In today's post "Wolves, swans, mirrored cities, and Kubla Khan," Alph came up, as both the name of the sacred river in Kubla Khan and the word for "swan" in one of Tolkien's Elvish languages. This made me think of Tintin and Alph-Art, the unfinished 24th Tintin book -- Hergé's "swan song"? -- which I had heard of but never read. I checked the summary on Wikipedia, which ends with this sentence:
Akass declares his intention to kill Tintin by having him covered in liquid polyester and sold as a work of art by César Baldaccini.
I'd never heard of that particular artist, so I clicked through to his Wikipedia article. One of his famous works is called Le Pouce ("The Thumb"):
Note added: In the song "This Country's Going to War" from the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, there's a bit where they sing, "They got guns / We got guns / All God's children got guns" -- but, due to the poor audio quality, as a child I always thought that what they were saying everyone had got was thumbs. This was reinforced by the body language as they sing that part, holding out their hands with thumbs extended:
Yes, I know thumbs doesn't make any sense in that context, but come on, was I supposed to be surprised at the Marx Brothers saying something that doesn't make sense?
I think I've mentioned before on this blog my uncle's half-serious opinion that Groucho Marx was the incarnation of the Greek god Zeus. When I asked him where that idea had come from, he said the thing that originally suggested it to him had been Groucho's duck-like walk, which made him think of Zeus taking the form of a swan when he seduced Leda, fathering Helen of Troy and Pollux. (Castor was a twin half-brother, fathered by Tyndareus, as was Helen's twin half-sister Clytemnestra.)
