GARY. C. MOORE:
Dear All,

If I can manage it, a new upload will be sent to the Analytical Indicant Theory Files. It will be annotations from *Hannotations* whose web site address will be right at the beginning. It will contain many pictures and pieces of poetry very interesting to most people who have not the slightest interest in Thomas Harris whatsoever. Anyone who loves Florence and New York City as I do will find a great number of items to catch their attention. There is a reference to Hubbard, Texas and Battlecreek Cemetary for East Texans. There are vast references in this down load as well as all the sites listed at the very beginning of my commentary. Many go into great and obscure detail I do not think are easily available anywhere else.

Now, if anyone has actually paid any attention to any of this - as I full well know other people on the lists say *Why does not Gary pay any attention to what I write?* so I understand your disappointments - BUT, as I quoted recently for Jud *What we drive, drives us*. I am a slave to my passions and I do not mean that metaphorically. This also means, as relectant as I am to admit giving up my *free will*, Jud is essentially right about determinism - and this is my determinism. I have given up on Wittgenstein at least for the moment, but I am finding Eliminativism absolutely abounds in Thomas Harris and the Marcus Aurelius he has led me to. I think anyone interested in Eliminativism should find out why. Like Wittgenstein, they both cut down to the pure nakedness of mortal perception and motivation.

And speaking of motivation, my favorite part of HANNIBAL is not even touched on - as far as I can find, but I have only superficially purused all of the vast material - in these commentaries. REMEMBER, NONE OF THIS NEW DOWN LOAD IN BY ME AT ALL!!!!!!! No selection has been made - other than to exclude the obviously and utterly ridiculous - and no editing has been done whatsoever. This site and the others mentioned at the very beginning of the commentary - I can no longer bring up Pentaone for whatever reason - show a mastery of great detail and many writers show great knowledge of their specific subjects which may have absolutely nothing to do with the more disgusting aspects of Doctor Hannibal Lecter. Do not get me talking about doctors, though. So there is plenty of things that will interest absolutely anybody - AND these sites MAY DISAPPEAR AT ANY TIME!!!!! There are numerous paintings, pictures, illustrations, and etchings of interest all in several compact places of interest that are otherwise hard to come by and may suddenly become altogether unavailable. Obscurer pieces cof liturature that still tickle the fancy can be found throughout as well as new views of *famous* literature. In this new down load, Dante, Blake, and a short mention of Yeats will be found.

Many of the references, though, may seem incredibly trivial. However, like the first mention of figure eights in RED DRAGON, suddenly at the end of the novel a tremendous significance is given to that very figure. Many I have never found any significant point to, but that may very well be to my abundant ignorrance of the many specialties many of these people quoted display.

SO! No matter how you feel about Thomas Harris there is an abundance of material here to interested ANYONE!!!!


Ciao, Gary

Hannibal and Catholicism.

The following heavily relies upon the websites Mary Jo Watts set up, and then deleted or hid, on Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal formally at http://complit.rutgers.edu/mwatts/sol/silence.html as well as Pentaone’s The Hannibal Library available at http://www.pentaone.com/hannibal/redann1.shtml
2-13-2004:
I came across an article a couple months back about the movie Mel Gibson is currently working on called The Passion about the death of Jesus Christ. The article said that Mel was a "traditional" Catholic. I didn't know there were such things as traditional Catholics so I looked into it. I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic High School but most of my experience with the Catholic Church was post Vatican II. I have only vague memories of kneeling at the Communion rail and having to wear a veil in church. I thought all (Roman) Catholics were the same and did as the pope instructed. I was obviously wrong. Traditional Catholics reject the changes which began with Vatican II and consider the new, modernized church to be more Protestant than Catholic. They have a point. The principal architect of the liturgical changes made to the Roman rite was an Italian priest by the name of Annibale (Hannibal) Bugnini. With the help of several Protestant advisers, he created the new liturgy. He became quite powerful in the church and was made an archbishop in 1972. Then suddenly, in 1975, he was dismissed from his position and sent to Iran. Apparently, the reason for his exile was that Pope Paul VI believed him to be a Mason. Catholics consider freemasonry to be an enemy of the Church. So, Hannibal was a Mason.

Dear Jud,

This is one of the reasons why this remains a work in progress. I am going back over the Hannotations commentary to see if I have missed any significant points. Many times, if you will look for your self, they may at first seem random and trivial, even if, as in this case, it is taken directly from Harris. I can find no significant meaning to continue such a *running gag* type course from SILENCE, where it has no seeming significance at all, into HANNIBAL where it finally provides a clue to Commendatore Pazzi as to Dr. Fell's real identity. Had Harris then planned to write HANNIBAL while writing SILENCE OF THE LAMBS? Was all of this prearranged in his head? Harris was a very successful novelist with BLACK SUNDAY and RED DRAGON, but I see every reason to think writing SILENCE OF THE LAMBS was a great risk. After all, he makes a kind of *hero* out of a monster by any ordinary estemation of human character. But instead of being banned, even denied publication, SILENCE became one of the great successes in the popular novel field, something which, now, trying to think objectively about it, I do not understand. It poses far too many fundamental ethical questions - which only pass by peoples' mental censors because of the *thrill* of reading the words spoken by a serial killer, even though that serial killer is unlike ANY real serial killer who has ever existed. Thomas Harris' career should have come to a dead stop with that book. nstead, it is treated as if it were the personal dairy of Joseph Stalin or Adolph Hitler saying, *Yes, I did it! I enjoyed killing all those people and would do it again! And here are all the details . . .* Remember the sensation that the fake Hitler diary caused in Germany, what was it, the 1980s? Would not people have paid good money to know what the thoughts of Stalin were, sending all his old comrades to the firing squad? What exactly his instructions were to the MGB on killing Trotsky in Mexico City? As Dr. Chilton said to Clarice Starling, *We thought, 'Here's an opportunity to make a landmark study' - it's so rare to get one alive.* [Chilton] *One what?* [Clarice] *A pure sociopath . . .* Except that he is not. He has studied Marcus Aurelius far too well.

So here is a piece on Lecter's polydactyly I originally passed over and STILL do not know what to think of.

***Chapter 3: Page 13 [15]: "Dr. Lecter has six fingers on his left hand. Clarice Starling stopped a little distance from the bars, about the length of a small foyer. “ ‘Dr Lecter.’ Her voice sounded all right to her. He looked up from his reading. For a steep second she thought his gaze hummed, but it was only her blood she heard. ‘My name is Clarice Starling. May I talk with you?’ Courtesy was implicit in her distance and her tone.”

GCM: QUOTE from Wikipedia – the Free Encyclopedia & other sources: *Range of motor skills in these extra digits is hard to chart given the rarity of the condition, but cases have varied. In some cases, the extra digit has no joints in the bone and thus is completely immobile, in other cases the extra digit has limited dexterity, and some cases have been reported in which an extra finger was fully functional, and indistinguishable from the rest of the fingers. Having an abnormal numbers of digits (6 or more) can occur on its own, that is, not linked to any other symptoms or disease. Polydactyly may occur in families as a dominantly inherited trait that involves only one gene that can cause several variations. It is not due to anything the mother did during pregnancy - it just happens. Sometimes these problems are in the genes and can be passed down generation to generation, but many times there is simply no known explanation. Historically and in the contemporary world, polydactylyism has been associated with witchcraft, psychic power, the extraterrestrial, divine connection, and sporting prowess.*

Other than setting a mere mood of strangeness, I do not understand the introduction of polydactyly. There is another mention of it on page 20 [22] *He stopped her with his upraised hand. The hand was shapely, she noted, and the middle finger perfectly replicated. It is the rarest form of polydactyly.*

In HANNIBAL the sixth finger will be removed to obscure identification. *'Dr. Fell, may I ask you a personal question?' [Pazzi] 'If your duty requires it, Commendatore.' [Dr. Fell/Lecter] 'you have a relatively new scar on the back of your left hand.' [Pazzi] ''Carpel tunnel syndrome, Commendatore. History is a hazardous profession.'* The several mentions and retention through two novels instead of simply dropping the matter indicates something substantial here, but what? That *History is a hazardous profession*, though, is abundantly demonstrated but not by Lecter as Dr. Fell but by Rinaldo Pazzi of the Pazzis, the detective, whose short stretch of walk brought him through not only hundreds of years of Florentine history but also of Pazzi family history which he will gruesomely repeat. For a novelist to intertwine so many almost suffocating historical details and themes in such a short length of story is miraculous and demonstrates extraordinary literary skill to do it with irony, instead of buffoonery.

One is not told if the sixth finger is or was fully functional. I have not found a definition of how such a *fully functional* digit would perform. It would seem even more strange, though, if the mentally thoroughly efficient Lecter would have retained a non-functional appendage beyond the ideal time for surgery in early childhood. But then we know little of his early childhood, capice? In which case, if it were functional, what was its function? All ,of this is important to Thomas Harris, but why?

Note:
A new site with very good annotations, especially on HANNIBAL, http://hannibal.hannotations.com/ Go to the bottom of the page. hannotations@yahoo.com hannotations@yahoo.com.