Dustings #48
/One time I was poking around a used magic book shop and I came across a pamphlet called Smoke by Ted Annemann. I’ve looked for it since, but haven’t been able to track it down. This might be because “Smoke” is such a generic name, which makes it hard to search for. Or it might have been re-released under a different name. Or maybe Annemann never wrote it at all. If someone told you that after Annemann died, people would put out stuff under his name just to increase sales, you’d probably say, “That sounds about right.” It was the 1940s, it would be difficult to check if he really wrote something. And we’re talking about magicians, who are notorious scumbags.
Anyway, if I’m remembering correctly from my brief flip through the manuscript, it was a pretty basic idea. It was just a matter of doing a center tear and dropping the pieces into a fire and “reading” the word from the smoke. While it’s very simple, it does address two issues with the center tear:
Why do they have to write the word down?
Why do you tear it up?
They write it down because you need to burn it. And you tear it up because that’s what people often do when they burn something.
Anyway, it’s a perfectly fine motivation. And it works nicely, especially l if there’s already a fire nearby that you can utilize to burn the pieces.
But the reason I mention the idea today is because I found this quote from The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes, which goes along nicely with this premise…
“In college I had a physics professor who wrote the date and time in red marker on a sheet of white paper and then lit the paper on fire and placed it on a metallic mesh basket on the lab table where it burned to ashes. He asked us whether or not the information on the paper was destroyed and not recoverable, and of course we were wrong, because physics tells us that information is never lost, not even in a black hole, and that what is seemingly destroyed is, in fact, retrievable. In that burning paper the markings of ink on the page are preserved in the way the flame flickers and the smoke curls. Wildly distorted to the point of chaos, the information is nonetheless not dead. Nothing, really, dies. Nothing dies. Nothing dies.”
This post on the WYW Book Club was a pretty big hit in my email box, so some of you might benefit from this item, courtesy of Chris Rawlins. It’s a bookmark that purportedly comes from a similar type of service as mentioned in that post. You could have them printed up professionally or probably print out a serviceable one yourself on some card stock. This could either be something you leave around casually as a potential Hook for a future performance. Or it could come in the package with the book, just adding to the idea that this is truly coming from a special service.
If you’re really lazy, you could order Chris’ effect, Rudiment, which comes with some of these bookmarks as part of the package. Rudiment isn’t the same premise or effect as I wrote about in the WYW post, but he needed some bookmarks for the sake of the routine and decided to go with this idea as a way to kill two birds with one bookmark. Thanks to Chris for sharing.
And thanks to those of you who wrote in with your explanation for choosing Option 3 in last Friday’s Dustings (as discussed in the post right before this one). I won’t be able to respond to everyone individually because there were quite a few responses and most were fairly long. So I’m offering a generic “thanks” now and if there’s anything in particular I want to follow up on with you more individually, I’ll be in touch.
If you want to go down a not-exactly-magic, but somewhat-adjacent rabbit hole, I recommend the story of Velocity Gnome that reader, David S. recently informed me of. As I said, it’s not magic, but it is the story of a long-form immersive fiction, somewhat similar to (but much longer than) some of the stuff I’ve written about here. It happened to a kid named Kolin in the early 2000s.
Here’s a podcast episode about the story.
And here’s an article by comedian Chris Gethard that doesn’t give away too much (but does link to a first-hand account of the story) and does a good job of explaining the potential greater significance of the incident.
To set the stage, here are the basics of the story (taken from Gethard’s article).
Everything started when a complete stranger knocked on Kolin’s door, claimed he was from the future, and handed him a package.
For the next few years, Kolin wound up interacting with these people intermittently. Some of these dealings happened online, but most of them involved Kolin traveling to a number of different states while meeting many people who were in on the conspiracy, which he was sometimes aware of and sometimes not.
After a few years of these strange interactions, they stuck the landing
It’s a pretty interesting story. And it’s a good example of someone being immersed in a fictional situation, but in a way where they know it’s fiction (as opposed to, like, a practical joke).