Monday, March 25, 2024
College of the Desert Revisited
Saturday, September 1, 2012
College of the Desert
(Continued from 6:08 AM EDT yesterday and the day before)
"Richard Elster was seventy-three, I was less than half his age. He’d invited me to join him here, old house, under-furnished, somewhere south of nowhere in the Sonoran Desert or maybe it was the Mojave Desert or another desert altogether.* Not a long visit, he’d said."
— Don DeLillo, Point Omega
Maybe it was the desert near Twentynine Palms.
"Sometimes a wind comes before the rain
and sends birds sailing past the window,
spirit birds that ride the night,
stranger than dreams."
— Ending of Point Omega
* Update of Sept. 2, 2012— A different passage yields a more precise location.
Tuesday, November 23, 2021
Wednesday, November 1, 2017
Aleph Meets Zahir
For the "Aleph" of the title in the seal of
the College of the Desert, see the final post
in a search for the College in this journal.
A better-known Aleph appears in a story by Borges.
See Borges + Aleph in this journal.
For the "Zahir" of the title, see another story by Borges
and the coin scenes in the films "No Country for Old Men"
(2007) and "Mojave" (2015).
The word "Zahir" has appeared previously in this journal
in a post of January 11, 2011, Soul and Spirit.
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
For All Hallows’ Eve
See the previous post and College of the Desert in this journal.
From the latter, see particularly Slide 69 in Geoff Hagopian's Symmetry.
Sunday, August 13, 2017
The Red Pill
"We have passed through the looking glass
and down the rabbit hole."
— Kurt Andersen in the Sept. 2017 Atlantic
See as well "the desert of the real" and,
for comparison, College of the Desert in this journal.
Friday, March 18, 2016
Southwestern Noir
Kyle Smith on April 15, 2015, in the New York Post —
"The ludicrous action thriller 'Beyond the Reach'
fails to achieve the Southwestern noir potency
of 'No Country for Old Men,' but there’s no denying
it brings to mind another Southwestern classic
about malicious pursuit: the Road Runner cartoons."
See also ….
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Palm Desert’s Got Talent
“The film captures the offbeat time warp of the present-day
desert cities around Palm Springs, with the movie being
partly filmed in Palm Desert.”
See also posts on College of the Desert.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Graduation
Today is commencement day at College of the Desert.
Without Graduation
(from a poem by Jorie Graham)
With Graduation
Click either passage above for some commentary.
Monday, October 10, 2011
The Aleph
COLLEGE OF THE DESERT
Minutes — Organization Meeting
11:00 a.m., Saturday, July 1, 1961—
15. Preparation of College Seal:
By unanimous consent preparation of a College
Seal to contain the following features was
authorized: A likeness of the Library building
set in a matrix of date palms, backed by
a mountain skyline and rising sun; before
the Library an open book, the Greek symbol
Alpha on one page and Omega on the other;
the Latin Lux et Veritas, College of the
Desert, and 1958 to be imprinted within or
around the periphery of the seal.
From the website http://geofhagopian.net/ of
Geoff Hagopian, Professor of Mathematics,
College of the Desert—
Note that this version of the seal contains
an Aleph and Omega instead of Alpha and Omega.
From another Hagopian website, another seal.