Legend has it that the 19th-century French Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855) had a pet lobster named Thibault that he took on walks in the Palais Royal gardens of Paris, using a blue silk ribbon as a leash. When asked why he did this, he replied



It's an amusing story, but is it true? Did Nerval really take his lobster on walks? Over at Boing Boing, Mark Dery delves into this mystery at length.

First, Dery consulted literary scholars. He discovered that they disagree about the story's veracity. It turns out that the original source of the story was Nerval's friend Théophile Gautier, and one critic, Richard Sieburth, thinks Gautier invented the story as a hoax to "impress the bourgeois." But another scholar, Richard Holmes, thinks the story could be true, noting Nerval had a "well-documented fascination with odd or exotic animals."

So next Dery turned to marine biologists to find out if it would even be physically possible to walk a lobster. The answer, summarized, is that it might be possible, but it wouldn't be easy since a) under ideal conditions a lobster will survive for only 30 or 40 minutes out of water, and b) lobsters aren't designed to walk on land. They can scuttle around, if they're stressed enough, but they don't like doing it. Diane Cowan of the Lobster Conservancy says bluntly, "Taking a lobster for a walk in the park is a cruel and sadistic idea. Please do not even think about it."

And could Nerval even have kept a lobster as a pet at home? To do so would have required "a large tank with relatively cool seawater and it would have needed some kind of aeration." It's unlikely Nerval had any of this.

So the answer to the question of whether Nerval really walked his lobster is that, no, he almost certainly didn't. But Dery offers two other possible explanations for the story (besides the suggestion that Gautier invented it).

Nerval's correspondence reveals that once, during a visit to the coastal town of La Rochelle, he intervened to save a lobster from a fisherman's nets and then took the lobster home with him. Perhaps this was the source of the tale.

Or, perhaps (possibility #2) Nerval came up with the lobster-walking story, but he intended it to be read allegorically. In other words, the lobster that Nerval walked was a symbolic lobster, not a real one.


Nerval, Dery notes, was "a fervent scholar of the occult," and lobsters have special significance in some occult sources, such as Tarot cards. For instance, the Moon card shows a lobster crawling out of a pool onto dry land, up a path guarded by two dogs (or a dog and a wolf) toward the full moon. The lobster, in this setting, could be interpreted as a symbol of the animal self struggling toward enlightenment. So Dery asks:


An interesting idea. It certainly makes me view the B-52's song "Rock Lobster" in an entirely different light.

Matthew Callan has written a great account of Jean Shepherd's 1956 I, Libertine hoax:

In July 2012, science writer Jonah Lehrer resigned from The New Yorker under a cloud of shame, after it was revealed that his latest book, Imagine, was full of fabricated quotations. Yesterday, he took what he may have been hoping was a first step toward rehabilitating his public image by giving a confessional talk at a Knight Foundation seminar in Miami.

If image-rehabilitation was his goal, it probably didn't work, because most of the coverage of his talk was snarky and cynical about his intents, especially after poynter.org reported that he was paid $20,000 for speaking.

As Lehrer spoke, a giant screen behind him showed real-time tweets about the talk, many of which were openly derisive of him, adding a surreal element of public shaming to the event.


During the talk, Lehrer delved into the scientific literature about error, trying to apply what he found to his own errors and figure out how not to do it again. Craig Silverman offers a good response to what he said:


Update: The Knight Foundation now says it was a mistake to pay Lehrer so much. That doing so was "tantamount to rewarding people who have violated the basic tenets of journalism." Also, a Forbes reporter managed to contact Lehrer and asked him if he would consider donating the money to charity. Lehrer replied, "I have nothing to say to you."

I actually find it more surprising that he's still cranking out books at the age of 89 than that he's using a female pen name. Good for him! It's inspiring!

Justin Young and Brian Bushwood, of the NSFWshow podcast, were intrigued by the success of the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey. They were particularly impressed with how many books were selling well for no other reason, apparently, than that they looked Fifty Shades of Grey. So they decided to conduct an experiment — to find out whether an ebook could succeed simply by resembling Fifty Shades of Grey.

They came up with a title for their novel, The Diamond Club. They also sketched out a rough outline of a plot:


They singled out three qualities their novel would need to succeed:

1. a cover that looked like 50 shades of grey
2. lots and lots of sex
3. characters with trendy jobs.

They attributed their novel to a fictitious author, Patricia Harkins-Bradley. But they enlisted the help of their readers to do the actual writing. In this way, none of the authors had read the entire book, and there was little cohesion between chapters. So they could guarantee that the novel wouldn't gain readers on the basis of its great writing.

Finally, and this was a key part of the experiment, they asked all their listeners to buy the book, priced at an affordable 99 cents, in order to push the book into the top 10% at iTunes. Their theory was that once the book broke into the top 10%, momentum would take over, and people (who weren't listeners of their podcast) would buy the book simply because other people were buying it.


It looks like their experiment has succeeded. The book has been hovering around in iTunes Top 10 List. It's also available for the nook and kindle. Reportedly, it's already earned Young and Bushwood close to $20,000.

Similar literary experiments have been conducted before. Back in 1968, Mike McGrady and his friends at Newsday first proved that a crowdsourced book could become a bestseller with their sex-filled novel, Naked Came the Stranger.

And even earlier, in 1956, deejay Jean Shepherd and his listeners proved that publicity alone could create demand for a (non-existent) book — I, Libertine.

'Quiz' is a relatively new word. It first came into use in the late 1700s, making it a little over 250 years old, and there's a curious story about how it came into being.

The tale goes that it emerged from a wager made in 1791 by Richard Daly, manager of the Theatre Royal in Dublin. Daly bet his friends that within 48 hours he could make a nonsense word be spoken throughout Dublin — specifically, a word having no meaning nor derived from any known language. His friends took him up on the bet. So Daly sent out his employees to write the word "QUIZ" in chalk on doors, windows, and walls throughout Dublin. The appearance of this mysterious word became the talk of the town, allowing Daly to win his bet. And it caused the word 'quiz' to pass into popular usage.

There's a number of reasons to doubt this story. For one, it first appeared in print in 1835, 44 years after the event supposedly took place. The story took the form of one of those small blurbs of trivia that newspapers and magazines used to pad out their columns. It ran in a number of publications, such as the New York Mirror (May 2, 1835), The Mirror (Feb 21, 1835), and The London and Paris Observer (Feb 15, 1835). However, it's authorship wasn't attributed, or attributed only by initials, so we have no way of knowing how the author knew his information. Perhaps a newspaper editor simply made it up. (The most elaborate version of the story is found in Frank Thorpe Porter's Gleanings and Reminiscences, 1875. Porter doubtless embellished it.)


Second, it's easy to find examples of the word 'quiz' used before 1791. Here's an example from the London Magazine, Nov 1783.

However, it's possible that Daly (or someone connected with the theater) did write the word "QUIZ" all over Dublin, but that this stunt had nothing to do with the word's origin. Back in the 1790s, Quiz didn't mean what it means today. It was a derogatory term meaning an oddball or eccentric. Or, as the London Magazine put it, "one who thinks, speaks, or acts differently from the rest of the world in general."

An article in the Sporting Magazine (Dec 1794) indicates that to call someone a Quiz could also insultingly imply they were pedantic and rule-bound. It was a bit like calling someone a Nerd or a Square:


When interpreted in this sense, the word seems appropriate as something that rambunctious young theater employees might have written as graffiti all over Dublin, as a way to make fun of the respectable residents of Dublin. But the word wasn't widely known (as indicated by the need for both the London Magazine and the Sporting Magazine to define the term for their readers), so the prank might have caused some confusion and led people to ask what the strange word meant.


Of course, there's no evidence (such as contemporary newspaper accounts) to confirm that this prank ever occurred. So this is all pure speculation.

But if Richard Daly and his theater employees didn't coin the word Quiz, how did it originate? One theory, offered here by Stephen Fry, is that "it probably derives from the first question in the old grammar school Latin oral: 'Qui es?' or, 'Who are you?'"

The Oxford Dictionaries offers some further information:


My 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that its current meaning may come from its association with the word 'inquisitive,' which is a very old word, as old as the English language itself, having derived from the latin inquirire (to inquire).

Brief Answer: No!

Longer Answer: If you do a search for the phrase, "The best things in life make you sweaty," you'll find quite a few sites (facebook and tumblr pages especially) attributing this quotation to Edgar Allan Poe. There's even a short article at the Richmond County Daily Journal which uses this supposed Poe quotation as its lead.

Of course, Poe never said this. Nor was it the kind of thing he would have said. I doubt Poe was a big fan of sweating. His greatest passions were writing and drinking. Neither of those activities make you sweat much.

I'm not sure where the quotation (and its attribution to Poe) originated. Nor am I sure whether the people posting it actually think Poe said it, or whether it's just a joke. If it's a joke, that suggests the people posting the quotation know enough about Poe's life to realize it's absurd. Is that a safe assumption to make? Probably not.

As I noted in my previous post, Mike McGrady, creator of the 1969 "Naked Came the Stranger" literary hoax, died recently. A little-known footnote to this hoax is that it inspired an x-rated movie in 1975. Here's the trailer for that movie. (It's pretty much safe for work.)

Mike McGrady was the mastermind behind the Naked Came the Stranger hoax of 1969. His aim was to show that any book with enough sex scenes, even if lacking in any other merit, could sell well. And the book he created to prove this point did sell well. Although its sales had a lot to do with the fact that McGrady's sister-in-law, the attractive Penelope Ashe, posed as its author. Which shows that the good looks of an author can definitely sell books. And, of course, the book sold even better once it was exposed as a hoax, demonstrating that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Did he not intend to plagiarise, or did he not intend to get caught?


(Thanks, Joe!)

In my article about the origin of April Fool's Day, which I wrote a few years ago, I noted that the first explicit reference to April 1st being a day for pranks can be found in a poem written in late-medieval Dutch (around 1561) by Eduard De Dene. The title of the poem is "Refereyn vp verzendekens dach / Twelck den eersten April te zyne plach." Marco Langbroek kindly translated this for me as: "Refrain on errand-day / which is the first of April."

But it recently occurred to me that although I knew about the poem, and had the title translated, I had never seen the full text of the poem itself. And in fact, I don't believe the poem has ever been translated into English. To me, this seems like a glaring omission in our knowledge of the history of April Fool's Day.

So I've tracked down the poem, which originally appeared in De Dene's work Testament Rhetoricael. I found it on the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren. I've copied it below, but the version on the dbnl includes a few extra footnotes.

I'm hoping the internet can do its magic and help me get this poem translated. Any Dutch speakers out there? Marco? I'm guessing the language in the poem may be a bit of a challenge even for native Dutch speakers.

QR Markham, author of the spy thriller Assassin of Secrets, has been accused of plagiarism, as people identify multiple passages in his book that originally appeared elsewhere (such as in books by Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum). The publisher (Little, Brown) has recalled all copies of his book. And it turns out that a Huffington Post article written by Markham also used the words of someone else. So Huffington Post removed all articles by him. In other words, things aren't going well for Markham.

But what makes this case strange is an article in the New Yorker by Macy Halford, speculating that Markham (which is the pen name of Quentin Rowan) deliberately used other people's words in his novel in order to make an artistic statement — both to comment on the lack of originality in the spy genre and to turn his own readers into detectives:


But Halford acknowledges that if this was Markham's intention, then he was far too clever for his own good, because he shot himself in the foot. Who's going to publish him after this?

This isn't the first time that apologists for a literary hoaxer have argued that the hoaxer's actions should be viewed charitably, as some kind of artistic statement about writing and the creative process. For instance, during the JT LeRoy case, defenders of Laura Albert (who manipulated readers into believing that LeRoy was a real person) made a similar argument, suggesting that Albert was an artistic genius, not a con artist.

The argument speaks to the strange morality that differentiates hoaxes from frauds (or lies). We condemn liars for taking advantage of people's trust. But hoaxes have traditionally been viewed as a special kind of lie — ones in which we forgive the liar and instead blame their victims for being too gullible. So when someone gets caught perpetrating a sensational act of deception, there's often a debate about whether their act should be interpreted as a simple lie or a forgivable hoax.

Such debates usually boil down to two key considerations: Did the hoaxer/liar leave a lot of clues about their intention? (That is, did they make the lie or theft kind of obvious?) And did they profit financially from the act?

Markham pretty much strikes out on both considerations. So I doubt he's going to be remembered as a rogue literary genius.