Sandy/Jansy: I’m both proud and ashamed that I knew the French slang for “lap dog” when I was 10 years old, some years before I discovered the literal meaning of “lecheur con.”
The “deep” significance of “coincidences” continues to intrigue. Koestler and Whitehead have clarified some of the mysteries of “real-life” coincidences using plausible probability estimates. E,g,, you are thinking of someone, and then that someone phones you. Or you dream of someone who has just dropped dead 4000 miles away. (Whitehead would point out the large number of people you dream about who have not dropped dead!) Or that in a group of 20, it’s more likely than not that 2 share the same birthday! The difficult thing for HomSaps to accept is that many of the things that happen have very small, even zero prior probabilities. Don your logic hard-hats and listen up: all impossible events have zero probability, but some zero probability events do happen. We mathematicians have the useful term “vanishingly small.” If I ask you to think of an integer, the prior probability of your particular, actual choice is strictly zero, unless I say “think of an integer between 1 and 10,000,000.”
You could argue that in fiction you are free to invent an event (what d’you make of that rhyme?!) of varying probabilities betweeen 0 and 1, but since you have left the realm of actualities, it becomes difficult to estimate or even define “probability.” In the real world we can in principle estimate the fraction of real outcomes to potential outcomes. In a novel, we can ditch causal chains, and, as in VN’s Invitation to a Beheading or Prospero’s Tempest, just make the pageant disappear. That’s quite a coincidence, nein?
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 29/09/2008 23:43, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Sandy Klein sent excerpts from http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2008/09/quaintly-circumstantial.html <http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2008/09/quaintly-circumstantial.html> , under `Quaintly Circumstantial'
In Are You There, Crocodile?: Inventing Anton Chekhov, Michael Pennington lovingly describes his visit to Melikhovo[...]thrilled to have stood on the steps where the dandyish-looking Chekhov was famously photographed holding Quinine, his dachshund: Bromide had a grandson named Box II (for unexplained reasons) that a few years later became the pet of Vladimir Nabokov. Box II ended his days in Prague with Nabokov’s widowed mother. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov describes his dachshund in his final days as “an émigré dog in a patched and ill-fitting coat.” Pennington picks up the Chekhov/Nabokov connection.[..]coincidences, however abhorrent in art, are reality’s consolation prizes.
Dachs must have been favourites among artists. Victor Hugo's grandson had a dachs, called "Lolita" and he once dressed her up to meet Picasso's dachs, "Lump", as a "bride". Here are the images and short text: