… And then there is Gresham College —
Film script adapted from the Gresham novel Nightmare Alley —
Update of 4:04 PM ET —
Friday, April 7, 2023
Friday, January 13, 2023
LMS Gresham
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Posted on 13/01/2023 by Peter Cameron My last major job at Queen Mary University of London more than ten years ago was designing and presenting a new first-semester first-year module to be taken by all students on mathematics programmes or joint programmes involving mathematics. I discussed it in my LMS-Gresham lecture. |
LMS
Gresham
"… seeds having fallen on barren rock, as it were" . . .
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Friday, November 1, 2019
Hofstadter’s Shadowland
“… I realized that to me,
Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows
cast in different directions by
some central solid essence.
I tried to reconstruct
the central object, and
came up with this book.”
See also a search for Gresham Alley.
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Saturday, March 31, 2018
Illusion
“The greatest obstacle to discovery
is not ignorance —
it is the illusion of knowledge.”
— Daniel J. Boorstin,
Librarian of Congress,
quoted here in 2006.
Related material —
Remarks on Rubik’s Cube from June 13, 2014 and . . .
See as well a different Gresham, author of Nightmare Alley ,
and Log24 posts on that book and the film of the same name .
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Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Raiders of the Lost Images
On the recent film "Justice League" —
From DC Extended Universe Wiki, "Mother Box" —
"However, during World War I, the British rediscovered
mankind's lost Mother Box. They conducted numerous studies
but were unable to date it due to its age. The Box was then
shelved in an archive, up until the night Superman died,
where it was then sent to Doctor Silas Stone, who
recognized it as a perpetual energy matrix. . . ." [Link added.]
The cube shape of the lost Mother Box, also known as the
Change Engine, is shared by the Stone in a novel by Charles Williams,
Many Dimensions . See the Solomon's Cube webpage.
See too the matrix of Claude Lévi-Strauss in posts tagged
Verwandlungslehre .
Some literary background:
Who speaks in primordial images speaks to us
as with a thousand trumpets, he grips and overpowers,
and at the same time he elevates that which he treats
out of the individual and transitory into the sphere of
the eternal. — C. G. JUNG
"In the conscious use of primordial images—
the archetypes of thought—
one modern novelist stands out as adept and
grand master: Charles Williams.
In The Place of the Lion he incarnates Plato’s
celestial archetypes with hair-raising plausibility.
In Many Dimensions he brings a flock of ordinary
mortals face to face with the stone bearing
the Tetragrammaton, the Divine Name, the sign of Four.
Whether we understand every line of a Williams novel
or not, we feel something deep inside us quicken
as Williams tells the tale.
Here, in The Greater Trumps , he has turned to
one of the prime mysteries of earth . . . ."
— William Lindsay Gresham, Preface (1950) to
Charles Williams's The Greater Trumps (1932)
For fans of what the recent series Westworld called "bulk apperception" —
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Saturday, December 21, 2002
Saturday December 21, 2002
Nightmare Alley
Tonight’s site music in the garden of good and evil is “Hooray for Hollywood,” with lyrics by Johnny Mercer:
Hooray for Hollywood.
You may be homely in your neighborhood,
But if you think you can be an actor,
see Mr. Factor,
he’d make a monkey look good.
Within a half an hour,
you look like Tyrone Power!
Hooray for Hollywood!
From Pif magazine:
Nightmare Alley (1947)
Directed by Edmund Goulding
Reviewed by Nick Burton
“Edmund Goulding’s film of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel Nightmare Alley may just be the great forgotten American film; it is certainly the darkest film that came from the Hollywood studio system in the ’40s….
A never better Tyrone Power stars as Stan Carlisle, a small-time carny shill…. Stan shills for mind reader Zeena…. The… pretty ‘electric girl’… tells Stan that Zeena… had a ‘code’ for the mind-reading act… Stan… decides to seduce… Zeena in hopes of luring the code from her.”
The rest of this review is well worth reading, though less relevant to my present theme — that of my
which points out that the article on “nothing” is on page 265 of The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. (This is also the theme of yesterday’s journal entry “Last-Minute Shopping.”) Here is another work that prominently features “nothing” on page 265… As it happens, this is a web page describing a mind-reading act, titled simply
“Imagine this: A spectator is invited to take a readable and 100% examinable, 400 page, 160,000 word novel, open it to any page and think of any word on that page. Without touching the book or approaching the spectator, you reveal the word in the simplest, most startlingly direct manner ever! It truly must be seen to be believed.
The ultimate any-word-on-any-page method that makes all other book tests obsolete….
All pages are different.
Nothing is written down.
There are no stooges of any kind. Everything may be examined….
‘Throw away your Key. This is direct mindreading at its best.'”
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From Finnegans Wake, page 265: “…the winnerful wonnerful wanders off, with hedges of ivy and |
Hooray.
Mercer’s lyrics are from the 1937 film
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