said debt will be paid—the promise that there will be money. The deregulation of the banking system in the 1990s made it possible to trade on these promises of money as if they were money, and eventually they became money. This was essentially an act of trust between both parties in the transaction. Some of the most enthusiastic recent debtors to join this cycle of promises were first-time home-owners —mostly low-income families and racial minorities trying to climb their way into the middle class by owning property. The exchange was one in which these first-time home-owners were “given” property after making an unrealistic promise of repayment, drafted in terms that included exponential interest rates hidden in the fine print. Due to these fine-print issues, the aforementioned promises of payment routinely remained unfulfilled in recent years. Countless first-time home-owners defaulted on their mortgage payments, while their “IOUs,” which had been repackaged and traded as good honest money by financial institutions worldwide, ultimately generated gaping deficits of immaterial wealth spread evenly among the global economy. And so it came to pass that the world’s financial system was brought to its knees by the unfulfilled 77 Mrs. Miriam Abacha has a problem. Ever since the death of her husband, her family has faced hostility, mostly from the present civilian government. Consequently her son, Mohammed Abacha, has been under torture in detention for a sin he did not commit, and has had to make a lot of confessions regarding the valuables that her late husband entrusted in his hand for safekeeping at the untimely hour of his death. Now she desperately needs help to manage the 600 millions of dollars that the late Mr. Abacha left after his passing. And she is hardly alone in her predicament. There is also Mrs. Margaret Muteta, who managed to escape Zimbabwe after a brutal assault on her family by the forces of president Mugabe. Her husband died, and several murder attempts were made on her life, but she was lucky enough to find her way out of Zimbabwe, with her children and with the large sum of cash monies that he inherited her. Rebels, dethroned kings, ousted heads of state, cancer-stricken widows—all are willing to hand over their riches. This source of wealth has been overlooked, but when added up, the amount of African money tied up as a result of these unfortunate circumstances is upwards of 10 trillion dollars, which, according to some estimates, is approximately the entire amount lost in the current financial crisis. So, in the spirit of international cooperation, I offer here a guide to sources of money available to help resolve the current financial debacle. Feel free to contact [email protected] for more details! ••• The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. —Vladimir Lenin 0001 Mr. Ahmad Yousef, South Africa Benin plane crash, 2003 $ 50,000,000.00 0085 Mr. Paul Chan, Hong Kong Urgent business proposal $ 0003 Mr. Reda Abdallah, Burkina-Faso Plane crash disaster $ 29,200,000.00 0087 MR. DANLAMI USMAN, Burkina Faso My client died in the Iraq war $ 0002 0004 0005 0006 0007 0008 0009 0010 0011 0012 0013 0014 0015 0016 0017 0018 0019 0020 0021 0022 0023 0024 0025 0026 0027 0028 0029 0030 0031 0032 0033 0034 0035 0036 0037 0038 0039 0040 0041 0042 0043 0044 0045 0046 0047 0048 0049 0050 0051 0052 0053 0054 0055 0056 0057 0058 0059 0060 0061 0062 0063 0064 0065 0066 0067 0068 0069 0070 0071 0072 0073 0074 0075 0076 0077 0078 0079 0080 0081 0082 0083 0084 Mr. P. Lee, Hong Kong Mr. Jack Binnenhof Mr. David Berman Mr. Felix Henk BARRISTER TEDDY WILLIAMS Mr. Mike Rodger, South Africa Mr. NELSON UDO Mrs. Kim Abbott Miss Ima Eyene, Ivory Coast Mrs. Rose Wood Mrs. Elisa Elena Palumbo, Venezuela Mrs. Joy Brown, Netherlands Mr. Mou Xinsheng, China Mr. Martin Mase, UK Mr. Rich Orgaranya, Abidjan Mr. Henk Wolter Mr. Walter Taylor, Liberia Mr. Song Lile, Hong Kong Mrs Margaret Muteta, Zimbawe Mrs. Rose Moore, Nigeria Mr. Simon Yi, Hong Kong Mr. ABUDU IDRISA, Burkina Faso Barrister Tony Brown, Accra-Ghana Mr. UMAR HASSAN, Burkina Faso Sgt. Robert Green, Iraq Miss Flora Toure, Sierra Leone Mr. Marco van Vossen Mr. Ejner Andersen Mr. Michael Anderson, Netherlands Mrs. Amanda Amos Jacob, Ivory Coast Mr. Chan Lee, Hong Kong Mr. Fredrick Eager Mr. David Gant Mr. Samuel Thanong, Hong kong BRUNIOR DUNKWU, Burkina Faso Mr. Blessing Ade, Benin Mr. Naut Klasse Mr. Douglas Blair, London Mr. Peter Mageza, Kenya Mr. MUSTAFA HASAN, Burkina Faso Mrs. Mary Jane Kalo, Sierra Leone Mr. Ballack Morrison Mr. Frank Balogun, Nigeria Mrs. Susan fernando, Kuwait Mr. Densmore Stewart Mr. HE Guangbei, Hong Kong Mr. Jung Li, China Mr. Patrick Chan, Hong Kong Miss LINDA SAKA, Kumasi Ghana Mr. Peter Lee, Hong Kong Mrs. irena versloot Mr. GEORGE PETERS Mr. Ubi Daniels, Benin republic Mr. Divine Jajar, Burkina Faso Mr. Anthony Aka, Accra-Ghana Barrister Jean Lawson, Togo Mr. Fred Yengeni, Zimbabwe Mr. Luke Shaw Martina Franzov Mrs. Yvonne Zwanette Mr. Amed Usman, Burkina Faso Mr. Ejner Andersen, South Africa Mr. Eken Brown Aku, FBI Nigeria Mr. Azi Kama, Burkina Faso Mr. Santos Da Silva Mendes, London Mr. Boateng Berko, Ghana Mr. Tony COBBS Mr. Siu Kwan Cheung, China Mrs. Agnes Jonas Savimbi, Angola Sir Lord Davies ROBERT S. MUELLER III, FBI Mr. Koh Siong Kian, Malaysia Mr. JAMES MORGAN, Abidjan Miss Veronica Las, Ivory Coast Dr. S.K Williams, UN rep in Nigeria Mr. GEORGE MEYERS Fernando Alvaro Gomez, Paraguay Mr. Hazel Tobassi Mr. Nicolas Kadiogo, Burkina Faso MRS AGNES ADAMS, Liberia Mr. Gerald Zongo, Burkina Faso Mrs. Irena Morris, Amsterdam December 2004 Asia Tsunami disaster NETHERLANDS LOTTO NETHERLANDS LOTTO NETHERLANDS LOTTO Jürge Krügge’s will Plane crash in Kenya Cashed the check Long time cancer of the breast Refugee, father killed by congolese rebels NOKIA NATIONAL BONANZA Oesophageal Cancer Long time cancer of the lungs Kick backs from smugglers Funds abandoned in bank since 2004 Money my late father left for me You are a lucky winner! Brother to the former president Business proposition Death of my husband, Mr King Muteta Mr. John Wheeler says you are dead People have made tidy sums out of this Abandoned funds Client died in gas explosion Client died in plane crash Oil money to be moved out of country Money left by dead father NETHERLANDS LOTTO Richard Williams died in car crash Eng. Gilbert M. Reain died in plane crash Cancer of the liver and stroke Business Proposal AWARD WINNING NOTICE CONGRATULATIONS!!! Depository made by a foreign investor CUSTOMER DIED ON A PLANE Compensation fund only in your favour Eng. Gilbert M. Reain died in plane crash Oil magnet left behind unclaimed funds Dr. George Brumley died in air crash BUSINESS PROPOSAL Husband lost his life when he went to Bouake Client shares your surname Over-invoiced oil contract Cancer problem NETHERLANDS LOTTO Iraqui client died in war Kick backs from business people Lucrative business proposal Father was poisoned to death 2004 Asia Tsunami disaster You are a Lucky Winner! Client killed during the Tsunami disaster Assistant to a politician who is in court Offer to transfer funds as next of kin Fund has been stashed out of excess profit Unclaimed inheritance deposit Problems going on in our country NETHERLANDS LOTTO NETHERLANDS LOTTO NETHERLANDS LOTTO Account that is presently dormant Sole surviving relative of an investor You had an illegal transaction with Impostors I came across some amount of money I didn’t forget your past efforts Foreign customer of my bank who perished Lucky Winner! Looking for an experienced business person This money was from Gold & Diamonds Lucky Winner! Bank has released your part of inheritance A client of mine died of a heart condition My father was assassinated by the rebels Toxic Waste dump deaths Scam compensation AUSTRALIA LOTTO LOTTERY INC In appreciation of your earlier assistance Floating fund in an account Mr. Robert Rice died on a plane crash We suffered maltreatment and hardship I need your urgent assistance I am a dying woman $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ 25,000,000.00 5,000,000.00 5,000,000.00 5,000,000.00 60,200,000.00 29,400,000.00 5,000,000.00 37,600,000.00 9,000,000.00 2,000,000.00 31,000,000.00 20,000,000.00 60,000,000.00 200,000,000.00 30,000,000.00 5,000,000.00 $ 130,000,000.00 $ 400,000,000.00 $ 89,000,000.00 $ $ $ $ 49,000,000.00 10,000,000.00 30,600,000.00 8,000,000.00 $ 21,000,000.00 $ 9,000,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ 70,000,000.00 5,000,000.00 26,000,000.00 25,000,000.00 9,600,000.00 34,600,000.00 5,000,000.00 5,000,000.00 46,600,000.00 50,000,000.00 5,000,000.00 $ 25,000,000.00 $ 29,200,000.00 $ $ $ 45,000,000.00 21,000,000.00 21,000,000.00 $ 240,000,000.00 $ 27,000,000.00 $ $ 338,000,000.00 4,000,000.00 $ 61,000,000.00 $ 290,000,000.00 $ 51,000,000.00 $ $ $ 30,000,000.00 22,200,000.00 4,000,000.00 $ 150,000,000.00 $ 11,000,000.00 $ $ 400,000,000.00 7,000,000.00 $ 37,000,000.00 $ 5,000,000.00 $ $ $ $ 27,462,000.00 5,000,000.00 5,000,000.00 31,000,000.00 $ 300,000,000.00 $ 28,000,000.00 $ 152,000,000.00 $ 60,000,000.00 $ 1,000,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ 1,600,000.00 1,900,000.00 5,000,000.00 51,530,000.00 5,000,000.00 $ 37,000,000.00 $ 53,200,000.00 $ $ $ $ 17,000,000.00 1,000,000.00 2,000,000.00 4,500,000.00 $ 75,000,000.00 $ 28,500,000.00 $ $ $ 41,100,000.00 76,400,000.00 1,710,000.00 $4,467,102,000.00 $0.00 $4,467,102,000.00 0086 0088 0089 0090 0091 0092 0093 0094 0095 0096 0097 0098 0099 0100 0101 0102 0103 0104 0105 0106 0107 0108 0109 0110 0111 0112 0113 0114 0115 0116 0117 0118 0119 0120 0121 0122 0123 0124 0125 0126 0127 0128 0129 0130 0131 0132 0133 0134 0135 0136 0137 0138 0139 0140 0141 0142 0143 0144 0145 0146 0147 0148 0149 0150 0151 0152 0153 0154 0155 0156 0157 0158 0159 0160 0161 0162 0163 0164 0165 0166 0167 0168 Mr. Mani Bako, Burkina Faso Mrs.Marita Zongu, Gabon Mr. YAKUBU DANJUMA, Burkina Left over funds from a dead client I have been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer Plane crash in Kenya DR YAYA MOHAMMED, West Afrique Russian oil dealer died in plane crash Mr. ANDREW OGUIKE AUSTRALIA LOTTO LOTTERY INC. Mr. Anthony Chedom I didn’t forget your past efforts Ibn Mohammed Mohammed, Caymans Mrs T. Groenwoud Mr. Ali Hadaf, U.A.E. DR. OSMAN SANI, Ms. Maria Bowmer Mr. Ahmad Karinm, Zimbabwe MADAWI ATASSI Mr. Max H. Adams, Spain Mr. Cheung Pui, Sai Wan Ho Mr. Vincent Cheng, Hong Kong David Nikos Philip, Greece MR.USMAN ABU, Burkina Faso BENARD KALU, Benin Mr. Karim Ahmed, Burkina Faso Mr. P. Chan Woo, Hong Kong Mr. Prince Kamal, Sierra Leone Mr. John Raylands, Netherlands Mrs. Lin Yongz, Hong Kong Mary Van Dotcha, Netherlands Ibrahim Zongo, Burkina Faso MR.ABDUL SAHID, Burkina Faso Dr. JOHN ZAKKY, Zimbabwe Dr. Christopher C. Marshall, UK Mrs KATE JOHNSON, Zimbabwe Mr. Royaume Mossi, Burkina Faso Mr.Williams Samora, Zimbabwe FERNADEZ MANTINEZ MR. Wang Qin, Hong Kong YURIY LAGUTIN, Russia Mr. Buba Jaap, Dakaar-Senegal Mrs. Estella Rogers Mr. SALIM IBRAHIM, Dubai Mr. Williams Mako, Zimbabwe Mr. Jubril Martins, Togo Mr. Anderson Solomon Mr. Micheal Utomy, Nigeria MR. LEU CHENG Mr. James Cross, Hong Kong Mrs. Suha ARAFAT, Palestine JOHNSON KHUMALO, South Africa Mrs. Hajia Mariam Abacha, Nigeria Dr. Stevenson Drut, Accra Ghana Mr. Fincka West, Liberia PRINCE MIKE KUMARA, Abidjan Meh Edwige Sonia, Ivory Coast MS. SANDRA MORGAN, Liberia (SGT 1ST CLASS) DANIEL VANESS Miss Nadine Kwame, Ivory Coast ZAKI ABDU, Burkina Faso WILFREDO STEELE, Burkina Faso ABUDULA LUKUMON, Burkina Faso Mr. Sani Danjuma, Cuba Morgan Coleman, Abidjan Mr. Fredrik Emerah, Burkina Faso DICKSON BEN, Burkina Faso Miss Mariam Hajiaasa, Nigeria MR. SUNNY SIMON, Burkina Faso Mrs. Ava Gomez Mrs. Emilo Sanchez Mrs. Marry Jones Mr. Connie Jones Mr. Timo Simmons Mr. John Walter, Sierra Leone Mr. Cole van Hans Mr. James Owusu, Ghana Princes Hassan and Marima, Liberia Mrs. joan nelson, west africa Mr. Tim Dogolea, Liberia Mr. Jonathan Ide, UK SR. CARL LOUIS Mr. Faradin Ahmad Mr. Kuiters A. Antonius Miss Lillian Doudou, Cote d’Ivoire Mrs. Marria Kuba, Benin Mlle. Veronique R. Guei, Abidjan Noelle Mbenga As at now I am seriously sick The gaming board (LOTTO.NL) Mr. Morris Thompson died SEEKING A FOREIGN PARTNER MICROSOFT-STAATS-LOTTERIJ-GROUP I discovered a floating fund Bank of Africa Business proposal which we never concluded Lucrative and motivating business proposal I have a transaction of mutual benefits I have only about a few months to live I HAVE A BUSINESS DEAL Instruct Mr. Sanchez where to deliver Plane crash in Benin I have an obscured business suggestion My father was killed by the rebels WINNING NOTIFICATION We shall come out successful. WINNING NOTIFICATION There is money left behind I DISCOVERED AN ABANDONED SUM Contact my secretary for your gratification I have been diagnosed with cancer I got your contact through Network I came across a very huge sum of money Father was killed for supporting white minority MEGALAND LOTTO INTERNATIONAL Mr. Richard Nault died without a will Sensitive information from top oligarch Concorde plane crash TRIPPLE WINS GAMES I have only about a few months to live We fled Zimbabwe for fear of our lives The late president of Togo, who died $ 13,800,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ Personal aide to our former president Father was poisoned to death My mother died during the coup d’etat I was secretary, wife and assistant to president Very desperate need for assistance Need for assistance CONFIDENTIAL IS THE CASE CONFIDENTIAL IS THE CASE CONFIDENTIAL IS THE CASE I will like you to advice me on a Business Father was poisoned in a cocktail party MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING I was seaching for a reliablie person Death of my husband, former head of state We discovered an abandoned sum Millennium Computer Game computer balloting sweepstake Surf Lottery Coordinator INTERNATIONAL INTERNET LOTTERY You are a Lucky Winner! Diamond monies have been sent to Ghana Lottery Award A transaction that will benefit you and I Father was buying arms in Russia and Libya Only 3 months to live, cancer problem Personal aide to Charles Taylor Funds have been delayed by dubious officials MICROSOFT WORLDWIDE AWARD Client died in plane crash in Bahrain Info-2008-Award Substantial capital which I inherited Widow to Late Mr. Sheik Kuba I need your urgent assistance You know much better than me 1,800,000.00 30,000,000.00 1,000,000.00 3,000,000.00 35,500,000.00 25,000,000.00 2,000,000.00 75,000,000.00 31,500,000.00 700,000.00 61,500,000.00 $ 13,500,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ 48,500,000.00 38,500,000.00 1,700,000.00 50,400,000.00 500,100,000.00 20,000,000.00 5,000,000.00 $ 43,500,000.00 $ 47,000,000.00 $ $ $ 8,000,000.00 65,000,000.00 3,000,000.00 $ 75,000,000.00 $ 16,000,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ 30,000,000.00 60,000,000.00 6,250,000.00 53,000,000.00 900,000,000.00 42,500,000.00 4,500,000.00 $ 70,000,000.00 $ 64,000,000.00 $ $ Century Sweepstakes Agency 49,500,000.00 $ Client died in Iraq war My son has been under torture for a sin 43,500,000.00 $ $ $ Over-invoiced Apartheid contracts 61,500,000.00 675,000,000.00 Personal assistance to Dr. Franklin Wood I have lost confidence with everybody 750,000,000.00 $ We experience difficulty remitting our proceeds $ We are searching for representatives $4,467,102,000.00 38,000,000.00 198,801.00 31,000,000.00 $ 660,000,000.00 $ 6,500,000,000.00 $ 700,000,000.00 $ 1,600,000,000.00 $ $ $ $ 75,000,000.00 20,500,000.00 12,000,000.00 330,000,000.00 3,200,390.00 $ 450,000,000.00 $ 24,000,000.00 $ $ $ $ 45,000,000.00 45,000,000.00 45,000,000.00 45,000,000.00 $ 200,000,000.00 $ 118,500,000.00 $ 132,600,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ 34,500,000.00 90,000,000.00 55,200,000.00 1,574,000.00 1,700,000.00 2,000,000,000.00 300,000,000.00 5,000,000.00 $ 24,000,000.00 $ 27,900,000.00 $ 6,000,000.00 $ 555,000,000.00 $ 600,000,000.00 $ 120,000,000.00 $ $ $ $ 16,500,000.00 2,400,000.00 27,000,000.00 1,500,000.00 $ 26,700,000.00 $ 19,500,000.00 $ $ 88,500,000.00 9,500,000.00 $19,113,223,191.00 $0.00 $23,580,325,191.00 0169 Ousman and Aisha Diouf Father was buying arms for the rebels $ 0171 Mr. Adrie Sulu Alaska Airlines plane crash $ 0170 0172 0173 0174 0175 0176 0177 0178 0179 0180 0181 0182 0183 0184 0185 0186 0187 0188 0189 0190 0191 0192 0193 0194 0195 0196 0197 0198 0199 0200 0201 0202 0203 0204 0205 0206 0207 0208 0209 0210 0211 0212 0213 0214 0215 0216 0217 0218 0219 0220 0221 0222 0223 0224 0225 0226 0227 0228 0229 0230 0231 0232 0233 0234 0235 0236 0237 0238 0239 0240 0241 0242 0243 0244 0245 0246 0247 0248 0249 0250 0251 0252 Mrs. Louisa Wilson, Burundi MR. ISLEM WAHEED, Burkina Faso Mr. Bob Sanko, Abidjan DR.HAMED YAMI, Burkina Faso Elizabeth Balma, Sierra Leone Dr. Graham Smith Miss Sandra Ken, Abidjan Mrs. Mariam Dominquez Barr. Paul Moore Simon Taylor, Dubai Mr. Hammad Ali, Ghana Johnson Nattah, Ivory Coast Mr. Lolly Stevens, Wales Mr. Ahmad T. Karinm Mr. Abdulsalam Saeed, Burkina Faso Mr. Jeff Masaba, South Africa HAGHY MUOS, Ouagadougou DR YACUBU ADAMS, Burkina Faso MR. WANG QIN, Hong Kong DR WILLIAM MOOND, West Africa Miss Doris Gugumbi, Liberia Mr. Natha Williams, Burkina Faso Ibrahim Mohammad Mrs. Zhu Yuning Mrs. Fatia Kumah, West Africa Graham Wallace, Jamaica Miss Rosemary Freepon, Sierra Leone Lind Patresons, we met at party Mr. Alex Mamadou, Ivory Coast John & Maria Rechard, Sierra Leone Mr. Phillip Amani Kapi, Abidjan Jonas Bah Jr, West Africa Miss Alh Mamanbelo, Abidjan Mr. Faroog Yousuf, Dubai Mr. Eric Issouf, Burkina Faso Li Zhawang, Kuala Lumpur RETIRED GRAL O.S. ODUYEMI Mr. Parrick K. Chan, Hong Kong Mr. Tong Loh Su, Hong Kong Mr. Ogbemudia Olonga, Zimbabwe Mr. Tongo Su, Hong Kong Mr. Jos William, Burkina Faso Mr. Zafar Habib Khan, U.A.E. Mrs. Jeniffer Doreona, Athens MR. SHERIF SAMBO, Ghana Mrs. Wells Iris, Hong Kong Mrs. Maria Lopez Amina Aliyu, Cote d’Ivoire MR SAWADOGO ALPHA, Burkina Dr. Abdul-Azeez Mustafa, Malasia Ms Helen Desmond Momoh, Sierra L. JANE OWENE, South Africa Mr. Antonio Dembo Jnr., Angola Mr. Mark Akume, Ghana Mrs. Zu Yuning, UN Lorita Candy, Botswana Mr. Malick Weyrah, Burkina Faso Mrs. SABINE JOHNSON, Bahrain JUNIOR JOHNGARANG, Sudan Isa usman, Burkina Faso Mr. Kin Asaba, London Abdou SANI MOHAN, Sudan / Darfur Mr. MUHA OJO, Cairo Dr. Rod Thompson ALI MUSA, Burkina Faso Miss Linda Jerry, Ivory Coast Mr. Aliu Kabiru, Burkina Faso Princess Ajara Zongo, Sierra Leone Mrs. Gregge Van Der Hoofd Miss Janet Chynwa Barrister Matthew Baker, London MR.KAITA ARUNA, Burkina Faso MR KARIMU YAYA, Burkina Faso Mr. Sani Mohamed, Burkina Faso Mrs. Anabel Dominic, Tanzania Kojo, Accra (refugee camp) Mr. Larry Wounder, Ghana Miss Emily Cleven Mr. Patrick F. Chengh, Hong Kong MR. JIM BRIGHT Mrs. Helen Edward, Sierra Leone Mrs. Klara Sosnikolai, Russia My husband worked for Chevron / Texaco We discovered an abandoned sum Dr.George Brumley Jr. has died Beneficial to both of us at the end My father and I escaped civil war Consultant to Mikhail Khodorkovsky Money left by dead father in Accra YOU ARE A LUCKY WINNER! You are listed as beneficiary I have a desire to assist helpless families I have packaged a financial transaction All Will Be Well At The End Of The Day I need your trust and assistance I discovered a floating fund Mr. Zahid Al Fahim died in Afghanistan COCA-COLA COMPANY PROMOTION In search for a reliable business partner I hoped that you will not betray this trust Client, Gral Habib Al-Fazeh died in Iraq I NEED YOUR CO-OPERATION My day is very boring here in Refugee Camp I have a proposal We have your lost monies Grant from Fondazione Di Vittorio Payback to my husband from Russia Oil deal with Venezuela, tax free My money is in Abidjan, help me! My uncle is building a ski slope! It is my desire to contact you on honesty Father was assasinated by the RUF rebels Private deal here in my branch office I have a substantial capital to invest Daughter of Konel Mamanbelo, no criminal The last of my money which no one knows I want the bank to release the money to you A deceased client of mine left you money We send your fund to you via cash delivery Nevertheless I have a business proposition Shareef was killed at his personal oil well We had believe that Mugabe will stop Ahjmed was killed during the war in bomb blast It’s just my urgent need for foreign partner Mohammad Al Nasser died from torture My time will soon be up Partner to assist me through banker seminar I am a dying woman The Chef Charity yearly draw You will receive funds under legal claims Left over funds of one of my bank clients Have a investor friend from Brunei Father has been arrested for illegal ammunition LOST MY FATHER YEARS BACK Father made a lot of money from rebels Account has been untouched for 2 years Old money from Fondazione Vittorio I won’t last for six month due to the cancer Huge sum of money from oil merchant I don’t want my money used by unbelievers Money from WLA to restructure Sudan In our bank, there is abandoned sum Due to your inconsistence to the other The Bank director has approved the transfer My family died in plane crash on Red Sea Staats Lottery Promotion we discovered an abandoned sum Now permit me to ask these few questions My staffs came across an old account My parents were murdered by the Rebels Microsoft / Staatsloterij I need to take my money out of Africa My client of mine died in Banda Aceh There is an abandoned sum I have a business beneficial for both of us I decided to contact you for business I shall give you the contact of the Bank Help us retrieve our consignment box Receive a large sum of money in your account I wish your assistance in investing I have an obscured business suggestion The Office of the Royal Finance Huge amount in one Metallic Trunk Box Khodorkovsky assets in Russia $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $23,580,325,191.00 665,000,000.00 0253 Mr. Issa Momodu, Burkina Faso I discovered an abandoned sum $ 25,500,000.00 0255 Mr. Peter Engels Europelotto $ 10,500,000.00 30,000,000.00 31,500,000.00 45,000,000.00 28,500,000.00 360,000,000.00 31,500,000.00 3,000,000.00 $ 20,000,000.00 $ 6,850,000.00 $ 5,500,000.00 $ 16,000,000.00 $ 25,000,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ 20,000,000.00 29,200,000.00 14,000,000.00 20,500,000.00 12,500,000.00 20,500,000.00 13,500,000.00 13,500,000.00 22,500,000.00 67,000,000.00 43,756,000.00 27,400,000.00 $ 135,900,000.00 $ 300,000,000.00 $ 37,500,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ 27,000,000.00 24,688,340.00 32,750,000.00 600,000,000.00 17,700,000.00 81,000,000.00 $ 103,500,000.00 $ 16,500,000.00 $ $ $ $ 41,000,000.00 80,504,020.00 42,000,000.00 61,600,000.00 $ 336,635,127.80 $ 34,500,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ 11,500,000.00 31,500,000.00 1,050,000,000.00 30,900,000.00 850,000.00 $ 16,500,000.00 $ 750,530,000.00 $ $ $ 21,600,000.00 24,000,000.00 19,400,000.00 $ 105,000,000.00 $ 94,500,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ 780,000,000.00 43,865,000.00 46,500,000.00 13,500,000.00 4,500,000,000.00 50,500,000.00 3,500,000.00 76,500,000.00 36,344,000.00 3,500,000.00 $ 45,000,000.00 $ 31,500,000.00 $ $ 25,500,000.00 4,500,000.00 $ 26,700,000.00 $ 150,000,000.00 $ 64,500,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ 28,300,000.00 57,900,000.00 40,500,000.00 22,300,000.00 13,500,000.00 $ 2,250,000,000.00 $ 1,050,000,000.00 $ 45,000,000.00 $ $ $ 48,500,000.00 30,000,000.00 78,000,000.00 $15,303,172,487.80 $0.00 $38,883,497,678.80 0254 0256 0257 0258 0259 0260 0261 0262 0263 0264 0265 0266 0267 0268 0269 0270 0271 0272 0273 0274 0275 0276 0277 0278 0279 0280 0281 0282 0283 0284 0285 0286 0287 0288 0289 0290 0291 0292 0293 0294 0295 0296 0297 0298 0299 0300 0301 0302 0303 0304 0305 0306 0307 0308 0309 0310 0311 0312 0313 0314 0315 0316 0317 0318 0319 0320 0321 0322 0323 0324 0325 0326 0327 0328 0329 0330 0331 0332 0333 0334 0335 0336 Mr. Abudu Ali, Burkina Faso Hajia Maamak, Nigeria Dr. Abraham Jacob, Burkina Faso BARRISTER JOHN IBE Mr. Abdul Idrisa, Burkina Faso Mr. George Lamptey, Ghana MR. KEN AMBRO, Burkina Faso DR. ISMALER TOJA, Burkina Faso JAMES MORGAN, Abidjan MR. KESTER Mikal, Burkina Faso Mrs. Mary Van Kotchka Mr. Samuel Kofi, Accra - Ghana MR. UMARU HASSAN, Burkina Faso Mrs. Mariam Sancara, Burkina Faso MR. JAMES ELLENWOOD Ms. Lima Cana Mrs. Jeniffer Doreona Brian Hoofman Mr. Christof K. W. Zhang, Hong Kong Mr. Dennis Limeng, Kuala Lumpur SANDRA JONES, London DR.PATRICKS EURACKS, Benin Mr. Walter Wale, Benin Zam Tamaar, Burkina Faso MR.BARBA CLARK, Burkina Faso Mr. Allasane Mukaila, Burkina Faso MR. William Kabor Mr. Samir Smisim Mr. Ken Dominic, Nigeria Mr. ASITA ALI, Burkina Faso MR. BUMBARU HASSAN, Burkina Mrs.Susan Johnson, Ivory Coast MR. AMADE, Burkina Faso Mr. Tim McCarron DR. BADINI BOLLY, Burkina Faso Mr. Masani Umar, Burkina Faso Mrs. ADELA MARTINEZ Miss. Judith Vaye, Liberia Mrs. Ana Jose Mr. Alem Tijani, Burkina Faso Miss Sarmantha Jones, Ivory Coast Jani Adams, Abidjan Mr. Oni Obo, Nigeria Prince Joe Eboh, Nigeria MR. KOSI OBI, Benin Mr. Nikolaas Cort MRS. RUTH GATE, Austria Mr. M. Thomas Juan, España Mrs. Monica José, Spain MR. ANTONIO GUZMAN Sharon De Hof Mrs. Roselyn Bermudez, Madrid Mr. Luis Garcia Mr. Norman Macaay Mr. Martin Agustin Mrs. Maria Montes Mr. Martin Chitty Mr. Peter Wittehoff Mrs. LAURA JONES Mrs. Elizabeth Kuyper, Amsterdam Martin van Randeraat Dr. Benito Carlos Mr. Federico Inocencio Rosanna Favetta Mrs. Samantha De Witt Mrs. Patricia Douet, Spain Mellisa Van Guul Mr.David Morelle Rosemary Everson Mr. Felix Ouattara, West Africa Dr. Greg Benjamin Mrs. Precious Walker Joan Van Henk Veronica Von Markoff Mr. Kenneth Gram Mrs. Rosana Favetaitea Mr. Martin John Mrs. Faith Owen GRAIG VAN DIJK Mr. George Klaar Dr. Jerome Coles David Bradley Urgent Need For Foreign Partner Widow of formr president Abacha You may be capable of handling this Money left behind by my client We discovered an abandoned sum My bank made extra money I HAVE A BUSINESS PROPOSAL We discovered an abandoned sum This part of the world experiences crises I HAVE A BENEFICIAL BUSINESS Lucky Winner! 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LUKAS DEMPSEY Mr. Peter Copper Ms. Hellen Keller Mr. Ahmad Yousef, South Africa Mr. Michael Anderson, Netherlands Mrs. Amanda Amos Jacob, Ivory Coast Mr. Chan Lee, Hong Kong Mr. Blessing Ade, Benin Mr. Naut Klasse Mrs. Mary Jane Kalo, Sierra Leone Your Support Is Needed!!! Concorde Plane Crash [Flight AF4590] SURPRISED TO HEAR FROM YOU I am the widow of former head of state True assistance for widow from Haiti Nigerian Petroleum Corporation (NPC) We will wait for your reply Happy new year, I will die soon I NEED YOUR HELP, for transfer Husband assasinatd by rebels for Diamonds I have come to inherit a substantial amount WIDOWS IN NIGERIA. I have private minning company I will soon proceed for my retirement leave My father was accused of Treason NEXT OF KIN. 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Reain died in plane crash Husband lost his life when he went to Bouake $4,239,415,508,787.07 7,500,035.00 £ 1,051,974,000.00 £ 95,000,000.00 £ 27,000,000.00 850,000.00 £ 450,000,000.00 £ 900,000,000,000.00 £ 73,342,000.00 £ £ £ £ £ £ £ £ 9,500,000.00 20,800,000.00 45,900,000.00 62,500,000.00 45,000,000.00 111,500,000.00 500,000,000.00 54,500,000.00 £ 534,900,200,000.00 £ 290,200,000.00 £ 123,000,000.00 £ 1,150,000,000,000.00 £ 65,000,000.00 £ £ £ £ £ £ 60,000,000.00 59,200,000.00 678,567,040.00 16,500,000.00 45,000,000.00 45,000,000.00 £ 150,000,000.00 $ 50,000,000,000.00 $ 125,000,000,000.00 £ $ $ $ 701,067,300.00 30,000,000,000.00 45,000,000,000.00 3,700,000.00 $ 45,000,000,000.00 $ 25,008,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ 15,500,000.00 37,000,000.00 48,500,000.00 25,500,000.00 30,000,000.00 20,800,000.00 73,342,000.00 45,900,000.00 81,000,000.00 $ 103,500,000.00 $ 130,054,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ 787,248.00 1,050,000,000.00 30,900,000.00 78,567,040.00 30,000,000.00 $ 360,000,000.00 $ 60,200,000.00 $ $ 159,500,000.00 3,000,000.00 $ 80,504,020.00 $ 30,000,000.00 $ $ 42,000,000.00 16,000,000.00 $ 500,000,000.00 $ 290,200,000.00 $ 117,700,000.00 $ 103,500,000.00 $ 16,500,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ 25,000,000.00 14,000,000.00 81,000,000.00 41,000,000.00 80,504,020.00 67,000,000.00 38,300,000.00 $ 150,000,000.00 $ 135,900,000.00 $ $ 350,500,000.00 23,850,000.00 $ 6,000,000,000.00 $ 25,000,000.00 $ $ 50,000,000.00 9,600,000.00 $ 34,600,000.00 $ 25,000,000.00 $ $ 5,000,000.00 21,000,000.00 $3,591,898,782,220.13 $305,786,416,328.00 $8,137,100,707,335.20 0505 Mr. Ballack Morrison Client shares your surname $ 0507 Mr. Jung Li, China Kick backs from business people $ 0506 0508 0509 0510 0511 0512 0513 0514 0515 0516 0517 0518 0519 0520 0521 0522 0523 0524 0525 0526 0527 0528 0529 0530 0531 0532 0533 0534 0535 0536 0537 0538 0539 0540 0541 0542 0543 0544 0545 0546 0547 0548 0549 0550 0551 0552 0553 0553 0555 0556 0557 0558 0559 0560 0561 0562 0563 0564 0565 0566 0567 0568 0569 0570 0571 0572 0573 0574 0575 0576 0577 0578 0579 0580 0581 0582 0583 0584 0585 0586 0587 0588 Mr. Frank Balogun, Nigeria Mr. Patrick Chan, Hong Kong Mrs. irena versloot Mr. GEORGE PETERS Mr. Ubi Daniels, Benin republic Mr. Divine Jajar, Burkina Faso Mr. Luke Shaw Martina Franzov Mrs. Yvonne Zwanette Mr. Eken Brown Aku, FBI Nigeria Mr. Azi Kama, Burkina Faso Mr. Santos Da Silva Mendes, London Mr. Boateng Berko, Ghana Mr. Tony COBBS Mrs. Agnes Jonas Savimbi, Angola Sir Lord Davies Mr. Koh Siong Kian, Malaysia Mr. JAMES MORGAN, Abidjan Miss Veronica Las, Ivory Coast Dr. S.K Williams, UN rep in Nigeria Mr. Mani Bako, Burkina Faso MR. 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Mohammad Al Nasser died from torture $ 338,000,000.00 $ 290,000,000.00 $ 150,000,000.00 $ 11,000,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ 4,000,000.00 400,000,000.00 5,000,000.00 5,000,000.00 5,000,000.00 1,600,000.00 $ 28,000,000.00 $ 152,000,000.00 $ 51,530,000.00 $ 37,000,000.00 $ 53,200,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ 1,900,000.00 5,000,000.00 1,000,000.00 17,000,000.00 1,000,000.00 $ 61,500,000.00 $ 675,000,000.00 $ 13,800,000.00 $ $ $ $ 43,500,000.00 49,500,000.00 1,800,000.00 2,000,000.00 $ 75,000,000.00 $ 700,000.00 $ $ $ $ 31,500,000.00 61,500,000.00 48,500,000.00 8,000,000.00 $ 47,000,000.00 $ 3,000,000.00 $ 65,000,000.00 $ 75,000,000.00 $ 16,000,000.00 $ 30,000,000.00 $ 900,000,000,000.00 $ 4,500,000.00 $ 42,500,000.00 $ 70,000,000.00 $ 6,500,000,000.00 $ 700,000,000.00 $ 1,600,000,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ 38,000,000.00 20,500,000.00 12,000,000.00 330,000,000.00 3,200,390.00 $ 450,000,000.00 $ 34,500,000.00 $ 200,000,000.00 $ 118,500,000.00 $ 132,600,000.00 $ 1,574,000.00 $ $ $ 90,000,000.00 55,200,000.00 1,700,000.00 $ 2,000,000,000.00 $ 5,000,000.00 $ $ 300,000,000.00 27,900,000.00 $ 555,000,000.00 $ 600,000,000.00 $ 120,000,000.00 $ 25,500,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ 16,500,000.00 2,400,000.00 10,500,000.00 30,000,000.00 31,500,000.00 45,000,000.00 31,500,000.00 67,000,000.00 32,750,000.00 81,000,000.00 $ 103,500,000.00 $ 16,500,000.00 $ $ 41,000,000.00 80,504,020.00 $917,763,358,410.00 $0.00 $9,054,864,065,745.20 0590 0592 0593 0594 0595 0596 0597 0598 0599 0600 0601 0602 0603 0604 0605 0606 0607 0608 0609 0610 0611 0612 0613 0614 0615 0616 0617 0618 0619 0620 0621 0622 0623 0624 0625 0626 0627 0628 0629 0630 0631 0632 0633 0634 0635 0636 0637 0638 0639 0640 0641 0642 0643 0644 0645 0646 0647 0648 0649 0650 0651 0652 0653 0654 0655 0656 0657 0658 0659 0660 0661 0662 0663 0664 0665 0666 0667 0668 0669 0670 0671 0672 Mr. Jos William, Burkina Faso Mrs. Jeniffer Doreona, Athens MR. SHERIF SAMBO, Ghana Mrs. Wells Iris, Hong Kong Mrs. Maria Lopez Amina Aliyu, Cote d’Ivoire MR SAWADOGO ALPHA, Burkina Dr. Abdul-Azeez Mustafa, Malasia Ms Helen Desmond Momoh, Sierra L. JUNIOR JOHNGARANG, Sudan Sharon De Hof Mellisa Van Guul Mr.David Morelle Rosemary Everson Mr. Felix Guattara, West Africa Dr. Greg Benjamin Mrs. Davel Gardel ALBERTO Gomez Mrs. Nuremberg Mr. Kenneth Gram Dr. Jacobo Lieber Ms. Hellen Kalloun. Russia JOHNE YACOUBA Mrs Barbera De Garga MR. PATRICK CHAN KWOK WAI Mrs. Emmanuela Di Santo Mrs. Alice van Groote Mr. Bones Van Clink MR. ELLEN MARGALVAREZ MRS. COMFORT JUSPE DR. DAVID GARCIA Mr. Luisa Johnson Susan HOLMES Mr. Hugh Gareth Mr. Jaime Halbert Mrs. Maria Meer Eava Maître Xavier Voltaire Mr. Mario Alberto Jiho DR. TOM GARCIA Cathy Lurto Mr. Eddy Van Bakker Mr. Derek White Richard Woodgaster Rinwald de Bever Paul Saidu, South Africa Mr. Archie Kane, London Samuel Gunago, Burkina Faso Prof. Derek Max Harrison Medley, London Francis Udomba, Burkina Faso Mr. Wilson Brown, London Mr. Mark Adams Mr. William Cole JOHN MAXWELL Mrs. Vivian Salem, Iraq Mr. George Melvin Mrs. Deborah Hutton John Boko, Abidjan Ben Kuruneri, South Africa Barrister Musa Issah, Nigeria Mr. Okorie Decency, Nigeria Pastor Kenneth Bornking, Ivory Coast Mr. Alex Osamuyi, Nigeria Dr. Denison Eze, Nigeria Dr. Seiyefa Obokoro, Ghana / Nigeria Mrs Kadat Jubril Ruma Caristides Madam Edith Marculey, Sierra Leone Mr. Stev Ebe, Ghana Mr. Oduobi Tokunbo, Nigeria JONATHAN LUTHMAN, Yugoslavia Mr. EDWARD UWA, Nigeria Mr. MICHAEL NKOMO, Zimbabwe Mr. JOSEPH OTUMBA, Nigeria Mr. M.Hasam, Nigeria Mr. Fred Bangoh, Abidjan Camp Miss. 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Nigerian Petroleum Corporation (NPC) We will wait for your reply Happy new year, I will die soon I NEED YOUR HELP, for transfer Husband assasinatd by rebels for Diamonds I have come to inherit a substantial amount RICH WIDOWS IN NIGERIA I have private minning company I will soon proceed for my retirement leave My father was accused of Treason I have urgent and very confidential business For assisting us in this deal Sierra Leone mining co-operation Forceful removal of the Elected President REQUEST FOR UNALLOYED HELP I seek your consent to present you as cousin I am still too young to manage this fund My wife also has a terrible mouth smell I decided to donate this fund to church $ $ $ $ $ $9,054,864,065,745.20 336,635,127.80 11,500,000.00 34,500,000.00 31,500,000.00 1,050,000,000.00 30,900,000.00 850,000.00 $ 16,500,000.00 $ 750,530,000.00 $ 4,500,000,000.00 $ 25,500,000.00 $ $ $ $ 21,600,000.00 24,000,000.00 150,000,000.00 30,000,000.00 $ 360,000,000.00 $ 31,500,000.00 $ $ $ $ 31,500,000.00 20,500,000.00 13,500,000.00 1,000,000.00 $ 22,500,000.00 $ 6,000,000,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ 67,000,000.00 30,000,000.00 3,000,000.00 2,000,000,000.00 32,750,000.00 980,000.00 81,000,000.00 $ 600,000,000.00 $ 41,000,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ 103,500,000.00 16,500,000.00 80,504,020.00 42,000,000.00 62,245,000.00 336,008,200.00 12,560,002.00 33,500,200.00 1,170,023,000.00 31,600,000.00 850,000.00 $ 4,500,000,000.00 $ 350,500,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ 150,000,000.00 64,500,000.00 40,500,000.00 22,300,000.00 891,934.00 $ 30,000,000.00 $ 2,150,000,000.00 $ $ $ 48,500,000.00 45,000,000.00 78,000,000.00 $ 1,050,000,000.00 $ 35,000,000.00 $ $ $ 378,000,000.00 6,000,000.00 116,000,000.00 $ 200,340,007,900.00 $ 32,504,600.00 $ $ $ 41,850,000.00 7,500,035.00 1,051,974,000.00 $ 90,000,000,000.00 $ 73,342,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ 20,800,000.00 45,900,000.00 62,500,000.00 45,000,000.00 111,500,000.00 500,000,000.00 54,500,000.00 $ 534,900,200,000.00 $ 123,000,000.00 $ 150,000,000,000.00 $ 159,600,000.00 $ $ $ $ $ $ 59,200,000.00 678,567,040.00 20,400,000.00 238,650,000.00 90,400,000.00 235,000,000,000.00 $1,240,962,123,058.80 $0.00 $10,295,826,188,804.00 Brotherly Deception Jeffrey Croteau On 31 August 1885, a number of North American Masonic groups met in Baltimore to form the General Masonic Relief Association of the United States and Canada, an organization dedicated to “facilitating the discovery and exposure of persons traveling about the country and imposing upon the charities of Masons.”1 In other words, they formed an organization that made it easier for Masonic charities to identify Masonic impostors. Freemasonry is the oldest fraternity in the world, one of the best known, and, arguably, the most misunderstood. The British first brought Freemasonry to America in the late seventeenth century; by the early eighteenth century, the fraternity was officially organized in the colonies with the founding of two Grand Lodges. Freemasonry expanded along with the nation—the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often referred to as the “Golden Age of Fraternalism,” a period during which dozens of new fraternal organizations were founded and participation in fraternal groups was a typical social activity for many Americans. By 1896, the Masons claimed a membership of 750,000 members in the US alone.2 But why would someone bother to impersonate a Freemason? At a time when it was uncommon to receive benefits in the workplace or from the government, many turned to fraternal organizations, which used the dues they collected to provide their members with various types of insurance, including death benefits. In effect, one joined a support network, pledging an oath to aid one’s brethren, as well as one’s brethren’s dependents, in a time of need. In many US cities, Masonic relief boards were created as a way to respond to the pressures of a transitory urban population. While local Masonic lodges were able to aid their own members, relief boards stepped in to help Masons who belonged to lodges in other cities, states, or countries. This relief might include financial aid, job assistance, and provision for funerals and burials.3 The benefits naturally enticed con men to travel from city to city and pose as Masons. In order to prove that an applicant was in fact a Mason, he was often required to demonstrate knowledge of secret words and “grips” (i.e., handshakes).4 Yet this alone was not sufficient proof that a Mason was in good standing with his local lodge; to prove this, the applicant would typically have to show some documentation as well. The 82 Masonic Relief Association’s biannual meeting took up the question of appropriate documentation, given the fact that both genuine claimants and con men might present themselves without the necessary papers. “What Should Be Done With Applicants Who Are Without Certificates Or Receipts For Dues, Or Some Proper Documentary Evidence, and Whose Lodges Cannot Readily Be Reached By Telegraph,” a paper presented at the 1911 gathering, offers insight into the astute psychological profiling required to unmask pretenders: Bearing in mind that the impostor is more than likely to be supplied with the necessary evidence to fix his standing in the Fraternity, there is always a strong probability that an applicant presenting himself without any documentary evidence is the one who, through a lack of knowledge of the requirements, has been careless in the matter of carrying the necessary papers with him, and because of that fact should be given every opportunity to establish his status: It appears to me that in such case the first duty of the examiner should be to ascertain, so far as possible, whether the applicant is in truth a Master Mason. …. Each examiner must necessarily rely upon his own impressions of the applicant as to what may be accepted as truthful statements from him, but it is well to bear in mind that the most plausible statements and the smoothest stories come from those who are unworthy and who have had previous experience in soliciting relief. The hesitating and awkward applicant ofttimes is entirely worthy, but his lack of experience, his general disinclination to make known his actual condition, and frequently his shame that he should be put in the position of asking relief, makes him appear in a most unfavorable light. The story that runs smooth with a ready answer for every inquiry, should, to my mind, receive the most careful attention and be subjected to the more rigid tests.5 In a further effort to thwart scams, the Masonic Relief Association began publishing a monthly Official Warning Circular—cataloguing names, descriptions, and sometimes photographs of known Masonic impostors—which was sent to relief boards around the country to advise them of the con men that might come their way. The hope was that centralized information would spread faster than a Masonic impostor could travel. For opposite and overleaf: All photos from Album of Masonic Impostors, 1903. Courtesy the Van Gorden-Williams Library & Archives, National Heritage Museum, Lexington, Massachusetts. 83 84 85 example, if the New York board discovered a fraud, a telegram or a telephone call to the Masonic Relief Association would ensure that a notice was placed in the next Circular. By the time the charlatan made his way to Cincinnati, the relief board there would already have seen his mug shot. Just how many Masonic impostors were there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In the twenty-seven-year period between 1885 and 1912, the Masonic Relief Association tallied 4,833 “unworthy cases,” an average of about 180 per year.6 Naturally, this did not account for Masonic impostors who escaped detection. The Album of Masonic Impostors, published in 1903 by the Association, featured 156 of these men, drawn from circulars published up to that point.7 A small sampling from this rogues’ gallery is presented here. 1 Masonic Relief Association of the United States and Canada, Nineteenth Report, 1913, p. 25. The group dropped the word General from its title sometime between 1903 and 1911. 2 Mark A. Tabbert, American Freemason: Three Centuries of Building Communities (Lexington, Mass: National Heritage Museum/New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 87. 3 Lynn Dumenil. Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 19. 4 Tabbert, op. cit., p. 108. 5 L. F. Speer, “What Should Be Done With Applicants Who Are Without Certificates Or Receipts For Dues, Or Some Proper Documentary Evidence, and Whose Lodges Cannot Readily Be Reached By Telegraph,” The Masonic Relief Association of the United States and Canada, Eighteenth Report, 1911, pp. 27–28. 6 Masonic Relief Association of the United States and Canada, Nineteenth Report, 1913, p. 64. 7 The Album of Masonic Impostors, as well as many issues of the Official Warning Circular, and various supporting materials, including many issues of the Association’s annual proceedings, are in the collections of the National Heritage Museum’s Van Gorden-Williams Library & Archives, one of the largest Masonic libraries in the United States, located in Lexington, Massachusetts. 86 Slettemark / Nixon Mats Bigert In early 1974, the Swedish-Norwegian artist Kjartan Slettemark applied for a new passport. But the photograph he submitted had been manipulated to replace his own face with Richard Nixon’s. Framed by Slettemark’s scraggly beard, the US president’s face went undetected by the issuing authorities. When picking up his new passport at the Stockholm police department, however, Slettemark had to sign it in front of an official, who was surprised to see that the signature had a capital A in the middle of the artist’s first name, rendering it “KjArtan.” Asked why the spelling was different from the one on the original application, Slettemark replied, “I always sign my artworks this way.” 87 The passport was approved and Slettemark used it soon after to enter the US . On his return to Sweden, he managed to sell his story as an “exclusive” to all six major Swedish dailies, and in July 1974, they each published a picture of the passport on their front pages. When asked about his action, Slettemark replied that he wanted to offer Nixon, his identity now transformed into art, a means of escape. On 9 August 1974, Nixon signed his letter of resignation. Kjartan Slettemark underwent his final transformation on 13 December 2008. One obituary ended with a typical Slettemark quote: “Konsten kommer, konsten går, lycklig den som konsten,” which could be rendered as “Art comes, art goes, happy the one who art.” The Fall and Rise of Ernest Lalor Malley Christine Wertheim “You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,” said Alice. “Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem…?” “Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented—and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.” —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass In 1945, John Ashbery discovered the work of an obscure Australian poet named Ern Malley. “I liked the poems very much,” Ashbery recalls. “They reminded me a little of my own early tortured experiments in surrealism, but they were much better.”1 Later, in 1961, he included two of Malley’s poems, “Boult to Marina” and “Sybilline,” in an issue of Locus Solus edited with Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, and James Schuyler. Though neither Koch nor Ashbery believed Malley had any influence on his own work, both thought of him as a “secret, exotic, precious, outlandish figure” whom they would teach in their poetry classes at Columbia and Brooklyn College, introducing his work to the next generation of American writers, and, through them, back to their Australian peers John Forbes and John Tranter.2 Like Baudelaire, who imported Poe into France and returned him to America as a symboliste, Ashbery and Koch brought Malley to the US and returned him to Australia as a shining example of a new postwar avant-gardism that reveled in pastiche, ironic quotation, and love for the feel of a Bad Poem.3 By this circuitous means, a man on the margins of culture at the time of his death in 1943 was finally acclaimed in his own land in 1991 when Tranter included his entire oeuvre in a Penguin anthology of Australian poetry.4 But who exactly was Ern Malley, and why had it taken this detour through American letters to send his star streaking through the great blue vault of the Ozzie cultural sky? In his authoritative book The Ern Malley Affair, Michael Heyward outlines the main events of the poet’s tragic life. Ernest Lalor Malley was born in England in 1918. In 1920, after his father died of war-related injuries, the Malleys emigrated to Sydney, Australia. When their mother died in 1933, the fifteen-year-old Ern was left alone with his sister Ethel. After high school, he worked for a while as a car mechanic, then drifted to Melbourne, where he sold insurance and lived alone in a rented room. At the beginning of 1943, struck with Graves’ disease, he abruptly returned to Sydney, where, despite Ethel’s care, he died on 23 July at the age of 88 The Autumn 1944 cover of Angry Penguins, featuring cover art by Sidney Nolan. Courtesy Tom Thompson, Samela Harris, and the Heide Museum of Modern Art Archives, Victoria. Our indefatigable Australian readers can discover more at the Heide’s upcoming exhibit, “Ern Malley Returns to Heide,” 18 July–15 November 2009. twenty-five, leaving nothing behind but a sheaf of handwritten poems and a postcard with a curious inscription. Ethel, not being of a literary bent herself, but loving her brother, bound up the sheaf and sent it to the editor of a literary magazine, Angry Penguins, published from Adelaide. Max Harris, the Penguins editor, recognized at once the genius that was Ern and decided not merely to publish the poems but to devote an entire section of the Autumn 1944 issue to them, complete with a full color image by the great Australian painter Sidney Nolan illustrating lines from Malley’s “Petit Testament”: I said to my love (who is living) Dear we shall never be that verb Perched on the sole Arabian Tree “No young Australian poet had ever had a more auspicious launch for his work,” says Robert Hughes in his afterward to The Ern Malley Affair. “His early death, clearly, was a tragedy. But then it became apparent that, behind this tragedy, a comedy lurked. Ern Malley was not dead, for he had never lived. He and his entire oeuvre had been made up, in the course of a single afternoon in a military barracks in Melbourne, by two young poets, Corporal Harold Stewart and Lieutenant James McAuley.”5 In other words, Ern Malley was a hoax. Born only a year apart, McAuley and Stewart were poor sons of Sydney’s working class, whose talents won them entry to the prestigious Fort Street School for gifted children, and later to Sydney University. McAuley and Stewart spent hours together in cafés. … They enjoyed each other’s wit, and each respected the other’s intelligence, but they were not at all alike. Moody and charismatic, McAuley became the centre of attention the instant he entered a room. He dominated any social situation. Stewart was genial but a loner, shy and rather secretive . … Poetry was the one thing Stewart wanted to do. McAuley gave the impression he could do anything. But the golden boy was also deadly serious about poetry.6 As a student of poetry, the young McAuley was complex. He adored the Symbolists, Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and de Nerval. He wrote about Pound, and was fascinated by Eliot. He translated Heine and Rilke and set Elizabethan lyrics to music. A natural parodist, he knocked out a letter pastiching Finnegans Wake that nails Joyce. At the start of World War Two, he was also a conscientious objector, composing a popular antiwar musical, I’d Rather Be Left. But these early leanings were not to last; by 1943, he had joined the army and was calling himself “a disappointed radical.”7 Poetically, too, McCauley seemed to have switched sides, professing hostility to the new generation of avant-garde work, which he saw as mere hand-me-down agonistics vacuously repeating the pre-war formulas without the emotional sincerity that had infused the earlier experiments. In 1940s Sydney, such sentiments were common, modern poetry then being seen “as a collapsed tradition that in Australian terms was no tradition at all.”8 Not so, however, in Melbourne and Adelaide, where the new poetic fashions aroused a sense of hope and possibility. Here, in 1939, in an atmosphere at once up to date and yet optimistic, an eighteen-year-old student named Max Harris set out to ignite a revolution in Australian poetics by launching the Angry Penguins, a magazine dedicated to the very things the jaded Sydneyites despised. “Both outlooks were ‘modern’ and both informed. They were on a collision course.”9 When the fall issue of Penguins began to circulate from Adelaide in early June 1944 (seasons being reversed in the southern hemisphere), one of its first readers was Brian Elliott, a lecturer at Adelaide University and Harris’s teacher. Elliott smelled a rat, concluded 89 that Harris himself was the author, and wrote a parodic review of the work as a poem in the style of Ern Malley, which, Elliott implied, was also the style of Harris. The lines of the poem formed an acrostic that read M-A-XH-A-R-R-I-S-H-O-A-X . Published in On Dit, the journal of Adelaide University, this review sparked a veritable find-the-poet fever in the Australian press and alarmed Harris, who hired a detective named Bannister to watch Ethel Malley’s supposed address in Sydney. Meanwhile, as the journal made its troubled way around the country, it was seen by Tess van Sommers, a young reporter for Sydney’s Sunday Sun and a friend of McAuley and Stewart, whom she had overheard discussing a scam. Recognizing this hoax as the joke, and thinking she could cover the story sympathetically, she told a colleague. “But Sommers was not yet a ticketed journalist, … and her seniors, smelling blood, elbowed her aside.”10 The story was then handled by Colin Simpson, the paper’s star reporter and editor of its magazine supplement Fact. Simpson immediately called McAuley and Stewart, who refused to talk to anyone but Sommers. Through her, it was agreed that Fact would release a teaser and follow with full disclosure of the hoax the following week. To spice up the story, however, Simpson rang Harris at 2 AM the morning before printing the initial teaser to quiz him about the meaning of Malley’s poems and about his opinion of his own poetry, but giving no information in return. Woken from a “Nembutal-stupefied sleep,” Harris’s replies were as lucid as could be expected under the conditions, but when edited for print they portrayed him as a pompous ass. On 18 June, Fact put the teaser on its front page under the heading “Ern Malley, the great poet or the greatest hoax?” By now Harris knew that Harold Stewart lived at Ethel’s address, but neither he nor his publisher, John Reed, could believe the hoax had been produced by Stewart or any of his circle. “It was a long week of unknowing for the Penguins who could only speculate about the real Ern Malley.”11 Likewise, Stewart and McAuley were troubled. They had not intended that the case become public—this was a private affair meant only for those in the cultural elite—and they had wanted to wait until the journal reached Britain, where they could potentially snare much bigger fish, before revealing the hoax. As things stood now, they were forced to cooperate with Fact, which would publish their names with or without their permission. What they themselves now wanted was to explain the high-minded and serious nature of their experiment; though a hoax, the affair was no joke. On 25 June 1944, in an article wedged between the sports and the comics sections, Fact revealed the entire affair along with a statement by McAuley and Stewart outlining the reasoning behind the scam: “For some years now we have observed with distaste the gradual decay of meaning and craftsmanship in poetry. … The distinctive feature of the fashion … was that it rendered its devotees insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination.” However, they went on, “it was possible that we had simply failed to penetrate to the inward substance of these productions. The only way of settling the matter was by experiment. … What we wished to find out was: Can those who write, and those who praise so lavishly, this kind of writing tell the real product from consciously and deliberately concocted nonsense.”12 They also explained how they had created the poems: “We produced the whole of Ern Malley’s tragic life-work in one afternoon, with the aid of a chance collection of books that happened to be on our desks: the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a Collected Shakespeare, Dictionary of Quotations &c. We opened books at random. … We misquoted and made false allusions. We deliberately perpetrated bad verse. … The first three lines of the poem “Culture as Exhibit” were lifted, as a quotation, straight from an American report on the drainage of breeding-grounds of mosquitoes.”13 The pair went on: Our rules of composition were not difficult: 1. There must be no coherent theme … 2. No care was taken with verse technique … 3. In style, the poems were to imitate, not Mr. Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece and others.14 In conclusion, they stated: “Having completed the poems, we wrote a pretentious and meaningless Preface and Statement which purported to explain the aesthetic theory on which they were based. … As we have already explained conclusively, the Writings Of Ern Malley are utterly devoid of literary merit as poetry.”15 As we know, the poems and statement were then sent to Max Harris with the cover letter from Ern’s sister, Ethel. (According to McAuley and Stewart, this letter was the hardest part of the scam, taking more time to concoct than the entirety of Ern’s oeuvre.) That Harris was chosen as the target of this experiment demonstrates both the low and the high opinion these two literary-scientists had of him. Like McAuley, Harris was a true Romantic, believing in the value of Culture and, specifically, the need for it in mid-century Australia. 90 Yet the hoax broke him. Not only did he become the laughing-stock of the entire Australian press for many months, the affair turned especially nasty when the state decided to prosecute him for obscenity. Near the end of August 1944, Harris, who was cramming for exams at the time, was charged under Section 108 of the South Australian Police Act with the sale of certain “indecent advertisements.” The complaint identified thirteen passages in the current issue of Penguins, seven from Malley, the rest from Harris and other contributors. Section 108 defined “indecent advertisements” as “printed matter of an indecent immoral or obscene nature.”16 Although at the time many novels were banned in Australia, this was the first attempt to suppress poetry. The trial, held at the Adelaide Police Court on 5 September, was the hottest show in town, with the burden of proof allotted to the Crown’s main witness, a Detective Vogelsang who had been assigned the gig. Vogelsang had no particular credentials for the job, and his only previous contact with Harris had been on 1 August, when his superiors had dispatched him to interview “someone responsible for” the Malley issue of Angry Penguins. Vogelsang’s testimony amounted to nothing more than an assertion of his own opinions about Malley’s work, making the trial, in effect, a surreal battle of wits between Harris and Vogelsang over whether lines like the following would be obscenely interpreted by the average reader: Only a part of me shall triumph in this (I am not Pericles) Though I have your silken eyes to kiss And maiden-knees Part of me remains, wench, Boult-upright The rest of me drops off into the night. —“Boult to Marina” Given that Harris was only twenty-three at the time, his courage in the face of this onslaught is astonishing. In the end, however, he was fined five Australian pounds, with costs of two pounds and eleven shillings. Harris and Reed published three more issues of the Penguins, but the magazine had lost its focus, and in 1945 Harris moved to Melbourne, becoming a bookseller.17 Like Alan Sokal—who caused a scandal in 1996 when, only days after publishing an article in the “Science Wars” issue of Social Text, he announced in another publication, Lingua Franca, that the piece was a hoax composed opposite: Letter from Ethel Malley to Max Harris, accompanying her brother’s poems, 28 October 1943. Courtesy Tom Thompson and Samela Harris. 91 above: Telegram from C. Bannister, Sydney private investigator, to Max Harris, 15 June 1944. below: Telegram from Max Harris to John Reed, the publisher of Angry Penguins, on 16 June 1944. Courtesy Tom Thompson and Samela Harris. of “fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense”—McAuley and Stewart had made their point. But literature does not function like theoretical discourse, and McAuley and Stewart would no doubt be surprised to find that the poems still live on. There is something in the character of Malley, some aspect of the Australian temperament, which still appeals to writers, painters, and composers. The artists Sidney Nolan and Garry Shead both produced a series of works based on Malley, there has been an Ern Malley jazz suite, and Peter Carey wrote a novel, My Life As A Fake, that used the Malley story as a template.18 When passed through the transforming lens of the American avant-garde, Ern Malley’s work did not only move from being derided to being admired; it also went from being fake to “real.” For the Americans, who were hip to the hoax, the fictitious origins in no way 92 detracted from the quality of the poems—perhaps those origins even enhanced it. LITERARY EXPERIMENTALISM While McAuley and Stewart thought Malley’s works devoid of merit, others believed then, and still believe today, that they possess genuine literary value. In his initial enthusiasm, Harris had sent a copy of the Malley issue of Penguins to Herbert Read, the great British critic, who, though he received it after the scandal broke, nevertheless was full of praise for the work. As Read put it in a letter to Harris, the hoaxer must inevitably use processes akin to, if not identical with, the original work of art. If his model is something conventional, the parody may be all the more difficult to make, for it is easy to detect. But if, as in the present case, the type of art parodied is itself unconventional and experimental, then the parodist has exceptional freedom, and because of his freedom, can end by deceiving himself. … It comes down to this: if a man of sensibility, in a mood of despair or hatred, or even from a perverted sense of humour, sets out to fake works of imagination, then if he is convincing, he must use the poetic facilities. If he uses the poetic facilities to good effect, he ends up deceiving himself. … This kind of [work] is modern Ossian, [and] like Ossian, can understandably deceive the best of critics.19 Ossian, the most famous and influential literary hoax of the eighteenth century, was purportedly a blind third-century warrior who wrote Fingal. “Discovered” and translated by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, the six-part epic poem became a rallying cry for Scottish nationalism. Even when “the piercing eye of Samuel Johnson” uncovered it as a hoax by Macpherson, the book had “an influence that no critic could kill. … Some of the greatest figures of the time (Goethe, Schiller, … even Napoleon) took him up, finding in Ossian the true rugged voice of primitive Europe, a Nordic Homer.”20 Like the two other famous hoaxes of the eighteenth century—the poems of a “Thomas Rowley” written by a fifteen-year-old named Thomas Chatterton, and Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry—the Ossian work was “brought into existence in order to enlarge and glorify achievements of the past and to substantiate ideals of national identity.”21 From this perspective, the Ossian and Malley affairs were not the same; faking a traditional form and faking an experimental form are quite different propositions. Since the early twentieth century, the term experimental has been applied to prose and poetry that extend the bounds of literary language. Well-known experimental techniques include playing with the graphic possibilities of words and the white space on the page, cutting up or erasing other people’s texts, automatic writing, and many others. The sense of the “experimental” in these techniques is the informal “innovative act or procedure,” the trying of something new, in order to gain experience.22 However, in some cases the experiment is undertaken in the more formal scientific sense of a “test or procedure carried out under controlled conditions to determine the validity of a hypothesis or make a discovery.”23 The work of Ern Malley is an exemplar of this rare genre. In the history of experimental writing, much fake literature and many fictional authors have been admired no less than their real counterparts.24 The greatness of 93 McAuley and Stewart’s method lay in the fact that it not only constructed a powerful hoax, it also proved the impossibility of categorically distinguishing between the “real” and the “fake” in this genre. Paradoxically, the Malley poems scientifically demonstrated that in the realms of literary experimentalism, we cannot tell the authentic from the inauthentic, because the authentic, and indeed the “author,” are often self-conscious shams. Thus we see that literature is a complex affair whose value cannot be reduced to a referential truth indexed by the phrase “based on reality.” Literary forgery is not a crime; it is a mode of cultural critique. Yet this does not mean that authorship is erased entirely or that there are no values by which we can now make literary judgments. An examination of Malley’s poem “Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495” can help shed light on this conundrum. A L AST WORD I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air, Closed my inanimate lids to find it real, As I knew it would be, the colorful spires And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back, All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters— Not knowing then that Dürer perceived it too. Now I find that once more I have shrunk To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream, I had read in books that art is not easy But no one warned that the mind repeats In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still The black swan of trespass on alien waters. —“Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495” The ekphrastic poem, based on a Dürer watercolor, was presented as the opening piece of Malley’s collection as arranged by McAuley and Stewart, and repeated in every published edition. However, “Innsbruck” had been originally written by McAuley as a real poem, one he later deemed unsuccessful and ascribed to Malley because of its inadequacies. Indeed, the precise nature of its failures was the spark from which the poets let their parody take flame. Michael Heyward writes: “The poem identifies Ern Malley as a clairvoyant who can ‘see’ the scene he imagines by taking the paradoxical step of closing his eyes.”25 He continues: “Ern Malley’s ‘real’ evocation of a ‘real’ painting by the ‘realist’ Dürer was a brilliant feint, a way to distract the reader from what the poem was really saying—that its author was a chimera. McAuley designed it that way.”26 McAuley himself described the poem frankly as a “come-on,” adding that “we are now so well trained into Coleridge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ that we exercise it not only where we should but also where we shouldn’t.”27 Though the apparent author changes, the poem remains. In his book Interpretation as Pragmatics, the literary theorist Jean-Jacques Lecercle makes a successive series of analyses of “Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495,” first assuming the poem is real, then that it is a hoax, and finally, that it is a real poem (deemed unsuccessful) inserted into a hoax. As Lecercle says, “McAuley’s poem is not merely the product of his admiration for Dürer … but it could never have been written if its author had not admired T. S. Eliot. … Here is the paradox: the poem complains about the inevitability of imitation, of repetition, at the very moment when, assimilating an influence or inserting itself within a tradition, it attempts to assert an individual talent.”28 For each of his readings, Lecercle provides a diagram. The graph for the reading of real-poeminserted-into-hoax is, as Lecercle himself admits, “so complicated as to be called pretentious”: T1 (McAuley) T2 (Stewart and McAuley) A1 A3 A’ T’ A2 A T R T1 R1 (Malley) R2 R3 R’ The critic goes on to provide another, simpler diagram to model the more general relation between author, reader, and text that is the subject of his overall thesis. For our purposes, the “pretentious” diagram is perfect. Here we see that the author has not so much disappeared as become an operation in a structure, a place that may be occupied by a number of different agents: a fictitious Malley writing serious mid-century modernism; McAuley and Stewart writing parodies of that form; and McAuley alone writing seriously an earlier form of modernism he later deemed unsuccessful precisely because it showed signs of the newer fashions he had come to despise. Yet, while the agent occupying the place changes, the position (i.e., the authorial function itself) remains. People may disappear, names may be erased, but the author has not vanished, and what is left is not a “pure” textuality, but a poem whose sense changes with the author to whom we attribute it. And we do attribute authorship, as do each of the poem’s various authors at the point where they occupy the authorial position. Real authorial invisibility simply does not yet exist. Certainly, as Eliot Weinberger once presciently noted, 94 true invisibility—the text-in-itself—could be achieved very simply by just “publishing every book and magazine contribution under a different name.”29 No one we have heard of has yet been so meek. However, by allowing their literary son to eclipse them in the annals of Australian verse, both McAuley and Stewart demonstrated extraordinary authorial restraint. By claiming neither the copyright on his work, nor any of its financial rewards, like good parents, they have granted their child his true independence; the right to live, to speak, to affect us all in his own inimitable Ernest-like way. 1 Michael Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 286. 2 Ibid., p. 288. 3 Ibid. 4 See Philip Mead and John Tranter, eds., The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1991). 5 Robert Hughes, “The Well-Wrought Ern,” in Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, op. cit., p. 301. 6 Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, op. cit., p. 42. 7 Ibid., p. 53. 8 Ibid., p. 57. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 156. 11 Ibid., p. 163. 12 Ibid., p. 172. 13 Ibid., p. 173. The first stanza of “Culture as Exhibit” runs as follows: “‘Swamps, marshes, borrow-pits and other / Areas of stagnant water serve / as the breeding grounds…’ Now / Have I found you, my Anopheles! / (There is a meaning for the circumspect) / Come, we will dance sedate quadrilles, / A pallid polka or a yelping shimmy / Over these sunken sodden breeding-grounds! / We will be wraiths and wreaths of tissue-paper / To clog the Town Council in their plans. / Culture forsooth! Albert, get my gun.” 14 Ibid., p. 173. 15 Ibid., pp. 173–175. 16 Ibid., p. 227. 17 Years later, Harris and McAuley met and became friends. Ibid., p. 277. 18 Peter Nicholson, “Ern Malley: Doppelgänger in the Desert,” 3 Quarks Daily, <3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2006/11/ern_malley_dopp.html>. Accessed 25 November 2008. 19 Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, op. cit., pp. 196–197. 20 Robert Hughes, “The Well-Wrought Ern,” in Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, op. cit., p. 304. 21 Ibid., pp. 304–305. 22 Paraphrase of the entry on experiment in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004). 23 Ibid. 24 The list of other modernist fictional authors includes the many personae of Fernando Pessoa, the “scribes” of Armand Schwerner’s fake Sumerian Tablets, Lester the Puppet, Araki Yasusada, and many more. 25 Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, op. cit., p. 112. 26 Ibid., p. 115. 27 Ibid., p. 115. 28 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Interpretation as Pragmatics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 145–146. 29 Eliot Weinberger, “Three Footnotes,” Boston Review, <bostonreview.net/ BR22.3/Weinberger.html>. Accessed 29 December 2008. However, as Weinberger points out, “as far as one knows, [writers] have never practiced it: if one were that egoless, one wouldn’t be a writer.” Artist Project: All Work and No Play Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin A pivotal scene in The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s classic film adaptation of the Stephen King novel, occurs when Wendy, the wife of the protagonist Jack Torrance, enters the enormous reception hall in the isolated mountain hotel where her husband has been obsessively typing away on his “novel.” Previously barred from the space by the increasingly unstable Jack, Wendy nervously goes to his typewriter and finds on its roller a sheet of paper on which the message “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” has been typed over and over again. Frantic, she turns to the thick stack of pages neatly piled nearby, where she finds the exact same phrase on the top dozen or so pages she rifles through before being interrupted by Jack. The manuscript, which she had imagined would be a sign of her husband’s artistic achievement, is revealed instead as an undeniable symbol of his descent into madness. Never one to stint on artistic integrity and veracity, Kubrick used no shortcuts for the relatively simple scene. As artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin discovered during recent research in the Kubrick archives in London, instead of having the sentence typed on only the few sheets seen by viewers, the director asked his secretary Margaret Warrington to type it on each one of the 500-odd sheets in the stack. What’s more, he also had Warrington type up an equivalent number of manuscript pages in four languages—French, German, Italian, Spanish—for foreign releases of the film. For these, he used idiomatic phrases with vaguely similar meanings: Un “Tiens” vaut mieux que deux “Tu l’auras.” A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen. Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today. Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca. The early bird gets the worm. No por mucho madrugar amanece mas temprano. Even if you rise early, dawn will not come any sooner. 95 The Perfect Crime: An OPEN LETTER TO THE EDITORS OF FRIEZE MAGAZINE Brian Dillon Dear Jörg and Jennifer, I trust you’ll forgive this unorthodox way of getting in touch. I’m writing to explain—and, I hope, put to rest—a matter that’s been preying on my mind for some time now. You’ll remember that last year I wrote a piece for the October issue of the magazine on the history and theory of charlatanry. We’d discussed the essay over lunch in the spring, and both of you (and Dan too) were excited by the prospect of a piece on fakers, artistic and otherwise. We talked about what distinguished a charlatan from a simple liar or a con artist, and supposed it might have something to do with insincerity rather than straightforward deceit. That was essentially the line I took in my piece, “Is F for Fake?”, which dealt with Warhol, Duchamp, Dylan, and the notorious quack doctor John Brinkley, among others. It was a fascinating essay to research, and I think we were all happy with the result. Now, you may not recall that the piece opened with an epigraph from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, from 1621. (Well, 1621 is the date of the first edition; Burton kept revising the text until his death in 1640.) Here’s the sentence as it appeared: “I count no man a Philosopher who hath not, be it before the court of his Conscience or at the assizes of his Intellect, accused himself of a scurrilous Invention, and stood condemned by his own Judgement a brazen Charlatan.” I think you’ll agree it’s an apt summation of some of my argument, which mentioned in passing various accusations of charlatanry leveled at the likes of Baudrillard and Derrida. I guess a quotation from Burton felt especially à propos, too, because the charlatan, like the melancholic, seems in some ways such a seventeenth-century figure—I was thinking of famous fakers in plays by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson—but also because The Anatomy of Melancholy mounts so baroque a display of erudition that one starts to suspect Burton must have made some of it up. Actually, I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that many of his citations from classical authors are inexact at best, perhaps as a result of his working from memory or his own careless notes. In any case, the reader certainly gets the 100 impression that his scholarship is a sort of performance, if not actually a confidence trick. But that’s neither here nor there. I’m skirting my main point, which is this: I invented that quotation myself. It’s a fake. I’d been looking out for a suitable epigraph while researching the essay, and failed to find a passage that sounded just right. A few days before the deadline I pulled my copy of Burton off the shelf and spent an hour or so trawling the index for references to shamming or deceit: still nothing, not even in Burton’s brilliant discussion of the melancholic’s tendency to malingering and hypochondria. And then it struck me that with a little care regarding seventeenth-century syntax and a few quaint capital letters, I could simply contrive the quotation I needed. Maybe you can imagine the fun I had writing that sentence—I still think it sounds plausible, though I’m not sure Burton would have used the word “brazen” in that way—but you probably can’t guess, yet, the trouble it’s caused me since. Be assured that I thought seriously about coming clean, and even drafted an email to Jennifer on the day I filed the piece, in which I admitted my modest ruse, and trusted that you’d both appreciate the joke. I’m hoping even now that you’ll figure the con was in the spirit of the essay as a whole, though things have assuredly become more complicated—at least for me, if not for you as editors. I half expected that your tireless copy editors might spot some oddity in the sentence—it’s happened before, and I’ve been infinitely grateful, when I’ve accidentally botched a quotation—and the fact that nobody did flag it for fact-checking should not reflect ill on anybody’s professionalism. It’s only my own reputation that’s been sullied by my foolish and arrogant decision to keep you in the dark. So what was I thinking when I sent you the piece and failed to admit my deception? I certainly didn’t imagine I was effecting some sort of Sokal-like revelation of the credulousness of the art press; you know I’m not convinced by that man’s stupid trick and can’t abide his bullying little book. I suppose my (immature, I know) delight at the whole scurrilous metaaptness of the ploy got the better of me. But I’d also been re-reading Baudrillard’s Simulations and Simulacra, and been opposite: Brian Dillon channeling Robert Burton in the October 2008 issue of frieze. 101 reminded of the ruse he pulls in the epigraph to that book. It starts, as you’ll no doubt recall, with a quotation from Ecclesiastes: “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” If it sounds too fitting to be true, that’s because Baudrillard famously wrote the passage himself, as he later admitted in the third volume of Cool Memories. Google it now and you’ll find several discussions of the epigraph as a quintessentially Baudrillardian sleight, and probably just as many where the author quotes it straight but is oddly unable to find it in any translation of the Bible. But all of that is just my own selfaggrandizing stuff. More to the point, you might be wondering by now what’s brought on this confession, so late in the day. Events, you see, have taken a curious turn. Some weeks after the frieze issue in question appeared, I was contacted by an academic in Uruguay—a notable scholar of Borges, as it happens—who was preparing a collection of essays on the subject of fakery and wished to include “Is F for Fake?”. I was flattered, of course; after securing assurance that frieze would be fully credited in the book, I agreed to publication and began to add some scholarly apparatus to the essay. And then my heart sank: what of the fake quotation? Assuming that an academic editor would want to excise such a sophomoric jape, I dashed off a confession and proposed an alternative epigraph. I’m perplexed to have to tell you now that the editor likes the joke—it has an air, she says, of the Argentinean master! The book will appear, in Spanish, later this year. You’ll appreciate, I’m sure, my predicament—which I hope, indeed pray, is not also now your predicament. We—forgive me, I—have sent this little lie out into the world, where it may do who-knows-what damage in the years (let’s not speak of the decades, or centuries) to come. I’ve been haunted recently by the possible scenarios. A diligent graduate student, justifiably thrilled to unearth evidence of Burton’s early theorizing of the relationship between philosophical thought and self-conscious performativity, may waste hours, days, weeks, combing a Spanish translation (or worse, the linguistically knotty original) for the fantastical sentence. More vexingly, unwitting scholars might take the epigraph on trust, and quote it in their own writings, so that it insin- 102 uates its way into academic discourse. I’ve begun to dream of whole libraries filled with false citations. Enough of these fancies, though; I’m sure it won’t come to that. In any case, you must rest content in the knowledge that I take full responsibility for this egregious deceit. (As also in the certainty that it has not happened before, nor ever will again. Really.) And yet, dearest editors, isn’t there a sense in which we are all in this together? Honestly, I don’t want to worry you—we’re all conscientious and busy people, with neither the time nor the inclination for infamy—but can you really say, in light of the sordid course of events that I’ve tried hard, believe me, to lay out for you as sincerely as possible, that you don’t feel something of the same twinge of guilt that I feel right now? But we must remain calm; discovery, not to mention posterity, is a long way off. The relationship between writer and editor is such a delicate and—don’t you agree?— such a precious one. It’s based on trust, of course, and I know that I can trust you. Yours truly, Brian Madeleine Lamberet and Georges Grigoroff in Eus, 1980. Photo George Makari. In the Orchards of Nostalgia George Makari Before I stumbled onto Eus, my only trip to France was an empty cliché. Backpacks on, my longhaired college pals and I celebrated our arrival by drunkenly tossing a Frisbee in the gardens of Versailles. We burned our way through cultural landmarks and topless beaches, and in the end, met no one who was French and no one who was topless. A few years later in New York, I fell in love with an American woman who had spent her childhood in France, and in 1987, I accompanied her home to a medieval village perched in the Pyrenees. The place itself was a cluster of houses, a zigzag of cubes and rectangles made of white rock and orange terracotta roofs. Wide at the base, the village lifted and narrowed as it moved up the mountainside, peaking in an eighteenth-century Baroque church with a bell tower. Down in the valley, there were verdant orchards and beyond that a range of gray mountains that rolled out into an immense vista and somewhere became Spain. After following a perilous little road that snaked its way higher and higher, I first arrived at the village. Amid 103 faint outlines of formerly terraced land, hand-painted markers pointed hikers higher up the mountain to a ghost town called Comes. In 1930, the final inhabitants of Comes dug up their dead and carried these remains and their few possessions down into the valley. At that time, Eus seemed headed for a similar fate, but the next decade brought a wave of settlers that saved it from ruin. By the time I set eyes on it, the village was thriving; along its maze of footpaths, there was carefully tended thyme and Barbary cactus, red and yellow roses, Pyrenean irises, fig trees, hanging muscat grapes, and aloe. Still, for a child of the New Jersey suburbs, it was as if I had fallen backward in time. There were few phones or televisions, and no supermarkets. People slipped notes under doors to pass on invitations or news; on Tuesday, everyone carried their baskets into town for the fair. Everything looked ancient, from the stone houses and the skinny cobblestone passageways to the tin Deux Chevaux cars. Washerwomen could be found at the village well, and builders used cow dung for cement. In the morning, the bell in the church tower rang on the quarter hour. It also called people to prayer in the morning and evening for “l’Angelus,” and when a villager died, it tolled through the day. The inhabitants also came from another time. Take our neighbors. Georges Grigoroff had been a warm, jolly uncle to my wife in her jeunesse. He was short and stocky, and his white hair sprouted wildly from under his beret. Bushy eyebrows framed his electric blue eyes. From afar, he resembled any number of French villagers; dressed in blue and black, skin craggy from the sun, severe, arms clasped behind his back as he walked. Though he cultivated grapes for wine and bees for honey, Grigoroff was an intellectual. The word may sound pretentious, but after being popularized during the Dreyfus Affair, the term caught on in France. In Grigoroff’s case, this meant that by day he was an expert on agriculture and land reform, and at night a political militant, an anti-authoritarian syndico-anarchist. There were others like him in Eus—elderly men and women who had hauled their convictions over these mountains and repopulated this village after their cause was lost in Spain. Grigoroff’s companion of forty years, Madeleine Lamberet, lived in an adjoining house. An ebullient painter well into her eighties when I first met her, her porcelain skin was accentuated by a shock of beautiful white hair, impeccably coiffed in page-boy style. A student of the painter Maurice Utrillo, she had become a committed anarchist around 1936. She was passionate about Romanesque art, flamenco dancing, and fight-the-power demonstrations. Attracting a coterie of artsy friends fifty years her junior, Madeleine seemed like an ageless Pan. Filled with an aesthete’s joys, she perpetually pronounced things beau and charmant in a mellifluous voice. Georges and Madeleine would darken, however, when recounting the Spanish Civil War. They spoke incessantly of Buenaventura Durruti, Franco, and the collapse of Barcelona, as if on a brief vacation from 1939. They never missed the July 19th reunion of Spanish loyalists. In one of her last letters to us, some sixty years after the fact, Madeleine could not help but note that the 19th was approaching, writing plaintively of “this revolution that holds all our heart.” It was their great defining tragedy, and, with them, it lived on. Meeting Georges and Madeleine was like stumbling upon soldiers who had gone into hiding up in the hills and refused to believe the war was over. During the 1970s, this couple became heroes to the youth of Eus who tagged along after them, memorized their protest songs, listened with rapture to their tales, and imagined Eus to be a classless commune. To have fought fascism, to have risked everything by going 104 underground into the resistance: these two had come through the fire that had forged the next generation’s world. Utopian believers in freedom, in collectives founded only on individual desire, Georges and Madeleine exemplified these credos with their disdain for all centralized authority and institutions like marriage. Though inseparable and doting, they maintained their independence by residing in attached houses. Cool. Though he could be hilarious, witty, and wry, over the years, I must admit, I grew weary of Grigoroff. He had become harder in old age, and with me, he simply could not contain his disdain for Americans. I remember sitting at his dining table, and as always, our conversation turned to American Imperialism, the situation with the blacks in the United States, and whether I had read John Steinbeck (not again!). Did I know about these things? It was as if we were playing chess and with these few moves, he had checkmated me. He enjoyed pinning me to the losing proposition of being his America, while he waltzed away as the enlightened egalitarian. Even though I had read Steinbeck and had not voted for Monsieur Reagan, I knew that didn’t matter. If I wanted him to be my French intellectual, I would have to bear up as his pigheaded American. Still, our arrangement confused me. As an anarchist, Grigoroff reserved his most intense hatred for the Soviets, the same enemies as Monsieur Reagan. He insisted that Stalinists had murdered Durruti and betrayed the cause in Barcelona; they had turned the dreams of liberty and equality into a nightmare. Grigoroff’s refusal to forget burned like a long dark fuse in his eyes. I once heard that he had staged raids inside Spain, like the famed guerrilla Sabaté who had hidden out in Comes and Eus for a while after the war, but I did not know how heavy his hatred was until he invited us to his tiny atelier in Montmartre. It was a closet-sized garret stuffed from floor to ceiling with anti-Communist pamphlets, declarations, and manifestos, all written and in some cases printed by Grigoroff himself. As I entered, the piles trembled and threatened to fall. Looking around, I spotted a cot and a hot plate. It was not so much a livable space as a secret room for his rage. Armed with a pen and a host of pseudonyms, such as Georges Balkanski, Georgi Hadjev, and George Khadjev, he wrote tract after tract, seeking to topple a superpower. It seemed fanatical and breathtakingly romantic, certainly from another century. He lived as if we were still in a world that could be transformed by freethinking pamphleteers holed up in Paris. And then, an extraordinary thing happened. Grigoroff’s dream met and mixed with a million others’. This man who had refused to let go, chanting, singing, in his own way praying, was miraculously given his due. In 1989, the Soviet empire and its Iron Curtain disintegrated. Georges Grigoroff won. And at that moment I discovered that our next-door neighbor was not French at all. ••• According to many in our village, Eus is neither French nor Spanish but Catalan. That is the most recent answer to the troubling questions of identity that have roiled this border region and given it many names: Occitania, Catalunya Nord, Languedoc, Rousillon, PyreneesOrientales. Recently, a bureaucrat incurred great ridicule by proposing that the region be renamed Septimanie, in honor of its supposed Visigothic origins. This vast wall of stone, the Pyrenees, has always constituted a natural border—but between whom and whom? The reply to this question has changed, often at the point of a sword. The reminders are everywhere. Throughout the mountains, impossibly perched fortifications mark the landscape. On sheer cliffs, the Cathars built their castles. Manicheans, these heretics proclaimed the material world to be made by an evil God, and they made this region their own, until they were slaughtered by the papal decree of a man named Innocent. Long dependent on the largesse of the Count of Barcelona, the region fell to the French in 1462, and was taken back by the Spanish thirty years later, only to be ceded again to the French in 1659. Solidly French since then, the inhabitants of the Pyrenees still seemed to hedge their bets. Hard to win, harder to control, these unconquerable mountains remained home to refugees, criminals, eccentrics, loners, searchers, utopians, and runaways. Here, a man might forget his past and disappear. Here, believers could build their new worlds. A Protestant or Jew might worship in peace; a Spaniard might pass as French; a fugitive might lose the law. The place became associated with cunning and the art of the double-cross. The French spoke of their southern compatriots as untrustworthy and shifty; the Spanish warned of a northern region filled with heretics and outlaws. But such a place had its uses. Over the last, cruel century, many in Europe were forced to disappear, and so they came. Les évadés, the locals called them. In 1939, the defeat of the Spanish Republicans brought the first torrent of refugees over the mountains. The cellist Pablo Casals found shelter in the valley below Eus; the poet Antonio Machado dragged himself to the port town of Collioure only to die. In a region with 223,000 French, 105 some 250,000 exiles poured in. Later, when Franco outlawed the use of the Catalan language, another exodus began. For those who knew no other language, talking itself had become a crime. Grigoroff was one of those exiles who adopted France as his refuge. But when the Soviet Union fell, he announced that he would now leave forever and return to Bulgaria. It was no secret that he had been born in Sofia, but people were shocked. Wasn’t Georges one of those who had given up his birthplace for the idea of being French, for the ideals of liberté, fraternité, and égalité ? If anyone seemed to have liberated himself from the sentimental claims of a birthplace to follow freely chosen political commitments, it was him. Then there was the matter of his other wife. Villagers were stunned to learn that when Georges departed Bulgaria nearly half a century earlier, he had been forced to leave behind a woman he loved. Some had known and forgotten; others, like myself, had never known. If she was not really a secret, neither was she ever discussed. When I found out about her, it suddenly became clear that Georges’s arrangement with Madeleine was predicated not only on the spirit of anarchism but also the ancient proscription against polygamy. Afterwards, many of us tried to piece together clues we had chosen to overlook. Once, Grigoroff announced to the daughter of a local anarchist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War that he wanted to hold a banquet and reveal all the secrets he’d been hiding. A banquet was held; he said nothing. There were other moments, too, but to the exiles from Spain, there was nothing more to know. Georges was a brother from their strangled cause. He stood before them in that light; he was that. And yet, he had another past. After the fall of Spain, he fled over these mountains but continued to Sofia where he reunited with his family, married, became an anarchist leader, and then, during World War Two, was placed in a concentration camp. Liberated in 1944, he had a short taste of freedom before the Soviets marched into Bulgaria and swept him into one of their political prisons. Of the tortures he endured, he told one to my wife, then twelve, perhaps because it had the air of a schoolyard game gone mad. Soldiers drew a chalk circle on the floor of his cell and a cross on a facing wall. While playing cards, they instructed Georges to stand inside the lines and stare at the cross. For days. He was not to move. He was not to stop. When he collapsed, they whipped him, doused him with water, and propped him back up inside the circle. As for Madeleine, she too fled over these mountains and did not stop, but went on to Paris, which soon fell under Nazi occupation. As a known anarchist, her life was in danger. She made her way into the underground, where, with her sister Renée, she organized the clandestine French Anarchist Federation. Using her skills as a painter, she forged passports for Jews and smuggled these papers to a contact at Gestapo headquarters in Paris. (When my wife and I asked if she was frightened, she looked at us sweetly, as if we were strange children.) After the war, when the time came to liberate a comrade in a Soviet prison, a man she knew from her days in Barcelona, this fearless woman took the assignment. Posing as an enthusiastic Marxist painter, she beguiled the Bulgarian cultural czars and somehow helped free the man. It was Grigoroff. I know it sounds implausible, too James Bond to be real, and perhaps it is not true. But I wonder if during those horrific years the only tales that did not end in death or silence were the implausible ones. They lived together as lovers in Paris, and arrived in the village around 1968. The couple bought two ancient stone ruins side by side and restored them. From their terraces, they could peer out each morning at the mountains they had once scaled in flight. All around them were reminders of their brief victory and exodus: the Catalan language, the shepherds’ paths through mountain passes that had carried them to safety, the dried ham that had sustained them, and the Mediterranean sun. They pointed themselves back in time, back to the beginning that allowed their worlds to entwine. They held Barcelona tight, refusing to let go, watching documentaries, reading histories, and surrounding themselves with the days of hope, the broken promises, and the massacres. Soon, myths grew up around them, myths they did nothing to dispel. Those of us who had disappeared into these hills for our own reasons filled our imaginations. Georges became “l’Anarchist”; Madeleine, his Simone de Beauvoir. But the collapse of the Soviet Union altered the geography of their remembrances; it awakened them from a long nightmare that had nonetheless given them each other, and it forced a choice upon them. When the walls of Europe collapsed, Georges was free to take back a life that had been torn from him. All he had to do was step over the last forty years. Or he could refuse that for this life here, for her. He left. In Eus, the villagers were appalled. To this day, no one can quite forgive him for abandoning Madeleine, and in so doing, breaking the spell those two cast over the village. Even though it would be unfair to say he tried to deceive us, many felt it was true, so strong was 106 the power of their fantasies. And though Georges and Madeleine died over a decade ago, each year when we return to the village, we discover people still can’t stop talking about them. No one can get over it. It was said, however, that douce Madeleine accepted Georges’s decision. Gossips whispered that she herself had wearied of the circle within which history had trapped them. In 1997, this timeless woman was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and eighteen months later, on 9 May 1999, she died alone in her apartment in Paris. As for Grigoroff, his return to Sofia was the cause for some celebration. His tireless attacks on the Communists were lauded by none other than the King of Bulgaria, an honor not without irony for an anarchist. However, on 12 October 1996, he too died alone. After a brief reunion, his Bulgarian wife had divorced him, saying he was no longer the man that she once knew. opposite: Propaganda poster created by the Gruppe Deutsche AnarchoSyndikalisten (a group of anti-fascist German exiles in Barcelona), artist unknown, ca. 1936. 107
