M. Trente has furnished a signal service to the scholarly world with his éclairage of one of our unsung research bodies, worthy of [translation error: the anonymous translator is a blockhead] Block [error: confused Ginzburg with Allen Ginsberg, of “Howl” fame about all-devouring systems] Ginsberg.
Far from the common eye, for the thanks of posterity, scholars labor in citadels of knowledge— [all real, to make it funnier, the same way Weird Al’s “The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota” lists only real things: “Elvis-O-Rama, the Tupperware Museum / The Boll Weevil Monument and Cranberry World / The Shuffleboard Hall Of Fame, Poodle Dog Rock / And The Mecca of Albino Squirrels / We’ve been to ghost towns, theme parks, wax museums / And the place where you can drive through the middle of a tree / We’ve seen alligator farms and tarantula ranches…”] the Labyrinth Sodality and Iberian Sundial Society, [the Gründerzeit period is apt for a quantification exercise like world-record-keeping] the Rekord-Club Gründerzeit, the forthcoming Museum of Tri-Jurassic Technology, the Pith Brooks Museum, and especially the Anti-Gravity Research Foundation, have all at some point received their due; and now another has come due.
One fears it will grace more catalogues than shelves, reviewed more than read, yet any reader of even modest cultivation will at once perceive that Trente’s inquiry eclipses those earlier curiosities in both scope and intellectual élan, and would prove an inestimable ornament to any library. [because of course, it doesn’t exist] For Trente’s [G. K. Chesterton, Heretics: “There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic.”] Chestertonian thesis is a micro-historical vindication of the English verity that no things are uninteresting—only people.
…M. Trente conducts us to a [o3 summary: “New Orleans serves as an ideal setting for the Institute due to its palpable atmosphere of historical layering, Gothic memories, romantic decay, and preservation against odds while ignoring the looming danger of the final Mississippi River flood which must some day wipe out the city (after which ‘the good times’ will no longer roll), mirroring the Institute’s own mission. The city’s unique, somewhat”out of time” character, its tradition of embracing eccentric visions, and its rich tapestry of hidden stories and diverse cultural ephemera provide a fitting backdrop for an institution dedicated to the exhaustive study of a single day. The ‘door into summer’ finds a resonant physical and metaphorical home amidst its famed hidden courtyards and literary mystique.” NO also lets us use ‘quarter’ which gives us an additional resonance with September, similar to the journal metadata.] quaint quarter of New Orleans, past the park where the seagulls cry and 19 steps down[The Aleph is on the 19th step of the staircase down to the cellar in “The Aleph”] a dilapidated lane—past a sleeping [RIP my cat (2013–112024)] rusty-black cat—where, from time to time, a meek figure or a mail-carrier may approach the disquietingly overgrown official entrance. The lost may consult the [ironic temporal phrases] stately period engraved on the plaque—the one with a bird & wildcat—to learn that it is no less than a door into summer:
The Institute of September the Thirtieth
(Founded 1969)
[John 1:5 “Et lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non conprehenderunt” (“And light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it”); the heavy use of classics here is not just appropriate for the academic style, adds a level of irony, because classicists are obsessed with Athens/Rome in a similar way to the Institute, and academia still has not completely shaken it off.] Lux in Tenebris Diei Unius [“Light in the darkness of a singular day.”]
Dedicated exclusively to the exhaustive study and preservation
of all phenomena, documents, and recollections pertaining to
September 30, 1939.—(all translations mine) [reminder that we are reading an incompetent English translation of a questionable French translation of an English original: what does the plaque really say…?]
The Institute is one of the least known legacies of the late [ironic root: ‘vincēns (“conquering”)’, see the encomium] Vincent [As in, Rosicrucians (but also ‘brighter’, and an allusion to a relative of mine)] Rosier ( [because 12yo in 1939] 1927–1988 [must die at plausible old age but preferably pre-WWW and allowing for academic publishing timelines] ), for whom Trente diligently provides an enlightening parcours de vie: birth in rural Ireland, emigration to the [translation error of “Windy City” for Cité du Vent] City of Wind, Chicago, hardscrabble childhood playing ball in lots and running with youth gangs, the [It is a common trope of hagiographies that the subject was a prodigy and recognized for their brilliance (for an extended “meta-hagiography” set in America, see Neil Gaiman’s “Golden Boy” comic). We don’t need too much hagiography here, but it does help the timeline & worldbuilding if we get Rosier out into the real world quickly.]precocious admission to an anthropology major followed by a contretemps while kayaking Papua New Guinea, on behalf of the OSS, which connections proved useful in post-war import-export ventures (making, and losing, his first fortune when his curious ‘Rosier Cube’ oranges, followed by apples, became popular, until unpopular, in the West). He was even trusted with back-channel Soviet negotiations over the [What was the “Mukbang Incident”? We shall never know—any reference that comes to the reader’s mind, like the George H. W. Bush vomiting incident, will surely be funnier than one I came up with…](still-classified) Mukbang Incident, followed by restless expansion into unrelated ventures including his publishing & chemical supply conglomerate (best known for deodorant), shrimp fishing (vertically integrated restaurant chain), legendary commodities trades (famously breaking the Newcastle union through locally-delivered coal futures), and an ill-fated Texas ostrich farm investment (now a minor tourist attraction). Eventually he withdrew into Californian venture capital, a seersucker-clad gray eminence among Silicon Valley upstarts, where he amassed the Greco-Roman art collection he is chiefly remembered for. After such an eventful life, he died quietly in bed, attended solely by a priest, last words unknown.
…Trente frames no hypotheses for the reason of these phenomena, for it is enough that they move as he describes, but he explains the occult title thus: during the old lion’s final inspection of the Institute, our author marshaled the courage to ask, “Why the Thirtieth? Why not, say, the day after?”—only for him to rear back: “October The First is too late!”
This recalls those early 20th-century titans who dreamt of universal photographic catalogues, of vast Palais Mondiaux in [error + Borges reference (his favorite city, where he often lived, and eventually died)] Geneva meant to house the entirety of human inscription, but in Rosier, those ambitions are involuted to a breathtaking degree. For the Institute tasks itself with gathering the disjecta membra of September the Thirtieth and shoring them against ruin, a repairing of the world guided by a genius loci almost Blakean—“To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.”
However paradoxical its foundational premise might appear to the uninitiated, like a [successful French restaurant chain known for its stubbornly specialized single-menu policy of serving only steak + French fries for the past 50+ years] L’Entrecôte of history, the sheer encyclopedic ambition of the Institute’s collections testifies to an endeavor wherein (per the playwright), nihil humanum is deemed alien; the Institute attempts a radical recentering of the human condition upon this [note: “pataphysical” does not have an apostrophe according to WP] pataphysical temporal locus, an eternal September. Everything is coming to be, or has become, through the 30th of September, 1939. There is no camel which, followed for long enough through the desert of the real, with honesty and integrity, does not go through the eye of that needle.
Its agents diligently peruse library catalogues for items to Xerox™, and rare book dealers sedulously send circulars of items appearing at auction to feed its esurience for every book published that week, or which might have been on sale.
The Institute has the largest newspaper collection in the world—not in depth, but in breadth, as they aim to collect every newspaper that day (and before, and after), in both morning and evening edition. As its seemingly-limitless endowment is not so unlimited as its task (for ars longa, dies brevisque[The art so long, the day so short.]), the Institute often preserves only the most relevant issues, while the rest are dispersed; and so there is a steady stream of visitors who are there to examine, as the case may be, the sole known surviving issue of a South American newspaper (on gauchos), or searching later issues in the hopes of pirated articles or rebuttals. Likewise, the sum of the meteorological and stellar records kept at the Institute (off-site) can only be described as ‘astronomical’, and every so often, an astronomer from Cambridge or Mount Wilson may inquire after a plate. Increasingly, scientific time-series are calibrated against the Institute’s comprehensive cross-section, as a temporal prime meridian, a fixed point around which a world turns.
…In its early days, the Institute prioritized ephemera: diaries, real or dream (often a single page from anonymous donors), receipts, hotel registers, passenger manifests, restaurant and dining-car menus, playing cards, collectibles like Dixie cups, amateur recordings of radio stations, or any photo an archivist could argue might have been taken on the 30th. (…The [pun] “Rosier Apple”, bred in Michigan and introduced commercially with a trademark granted on September 30th, is now known exclusively from an archival [fragile, fading, dream-like] watercolor sketch.)
This reviewer notes approvingly the Institute’s initial reverent focus on juvenilia— [translation error: marbles] children’s marbled papers, bubble gum wrappers (focused on [foreshadowing] baseball cards), and schematics for [I just like go-karts, perhaps due to Mario Kart 64 and the go-kart place near where I grew up] homemade go-karts from the Chicagoland area—prescient, as they could never have been preserved later, and represent some of the few meaningful sociology archives of childhood (a field which, beyond charming anecdotes, still awaits its Bachelard or Bourdieu).
These often have unexpected uses in deducing the ley-lines of the past.
Gourmands consult the menus to understand the evolution of fine cuisine, like where certain sourdough breads came from. The grocery store receipts, seemingly so picayune, have proven priceless to nutritional historians; the U.S. National Institutes of Health have digitized the collection to understand public nutrition on the eve of war and the health effects of rationing.
And linguists discovered a previously unknown temporal dual to hapax legomenon, termed hapax ephemeron: words used by multiple people but zeitgebunden to a single day, which are invisible to less comprehensive archives, and which seem to function as a unique langue of that day (eg. “autumnese” or “umbrellous”, [ironic inversion of the looming Blitzkrieg; ‘lightning-peace’] “Blitzfrieden”, “droop-tail”, “farewellfare”, “khaki-gaze”, “spell-gaping”, “Thirtio”). The past is a foreign country which poses its own translation challenges to would-be exegetes, which are still being thrashed out in the annual [appropriate jargon title but also evokes ephemerides; you can see hapax ephemerata as the ‘shooting stars’ of a domain: blink and you’ll miss it] Ephemerata linguist symposia.
Parallel analyses indicate that other domains experience hapax ephemeron, of advertisements put up only to be pasted over the next morning, daily-special dishes never seen again; each day may be regarded as a man who is born with the dawn, matures in the afternoon, retires in the evening, and dies with the sunset. (That other melancholy Dane was indeed correct, that the 30th had to be lived forward, though it is understood only backward; and this understanding—like the [Hegel wrote ‘Minerva’] owl of Athena or a review—is doomed to arrive too late.)
[full Søren Kierkegaard quote: “There are many in our time who possess the result of the whole of existence and do not know how to account for the slightest thing…It is quite true what philosophy says, that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forward. Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with temporal life never being able to be properly understood, precisely because I can at no instant find complete rest to adopt the position: backward.”; entry 166–167, Journal JJ, 1843; pg179 of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 2: Journals EE–KK, ed. Cappelørn et al 2008, ISBN: 978-0-691-13344-7.]
With a veritable paradise of archives in one building, visiting novelists and historians will often reconstruct “a day in the life” of a major figure and find out if the President had fake turtle soup at the White House before taking in a contemporary movie like [“The end will be painless but swift; shortly after experiencing total blindness, Judy will die…Three months later, Ann comes to visit. Judy and she are in the garden planting bulbs when Judy comments on how odd it is she still feels the sun’s heat under the rapidly darkening skies. They both immediately realize she is losing her vision…Judy makes an excuse to remain home, helps him pack, and sends him off, telling him, ‘What we have now can’t be destroyed. That’s our victory, our victory over the dark. It’s a victory because we’re not afraid.’” (Rejected: The Wizard of Oz (obvious, already used); Mr Smith Goes To Washington (not thematic enough even if FDR liked it); Goodbye, Mr. Chips (too focused on creating a legacy); Stagecoach (‘strangers jumbled together briefly’ is not bad but too weak).)] Dark Victory, and if he took a train with an itinerary, then the list of known passengers he might have talked to, and what he would have seen along the way like advertisements, local newspapers and weather. (A curse of reading this is that readers will start noticing “late September 1939” everywhere, in accordance with the Institute’s “Law of Thirty-Nines”: “I find thirties and nines to be more and more manifest the harder I look.”)
One can sit in the media room, and play what the archivists call the “alephabetical tracks”: a 24-hour long track splicing together random seconds from every unique audio source with a known broadcast time for various geographical divisions like “Chicago” or “Continental USA”—this is a useful corrective to histories which suffer the mass tyranny of greatest hits like Glenn Miller’s [translation error and common memory mistake to add the lyric ‘Somewhere’ to the shorter title] “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, and necessarily ignore all the local one-off broadcasts, like the many chorus groups.
These archives have been mined for art projects such as [anagram] Martin Claychrist’s haunting day-long film, The Thirtieth Looks Back: the artist isolated tens of thousands of faces from photos and footage, and then the film continually superimposes faces as a collage—each new face covering up the previous ones.
Not all efforts prove suited for academic study. One post-graduate visitor attempted an ambitious “olfactory art” project to synthesize the dominant ambient smells of various global locations: vials of synthesized Parisian café exhaust, rural Irish peat smoke, and the metallic tang of Chicagoan industrial zones, based on chemical analyses of soil samples and contemporary descriptions in literature; while some visitors found it useful, there were persistent questions about whether the 30th really smelled that bad, and what the value to the Institute was.
And the charming, if scientifically dubious, effort to catalogue the collective unconsciousness of humanity foundered when the initial statistical dream diary results, showing anomalous ‘ψ’ predictions of October 1st, disappeared in followup data collection, and unspecified related projects were shelved due to “administrative irregularities” (and with them, dreams of retrocognition).
Of late, Trente informs us, they have begun experimenting with the newest audio-visual technology on NeXT workstations to record ‘living histories’ in an advanced prototype hypertext system, recruiting ‘citizen-researchers’ to interview anyone over the age of 50. These may be of particular value in the future with the development of the [reminder this is the 1980s] “Inter-Net” [Gallic arrogance] (an Americanized Minitel), or perhaps another fad.
The Institute, it must be said, grapples with the inherent problématique of matching its conceptual focus (or Anglo-Saxon absence thereof) to its resources, and avoiding professional deformation.
The first challenge appeared early on, in its [China/Legalists/Lord Shang (legendarily hoist upon his own petard); inversion as Legalists famously cared little for the books or classics eg. Qin Shi Huang’s “burning of books and burying of scholars”] “Warring States” period: to what extent should the Institute seek to ingest all legal and government documents, which are generated in such timestamped volume? The Legalists argued for a strict one-size-fits-all policy of taking anything dated the 30th, to create La Bibliothèque totale or [translator error] Total Bookcase ([Not a parody of any specific Legalist slogan or passage, but a style parody of The Book of Lord Shang and Han Feizi]“If every record is preserved, there will be neither errors nor doubts”); if other research on “decorative disciplines” had to be defunded, so be it. The Antinomians emphasized the sheer archival volume of such a simplistic policy would inevitably lead to the downfall of the Institute, either in the rebellion of researchers, or in its budget shortfalls. The resolution, it is not without a certain irony, came when the Legalists’ warehouse expansion could be funded only by an act-of-faith of researchers, including the fiercest Legalist advocate, Dr Shang. (“—nor archivists”, Institute legend reports the Antinomian retort.)
Trente highlights as the second major (archi)tectonic fault the “military historian” vs “pacifist” divide: the most salient events of the 30th are, of course, the developments in WWII—setbacks in the Phony War, the infamy of Poland and creation of a government-in-exile, which mark its true start.
The military historians argue that Rosier’s intent was clearly to study WWII and preventing that disaster, with an emphasis on Polish issues (likely due to a personal connection, given the Polish immigrants and refugees in South Chicago at that time), and that the Institute had unbalanced priorities. The reader too will wonder at the resources expended by the Melbourne sub-archive on reconstructing the recipe for the half-time meat pies served at the 1939 VFL Grand Final (reproduced in an [organ meat often used in meat pies] appendix), a culinary detail perhaps less crucial than the fate of Poland, yet pursued with greater gusto.
The ‘pacifists’ argued that Rosier’s intent was even more clearly to not study WWII: had he intended that, evidently, it goes without saying, he would have said so, no? (Trente’s sympathies are clear in his critique, not without an almost Gallic verve: “It’s the Institute Of September The Thirtieth, not Of The Second World War! Does the world need another? Much less a shrine of Polish effigies built around the [declaring the government-in-exile] inkwell & pen used by Raczkiewicz⸮”) [irony/sarcasm mark: popularized in France] The dispute approached a second war in the world of the Institute, as, each convinced only they understood the still-silent Rosier’s reason to be, even the most remote affiliates were forced to choose sides, culminating in a poker-waving incident (after which the conflict chilled).
[ironic foreshadowing of Tlön ending] Trente characterizes the pacifists as winning less by dialectic than by decay, as the military historians died off and it became ever harder to say something new, while the pacifists (like the boxer Melankomas) kept their arms up, discovering ever new fields to mine: jazz performances, hydraulic and electromechanical computers, the [defensive dismissal of Polish accomplishments due to the massive French failure pre-WWII, see Foucrier2023] much-ballyhooed Polish cryptography program’s reception, [broadcast by NBC but not recorded: “‘The fact that the game was being televised had no significance to those of us playing’, Principe said. ‘Waynesburg had been considered sort of a warm-up, and we reacted accordingly. I do recall that we apparently had regarded them too lightly because they scored the first touchdown. But it is rather difficult to remember anything different about the first TV game.’”] the lost first TV broadcast of an American football game (the holy grail of the athletics division), auspicious births (Trente describes a [1987] recent chemistry Nobelist as a “5-alarm fire” as the Institute labored to fix an unexplained lacuna—indicative of a certain Gallophobia?), and every 10 years, a frenzy of guest researchers who descend upon the quiet quarter to await the [Census records are released after 72 years. Researchers in 1991 (story’s review date) would be anticipating the 1920 census, and looking forward to 1930, etc.] uncensored release of the next US Census.
While Trente diplomatically describes the Institute as running like clockwork, the reader will detect a delicate sous-entendu. How will the Institute handle digitization? Can the 30th archives be adequately computerized, and avoid pieces decaying? [translation error of “bit rot”] Is a Xerox™ a substitute for the original (a debate ended, but not resolved, by a budget crisis within its first decade)? What might be lost if the physical archives are discarded and future scientific methods cannot be applied to the original artifacts? (A micro-CT of items like Rosier’s baseball glove runs to gigabytes, yet captures neither isotope ratios, environmental DNA, nor dried-sweat proteins for future proteomics.) Can the aura of the artifact, its very “thereness” so crucial to our phenomenological encounter with the past, truly survive its dematerialization? Even [patron saint of archivists, libraries, and translators] Saint Jerome—whose feast, the Institute oft notes, falls on the 30th, surely not a coincidence, because nothing is a coincidence—would struggle with Institute norms, such as dating all internal documents by the ‘Adjusted Eon (Æ)’[1939 = Year Zero; George William Russell was a mystical Irish poet “who wrote with the pseudonym Æ (often written AE or A.E.)…This derived from an earlier Æon signifying the lifelong quest of man, subsequently abbreviated.”; he saw visions in which he “was made partner in memory of mighty things, happenings in ages long sunken behind time…an almost intolerable lustre of light, pure and shining faces, dazzling processions of figures, most ancient, ancient places and peoples, and landscapes lovely as the lost Eden.”].
It is with a certain drollery, Trente informs us, that the Institute has recently inaugurated a year-long futurology project, “The Way The Future Was”, collecting every speculative article, magazine feature, or radio commentary predicting “what the world of tomorrow would be”, short term or long term, triggered by the 1939 New York World’s Fair. (It is a testament to the Institute’s peculiarly New World optimism that they predict that understanding how the past understood the future can help understand the future of understanding the past of September the Thirtieth, 1939.)
The temerous reader will eventually be forced to agree with Trente that “the future of the past has never been brighter”—
[apostrophic encomium section, leading into a “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” ending, inverted to a real, rather than fictional, world conquering us; this is a trap-ending for the reader, who thinks he has ‘solved’ the story as a rewrite of “Tlön”, and thereby fell for a “maze created by men”, instead of trying to understand the (by now almost forgotten) Vincent Rosier’s kokoro]
O Thirtieth! O victorious Vincent’s ever-rosier day! For once dead, now livest: thy [not italicized in English, but also not incorrectly translated because we have had enough errors by this point] catalogues raisonné, monographs, theses, anthologies, all continually mirror thy radiance; [Wyndham Lewis: “A Man of the Week: Marinetti”, 1914: “The Past is made up of those who have bitterly and enviously exceeded their allotted span, and still stalk or scurry about in any Present, tripping up the living, mysteriously congesting the traffic, confusing values in Art and manners…The Past is composed of a brilliant cohort of mortals who determined not to die, but to remain on this earth. Every new generation finds this fine fleur of mankind in possession of the land they come to occupy. In Italy, more than in any other country, they hold impregnable positions in the many strongholds they have built for themselves—museums, churches, and libraries…A great Artist sometimes would get as much ‘life’ as he wants out of the chemical adventures of his bones and flesh after death. His public decease, were it not always a physiological fact, would have to be regarded as a trick. It is the signal for the pure explosion of his appalling vitality…he is compelled by knowledge of the fact that he cannot exercise a full influence while still alive; to conspire against the Future, and begin thinking of posterity and his ‘after-life’ on earth. He develops into a bitter and meddlesome ghost. He knows his best life will begin at his fleshly demise, and he works accordingly, with the sinister determination not to be done out of complete and triumphant existence, but to get it at the expense of the next generation. This is obviously not his fault. We must learn, provisionally, to treat the Artist as a dead man, and give him the honors of the dead. For among the dead only the dead are honored. We must acquire a facility for overlooking the compromising fact of an Artist’s existence.”] thy brilliant cohort of mortals, now deathless, possess the land in perpetual re-issue (authorized or pirated); thy breakthroughs and éclaircissements mesmerize the mind; and thy novels and recipes and words (hapax no longer) sporulate and bud around the world.
O Time, O Death, where is thy sting? For the archivists already speak of the challenge of [Hrönir] artifacts of the 30th multiplying on their own, like mankind: memoirs ghostwritten by the silver screen, homages, forgeries, Ossianic fragments, stamps canceled by post offices closed that [Saturday] day, coins and medals which should have been struck for that date (sometimes discrediting supposed originals), and sold to unsuspecting (or suspecting) numismatists.
Trente closes by reprinting a circular announcing the formation of an international society, the Rosier Cross, to memorialize the [deliberately ambiguous of whom or what] death. Its chapters expand worldwide, for one generation cannot suffice to the task of creating a world. Already, we are told, this [see Lewis Wyndham: “to conspire against the Future”] conspiracy against the Future counts among its members not just linguists but eminent clerics and engineers.
Here, at the end of history, mankind has been disillusioned of ideology and symmetry, and unable to look forward, looks back. How could men not fall under the sway of the 30th, to the coalescence of its minutely detailed reality (in 1,440 equitable parts)? It would be futile to reply that today, as every day, is as detailed and real as the 30th—for where is the Institute of Today, and who its Maecenas⸮ It is no-one and no-where and no-when; and men cannot live in a Xanadu or utopia.
The 30th may be a maze, but it was one lived by men, and destined to be solved by men. Its [callback to Military Historians vs Pacifists: ‘dialectic’ vs ‘decay’ #1] dialectical rigor enthralls the mind, though it is the dusty rigor of the chronologist. Already September 1939 (or “Zeroth of 0 Æ”) looms larger in the imagination, other months and years [callback #2] decaying before it, as the textbooks are rewritten; Poland is remembered, while our France is forgotten as merely an inevitable sequel. A Palo Alto recluse has changed the earth—and the great work goes on.
If Trente’s exponential bibliometric projections are correct, by [review published 1991, 52 years after 1939; 2091 − 1939 = 152] “152 Æ”, no publication on the 20th century will fail to mention the 30th. We shall be remembered solely by scholars (of the 30th) for this autumnese review. The mere langue & parole of [1991] 52 Æ will perish from the earth. The world of the Twentieth will be the Thirtieth.
Page 2: [“Bioy Casares had come to dinner at my house that evening, and we had lost all track of time in a vast debate over the way one might go about composing a first-person novel whose narrator would omit or distort things and engage in all sorts of contradictions, so that a few of the book’s readers—a very few—might divine the horrifying or banal truth. Down at that far end of the hallway, the mirror hovered, shadowing us. We discovered (very late at night such a discovery is inevitable) that there is something monstrous about mirrors. That was when Bioy remembered a saying by one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar: Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind. I asked him where he’d come across that memorable epigram, and he told me it was recorded in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, in its article on Uqbar.”]
It makes little difference to us, as we go on revising, in our quiet countryside retirement, a [ie. The First Encyclopaedia of Tlön] cyclopedia of [Adolfo Bioy Casares; indirection for Borges, and ‘Casares’ replaces ‘Quevedo’ better than ‘Adolfo’ (too obscure) or ‘Bioy Casares’ (too long & wrong rhythm)] Casares we shall never publish.
…A strength of M. Trente’s work is that it does not confine itself to the dry gazetteers or almanacs or statistical digests the Institute has heaped up in the thousands, but evangelizes its holdings by synopsizing all artifacts: from artwork to carefully clipped magazine and newspaper articles, indexed by topic, location, and name.
For Thirtio appears everywhere now, whether implicitly in an extended conference, a politician’s vacation, or just anecdotes in passing many years later. This review itself becomes part of the Institute’s labyrinth, as the attentive reader will indeed find no shortage of references to [ie. decrypt] decipher in this work (for in the making of an axe handle with an axe, the model is near at hand). [meta-fictional irony] We go to look up yet another one—but see the dusk has fallen, and it is half-past-nine already [ie. 9:30 PM or 9/30.], we end too late. (And outside the softest creak of something on the wing… oh, do not look back, we beg you in God’s name, do not keep looking back!) [The Institute neither loves nor hates you, but you are made of useful resources for the study of the 30th; wisdom & power do not imply benevolence.]
[translation error] Ainsi, we close with an affecting example of boyhood, [’tis the season!] harvested from [Vincent Rosier, on the opening of the Institute] an anonymous submission to a [very obscure local Chicago newspaper which was open in 1969 but closed not too long afterwards] Chicago newspaper (the Hegewisch News) in 30 Æ, by a memoirist manqué: [Rosier is a ‘manqué’ or failed memoirist, in a way, by never writing it up himself properly and creating an institute instead, having realized too late in his life what he wanted to preserve]
[…] Saturday, end of September, and the end of summer baseball season ’39. [real baseball team names, but nicely alliterative and rhythmic, and hints at the possibility that the ‘Pistons’ are visiting from Detroit] The Pirates stare down the Pistons, spitting [chewing tobacco, still relatively commonly consumed by children in the 1930s] chaw in the dust. It’s a beautiful day for a parade or game: cold, crisp, and fair, a touch of the looming winter to make a boy forget laying in a fug for weeks before. […]
Whiston is glaring daggers at me: I will suffer eternally for letting the gang down. The other lads look away at the stands, the fences, the dugout, the sun over the roofline half past five… We can still win, it’s five four bottom ninth, it ain’t too late, all we need is one last out and their runners are not worth a plugged nickel. But they have given up like a kicked droop-tail, and the Pirates are euphoric as they snigger at us and chant: “blast it past it! onta Waveland! hey batter hey batter hey batter—swing!”
The bat cracks. “High!”
A slow lazy arc, every eye silently following it spell-gaped, past the sun, back down, on its [cf. Newton, clockwork universe, Laplace’s daemon] predetermined path toward no one but me, exiled to the outfield, as I casually hold up my glove for the white sphere emerging from the dark like a revelation, pitched to me by the [Irish inflection] Good Lord Himself, landing with just the slightest thwack…
As cheers erupt on both sides…
Never better all our lives. [“And everyone thought the meeting of the man and woman had been by chance.”]
End.
October The First Is Too Late
by Gwern Branwen· May 19, 2025· 23 min read
