Start Making Books and Stop Making Sense

 The second installment of Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, as read aloud by me, is now up on youtube and posted below. Briefly mentioned in it is the medieval philosopher Roger Bacon, a friar and early empirical scholar who also, rather confusingly, was renowned as the inventor of a mechanical head that could predict the future, "Doctor Mirabilis". Friar Bacon first popped up on my rader last week, in my landlord's superb podcast All Rather Mysterious, where he is proposed as a possible author of the enigmatic "Voynich Manuscript", which is this:

 You can leaf through the entire manuscript here. The writing is meaningless, and it's fair to say the pictures are as well, but pictures don't have to mean anything, so rather than being a "hoax" textbook as some have suggested, I prefer David Reed's "princess in a tower" theory, that this is simply the work of someone who "was illiterate, but had seen books, and was excited by them." I don't know if Luigi Serafini had ever seen the Voynich Manuscript, but a similar excitement seems to have inspired the Italian architects's Codex Seraphinianus...

 Serafini said himself that "he wanted his alphabet to convey the sensation that children feel in front of books they cannot yet understand", and like the writing in the Voynich Manuscript it is asemic, a word I've just learned. This hasn't stopped people trying to "decode" the book's "secrets" ever since its publication in 1981, but the only difference I can see between the impeti behind the Codex Seraphinianus and the Voynich Manuscript is that Serafini's book was definitely meant for public consumption. 

 This is not asemic. It is the cross-section of a Kaiju.

 
 Maybe we should all be taking this time under lockdown to work on our own asemic codices, now that we're all princess in a tower. Nothing too big to start with. Only yesterday I learnt from The Wellcome Collection of all places, how to make an eight-page "zine" out of a single piece of paper:

 Is this new learning? Certainly I was never taught it in all my childhood of making half-finished comic books! Oh well, here's episode 2 - Court-blaming, comet-shaming, and not getting the angel: