Golin and the Stone  continues.

"If this weren't a public situation, I'd be tempted to get into this on a
psychiatric level." — Christopher Alexander to Peter Eisenman, 1982

Scene from the sequel to Unbreakable  and Split  —

Not to mention elevation .

On the new Netflix series "Maniac" —

(Spoiler alert)

"The treatment Owen and Annie sign up for promises to fix
its subjects’ brains with just three little pills—A, B, and C—
administered one after another over the span of three days.
The first forces you to relive your trauma;
the second exposes your blind spots; and
the third pill forces a confrontation."

— Kara Weisenstein at vice.com, Sept. 26, 2018, 12:19 PM

See also, from Log24 earlier …

A.  Monday — Mathematics as Art
B.  Tuesday — Trinity and Denkraum  Revisited
C.  Wednesday — Trinity Tale

of  Woody Allen's  philosopher …

"Deadline reports that Stone is finalizing a deal
to star in Maniac , a 30-minute television series with
her former Superbad  castmate Jonah Hill.
The project, a dark comedy, will be directed by 
True Detective  alum Cary Fukunaga and is based
on a 2014 Norwegian series about a mental-institution
patient living out a fantasy life in his dreams."

— Vanity Fair  today

See as well the previous post and Jews Telling Stories.

Update of 11:07 PM ET —

From Variety  today — "Hill and Stone would also make their
TV producing debut as the two stars are attached to exec produce
with … Anonymous Content’s Michael Sugar and Doug Wald …."

"The problem is having a solid business plan and knowing what
you're doing, whether it's a movie, a TV series or a company."
— Steve Golin in The Hollywood Reporter , Sept. 4, 2013

Peter Schjeldahl in the current (Dec. 14) New Yorker :

The phrase “outsider art” was coined in 1972 by a
British art historian, Roger Cardinal, to translate
the sense of “art brut ,” which Dubuffet had
considered rendering as art “raw,” “uncouth,” “crude,”
or “in the rough.” But the term misses the full thrust
of Dubuffet’s elevation of “people uncontaminated
by artistic culture,” as he called them. He aspired not
to make outsiders respectable but to destroy the
complacency of insiders. He disqualified even tribal
and folk artists, and spirited amateurs like Henri
Rousseau, for being captive to one tradition or another.
Art brut  must be sui generis, from the hands and minds
of “unique, hypersensitive men, maniacs, visionaries,
builders of strange myths.”

The literary  art of Fritz Leiber and Stephen King seems to
fit this definition.

Somewhat less brut — the literary art of Plato.

A non-literary illustration:

  Time as "a moving
   image of eternity.”
       — Plato   

A sermon for the father of Kal-El.
See also related material in this journal
on Vegas and on Maniacs.

Bond

USA Today on last night’s White House dinner:

“In his toast, Bush said the royal visit was ‘a reminder of the unique and enduring bond’ between the two countries.”

The New York Lottery evening number
for All Souls’ Day, Nov. 2, 2005, was

007.

Related material:

Entries for Nov. 1, 2005 and
the song Planned Obsolescence
by the 10,000 Maniacs

(Hope Chest:
The Fredonia Recordings)

Skeptics’ Anniversary

From AP’s “Today in History” for Oct. 28:

“On this date:
In 1636, Harvard College was founded in Massachusetts.”

In the spring of 1960, Harvard sent to all incoming freshmen a reading list consisting, as I recall, of two books:

1.  Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, by Martin Gardner (Dover, 1957), and

2.  A book on evolution, whose title I do not recall.  Perhaps it was Apes, Angels, and Victorians, by William Irvine (McGraw-Hill, 1955).

I found in later years that Gardner was not to be trusted (certainly not on the subject of mathematics– he never had even one college course in the subject). Darwin, however, still seems eminently reasonable.

For my own views on the religion of Scientism advocated by many at Harvard and by those who admire Gardner, see

For a musical version of some related views, see

For an update on the religion of Scientism, see yesterday’s Newsday:

The word “nonreligious” here should,  since Scientism itself amounts to a religion, be viewed with a great deal of skepticism.

Fountainhead

Dominique and
Dominique

Center of Time

“The old man of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ imagined the city’s power as being able to ‘gather’ him into ‘the artifice of eternity’— presumably into ‘monuments of unageing intellect,’ immortal and changeless structures representative of or embodying all knowledge, linked like a perfect machine at the center of time.”

— Karl Parker, Yeats’ Two Byzantiums 

“I wrote Fermata listening to Suzanne Vega, particularly her album ‘99.9° F.’  It affected my mood in just the right way. I found a kind of maniacal intensity in her music that helped me as I typed. So if Fermata is attacked, maybe I can say i’m not responsible because I was under the spell of Suzanne Vega.”

— Nicholson Baker, interview

For some real monuments of unageing intellect, see “Geometrie” in the weblog of Andrea for February 10, 2003.