Plan 9 Continues:
Monday, July 25, 2022
Wednesday, July 13, 2022
A New Yorker Child’s Progress
A New Yorker writer on why he wanted to
learn mathematics at an advanced age —
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"The challenge, of course, especially in light of the collapsing horizon, since I was sixty-five when I started. Also, I wanted especially to study calculus because I never had. I didn’t even know what it was—I quit math after feeling that with Algebra II I had pressed my luck as far as I dared. Moreover, I wanted to study calculus because Amie told me that when she was a girl William Maxwell had asked her what she was studying, and when she said calculus he said, 'I loved calculus.' Maxwell would have been about the age I am now. He would have recently retired after forty years as an editor of fiction at The New Yorker , where he had handled such writers as Vladimir Nabokov, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, John Updike, Shirley Hazzard, and J. D. Salinger. When Salinger finished Catcher in the Rye , he drove to the Maxwells’ country house and read it to them on their porch. I grew up in a house on the same country road that Maxwell and his wife, Emily, lived on, and Maxwell was my father’s closest friend."
— Wilkinson, Alec. A Divine Language (p. 5). Published |
See as well two versions of
a very short story, "Turning Nine."
Wilkinson's title is of course deplorable.
Related material: "Night Hunt" in a
Log24 search for the phrase "Good Question."
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Tuesday, March 9, 2021
Alternate Past: LA/91506
(Title suggested by the beanie label "Alternate Future: NYC/10001")
A version of the Salinger story title "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" —
"… her mouth is red and large, with Disney overtones. But it is her eyes,
a pale green of surprising intensity, that hold me."
— Violet Henderson in Vogue , 30 August 2017
See also that date in this journal.
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Friday, April 6, 2018
Watching the Zero
From "The Blacklist" Season 5, Episode 11 —
– Remind me again what it is that we think we're doing here.
– The phone acts as a passive packet sniffer.
It's a trick Tom taught me.
– Packet sniffer? Ugh.
– The FBI uses them.
I'm sure your tech people know all about them.
It can intercept and log traffic that passes over a digital network.
– It is an absolute mystery to me how these gadgets work —
the Dick Tracy phones, these blueteeth connections.
Quite frankly, I miss the rotary phone.
Except for that zero.
Watching that zero crawl back.
Oh, my God.
It was painful.
– We have the code.
– Great.
And more:
Philip J. Davis reportedly turned 86 on January 2, 2009.
An image from this journal on that date —
“You have the incorrect number.
I will tell you what you are doing:
you are turning the letter O
instead of the zero.”
— "Symbols and Signs,"
Vladimir Nabokov, 1948
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Friday, January 2, 2009
Friday January 2, 2009
Signs and Symbols
continued…
from the five entries
ending on June 3, 2008
and from yesterday,
New Year's Day
The end of a story by Vladimir Nabokov in The New Yorker of May 15, 1948:
"You have the incorrect number. I will tell you what you are doing: you are turning the letter O instead of the zero."
They sat down to their unexpected festive midnight tea. The birthday present stood on the table. He sipped noisily; his face was flushed; every now and then he imparted a circular motion to his raised glass so as to make the sugar dissolve more thoroughly. The vein on the side of his bald head where there was a large birthmark stood out conspicuously and, although he had shaved that morning, a silvery bristle showed on his chin. While she poured him another glass of tea, he put on his spectacles and re-examined with pleasure the luminous yellow, green, red little jars. His clumsy moist lips spelled out their eloquent labels: apricot, grape, beech plum, quince. He had got to crab apple, when the telephone rang again.
Click for details.
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