writer Henry Miller shares his genealogical line

Anon, Birth of a Woman 1907

Henry Miller, in Robert Snyder, This is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn. Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1974—

And so, if my memory serves me right, here is my genealogical line: Boccaccio, Petronius, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky (and other Russian writers of the nineteenth century), the ancient Greek dramatists, the Elizabethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare), Theodore Dreiser, Knut Hamsun, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Élie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, van Gogh, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Céline, everything read on Zen Buddhism, everything I read about China, India, Tibet, Arabia, Africa and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was the language of the Bible rather than its “message” which I got first and which I will never shake off.

Mencken's stolen bible for Louis Untermeyer

H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Sun

Louis Untermeyer, From Another World: The Autobiography of Louis Untermeyer. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939, p. 193—

I was recovering from a touch of grippe when a letter arrived from Henry [Louis Mencken]. It was one of his more medical documents—Henry used to be in and out of Johns Hopkins [medical center] and was continually giving advice to the doctors. He counciled me to get rid of my physician, drink three stiff glasses of Gluhwein, and sleep on a stolen Bible…This, I thought, is another of Henry’s Menckenisms; I laughed and forgot the matter. Two days later, a worn Bible arrived by parcel post. The cover was blazoned in gold: “Property of the Hotel Astor,” and the flyleaf bore this inscription: “To Louis Untermeyer, with the compliments of the Author.”

that Lazarus was the original raised character

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Wavelength. Digital montage (©2021). 

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Edward Robb Ellis, A Diary of the Century. New York: Kodansha, 1995, p. 222—

Tuesday, March 1, 1955: In the city room today some of us were discussing a report that the New Testament has been published in Braille. Frank [Kappler] said: “Yes—but did you know that Lazarus was the original raised character?”

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James Joyce, Ulysses (Chapter Six)—

“Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job.”

if memory serves me right here are my origins

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Above Roy R. Behrens, In Point of Fact (© 2021). Digital montage.

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Henry Miller, quoted in Robert Snyder, ed., This is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1974), pp. 119-121—

If my memory serves me right, here is my genealogical line, Boccaccio, Petronius, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoievski (and other Russian writers of the nineteenth century), the ancient Greek dramatists, the Elizabethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare), Theodore Dreiser, Knut Hamsun, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Elie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, van Gogh, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Céline, everything I read on Zen Buddhism, everything I read about China, India, Tibet, Arabia, Africa and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was the language of the Bible rather than its "message" which I got first and which I will never shake off.

Typographic Poster | Samuel Garwood

Typographic Poser | Samuel Garwood

Above Poster by Samuel Garwood, graphic design student, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa (2015), in celebration of the typeface Helvetica.

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James Joyce—

Come forth, Lazarus! But he came fifth and lost the job.

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Alec Guinness, My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor. New York: Viking Penguin, 1997, p. 135—

The raising of Lazarus from the dead is the subject of today's Gospel. The current sub-supermarket translation has Christ asking, "Where have you put him?"—as if Lazarus might be a basket, and later, "Lazarus, here! Come out!"—as if calling a terrier digging in a rabbit warren.

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Robert Byrne—

Cogito ergo dim sum: Therefore I think these are pork buns.

Typographic Poster | Alexandria Toszegi

Typographic poster © Alexandria Toszegi 2015

Above Poster by Alexandria Toszegi, graphic design student, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa (2015), in celebration of type designer Paul Renner and his design of the typeface Futura.

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Fran Lebowitz—

If thine enemy offend thee, give his child a drum.

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Judith and Neil Morgan, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel. New York: Random House, 1995, p. 73—

One unborn scheme [devised by Dr. Seuss and his friend Hugh Troy] was to launch a private detective agency named Surely, Goodness and Mercy. Its slogan was to be biblical: "[Surely, Goodness and Mercy] Will follow you all the days of your life."

Finnegans Wake | James Joyce

Roy R. Behrens © Combat Fatigue. Digital montage (2004).

When I initially made this digital montage—in a form that alludes to a book spread—it had nothing to do with the Irish novelist and poet James Joyce (1882-1941), at least not directly. In fact, the obscured image on the right is reworked from a photograph (in the Library of Congress) of an equally admired writer and Joyce's contemporary, the Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). But it had everything to do with writing and designing. Years earlier, when I was in an architecture class in graduate school (the only one I've taken), I began to think about Venn diagrams in relation to figure-ground patterns, and then, by extension, to architectural building plans. In part I was led to this by the writings of Christopher Alexander. It seemed to me then that one can make purposeful "category confusions" (puns, rhymes, parodies, allusions and so on) in architectural building plans as easily as one can with words. I was "reading" Finnegans Wake at the time, so to some extent this came to me because of their concurrence.

Not to pretend to explain Joyce's comic novel, its two central characters are HCE (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker) and ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle). Beyond that, you can find a detailed and reasonably good summary at the Wikipedia article on the book. For the moment, I would simply like to share a few examples of the astonishing word play that Joyce employs throughout the book.

He frequently offers sentences that say one thing and yet, by the way they are written, they echo (or parody) other famous passages, especially religious texts. Listen to these two examples:

"In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singitime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!"

"Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allaluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger."

The complexity of the patterns he makes is beyond belief. Here's a particularly interesting part in which he poses a question, then follows with an answer:

"8. And how war yore maggies?

Answer: They war loving, they love laughing, they laugh weeping, they weep smelling, they smell smiling, they smile hating, they hate thinking, they think feeling, they feel tempting, they tempt daring, they dare waiting, they wait taking, they take thanking, they thank seeking, as born for lorn in lore of love to live and wive by wile and rile by rule of ruse 'reathed rose and hose hol'd home, yeth cometh elope year, coach and four, Sweet Peck-at-my-Heart picks one man more."

Finally, I don't know how many people realize that, throughout this astonishing book, Joyce has embedded word sequences—words that begin with h, c and e—to allude of course to HCE (the protagonist). There are tons of them, but here a few:

"Howth Castle and Environs. he calmly extensolies. Hic cubat edilus. How Copenhagen ended. happinest childher everwere. Hush! Caution! Echoland! How charmingly exquisite! human, erring and condonable. heptagon crystal emprisoms. Heave, coves, emptybloddy! Hengler's Circus Entertainment. Heinz cans everywhere."

Biblical Printing Errors | Bloopers

The following is adapted from the article "Bible, specially named editions" in Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia. Third Edition. (New York: Harper and Row, 1987)—

In the so-called Wicked Bible, printed in London by Baker and Lucas in 1632, the word not was omitted from the seventh commandment, to make it "Thou shalt commit adultery."
 

Genesis 24:61, which is supposed to read "Rebecca arose, and her damsels," was mistakenly printed as "Rebecca arose, and her camels" in an edition known as Rebecca's Camels Bible, printed in 1823.
 

Published in 1702, the Printers' Bible contained an error in Psalms 119:161 in which the word printers was substituted for princes, so that King David was said to complain that "printers have persecuted me without a cause."
 

In the Murderers' Bible, published in 1801, the word murmurers was misprinted as murderers in Jude 16, resulting in a verse that reads "These are murderers, complainers, walking after their own lusts..."
 

The To Remain Bible refers to a flawed edition, published at Cambridge in 1805, in which Galatians 4:29 was mistakenly printed as "he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the spirit to remain, even so it is now." The words to remain are erroneous. While checking the galleys, a proofreader questioned if there should be a comma after the word spirit. The editor responded by penciling "to remain" in the margin, which was then mistakenly typeset.