A letter from Amos Tutuola

Twenty-four years ago, when I was a freshly-minted assistant professor, a colleague and I planned a book project to collect brief essays by writers around the world on the subject of language; it was to be titled "Without Any Rules: The Politics and Poetics of the Vernacular." In the end, we only received a small fraction of the hoped-for contributions, and the project remained incomplete. Some, though, were very kind and enthusiastic -- among these was the late Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, best known for The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. He did indeed send the promised essay, and perhaps someday I'll find a home for it -- but in the meantime I'll always cherish our brief correspondence.

UPDATE: Mr. Tutuola's essay has been published in Transition 120, and the editors decided to use images of the original typescript!

The Soul of Edgar A. Poe

From The Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 25, 1860

Faithful followers of this blog will have read some weeks ago of the curious case of the stolen "Ultima Thule" Daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe, and of its likely thief, the "comic songster" Ossian Euclid Dodge. Mr. Dodge, though not a young man, headed west, and set up a music shop in Cleveland, Ohio, on Euclid Avenue, a thoroughfare whose name must have gratified his ego. While there, he permitted his purloined photograph to be copied, as well as used as the subject of a portrait in oils of Poe by the painter and sculptor William Walcutt. Alas, Walcutt's painting too has become lost over the intervening epoch, along with his reputation -- aside from a few scattered references in the press of his day, there are few of his works in museums today, and even the date of his death -- 1882 or 1895 -- is uncertain. His one remaining work of note is the Perry Monument in Cleveland.

A Horrific Letter From Greely

In the annals of bad handwriting, there are few exemplars to compare with the letter -- facetious, yet fabulously plausible -- cooked up by Mark Twain in Roughing It. A purported reply from Horace Greely to a young man who wished, against nature, to grow turnips upon vines, its inane readings, as given by Twain, are among the strangest and most hilarious in the history of American letters. The narrator's increasingly desperate attempts at decipherment -- "sausages wither in the east," "potatoes inherit and condemn," and "my beer's out" -- rival the nonsense of English as She is Spoke, a favorite of Twain's. Alas, the solution --a typescript of the letter -- arrives too late, and the lad who dreamed of such novel cultivars expires before it arrives. They bury him with a turnip in each hand.

The Terrific Register

Writing to his friend W.H. Wills in 1851, Charles Dickens recalled his boyhood fascination with a periodical known as The Terrific Register.  Every issue featured a grisly woodcut of some horrid murder, disembowelment, beheading, or massacre, and Dickens thought the subscription well worth the cost: "I used, when I was at school, to take in the Terrific Register, making myself unspeakably miserable, and frightening my very wits out of my head, for the small charge of a penny weekly; which, considering that there was an illustration to every number, in which there was always a pool of blood, and at least one body, was cheap." The images seem to have had quite a lasting effect on the young Dickens, as many of them re-appeared in his mature works; Mr. Foscue, the 'Miser that eats himself' may have been one of the inspirations for Ebenezer Scrooge!