Posts Tagged ‘plays’
“In order for a book to exist, it is sufficient that it be possible. Only the impossible is excluded.”*…
One of your correspondent’s daily pleasures is Rusty Foster‘s newsletter, Today in Tabs. Here, an especially pleasing excerpt…
In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story called “The Library of Babel.” If you haven’t read it, or if it’s been a while, go read it now. It’s only eight pages. If that’s all this email accomplishes for you today, I’ll consider it a success.
In its finite but innumerable books, Borges’ Library contains every possible arrangement of letters. In 2015 Jonathan Basile made LibraryofBabel.info, a website that not only accomplishes this but is even searchable. Here’s one of the 10²⁹ pages that just say “today in tabs.” Here’s the last line of The Great Gatsby. Can you find it? If not, don’t worry, it shows up embedded in 29³¹⁴¹ more pages of gibberish. How about this page? It implicitly existed before I searched for it, which I find kind of upsetting.
But as interesting/disturbing as the Library’s content is, I’m also fascinated by the physical structure of it. Picture a cross between “The Name of Rose” and “House of Leaves.” A sort of infinite scriptorium designed by bees…
Enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible, and secret: “The Library of Babel,” from @fka_tabs.
See also “Visit The Online Library of Babel: New Web Site Turns Borges’ “Library of Babel” Into a Virtual Reality, source of the image above.
* Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
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As we check it out, we might send thoughtfully and warmly observed birthday greetings to David John Lodge; he was born on this date in 1935. An author, critic, and professor of literature, he has written 18 novels, a baker’s dozen works of nonfiction (plus two memoirs), three plays, and four teleplays. He’s probably best remembered for his wonderful “Campus Trilogy” – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988), the second two of which were each shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
“Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio”*…
The ever-illuminating Jason Kottke dips into Statistical Reasoning for Everyday Life (Bennett, Briggs, and Triola; Addison Wesley Longman; Second Edition, 2002) for a measure of Shakespeare’s vocabulary. Using a method recounted here, the authors concluded:
This means that in addition the 31,534 words that Shakespeare knew and used, there were approximately 35,000 words that he knew but didn’t use. Thus, we can estimate that Shakespeare knew approximately 66,534 words.
Linguist Richard Lederer observes (as cited in in this piece) that Shakespeare hadn’t begun to reach the bottom of the barrel: there are currently over 600,000 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary (and in Shakespeare’s time things were especially fluid– as witnessed by the Bard’s own fevered invention of new words and phrases).
Still, Shakespeare’s facility is easier to appreciate in context when we recognize that the average English speaker has a vocabulary of (only) 10,000 to 20,000 words, and, as Lederer observes, actually uses only a fraction of that (the rest being recognition or recall vocabulary).
* Love’s Labour’s Lost I,ii
As we reach for our copies of Word Power, we might wish a glittering birthday to Anita Loos, who was born on this date in 1888. A writer from childhood, she sold a movie idea to D.W Griffiths at Biograph while she was still in her teens– and began a career through which she wrote plays, movies, stories/novels, magazine articles, and finally memoirs.
She’s probably best remembered for her 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Loos claimed to have written the spoof, which she started on a long train ride, as an entertainment for her friend H. L. Mencken (who reputedly had a fondness for Lorelei Lee-like blonds). In any case, the book was an international bestseller, printed in 14 languages and in over 85 editions. It was a hit on Broadway in 1949, then adapted again into a movie musical in 1953– the Howard Hawks classic in which Marilyn Monroe reminds us that “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
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