Log24

"Show me all  the Natalie Portmans!"

From an article on cybersecurity in today's new New Yorker —

Boback and Hopkins formed a corporation.
Hopkins came up with its name, Tiversa ,
a portmanteau of “time” and “universe.”
It was also an anagram of veritas :  Latin for
“truth,” but scrambled.

Then there is …
vastier veritas —

A problem not only at Harvard.

For instance… A Hollywood anticlerical classic:

Schoolgirl Problem —

In her new spiritual memoir . . . .

Armies of the Night —

Armies of the Day —

Cole Porter —

Night and Day —

This year's Class Day speaker at Harvard
will be Natalie Portman.

Related material:

See also the link to Preoccupied  from Sunday—

"The Cardinal seemed a little preoccupied today."

"A friend asked why I am saying kaddish.
 A good question."

— Kaddish , by Leon Wieseltier, Chapter One

Scarlett Johansson
and Natalie Portman

See Scarlett in Lucy …

Barry Rudd at the end of John Hersey's
1960 novel The Child Buyer :

"Fascinating to be a specimen,
truly fascinating.  Do you suppose
I really can develop an I.Q. of
over a thousand?"

… and Natalie in Black Swan .

Midrash :

December 2, 2014

• "12:30 pm we leave for the historic
  Princeton Cemetery on Witherspoon and
  Paul Robson Streets to assemble for
  a service and burial at 2:00 pm."

McGee Thanks the Academy:

“The ulterior motive behind this essay [“Reading Authority,” above], the purpose for which I seize this occasion, concerns the question or problem of authority. I stress at the outset my understanding of authority as the constructed repository of value or foundation of a system of values, the final effect of fetishism– in this case, literary fetishism. [Cf. Marx, Das Kapital] Reading– as in the phrase ‘reading authority’– should be grasped as the institutionally determined act of constructing authority….”

Wikipedia:

“[In Peter Pan] Smee is Captain Hook’s right-hand man… Barrie describes him as ‘Irish’ and ‘a man who stabbed without offence‘….”

Background: In yesterday’s morning entry, James Joyce as Jesuit, with “Dagger Definitions.”

A different Smee appears as an art critic in yesterday’s afternoon entry “Design Theory.”–

Smee Stabs Without Offence:

“Brock, who has a brisk mind, is a man on a mission. He read mathematical economics and political philosophy at Princeton (he has five degrees in all) and is the founder and president of Strategic Economic Decisions Inc., a think tank specializing in applying the economics of uncertainty to forecasting and risk assessment.

But phooey to all that; Brock has deeper things to think about. He believes he has cracked the secret of beautiful design. He even has equations and graphs to prove it.”

A Jesuit in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question?”

Beckett Bethicketted:

“Our entanglement in the wilderness of Finnegans Wake is exemplified by the neologism ‘Bethicket.’ This word condenses a range of possible meanings and reinforces a diversity of possible syntactic interpretations. Joyce seems to allude to Beckett, creating a portmanteau word that melds ‘Beckett’ with ‘thicket’ (continuing the undergrowth metaphor), ‘thick’ (adding mental density to floral density)…. As a single word ‘Bethicket’ contains the confusion that its context suggests. On the one hand, ‘Bethicket me for a stump of a beech’ has the sound of a proverbial expletive that might mean something like ‘I’ll be damned’ or ‘Well, I’ll be a son of a gun.’….”

— Stephen Dilks

At the Oscars, 2009

Related material:

Frame Tales and Dickung