i'm very enchanted by janacek's a fairy tale still and wondering if i can find a suitably bad analogy question from one of those gre practice books to use in my thesis about the relationship between analogy-making and riddle-solving and how the kaplan folks might think they're training you to think, but what they're doing is to supply you with as many answers as possible so that you're nearly able to recognise what is right on the test without necessarily working it out. this, i submit, is similar to riddle-solving, which we tend to regard as a matter of ingenious application of superior wit or intelligence, and fairy tales and certain folktales certainly let you believe this, posing riddle-tasks as a valid assessments of worth. the truth is however that few of us "solve" riddles or even really "guess" them, what we do is to *recognise* them - i.e. if you've heard enough riddles involving teeth that also involve thirty-two, you're clued in by the number. and this came to me too, when i was reading turandot (the gozzi play not the puccini) not only in the rumpelstitskin kind of naming that is involved, but when the prince is advised against trying to answer her riddles, because "these aren't old riddles! she makes new ones up!" the strong sense that solving riddles is really dependent on predisclosed clues or knowledge. and what field studies in fact show is that in riddling cultures, no one is expected to solve riddles. you're expected to know riddles, which helped me turn everything around and say, that all riddles, in a sense, are already unfair riddles. so that eventually, you can turn back to the beginning and say that even the earliest riddles of wisdom literature are precisely that - they're cathechismic in nature, they disclose the right answers to you. i need to get blueflower out of the library again i seem to recall a bit in it when novalis was asked to leave school because the answers he gave to the priests were not the expected answers, the answers he was schooled to return. i also wonder if i can find someone with a tv to let me watch an episode of jeopardy because i'm sure that has something to do with the theory that the two parts of the riddle are convertible, only i think i've only seen the show once a long time ago and don't really remember how the mechanics of the game goes. is it sneaky to work music into thingii? i wonder if charles ives unanswered question can be worked into it somewhere, as a 2-part invention lacking the second part. that might fit into the third part of the essay, on riddles that are not solved. (my three parts, allowing me to put in every damned thing i please, are riddles that are solvable, riddles that could have been solved had one known oneself, and riddles that are unfair - that is to say, which then can be connected, circular-fashion, to the first part, where the point is to disillusion the reader as to the solvability of those first riddles, where we show that even then, what we had thought of as solving, is already a matter of predisclosure, and that we're always duped in some way.) of course, if i don't have time, i might just call my thesis "three riddles" and write one on merchant of venice (thereby throwing in turandot, fairy tales, byatt's childe in the threshold, emblems) and one on britomart and throwing in other assorted "bedtricks" in shakespeare, using rodari's model of riddles, and a third on macbeth as an epithet riddle - where i can smugly produce my macduff source, and write about the direction of revelation, using "autobiographical riddles" to talk about that? hmm.