On 3/12/06 12:50, "Alexey Sklyarenko" <skylark05@MAIL.RU> wrote:
the choice of Carl over Karl is no surprise to us mathematicians. The greatest German EVER was christened CARL Friedrich GAUSS (1777-1855) [skb]
Dear Stan Kelly-Bottle,
As someone who was born in the Communist state (in 1970), I was habitually thinking of that other Karl (of whom we belatedly found out that he was not the greatest German -- in fact, not a German at all) and quite forgot about one of VN's ancestors, the composer Graun, whose name was CARL Heinrich.
Your ‘coincidences’ are remarkably UNremarkable [skb]
Prel = perl (Russian for "pearl")
pearl = aprel (Russian for "April;" Carl du Prel was born on April 3, 1839, and died the year in which VN, whose life also began in April, was born)
In you opinion, the above is not erstaunlich?
I read only a few chapters of "The Philosophy of Mysticism" (1885), the book by Carl du Prel that appeared, by another coincidence, the same year as Stevenson's Jekyll & Hyde was written and that deals almost exclusively with dreams, and those chapters strike me, like Victor's tongue-twister, as strangely Pale Fire-relevant. To Victor's observations about Charles/Karl (their irony didn't escape me) I could add that Kinbote's uncle Conmal addresses him once as karlik, which is Russian for "dwarf." Conmal's address is ironical, because Kinbote is a big tall man, "the Great Beaver." It is Hyde in the Stevenson story who has a dwarfish appearance. In his lecture on R. L. Stevenson, VN points out that both "Hyde" and "Jekyll" are Danish words, just as the word "bodkin" happens to be one. Add to this the fact that the word "kinbote" occurs in "Jekyll and Hyde" (as pointed out by Carolyn).
Alexey Sklyarenko
Dear Alexey: it takes quite a piling up of non-causally-related Koestlerian events to ASTONISH this jaded Statistician! I gladly share your tongue-in-cheek DELIGHT when such things happen. BUT, being an ‘undivided monist’ like VN, I EXPECT such co-incidents in a tightly co-integrated world. Our (VN’s and mine!) cosmic-comic God (unlike Einstein’s) does play games-of-chance: word-golf with LOADED dice!
Karl - Carl – Cart – Cant – KANT. Lord, here comes Immanuel just in time for Christmas.
Having lectured in CCCP (before you were born, in fact), I can also share (again with VN) your dread of that other unmentionable Karl! Though a dwindling few still defend him as a philosopher whose ideas were hijacked by monsters.
One case where the C-K switch seems significant, at least to my irrational neurons: why do I delight in CULTURE but shiver-cold at the sound/sight of KULTUR?
Can I switch briefly (to reduce the number of postings as SES requests)?
We discussed the ‘memorability’ of VN’s writings, i.e., the ease (or lack of) in being able to recite VN from memory. Clearly, when VN sticks his gear-lever in P for Poetic, his words are more easily etched in our minds. In fact, poetry is often characterized as ‘memorable prose.’ Thus HH’s opening hymn to Ms Haze trips wonderfully from our tongues (literally!). Yet, consider Claude Shannon’s Information Theory which is based on probabilities. Information is that which ‘reduces our uncertainty.’ For example, if we reach the letter Q/q in an English message string, there is a high probabilty that U/u will follow. The U/u therefore carries little ‘information’ (there’s not much uncertainty). Likewise, when a prosaic lister writes “I’ll strike when the ...” we expect the completion of the cliché “iron is hot.” We are left to ponder WHY poetry is so ‘memorable’ when each unrolling word/phrase is presumably fresh, cliché-free, and unexpected — and therefore packed with ‘information’ -- and therefore more taxing to memorize? Of course, one can mention meter and rhyme as common mnemonic aids.
Stan Kelly-Bootle