Log24

Friday, February 17, 2017

The Unreliable Reader

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:21 pm

Continued from "Religion at Harvard,"  May 7, 2010 —

The Unreliable Narrator meets The Unreliable Reader
Aaron Diaz at Dresden Codak

"The warnings come after  the spells." — Doctor Strange

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Burt’s Obit

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:44 am

It is false that "Mr. Shavitz sold his company… for about
$925 million."  The New York Times  seems to have
hired a Harvard unreliable reader. Also, following limited
prosperity, he no longer lived in a "converted turkey coop,"
though the coop remained on his property, according to
an Associated Press obit.

Friday, June 6, 2014

ART WARS: Fundamentals of Design

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:15 pm

Thanks to the Museum of Modern Art for pointing out
a new emphasis on design  in U.S. Army Field Manual 5-0.
MoMA supplies a link to an article from May 3, 2010:

Design Thinking Comes to the U.S. Army.

An excerpt from the manual:

An approach to this text by Harvard's legendary "unreliable reader"—

The Unreliable Narrator meets The Unreliable Reader
Aaron Diaz at Dresden Codak

"The risks multiply, especially when a problem involves 26 March 2010…."

Friday, May 7, 2010

Religion at Harvard —

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:01 pm

The Unreliable Narrator Meets the Unreliable Reader

The Unreliable Narrator meets The Unreliable Reader
Aaron Diaz at Dresden Codak

Comment by John Farrier on a list of 42 contrived plot devices
"My favorite is the Unreliable Reader — a counterpart to the Unreliable Narrator."

Vladimir Nabokov — "Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge."

  • Harvard Registrar's Office
    2010 Spring Reading Period Ends–  May 6 (Th).
     
  • Press release about a Harvard Square event at 7 PM Thursday —

    "Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome religion scholar and bestselling author STEPHEN PROTHERO for a conversation about his new book, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—And Why Their Differences Matter." ….

    Prothero's book avoids "the naive equating of them all as merely different paths to the same summit."
     

  • Harvard Crimson photo caption today —

    "Religion scholar and bestselling author Stephen Prothero speaks at the Harvard Book Store last night about his new book 'God Is Not One' in which he seeks to demonstrate how differences in paths leading to the same destination can enrich, not prevent, dialogue and cooperation."

Monday, March 31, 2014

The Story of Noam

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

On The Blazing World , a new novel —

“Hustvedt uses fragment-stories, frame narratives, and unreliable
narrators to talk about the ways in which brilliant women across
history have been silenced, forgotten, and appropriated by men.
This is a narrative suspicious of narratives, a story that
demonstrates how damaging stories can be.”

— Review by Amal El-Mohtar

The protagonist of Hustvedt’s novel is named Harriet Burden.

A midrash for Darren Aronofsky, director of The Fountain*  and Noah

Part I: The Burden of Proof —

Part II: The Story of Noam

* See The Fountain  in “The Story Theory of Truth,” Columbus Day, 2013

Monday, September 2, 2013

Analogy

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:30 pm

From The New York Times Sunday Book Review  of Sept. 1, 2013—

THE GAMAL
By Ciaran Collins
Illustrated. 469 pp. Bloomsbury. Paper, $17.

Reviewed by Katharine Weber

Ten years ago, when Mark Haddon’s “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” turned up on the best-seller list and won a number of literary awards, the novel’s autistic narrator beguiled readers with his unconventional point of view. Today, even as controversy surrounds the revised classification of autism in the latest version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the quirky yet remarkably perceptive points of view of autistic narrators have become increasingly familiar in every category of fiction, from young adult to science fiction to popular and literary fiction.

Like Haddon’s Christopher Boone, the narrator of Ciaran Collins’s remarkable first novel, “The Gamal,” has been encouraged by a mental health professional to write his story for therapeutic purposes. Charlie McCarthy, 25, is known in the West Cork village of Ballyronan as “the gamal,” short for “gamalog,” a term for a fool or simpleton rarely heard beyond the Gaeltacht regions of Ireland. He is in fact a savant, a sensitive oddball whose cheeky, strange, defiant and witty monologue is as disturbing as it is dazzling. …

The Gamal  features a considerable variety of music. See details at a music weblog.

This, together with the narrator's encouragement "by a mental health professional
to write his story for therapeutic purposes" might interest Baz Luhrmann.

See Luhrmann's recent film "The Great Gatsby," with its portrait of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's narrator, and thus Fitzgerald himself, as a sensitive looney.

The Carraway-Daisy-Gatsby trio has a parallel in The Gamal .  (Again, see
the music weblog's description.)  

The Times  reviewer's concluding remarks on truth, lies, and unreliable autistic
narrators may interest some mathematicians. From an Aug. 29 post

IMAGE- Barry Mazur: 'A good story is an end in itself.'

A different gamalog ,  a website in Mexico, is not entirely unrelated to
issues of lies and truth—

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Infinite Jest

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 pm

Leg-Pulling

Jim Holt, review of David Foster Wallace's book on infinity 'Everything and More'

Michael Harris in AMS Notices suggests David Foster Wallace may be pulling our legs in 'Everything and More'

"… to make the author manifestly unreliable"

Not to mention the reader.

Famous author hangs himself in the 2005 film 'Neverwas'

Related material —

But seriously…

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