A Tiny Lead?

Where were you on the night of May 10th, 1935?  Eh? 

Good Christ, speak-up small fry!

A Curious Case

"The infant had, they said, a most wizened and old-looking face..."

Was it you Benjamin? Could it be? 

No! You're far too cold and lifeless a creation for the likes of HSK.

Short Round

"You discovered the bodies?"
"Yes, sir. Mrs. Pike, there, was with me."
"You found them both dead?"
"Yes, sir...Jimmy and I were pretty friendly at the theater. He was a nice little fellow and seemed grateful that I'd given him his job. We'd only needed one midget for a Oriental scene in the second act and the agencies had sent about fifteen. Mr. Gehring , the director, told me to pick one of them as he was busy and I picked Jimmy because he was the littlest."

- From Marc Connelly's "The Coronor's Inquest," (1930) which can be found in this.

"London, England, November 13, 1936: The baffling case of the murder of Andre Marceau, of England, by strangulation, committed apparently by an infant -- though in actuality beyond doubt by a grotesque dwarf or else midget, in infant's clothes -- let down from a hovering Knepp-Chandley autogiro and then whisked away again, is shortly to be completely solved, if the optimistic, and at the same time very positive, statement of Inspector Xenius Jones, youthful crime sleuth from the Bombay, India, police force, and recent addition to Scotland Yard, may be accepted."

- From HSK's The Marceau Case (1936), which can be found here.

It appears that midget murder was abound both inside and outside of the "vicious circle."

The Lost Screenplay?

Buckaroo Banzai, born to an American mother and a Japanese father, thus began life as he was destined to live it...going in several directions at once.  A brilliant neurosurgeon, this restless young man grew quickly dissatisfied with a life devoted solely to medicine.  He roamed the planet studying martial arts and particle physics, collecting around him a most eccentric group of friends, those hard-rocking scientists The Hong Kong Cavaliers.

And now, with his astounding jet car ready for a bold assault on the dimension barrier, Buckaroo Banzai faces the greatest challenge of his turbulent life...

...while high above Earth, an alien spacecraft keeps a nervous watch on Team Banzai's every move.

From: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

For more information on the work of Dr. Banzai visit the Institute.

The Daily Watchdog

Courtesy of the esteemed Professor Park

Getting Knotted

"Is that you, Ward? It's me, Rosegail."

An Episode Concerning a Man Trapped Within a Story Within a Story Within a Story...(I Think)

To Whom:                                   

I am presently ensnared in a collection of stories set within a story which is itself set within yet another story (I think).  All of which is occurring somewhere between a painting and a plaster wall (I think). More details to follow if and when I emerge (I think).

Unsurely,

KDR

Current Mood: In the Weeds

Scraps at Midnight

The cover has closed on Sing Sing Nights (for now), but my time in Keelerville (that London of the West) has only just begun. I am now set to begin Keeler's next opus, Thieves' Nights and my palms sweat with anticipation.  

What did I make of Sing Sing Nights, you ask?  In a word: dizzying.  If this is one of Keeler's more "conventional" works (as has been reported), I can only imagine what lies ahead.  While the book may not be as "off the rails" as his later works, there is certainly a peculiar/unique voice and vision at work that seems undeniably Keeler-esque (at least from what I, a recent initiate, can tell).  

Some of the emergent obsessions in SSN:

• Use of truncated/rearranged words and letters, and an abundant use of initialized monikers. (Question to self: Might some of this connect to the Oulipo?  Answer to self: Check it out).

• Pseudonyms and doubles (and triples?!?!) (e.g. Gryce/Cawthorne, Annesly/Grillo).

• Subset of above: A fixation with the construct of identity.  Identities often transplanted, transformed,  or confused via names, wardrobes, or brain surgery (!)

• Scraps, documents, pieces - more than just clues to the mystery?  All a part of Keeler's meta/self-reflexive narrative constructions.  Is he showing us the clues to more than just the riddle at hand?  Is he using these devices parodically, or perhaps just calling attention to his "tangled" narrative methods?  (see also: the latter discussions between Krenwiscz, Eastwood, McCaigh).

• The Race Question (more on this later --- for now one word: Confucius)

• Keeler constantly comments on the convoluted quality of his narratives (e.g. tangled, snarled, etc).  See also: duh  What Keeler might refer to as "some semblance of winkability" (pg. 206, Ward Lock & Co.).

• Annesly/Grillo might function as a kind of Keeler surrogate --- a beastly and extreme outsider figure ("The outcast was to be taken in, to be made a peer of his fellows"). There's something deeply sad about Eastwood's narrative of love lost and sort of found.  I could be reading too much into it, but it felt shot through with a kind of lived sorrow/loneliness.

• n + (?!?!?)

Harry Stephen Mathews?

"After inventing incident 'n' between thread 'A' and thread 'B,' there must be invented immediately an incident of numerical order ' n + 1' involving thread 'A' with still another thread 'C'; then an incident 'n + 2' involving the same thread 'A' with one 'D'; then an incident 'n + 3' comprising an incident between thread 'A' and still a further thread 'E'; and this, to avoid an impasse, must be carried on as a rule to not less than an incident of order 'n + 4' or even 'n + 5'; and now mark well the essential desideratum of this preliminary invention. Here it is: Incident 'n' must produce incident 'n + 1'; 'n + 2' must be the result of 'n + 1'; 'n + 3' must be the result of 'n + 2'; and so on. This much correctly done, any writer - no matter who he be - will have a real set of threads with which to weave, as well as the nucleus - if we may use such a term - of the web itself."

From the Oulipo Companion:

N + 7 - A method invented by Jean Lescure that consists (in Queneau's terse definition) "in replacing each noun (N) with the seventh following it in a dictionary...When choosing a dictionary, it is useful to remember that the smaller it is, the greater the alphabetic distance between the original word and its replacement and the simpler the words found."

Say what?

Is this a mystery novel or a portable experimental writing workshop? While one seems vastly more convoluted than the other (you be the judge), each are inventive ways for narrative creation/construction. Could it be that HSK is a founding father of the Oulipo?

"The Strange Adventures of the Overlooked Oullipian." Hmmm.