Acrostics, mesostics and trash metal

If you are still unclear as to what an acrostic is, the first two sentences of the definition given by Wordsmith.org (found here on Answers.com) may help dissipate any remaining ambiguity:

An acrostic is not an angry insect ("a cross tick"), any more than an oxymoron is a big dumb cow. Rather, an acrostic is a poem, in which the first letter of each line spells out a word.

This definition actually debunks two deeply rooted assumptions that I had concerning dictionaries:

• Isn't it unusual for a dictionary to start defining a word by what it does not mean?
• Would you have ever thought it possible to turn to a dictionary for comic relief? I thought humor — if at all present — could only reside in the citations used to illustrate the definition of a word in context.

This may just be that Wordsmith.org is not a conventional dictionary. As refreshing as it may be, this definition could be amended a little. Poems are indeed the preferred embodiment for acrostics, because of their mostly fixed layout, but Arnold Schwarzenegger's letter can be added to a long line of texts in prose which benefit from a two-dimensional reading. Among the more elegant and recent is Linton Weeks's farewell review in the Washington Post.

In both examples, the "hidden" message was meant to be discovered by everyone. A variant of the acrostic and a more effective cryptographic pattern is the mesostic, which also has you look for subtext by reading the text vertically. While acrostics rely on the first letter of each line, mesostics use the middle of each line.

Do you remember how we were supposed to be able to hear the voice of the devil by playing trash metal tracks backwards?

Synaesthetic

Last week, Zimbolli sent me a message entitled "synaesthetic", which Thunderbird classified as Junk. Attracted by the unusually learned subject line, I did open the message body, only to find the not-so-unusual male enhancement promises and the following URL:

www[dot]pill22[dot]com

Isn't it ironic that a spammer would try to make it difficult for a robot (and to some extent for a human being) to figure out the website they are rooting for? Usually, it's email addresses you disguise by spelling out the dots, not URLs.

Anyway, while idly looking around for examples of synesthesia in poetry (Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire first came to my mind, but I was looking for examples in English), I stumbled upon something I had never heard about in all those years I spent studying/playing early music: the "ocular harpsichord" and the "color organ". It turns out that sound and light shows are not a 20th century invention at all! Jean-Michel Jarre's musical family tree includes people like Telemann or Rameau (late 17th-18th centuries), who wrote pieces for keyboard instruments capable of producing sound and light to go with the sound. Of course, it's not like musicians until then had ignored the emotional power of simultaneous sensory perceptions from different sources (auditory and visual in this case), but I thought it was interesting that it would be synthesized in a single instrument.

Something that I surely must have heard about in all the years I spent studying literary theory and cultural history but just "re-"discovered is Newton's theory of color and music. The theory compares the vibrations resulting in the different color shades on the spectrum and the vibrations resulting in the different musical notes in Western scales. It is schematized in the color wheel, published in Opticks in 1704, on which you can see letters corresponding to a Dorian mode scale starting on D separating the sectors displaying the spectral colors.

Many thanks to Zimbolli (or whoever that was) for piquing my interest and for reminding me that Google, YouTube and Wikipedia are my friends.