Richard A. Dengrove, 2651 Arlington Drive, #302, Alexandria, VA 22306 May 2000
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Intro - Wherein I discuss a certain website that happens to be important to me
Books of Wonder - Wherein I give a long, drawn out definition
Old Canards - Wherein I discuss a writer who discusses other writers about old canards
Books of Marvels: from dirty jokes to science - Wherein I concentrate on dirty jokes
What are Marvels for? - Wherein I answer my question fast and get to the real question
Letters of Comment - Wherein I show I have received letters of comment from Teddy Harvia, Buck Coulson, Lloyd Penney, Sheryl Birkhead, Louis R. Chauvenet, Cary Hoagland, Harry Andruschak, Rodney Leighton
Art Credits - Teddy Harvia (Front Page, Wasps), Clip Art (Manlion, Searcher, Birdboy, Armless, Sandow)
Write Me. Back to My Home Page
The previous zine took a year and this took a year. What gives? I am trying to do more actual research. Anyway, my zine is not the worst offender: I know one zine, Don-O-Soar, where there was over a ten year hiatus between issues. Let's just say my pace is leisurely.
Sometimes books of marvels pose as science, but their purpose isn't really science but entertainment. Writers might claim they are factual, but they do this lest we be disturbed by the sneaking doubt we are reading hooey. And our entertainment be ruined. A doubt that bothered us more in the 19th and early 20th than it does now. I remember reading "Ripley's Believe It or Not" as a kid. Some people said they didn't believe it. As a kid, being the gullible urchin I was, I did. Later, being a sophisticated adult, I didn't. Later still, being a more sophisticated adult, I both believe at certain times and disbelieve at others.
It doesn't take much to make a marvel, just something out of ordinary reality. Even elephants or ostriches will do it; we don't see them in ordinary reality. Even an elephant without his memory and an ostrich without an alarm clock in his stomach are marvels. Even the habits of common animals like owls and deer, which must have been well known to the primarily bucolic population of several hundred years ago, could be the stuff of marvels then. It was rare that people caught a glimpse of these animals being born and dying. And legends could spring up about that. And marvels.
This traditional definition of marvel is loose; my personal definition is looser still. I liked to read utopias as a kid, and, in my psyche, books of marvels and utopias are kissing cousins. Look at it this way. Marvels of nature are different from ordinary reality. . Similarly, utopias, marvels of the human mind, are different from our ordinary mental state.Certainly they are not for making actual new societies. Few people, besides their creators, believe that utopias would be desirable to live in, especially the more authoritarian examples.
Also, I would stretch the definition of marvel to include skeptical books. even though books of marvels at first sight seem the province of the credulous. As a kid, I read books on hoaxes. Hoaxes by Curtis McDougal was my favorite. While the book was written in the early '40s, I believe he is still alive and churned out his last exposé in the '90s. It is indeed marvelous how people can be fooled. And entertaining. Sometimes, the marvel lies in how trivial the piece of information is. If my memory does not fail me, there was a book by a Steiner and Steiner published in the late '50s, entitled Useless Information, or How to Know More and More about Less and Less. Did you know that there are no Mi-Wuk Indians anymore who speak Mi-Wuk? That the little toe will disappear in the year 12,481, or some such overly precise date? That an Iraqi Kurdish sect, the Yezidi, believe that eating lettuce is sinful?
With this imprecise criteria, I am going to take some books of marvels, and show you some even odder things about them.