(The title is from a work by Charles Sanders Peirce.)
For LYNX 760 —
For more beauty and strangeness, see Strange McEntire.
Friday, March 28, 2014
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
“Great Unconscious Gravity” *
"Right through hell there is a path" — Malcolm Lowry
An illustration from a post of April 13, 2009 —
That date was suggested by . . .
The "Amen Corner" tune was suggested by the life of
a Bee Gees drummer who died recently, by the title of
a book he wrote — You Should Be Dancing — and by
a scene (S1E2) in the Max miniseries "The Penguin" —
"Shit like this, the pain of it, you gotta be careful…
'cause it'll eat you alive if you let it.
It's a helluva lot more fun to dance."
* Phrase from a passage by Chesterton that led, in a
post of April 13, 2009, to the above image of Reba.
Saturday, May 9, 2020
Quicksilver* Meditation
Suggested by the previous post —
| Tom Lamont in The Economist , June/July 2020 —
Recently, I saw that a person called Celine in San Francisco had tweeted to her 2,500-odd followers about the difficulty of “trying to date SF guys in between their week-long meditation retreats, Tahoe weekends, month-long remote work sessions…” About 4,000 people tapped to endorse the sentiment, launching Celine onto an exponential number of strangers’ screens, including my own. The default sound for any new tweet is a whistle, somewhere between a neighbourly “yoo-hoo” and a dog-walker’s call to heel. |
“Everybody, here comes the life of the party
Everybody, here comes the life of the party, yeah, she is.”
Songwriters: Ben Hayslip / Rhett Akins / Jason Sellers
See as well Life of the Party in this journal.
Synchronologists may consult posts of March 2015.
* ” This was Language herself , as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding
out of the molten quicksilver of the first star called Mercury on Earth,
but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.” ― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength .
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Sunday, June 28, 2009
Sunday June 28, 2009
Sunday Jews
by Hortense Calisher*
by Hortense Calisher*
“Sunday Jews … [2002] explores issues of identity in an eclectic family, which includes an art expert, an atheistic rabbi, an anthropologist, and an agnostic Irish Catholic.” —Encyclopaedia Britannica
One definition
of “uh”–
For some background,
see Jefferson’s Birthday.
One definition
of “uh”–
Strange Bedfellows:
For some background,
see Jefferson’s Birthday.
* Pictured next to John Updike
in “Multimedia” at the top of
today’s NY Times obituaries
(pdf, 1 megabyte).
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Monday, April 13, 2009
Monday April 13, 2009
Happy Ending
For the birthday of
red-haired revolutionary
Thomas Jefferson
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Friday, July 9, 2004
Friday July 9, 2004
Scoop
This afternoon I came across, in a briefcase I seldom use, two books I had not looked at since I bought them last month:
- The Footprints of God, a recently published paperback by Greg Iles, a writer who graduated from Trinity High School, Natchez, Mississippi, in 1979, and from the University of Mississippi in Oxford in 1983.
- Sanctuary, by the better-known Mississippi writer William Faulkner.
At the time I purchased the books, indeed until I looked up Iles on the Web today, I was not aware of the Mississippi connection. Their physical connection, lying together today in my briefcase, is, of course, purely coincidental. My view of coincidence is close to that of Arthur Koestler, who wrote The Challenge of Chance and The Roots of Coincidence, and to that of Loren Eiseley, who wrote of a dice game and of "the Other Player" in his autobiography, All the Strange Hours.
A Log24 entry yesterday referred to a comedic novel on the role of chance in physics, Cosmic Banditos. Today's New York Times quotes an entertainer who referred to President Bush yesterday, at a political fund-raiser, as a bandito. Another coincidence… this one related directly to the philosophy of coincidences expounded jokingly in Cosmic Banditos.
I draw no conclusions from such coincidences, but they do inspire me to look a little deeper into life's details — where, some say, God is. Free association on these details, together with a passage in Sanctuary, inspired the following collage:
Related Texts
Faulkner on a trinity of women
in Sanctuary (Ch. 25):
"Miss Reba emerged from behind the screen with three glasses of gin. 'This'll put some heart into us,' she said. 'We're setting here like three old sick cats.' They bowed formally and drank, patting their lips. Then they began to talk. They were all talking at once,* again in half-completed sentences, but without pauses for agreement or affirmation."
"In Defense of the Brand":
"In Defense of the Brand":
"When I was helping Frito corn chips expand its core user group in the mid-'90s, we didn't ask Frito-Lay to just wave the Fritos banner. The brand was elevated to a place where it could address its core users in a way that was relevant to their lifestyle. We took the profile of the audience and created a campaign starring Reba McEntire. It captured the brand's essence, and set Frito eaters amidst good music, good people, and good fun."
Song lyric, Reba McEntire:
"I might have been born
just plain white trash,
but Fancy was my name."
just plain white trash,
but Fancy was my name."
Loren Eiseley,
Notes of an Alchemist:
I never found
the hole in the wall;
I never found
Pancho Villa country
where you see the enemy first.
— "The Invisible Horseman"
* A significant phrase. See