66c - Death and the Compass

I first learned about Jorge Luis Borges and his short story Death and the Compass in 2022 while reading George Fayen's essay in the book Patterns of Symmetry. In July 2024 I read the story and discussed it with a book club run by my school's library.

The Page to Screen Book Club

After finishing Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, an eight day story about a conman turned postmaster, we read Death and the Compass and watched the short film adaptation Spiderweb directed by Paul Miller.

The first sentence of the story, as translated by Donald A. Yates, is: Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti.

I read this in the book Labyrinths, and we noted that translator Anthony Kerrigan worded it as the exercise of daring perspicacity in the text other club members read. The line came up again as the first narration of Spiderweb: Of the many unusual cases which challenged the powers of the celebrated investigator Erik Lönnrot, none was as bizarre as the periodic series of events which came to a conclusion at the desolate mansion of Triste-le-Roy amid the heady aroma of eucalyptus.

I liked the story, its half hour adaptation, and the cover of the copy of Labyrinths I checked out at Neilson Library:

A slightly different version of the cover was at one point featured on photographer Jason Fulford's website, but can now be found at isfdb.org (jpg). The mirrored pentagon inspired me to put together a little polygon reflection project I had been thinking about for a while.

SVG Mirror Polygon

link

This interactive polygon placement tool is an SVG image that edits itself. Click to place a polygon, and the next click will place a reflection of the polygon across one of its sides. The most recently placed polygon is selected, unless you shift-click to select another one. Shift-click the background to select none, and press backspace or delete to remove the selected polygon. Use control-C or command-C to copy a data URI containing the current image.

The following parameters listed with their default values can be edited using a query string:

borderColor

CanvasText

decimalPlaces

12

fillColor

red

heightOfPolygon

10

inlineStyle

color-scheme: light dark; background-color: Canvas

selectedWidth

.5

unselectedWidth

.1

vertices

5

Set the values using the first letter of the parameter name. The default values for the polygon border color and the background color are system colors. The width variables adjust the size of the polygon's border. The vertices parameter can either be a number 3 or greater, or a 2D array of points defining any polygon. Convex polygons work best, and if you only specify the number of vertices then a regular polygon will be used.

For example, use these settings for a silver colored pentagon with one right angle: f=silver&h=12&v=[[0,0],[0,1],[0.74,1.31],[1.31,0.74],[1,0]]. I abbreviated the anchor text to include less digits, and some characters should be percent-encoded.1 This is an octagon that fits well inside a regular pentagon: f=%23000&h=14&v=[[1,0],[0.58,0.58],[0,1],[-0.58,0.58],[-1,0],[-0.58,-0.58],[0,-1],[0.58,-0.58]]. The fill color %23000 means #000 or the color black. One more example: i=background-image:url("https://www.nasa.gov ... AS17-134-20387.jpg").

1. Just the square brackets. I've since written a percent-encoding guide as reference for generating URIs in the future.

Footnotes

Over my summer break, which ends in a week, I walked by Buckminster Fuller's gravestone on the Bellwort Path at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

The book cover image above was accessed through the Open Library covers API.

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