Posted on 09/25/2017 7:34:11 PM PDT by mairdie
The Kindle book I wrote last year about the life of Henry Livingston, Jr., identified by multiple scholars as the actual author of "Night Before Christmas", is available for free on Amazon for 24 hours starting 26 Sep 2017.
I brought the issue to Vassar Professor Don Foster in 1999 and he agreed to research the attribution if I would work as his virtual grad student. So, for a year, I criss-crossed the country to research institutions, and lived in a small cubby reading the newspapers of the time until I felt as though I lived in that time when George Washington was spoken of in the present tense.
Don's book came out in 2000 and there were articles in People Magazine and the New York Times. Very exciting.
But we hit at the same time a gentleman had bought a Moore handwritten copy of the poem and was trying to sell it for a great deal more. His market apparently collapsed when Don's book came out. So he hired a gentleman known for writing about the occult who produced a magazine article tearing apart Don's research. Don was sloppy in some places, but his basic work was good. Unfortunately, the few mistakes were enough to let the other gentleman dominate the discussion, even though most of his objections were just wrong.
Then in 2011 the New Zealand emeritus professor, MacDonald Jackson, who had once corrected an attribution of Don for a sonnet he'd misattributed to Shakespeare, contacted me and asked if I could help him approach the problem with statistics. I did. My background was computer language design and my husband is a down and deep computer researcher. My friend was president of computational linguistics back when I chaired the computer languages community, and I sucked her in.
We'd gone to a Dunkin' Donuts and I'd read the poetry of Moore and Livingston to her and explained I was having trouble saying Moore's lines, while Livingston's flowed. She said it was probably due to the phonemes - the sounds of the words - moving the tongue in the mouth and, when this was presented to Mac, he agreed that it might be a fundamental way to examine the bodies of work. It turned out to be a statistically significant way to separate them and when compared against the phonemes in "Night Before Christmas" proved conclusively that the author had to be Livingston and not Moore. EUREKA!
We did this work over several intense, long years. Mac's book came out last year, but it was written in academic peer talk, and is pretty hard to read unless you're a statistician. Mac, by the way, is revered in the community for the quality of his work, mostly focused on Shakespeare.
So I decided to come out with a book that described the research but was written in people talk. Thus, this book.
I don't know what time on the 26th (Tuesday) that Amazon will turn the book free, but I only get 5 days that I can make it free, so I'm using one of them to give it to you. If this works - and my fingers are crossed - then I'd deeply appreciate anyone who would be willing to review the book. My thanks to anyone reading it.
thank you
You’re more than welcome. I’ve really come to love this community.
You should write a book on Hillary’s virtues. It would be cheap to print at one blank page or you could do the eco friendly version which is an empty envelope.
It was hard enough spending so much time living in Clement Moore’s head. I don’t think I could bear the thought of living in her head. Incredible YUCK!
Fantastic. Thanks! The creativity on FR never ceases to amaze me.
That’s exactly the reaction I have to this community. Everywhere I turn, on everything that interests me, there’s someone that I can learn from. It is just amazing that they’ve all come together here.
btt
Added to my Kindle wish list, I’ll wait ‘til tomorrow to order it...
That’s terrific. Thank you.
I don’t know what time the free kicks in. Could be midnight E.T., could be 8am E.T. Just very unsure how this will work. I’d keep my fingers crossed, but it makes it hard to type.
Is it available on B&N’s Nook?
It was SO exciting to actually write it. It broke my heart that I couldn’t add wav files from Henry’s music manuscript book, but it made the book too large. My dream is to create some small video productions to animate the statistical research to make it as clear as possible.
You should write a book on Hillary’s virtues. It would be cheap to print at one blank page or you could do the eco friendly version which is an empty envelope.
= = =
I already have that one.
It is a file one bit long, and that bit is 0.
It’s only available on Amazon Kindle, so I don’t know that that plays on a Nook. I read on the computer, rather than on a portable device.
It's interesting, to watch a real live civil war, with millions of deaths to come, develop before my very eyes. You have to wonder what Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, the originals, and the rest would think.
Ok
This is not Dr. Livingstone, I presume?
Bump for later.
Not even related, to the best of my knowledge. But I would not presume that such a relationship could not, presumably, exist beyond my presumptions.
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