Sunday Best: The link Sunday Art from the previous post.
Sunday Bester: The author Alfred Bester in this journal.
Sunday, September 1, 2024
Wednesday, July 6, 2022
In memory of Alfred Bester, author of The Deceivers:
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Tuesday, December 8, 2020
Best Meets Bester
The New York Times online today —
Menu bar above a book review: “The Best of 2020.”
Alfred Bester —
Related search results —
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Wednesday, July 3, 2019
Monday, March 9, 2026
Like Decorations for Wallace Stevens
"Seven out of seven days I'm needin' you
You bring life to the party
(Ooh, ah-ha, ooh, ah-ha-ha)"
"The Esper party began . . ." —
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Life of the Party From Stephen King's Dreamcatcher :
From Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man :
From Anne McCaffrey's To Ride Pegasus :
"… it's going to be accomplished in steps, this |
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Friday, October 31, 2025
Undercroft* with Shadow**
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Thursday, September 5, 2024
Folie à Trois: Spanish Steps in Times Square
See as well Nabokov and Gibson on synesthesia.
"A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction . . . " — Wallace Stevens
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Sunday, September 1, 2024
Strip Joints
From the previous post's search for Bester . . .
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See also "Strip Mathematics," by Zoltan Dienes —
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Strip joints I prefer . . .
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Saturday, May 18, 2024
Patriarchal Elegy: Drei Ecken
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Thursday, December 7, 2023
Tuesday, December 14, 2021
The Illustrator
This post was suggested by Chapter Two, "The Sprite and the Synergist,"
of Alfred Bester's The Deceivers , and by . . .
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Tuesday, September 28, 2021
In Search of Hauora
Compare and contrast with —
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Related material: Mel Bochner and Carnegie-Mellon.
Alfred Bester fans may also enjoy more
damned confusion from Dan Brown —
(Not to be confused with Gully Foyle .)
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Wednesday, September 1, 2021
Obiter Dicta
The title is a phrase from Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word —
"the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta ,
the words in passing, that give the game away"
The President on July 23, per USA TODAY —
"And there’s a need, whether it is true or not,
there is a need to project a different picture."
Related material —
EVERY LAST EASTER EGG AND REFERENCE
IN EPISODE 6 OF HBO'S WATCHMEN .
Wikipedia — "For the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards,
Damon Lindelof and Cord Jefferson won the award
for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie,
or Dramatic Special for this episode."
See also . . . The Bard of Teaneck —
"What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973?
He would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound,
nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring
the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride,
vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of love.
Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks."
— Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post,
Sunday, Oct. 2, 2005
Weingarten's remarks were quoted here on that Sunday, along with
the following illustration —
Spear Daddy!
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Sunday, May 9, 2021
Bounty Hunter: Q is for Quality
The Nation (May 7) on Larry McMurtry's bookstore —
"It was as if a tornado had swept up Charing Cross Road
and plopped it down next to a rural Dairy Queen."
Or swept up Buckingham Palace and . . .
Related philosophy —
And . . .
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Wednesday, January 13, 2021
What’s in a name?
” ‘The Maori named him Rog,’ Yael continued,
‘because those were the only I.D. letters that could
be made out on the wreck.’ ”
— Alfred Bester, The Deceivers
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Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Japanese Bed*
The reported death on Monday of the Random House editor of the 1996
book Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics suggests a search in this journal
for "primary colors." From that search, some non-political quotations —
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From “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” by Wallace Stevens:“The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: ‘I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall’ or ‘Planes in color. . . . The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.’ The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: ‘But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.’ Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less.”
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* Title suggested in part by Monday evening's post Annals of Artspeak
and the related Microsoft lockscreen photo credit —
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Thursday, August 20, 2020
Milking the Sixteenths
“In the main belly cabin he discovered the reason
for the tropical heat; a naked woman was sweating
and swearing over the maintenance gear surrounding
a transparent incubator. She was tinkering and crawling
over and under the complications like an octopus.
It was his assistant, Dr. Cluny Decco, and Krupp had
never seen her nude before, but his controlled voice
did not betray his delighted amazement.”
— Alfred Bester, The Deceivers . Kindle Edition.
From a post, Dharma Fabric , of January 7, 2020 —
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Monday, January 13, 2020
Abandoned Norwegian Space Vessel
"… an abandoned Norwegian space vessel" is a phrase from
a review of the recent film "Ad Astra."
Related material — Bester's "The Stars My Destination."
Book cover (adapted) —
See also the previous post.
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Monday, December 9, 2019
Plan 9 from Deep Space
A search for "deep space" in this journal yields
the following meditation:
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Alfred Bester, Tiger! Tiger!:
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Monday, November 25, 2019
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Social Logic
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Friday, March 10, 2017
The Transformers
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Wednesday, August 14, 2019
The Mask of Zero
For the title, see Zero: Both Real and Imaginary (a Log24 search).
The title was suggested by the previous post, by Zorro Ranch,
by the classic 1967 film The Producers , and by . . .
Related material —
Vanity Fair on Sept. 8, 2017, celebrated the young actress
who played Beverly Marsh in the 2017 film version of
Stephen King's IT . See a post from her 12th birthday —
"Winter's Game" — that touches upon Maori themes.
More generally, see Bester + Deceivers in this journal.
And for the Church of Synchronology . . .
See posts related to the above Vanity Fair date.
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Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Word Magic
"Business-wise, Magic is working—Bloomberg reported
that the game brought in $500 million in revenue last year.
Hasbro owns Monopoly and Scrabble, but Magic is its top
game brand. . . .
The idea of using a card mechanic to generate story has
precedent—the Italian postmodern writer Italo Calvino
generated an entire novel based on drawing from a
tarot card deck. Games provide frameworks that miniaturize
and represent idealized realities; so do narratives."
— Adam Rogers, Sunday, July 21, 2019, at Wired
"The Esper party began . . ." —
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Life of the Party From Stephen King's Dreamcatcher :
From Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man :
From Anne McCaffrey's To Ride Pegasus :
"… it's going to be accomplished in steps, this |
Adam Rogers at Wired as quoted above —
"The idea of using a card mechanic to generate story
has precedent. . . ."
See The Greater Trumps .
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Sunday, July 7, 2019
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Cube Geometry Continues.
An illustration from the April 20, 2016, post
Symmetric Generation of a Simple Group —
"The geometry of unit cubes is a meeting point
of several different subjects in mathematics."
— Chuanming Zong, Bulletin of the American
Mathematical Society , January 2005
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Friday, March 10, 2017
The Transformers
"The transformed urban interior is the spatial organisation of
an achiever, one who has crossed the class divide and who uses
space to express his membership of, not aspirations towards,
an ascendant class in our society: the class of those people who
earn their living by transformation— as opposed to the mere
reproduction— of symbols, such as writers, designers, and
academics"
— The Social Logic of Space ,
by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson,
Cambridge University Press, 1984
For another perspective on the achievers, see The Deceivers .
Related material —
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Exhibit C:
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Tuesday, September 6, 2016
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Purple Requiem
See as well "The Stars My Destination" in this journal.
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The Alchemist’s Chessboard
Material related to the previous post and to Alfred Bester's
1981 followup to The Stars My Destination titled The Deceivers —
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The Lapis Philosophorum :
"The lapis was thought of as a unity and therefore often stands for the prima materia in general."
"Its discoverer was of the opinion that he had produced the equivalent of the primordial protomatter which exploded into the Universe." And from Bester's The Deceivers : Meta Physics "'… Think of a match. You've got a chemical head of potash, antimony, and stuff, full of energy waiting to be released. Friction does it. But when Meta excites and releases energy, it's like a stick of dynamite compared to a match. It's the chess legend for real.' 'I don't know it.' 'Oh, the story goes that a philosopher invented chess for the amusement of an Indian rajah. The king was so delighted that he told the inventor to name his reward and he'd get it, no matter what. The philosopher asked that one grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on to the sixty-fourth.' 'That doesn't sound like much.'" Related material : |
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Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Symmetric Generation of a Simple Group
The reference in the previous post to the work of Guitart and
The Road to Universal Logic suggests a fiction involving
the symmetric generation of the simple group of order 168.
See The Diamond Archetype and a fictional account of the road to Hell …
The cover illustration below has been adapted to
replace the flames of PyrE with the eightfold cube.
For related symmetric generation of a much larger group, see Solomon's Cube.
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