[OVERRIDE]

A Dénouement

1.

The following ten publications here at The Hinternet (or thirteen, counting the associated translations) constitute the chapters of a work of serial metafiction (hereafter, “the Work”), of which I, Justin Smith-Ruiu, notwithstanding the several names credited throughout, am the sole author:

1. Chapter One: Justin Smith-Ruiu, “The Storyteller” (March 24, 2024)

2. Chapter Two: Mary Cadwalladr, “Mary’s Universal Musurgy” (August 26, 2024)

3. Chapter Three: Hélène Le Goff, “What’s Going on at The Hinternet?!” (September 6, 2024)

4. Chapter Four: Hélène Le Goff, “This Time for Real” (September 8, 2024)

5. Chapter Five: Kenny Koontz, “You Must Study the Motions of the Bodies of the Living” (September 12, 2024)

6. Chapter Six: Mary Cadwalladr, “How Old Is Rap Music?” (September 26, 2024)

7. Chapter Seven: Hélène Le Goff, “Hurricane Hélène Is Back!” (September 29, 2024)

8. Chapter Eight: Hinternet Staff, “Kamala Harris for President” (October 5, 2024)
   8.1. Глава восемь: Hinternet Staff, « Камала Харрис в президенты » (5 октября, 2024 г.)

9. Chapter Nine: Justin Smith-Robot, “The Boötes Void” (October 13, 2024)
   9.1. Caput IX: Justin Smith-Robot, « Boötis vacuum » (die tertimo decimo mensis Octobris anno MMXXIV)

10. Chapter Ten: Justin Smith-Ruiu, “The Language Burrow” (October 27, 2024)
    10.1. Chapitre dix : Justin Smith-Ruiu, « Le terrier du langage » (27 octovre 2024)

None of the other pieces published at The Hinternet between March 24, 2024, and today, November 10, 2024, are to be considered proper parts of the Work. All guest-written pieces published during this period, but not included in the above list, were in fact written by the very same, and very real, people to whom they are attributed. And while Kenny Koontz, Hélène Le Goff, and Mary Cadwalladr are indeed fictional creations, the other names currently listed in our Masthead belong to real, living people, save for those in the “Eternal Editors” section, which belong to real, dead people, such as our beloved Izaak Walton.¹

And now a word from our sponsors down at the Slop Factory.

There remain some thorny questions concerning the possible existence of “paratexts” to the Work, notably those also published at The Hinternet that are not listed above, but that are linked or referenced in at least one of the chapters in the list. These would include, for example, “An Introduction to Philology” from May 11, 2024. Likewise, “Kamala touched me!”, the piece I posted from a room at the Radisson Blu in Bucharest while suffering from Covid on August 30, 2024, turned out to have a significant role in the plot, such as there is, of the Work. Yet this too must be considered a paratext, since, at the time of its writing, it was not conceived in any way as belonging, not even in parallel to its factual claims and honest observations, to any metafictional universe.

There is likewise a handful of pieces written between August 30 and today that might be considered paratexts, to the extent that they are attributed to myself as author, while in subsequent installments in the serial metafiction there are plot-driven occasions to deny that it was the real Justin Smith-Ruiu who wrote them — such denials being, obviously, only another part of the fiction. These pieces include, most notably, “Only Idiots Care about IQ” on September 16, and “Notes on the Political Economy of the 21st-Century University” on September 21. The simplest explanation for these “irruptions of the real” is that I just couldn’t help myself — I had wanted to maintain the metafiction consistently at least from late summer through to today’s final reckoning, but the old honest essayist in me sometimes just could not be held back.

Scholars in the coming decades and centuries will be free to decide for themselves how to classify these paratexts. But by our criteria, again, they do not constitute any proper part of the Work, and our reasoning here, aside from the usual concerns about parsimony, is simple: we likewise reference several other works in the Work, of which perhaps scholars might someday wish to compile a complete bibliography, which are demonstrably written by other people and published in other venues, and we fear the slippery slope down which we might be compelled to descend, which would have us next claiming that their work is part of the Work, once we acknowledge even our own paratexts as part of it. Nonetheless the reader is invited, nay encouraged, to follow out all the links and references found throughout, and to delight in the many ways these enrich and ornament the world of the Work.

We must in turn make brief mention of the so-called “Ghost Chapter”, also sometimes known as the “chapitre sous rature”, entitled “State of the ‘Stack 2024”, which consisted entirely in a video uploaded to The Hinternet in late August, 2024, in which I, wearing what were much mocked at the time as “Joe Biden shades”, made all sorts of unhinged declarations about the radical changes I was in the course of making in my personal and professional lives. This video was unpublished some weeks later, and you can presume that its disappearance had at least something to do with my jitters about the professional consequences of keeping it up there. And yet, for the sake of narrative cohesion I must note, now, that this Ghost Chapter is in many respects the clavis for understanding the Work as a whole. Thus, unlike the paratexts, “State of the ‘Stack 2024” is a proper part of the Work, but it is a proper part to which you, readers and scholars of the future, have no access.

There is also, we must mention for the sake of completeness, a rapidly growing body of apocrypha. These form no proper part of the Work at all, and in my view it is only fitting to consign any further comment on them to the footnotes.²

Now that I have exhaustively delimited what constitutes the Work and what does not, I hereby formally and legally bring the Work to a decisive and irreversible close.

2.

From this moment on, nothing I ever write or say, nor anything written or said by any other, will have any legal, artistic, mereological, or indeed metaphysical claim to be a proper part of the Work. This does not mean, however, that there will be no more contributions to The Hinternet from Hélène, Mary, or perhaps others going forward, though I do expect, in slight homage to that one animated television show, to end up “killing Kenny” by some clever device or other. He was annoying. From now on, if you see a piece published under the name “Mary Cadwalladr”, you will know that this is me, Justin Smith-Ruiu, in my “music critic” mode. When you see a piece from Hélène Le Goff, you may be sure that it was written by me, by Managing Editor Olivia Ward-Jackson, or by some combination of the two of us. When you see a piece by “Hinternet Staff”, well, that’s a wild card. It could be me, or Olivia, or the entire Editorial Board speaking as one, or only some of us, or a celebrity guest contributor, somewhat as when William Shatner appears on The Masked Singer — except that, in our case, such a cameo either may or may not be followed by a “reveal”. There may yet be other characters introduced down the line as well, but, again, what they may end up doing will in no way be part of the Work. Here’s how you’ll know whether they are actual guest contributors or not: for every pseudonym we use here, there will be a corresponding “banner”, such as the one we made for Hélène’s “Adequate Housekeeping” columns. Otherwise, for any actual guest contributor, we will simply give them a byline, with no banner. That’s a promise.

I insist that it is not now, nor was it ever, my desire to “deceive”, but only to experiment with some of the creative potentials of pseudonymy. I have generally trusted the reader, perhaps too optimistically, by use of their God-given faculty of attention to be able to make out what’s what. What’s more, in an early chapter of the Work I even had a 2027 version of myself share an interview he did —or will do— that year with Ezra Klein, in which he explicitly identifies Koontz as an alter-ego of himself, gives plenty of indications that Le Goff is not who she seems to be, and in general lays out the entire strategy of pseudonymy that would then guide me in the several pieces to follow. Given all of this signposting, I can only say that if you feel “deceived”, well, that’s on you, pal. You should have been paying closer attention.

“Cela ne me prend que 15 minutes par jour.”

There are, I mean, deceptions and deceptions. When Denis Vrain-Lucas defended himself in a Paris court for having forged some letters not only of René Descartes and Isaac Newton, with which he probably could have got away, but also, later, of Vercingetorix and even Jesus Christ, he argued that the judge and jury should be grateful to him, for having taken what is in the end a rather monotonous history of humanity, and made it more interesting. Vrain-Lucas was just rendering a service, he claimed. We may dispute this specific claim, but what we cannot deny is his incredible ingenuity and creative power. If he did something “wrong”, this has much more to do with the social institutions —the rare-document auctions and the financial transactions that came with these, in particular— than with the “mystifications”, to speak in the language of his contemporaries, that Vrain-Lucas devised. When, by contrast, the great Ken Alder (a devoted reader of The Hinternet, incidentally — Hi Ken!), published in Critical Inquiry, in 2004, a virtuosic “translation” of a letter written from prison by Denis Vrain-Lucas, well, that text moved through a very different series of institutions (peer-review, etc.), in such a way as to make its appearance in the world with plaudits rather than condemnations, let alone a prison sentence, when the true nature of its origins were discerned by Ken’s readers.

Where now does our own work stand, if we place it somewhere on a continuum with Vrain-Lucas’s blameworthy deceptions at one extreme and Alder’s praiseworthy creativity at the other? It may be too early to say. You see, the institution I happen to be navigating is none other than the AI-enhanced internet, rife with disinformation, with words of utterly indeterminate authorship, many of which have no genetic link to human thought at all. How will all this transform the norms and conventions of authorship? More interestingly to me, how will all this transform the metaphysics of authorship? While any conjectures here would surely be premature, what is certain is that nothing of what until recently we thought was fixed for all time, in the practices of reading and writing between the era of the print revolution at the one end and the AI revolution at the other, is going to have any relevance at all in the new world, which we have in fact already entered.

My boldest hope for the present endeavor, and similar ones I have attempted, and similar ones others are attempting, is that these will turn out in distant hindsight only to have been “deceptions” in the way that the trains of the silent-cinema era are said to have “deceived” movie-goers into believing they were about to get pushed out of the way by the cow-pusher; or the way radio listeners believed they were under attack by Martians when Orson Welles recited War of the Worlds to them; or the way Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s readers refused to take his word for it when, after perfecting the genre of the epistolary novel, he had repeatedly to insist that his Julie nor her lover never had any flesh-and-blood life to them at all; or indeed, when the “First Bird” of legend flew right into the bunch of grapes Zeuxis had included in his trompe-l’oeil fresco.

As for the literary art in particular, we note that prior to the tacky age of the Westphalian order, with all its interchangeable romantic national writers propped up in monuments and edifices as crucial components of the construction of this or that national identity, there was seldom a fiction writer who failed to understand what a dangerous game they were playing. Lucian of Samosata worried to no end about the moral implications of stating as true things that in fact did not happen, yet went ahead anyway and called his novel A True History. Miguel de Cervantes makes a dazzling metafictional move in Part II of Don Quixote, when he elevates the deceptive powers of El Cid, who now not only makes our protagonist go astray in pursuit of illusions, but also tricks the reader into taking as true what is entirely made up, to wit, Part I of Don Quixote itself.

It’s been a murky business all along, I mean, but what such “breakthroughs”, so to speak, as represented by the runaway train of silent-cinema can have the power to do, I believe, is to return art to its primordial magical-incantatory function, whereby it does what it has always done at its best, to wit, brings the Upper World down into the Lower World, and refuses to let us go on believing, or pretending, that this Lower World is all there is. But anyhow whatever its afterlife, the work, and indeed the Work, must be done.

“I can small the fowers.”

3.

Even if the Work is now over, there are, as I have indicated, some remaining matters in need of clarification. In particular, I suspect the reader might be wanting a brief summary of the narrative arc of the Work, which I am happy to provide. Even so, there’s no doubt that what the reader would really need is a more comprehensive Vade-Mecum to accompany the Work, to explain not just what is “happening” from moment to moment in a minimal sense, but also how best to experience what is happening, as well as to help make some sense of its potential meanings — a necessary supplement, I take it, for any attempt at literary creation that extensively deploys devices only made possible by our new communications technologies, and that is in this respect properly classified, among other things, as “internet-specific fiction”, just as, say, an interpretive dance atop a rapidly melting glacier is “site-specific art”.

In the course of writing the Work I came to notice how awfully weakly most readers of internet-specific texts are able to focus their attention, or really to make any effort at all to work through texts that do not immediately and boldly declare what they are trying to do in a way so simple that AI is sure to understand them, and to channel them accordingly down the right algorithmic pathways. As I have taken to saying, I want my writing to be such that it makes even AI tired — as I see things, in the 21st century this just is what might still be meant by “the aesthetics of resistance”. But if that is what it is going to do, I came to understand at least some weeks ago that I am, willy-nilly, going to have to do no small amount of hand-holding. To be perfectly blunt, in writing the Work I was given a painful illustration of the inability of many readers to understand anything in a text beyond its “degré zéro” meaning. This was for me a fleeting glimpse into the lives most people pass today in happy ignorance of polyglossy and dialectic, with grossly underdeveloped hermeneutical faculties, and ant-like attention spans. This glimpse compelled me to change my tack in medias res, and, as I will explain soon enough, to begin both dropping hints more unsubtle than I would have preferred, and periodically to return from the “convalescence” to which the metafiction had banished me, in order to assure readers on the verge of quitting The Hinternet for good, that I was indeed still around, and doing just fine — never better, in fact, to the extent that I was finally working, for the first time in my life, in a mode of uninterrupted and joyous creativity. It may, I grant, be late in the game, and I can’t help but quote Henry James out of context as I contemplate my recent departure into creative writing, who wrote of something else altogether that “[i]t’s like changing bankers — after fifty: one doesn’t do that.” Yet the exception I might make in my case would appeal to the fact that in truth I have always done it, even if for most of my life I excelled at keeping it on the down-low.

One of the urgent questions to which I have alluded concerns the special status of the first chapter of the Work, entitled “The Storyteller”, which, you will note right away, is a far chronological outlier relative to all the others, having been published several months before the chapter that follows it. It thus has something of a prefatory quality, or even something that could remind us of the epistolary dedications with which books commenced of old. Another question concerns the status of the present essay. It is, you may have noticed, included under the relevant heading in the navigation bar, since there did not seem any other obvious place to put it. Yet it is not included in the list, with which we began, of the chapters of the Work. While I do not detect anything quite as confounding as a set-theoretical paradox haunting the Work, I am at least somewhat troubled by the realization that the present piece must be included in the list of chapters it begins by enumerating, yet, simultaneously, that it cannot be. If it is not included in the Work, then the Work has no resolution, but only ends on a cliffhanger, when our poor uploaded Justin Smith-Ruiu character pleads with Hélène for an “[ᴏᴠᴇʀʀɪᴅᴇ]” from “the Storyteller”. If that’s how things are to end, we will have to deem the Work woefully incomplete, because tragically truncated. But if the present chapter is included in the Work, well then, it will turn out that in spite of the magical-incantatory effort of my own a few paragraphs up, to bring the Work to a “formal and legal” close —whatever that is!—, this may not have been quite enough to tie things off as neatly as we might have hoped.

But before we get to these vital questions, let us first briefly summarize the structure and broad narrative arc of the Work, while also, in the course of this summary, offering at least some hints as to what the Work is “trying” to do.

“And I’ve already lost 15 |pounds.”

4.

The Work begins with a chapter that, again, cannot fail to stand apart from the others, as a preface, an overture, or at least an unusually thick dollop of what they sometimes call “front matter”. It depicts some kind of quasi-Gnostic vision of reality, consisting in an Upper and a Lower World, where the former is inhabited by a race of angel-like beings whose principal activity is telling stories to one another for all eternity. These stories have at least something to do with the lives of human beings in the Lower World, though whether there is a causal relationship, or perhaps a hypostatic one, between the transcendent narrations on the one hand and our empirical lives on the other is never fully made explicit. One of the inhabitants of the Upper World, however, who happens to be “close to God” (also known by his secret name of “the Magsman”), gets himself mixed up, as a result of his own unfortunate mistake, in the actual worldly life of a certain Justin Smith-Ruiu. The chapter ends with this “angel of narrative” descending into, and subsequently co-inhabiting the earthly body of, our author. It is however unclear whether this coming-together, or this ενσάρκωση, as it is called, is meant to explain only the production of that single day’s Hinternet piece, or instead to mark a more permanent change in our author, which is to say in me. 

Some months go by, and The Hinternet seems simply to lumber on in its ordinary mode of operation. But then the Ghost Chapter, as we are calling it, announces, in late August, a clear rupture. Whether we can attribute this to my own psychological fragility, or whether rather the appearance of such fragility is consciously intended to play a part in a developing narrative, is as yet unclear. But with Chapter Two, many things start changing here at The Hinternet, and old quirks and conventions you had come to take for granted begin to disappear. For one thing, a new featured contributor, Mary Cadwalladr, makes her first appearance, telling us that she is now to be The Hinternet’s regular music writer. This is new. Since its founding in August, 2020, The Hinternet had never featured regular contributors besides myself. Something, plainly, was up. Soon enough, in Chapter Three, we find another new character, one Hélène Le Goff, who describes herself as, among other things, our new Managing Editor, and also, curiously, as an actual “witch”. She gives the distinct impression, now, of being the one who will “call the shots” going forward. She also makes some very grand and implausible claims about the status of The Hinternet as a “magazine” in the full and proper sense of the term, a declaration which, I am now free to acknowledge, caused at least some of my friends and associates in the actual magazine world to wonder whether I was quite alright.

The impression of Hélène’s ambition to greater control of things is deepened in Chapter Four, and then, in Chapter Five, we have yet another piece from a new featured contributor, Kenny Koontz, who, besides some signs of a more vibrant and catty personality than my own, otherwise seems very much to share the same interests, and many of the same life-coordinates, as myself. Mary comes back again in Chapter Six for a deep-dive into the pre-history of rap music, likewise sounding, other than her frequent emphasis of the fact that she is Welsh and not American, for all the world like Justin Smith-Ruiu.

It was after publishing this chapter, I confess, that I became particularly discouraged, upon noticing that the great majority of The Hinternet’s readers were not paying nearly the attention that would be required to gain any real sense of what was going on, and in spite of the massively ramped-up time commitment that this project was now demanding of me, since I made the turn to pseudonymy and “next-level” multi-post metafiction, subscribers were leaving in droves under the misprision that I, Justin Smith-Ruiu, had effectively abandoned them. I resolved, in the following chapter, to “heighten the contradictions”, as they say, and to make it clear to anyone who could still fog a mirror that what they were witnessing was not entirely as it appeared. I did this by means of an absolutely fantastical “crisis scene”, in which the Editorial Board, led by Hélène Le Goff, effectively staged a putsch, and went ahead and endorsed Kamala Harris over my own protests. This technique enabled me to explore, dialectically, some real quandaries I’ve been facing in my real life about offering electoral support to the American Democratic Party, while also, I hoped, advancing our plot significantly. I can at least say that the piece “got” many readers, as I had by now long been trying to “get” them, and caused them to begin seriously to ask the “WTF” question that, as Aristotle said, is the beginning of all knowledge. Regrettably, most of my American audience, so irremediably infected by the toxins of their political culture, which have by now spread into all domains of their life and effectively stunted any hope for the truly autonomous play of the imagination among them, took this chapter as an on-the-level statement of political opinions. Whose political opinions, exactly? Mine, or Hélène’s? No one could say, but at least this piece served to get a good number of people hooked on the developing story, and eager to see what was to come next.

What came next was a pure exercise of imagination, attributed to one “Justin Smith-Robot”, who now, it seems, was spelling out for us the real stakes of this whole multi-week drama of Hélène, the Editorial Board, the missing and supposedly convalescing Justin Smith-Ruiu, and all the other minor players. It turns out here, in Chapter Nine, that these other figures who had moved in and taken the reins at The Hinternet were decidedly malevolent beings, perhaps human, perhaps AI —or perhaps, if we stay in the Gnostic key, demons of some sort—, and that their plan from the beginning had been to replace me with an AI that simulates my writing style to the point of indistinguishability (the new “Turing test”, it was suggested). To make this happen, they had committed the horrifying crime of forcibly uploading my conscious mind to the internet — at least until such a time as my consciousness was no longer needed to train the AI that was eventually to replace me. There is a hint that this crime is now occurring “across Substack”. With this, readers, I believe, finally started to be able to make out that what the whole metafictional series was “about”, was, precisely, the existential threat to writing as a creative endeavor that is being mounted by our new information technologies. This interpretation is confirmed in the tenth and final chapter, “The Language Burrow”, which features an AI version of myself, now free to write under my name rather than under the transitional “Justin Smith-Robot” title, who makes a solid effort to describe his routine “of a Sunday”, but ends up getting stuck in, well, a “language burrow”, thereby giving away his real identity. This chapter ends with me, or with my uploaded consciousness, begging Hélène “to find the Storyteller” and to “request [ᴏᴠᴇʀʀɪᴅᴇ]”, which brings the narrative full circle, retroactively placing it in continuity with Chapter One, and also setting us up for the dénouement which I am trying damned hard to bring about in the present piece. 

Throughout the final chapters, there were several additional layers of technical complexity, which gave these pieces the appearance, in addition to being texts, of being “feats”. These included the unlikely and generally unexplained translations of them into Russian, Latin, and Renaissance French, not to mention the ingenious engineering work on the audio versions from our own David Lamb (again, a real person). All these “bells and whistles” served a purpose, beyond mere delectation. They were intended to bring about a particular quasi-aesthetic feeling, which, if translated into natural language, would take the form of a question: “Who would bother to do this?!”

5.

I had promised to say a few more words about “The Storyteller”, whether its main character is supposed to be me or rather some kind of guardian angel assigned to me, and whether his tenure in the metafictional universe of The Hinternet is best seen as open-ended or rather as having been introduced and tied off already on that same day of March 24, 2024. But as I proceed in the present piece it has come to seem to me that any lingering questions about our Chapter One will be answered, to the extent that they can be answered, only together with the final question I have promised to address, namely, the one concerning the status of the present piece, and its problematic relationship to the Work. Is it part of the Work, or isn’t it? Does it bound the Work, or stand apart from it?

Again, if I can return to the set-theoretical worries I’ve introduced, which I might also have rendered simply in terms of the semantic paradox of the man from Crete who claimed that all Cretans are liars,³ we are faced, undeniably, with a puzzle: if the present piece is part of the Work, then you have no reason to take as true the claim that the Work exists at all, or that it is “hereby formally and legally closed”, etc. But if it is not part of the Work, then you likewise cannot be expected to take the present piece into consideration when you read the chapters purportedly constituting the Work, as any work of artistic or literary creation must, we may all agree, be self-contained. If it requires something outside of itself to confirm its status, then that external thing ipso facto becomes a proper part of it. Thus the present piece both must be, yet cannot be, included in the work it claims both exhaustively to define and formally to close. 

Here, now, in fine, is how I propose to resolve this apparent paradox. In all our eons of storytelling, legends abound of those among us who have, on occasion, found themselves unable to track with any precision what parts of their tales arise from the bare reality of the entities and events that imprinted on their memories, and what parts are superadded by their own irrepressible narrative natures. The result, at least among our most lucid, is a resigned sigh, an indifference some say is born of the wisdom accrued with age (for even angels age), regarding the supposed boundary between the real and the made-up. Should there be some expedience in maintaining the difference, as circumstances sometimes require, should the blurring of the line cause distress or confusion among mortals in particular, as when Oprah discovered one of the books she had promoted to her Club as a memoir in fact contained scenes that were sooner the fruit of the author’s imaginative faculty than of wie es eigentlich gewesen ist…, one solution we have adopted in recent centuries is to take all the strands of the lives of our characters, both real and imagined, both woman-born and head-born, both been and told — to take them, I say, and to bind them tightly together into a single entity, a tertium quid that participates in the natures of both, which the mortals intuitively understand even if they have no name for it and often believe that it has not even any right to exist. This new being, once we have tied it off with elegance according to the rules of our ancient art, is what we of the Sodality, for some reason, are in the habit of calling a Bun. 

Return to the beginning — Chapter One: “The Storyteller”

1. For the sake of full transparency, I must walk back that claim a little bit. “Cisco T. Laertes” and “Eigil zu Tage-Ravn”, names currently found on the Masthead in the list of our “Contributing Editors”, are in fact the frequent pseudonyms of myself and D. Graham Burnett, respectively. We appeared under these names in In Search of the Third Bird, and returned once again for a guest contribution, “The Corona of Care”, at The Hinternet, on December 12, 2021.

2. The majority of apocrypha of which I have been made aware so far seem to be coming from a group called “The Metafiction Research Collective” in Teheran, which functions somewhat on the model of the underground Baha’i universities of Iran, offering unofficial course credits for the study of such topics as “Kant and the Enlightenment” in the cramped kitchens of the apartments of the universities’ faculty members. Three such apocrypha strike me as noteworthy. One concerns the “Brooklyn science comedian” Molly Gottstaulk, who made a brief appearance in “An Introduction to Philology” following upon Nathan Heller’s mention of her in his New Yorker profile of the Order of the Third Bird, in which Nathan, likewise a reader of The Hinternet (hi, Nathan!), maintains that this personage is obviously made up. The Iranians however have given us an elaborate rendering of one of Molly’s stand-up routines, in which she is arrested for a victimless hit-and-run incident, and, upon hearing that part of the Miranda rights speech that tells her “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law”, blurts out: “Force equals mass times acceleration.” To which of course the officer replies, “Excuse me, ma’am?” And Molly explains that the officer just told her anything she says “can and will” be used against her, which logically entails that this claim she just made, f = mv, must now, by law, be “used against her”, and thus she will have an opportunity to defend one of the most well-founded laws of mechanical physics before a jury of her peers, which practically guarantees that she’ll, as they say, “beat the rap”. The whole thing, the Iranians insist, is hilarious, the way Molly tells it.

Another of the apocrypha is little more than a glimpse of an imagined scene from an old movie, of the late-Frank Capra era and style, perhaps starring Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart. Two men are sitting in a diner in Manhattan, their fedoras resting on the banquette next to them. They are having a conversation:

Albert: Doggonit listen Frank, I’m being serious. The Book of Revelation is really just a prophet’s vision of the present era, the television sets, the Bomb, the jet airplanes, the motion pictures — all of it. He saw it all, but he had to describe it in the only language available to him.
Frank: I’ve heard that from plenty of kooks before, Al.
Albert: You don’t say? Then why didn’t I know about it? Why didn’t I ever get this idea before?
Frank: You want me to be frank? It ain’t my name for nothing: You never had it before because you just hadn’t-a crossed that particular threshold of kookiness yet.

Finally, there is the tale of Morey Katz (1889-1961), a relatively unknown Borscht Belt comedian who had once mentored Soupy Sales. In the late 1940s Katz developed a routine that was supposedly inspired by a chapter of Guillaume de Nîmes’s 1549 book, Characteres quaedam hominum, morum temporumque. The chapter is entitled “An Socrates Iudaeus sit?” [“Whether Socrates Is Jewish”], which serves as the launching point for Katz’s long and elaborate imitation of that philosopher as someone who not only practiced dialectic in the agora, but did so with an unmistakably Yiddish-inflected “schtick”. For greatest effect, Katz would often bring the Characteres quaedam on stage with him, and invite his audience members to come up and inspect its pages. The kicker? Guillaume de Nîmes never existed at all, and Morey Katz was a Voynich-level expert forger, who fabricated this entire volume from scratch, having mastered Latin, learned everything there is to know about Renaissance vellum, parchment, ink, procured for himself all these period-appropriate materials, and invented, down to every last detail, a work of Renaissance Latin literature whose inauthenticity could only be proven with the arrival of carbon-dating techniques decades later. Why did Katz go to all this trouble? Some say it was to parody, after a manner, that other famous forgery of some years before, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Others say it was just his perfectionism as a comedian at work: he needed that book to make the joke land better.

3. Whether or not all Cretans are liars, I do have decisive proof that at least some lyres are Cretan: