Log24

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 …

… In gratitude for his book Real Presences—

Will and Idea:

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.

(Continued… A Meditation for Holy Cross Day )

Black Diamond in this journal
versus
Black Diamond at Harvard—

Doctorow’s Epiphany

E. L. Doctorow is 72 today.

In the Garden of Adding…

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.”