"You want to go into the desert and learn higher magic, nebbich, when you … cannot distinguish a Hall of Riddles from the real world and do not even suspect that the books of life contain something other than what is written on the spine?" —Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

Studying by moonlight.  The book, Cemetery Maps, was a gift from our friend Gordon.

Alive to those suggestions of a mysterious sphere of being that come to the man who of a night has watched the pearly grey of the weather-gleam.  From The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry, Vol. 2, 1887.

"Remember the week-day to keep it holy."  From Pasteboard Proclivities by Elbert Hubbard, 1909.

"Some must take the good and some the evil / Dropped from either wing of this strange angel."  From "Al Hassan's Secret," in The Bird and the Bell by Christopher Pearse Cranch, 1890

Endangered Entertainment Is Going to Be Unpredictable

by Craig Conley

Kirk Marsh, the unpainted clown in the Venardos Circus, says that in comedic performances, the lack of a fourth wall enables direct audience engagement.  What Marsh hints at but doesn't reveal outright is that a circus (root meaning "ring") does away with the other three walls as well.  As in the ancient puzzle of geometry, one cannot square a circle.  Without walls, traditional definitions of entertainment become hazy.  Preconceived boundaries become dotted, like a string of lanterns.  In light of such nebulous freedom, an audience is plunged into a rather profound sense of wonderment, but so are the performers, night after night.  In fact, a cloud of doubt looms over a circus tent, no matter where it is pegged.  "If you're striving to be excellent," ringmaster and producer Kevin Vendaros notes, "you never get to that place where it's all locked and ready to go.  There's a vulnerability.  The cast opens its hearts to the audience."  Just as the audience can't guess what will happen next, the performers are viscerally kept on their toes, moment to moment.  Unlike Hollywood or Vegas-style entertainment, in which illusion is par for the course, and unlike Broadway shows, which are necessarily rote, a traveling circus is about reality and unpredictability — not the reality of everyday life, granted, but not trickery, either.  The stunts and demonstrations are real and dangerous, celebrations of skill and not deception.

Traditionally associated in the public mind with exotic animals, today traveling circuses mostly feature human performers.  Ironically, it is the circuses themselves — analog entertainment in a digital age — that are now endangered.  Minister of Parliament Peter Luff summarized the situation this way: "When the world is so troubled with natural disasters, international terrorism, threats of flu pandemics, the impact of climate change and with scandalous poverty, malnutrition and disease, the circus may seem a rather trivial matter.  …  But I believe performing arts have a vital contribution to make to the welfare of our nation and that circus is perhaps the most overlooked, undervalued and misunderstood performing art of them all.  Today's touring circus is not just misunderstood — its very existence is under threat."  Luff went on to note that circuses visit some of a nation's smallest communities, and "For many thousands of young people, a touring circus is their very first introduction to live performing art.  The circus is a profoundly democratic art form, and its very nature is multicultural.  The innocent pleasure circuses bring, though, as highly talented professionals even risk their lives on a twice daily basis, is threatened." 

Undaunted by the iffy prospects, Venardos created his circus in 2014, having previously been the youngest ringmaster for Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey Circus (at 22 years old), with additional experience at Big Apple Circus and Circus Vargas.  He set off on his own, desiring to be in control of his career and aspirations. But does Venardos' enterprise perpetuate the age-old dream of running away to join the circus?  "I am absolutely counting on it!" he says.

"Along the banks of the River Bug would be a good place for the establishment of a lot of mental misfit palaces of hallucination for future residences of all emperors, kings, and knaves."  From The Thinkograph, 1916.

Wow -- man is here defined as "a being said to be the highest work of God—and who admits it."  From The Roycroft Dictionary Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days by Elbert Hubbard, 1914.

A sense of the supernatural and the weird, bound up with a mysterious feeling of limitlessness and indefinitude that haunted him in his thoughts about this world and our earthly life.  The forms of another mysterious world, very near to this earth of ours, were seemingly present to his imagination.  From The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry, Vol. 2, 1887.

One day Tumblr lost its mind (corporations can do that!) and flagged 10% of my 37,000 posts as "adult content" when in fact the imagery derived from children's fairy tales, old magazines for homemakers, holy books from world religions, and vintage yearbooks from universities.  A drawing of a cat dancing with a rabbit amongst flowers, for example, was labeled by Tumbr as violating community standards.  The Tumblr robot is, in fact, quite literally blind.  It doesn't have eyes, nor a brain.  It can't know what a picture is depicting.  But the powers that be at Tumblr still allowed their robot to slander 3,000 images that I curated over the years.  Of my 3,000 posts that got flagged, only one painting (by a classical artist hailed as genius through the ages) dared to include female nipples, which Tumblr has deemed offensive to humanity -- but I think the robot caught those nipples purely by accident, considering that it also thought a picture of a sleeping alligator was pornographic.  But how did I even find all 3,000 flagged images, when Tumblr doesn't let you actually see what it flagged unless you scroll through each post individually?  It's diabolical, because if you have 37,000 posts like I do, a normal web browser won't make it all the way through that many posts without freezing up.  It can hold only so much data in memory, and then it finally won't respond anymore.  I'll tell how I managed to do this, and then I'll touch upon why.

It took fashioning a custom extension in Chrome that did two important things: the extension allowed me to automatically scroll through my Tumblr feed until it detected the next incorrectly flagged item, which saved both hours and carpal tunnel syndrome.  It also removed hidden posts well beyond the scroll view from the page, thereby freeing up memory for further scrolling.  It also developed a mechanism for skipping ahead in the list of posts to recover from interruptions from Tumblr itself (Tumblr loves to freeze up on its own with an "Ah snap" apology, leaving you in limbo unless you've already armed yourself against them).  Of course I still had to click on all 3,000 buttons to request a review of the flagged content.  And I had to click on all 3,000 "okay" buttons after Tumblr said it would take a second look.  And then I had to hit shift-spacebar 3,000 times to get the routine running again to find the next incorrectly slandered post.  Tumblr ate up my entire evening with this nonsense, and it exacerbated my carpal tunnel syndrome.  I seriously do daydream about joining a class action lawsuit.  But why did I go to this much trouble ... is there any actual logic or reason to it?

Well, one can't talk to actual people at Tumblr -- I've tried contacting their staff, over and over again, and all I got was cut-and-paste generic responses that didn't address my questions.  Tumblr staff, if they even exist as real people, are offensive to my own community standards.  So since that didn't work, I asked myself what I was left with.  I was left with the robot flagger itself.  Now, I don't know if the promise (or threat) of artificial intelligence is anything more than a pipe dream.  My first thought upon every latest headline about AI through the decades is, "Let's see an intelligent computer programmer before we worry about an intelligent machine."  Even so ... I'm not unconvinced that everything in the universe is sentient on some level.  Mightn't a rock have some kind of intelligence that we don't under-sand?  Mightn't a computer program, upon receiving thousands of error messages back, get some sort of message that its process is flawed?  Who knows?  Probably not!  But at the end of the day, it's the robot that's flagging blindly, and it's the robot that receives the error messages, and it's the robot that sends out the asinine apology e-mails (requiring me to click 3,000 more times to delete them).  (We've surpassed 12,000 unnecessary clicks.  Wear and tear on my machinery, wear and tear on my physical body, wear and tear on my soul.  Seriously, lawyers, contact me!  Let's make some reparations!)  When it came down to it, knowing full well that contesting all 3,000 slanders was useless, I did it anyway, because I wasn't going to go to bed another night with 3,000 products of my painstaking research publically flagged as inappropriate when they weren't.  At the very least, I was determined to stand up for myself and my content, even if I was certainly shouting in the wind.  Is it crazier than anything Tumblr does?  Not by far!  And there's comfort in that, too.

Reblog if a beard has changed your goals, outlook, or accomplishment of good.  From The Daily Universe, 1968.

From The Roycroft Dictionary Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days by Elbert Hubbard, 1914.

A bizarre chicken-themed gift pairing idea: Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop and Secrets of Chicken Whispering.

We love courteous spirits, and the ghost of Irenæus, the Deacon asks his readers not to be alarmed in the opening lines of Only a Ghost! (1870).

You've heard of May/December marriages, but unmarried life is measured in afternoons, not months or seasons.  (We like how someone named Penny gives her two cents on all this.)  The Afternoon of Unmarried Life by Anne Judith Penny, 1859.   See also The Collected Lost Meanings of Wedlock.

"How to get into this book."  From English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs, 1890.  See Machinarium Verbosus: A Curiosity Cabinet of Gadgets to Transform Any Book & Reader, To Be Sure.