Theodor Adorno delightfully likens punctuation marks to friendly spirits:

An illustration of a battily smiling moon from a 1901 issue of Harper's magazine.

Language is a translation that really only works in the middle range of existence.
—William Keckler, in the context of how the unspeakable can be exquisite pleasure

It is surprising but true that even the most exclusive stores stock an expensive selection of boring clothing.
—Christie Ridgway, Follow That Groom! (2011)

An illustration from an 1878 issue of Harper's magazine.

It's a little late to be mentioning this, but Hercule Poirot is the greatest villain of Agatha Christie's world (and hence ours, what with the way that fiction interpenetrates).  Poirot is inseparable from murder, just as the goddess of the hunt, Diana, is one with the stag.  A murder need not have already occurred — Poirot is there, his very presence guaranteeing death.  His investigations have nothing to do with serving justice.  Let's take an example at random: Death on the Nile.  One single, purposeful murder unnecessarily multiplies into five deaths, wholly due to Poirot's egomaniacal investigation.  It's inconceivable that five deaths with Poirot's bloody "case closed" stamp are preferable to an unsolved mystery with a single victim.  When Poirot finally gathers his (surviving) suspects to endure an interminable blathering of self-congratulation, he never addresses the elephant in the room — the fact that the world would be an infinitely safer place if he were to leave well enough alone.  P.S. Poirot is obsessed with motives, as if anyone with a motive possesses, by definition, a criminal mind and the capacity for murder.  His presumption that everyone on earth is capable of cold-blooded killing says far more about Poirot's own rotten soul than it does about the rest of humanity.

When pigs fly!  Lewis Carroll is popularly credited with the earliest reference to pigs flying (1872).  But here's one from the May 23, 1857 issue of Punch.  (We do what we can!)

"You're—and don't take this the wrong way— you're a . . . commodity."
—Josh James Riebock, Heroes and Monsters

Staring into the depths: an illustration from a 1915 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "He gazed outward with her into the far, dim, restful spaces."

How to handle the psychic pain of learning that your music idol's own favorite song is "Stars Are Blind" by Paris Hilton:

1. Remember that Paris Hilton didn't write the lyrics or the music.  She hired genuine talent to raise and buttress whatever exactly it was that she brought to the recording studio.

2. Remember that Paris Hilton hardly exists and therefore isn't especially fearsome.  Perversely, she is famous for being famous — a persona without a presence.  She's perhaps even less real for having starred in a television "reality series."  She's as deep as a t-shirt slogan, as insubstantial as a tabloid headline plastered across a perfume bottle, an eternally spent bombshell with a leaked porn tape.

3. Your musical idol is entitled to his own (bad) taste.  It's impossible to know what he's hearing when he listens to Paris Hilton.  Every brain "decodes" musical signals differently, irresistibly overlaying idiosyncratic associations.  Heck, given just the right mood and circumstances, listening to Bono's opinion on everything could — theoretically — be a pleasant experience.

4. Paris Hilton's "Stars are Blind" isn't an offense to human culture.  It's a breezy, reggae-infused love song, neither more nor less than the genre demands.  It's a passing cloud, not shapely enough for anyone to exclaim, "Very like a whale!", not large enough to offer shade, not charged enough to threaten lightning, not heavy enough to replenish the aquifers, not refractive enough to offer a rainbow.  It neither helps nor harms but flimsily "is."

5. If all else fails, chant the Litany Against Paris Hilton:

Paris Hilton is the mind-killer.
Paris Hilton is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face Paris Hilton.
I will permit her to pass over me and through me.
And when she has gone past I will turn my inner eye to see her path.
Where Paris Hilton has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

If I find a faint shadow of hands on a wall and the memory of a rabbit in white chalk, I may recall that all dreaming is a kind of living where you cannot die no matter how many times you fall from the building.
—Geof Huth (see his entire piece here.)

Chalk rabbit underfoot by tech wizard Gordon Meyer.

Star Wars' light sabre prototypes:  an illustration from an 1896 issue of Scientific American magazine.

"A true historian records fact and fable with philosophic indiscrimination.  Who is he to decide between them?  He leaves posterity to do that.  Besides, he knows well that there are plenty of fables that in reality are far more ... revealing of Nature's secrets than many verified facts and unquestionable events."
—John Cowper Powys, Porius (an exquisite novel, by the way!)

"One might say that 'a rose is a rose is a rose' (or perhaps 'a noun is a noun is a noun'), but verbs are not so simple."
—Phineas J. Caruthers, Style & Circumstance: The Gentleperson's Guide to Good Grammar (2012)

Q: Is this some cosmic joke?
A: It's real estate, for God's sake.
—The Deal, Vol. 5, p. 4 (2007)

While looking for the proverbial farmer's daughter, we encountered "the beautiful, hypothetical stranger"!  She appears in a 1911 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine.

An illustration from a 1910 issue of Hampton's magazine.  The caption reads: "Just as Painless Parker yanked out a molar, he would stamp his foot, and the band would play, so that the audience couldn't hear the patient's cries."

Dedicated to tooth enthusiast and musician Gary Barwin.

How very kind of a certain Miss Grayson to leave a 5-star review of our Field Guide to Identifying Unicorns By Sound over at Amazon's U.K. store.  She concludes: "A very lovely little book to own and keep forever."

Meanwhile, a certain Paolo bestowed four stars to our Divination by Punctuation over at Amazon U.K., noting that "Some intuitions are worth the whole book!"

Fifty-five of our books are now available to Amazon's U.K. customers.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Here's a precursor to the motto, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas."  Via our friend at Frog Blog.

"It may surprise you, but walking downhill (and, similarly, walking down a flight of stairs) does a better job of improving glucose tolerance than walking uphill does."
—Jack Challem, AARP Stop Prediabetes Now (2011)

each word
seen from inside
knows you
—the perspicacious Gary Barwin. 
(See his whole poem at The Week Shall Inherit the Verse.)

"Now you cannot move!"  An illustration from a 1909 issue of Saturday Evening Post magazine.

An illustration of a genie in a fireplace from a 1900 issue of The Strand magazine.

Four months before the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, we find this illustration in Punch:

"The only certainty, the only reality that can be trusted, is stillness."
—Daniel P. Watkins, Anna Letitia Barbauld and Eighteenth-Century Visionary Poetics (2012)

An illustration from an 1878 issue of Harper's magazine.

Scream in ecstasy: we located ancestors of Salvador Dalí's moustache fairies, in The Californian (1891).

An illustration from a 1900 issue of The Strand magazine.  The caption reads: "He seemed to be whirled away."

"In the caves at Lascaux there is a pictograph that perfectly maps the West London theater district."
—Nathaniel Mackey, "Song of the Andoumboulou: 56," Hambone (2002)

An illustration from a 1904 issue of Saturday Evening Post magazine.  The caption reads: "To reassure her he began doing incredible things with the big silver hoops."  It was this illustration that inspired our article for Secret Art Journal, "Magic as Reassurance."

Staring into the depths: an illustration from a 1901 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "Terris sat and looked with the god."

We say this in infinite jest: here's a precursor to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1,088 pages), from Punch, 1853.

"The only certainty is this: If you do nothing, you'll achieve nothing."
—Vickie L. Milazzo, Wicked Success Is Inside Every Woman (2011)

An illustration from an 1889 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.  The caption reads: "I have always regarded these old boots with a feeling akin to awe."

Jonathan Caws-Elwitt reports a record from the Guinness book — the Alec Guinness book, that is.*

Tyrone Guthrie was ... quite the tallest enfant terrible to be found in the English-speaking world--standing six foot four in his socks.

*Alec Guinness's memoir, Blessings in Disguise.

Here's a precursor to the "wire fu" genre of Hong Kong action cinema, by nearly 70 years.  It's from Appleton's magazine, 1909.

"It is surprising, but true, that the culture of the Nubians is practically unknown."
—John G. Kennedy, Nubian Ceremonial Life (2005)

"I wish someone would write a good, comprehensive book of home dog medicine."
—John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Dressing Up an Animal Mascot

"Granted, sticking clothes on an animal mascot may not be the oldest trick in the book, but it sure seems that way."
—Kurt Shulenberger

An illustration from a 1903 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.  The caption reads: "Her gratification filled her inwardly with a delightful glow."

Florescent [sic] bulbs.  (An in-joke dedicated to Jonathan's "Black and White Bathroom").

"Write a novel in which the characters are painfully aware they are in a shitty novel and try constantly to escape from the book. Follow the characters as they migrate from novel to novel, some characters pursuing others into different books. Have lovers be terribly depressed when they rediscover each other in a new book, only to learn they are young brother and sister and so can no longer consummate their love. Or worse, they discover themselves in a book in which they must fight to the death. Have villains end up being cast as heroes and heroines in different novels, and heroes and heroines end up as grungy minor characters to whom no reader would pay any serious attention. Have a character mistakenly enter a book that is 'all photographs' and be rendered invisible."
—William Keckler

"The answer is simple but not helpful: It depends.”

—Rhoda Olkin

A precursor to the cult television series The Prisoner: Number Six hails a cab.  From Punch, 1853.

Write a novel about an anteater who is terrified of ants.
—William Keckler

soon there will be no pennies
luck will migrate
—Gary Barwin

We're reminded of a Zen koan: What was your luck before pennies were minted?

"Macaroons":  an illustration from a 1917 issue of Saturday Evening Post magazine.  Did you know that the phrase "funnier than macaroons" delivers zero Google results?  (It'll have one result once this blog entry gets indexed, of course.)

Jeff Hawkins writes:

I believe congratulations are in order. Someone (but not just anyone) had to install "funnier than macaroons" in Google's knowledge base. It's important, and anyone who says otherwise simply hasn't spent enough time hobnobbing with macaroons.

An illustration of a strong woman who can carry a tune, from an 1896 issue of The Strand magazine.

For Jonathan Caws-Elwitt.

Geof Huth told us that he just acquired an uncorrected proof of One-Letter Words: A Dictionary, the first in a collection of uncorrected dictionary proofs.  We're now hoping that O.L.W.'s proof is riddled with errors and constitutes a wicked reference like The Wicked Bible of 1631 (though that one, if memory serves, is merely missing a "not" in one of the Commandments).  We love the idea of uncorrected proofs deliberately being cited as [faulty] evidence.  We didn't think to tell Geof this, but we're picturing an entire research project in which every single footnote references an uncorrected proof.  No one has any reason to know this, but when we appeared at O.L.W. book signings/talks, we read favorite one-letter words from the uncorrected proof.  Our talks were technically illegitimate, springing from liminal matter that wasn't quite the "thing" itself.  We didn't do it as some sort of art piece (more fool we) but were merely caught between worlds: a reclusive writer publicly reading from a softcover of a hardcover to people listening but not buying any of it.

"It may surprise you to know that I prefer to work anonymously."
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Problem of Thor Bridge"

An illustration from a 1903 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "They were looking down into the void below."

An illustration from a 1904 issue of Scribner's magazine.

An illustration from a 1916 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.  The caption reads: "They were atoms in the careering metropolis, uncounted polyps in the blind, swarming, infinitely laborious structure that is New York."

There may be no "i" in "team," but there might be an "if" in "us" (which we learn from the sublimely talented Swedish band Kite on their third EP.  However, if you deserve a treat, don't miss their cover of "I Give You the Morning" on their second EP or their divine "Say It Ain't So" on their first EP).

"It is a theorem—at first sight surprising, but true, and even easy—that 'almost all' real numbers are not computable."
—Constructivity in Computer Science (1992)

An illustration from a 1904 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "'How fast the world spins,' the girl breathed."

The shadow side of the game Rock-Paper-Scissors: all is explained in our guest blog over at humorist Bernie DeKoven's Deep Fun.

Music piracy, 1906-style.  From Punch.

photo by Cobalt 123

"[He] told her over pudding – compote of wild berries – about his mother suddenly saying, apropos of nothing it seemed, 'The puddings of time,' and about how she might write a book about puddings through the ages."
—Isla Dewar, Secrets of a Family Album (2012)

An illustration from a 1915 issue of Saturday Evening Post magazine.  The caption reads: "The screaming larkins were merely a background."

An illustration from an 1863 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption read: "The die is cast. — April 1."

"Nothingness seems to possess an effortlessness," William Keckler notes, "But it's probably a trick."

Yes, it's the oldest trick in the book!

"She drifted to a halt, facing them, her smoky complexion apparent now."
—Dawn Madigan, Destined (2005)

The illustration is from a 1913 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine.

Jeff Hawkins explores "preemptive rhetoric," in which rhetorical answers deny being asked.  It's a phenomenon we're all familiar with but probably didn't know the name of.  See the link for examples, and consider this freshly personal one:

[The context is that no one at dinner could recall the name of that well-respected character actor.  Hours later, Oddfellow makes a telephone call.]

[The caller picks up and Oddfellow exclaims.]

A: John Malkovich!
Q: Aren't you supposed to be asleep?

Preemptive rhetoric!  Thanks, Jeff!

"Someone should write a book about what it feels like to fall in love at first sight."
—Swan Adamson, My Three Husbands (1995)

An illustration from a 1915 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "He pushed the brute's nose into the plate of honey."

Here's an illustration from forty years before the musical Damn Yankees.  (From Everybody's Magazine, 1915).

Can you guess the subject of this sentence?


Here's the answer in context (in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)

An illustration from a 1904 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "Murray had seen the vision too."

photo by Cobalt 123

"[A]propos of nothing, 'Yes, I want something to eat.'"
—Elliott Leyton, Men of Blood (2011)

An illustration from a 1900 issue of The Strand magazine, predating the hilarious series "Arrested Development."  The caption reads: "Maybe you are not my cousin, after all."

Here's a double-whammy: a precursor to René Magritte's The Treachery of Images as well as his The Son of Man.  From Punch, 1859, thirty-nine years before Magritte's birth.  (Previously re: Magritte.)

"This might surprise you, but artists are temperamental so-and-sos."
—Louise Penny, Still Life

"We should always remember that life occurs in the present tense."
—Kaplan GRE & GMAT Exams Writing Workbook

"Wood Magic or Two Wishes and the Way to Get Them":  an illustration from a 1913 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine.

"Now here is the kind of wish to wish
   On the great, gray, silent Stone.
One hand on his face, one on your heart,
   Just say in an undertone—


"And here's the kind of wish to wish
   Of the tall and gentle Tree.
One hand on his trunk and one held high
   Say these words earnestly—

An illustration from a 1906 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "The wild place leaped suddenly vivid as though afire."