What do you mean by “What”?
What do you mean by “Do”?
What do you mean by “You”?
What do you mean by “Mean”?
What do you mean by “by”?
Jordan Peterson is a funny guy if you ignore… Quite a few things actually. He’s got this weird rhetorical device that he uses in interviews whe speaks in complicated academic language to sound like he’s so smart you can’t even understand him. If the interviewer tries to repeat what he said in simpler language for the viewing public, he insists you have not grasped the full meaning of his argument and therefore any response you give is wrong by default. Then however (and this the best part) when faced with a simple question in the most basic language which everyone else watching would fully understand he will come back with “But what do you mean by ‘Do’?”
This post is about the magical writing of Ken Muller.
The first non-binary person I ever met online went by the handle Iceowl, and they introduced me to the world of conlangs (Constructed Languages).
Conlangs fall into 3 main categories:
- Fictional natural languages such as Elvish or Klingon.
- Optimised langauge which fixes problems with existing language such as Loglan or Toki Pona.
- Aesthetically pleasing languages like Elephants Dream or Kēlen.
I was into the aesthetics, Iceowl was into optimisation so we never really worked together on a language, but I’ll never forget what they said about the language they were creating:
“I have to make a new language because I can’t explain my gender in English.”¹
I think the underlying problem is that I got into conlangs because they seemed like a great way to hide information in an obscure form. Iceowl wanted to express things and have people understand something that they couldn’t explain in English. The problem is that in order to explain something in a language you made up, you first have to teach them the entire language, arguably a much bigger task.
This is my way of saying I don’t think I ever fully understood Iceowl’s gender, because I never learned their language and as such they couldn’t explain it to me².
Oh yeah, this post was about Ken Muller.
Ken Muller has 58 ebooks on Lybrary, and I purchased 2 a while ago.
The store info on lybrary shows Fold Cup is a single effect in 14 pages, written in 2008.
Single Stone, part of the Found & F.U.N. series, is 101 pages, a little over 45000 words³, written in 2021.
My hypothesis is that at some point between these two books, Ken Muller went full Iceowl and decided that the natural language of magicians was insufficient to fully explain his methods. The only solution? Create a new language of magic. Not just a language but a system. A System called FunSway.
FunSway is actually 2 acronyms which the system is named after. Take a moment to see if you can figure out what any of the words in S.W.A.Y. or F.U.N. might stand for.
Be honest, did you even have anything close to Special Ways of Appreciating Yourself and Foresight, Utility, Nurturing?
Of course the real question is does it work? Well I have no idea. Frankly I can’t make head nor tail of Ken’s writing, and that’s because the first 58 pages are written using a bunch of terms explained in the glossary, which starts on page 62, and is full of short definitions for moves mostly comparing them to other moves in the same glossary.
Let me give you an example:
Button – Sleight; a form of Chesting in which the object in pressed into the flesh above the diaphragm within the Womb for later violent expulsion. see p.85
But that’s okay, Because it’s explained on page 85, right? Let’s check out page 85.
Button – Sleight; this is a form/extension of Chesting or Arming where the object is pushed back into the flesh of the stomach as the diaphragm contracts. As the Masking/Holding wrist or forearm is removed, the object can be forcibly expelled several inches forward into the Womb. If caught by the Placing hand it is called ReButton. If by the other hand, RevButton. If into a container it is KupLoad. Compare with ExChest where the object sorta sticks to the shirt waiting to be retrieved. The amount of desired ‘release’ depends on where the receiving hand is during any Sway movement to enhance the natural flow of observed actions leading to the next phase.
Keep in mind that any word starting with a capital letter is another term which has its own meaning in the Sway system, which is just as well because I’m not interested in putting any magic props in my womb. What the fuck.
It’s like reading a dictionary and it says “splanching (verb): the act of using a splancher” so you look up splancher and it says “splancher (noun): a tool used by wugs for splanching”
Assuming the terms even have a definition. This book contains 7 refences to a sleight called Basic Vanish, but none of them say what Basic Vanish is. I know lots of vanishes, but I’m not sure which is the most basic. For a book which lists about 30 ways of simply holding an object, it seems pretty weird that it wouldn’t clarify which vanish was the basic one.
At some point in this kind of rabbit hole, a lesser academic might start to fear that they’re just not smart enough to understand this revolutionary new system of conjuring, but fortunately some of Ken’s other books have reviews on Lybrary, so we can see what other people make of FunSway.
One reviewer of Glass Act (49 pages, ~20000 words⁵, written 2023) describes it thusly:
I am sure the effect is great. Unfortunately, the author does not simply teach you the routine. Instead, he structures the instructions in a very complicated way and develops and uses a special glossary on various stratagems and deceptions and whatnot. And there are no pictures or photos to help. The result is instructions that to me are simply impossible to follow. I gave up after two hours. It’s a shame because I was really curious if the author could hold up to his claims.
One reviewer of Cup of T (53 pages, ~19000 words⁶, written 2008) wrote:
It is the poorest $20 I have spent on magic in decades. I was hoping to find something novel I could use. Tedious pages of definitions of different ways to hold a teacup. I have been doing Cups & Balls and magic for over 50 years. I found nothing I could use. A novice will get a headache if he can endure reading its entirety. I can not recommend this to any of my friends.
But wait… That was written in 2008, the same year as Fold Cup, which is a mere 14 pages. You might notice that it is the only one of his eBooks for which I have not provided a word count. This is because Lybrary doesn’t provide a word count, and the reason for that is that Fold Cup is not a single document they can scan on the server for that information. Fold Cup is provided as a zip file containing:
- a 14 slide powerpoint deck (~400 words)
- a 29 page PDF (~4000 words)
- a 33 page Sway methods PDF (~14000 words)
- an RTF text file explaining how to read the first 3 files (~500 words).
Some of this is doubled up (the last 14 pages of the FoldCup PDF are just the slides from the presentation) and I had to copypaste into googledocs to run the word count so it might be a little off, but subtracting the overlap it still clocks in a total of roughly 18000 words⁷.
Nothing happened between 2008 and 2021. Ken Muller was like this the whole time.
But lets just circle back to that 33 page Sway Methods PDF. Remember how I mentioned that Single Stone had a long appendix/glossary at the end? Well would it surprise you to know that this is essentially the same document as the 33 page Sway Methods PDF? The main difference being that it is now 42 pages long.
What happened between 2008 and 2021 is that Ken Muller’s dictionary, the thing you need to read to understand his gender methods got longer⁸.
This is a flaw with many conlangs, they look great in isolation but as soon as you try to write anything of substance with them, you realise that actually language is hard and you missed a bunch of important stuff, so you either just adopt terms from a natural language or you expand the langauge to be suitable for whatever you’re trying to write now.
Natural language has this property as well, but because most of them have evolved over 1000s of years, it’s very rare that we need to invent a new word, unless you’re William Shakespeare⁹. This history of evolution and development is the huge advantage of natural languages over conlangs. All the weird corners have been knocked off through common usage and missing words have been borrowed from other languages – like shadenfreud, tagliatelle, and shampoo.
When someone invents something totally new, like aspirin, nematodes, or vtubers, we can just append those words into the existing language and go about our day.
But that wasn’t good enough for Ken Muller. The language of magic has had 148 years to evolve since Edwin Sachs’ Sleight of Hand, or 441 years sing Reginald Scott’s Discoverie of Witchcraft. That’s relatively young as languages go, but in terms of subject specific specialist languages its way more established than the piffling 53 years of the C programming language, and most of the world’s digital infrastructure is built on that. I cant find a Ken Muller book older than 2008 which means the FunSway language of magic has been used for 17 years, mainly by the guy who invented it. This is the fate of most conlangs.
I didn’t want to pay anymore for Ken Muller’s writing but I did wonder how his shorter modern ebooks would read. After all, a book which is shorter than the 2008 FunSway glossary cant possibly contain the 2021 FunSway glossary, right?
Fortunately I had a perfect test subject to this question because Ken had released a free ebook in 2022 on a novel way of presenting the linking rings. Weighing in at 20 pages and 7300 words¹⁰, one reviewer gave it five stars, stating:
This routine reverses the normal linking ring plot of sequentially linking the rings, instead focusing on the unlinking process (or “breaking the chain”) and introducing several unique ring handling techniques. It is written in a somewhat scientific tone. It includes not only the mechanics but also the rationale for the choices made in designing the routine.
Now I’m not going to dwell on the fact that this reviewer has reviewed 50 items, almost all of which are free, but I think he must have not really read the book because what this actually contains is a 17 page advert for all the techniques you can learn from his other books on the linking rings, followed by 3 pages of suggested patter for a linking ring routine that starts with the rings in a chain. Indeed the review actively contradicts the text itself, which includes the passage:
This eBook does not contain any complete Effects, Performance Modules or Routines. Its purpose is to acquaint the reader with the Concepts and available Techniques, Modules and Routines available in individual eBooks. Each of those has an Appendix of Glossary, Support Material and
Articles, plus Sequential Graphic Photos to support learning and mastery.
But he has other books, books he charges for, books which contain a single phase or technique, which are too short to contain the FunSway glossary and must have some kind of information. Like Twiddle, written in 2020, 5 pages, 1900 words. It’s one sleight. Surely he has to describe this one sleight in a way which makes sense without additional context. Well I’m not really interested in paying the $8 to find out, so luckily for us there’s a review:
Looks as if it is introducing a useful mechanic. However, I find there to be a poor choice of verbs and adverbs. No drawings. Some discussion at Magic Cafe is not revealing and what is on YouTube is garnish. Leaves me feeling like a virgin (after 50 years of a sleight life).
I couldn’t find any mention of Twiddle on the Magic Cafe or YouTube, though this may be down to the fact that Steve Brooks is constantly purging the former and the latter has truly busted its search algorithm, but the fact that its overly verbose, has no pictures, and is hard to follow, (even for a seasoned sleight of hand performer) we can assume that it is written in the same way as the rest, but with a much reduced dictionary.
I find that part very telling though. Two of the reviews specifically state that the reader had 50 years of experience and yet they found the text hard to follow and couldn’t use any of it.
Language which is inscrutable even to experts… What does that remind you of?
Jordan Peterson! I knew there was a reason I mentioned him at the start. Language designed not to make information clearer and easier to learn, but to make it so difficult to follow that everyone assumes they just aren’t clever enough to understand.
FunSway is not an optimised language¹¹. It’s an aesthetic language, hiding its meaning behind forms intended to look a certain way. In this case it’s supposed to look academic, maybe even scientific.
But aesthetic languages are a fun way to hide a poem or secret messsage. If you write a hundred pages of information on one, it may as well be the voynich manuscript. I’d love to see some of Ken Muller’s works adapted into videos, because there might be some good ideas in them, but until that day I don’t think I’ll ever know the full intricacies of the basic vanish, twiddle twaddle, or where his womb is.
What got me thinking about these books after all this time is that next week I’m giving a lecture at my local magic club and I wrote set of notes for it. I thought I’d done an amazing job but after sending review copies to my collaborative magical friends Gwen Coney and James Merlin, I’m currently up to the 4th draft based on feedback. It made me realise its hard to tell if something you have written is inscrutable to anyone else because we each build a little extension of our natural language inside us. We typically self summarise when an outside observer would need the full context. Even something as simple as numbering illustrations and putting reference numbers in the text can help people connect the ideas to understand them to the same level as the writer.
The ideal reviewer of a complex text has 2 specific traits which are absolutely vital to the review process:
- They don’t know what the text explains
- They would like to know what the text explains
If they are already familiar with your work, they will infer things you have alluded to due to prior knowledge and as such are ill equipped to judge how well an uninitiated reader would fare.
If they are simply proofreading as a favour and don’t care about understanding the subject their feedback will be about surface understanding of the grammar and language, but can’t tell you if they absorbed enough information from the text to actually understand the substance.
I have to assume that a lack of such proofreaders is the reason for Ken Muller’s writing being the way it is, because it seems ridiculous to think someone would write 58 books as a joke or troll. Especially when you realise that wrist there’s a lot of overlapping content, they seem to be close to the word count of the complete works of Shakespeare.
And shakespeare didn’t even include illustrations.
¹ This is paraphrased, my memory isn’t that good.
² That said, I have since met many other non binary people and I understand all their genders just fine. Starting to think Iceowl’s inability to explain themselves in English was just a skill issue. Either that or English got a lot better in the last 20 years.
³ I know you’re probably thinking “is 45000 a lot of words?”, so let me put it into context by saying that Shakespeare’s longest play, Hamlet, is just over 30000 words. This book is one and a half Hamlets.
⁴ I am certain FunSway is meant to sound like the correct pronunciation of Feng Shui, which means Ken Muller may also be into spiritual bunk as well as a massive weeb.
⁵ 2/3 of a Hamlet, or roughly one Titas Andronicus.
⁶ Just under a Twelfth Night.
⁷ Somewhere between Timon of Athens and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Since those are less well known, keep in mind that they are each longer than Macbeth.
⁸ And also, in case it wasn’t clear, you can assume that every eBook bought from Ken Muller is ~50% comprised of the ever expanding translation guide needed to understand the other half.
⁹ Shakespeare is responsible for 1700 modern words in common usage, such as premeditated, remorseless, coldblooded, and skim milk. If you’re going to write 835,997 words eventually you’re gonna run out.
¹⁰ Half a Comedy of Errors.
¹¹ Holy shit, now I’m reincorporating the conlang stuff from earlier. Amazing that I write these things without a plan isn’t it?