Rene’s voynich.nu relaunch…

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As should be pretty clear from my posts over the years, I’m a big fan of René Zandbergen: he’s one of the very few Voynich researchers that have managed to keep a consistently clear head over the years, and it is his generally even-handed approach that casts a pleasantly affable shadow over voynich.nu, the website he put together many years ago and still one of the few genuinely useful general-purpose Voynich research resources in Internetland. (Please don’t get me started on the uselessness of the Wikipedia page, I want to keep this under 1000 words).

And so in many ways the news that René has now taken back control of voynich.nu (he stopped updating it in 2004, and then handed it over to Dana Scott to look after for a few years) and begun an HTML makeover on it comes as a very pleasant surprise. It’s already looking much better, and no doubt it will carry on improving for a while yet.

I suppose the key question, though, boils down to this: really, what have we learnt about the VMs in the last six years? And how does the whole voynich.nu programme fit in with where we are now?

It’s important to remember that René’s website, for all its substance, is not some kind of “Encyclopaedia Voynichiana“, trying to compile every comment ever made on every feature, drawing, paragraph, line, word, letter. Rather, it concerns itself at least as much with the historiography of the VMs as with the VMs itself. For some people, that is a strength: yet for me, that remains its central weakness. The basic historiographic problem is that the VMs’ provenance shudders to an awkward halt circa 1608, even though it is (demonstrably, I believe) significantly older than this – in fact, if the recent radiocarbon dating is broadly reliable, the VMs probably predates its appearance at the Rudolfine court by more than 150 years. Which is a bit like trying to use Twitter to grasp the dynamics of Queen Victoria’s court.

What, then, should a 2010 voynich.nu look like? In many important ways, we’ve lost all the major archival battles: Marci pointed us to Kircher and Kircher pointed us to Baresch (and that was the end of that), while Rudolph II and WMV jointly got us to Sinapius (and that was the end of that). All of which formed a pleasant historical pear tree to climb, but ultimately one with no fruit, low-hanging or otherwise. We have all the pathology of a history, but none of the substance: for all the patient research fun trawling the archives can be, this approach has not helped us.

And from where I’m sitting, the minute we start defocussing to allow the tsunami of historical possibilities and dead-end theories to wash over us (Wikipedia, anyone?), we’ve basically lost the epistemological fight too. The annoying thing about the VMs is that even though it really is, as I once noted, like a million piece jigsaw, it would probably only take 20 or 30 carefully chosen observations about Voynichese to unlock its cipher. But which 20 or 30 would be the key? We’ll only know in retrospect, I guess. 🙂

Perhaps a revised voynich.nu circa 2010 should focus not on its (let’s face it, fairly damaged and unhelpful) historiography, but rather on what we’ve genuinely learnt about the VMs in and of itself: by which I mean things like…

  • the difference between Currier A and Currier B (and all the shades inbetween)
  • reconstructing the original page order
  • places where the cipher breaks down and/or is hacked (such as space insertion ciphers)
  • apparent copying errors
  • letter stroke construction and variations
  • document constructional details, gatherings vs quires
  • marginalia
  • internal layering
  • the various painters
  • handwriting differences and evolution

All of which is very “Voynich 2.0”, but there you go. Really, we do now know a great deal about the VMs that isn’t to do with Marci, Newbold, Brumbaugh, etc: in fact, we have plenty of reasons to be optimistic if we but allow ourselves to be!

Review: Michael Jacobson’s asemic books…

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A few days back, two small book-shaped things arrived in the post: and I’ve been pondering what to say about them ever since. In fact, I’ve been struggling to work out what I think about them… you’ll see what I mean in a moment.

You might superficially compare them with, for example, Luigi Serafini’s famously unreadable book: however, I have relatively little doubt that, beneath all its overevolved, madly-mutated faux-alien language tropes, Codex Seraphinianus does actually express some kind of coherent linguistic knot that might ultimately be untied, whereas Michael Jacobson’s “asemic” books claim to be actively meaningless. That is, while they play with the form of narrative and abstract expressive shape, they don’t actually say anything – any kind of meaning you take away from them is your problem (or, conversely, your gift).

Perhaps the right way to classify them, then, is as some kind of visual anti-poetry, a kind of Dada take on the postmodernist anti-meaning turn. Which is to say: if all texts are ultimately meaningless in themselves (and only incidentally form meaning in the reader’s mind), then why are you surprised that these books are too?

Alternatively, perhaps there is actually a hidden higher-level message, so that if you turn the pages upside down and squint your eyes in just the right way, what emerges is something along the lines of “The Magic Words are Squeamish Ossifrage“, etc. So, a good part of the fun is working out whether there’s a joke (and if there is, whether it’s on you).

Whatever your particular take happens to be, I think you can still enjoy them purely on their own visual merits: for all their (claimed) lack of meaning, Michael’s two books do jump with a refreshingly jazz-like joy:-

  1. Action Figures (which seems to have started life in an exercise book) is, I would say, the weaker of the pair: I get the impression of an early youth (mis)spent with a spray can, trying as a young man to give expression to the same basic urges, but channelling them within structural rules (such as minimizing shape repetition, consistency of line, etc). Neat, but Mayan street-whimsical rather than obviously challenging.
  2. The Giant’s Fence is, by comparison, a far more sophisticated objet d’art, even if it is apparently influenced by Max Ernst’s Maximiliana. Here, Jacobson seems to have developed a confidence with his medium that lets him play not only with the interior calligraphic form but also with the structural rules within which they live. Shapes, gaps, multi-line things gradually intrude into the overall text-like flow, their waxing and waning presences driven by a subtly astrological metronome, where the passage of time from page to page has a enjoyably slow, quasi-geological feel. All in all, a nicely done piece that hints that Jacobson has more to come.

You can download your own free copy of Action Figures from the Literate Machine website here, though you’ll have to pay a princely £2.99 to download your own Lulu-ized copy of The Giant’s Fence.

Personally, I see asemic writing (the overall category in which these books live) as sitting on quite a different table to cipher/language mysteries, so I’m not hugely sympathetic to the suggestion that (for example) the Codex Seraphinianus, the Phaistos Disc, or the Voynich Manuscript are themselves asemic. However, it is certainly true that people project all kinds of bizarre historical narratives onto these, to a degree to which asemic writers can only faintly aspire: perhaps such vicariously vivid visions ultimately form a family of warped interpretational artworks all their own, a kind of semantic complement to asemic writing. “Asemic reading”, perhaps?

Review of Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes”…

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I’ve just got back from an enjoyable working holiday in Taiwan, marred only (courtesy of a certain Icelandic volcano) by a detour to Frankfurt and an insanely long coach/ferry journey back to the UK. During that time, my only exposure to ciphers was through China Airlines’ numerous on-demand seat-back films and documentaries: but rather than bore you with my take on Avatar (“Titanic meets The Abyss in a blue paint factory“), here are my thoughts on another film…

Continuing a centuries-long novelistic tradition, film-makers often construct their tortuous plots around enciphered and/or occult texts, particularly when wishing to shorthand a bit of high-speed visual mystery in. Guy Ritchie (the Artist Formerly Known As “Mr Madonna”) proves no exception to this rule of thumb: his “Sherlock Holmes”, painted against a backdrop of Victorian London while its new Tower Bridge was being built, has an inevitably evil protagonist putting the town to fear while taking control of a (you guessed it) centuries-old shadowy masonic cabal through the careful use of theatrical rituals, rhododendron leaf recipes, and occult manuscripts. Oh, and a gigantic steampunk bomb thing, too.

sherlock-holmes-still-small

With Ritchie’s Lock/Snatch editing trickery and Holmes transformed into an opiate-free fighting man (using the little known British martial art of ‘bartitsu’, which fans of Sammo Huang may recognize as “walking-stick fu”), there’s plenty of good-ish stuff to keep the screen busy. But ultimately the film is a shallow confection, even compared to Lock & Snatch: Jude Law is just too dull for Watson, while Robert Downey Jr reminded me again and again of Kevin Rowland (co-founder of Dexy’s Midnight Runners) which I’m not really sure is a good thing, however much you like “Come on Eileen”.

Still, if you scrape away all the surface dross (including Holmes’ rather contrived love interest), you do get occasional glimpses of a slightly better story trying to get out – fearfulness and wonder about the technology of the coming (20th) century, the occult as a tool for masking political power (rather than for masking natural powers), etc. It also has to be said that Ritchie’s various clue-tastic high-speed montages do give a surprisingly good feel for the kind of Holmesian intellectual rush Voynich researchers sometimes get when a load of details finally assemble themselves together: basically, when knowledge of real substance somehow forms from the dust-cloud of evidential fragments swirling around you.

Even so, the film as a whole only really convinces as an extended advert for the blatantly upcoming Holmes vs Moriarty sequels. In fact, Professor James Moriarty only ever featured prominently in two Sherlock Holmes stories, so there’s only obviously room for SH II and SH III. Some critics will already be ready to append a “T” to these, perhaps a little unfairly (though not by much).

Scottish puzzlemaster wanted…

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A couple of days ago, an entrepreneurial Scot put out a call on Gumtree for…

“…a Scottish historian, cryptographer or world class crossword puzzle solver. If you can do the Times Crossword in less than 10 minutes I want to speak to you. If Charles Babbage interests you, if you hang out at Rosslyn Chapel. Know who Fibonacci was or if you have heard of the Voynich manuscript, I would like to speak to you.”

Actually, it turns out that what Jamie Renton is hoping to find is a puzzle setter rather than a puzzle solver, i.e. someone combining, ummm, ellipticity with historicity in a broadly Kit-Williams-meets-Dan-Brown kind of vein. Feel free to email him here if this might interest you, as I’m sure Jamie will be happy to tell you more about what he’s setting up.

Voynich theory roundup…

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Even though the Internet would appear to be full of Voynich theories, Tardis-like there’s always room for just a few more: so here are some recent ones for you to feast upon. Today’s mission, should you choose to accept it, is simply to try to categorise them: satirical, apparently deranged, serious, April Foolery, brilliant, channeled, etc.

  1. Well-known Internet palaeographer (and Australian donkey-owning grandmother) Dianne Tillotson has a theory that the VMs was written by one Leonard of Quim.
  2. Online Shakespearean theorist Franz Gnaedinger has raised Richard SantaColoma’s theory to dizzying new heights: he believes the VMs “was written and drawn by Francis Bacon in 1622, as a private sequel to the highly successful Nova Atlantis, written in a pseudo-Polynesian idiom allowing page-filling automatic writing, and drawn in a deliberate retro-style honoring Francis Bacon’s ancestor Roger Bacon. The text is gibberish but makes allusions.“
  3. Sergey K suggests (by email) a new chronology for the Voynich Manuscripts, based on some dates apparently marked in blue paint in the SW rosette: “1441 dates of the making of the Voynich MS. 1574  JOHN DEE has bought the Voynich MS. 1597 (in this place my monitor very dirty) August. The Year and month when Edward Kelley  has finished the painter (colouring) of the book and run out from the prison.“Ros1574
  4. Chy Po, who has been studying the VMs for many decades, believes that “The sketches are Red Herrings & have nothing to do with the text, however they tell a tale of their own cautioning people not to be misled“, while the text is in “a Secret almost extinct language, perhaps impossible to crack as it is a variation of a One Time Pad.” However, “the name of this language is known to very few who guard it jealously, but even is was made public it would be of no help without those exact pages of the Pad which obviously cannot exist still.  I have strong suspicions that it is a copy of an handwritten book called “v**z H******g’ very few copies of which exist to be passed on to the next worthy disciple, if no one is deemed to be worthy then that particular copy is destroyed.“

Here, the satirical is clearly (1) [Leonard of Quim is an Ankh-Morpork character], the April Foolery is (3) [thanks for that, Sergey], while (2) bravely outdoes his virtual mentor Rich SantaColoma by a whole order of magnitude. As for Chy Po, perhaps the answer to the VMs, when it eventually arrives, will indeed fit this kind of “concealed secret language” template, who knows? But as to whether the book in question is called “vuoz Habsburg” (or whatever), you’ll have to work out for yourself.

Really, who would be me? Some days, I have to admit that not even I would be me.

New d’Agapeyeff cipher site…

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Not much to say about Tiago Rodrigues’ new d’Agapeyeff cipher site, except that he summarises the existing cipher analyses pretty well and adds a few of his own thoughts (such as splitting the search space into two 7×14 blocks to try to make it significantly more manageable). Apart from wanting him to change his outbound links from the Voynich News blogger site to the Cipher Mysteries WordPress site, I’d say he’s done a good job of putting together a pretty good starting point. 🙂

(Incidentally, my three d’Agapeyeff pages are here, here, and here.)

Go Oilers…

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So there I was in my first awesome week working at the B: my room mate Lynina kept saying that I was so ‘Legally Blonde’, and I was like “but do I have a dog? No? Well, I don’t think so”. And then she just kept on about the East Coast / West Coast thing, and I’m like “so now I’m Tupac? Well, duh.” But working in the cube is just so cool that it, like, transcends all that stuff in an totally I.M.Pei way. And when I say that, Lynina just rolls her eyes and I say “what? what?” and she lifts up her Renaissance News and Notes so I can’t see her face and we both laugh until we cry and then we both have to do our makeup again.

Actually, I always do well at interviews because, you know, I bought those totally serious-looking frames (even though I don’t need glasses at all, don’t tell anyone) and I think really hard of that guy who said “never make the interviewer laugh, but never let them forget you either” so I frown and try to conjure up the most like wild high cultural stuff I can until their head is spinning. Works for me, anyhow.

So anyway, I’m like four days (nearly a whole week, if you’re counting) into the job, and I’ve done the induction and the cleaning and the coffee round, and it’s my turn on the desk, and there’s a buzz from the guard upstairs and only The Maddest Mad Guy Ever turns up. You know, the one at the top left of the Do Not Let These People See The VMs montage pinned to the drawer that holds the snakes and the magnifiers, ringed in like red felt pen and stuff. But I’m new there and I don’t know this yet, so I’m like “Sure you can see MS 408, sir. Do you have a particular research question you’re trying to answer?”

At this point I notice he’s shaking, and I’m thinking he’s got some kind of palsy but actually it’s because he can’t believe he might actually be able to get to see the manuscript, what with it being digitized so that the curators can Just Say No To Mad Guys Like Him. So I say, you know, making light conversation, Sir, what kind of Oil is your hat made of? And he stops dead, looks at me as though I’ve just torched his favourite pet, and replies “what?”

So I say, when I was inducted here they told me that people who ask for MS 408 often wear some kind of rare oil-based hat, all the while I’m looking at his cap which, like, just happens to be for the Edmonton Oilers hockey team. He says  “there’s nothing under the cap” in this totally intense way, and I’m thinking of Forbes Smiley and say can I check your cap, sir, and he says what exactly are you looking for and I say it’s this really rare oil, Tynph Oil or something, that we mustn’t let near our manuscripts.

And so he half-lifts up a corner of his cap and there’s just this balding head thing underneath (pretty gross, he must have been like fifty or something), and I’m thinking about people cutting out maps with concealed blades and someone said that there was this weird map-like fold-out page in MS 408, so I say can I see inside your cap?

He’s shaking even worse now and lifts up his head and there’s this flash of crinkly metallic light under there and I’m thinking it’s a blade, it’s a blade, omigod it’s a blade, so I reach down into the drawer for a miniature LED flashlight to look closer at it but when I turn back he’s gone – disappeared, running up the stairs. And that’s when I notice his red-ringed face on the top left of the whole Do Not Let These People page and I feel really stupid, for the first time since like 3rd grade or something, when I got my own name wrong in a test. OK, so I was just a kid and my mom had remarried, and I felt under pressure to carry on maxing my grades: but all the same.

Like, I can’t believe I actually nearly completely let a blogger handle MS 408? So how totally bad is that?

Of bedknobs and grimoires…

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Honestly,I do try to look at things that are entirely unconnected with cipher mysteries. But somehow (I really don’t know how) they keep creeping in regardless.

For example, last night I settled down to watch “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” on DVD with my son on loan from the library (the DVD that is, however hooked on books Alex may be). Big mistake. The central part of the film has Miss Eglantine Price (Angela Lansbury) scouring Portobello Road bookstalls to try to find the missing half of a grimoire for the secret of the Star of Astoroth (the film-makers meant “Astaroth”, of course, though it’s not clear whether this mistake was also in Mary Norton’s books from which the film was evolved [by replacing time travel with Nazis]). Bibliophily, demonology, magic, codicology: already we’re in prime cipher mysteries territory. 🙂

astoroth-screenshot

What is written on the Star is revealed to be “Treguna, Mekoides, Trecorum Satis Dee” – these are the words of the ancient “substitutiary locomotion” spell to make inanimate objects jump about (and fight against Nazis). But what do they mean? Well… Satis is obviously Latin for sufficient (which you may recognise from the Renault Vel Satis – curiously, even though it seems they were trying to allude to ‘satisfactory velocity’, vel actually means ‘(inclusive) or’ in Latin [which is presumably why logicians use ‘v’ for or]); while Dee is obviously a direct homage to our cipher mysteries chum John Dee. Trecorum seems to be some kind of dizzy half-child of trigarum [‘team of three’] and decorum: but Treguna and Mekoides seem just to be a bit of grimoirish fun. Let me know if I’ve missed anything. 🙂

Finally, perhaps the spookiest vaguely-linked item of the day has to be Angela Lansbury’s workout video, “Angela Lansbury’s Positive Moves”. According to mbot’s comment here, this includes “many chair-based exercises as well as a portion where Angela speaks to us while taking a bubble bath surrounded by candles. It’s kind of amazing.” I don’t know about you, but I feel fitter just thinking about it.

Two more Voynich novels…

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Two more Voynich novels (both by debutant novelists) for our Big Fat List, one from late last year and one just about to come out…

First up there’s Harold W. Allen’s (2009) “The Renaissance Manuscript: A Novel Concerning the Origin and Meaning of the Voynich Manuscript“, which I have to say seems to be competing against Kennedy & Churchill’s “The Voynich Manuscript: The unsolved riddle of an extraordinary book which has defied interpretation for centuries” for some unknown maximally prolixitous book title award. It’s as if the 20th century never happened… Anyhow, Allen’s book is (presumably self-)published by “Yoyodyne Press”: though you may (as I did) possibly recall Yoyodyne from the example given in the Gnu General Public License (“Ty Coon, President of Vice… Yoyodyne Inc“), until recently I didn’t know that it was originally the made-up name of a giant Californian defence (sorry, “defense”) contractor in Thomas Pynchon’s (1963) novel “V”. Just so you know too.

Oh, and I forgot to precis Allen’s plot: a smalltown medieval history professor, his ex-girlfriend, and a Chicago inner-city teacher collectively attempt to work out who killed the professor’s best friend by tracing the origins of the Voynich Manuscript back to Babylonia and the Garden of Eden armed only with some puzzling pornographic emails, while being chased by a bunch of (presumably black-clad) three-letter-agencies and with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. As they say in Lahndahn, wudja Adam an’ Eve it? Review in due course (though I’m not necessarily expecting anything too Pynchonesque, but perhaps I’ll be surprised).

And finally, there’s Author Brett King and his historical mystery rollercoaster novel “The Radix”, due for release on 27th April 2010. Appreciative quotes from big-hitters James Rollins, Steve Berry and Jeffery Deaver, good quality cover photography and a solid-looking website, so it’s definitely supposed to look substantial. Its plotline runs:-

For centuries, the Radix existed in rumor and secrecy. Saints whispered its legend. Alchemists craved its power. Armies fought and died to possess it. Five hundred years ago, it vanished from the earth. History’s greatest mystery, lost to the ages.

And now (to nobody’s surprise) the Radix is back, a root hotly pursued by questing “government agent John Brynstone” (who presumably has a flame-haired partner called Jane Fyre? Hmmm… maybe not.), probably driven by his own personal demons to uncover the no doubt cataclysmically powerful ancient secret hidden in the VMs. Again, we shall see if Brett King’s story overcomes all this airport novel baggage

Barbara Barrett’s VMs Fortean Times article…

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At long last, Barbara Barrett’s Fortean Times article, “Voynich Under the Microscope“, has been published – and (for now, at least) it seems to be freely available on the web, which is very nice – read it quickly and buy a copy of FT anyway. 🙂

Ostensibly, it’s an update following the ORF TV documentary’s radiocarbon dating and microscopic analysis: but actually, Barbara seizes the opportunity to right a whole bunch of perceived Voynichological wrongs. For instance, she dismisses the whole “humanist hand” notion as a palaeographical misconception stemming from a 1976 comment by Rodney Dennis (a Harvard librarian) that has somehow hardened into a mistaken orthodoxy. She also dismisses all late-15th century theories (she’s doubtless far too polite to say *cough* “Leonardo”) based on the radiocarbon dating range, though whether she also intended to include 1465 (*cough* “Averlino”) I’m not sure – radiocarbon is good stuff, but is it really that good?

She has a little bit of a dig at unnamed bloggers’ casting doubts on the whole “written on fresh vellum” thing, keeping things fallaciously open in order to maintain otherwise untenable dating hypotheses. Well… I at least am still waiting for the data to turn up before I jump. As an exercise in historical reasoning, all the varied kinds of evidence we get have to dovetail with each other: and in this case, the evidence train may have left the station, but it most definitely has not yet arrived at its destination. The VMs’ patina formation, calcination, vellum gelatinization, etc – these are things I would really love to read about, but will that paper ever get written? Barbara seems to imply that she suspects it won’t, caught in a kind of research ownership turf war… but can that really be true? If true, what an abysmal waste! 🙁

Enjoy! 🙂

PS: though I liked Barbara’s mixed metaphor of “deflating a sacred cow”, it did also make me wonder what manner of holy flatus it was inflated with in the first place…