Or: The Naked Blackboard Jungle
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"…it would be quite a long walk
Swiftly Mrs. Who brought her hands… together.
"Now, you see," Mrs. Whatsit said,
– A Wrinkle in Time , |
Related material: Machete Math and…
Starring the late Eleanor Parker as Swiftly Mrs. Who.
Twelfth Night 2024 was the dies natalis of
comedy writer Brian McConnachie.
From this journal on that date —
Funeral scene from "Being There" (1979)
The March 20 date of a New Yorker story by
Mary Gaitskill suggests a review of that date here —
“GLOW,” starring Alison Brie —
“In the bluish light emanating from the TV,
EE looked at him, her eyes veiled.”
— Being There , by Jerzy Kosinski
Related note for film fans —
I prefer the less stressful TV series “GLOW,” starring Alison Brie —
“In the bluish light emanating from the TV,
EE looked at him, her eyes veiled.”
— Being There , by Jerzy Kosinski
Today's playlist at Joint Base Andrews —
ARRIVAL – "Gloria" and "Small Town Girl."
DEPARTURE – "YMCA" and "Tiny Dancer."
Related notes for film fans —
"Hannah Ware does the most she can in the role of Katia."
I prefer the less stressful TV series "GLOW,"
starring Alison Brie —
“In the bluish light emanating from the TV,
EE looked at him, her eyes veiled."
— Being There , by Jerzy Kosinski
From a memoir published in 1997 —
The author and his friend Katz :
I couldn’t believe it.
— ‘You want to come with me?’
— ‘If it’s a problem, I understand.’
— ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, no, no.
You’re very welcome.
You are extremely welcome.’ “
— A Walk in the Woods , by Bill Bryson.
(Crown, Kindle edition. p. 20.)
From a novel published in 1971 —
“In the bluish light emanating from the TV,
EE looked at him, her eyes veiled. ‘You want me
to come while you watch.’ Chance said nothing.
. . . .
‘I think I understand now.’ She got up,
paced swiftly up and down the room,
crossing in front of the TV screen;
every now and then a word escaped her lips,
a word scarcely louder than her breath.”
— Being There , by Jerzy Kosinski
Back to the present . . .
See also Dance 101: A Leg Up.
From a 2003 obituary of author Neil Postman —
"In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse
in the Age of Show Business (Viking, 1985; Penguin, 1986),
he indicted the television industry on the charge of making
entertainment out of the world's most serious problems.
The book was translated into eight languages and sold
200,000 copies worldwide, according to N.Y.U."
Postman reportedly died on Sunday, Oct. 5, 2003.
Log24 on that date —
Art Theory for Yom Kippur and Ado.
See also today's obituary reporting the May 21 death of Postman's
erstwhile agent Elaine Markson.
This journal on May 21, in a post titled "Crux" —
"Chance became tied to the liberties
of U.S. democracy, whereas its eradication
or denial became symptomatic of Soviet tyranny."
— Google Books description of No Accident, Comrade:
Chance and Design in Cold War American Narrative,
by Steven Belletto, Oxford U. Press (first published
in hardcover on Dec. 28, 2011)
Midrash —
Click the image for related posts.
Or: Being There
(A sequel to last night's Lyric Intelligence )
William Deresiewicz reviews Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 novel Player Piano :
The novel’s prescience is chilling. Six years before the left-wing English
sociologist Michael Young published The Rise of the Meritocracy ,
a dystopian satire that coined that now-ubiquitous final word,
Vonnegut was already there.
Related material:
Intelligence Test , Gombrich, and, more generally, Stupidity.
… and Finishing Up at Noon
This post was suggested by last evening’s post on mathematics and narrative
and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning’s New York Times.
Above: Frank Langella in Right: Johnny Depp in |
 |
“One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage.”
— “Is Fiction the Art of Lying?”* by Mario Vargas Llosa, New York Times essay of October 7, 1984
My own adventures in that realm— as reader, not author— may illustrate Llosa’s remark.
A nearby stack of paperbacks I haven’t touched for some months (in order from bottom to top)—
What moral Vargas Llosa might draw from the above stack I do not know.
Generally, I prefer the sorts of books in a different nearby stack. See Sisteen, from May 25. That post the fanciful reader may view as related to number 16 in the above list. The reader may also relate numbers 24 and 22 above (an odd couple) to By Chance, from Thursday, July 22.
* The Web version’s title has a misprint— “living” instead of “lying.”
What's wrong with this picture?
Google News today—
Midrash on what's wrong—
Related material from August 29—
Camp Germania
(Click for Source)
Related material from Camp Germania—
For a Festschrift on his eightieth birthday, she [Hannah Arendt] wrote “the storm that blows through Heidegger's work—like the one which blows across centuries against it from Plato's works—does not stem from this century.” And from her first book—on the idea of love in St. Augustine—to her last, she chose a much different path. While her public remarks were full of praise, her private ones were less so. After the war, Arendt, since married, returned to Germany and spent an uneasy afternoon with her former love and his resolutely anti-Semitic wife Elfriede. What she wrote of her experience was in her diary and was not published until after her death. This was not a diary entry like others she wrote: it was an animal fable called “Heidegger the Fox.” It begins, “Heidegger says proudly: ‘People say Heidegger is a fox.' This is the true story of Heidegger the fox.” She continued….
— "Being There," in Cabinet Magazine, Issue 25, Spring 2007
From the 7/20 Harvard Crimson—
"The scholarly expeditions undertaken by modern-day explorer and Harvard Foundation Director S. Allen Counter will be featured in a biopic produced by actor Will Smith.
…. Debbie Allen is also producing the film, and Farhad Safinia will be penning the script, Variety magazine reported.
…. Counter said that Debbie Allen described his character as 'a mixture of Indiana Jones and Robert Langdon,' the fictional Harvard professor of symbology in Dan Brown’s novels."
Farhad Safinia is co-writer and co-producer, with Mel Gibson, of "Apocalypto."
From "The Envelope: The Awards Insider" at the LA Times, a review of the film based on Dan Brown's "Angels & Demons"—
"The script tips its hand too early, and can't quite turn Langdon into Indiana Langdon on his Last Crusade."
— , Orlando Sentinel movie critic, May 15, 2009
Related material:
The Robert Jones Code—
“… told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing”
— Quoted here Sept. 14
“We’ve got to get ourselves
back to the garden.”
— Quoted here Sept. 10
| “The woman introduced herself. ‘I am Mrs. Benjamin Rand. I am called EE by my friends, from my Christian names, Elizabeth Eve.’
‘EE,’ Chance repeated gravely. ‘EE,’ said the lady, amused. Chance recalled that in similar situations men on TV introduced themselves. ‘I am Chance,’ he stuttered and, when this didn’t seem to be enough, added, ‘the gardener.'” — Jerzy Kosinski, Being There |
Related material:
— Heinz Pagels,
The Dreams of Reason
— Janwillem van de Wetering,
A Glimpse of Nothingness
"…it would be quite
a long walk
for him if he had to
walk straight across."
Swiftly Mrs. Who brought
her hands… together.
"Now, you see,"
Mrs. Whatsit said,
"he would be there,
without that long trip.
That is how we travel."
— A Wrinkle in Time,
Chapter 5,
"The Tesseract"
Related material:
To Measure the Changes,
and…
 |
The Ring of Gyges
10:31:32 AM ET
Commentary by Richard Wilhelm
on I Ching Hexagram 32:
“Duration is… not a state of rest, for mere standstill is regression.
Duration is rather the self-contained and therefore self-renewing
movement of an organized, firmly integrated whole, taking place in
accordance with immutable laws and beginning anew at every ending.”
Related material
Jung and the Imago Dei
| Log24 on June 10, 2007:
WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL? some people ask. I never ask. —Joan Didion Iago states that he is not who he is. —Mark F. Frisch |
“Not Being There,”
by Christopher Caldwell,
from next Sunday’s
New York Times Magazine:
| “The chance to try on fresh identities was the great boon that life online was supposed to afford us. Multiuser role-playing games and discussion groups would be venues for living out fantasies. Shielded by anonymity, everyone could now pass a ‘second life’ online as Thor the Motorcycle Sex God or the Sage of Wherever. Some warned, though, that there were other possibilities. The Stanford Internet expert Lawrence Lessig likened online anonymity to the ring of invisibility that surrounds the shepherd Gyges in one of Plato’s dialogues. Under such circumstances, Plato feared, no one is ‘of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice.’Time, along with a string of sock-puppet scandals, has proved Lessig and Plato right.” |
“The Boy Who Lived,”
by Christopher Hitchens,
from next Sunday’s
New York Times Book Review:
| On the conclusion of the Harry Potter series:”The toys have been put firmly back in the box, the wand has been folded up, and the conjuror is discreetly accepting payment while the children clamor for fresh entertainments. (I recommend that they graduate to Philip Pullman, whose daemon scheme is finer than any patronus.)” |
I, on the other hand,
recommend Tolkien…
or, for those who are
already familiar with
Tolkien, Plato– to whom
“The Ring of Gyges” may
serve as an introduction.
“It’s all in Plato, all in Plato:
bless me, what do they
teach them at these schools!”
— C. S. Lewis
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