purplecat | Is this a publicity stunt?

I just picked out of my work pigeonhole a package with Swedish Stamps. My address is hand-written as is a note in one corner which says "Will tell you more when I return!"

Inside is a slim volume entitiled "Being or Nothingness" by Joe K

The author, you will note, is an anagram of Joke.

There is a sticker on the cover which says "Warning! Please study the letter to Professor Hofstadter before you read the book. Good Luck!"

Douglas Hofstadter is best know as the author of Godel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid. A kind of pop-AI, maths and philosophy book which I was first encouraged to read by a Maths teacher in sixth form but which I only actually finished a couple of years ago. It's a good, if fairly dense, book and I'm not sure how comprehensible it actually is to someone who doesn't already have an AI/Maths/Phil background.

Inside the front cover is attached a letter to Hofstadter which rambles a bit and says things like "The text can be incorporated into both the Jewish and Christian tradition, but doing so with too much vigour would be to narrow its scope."

The back cover blurb implies the contents are a Swedish translation of Conan Doyle's lost "The Giant Rat of Sumatra" and adds that it is "oddly intertwined" with Hofstadter and his new book "I am a strange loop"... "which will soon be released by your Publishing House"

The Preface starts "One day I found a book. It was lying open, visible to all, but I was the only one curious enough to pick it up. This I have regretted many times." and ends "Brace yourself and turn the pages gently as you embark on a strange journey through time and space."

The contents appears to be short random pieces e.g. (page 6)

"Dedication

In commemoration of Joseph Knecht, magister Ludi Josephus III,
who abandoned `the glass bead game,'
the most beautiful of ideas,
FOR LIFE...
... UNTO DEATH"

(That's it for page 6).

Note reappearance of good old Joe K.

-

Beyond noting this is the sort of thing Who authors Lawrence Miles or Jim Mortimore might write, I'd say this was a publicity stunt for Hofstadter's new book except that it seems a pretty expensive way to do publicity - randomly posting books from Sweden with hand written addresses to vaguely related academics. It's not like I know Hofstadter in any way even though I do work in his general area.

Thoughts?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I just googled Hofstadter and "being and nothingness" and there seems to be quite a bit out on the the net from other people who have received this book.

Or, rather, there's some stuff. The first result isn't in English, so I can't read it in detail, but I like its title: "Being or Nothingness: marketing viral bizarro?"

However, I think it's more likely that you're in chapter one of a Da Vinci Code sort of book, and that your life is about to get very exciting and dangerous and involve much foreign travel - after you've solved the coded message on page 23, that is, and discovered the secret passage at the back of your office.

I've just found that and Babelfish is my friend.

People who've actually read the thing and, of course, I wouldn't dream of reading a personal book at work* (though I might consider classing this as a professional text book) seem to think it contains an overtly Christian allegorical message.

Which is all very well but doesn't really explain why it is being sent, apparently at random, to a mixture of Computer Scientists and Philosophers.

Apparently "Will tell you more when I return!" clearly refers to the second coming. Still trying to wrap my brain round that.

There is, allegedly, an exciting missing word in a hitchhikers quote on one page which you can then use to reconstruct a secret message from the other pages....

* posting to livejournal is, of course, another matter entirely.

Edited 2008-11-12 12:10 (UTC)

It sounds absolutely fascinating! Reading those comments on the Portuguese blog, it doesn't sound to me like some Christian crusade (surely that would be rather more obvious), but like a very elaborate and well-done wind-up. It would be such fun to do! Create a work, litter it with clues and puzzles and red herrings, mail it out to people whom you know are intelligent, computer-literate and probably drawn to puzzles and intellectual exercises, then sit back and monitor the internet, to watch the result.

I have actually read it now - the temptation was too great and its only 20 pages - most of which contain only a handful of lines of text. There is a fair bit of christian set dressing of one sort or another and a lot of prose which in SF books I associate with someone either being very clever or trying to appear very clever by throwing lots of ideas at the wall.

Without the christian stuff, I'd still probably go with bizarre viral marketing for Hofstadster's latest book. With it, I really can't decide what to make of it. Actually even without it, I still don't see it as a cost effective way to do publicity.

As a joke, I can imagine doing it, though, you know, you would have to be very bored.

Or some kind of bizarre world-wide puzzle RPG - that would be cool! *hopes it is this but suspects sadly it is not*

The marketing is working though! Now we all know about it too.

Though I can't say I'm itching to read it.

It'll probably turn out to be a huge disappointment, like when everyone got so excited by all the "Where's Lucky?" missing dog posters, and it turned out they were selling insurance.

It's not exactly set the internet ablaze though has it? Getting half-a-dozen computer scientists and a handful of their friends a bit interested is not, I would have thought, a world class publicity strategy...

*gah!* wrong account again!!!!

If it is an advertisment for insurance I shall be bitterly disappointed. Although since "random nutter" is one of the more plausible theories, I think I'm likely to be disappointed whatever.

I don't know what browser you use, but my problems with getting to wrong login vanished when I installed the Firefox LJ login manager extension. You can toggle between logins with a single click, and it displays your current login nice and clearly in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. I was forever using the wrong one before I got this, but very seldom do now - and usually only when responding to people who read both journals, when my brain obviously knows that it doesn't matter as much.

I use Safari - originally because I wanted to get the hang of Mac applications and then through habit and, I guess, a vague minority browser kick. However I've come to dread the phrase "there's a Firefox plugin"...

This two journal thing is getting embarrassing though. I should probably switch.

I have no clue, but how exciting!

This is very odd - I thought at first this was posted by another frined of mine, and it wasn't until I read the comments that I realised it was from you.

So you have a friend for whom this would be an everyday occurrence not worthy of comment?

Not quite! :-) But something in the style of writing, and the userpic (neither identical, by any means, but both similar) led me to think that this was her post, not yours.

Hi Louise,

I just received one of these books too, almost exactly a year after yours arrived. The hand-written message in the corner of my envelope reads "Today twenty-one years have passed since The Event - now it is up to us! DD".

Strange!

Tim

That's interesting... I wonder what the significance of early November is supposed to be...

It must be said, if it is a puzzle, that's not quite obvious enough to tempt me to invest the time into solving it.

Jon Ronson investigates this in the first chapter of The Psychopath Test and meets the apparent originator.

*wonders if she is interested enough to purchase a copy*

Might be worth skimming it in a bookshop if you're not interested in the rest of the book l-)

PS. happy to summarize but not using a smartphone keyboard, i.e. So not right this moment.

A bit of googling suggests the answer is fairly uninteresting...

Is this a publicity stunt?

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