JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 944
“The Edge… there is no honest way to
explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who
have gone over.
Oddities
and Curiosities and the Tryphiodorus Award
Sometimes
things that were just done because they could be done aren’t necessarily an
accomplishment—they may use letters in the alphabet and make words, but the
words really don’t seem to take us anywhere.
Literally. There is a literary practice (and I mean this in a medical
or forensic sense) in which the writer chooses to not use a particular letter
of the alphabet, abandoning it for very private reasons into the dustbin of
abandoned alphabet letters. (That dustbin is generally empty until one of these
people show up with the idea of filling it, unless of course we expand the
dustbin to include punctuation, and then it gets filled rat her quickly (though
not in the Steinian sense).)
The
work which most filled the alphabet dustbin more than any in history is probably the
Odyssey of Tryphiodorus (a Greek grammarian who flourished in Egypt ca. 4th century ACE) effort
written in 26 parts, each segment abandoning one letter of the alphabet until
each letter had been completely omitted from one section.. The author could
have a lot of time by writing this 26-part cycle in all at once, in one part,
abandoning all 26 letters at the same time—this may have produced a more
elegant result (with the Bellman’s map coming to mind).
This
Odyssey may have produced a sort of a
lipogramic palindrome, in a squinty-eyed
way.
Which
brings me to this odd structure proposed by real estate mogul and hyper-builder William Zeckendorf, whose vision brought to
the pages of LIFE magazine in 1942 (?) a
very tall completely automated structure designed for nothing but car
parking. People would drive to NYC in their own cars (!) and park them in this
car hotel; the car functions would be given over completely to the building, moved
into their spots and juggled and finessed into position by conveyors and forklifts
and such. 
Cars
in a building, moved about free of humans, rested; humans on the street making
their own human traffic. The whole idea,
the entire structure, seems backwards to me, the meaning of a building turned
inside out, wanting the essential idea, forwards and backwards being simply a
bad notion.
The
picture of Mr. Zeckendorf—who was tremendously energetic and who had very many good ideas along with these heavily
popularized odd plans—standing in front of a lovely (scale?) model of his
parking structure makes me want to see another, smaller version of Mr.
Zeckendorf and his model standing just
behind it, and smaller one after that, and so on…a fractally bad idea deserving of the Tryphiodorus award for missing the most sense. I bow deeply to Mr. Zeckendorf for trying and for constructing this beautiful (I want it) model.
