“To say more is to say less.”
― Harlan Ellison, as quoted at goodreads.com
Saying less—
- Home Schooling for the Hunger Games (last Thursday)
- Black diamonds in last Saturday's Talk Amongst Yourselves
- Last night's New York Times obituaries
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Black Diamond
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Friday, January 29, 2021
Space Laser Theory
From this journal on Nov. 17, 2018 —
See also another disastrous-mess commentary from Nov. 17, 2018.
Related weblog post —
Related theology — “Diamonds Are Forever” in this journal.
Related art — “Black Diamond.”
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Friday, October 26, 2018
Pathmark Meets Hallmark
From earlier posts now tagged Pathmark —
From earlier posts tagged Black Diamond —
A source for the above Ellison quote —
See also A Christmas Carol.
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Friday, July 13, 2018
Box
"When I was a kid living in the Long Island suburbs,
I sometimes got called a math genius. I didn’t think
the label was apt, but I didn’t mind it; being put in
the genius box came with some pretty good perks."
— "The Genius Box," March 16, 2018
From posts in this journal tagged "Black Diamond" —
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Saturday, June 4, 2016
Mythos
Previous references in this journal to the "Church of Synchronology"
suggest a review of that phrase's source —
"The fine line between hokum and rational thinking
is precisely the point of The Lost Time Accidents ;
a brick of a book not just because of its length but
because of the density of both the prose and the
ideas it contains.
It is, in a nutshell, a sweeping historical novel that's
also a love story but is rooted in time-travel
science fiction and takes on as its subject
the meaning of time itself. This is no small endeavor."
— Janelle Brown in The Los Angeles Times
on February 4, 2016
See also …
- the previous post,
- DeLillo's new novel Zero K , and
- posts now tagged Black Diamond Logo …
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Saturday, January 23, 2016
Hard
"Hard Science Fiction in the era of short attention spans,
crowd-sourcing, and rapid obsolescence"
— May 26, 2012, Dragon Press Bookstore symposium
Related material: Posts now tagged Black Diamond.
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Thursday, June 27, 2013
For James Martin
The body of James Martin, 79, founder of the Oxford Martin School,
was reportedly found floating in the sea near his private island
off Bermuda on Monday, June 24, 2013.
In his memory— A Log24 post from last December.
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Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Raven Light
"…a fundamental cognitive ability known as 'fluid' intelligence: the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of
…matrices are considered the gold standard of fluid-intelligence tests. Anyone who has taken an intelligence test has seen matrices like those used in the Raven’s: three rows, with three graphic items in each row, made up of squares, circles, dots or the like. Do the squares get larger as they move from left to right? Do the circles inside the squares fill in, changing from white to gray to black, as they go downward? One of the nine items is missing from the matrix, and the challenge is to find the underlying patterns— up, down and across— from six possible choices. Initially the solutions are readily apparent to most people, but they get progressively harder to discern. By the end of the test, most test takers are baffled."
— Dan Hurley, "Can You Make Yourself Smarter?," NY Times , April 18, 2012
See also "Raven Steals the Light" in this journal.
Related material:
Plan 9 from MIT and, perhaps exemplifying crystallized rather than fluid intelligence, Black Diamond.
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Saturday, December 22, 2012
For George Steiner…
… In gratitude for his book Real Presences—
A related shell game:
Ad for a talk at Harvard by Nick Bostrom in April 2010—
Click ad for background on the April 10 , 2010, symposium.
See also Bostrom on the The Simulation Argument
and the Log24 April 12, 2010, Shell Game post above.
Note the black diamond logo of Bostrom's Oxford institute.
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Thursday, November 1, 2012
For All Saints’ Day
Conclusion of "The Storyteller," a story
by Cynthia Zarin about author Madeleine L'Engle—
— The New Yorker , April 12, 2004 —
Note the black diamond at the story's end.
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Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Speak, Memory
"… the effective work of memory is the very definition of art."
— "In Memoriam: Chris Marker," by Richard Brody,
New Yorker weblog post, July 30, 2012
New York Lottery this evening: 178, 0772.
Definition: See 178 on May 25, 2012.
Art: See 772 on Nov. 21, 2010 and Harvard Black Diamond.
Moonshine:
The time of this post, 8:28, may be taken as
a reference to the date, 8/28, of the Feast of St. Augustine.
Augustine's remarks on memory are not without interest.
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Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Simple Skill
But with good Will
To show our simple skill…
( Continued from Midsummer Eve, 1993 )
The "Black Diamond" search from Holy Cross Day
leads to Talk Amongst Yourselves, which in turn
leads to PyrE in the Book, with Alfred Bester's
version of "Will and Idea."
This phrase may be regarded as a version of
Schopenhauer's "Will and Representation."
Related material—
"Schopenhauer's notion of the will comes from the Kantian thing-in-itself, which Kant believed to be the fundamental reality behind the representation that provided the matter of perception, but lacked form. Kant believed that space, time, causation, and many other similar phenomena belonged properly to the form imposed on the world by the human mind in order to create the representation, and these factors were absent from the thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer pointed out that anything outside of time and space could not be differentiated, so the thing-in-itself must be one and all things that exist, including human beings, must be part of this fundamental unity. Our inner-experience must be a manifestation of the noumenal realm and the will is the inner kernel* of every being. All knowledge gained of objects is seen as self-referential, as we recognize the same will in other things as is inside us." —Wikipedia
* "Die Schrecken des Todes beruhen großentheils auf dem falschen Schein, daß jetzt das Ich verschwinde, und die Welt bleibe, Vielmehr aber ist das Gegentheil wahr: die Welt verschwindet; hingegen der innerste Kern des Ich, der Träger und Hervorbringer jenes Subjekts, in dessen Vorstellung allein die Welt ihr Daseyn hatte, beharrt."
— Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung , Kapitel 41
Added Nov. 16, 2012, a translation by E. F. J. Payne—
"The terrors of death rest for the most part on the false illusion that then the I or ego vanishes, and the world remains. But rather is the opposite true, namely that the world vanishes; on the other hand, the innermost kernel of the ego endures, the bearer and producer of that subject in whose representation alone the world had its existence."
— THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION
by Arthur Schopenhauer
Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne
In two volumes
© 1969 Dover Publications, Inc.
© 1958 by The Falcon's Wing Press
Volume Two: Supplements to the Fourth Book,
XLI. On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature
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Monday, September 17, 2012
The Count
|
… I saw a shadow
I rose to a knee, |
Simpson reportedly died on Holy Cross Day.
That day in this journal—
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Friday, September 14, 2012
Plan 9
(Continued… A Meditation for Holy Cross Day )
Black Diamond in this journal
versus
Black Diamond at Harvard—
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Monday, January 6, 2003
Monday January 6, 2003
Doctorow’s Epiphany
E. L. Doctorow is 72 today.
The above is a phrase from The Midrash Jazz Quartet in Doctorow’s novel City of God.
Tonight’s site music is “Black Diamond.”
William T. Noon, S.J., Chapter 4 of Joyce and Aquinas, Yale University Press, 1957:
A related epiphanic question, second only in interest to the question of the nature of epiphany, is how Joyce came by the term. The religious implications would have been obvious to Joyce: no Irish Catholic child could fail to hear of and to understand the name of the liturgical feast celebrated on January 6. But why does Joyce appropriate the term for his literary theory? Oliver St. John Gogarty (the prototype of the Buck Mulligan of Ulysses)… has this to say: “Probably Father Darlington had taught him, as an aside in his Latin class — for Joyce knew no Greek — that ‘Epiphany’ meant ‘a shining forth.'”
From Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining:
Danny Torrance: Is there something bad here?
Dick Hallorann: Well, you know, Doc, when something happens, you can leave a trace of itself behind. Say like, if someone burns toast. Well, maybe things that happen leave other kinds of traces behind. Not things that anyone can notice, but things that people who “shine” can see. Just like they can see things that haven’t happened yet. Well, sometimes they can see things that happened a long time ago. I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years. And not all of ’em was good.
From a website on author Willard Motley:
“Willard Motley’s last published novel is entitled, Let Noon Be Fair, and was actually published post-humously in 1966. The story line takes place in Motley’s adopted country of Mexico, in the fictional fishing village of Las Casas, which was based on Puerta [sic] Vallarta.”
See also “Shining Forth” and yesterday’s entry “Culinary Theology.”
