Continued from "Religion at Harvard," May 7, 2010 —
"The warnings come after the spells." — Doctor Strange
Friday, February 17, 2017
Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Burt’s Obit
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.
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Friday, June 6, 2014
ART WARS: Fundamentals of Design
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 risks multiply, especially when a problem involves 26 March 2010…."
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Friday, May 7, 2010
Religion at Harvard —
The Unreliable Narrator Meets the Unreliable Reader
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."
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Monday, March 31, 2014
The Story of Noam
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
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Monday, September 2, 2013
Analogy
From The New York Times Sunday Book Review of Sept. 1, 2013—
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THE GAMAL 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—
A different gamalog , a website in Mexico, is not entirely unrelated to
issues of lies and truth—
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Thursday, May 6, 2010
Infinite Jest
Leg-Pulling
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"… to make the author manifestly unreliable"
Not to mention the reader.
Related material —
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