From the Narrow Desert: Chrysler

Showing posts with label Chrysler. Show all posts

Thursday, December 7, 2023

Mr. Mxyztplk revisited

I recently found a copy of Superman #30 (1944), Mr. Mxyztplk's debut issue. Here are some miscellaneous notes on how Mr. Mxyztplk relates to various other parts of the sync-stream:

Whitley Strieber's The Key, a book I have associated with Tim, exists in two different versions, one with a gold key on the cover and the other with a silver one, and with slightly different text. When quoting The Key in recent posts, I have referred to the two versions not by year or publisher but rather as the "gold-key" and "silver-key" versions. Mr. Mxyztplk also exists in "gold" and "silver" versions with slightly different text. In Golden Age Superman comics, his name is Mxyztplk; in the Silver Age, this is changed to Mxyzptlk.

In my December 5 post "Still 'From the Narrow Desert,'" I posted the music video for "High Hopes" by Panic! at the Disco, which shows Brendon Urie defying gravity by walking up the side of a skyscraper all the way to the top.

In Superman #30, Mr. Mxyztplk walks in front of a truck while reading a newspaper, is hit, and pretends to be dead. When an ambulance comes, he then makes himself too heavy to lift, then steals the ambulance and drives it straight up the side of a skyscraper all the way to the top:

In the final panel above, it is revealed that the newspaper Mr. Mxyztplk had been reading was printed in mirror image. As everyone knows, the newspaper in Metropolis is called the Planet. Printed backwards, that would be Tenalp. In my December 2020 post "The rain god and the weather dogs," I discuss a story called "The Planet Tennalp." (In Metropolis's real-world analogue, New York City, the newspaper is called the Times. I would mention what that looks like printed backwards, but that would be, ahem, a "trope." A canard, if you get my drift. A bit anti-Times-ic. By a strange coincidence, the "rain god" post also mentions the New York Times.)

I wrote the above paragraph in the morning and then went out to deal with some things. The New York Times referred to at the end of the paragraph was a license plate that said "192 NYT." While I was out, I saw another license plate which also contained the strings "NYT" and "19."

A few pages later, Superman grabs Mr. Mxyztplk, but he slips out of his grasp:

When Supes grabs him, Mxy says, "In popular parlance, pal, ya got me!" In my November 11 post "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name," I report hearing a song with the repeated lines, "You got me, I got no alibi," and thinking of them as being spoken by Tim.

In the third panel, Superman is holding Mxytplk very tight, but somehow he slips out anyway. This is something that Mushroom People can do in Eleanor Cameron's novels. More than once a human seizes a Mushroom Person only to have him slip free even when it seems impossible to do so. At first the boys believe that Mushroom People must have no bones at all, but later they decide their bones must be "compressible." In my November 25 post "Likeness in anything is likeness to him," I connected Mxy's flight out the window on the above page with the ascension of the Mushroom Person Tyco Bass.

Later, a giraffe puts in an appearance:

The bottom left panel above is what I was thinking of when I said earlier (in a comment on William Wright's blog) that Mxy makes music come out of a refrigerator. Actually, I see now that it's not a refrigerator but some sort of cabinet or safe.

On the last page, we discover that Mxy can be sent packing by getting him to say his name backwards. William Wright has run with this idea, reverse-reading such names as Curumo (alias Saruman) and Tim.

I love how this is portrayed as Superman "outwitting" Mxy, when his sole strategy is just to ask him, "What's the magic word?"

In the third panel above, Mxy says, "I, a lowly court-jester, could become a king!" This reminds me of these lines from the Muse song "Knights of Cydonia" (see "Mini T. rex, longhorns, everybody walk the dinosaur"):

And how can we win
When fools can be kings?
Don't waste your time,
Or time will waste you.

The "Russian reversal" in the last line is a close cousin to the idea of saying something backwards -- and of course time is very close to Tim.

Finally, note that Superman, Inc. is located at 480 Lexington Ave. That's a four-minute walk from the Chrysler Building, which is number 405.

Friday, December 1, 2023

The top of the city

William Wright has posted about Vizzini, a character played by Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride (all Mormons know and love that movie; there are no exceptions), which reminded me of the only other Wallace Shawn movie I’ve seen: Vanya on 42nd Street. I left a comment saying that was a link to the number 42 and the Empire State Building, but I had misremembered. It’s not the Empire State Building that’s on 42nd Street.

It’s the Chrysler Building. You know, the one that’s as big as a preternaturally big slug.

The main character in Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet series is David Topman, who is based on the author's own son David. Chrysler is from Kreisel, meaning "top" (the spinning toy), so Topman is basically a translation of Chrysler.

It occurs to me that the 1993 Kate Bush song "Top of the City" -- reportedly inspired by the skyline as seen from her hotel room when she was in New York promoting Hounds of Love in 1985 -- could be an unintentionally specific reference to the Chrysler Building, which is the "top" of the city in two senses.

Thursday, November 16, 2023

Giant slugs, twirling girls in green costumes, pools in the west of Ireland, frenzied dancing, renovated megaliths, invisibles among us -- you name it, we've got it!

In my November 9 post "Well, that didn't take long," the Chrysler Building (which I wouldn't have been able to pick out of a police lineup a month ago) entered the sync-stream. I looked up the etymology of Chrysler and found that it came from the German word for a spinning top, which in turn made me think of a line from Twelfth Night: "And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." It also made me think of Calvin's reference to "a slug the size of the Chrysler Building":

This in turn led me to search my own blog for slug and revisit the June 2021 post "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness."

Whirligig isn't a word you see everyday, so it jumped out at me when I found it on p. 177 of The Philosopher's Pupil a day or two ago:

"There's Alex!"

"Where?"

"There."

"You mean the girl in the green costume who's kicking up the water and twirling round and round like a corkscrew?"

"Yes. She likes doing that."

"She reminds me of something I saw once in a pool in the west of Ireland."

"Well, I'm going swimming now. Be good."

Tom dived in and swam towards Alex. Like Adam, he felt easier with her in the water. She had stopped her whirligig and waved to him.

So far, Scarlett-Taylor hasn't explain what he saw in the pool in the west of Ireland; perhaps it will come into the story later. For now, all we know is that it was a something, not a someone.

Two pages later, Tom is discussing gastropods with Adam. Asked to come up with a good line for a pop song, the latter suggests "It's only me," and then explains:

"Yes. There's two snails on a leaf, one on each side. Then one comes round the leaf and says to the other one, 'It's only me.'"

"Must they be snails?" said Tom after a moment's though.

"I see them as snails," Adam said firmly.

"I think it's brilliant," said Tom.

I had actually encountered that line about the two snails before, as Jorn Barger (who introduced me to Murdoch's work lo these many years ago) used to quote it. So this is where it's from.

⁂

Last night, after my staff had gone home, I was doing some final paperwork and such before closing up the school for the night. I had YouTube Music playing on my phone, using the "tuner" function, so that music was chosen for me by an algorithm. I wasn't paying much attention to the background music until I heard the line "no more counting dollars" while I was literally counting a stack of banknotes. This made me stop and look at the video, which was "Counting Stars" by OneRepublic, a group I'm unfamiliar with:

In the video, the band is playing downstairs, while upstairs there's some kind of charismatic revival meeting going on, with people jumping around and dancing and being "slain by the Spirit" and that sort of thing. One and only one of them twirls round and round like a corkscrew: a girl in a green costume.

Near the end of the video, one of the holy rollers, like Rumpelstiltskin, stamps too hard and falls through the floor. We then look down through the hole in the floor and see five men standing there looking up.

This syncs with the "Little Talks" video, where five men fall through the ice they are walking on into the sea, where they are menaced by a gigantic sea monster before it is zapped by their fairy protectress.

⁂

Today during my lunch break (which is several hours on Thursdays), I read a little more in The Philosopher's Pupil. On p. 194 there is mention of a Stonehenge-style monument which has been restored in modern times:

The priest and the philosopher gazed at the megaliths which were arranged in a broken circle some sixty yards in diameter. There were nine stones. The earliest reference to them is eighteenth-century, when four of them were standing. The others were uncovered and collected and erected in their present still-disputed positions by a nineteenth-century archaeologist.

After reading, I was in my study when a book inexplicably caught my eye. It was on a shelf with a lot of other short paperbacks, mostly children's literature, which my wife had picked up somewhere at a flea market or something. One of these was World Famous Strange but True by Colin, Damon, and Rowan Wilson. Colin Wilson is a writer I know and like, but I'd never paid any attention to this book before because it was on a shelf I rarely looked at and anyway appeared too tabloidish to be worth reading -- like a side-gig potboiler, not a serious part of Wilson's oeuvre. Today, though, I felt a strong nudge to take it down from the shelf, something I had never done before. I looked at the table of contents, which had summaries for each chapter. The summary for Chapter Six began "The monster of Lough Nahooin. The Loch Ness monster. UFOs and monster: Ted Holiday's theory. . . ." That seemed relevant, given the recent water-monster syncs, so I read that chapter -- only 10 pages, not counting the full-page photo of Nessie.

Here's how it begins, on p. 58:

Lough Nahooin is a small brown-coloured lake in Connemara on the west coast of Ireland.

A monster is spotted in the lake by Stephen Coyne and his family:

Describing it later to an investigator, F. W. Holiday, the Coynes said the monster was about twelve feet long. It had no eyes, but there were two horns like those of a snail on top of its head.

Holiday was the author of a book on the famous Loch Ness monster, which he believed to be some kind of giant slug. From the description of the Coyne family, he had no doubt that this Lough Nahooin monster was another member of the same species. Since Lough Nahooin is a mere 100 yards long -- compared with the twenty-four miles of Loch Ness -- there seemed a reasonable chance of catching the Irish lake monster.

A mere hundred yards long -- so really more of a pool than a lake. In the west of Ireland. Inhabited by "some kind of giant slug." The monster had "two horns like those of a snail" -- or of a giraffe.

Later in the chapter, on p. 64, we are introduced to T. C. Lethbridge and his theory about Stonehenge:

Lethbridge's starting point is the mystery of ancient stone monuments like Stonehenge and the Merry Maidens. . . . Lethbridge became convinced that the power that apparently emanates from such monoliths is a form of energy that comes from living creatures. He calls it bio-energy, or bio-electricity. He believes that such energy can be generated by the frenzied kind of dancing that forms part of many ancient religious rituals.

Frenzied dancing as part of a religious ritual appears in the "Counting Stars" video.

On p. 65, we even get a reference to modern renovations of Stonehenge:

When modern engineers set about replacing one of the giant lintels at Stonehenge, they had the full benefit of modern cranes and lifting equipment, and the operation was still a difficult and costly one.

On p. 66, another theory of Lethbridge's is discussed:

Lethbridge also points out that if these other levels are characterized by a higher vibrational rate of energy, then creatures from these levels could actually be walking among us now -- completely invisible to us.

In a July 2021 comment on "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness" -- the post I recently revisited because it contains the word slug -- I write:

"Aliens" (or whatever the hell they are!) walk our streets undetected.

This post is a good illustration of what makes it so hard for me to get a handle on synchronicity or what it means. That I should be "prompted" to read a relevant book by some spiritual agency -- God, Tim, the sync fairies, my own psychic subconscious, whatever -- is an understandable hypothesis, and we can ask who or what did it and why. But something much more involved than that seems to be going on.

Both The Philosopher's Pupil and World Famous Strange but True were, let us say, brought to my attention by the sync fairies. But how to account for the fact that in an 18-page section of the former book and a 9-page section of the latter, we find references to (a) a lake or pool specified as being in the west of Ireland, (b) snails, and (c) an ancient circle of standing stones in England being repaired in modern times. These three things have no logical connection whatsoever. The books were written in 1983 and 1994, respectively, and belong to entirely different genres. Are we to suppose that the sync fairies were feeding ideas to one of both of these writers, setting up my little syncs decades in advance? Or that they travel back in time and edit the past to keep the sync-stream going? Colin Wilson and Iris Murdoch knew and liked each other -- she offered to get him a scholarship at Oxford, which he declined -- but is that a possible mundane explanation (Wilson being unconsciously influenced by his friend's novel of a decade before), or is it just another improbable coincidence to add to the list? The unconscious-influence theory would be more believable if it went the other direction, from the nonfiction writer to the novelist. After all, Wilson didn't choose for a snail-horned monster to be seen in a lake in the west of Ireland; that happened in 1968. And of course the links between these two texts are just a tiny part of the vast interconnected web of syncs in which they are embedded. How does it all get set up, and by whom, and why? Even if we postulate that syncs are the work of an omnipotent God (and something pretty close to omnipotence seems to be called for), it's still hard to make sense of what exactly he is doing and how and why. And hypothesizing that sync is instead a naturally-occurring phenomenon, or something my own mind is doing, doesn't make it any more comprehensible -- au contraire. It's starting to feel more and more as if there must be some wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey shenanigans involved.

And for what? All these borderline-impossible coincidences painstakingly orchestrated for what? What's the point of having me experience all this?

Thursday, November 9, 2023

Well, that didn't take long

The last time I told the sync fairies to take a hike, I lasted all of two days, so I guess I should be proud of myself for making it almost a whole week this time.

I had thought the sync fairies would either respect my moratorium or ignore it. I hadn't expected them to explain themselves and make their case. Twice this week now I've had "recitation dreams" -- the kind where most or all of the usual imagery is shut off and it's just some guy talking. Well, in this case there was imagery, but it had more the feel of a PowerPoint presentation; the talking was the main thing.

The speaker was a slim white man who looked to be in his fifties, neatly dressed in smart blue clothing, with very short white hair and a demeanor that gave the impression of high-ranking military brass, though I don't think his clothing was a uniform. It was just a sweater and slacks, I think, but still came across as "very smart." He spoke extremely quickly but with extremely clear enunciation, as if his delivery were precisely calculated to deliver the maximum amount of information as efficiently as possible. He never introduced himself, but I thought of him as "Tim" and understood that it was in this form that one of the sync fairies had chosen to appear to me.

I can report very little of the specific content of these lectures. They were not delivered in English, nor, I think, in any other known language. I was left with the impression that the man had been speaking Latin, but I don't think he actually was, and I have no memory of any Latin words he used. Another impression was that he had been using something which, while still verbal, was more direct than human language -- something that stood in relation to our English or Latin as assembly language does to LISP or C. (Sorry, I know my computing references are just a bit dated!)

The main thrust of the lecture was that he and his colleagues were engaged in directing my attention -- the words directing your attention were displayed in English, in very large white italics -- and that this was an extremely complex and delicate operation. Its complexity was illustrated by means of a dizzyingly complicated multidimensional diagram that kept moving and changing and reassembling itself. Each attentional decision -- whether a choice of my own or a successful nudge from them -- opened up new attentional pathways and closed off others, and so the whole thing had to be played like chess, thinking several moves in advance and taking into account various contingencies. The purpose of any particular move might not become apparent until many, many moves later.

The first recitation was delivered during my ordinary sleep on Monday night. The second -- which had the same general message, though I don't think it was a repeat of the first -- was given in more unusual circumstances. I was in my study last night reading The Philosopher's Pupil by Iris Murdoch. I was starting to feel a bit tired and thought I'd finish the section I was on and then go to bed. I was on page 137, and flipping ahead I saw there was a good stopping place -- five or six blank lines indicating a scene change -- on page 140, so I planned to stop there. When I reached the end of page 137, though, I suddenly felt just overpoweringly tired, like I had to stop immediately. But the page ended with the first word of a new sentence -- "There" -- and I couldn't very well stop with that! I would at least finish the sentence. As it turned out, I read the next sentence, too, which brought me to the end of a paragraph:

There were meanings in the world. He had seen the number forty-four chalked on a wall.

The urge to sleep was now overwhelming, and was accompanied by a little singsong in my mind, some lines from Joyce: "Sleep now, O sleep now, / O you unquiet heart! / A voice crying 'Sleep now' / Is heard in my heart." I couldn't even delay long enough to go into the next room to bed. I put the book down, lay down on the floor, and there was Tim again, with a "thank you for coming to my Ted talk" look on his face.

When I woke up, after the second lecture -- at around 4:00 this morning -- I opened the book and saw how the next paragraph began:

That's when I realized I'd been outsmarted. I had taunted the sync fairies with lines from Lady Gaga -- "You can call all you want, but there's no one home / And you're not gonna reach my telephone." Well, they had just summoned me as if to a telephone ("Sleep now, O sleep now"), I had answered, and they'd said their piece. Those were the words that came to mind -- "said their piece" -- which put a song in my head:

If you think it's a joke
That's all right, do what you want to do
I've said my piece
And I'll leave it all up to you

The rest of the lyrics are relevant, too:

By the way, that bit about "forty-four chalked on a wall" is a reference to this from p. 92:

As he emerged later, ready to swim, from the changing-rooms, he noticed something disturbing. The number 44, which was the number of the cubby-hole where he left his key, was the same as the number of his house and was also the last two figures in the number of his car. It was also his age. Little things were significant. It was a portent and all portents now were frightening.

This got my attention at the time because it was a general reference to the phenomenon of synchronicity. Forty-four also happens to be my age as I read this book for the first time, despite buying it many years ago, but that's a weak-sauce sync.

What's the significance of these "44" syncs in the novel? Well, obviously the only way to find out is to keep reading. If I stopped right now, refusing to read another page until I've figured out this 44 business, that would obviously be counterproductive. But that's what I'd told the sync fairies. I kind of get what Tim was saying.

I idly wondered whether this specific sync from the novel -- seeing 44 everywhere -- was going to start invading my life, as literary syncs so often do. No, not in this case. For superstitious reasons, any number ending in 4 or containing repeated 4s is avoided in Taiwan. House numbers get out of sync because one side of the street is numbered 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, . . . while the other is 2, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16 . . . . Forty-four is one number I'm definitely not going to see chalked on a wall or anywhere else.

With that thought, I went to bed -- in the bed this time.

In the morning, I taught a private English lesson. My student had brought an article which begins thus:

Have you ever heard of collage? It's art that combines different materials or parts of images together to make something new.

It was illustrated with a photo of Georges Braque -- I at first took him for Madame Blavatsky -- and his Violin and Pipe, prominently featuring what looks like a pair of sunglasses.

After the lesson and before lunch, I checked William Wright's blog and read his latest: "Gordon Kor, a peaceful school bus, and Holy Places to Stand." He mentions an author called Gordon Korman, so I looked him up. His best known book appears to be one called Restart, with a broken-but-repaired pair of glasses on the cover:

Richard Arrowsmith used to talk about "strapping on the sync goggles" -- meaning tuning in to synchronicity -- so the glasses theme seemed relevant. Mr. Wright's post dealt with the Korman novel Schooled, so I looked that up on Wikipedia and read the first couple of paragraphs of the plot summary:

Capricorn Anderson, nicknamed "Cap," being arrested for driving without a license. Cap was driving his grandmother, Rain, to the hospital after she injured herself climbing a tree. He and Rain are hippies living on Garland Farm, a far-removed hippie commune with no telephone service. Rain's injury requires her to undergo physical therapy for two months, leaving Capricorn without a caretaker or a teacher. With no other choice, Capricorn is sent to a social worker, Flora Donnelly. Mrs. Donnelly, who also grew up on Garland Farm, realizes that she herself is the best person to look after Cap and takes him into her home. Flora decides to enroll Cap in Claverage Middle School (dubbed C Average by the student body) as an eighth grader while Rain recovers.

At Claverage, Cap finds himself completely unfamiliar with most social situations and conveniences. On his first day, he meets eighth-grade bully and jock Zachary "Zach" Powers, who singles him out for the school's biggest prank: electing the most unpopular student as the Eighth Grade President and besetting the victim with impossible demands, causing them to break down. Cap also meets Hugh Winkleman, a geeky social outcast at school, and befriends him. Cap ends up becoming the eighth-grade president due to his abnormal appearance and nature. Flora, realizing that Cap's obliviousness to social life and bullying protects him from the brunt of the abuse, reluctantly keeps silent. Meanwhile, Zach advances his plans to break Cap, enlisting the majority of the students, one of whom is Naomi, a girl with a crush on Zach. Naomi writes Cap fake love letters to get Zach's approval but begins to find herself drawn to Cap. However, Cap is unaffected and carries on as usual.

Claverage is interesting because it suggests the Latin for "key."

Last night I checked the old Arts & Letters Daily blog, which used to be run by Denis Dutton before he died and hasn't been the same since. A link from there took me to "The 'Crispy R' and Why R Is the Weirdest Letter," which mentioned Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend as a notable "crispy r" speaker. This led to me rewatching the video for "Ya Hey," the only Vampire Weekend song I know, and noticing that, while the Chrysler Building is visible through most of the video, it ends with a long shot of the Empire State Building. (The champagne bottles are also a sync with Lady Gaga: "I'm in the club, and I'm sippin' that bubb', and you're not gonna reach my telephone.")

I only recently learned to recognize these buildings, the NYC skyline never having been one of my strong suits. (For example, I learned that the World Trade Center had been a pair of Twin Towers, and that they had been famous, on September 11, 2001, and not a day before.) I became curious about the Chrysler Building -- my one and only existing association being with a Calvin & Hobbes reference to "a slug the size of the Chrysler Building" -- and checked a few things. I remembered that my parents used to have a Plymouth Voyager, made by Chrysler, and that the Plymouth logo used to be a picture of the Mayflower. As for the name Chrysler itself, it looks like it has something to do with the Greek for "gold," but it's actually from the German Kreisel, meaning a spinning top. This made me think of the Shakespeare line "And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges," which I looked up. It's from Twelfth Night, the play in which a fake love letter (cf. Schooled) induces Malvolio to go cross-gartered in yellow stockings. The immediate context caught my eye:

FOOL
. . . And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

MALVOLIO
I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you! [Exit.]

OLIVIA
He hath been most notoriously abused.

ORSINO
Pursue him and entreat him to a peace. [Some exit.]
He hath not told us of the Captain yet.
When that is known, and golden time convents,
A solemn combination shall be made
Of our dear souls. . . .

The Fool then proceeds to sing "The rain it raineth every day."

The "whirligig of time" is juxtaposed with "golden time" -- my two interpretations of Chrysler. "The Captain" syncs with the Schooled character known as Cap, who is also notoriously abused. (The 42 trailer also has a line about "the abuse" Jackie Robinson is about to receive.)

The slug the size of the Chrysler Building made me think that I'd mentioned slugs before on this blog. A search turned up only the 2021 post "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness" -- highly relevant to the theme of "sync goggles" and directed attention.

When I went out for lunch, I saw Braque-style sunglasses on the street:

I also passed the restaurant that has a big horseshoe on its sign, which I had never noticed until synchronicities made it relevant -- another link to "Horseshoes, leatherleafs, and inattentional blindness." Noticing that, I decided to go to D&D again for lunch.

Something else I'd never noticed before: One of the interior walls there is made to look like a blackboard with D∞D written on it in chalk. (It's a printed image, not actual chalk.) D is the fourth letter, so DD = 44. The lemniscate is 8, which is 4 + 4. Yes, even in Taiwan, "he had seen the number forty-four chalked on a wall."

No sooner had I sat down to eat than a woman with very large breasts and a tight T-shirt -- real subtle way of "directing my attention," sync fairies! -- came into the restaurant and sat opposite me. The T-shirt said, "No rain, no flowers." This syncs with the Rain and Flora characters in Schooled and the Fool's song in Twelfth Night. A more common form of the proverb is "April showers bring May flowers," which syncs with Plymouth. It also fits with the message that the current rain of syncs, though sometimes annoying and seemingly pointless, may be preparing the way for something to blossom later on.

So -- sigh -- reporting for duty again, sync fairies.