Elench (meaning 'a refutation or argument') doesn't actually rhyme with French. It's originally a Greek word (elenchein = to refute) and the forms elenchus and elenchi are used in logic. Or logicology, if you want an ology.

Elench is pronounced with a hard 'ch' sound -- Greek 'X' or chi has an aspirated 'k' sound, not quite 'kh' but getting there. So 'elench' is roughly 'i-lengk'.

Zetetic, btw, means 'proceeding by inquiry' and can be used to mean either philosophy a la Socrates, or police procedurals.

Some fairly recent British novels come to mind. The oldest and most routine is <A Philosophical Investigation> by Phillip Kerr: Wittgenstein's ideas worked into a bloody murder plot. <The Thought Gang>, by Tibor Fischer, had a zetetic bank robber on a crime spree in France. The other, <Excession> by Iain M Banks, is top-quality meta-galactic-range science fiction featuring a cabal of hyperintelligent war machines, and some vaguely hippy-ish spaceships who call themselves the Zetetic Elench.

Same old war, in other words: Love & Peace & Science & Philosophy & Individuality & Gestalts & Complexity Thresholds & Intelligence & Sex & Chess on one side ... and Death on the other.

Ideally, London's Police Force should be called <The Zet>, not <The Met>. And this consensual hallucination cyber-webspace, the reticulations that we live by, would be <The InterZet>...

<*The Seventh Seal*>

- Anybody seen a Knight pass this way?

- I saw him playing chess with Death yesterday...

- Anybody hear of plague in this town?

- The town I've left behind was burned to the ground. A young girl on a stake, her face framed in flames, cried "I'm not a witch - God knows my name!"

The Knight he watched with fear: he needed to know. He ran where he might feel God's breath. And in the misty church, he knelt to confess. The face within the booth was Mister Death.

"My life's a vain pursuit of meaningless lives - why can't God touch me with a sign?"

"Perhaps there's no-one there", answered the booth. And Death hid within his cloak and smiled.

"This morning I played chess with Death", said the Knight. "We played that he might grant me time. My Bishop and my Knights will shatter his flanks, and still I might feel God's heart in mine."

And through Confession's grille, Death's laughter was heard. The Knight cried "No! You've cheated me! But still I'll find a way we'll meet once again -- and once again continue to play..."

... and Death said "Now the game will end". The final move was made. The Knight hung his head, and said "You've won: I've nothing left to play."

The minstrel filled with visions sang to his love, to look against the stormy sky. The Knight, his squire and friends, their hands held as one, solemnly danced towards the dawn.

His hourglass in his hand, his scythe by his side, the Master, Death, he leads them on. The rain will wash away the tears from their faces...

- And as the thunder cracked, they were gone.

-- <Scott Walker, The Seventh Seal [after Bergman]>

++++++++++

Buffalo Bill's defunct
... who used to shoot onetwothreefourfive pigeons

Just like that
Jesus he was a handsome man ...

And what I want to know is
How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mister Death?

But somehow, Dar slipped through unread.

Does Dar-es-Salaam mean 'the gift of peace' or 'the ability to say hello'?

Not that the Tsarists ever had a serious presence in East Africa. There's that motley character in Heart of Darkness... and, way round on the other side, a German fleet called at Windhoek in Namibia, then German Sudwest Afrika, during one of the most futile voyages in history, en route to the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05 (Nichi-ro Senso, aka Russko-Yaponskaya Voyna).

The Baltic fleet, under Admiral Rozhestvensky, sailed around Europe (almost going to war with Britain by firing on fishing boats in the Dogger Bank), and Africa, across the Indian ocean and the China Sea, heading for Vladivostok or Port Arthur (aka Lushunkuo).

On arrival they were, as Pynchon puts it, handed their ass ("Ach! Mein Arsch!" -- according to a comicbook German-speaking participant) by the Japanese under a certain Admiral Heihachiro Togo.

Togo wasn’t the only echo of future events. Dominance in Korea was a recurring theme during the 20th century. The Japanese landed near Incheon. Their armies crossed the Yalu River into Russian-occupied Manchuria, while the Russians waited for either the globe-crossing Baltic fleet or the trans-Siberian railway.

When the Russian fleet arrived, the Japanese used wireless communications – aka radio – to track its location and sink it at the battle of Tsushima.

President Teddy Roosevelt offered to mediate, and got a Nobel Peace Prize for his trouble.

There’s a marvellous contemporary cartoon, bristling with ethnic stereotypes, by the splendidly-named George Frederic Bigot.

He almost restores my confidence that the Americans really had a General Scheisskopf, and the British a Colonel Blimp.

What does this have to do with Nabokov? Very little: he was five years old at the time.

According to Brainiac -- Jess's favorite TV science show, motto "I can do science, me" -- an experiment to find the slippiest food only had bananas in 2nd place, despite all those banana skin cartoons.

[... no need to look for anagrams, o my droogs... we've moved to Zappaology, Cap Tin Bee Farts, and The Dialectics of Poodle Play...]

And we'll do it till we are unconcho and it is useless anymore.

Just wanted to let you know that I've gobbled up the latest issues of <Frogspawn>-- I want you to know that your eloquence-- your unique style of hyper-erudite holism-- the style that makes you a <bona fide> Renaissance Man, the kind of man some of us thought was extinct-- does not fall on deaf ears.

Put more simply, you are one of my favorite writers.

Put another way, thank God for <Ireland>.

You really remind me of <Brien O'Nuallain>... quite a bit-- I've the idea that you two would have got on famously.

I also have a notion that I'd fall in love with <Ireland> if I ever got myself over there.

Not much call for teaching "English" in <Erie>, though, eh?

I'd prolly end up as a bar maid or something.

"tourism" goes against my grain, somehow.

I've travelled a fair bit for a younger person, but I'v always worked wherever I went.

Don't get me wrong- I'm no "protestant" and I think all my "ethics" are questionable, to say the least-- it's just, to paraphrase <William Faulkner>, "man has yet to invent something other than work to fill 8 hours of the day, that, if left unfilled, would drive a man insane."

Maybe he should have tried chess?

A good friend of mine from Vancouver emailed me recently and said "Jess-- chess is by far the healthiest of the addictions you've had in your life."

Well, got to go-- the travelling "loudspeaker truck advertiser" is on my block and I have to listen- by force.

I'm glad it's in Korean rather than English.

He's probably saying, "get cheap bedspreads at Kim's <Bedworld>"...

But as far as I know, he might be saying "I alone beweep my outcast state, and curse deaf heaven with my bootless cries".

Let's just say I'd be a bad person to give a rocket launcher to.

I wholeheartedly agree with Jess on that. Magnificent stuff, even for lesser trained ears, like mine.

<Let's just say I'd be a bad person to give a rocket launcher to.> I'd say you look super hot today, Jess.

This ought to amuse you. For reasons best known to myself, I was rifling through my old school work yesterday evening and I came across a scrap of paper - written when I was seventeen - that contained potential names for the 'band' that became Taghairm. Taghairm itself isn't on the list, but there are some quite chucklesome ones in there. I usually get embarrassed when I read anything I've read that's more than a week old, not least something I wrote in sixth form. But I'm more than willing, just this once, to lay myself bare and reproduce the list verbatim:

Grotto Bugbears
Sustenance
Gloss-Proj(1)
John Crowe Ransom & The Buckminsterfullerenes
The Pretty Kings of France(2)
The Death Bed Connoisseurs(3)
King's Indian Defence (4)
Martober(5)
Git-Slump
Jimmy 'Jack' Junkie & The Latter Day Saints
Burqas of the World Unite

Then - at the very bottom of the page - I saw something that made me leap a mile. The last of my suggestions was

Franz Ferdinand

Oh god, did I really inadvertently create one of the dullest, most rebarbative bands alive? Shame on me.

(1)I have no idea what this means, so don't ask.

(2)As in the John Crowe Ransom poem 'Prelude to an Evening':

'Do not enforce the tired wolf
Dragging his infected wound homeward
To sit tonight with the warm children
Naming the pretty kings of France' &c

(3)Presumably a nod to Shannon's rather cruel description of Gladstone as 'a connoisseur of nineteenth century deathbeds'.

(4)I was getting back into chess at the time. I still reckon KID is a great name for a band, and would ensure that all chess players in the country bought it.

Thanks for all the intense paean.

Hmm. Speaking of pain (we weren't), shouldn't one really say 'cruciating' ( = 'like being crucified') rather than 'excruciating' ( = 'like being taken down from a cross after being crucified') ... ?

This is the crux of the matter, and it makes me cross. Unless it's all to do with the <cruciate ligament> -- these sporting cliches get in everywhere.

Irish Angle, since you insist. There's a suburb of Dublin called Harold's Cross (the destination signs on buses say "Harold's X"). Way back when Harold Wilson -- <mack> may remember him -- was British prime minister, somebody referred to Northern Ireland as "Harold's Cross".

Guy walks into an Xtian bar -- if they *have* Xtian theme bars, I dunno -- with two planks. Throws a few nails on the counter and says "can you put me up for the night?"

An old joke, that. These days, the reply would be "certainly sir, smoking or nonsmoking? And is that a credit card in your loincloth, or... ?" Letting the question hang there, as it were.

[signed]

Gladly,

I had an imaginary band called <rodent orgasm structure>, whose members were Sean Rodent, Sean Orgasm, and Attila the Structure. They broke up, citing 'musical similarities' and -- according to the press release I wrote -- Sean went solo, like all the best Orgasm.

<mack> I like those names. This, mercifully, is what keeps the likes of us from accidentally becoming famous.

*Some Ideas in the King's Limerick Gambit*

Note: a couple of real kings, James II and William 'Billy' III, fought a series of battles and sieges around Limerick in 1689-90. Apart from a few monarchical stopovers at nearby Shannon airport, kings have paid no attention to the place since then. But...

High on chess, but you wanna get higher
The world, so they say, loves a trier
So whip out a sac
And you're on the attack
Ng5 is the fearsome Allgaier.

- Mam, when's the next stop?
- In 20 minutes.
- I'll get off there, so.
- What? Why?
- Cos I'm bored. This is sooo boring.
- And what would you do then?
- I'd go back home, I would.
- [sigh] How?
- Ehh. I'd phone David. Mam, I'll phone David anyway. Mam, can I have your phone to ring David?

- Indeed you can not.
- [pause] Mam, do you like David?
- Do I *like* him? Well. No, I don't.
- Why, Mam?
- Because he's a bad influence. Because he's lost his faith and he's making you lose yours. That's why.

[*at which point I could have intervened and said "Madam, do you agree with Dawkins that forcing religious faith into an apparently retarded child is tantamount to child abuse?" ... but I didn't.*]

<Pope 'Papa' Ratzi>:

- Ach, Scheisse, was ist los? Ein Zwischenzug, nicht wahr? Ich habe meine Läufer Verlören!

<Papal Flunkey, Curia Ministry of Works>:

- Nein, Papa meiner! Das Bischoff ist... Bischoff Mac-Carthy von Irland. Man muss 'defrocken', ja?

<Papa Ratzi>:

- Bischoff, Läufer, man kann nichts denken. How you say "Kill Zem all, und let Gott it out sort", ja?

<Flunkey>:

- Non Catholicus Romanus est. C'etait l'heretique francais, Voltaire, ou peut-etre quelque soldat islamique.

<Papa Ratzi>:
Non Catholicus? Ze Church is in der scheisse this time not? Zis Bischoff Mac-Carthy, ist "abuser of ze inner child" in Amerikanische Spreche? And why are we talking pidgin, Klaus?

<Flunkey>:
Pidgin, Herr Papa? You should have heard us when the painless Pole was in charge...

<Papa Ratzi>:
... and I was off running the Inquisition...

[all]

- Happy days.

But he never mentioned you *personally* in his meisterworks, did he? It's not like he wrote "I hit him with the shovel and Jessica worried my arms would get tired", is it? Or "O'Brualachain's commentary on De Selby was refuted by FischerQueen (University of Inuktitut Press, Korea) in the masterly 'DeSelby as time traveller: some possible origins' (2011)."

Oh, Henge, Henge, what will we do with you (at all, at all)? Sometimes your dolmens seem quite as erect as anyone else around here -- practically ithyphallic, on a good day -- and then you lapse back into these quasi-ironic ethnically stereotyped softoffs.

Insofar as my personal habits and indeed existence matter at all... and I tend to think they don't... I'm practically a non-drinker. My only bad alcoholic habit is buying bottles of wine and then leaving them for other people to drink, thus turning *them* into alcoholics. And of course I consume -- well, *have consumed*, if you insist on temporal accuracy, industrial quantities of other narcotics. Whaddaya mean, you can tell from the way I write? Listen, you ever hear of the <Tyrannosaurus Rex of Lucidity>?

Me neither. But if I ever write something on the prevalence of fossil LSD-25 molecules in dinosaur DNA, it'll be a core concept. Along with, um, Gestalts and Gestetners. And Gatling Guns and ceiling [sic] wax.

I now, under protest, will amend a previous confession. Not only have I *never* played either side of a Spanish/ Ruy Lopez, but - also - I have never drunk either side of a pint of Guinness. Or Murphy's. Or Beamish.

Hope that clears everything up. Don't let those bleeding vandal day-trippers knock too many chips off your old blocks.

nothing new:

Jess's post was a gem, as was yours.

AWHOOGA!!