Go Out in a Blaze of Glory
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You know how the Dictionary Game turns a serious reference book into a gaming generator; the dictionary is playfully transformed from a tool for decoding puzzling words into a puzzle-making machine, where whimsically fake definitions take the stage. But could any book, spontaneously pulled off the shelf, be transformed into a playfulness machine? Could one's entire home library be a gaming center? That's the lofty goal of Machinarium Verbosus: it offers, among other oddities, cut-out paper spectacles for seeing more than is readily apparent in any book.
The poet W. B. Keckler describes our book as a "very humorous series of essays, experiments and actual OBJECTS (?!) all addressing metaphysical ideas in literature--but in an EXTREMELY playful way. I LOVE this book."
The theorist of playfulness, Bernie De Koven, says this: "'Scholarly fun' seems to be a good name for it. Esoteric fun, like that of poets and etymologists and students of the arcane. The fun of playing with the obscure, the esoteric, the knowledge shared by the well-read few. A kind of fun that, in playing with all but forgotten lore, keeps it alive for those of us who some day may care."
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Thanks to the lionized wordsmith Gary Barwin, who blogged, " The world always offers curious and wondrous marvels as seen through the lens flare of Craig's eyes." You may recall one of our secrets for seeing in 3-D:
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We were honored to consult on some magic for a thrillarious new novel. Gary Barwin explains:
At some point in my Yiddish for Pirates novel, I needed our "hero," Moishe, to facilitate an escape from an auto-da-fé where some condemned conversos were about to be burned at the stake. I wanted this to be accomplished with some flair and by fighting fire with fire. I mean, at lot was at stake, as it were. When I want to know about magic, I ask my sagacious and professorially odd friend, Professor Oddfellow AKA Craig Conley author of numerous books and keeper of many arcane fires. He has rabbitted away more hatfuls of knowledge about magic than anyone I know. He suggested that my scene could use the ol' Egyptian fire trick. From the front, the audience sees only a wall of fire, but what is really happening is that there are two separate walls which allows the magician to appear to walk through a solid wall of fire. This was interesting. I thought I could adapt this in a number of ways. Firstly, because this is a book engaging with Hebrew, Kabbalah, books, mysticism, and a kind of Yiddish derring-do (I guess that could be translated more plainly as "chutzpah,") I'd make the trick use a Hebrew/Yiddish letter. The letter qoph (kuf) would allow someone to enter the wall of fire and then escape out a secret flaming sally port out the back. This was important not only because my characters needed to escape but also because this scene was taking place in the round, in the Quemadero, the Inquisition's Sevillian execution square. And the stakes would be in the enclosed part of the letter.
As it turns out, and here I'm giving the scene away, there is a rabbi who has a teffilin box filled with oil and he throws it like a Molotov cocktail onto the kindling below his pyre. So Moishe has to act more quickly than he planned. Still, the whole thing is pulled off like a brilliant magic trick. Or a miracle. At least, that's what Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor thinks, But more on that another time...
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Original Content Copyright © 2025 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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