Every November 11th, that is, on 11/11 of the calendar, Pana Day is celebrated. This was decreed by an association that seems invented by Wes Anderson, the Corduroy Appreciation Club, because that written date is reminiscent of the panels of the most professorial fabric. In an essay titled Snake in the Garden: Literature Teachers in Film and Television, the writer (and professor) Tim Carens dedicated a section to corduroy, since to wear a jacket made of that fabric it is essential to be credible as someone who She could hold a chair ever since Donald Sutherland wore it in taupe in American Desmadre. According to Carens, that was the way the casting directors found to imply that the wearer is “disconnected from everything that is modern and marketable in the contemporary economy.” In reality, corduroy has been quite modern and marketable for several seasons. You just have to look at the catalog of cult brands like Bode and Tik Toks that explain how to get a Dark Academia style style – the trend that consists of reading The Secret of Donna Tartt and romanticizing an unrealistic idea of Ivy League universities – with wide corduroy pants (no elastic), shirt and hand-knitted vest.
Few collections can boast, like this supplement, of having reached number 1111. Panorama de narratives, Anagrama's collection of translated fiction, which was founded in 1983, reached that number, which this supplement also meets today, very recently with the novel Adam Haberberg by Yasmina Reza, the story of a 47-year-old Parisian writer in crisis (can you be a 47-year-old writer and not be in crisis?) who meets a woman from his past. According to a legend widely repeated in publishing circles, it was José Manuel Lara, the founder of Grupo Planeta, who gave the Anagrama collection the name Yellow Plague because whenever he went to bookstores he found rows and rows of titles from Panorama de narratives. The characteristic tone, which fades in the sun in home libraries and acquires an elegant vanilla color, has barely changed since the collection was founded, but its consolidated graphics have undergone an important change just this year. Since Olga Ravn's The Employees, all titles have the name of the translator on the cover, below the title.
The 11th of the 11th is not a bad day in the history of Literature. That day, in 1821, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born, and also that day, but in 1849 (what a birthday), he was sentenced to death, although he was finally able to exchange it for four years of hard labor, which would give him vital time to write. Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Another writer who celebrated his name day on the day of the four ones was Kurt Vonnegut, born on November 11, 1922. In addition, James Bond was also born on that autumn day, according to the novels of Ian Fleming. Not by chance, on November 11, 1954, The Two Towers, the second part of The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R., was published. Tolkien. And seven years later, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 also arrived in bookstores on that date. Its title, which has given rise to the expression “a catch-22”, which means “a situation from which you cannot escape successfully, in which you can only lose”, in English, was about to be Trap 11 .
As obsessive Jordan Peele fans noticed upon the film's release, the film Us (2019) is full of 11:11. It all begins when the protagonist, Adelaide, sees a man holding a cardboard sign that says “Jeremiah 11:11,” just before she meets her double. From there, the mentions of that number and that passage of the Bible are repeated, in a baseball game in which the score is 11 to 11 and in a clock that reads 11:11. The director acknowledged that yes, that image of duplicity suited the film well, with the two numbers as if confronted by a mirror. The verse in question says the following: “I am going to bring you a misfortune from which you will not be able to escape; "They will shout at me, but I will not listen to them." It is not the only film that uses the symbolism and mystique associated with 11:11. In Christopher Nolan's Joker, all the clocks that appear in the footage show eleven hours and eleven minutes.
It is called “the 11:11 phenomenon” and refers to the tendency to look at the clock at 11:11 more than at other times of the day. According to psychology, it is not due to a magical or spiritual issue but is the result of apophenia, a tendency to look for patterns in random data. When someone starts to notice the double eleven, they tend to see it and remember it more than any other number. Apophenia, the first cousin of pareidolia (when you see faces in things), often occurs in popular fiction. For example, the protagonist of Pi, by Darren Aronofsky, becomes obsessed with finding the pattern of numbers that make up Pi. Winona Ryder's character in the first season of Stranger Things is also told that she suffers from apophenia and that she is seeing patterns where there are none.
