Showing posts with label No more wormwood beer just before bed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label No more wormwood beer just before bed. Show all posts
Friday, September 13, 2019
The bolt is sliding in its groove;
Outside the window is the black remov-
-ers' van;
And now with sudden swift emergence
Come the hooded women, the hump-backed surgeons,
And the Scissor Man.
W.H. Auden actually wrote "The Two" / "The Witnesses" (1932) as lyrics for a bonus track on "The Sky's Gone Out", but sadly he was nearly 50 years too early for Bauhaus to get together, so the project never came to fruition. Not many people know that.
This discovery was inspired by my need for a Arthur Conan Doyle / Heinrich Hoffmann collaboration in which Sherlock Holmes solves the case of the "Suck-a-Thumb Engineer".
Thursday, July 13, 2017
I remain unconvinced that the city needs a theme bar inspired by the early-Renaissance 'Urine Wheel' tradition
As is always the case, no-one listens to Uncle Smut.
Friday, February 3, 2017
May contain wormwood
This is now a thing:
For the next production, my cob-rewers favour a Porcini-infused Bière de Garde *. But then there is the trend among the local brewing noncognoscenti for seafood as a beer enhancement. This was originally an English tradition of Oyster Stouts that was adapted by Emersons for the Clam Stout, but things led rapidly downhill to such grotesqueries as Crayfish Porter and Seaweed Gose. The most recent manifestation of this trend was the "Fear Not" Smoked Eel Stout, which received mixed reviews (a local publican advises me), with some drinkers complaining that it tasted of "smoke" and "eels". I figure that the only way to exceed that will involve dried jellyfish.
* French for "beer for laying down and avoiding".
For the next production, my cob-rewers favour a Porcini-infused Bière de Garde *. But then there is the trend among the local brewing noncognoscenti for seafood as a beer enhancement. This was originally an English tradition of Oyster Stouts that was adapted by Emersons for the Clam Stout, but things led rapidly downhill to such grotesqueries as Crayfish Porter and Seaweed Gose. The most recent manifestation of this trend was the "Fear Not" Smoked Eel Stout, which received mixed reviews (a local publican advises me), with some drinkers complaining that it tasted of "smoke" and "eels". I figure that the only way to exceed that will involve dried jellyfish.
* French for "beer for laying down and avoiding".
Thursday, December 22, 2016
To wander unchecked through a garden of bright images [1000 Things to Memorise Before You Die]
I am disappointed in you, Sherlock fans. You are being wrong on the Internet. Across a plethora of misinformed websites, you insist that the "Mayfly man" chatroom interviews in "The Sign of Three" episode¹ are part of the Holmesian Memory Palace or Mind Palace, when any fule kno that what we see here is an example of a Memory Theatre.
The confusion is understandable, for you invest your attention into imagining nudge-nudge hints from the scriptwriters that confirm your slashfic speculations about the Holmeoerotic relationship with Watson. I know better than to expect minutiae or punctilios of detail.
So this is Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre, as reconstructed from the eyewitness reports of Camillo's visitors who entered it.
And a CGI rendition, for no extra charge!
Now the classical Memory Palace, as featured in the Ars Memoriae of antiquity, was all about the 'Method of Loci', and it was all about the serial retrieval of information. This is all commonplace knowledge now, with TED talks and National Geographic infographics and a chorus of Explaining Voices from bloggers in their scores, so you should all be familiar with the concept and it may well come up in the end-of-year exam.
The mental Palace provides a series of Loci -- niches, stations -- that you circumambulate in imagination, visiting each in turn to retrieve a series of facts or memories in the sequence that you filed them there. You stored them in each distinct locus along the route by mentally placing an Ally Gorical tableau or scene or statue there... vivid and theatrical, to make it both easier to visualise and more memorable once imagined.
Each detail of the tableau is chosen to embody one salient point of that mnemonic 'chunk'... the ram's testicles, the cup of poison, the salted pineapple, the splash of red paint... all comprising an image of Surrealist weirdness or Grand Guignol excess, a crime scene out of 'Hannibal'. Or in Cicero's example, "Aesopus and Cimber [two actors] being dressed for the roles of Agamemnon and Menelaus in Iphigenaia".²
So the images and tableau are unique to your own associational needs. The architecture or landscape that you populate with them is equally customised. A Memory Garden or Church or Gallery or Museum will work just as well as a Memory Palace, as long as you know it so well as to navigate its corridors or promenades in your mind, and it is punctuated with stopping points or Stations of the Schloss that vary enough in their circumstances to keep the images distinct and non-overlapping. You can use it again or again for different narratives of information sequences, so it does not need to be immense... Hannibal Lecter is credited with mnemonic architecture that "is vast, even by medieval standards. Translated to the tangible world it would rival the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul for size and complexity" -- but Lecter is just showing off.³
Something about the Memory Palace conceit resonated with the Neuromancer tropes of cyberspace -- virtual but spatial metaphors for representing data, stored or in motion, in human terms. So now Memory Palaces are everywhere, they probably have their own Lonely Planet guide,
and we hipsters who were reading Yates' book 40 years ago before they went mainstream, it is all tiresome for us, now we have moved on to reading Mary Carruthers' "The Medieval Craft of Memory" and other histories of mnemotechnics that you probably haven't heard of. Everyone quotes "The Art of Memory" but no-one memorises it. If they did, they would recall that the classical Method of Loci is covered in the first two chapters, while the bulk of the book traces its medieval mutations and Renaissance excrescences, in which the convenience of a retentive memory features hardly at all.
So Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre is not a Palace. Its amphitheatrical tiers are stocked with symbolic, talismanic images (between them the images encompass all possible human experience), laid out for simultaneous scrutiny from the central "stage" in Panopticon array4... arranged in a weird syncretic Hermetic / Kabbalistic grid, emanations of the Sephiroth radiating out. The idea now is all random-access retrieval. Comparisons are made with hypertext, and with information-overload data-immersion interfaces like Bush's Memex desk or the Microfilm Machine. Thus its appearance in a Laundry novel cannot be far away.
These later mnemotechnic theorists were not well-pleased with the idea of practitioners choosing their own personal imagery and stage sets; this struck them as undisciplined, anarchic, laissez-faire. It made more sense to them that there should be a universal pictogrammarie of recollection, optimised to the First Principles and Platonic driving forces behind the cosmos -- an Enochian sign-language, as it were -- which you should spend months or years committing to memory before the minor task of improving your memory could begin. Otherwise what point is there of having a theory? Every theorist deduced a different universal language, as they do.
The first appearance of the Memory Theatre in the fictive domain was in Terra Nostra. Fuentes imagined it as a tool for remembering Alternity, events in alternative time-lines that didn't happen. He reconstructed its terraces of statuary as mobile -- sliding, rotating, animated by shifting illumination and by projective slide-shows -- rather than frozen in hieratic stillness. But Fuentes' methods are unsound.
The second fictive manifestation of the Theatre, in Sherlock, is where we began.
The third appearance in fiction is closer to canon. The images are fixed in Critchley's version. They are made of papier mâché... "white and anonymous, looking rather like vulgar gnome-like garden ornaments." Though it may be that Camillo's notion was that the internalised version would move. In imagination the tiers would slowly revolve in the manner of a circular slide-rule or the volvelles of the Lullian art, creating new combinations.
Perhaps the user was intended to encode information in the form of a manhunter detection wall, by visualising a spiderweb of colour-coded strings to connect the relevant talismans.
But each fictive manifestation of the Theatre makes the next manifestation easier and more likely (according to the iron laws of the Morphogenetic Field): the successive intervals are shortening, the rhythm is accelerating. The third case marks the tipping point of the avalanche, Bellman Logic applies and the slippery slope becomes steeper. Extrapolating the curve, we only have two years left before every single work of literary or cinematic fiction is about a Memory Theatre. After that, as the Morphogenic Flux propagates backwards in time, past works will be recognised in retrospection as descriptions of Camillo's theatre.5 Memory Theatres will be the only culture we have.
I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.
2. Lengthy footnote goes here about Locus Solus as Canterel's memory palace. Tl;dw.
3. There's a plaque on the wall of Literature Street in Vilnius honouring Thomas Harris... not in recognition of his contributions to the literature of Memory, alas, but rather because Lecter is also credited with a Lithuanian background.
It is not known whether anyone is using Literature Street for the Method of Loci.
4. The stage is small, with room for one or maybe two people at a time, so the stairway leading up to it from behind narrows to a eye-of-the-needle entrance. There is nothing in the written description about the corridor being bedecked with banners and messages.
5. Just saying, Inferno.
Was the
So this is Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre, as reconstructed from the eyewitness reports of Camillo's visitors who entered it.
Finer details are recorded in Frances Yates' reconstructed plan. Don't bother to thank me for this nice fresh scan from the 1978 Peregrine reprint, that is just part of the usual Riddled service.
Now the classical Memory Palace, as featured in the Ars Memoriae of antiquity, was all about the 'Method of Loci', and it was all about the serial retrieval of information. This is all commonplace knowledge now, with TED talks and National Geographic infographics and a chorus of Explaining Voices from bloggers in their scores, so you should all be familiar with the concept and it may well come up in the end-of-year exam.
Each detail of the tableau is chosen to embody one salient point of that mnemonic 'chunk'... the ram's testicles, the cup of poison, the salted pineapple, the splash of red paint... all comprising an image of Surrealist weirdness or Grand Guignol excess, a crime scene out of 'Hannibal'. Or in Cicero's example, "Aesopus and Cimber [two actors] being dressed for the roles of Agamemnon and Menelaus in Iphigenaia".²
Below: Typical crime scenes memory images
So the images and tableau are unique to your own associational needs. The architecture or landscape that you populate with them is equally customised. A Memory Garden or Church or Gallery or Museum will work just as well as a Memory Palace, as long as you know it so well as to navigate its corridors or promenades in your mind, and it is punctuated with stopping points or Stations of the Schloss that vary enough in their circumstances to keep the images distinct and non-overlapping. You can use it again or again for different narratives of information sequences, so it does not need to be immense... Hannibal Lecter is credited with mnemonic architecture that "is vast, even by medieval standards. Translated to the tangible world it would rival the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul for size and complexity" -- but Lecter is just showing off.³
Something about the Memory Palace conceit resonated with the Neuromancer tropes of cyberspace -- virtual but spatial metaphors for representing data, stored or in motion, in human terms. So now Memory Palaces are everywhere, they probably have their own Lonely Planet guide,
and we hipsters who were reading Yates' book 40 years ago before they went mainstream, it is all tiresome for us, now we have moved on to reading Mary Carruthers' "The Medieval Craft of Memory" and other histories of mnemotechnics that you probably haven't heard of. Everyone quotes "The Art of Memory" but no-one memorises it. If they did, they would recall that the classical Method of Loci is covered in the first two chapters, while the bulk of the book traces its medieval mutations and Renaissance excrescences, in which the convenience of a retentive memory features hardly at all.
Symbolic image
These later mnemotechnic theorists were not well-pleased with the idea of practitioners choosing their own personal imagery and stage sets; this struck them as undisciplined, anarchic, laissez-faire. It made more sense to them that there should be a universal pictogrammarie of recollection, optimised to the First Principles and Platonic driving forces behind the cosmos -- an Enochian sign-language, as it were -- which you should spend months or years committing to memory before the minor task of improving your memory could begin. Otherwise what point is there of having a theory? Every theorist deduced a different universal language, as they do.The first letter of the
Name has been uttered
Below, right: Frozen
Left: RotatingThe second letter of the
Name has been uttered
The last letter of the
Name has been uttered
Perhaps the user was intended to encode information in the form of a manhunter detection wall, by visualising a spiderweb of colour-coded strings to connect the relevant talismans.
But each fictive manifestation of the Theatre makes the next manifestation easier and more likely (according to the iron laws of the Morphogenetic Field): the successive intervals are shortening, the rhythm is accelerating. The third case marks the tipping point of the avalanche, Bellman Logic applies and the slippery slope becomes steeper. Extrapolating the curve, we only have two years left before every single work of literary or cinematic fiction is about a Memory Theatre. After that, as the Morphogenic Flux propagates backwards in time, past works will be recognised in retrospection as descriptions of Camillo's theatre.5 Memory Theatres will be the only culture we have.
I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Filmed in the Debating Chamber in County Hall in London, which used to be the headquarters of the Greater London Council. Until Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC on the principle that local democracy is incompatible with Freedom... leaving County Hall to be occupied by a succession of fly-by-night tourist attractions. The Debating Chamber is now available for corporate hire.2. Lengthy footnote goes here about Locus Solus as Canterel's memory palace. Tl;dw.
3. There's a plaque on the wall of Literature Street in Vilnius honouring Thomas Harris... not in recognition of his contributions to the literature of Memory, alas, but rather because Lecter is also credited with a Lithuanian background.
4. The stage is small, with room for one or maybe two people at a time, so the stairway leading up to it from behind narrows to a eye-of-the-needle entrance. There is nothing in the written description about the corridor being bedecked with banners and messages.
Was the
Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record And Transfer device from Joe-90 designed not so much to implant memories and skills, but to awaken them through anamnesis? I could not possibly comment.
Friday, March 18, 2016
Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to leave suckers in possession of their money, that is the Law. Are we not Men?
#2 is more of a guideline
than a rigid directive
than a rigid directive
So there was this flurry of speculation a few years ago, as to who might be behind the ArcSurvival scam. 
Which was aimed at a small audience of guileless suckers who combined (a) terrified belief in the vague menaces of New-Age / Pop-culture apocalyptic bafflegab, (b) relieved belief in strangers who offered to save them with promises of technological omnipotence, and (c) possession of several million Euros in disposable wealth. Not a large Venn Diagram intersection there, so the speculation included whether ArcSurvival was a real (but incompetent) con or a parody of one, a travesty of a burlesque if not vice versa.
Left: As advertised in New Scientist
Now at Riddled Research Laboratory we pride ourselves on our expertise in the construction of Arks, for escaping the End of Civilisation As We Know It; and it would be nice if your humble staff could boast that we participated in the debate. The truth, alas, is that at in January 2011 we were primarily engaged in ranting about zorbs, Morris dancing and Mooses. We only learned of Arksurvival belatedly, via a comment on an old thread from helpful brownie 'Anonymous'.
The entry page of ArcSurvival.com must be read in a Dr Evil voice for proper effect:
which appears to incorporate plot elements from Gordon Dickson.
The whole thing is as mad as a barrel of green squirrels dancing a jig on a giant blue flower. It goes past the stage of mere barking madness into "entire wolfpack howling at the moon" territory, and you must read it now, preferably with Amon Düül II playing in the background. It all speaks of a fantasy life comparable only in its richness with Baron Merlona of Melbourne, but written with the blithe unconcern for practicalities of an 8-year-old child.
Although the authors missed a few tricks through their unfamiliarity with the word 'arcology'.* Nor were they aware of two crucial narrative traditions in the preservation of a tiny vestige of civilisation. First, the best way to isolate the Ark from a world of conflagration is in space;
and second, that lifeboats always have one passenger who is the agent of an evil ideology devoted to the destruction of all we hold dear. No-one knows why. It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something.
Many of the tropes are sourced from the recurring theme of the Libertarian Utopia. These have been variously advertised in Idaho (the Citadel scam), or in a desert in Chile (oops, water rights and land occupancy sold separately), or on a sand-bar in the Pacific belonging to someone else,
or aboard a ferro-cement barge. How does a ship made of concrete and rebar catch fire? It is a mystery.
After each con the suckers are sadder and poorer, but no wiser. They console themselves with the thought that libertarianism is such a rational, geometrically-logical philosophy / economic system that the next gaggle of grifters soliciting subscriptions to a Utopia of Selfishness will be motivated by their own self-interest to make it work, rather than just to take the money for a moonlight flit.
The Arksurvival Utopia was a product of its time, piggybacking on an ephemeral pop-culture deadline for EOCAWKI. 2012 was a golden age (as it were) of prepare-for-disaster gold-pimping. Since then the website has fallen into desuetude, leaving only those records we could salvage with theRiddled Time- Wayback Machine. Which deprives us of the opportunity to participate in the poll that opens later recensions of the Doomsday Countdown:
the options on offer do not include my personal EndCiv scenario, "Jaguars falling from the sky".
ANYWAY... the email address for negotiating one's berth on the Ark of Survival was saved; it was "newworld@hush.ai". Against all odds, that address is still extant, and is that of Amanda Law or Amanda Mary Heath or Amanda Mary Jewell -- GcMAF Entrepreneur and Friend of Riddled. She uses it to accept donations on behalf of the people she is curing from cancer, so that they might continue their expensive treatment.
Back in 2012, Amanda Mary and Douglas Jewell were based in Bulgaria, within the colony there of UK ex-pats, and
fond memories linger on. Suffice to say that there was drama. And it transpires that ArcSurvival.com was registered to "jewellless1@hotmail.co.uk", at an address in Cornwall, but hosted on a server in Bulgaria. Allowing one to hazard a guess that the last redoubt of civilisation in the midst of the New Dark Age will be Bulgarian in nature. Possibly the Health Restoration Centre in Smolyan, or the Stoikite Orphanage.
It would certainly have been useful for powering the Redoubt that Douglas William Jewell was CEO of Pearl Engineering at the time, and an expert in renewable energy.
Amanda now appears to reside in Mexico, as Healing Oracle and GcMAF Oracle, offering the intravenous GcMAF cancer cure as "Holistic health adviser and Cancer researcher" at La Flor de la Salud. That being a quackery clinic that started out by diagnosing slipped discs as the cause of all physical ailments and offering surgical treatment for slipped discs, later adding ozone, chelation, acupuncture, neuro-focal odontology and many other modalities of money-removal (although no-one has informed the quacks of Amanda Mary's presence on their staff).
And there was drama -- with a seminar advertised in Florida, "on taking control of your health", only to be cancelled at the last minute "due to the very recent and mysterious deaths of two holistic doctors in Florida during the last two weeks".**
It is not clear how she continues to treat her UK clients from Mexico, but many months have passed since the last appeals for funds on behalf of Anne Pharo and Freddie Mansfield, so it may be that this is no longer an issue.
* "An Arcology is a very large building with a self-contained ecology and a high population density, built in the shape of a rainbow."
** Not a rip-off; "Anyone who has already paid a deposit for the seminar will be automatically entered into the video course OR you may request a refund."
Which was aimed at a small audience of guileless suckers who combined (a) terrified belief in the vague menaces of New-Age / Pop-culture apocalyptic bafflegab, (b) relieved belief in strangers who offered to save them with promises of technological omnipotence, and (c) possession of several million Euros in disposable wealth. Not a large Venn Diagram intersection there, so the speculation included whether ArcSurvival was a real (but incompetent) con or a parody of one, a travesty of a burlesque if not vice versa.Left: As advertised in New Scientist
Right: as advertised in Private Eye
Now at Riddled Research Laboratory we pride ourselves on our expertise in the construction of Arks, for escaping the End of Civilisation As We Know It; and it would be nice if your humble staff could boast that we participated in the debate. The truth, alas, is that at in January 2011 we were primarily engaged in ranting about zorbs, Morris dancing and Mooses. We only learned of Arksurvival belatedly, via a comment on an old thread from helpful brownie 'Anonymous'.The entry page of ArcSurvival.com must be read in a Dr Evil voice for proper effect:
If you do not have expendable liquid funds available to you, to cover as a minimum of one point five million euros for each member of your family, please do not continue.I failed the test but continued anyway, and learned much about the nature of the coming catastrophe,
which appears to incorporate plot elements from Gordon Dickson.This is the long time planned and thought out new world of the few (many names including, Knights of Malta, Knights of the Templar, Bilderburg group, Illuminati, and so on Reptilian hybrids, shape shifters, etc, etc) It is quite well known that a large segment of these entities have been living underground for thousands of years, feeding off the surface in terms of energy, food, etc etc.The refuge itself is a "survival village in the safest place on earth. The village will be completely unknown to the outside world, and is a long distance from any habitation. It can not be detected by land or air and will always remain that way." There will be hydroponics, and homeopathic healing to guarantee the health of the passengers, and eugenic selection of an elite population of Nordic purity, and Free Energy technology, and evacuation via "high speed, long distance helicopter’s", and an impenetrable electric fence to keep out the Aberrations, I saw that series.
Although the authors missed a few tricks through their unfamiliarity with the word 'arcology'.* Nor were they aware of two crucial narrative traditions in the preservation of a tiny vestige of civilisation. First, the best way to isolate the Ark from a world of conflagration is in space;
Many of the tropes are sourced from the recurring theme of the Libertarian Utopia. These have been variously advertised in Idaho (the Citadel scam), or in a desert in Chile (oops, water rights and land occupancy sold separately), or on a sand-bar in the Pacific belonging to someone else,
or aboard a ferro-cement barge. How does a ship made of concrete and rebar catch fire? It is a mystery.After each con the suckers are sadder and poorer, but no wiser. They console themselves with the thought that libertarianism is such a rational, geometrically-logical philosophy / economic system that the next gaggle of grifters soliciting subscriptions to a Utopia of Selfishness will be motivated by their own self-interest to make it work, rather than just to take the money for a moonlight flit.
The Arksurvival Utopia was a product of its time, piggybacking on an ephemeral pop-culture deadline for EOCAWKI. 2012 was a golden age (as it were) of prepare-for-disaster gold-pimping. Since then the website has fallen into desuetude, leaving only those records we could salvage with the
How you think apocalypse will happen?Now on the one hand, some potential customers might have placed slightly more confidence in the people from whom they were buying protection from catastrophe if those people projected a greater sense of knowledgeable authority in the nature of that catastrophe. On the other hand, everyone appreciates an interest in one's opinions, and voting in an on-line poll can foster a sense of investment and ownership. On the prehensile tail,
the options on offer do not include my personal EndCiv scenario, "Jaguars falling from the sky".ANYWAY... the email address for negotiating one's berth on the Ark of Survival was saved; it was "newworld@hush.ai". Against all odds, that address is still extant, and is that of Amanda Law or Amanda Mary Heath or Amanda Mary Jewell -- GcMAF Entrepreneur and Friend of Riddled. She uses it to accept donations on behalf of the people she is curing from cancer, so that they might continue their expensive treatment.
Back in 2012, Amanda Mary and Douglas Jewell were based in Bulgaria, within the colony there of UK ex-pats, and
fond memories linger on. Suffice to say that there was drama. And it transpires that ArcSurvival.com was registered to "jewellless1@hotmail.co.uk", at an address in Cornwall, but hosted on a server in Bulgaria. Allowing one to hazard a guess that the last redoubt of civilisation in the midst of the New Dark Age will be Bulgarian in nature. Possibly the Health Restoration Centre in Smolyan, or the Stoikite Orphanage.It would certainly have been useful for powering the Redoubt that Douglas William Jewell was CEO of Pearl Engineering at the time, and an expert in renewable energy.
We are the only company with the depth of experience to provide a fully turnkey renewable energy investment package, with investments ranging from 1,000,000. Euros to 2,000,000,000. Billion.It does not seem that Doug found the investors with the €16,400,000 for his 12-Megawatt windfarm development. Perhaps the turbines required upgrading to strengthen them against the impact of falling jaguars. Surprisingly, he does not mention his Vacuum-Energy technology.
Amanda now appears to reside in Mexico, as Healing Oracle and GcMAF Oracle, offering the intravenous GcMAF cancer cure as "Holistic health adviser and Cancer researcher" at La Flor de la Salud. That being a quackery clinic that started out by diagnosing slipped discs as the cause of all physical ailments and offering surgical treatment for slipped discs, later adding ozone, chelation, acupuncture, neuro-focal odontology and many other modalities of money-removal (although no-one has informed the quacks of Amanda Mary's presence on their staff).
It is not clear how she continues to treat her UK clients from Mexico, but many months have passed since the last appeals for funds on behalf of Anne Pharo and Freddie Mansfield, so it may be that this is no longer an issue.
----------------------------------------------------------------
** Not a rip-off; "Anyone who has already paid a deposit for the seminar will be automatically entered into the video course OR you may request a refund."
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