Log24

Not  by Don DeLillo —

Those apt to be seduced by language, either secular or religious,
might note that the author of the Point Omega book above is also
the author of  Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power —

Hemingway fans might note as well a website whose background
image memorializes the Catholic fallen of the Spanish Civil War:

Fareed Zakaria in an online Aug. 21
New York Times  book review —

" Most intellectuals think ideas matter.
In one of his most famous and oft-­quoted lines,
John Maynard Keynes declared, 'Practical men
who believe themselves to be quite exempt from
any intellectual influence are usually the slaves
of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority,
who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy
from some academic scribbler of a few years back.'

Scott L. Montgomery and Daniel Chirot concur,
arguing that ideas 'do not merely matter; they matter
immensely, as they have been the source for decisions
and actions that have structured the modern world.' 
In The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How
They Made the Modern World , Montgomery and
Chirot make the case for the importance of four
­powerful ideas, rooted in the European Enlightenment,
that have created the world as we know it.
'Invading armies can be resisted,' they quote
Victor Hugo. 'Invading ideas cannot be.' "

* Related material: Point Omega , a book
   by Don DeLillo, in this journal.

“Am I still on?” — Ending line of  The Osterman Weekend  (1983)

"… as though echoing the road's vanishing point
up ahead…." — Album review, 2002

See Vanishing Point in this journal.

See as well Rolling Stone  four days ago
on Stevie Nicks in 1976:

Keep in mind, the audience has
no idea who Stevie Nicks is.

Continues…

Update of 9:29 PM ET (Click to enlarge.) —

Adapted from a Facebook page.

"We tried to create new realities overnight…."
— Point Omega, quoted here in the post
Devising Entities (July 3, 2010)

See also last night's Meditation as well as the earlier posts
Language Game and The Subject Par Excellence.

Continues.

From a news article featured on the American Mathematical Society
home page today —

A joint Vietnam-USA mathematical meeting in Vietnam on
June 10-13, 2019:

This  journal on June 12, 2019:

See also the Twentieth of May, 2008 —

Welcome to the Garden Club, Pilgrim.

The above title is that of a facetious British essay linked to in the previous post.
It suggests a review . . .

“. . . some point in a high corner of the room . . . .”

     — Point Omega

Click on the book cover below for posts tagged "Haiku."

A Phrase That Haunts

From this journal on August 23, 2013 —

Illustration from a New York Times  review 
of the novel Point Omega —

From the print version of The New York Times Sunday Book Review
dated Sept. 13, 2015 —

The online version, dated Sept. 11, 2015 —

From the conclusion of the online version —

On the above print  headline, "Wrinkles in Time,"
that vanished in the online version —

"Now you see it, now you don't"
is not a motto one likes to see demonstrated
by a reputable news firm.

Related material:  Jews Telling Stories.

"Sometimes a wind comes before the rain
and sends birds sailing past the window,
spirit birds that ride the night,
stranger than dreams."

— The end of DeLillo's Point Omega

"We tried to create new realities overnight,
careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans
in memorability and repeatability."

… Our Most Important Product …

"Omega is as real  as we need it to be."

— Burt Lancaster in Sam Peckinpah's last film

To Feb. 11, 2012:

“News and Traffic. Sports and Weather. These were his acid terms
for the life he’d left behind, more than two years of living with
the tight minds that made the war. It was all background noise,
he said, waving a hand. He liked to wave a hand in dismissal.”

— DeLillo, Don (2010-02-02), Point Omega 

Send in the Clowns.   (Click to enlarge.)

The above flashback was suggested by Lev Grossman’s verb “trafficked”
in yesterday’s posts, and by the song lyric “show us the way to
the next little girl.”

Review of DeLillo's novel Point Omega—

"One difference between art and entertainment has to do with the speed of perception. Art deliberately slows and complicates reading, hearing, and/or viewing so that you’re challenged to re-think and re-feel form and experience. Entertainment deliberately accelerates and simplifies them so that you don’t have to think about or feel very much of anything at all except, perhaps, the adrenalin rush before dazzling spectacle. Although, of course, there can be myriad gradations between the former and latter, in their starkest articulation we’re talking about the distance between, say, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest  and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol…."

— Lance Olsen, March 1, 2010, in The Quarterly Conversation

Robert Hughes on fast and slow art—

"We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media. For no spiritually authentic art can beat mass media at their own game."

– Speech of June 1, 2004

Log24 on art speeds—

A Study in Art Education (June 15, 2007)

Twenty-four (March 13, 2011)

From this evening's online New York Times—

See also Don DeLillo's Point Omega , a novel published on Groundhog Day, 2010.

In the Details

This afternoon's post, Point Omega continued, concerned the New York Lottery numbers for yesterday evening and midday today.

A footnote to that post—

Today's evening New York Lottery number was 664.

In the spirit of the theological content of this afternoon's post—

Today's evening NY number 664 may or may not refer to the year of the Synod of Whitby.

That Synod was about reconciling the customs of Rome with the customs of Iona.

A somewhat relevant link from the Language Game post referred to in this afternoon's post was on the word "selving." This link, now broken, referred to a paper hosted by, as it happens, Iona College. The following is a link to a cached copy of that paper—

"The Story of the Self: The Self of the Story," by James E. Giles (Religion and Intellectual Life, Fall 1986— Volume 4, Number 1, pages 105-112)