Related material: Vonnegut’s Star.
Saturday, August 15, 2020
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Montana Wildhack
"On Tralfamadore, Billy is put in a transparent geodesic dome
exhibit in a zoo; the dome represents a house on Earth.
The Tralfamadorians later abduct a movie star named
Montana Wildhack, who had disappeared and was believed to
have drowned herself in the Pacific Ocean. They intend to
have her mate with Billy." — Wikipedia on Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse-Five .
See also the previous post and (from Log24 on Jan. 22) "Hollywood Moment" …
Comments Off on Montana Wildhack
Sunday, December 13, 2015
Another Opening, Another Show
Ben Brantley in tonight's online review of a show that
reportedly opened off-Broadway on Dec. 10, 2015 —
" 'Mattress' has its charms, but they do wear thin. "
See also The New York Times on Martin Gardner Nov. 30:
A companion image from this journal
on the "Mattress" opening date —
Midrash:
Vonnegut Asterisk
Comments Off on Another Opening, Another Show
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Packed
Significant Passage:
On the Writing Style of Visual Thinkers
"The words are filled with unstated meaning.
They are (the term is Ricoeur's) 'packed'
and need unpacking." —Gerald Grow
From the date of Ricoeur's death,
May 20, 2005—
“Plato’s most significant passage
may be found in Phaedrus 265b…."
|
With a little effort, cross-referenced." — Opening sentence
|
Mozart's K 265 is variations on the theme
now known as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."
For darker variations on the Twinkle theme,
see the film "Joshua" and Martin Gardner's
Annotated Alice (Norton, 2000, pp. 73-75).
For darker variations on the asterisk theme,
see Darkness Visible (May 25)
and Vonnegut's Asterisk.
Comments Off on Packed
Friday, February 12, 2010
Capital E
Where Entertainment is God, continued—
The following paragraphs are from a review by Piotr Siemion of Infinite Jest, a novel by David Foster Wallace. Illustrations have been added.
"Wallace was somehow able to twist together three yarns…. …there's a J.D Salinger for those who like J.D. Salinger. There's William Burroughs for those hardy souls who like some kick in their prose. And there's a dash of Kurt Vonnegut too. All three voices, though, are amplified in Infinite Jest beyond mere distortion and then projected onto Wallace's peculiar own three-ring circus….
… there's entertainment. Make it a capital E.
Illustration by Clint Eastwood
from Log24 post "E is for Everlast"
Infinite Jest revolves, among its many gyrations, around the story of the Entertainment, a film-like creation going by the title of 'Infinite Jest' and created shortly before his suicidal death by the young tennis star's father. The Entertainment's copies are now being disseminated clandestinely all over Wallace's funny America. Problem is, of course, that the film is too good. Anybody who gets to watch it becomes hooked instantly and craves only to watch it again, and again, and again, until the audience drops dead of exhaustion and hunger. Why eat when you're entertained by such a good movie? Wallace's premise brings you back to that apocryphal lab experiment in which rats were treated to a similar choice. When the rat pushed one button, marked FOOD, it would get a food pellet. The other button, marked FUN, would fire up an electrode rigged right into the orgasm center somewhere in the rat's cortex. Needless to add, one rat after another would drop dead from hunger, still twitching luridly and trying to finesse one last push of the button. Same thing in Wallace's story, especially that even those characters who have not seen the Entertainment yet, keep on entertaining themselves by different means."
The title of the Entertainment, "Infinite Jest," might also be applied to a BBC program featuring mathematician Peter J. Cameron. The program's actual title was "To Infinity and Beyond." It was broadcast the night of Feb. 10 (the date of this journal's previous post).
Few, however, are likely to find the Infinity program addictive. For closer approaches to Wallace's ideal Entertainment, see instead Dante (in the context of this journal's Feb. 4 posts on Cameron and the afterlife) and the BBC News.
Comments Off on Capital E
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Saturday September 15, 2007
|
Professors: Post Your Syllabi
Professors should post their course syllabi before move-in, not after class has started The Harvard Crimson
Published On Friday, September 14, 2007 12:54 AM
"Classes start in three days, and that means it’s time to… examine course syllabi– that is if you can find them…." More >> |
Classics 101:
The Holy Spook
Prof. Coleman Silk introducing
freshmen to academic values
The Course Begins:
Larry Summers, former president
of Harvard, was recently invited,
then disinvited, to speak at a
politically correct UC campus.
A Guest Lecturer Speaks:
"This is so pathetic. I used to write long disquisitions on the ethical dimensions of behavior like this, but years of it can make a girl get very tired. And that's because this stuff is tiresome, and boring, and wrong, and pathetic, and so very indicative of the derailed character of academic life. It's more important to keep punishing Summers for a comment he made years ago– and apologized for many times over, and essentially lost the presidency of Harvard over– than it is just to move on and let free exchange happen on campuses. I doubt Summers would have devoted his time before the Regents to theorizing gender (not that I would personally care much if he did– I was not so mortally wounded by his observations as others were), and he is a brilliant man with much of value to bring to a visit with the Regents. But what does that matter when the opportunity to mob a politically incorrect academic presents itself?" —Erin O'Connor on Sept. 15, 2007
Illustration of the Theme:
Clarinetist Ken Peplowski
plays "Cry Me a River"
as Nicole Kidman focuses
the students' attention.
A sample Holy Spook,
Kurt Vonnegut, was introduced
by Peplowski on the birthday
this year of Pope Benedict XVI.
"Deeply vulgar"
— Academic characterization
of Harvard president Summers
"Do they still call it
the licorice stick?"
— Kurt Vonnegut
Related Material:
Monday, May 14, 2007
Monday May 14, 2007
Seven Bridges
"Make me young…"
— Kilgore Trout
For the old at heart:
The Mathematical Association of America in this
Euler Tercentenary Year honors the seven bridges of
Königsberg, Prussia (birthplace of David Hilbert).
For Kilgore Trout:
A song about the road to (and from)
Hank Williams's memorial marker:
"There are stars in the Southern sky
and if ever you decide you should go
there is a taste of time-sweetened honey
down the Seven Bridges Road
Now I have loved you like a baby
like some lonesome child
and I have loved you in a tame way
and I have loved you wild"
Nicole Kidman dances
"Sweet Home Alabama"
Comments Off on Monday May 14, 2007
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Saturday May 12, 2007
Artistic Vision
Last night's entry "A Midrash for Hollywood" discussed a possible interpretation of yesterday's Pennsylvania Lottery numbers– mid-day 384, evening 952.
In memory of a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter who died yesterday, here is another interpretation of those numbers.
First, though, it seems appropriate to quote again the anonymous source from "Heaven, Hell, and Hollywood" on screenwriters– "You can be replaced by some Ping Pong balls and a dictionary." An example was given illustrating this saying. Here is another example:
Yesterday's PA lottery numbers in the dictionary–
Webster's New World Dictionary,
College Edition, 1960–
Page 384: "Defender of the Faith"
Related Log24 entries:
"To Announce a Faith," Halloween 2006,
and earlier Log24 entries from
that year's Halloween season
Page 952: "monolith"
Related Log24 entries:
"Shema, Israel," and "Punch Line"
(with the four entries that preceded it).
It may not be entirely irrelevant that a headline in last night's entry– "Lonesome No More!"– was linked to a discussion of Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick, that a film version of that novel starred Jerry Lewis, and that yesterday afternoon's entry quoted a vision of "an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis."
See also April 7, 2003:
April is Math Awareness Month.
This year's theme is "mathematics and art."
"Art isn't easy."
— Stephen Sondheim
Comments Off on Saturday May 12, 2007
Wednesday, May 3, 2006
Wednesday May 3, 2006
Ontology Alignment
continued
continued
“Mathematics ushers one into the realm of abstraction and universality, grasped only through pure reason. Mathematics is the threshold we cross to pass into the ideal, the truly real.”
— Rebecca Goldstein,
Mathematics and
the Character of Tragedy
Pennsylvania Lottery:
The winning numbers
for Tuesday, May 2–
the feast of
St. Athanasius:
Mid-day 703
Evening 462
“You gotta be true to your code”
— Sinatra (see previous entry)
| Dewey Decimal Code:
703 The Arts: Related material: For the arts, see |
The numbers 703 and 462 are, in Goldstein’s phrase, “truly real.” However, their link to St. Athanasius and to the Spanish language is, as purveyors of fiction* say, “purely coincidental”– as is much of what makes life interesting.
“All persons living and dead are purely coincidental….”– Kurt Vonnegut, epigraph to Bagombo Snuff Box
* For instance,
David Auburn in Proof,
which also involves
Dewey decimal numbers
Comments Off on Wednesday May 3, 2006
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Wednesday December 31, 2003
Personal Jesus
|
Columnist Cal Thomas What exactly does Dean believe about Jesus, and how is it relevant to his presidential candidacy? “Christ was someone who sought out people who were disenfranchised,” he told the Globe, “people who were left behind.” Dean makes it sound as if He might have been a Democrat. “He fought against self-righteousness of people who had everything,” the candidate continued. “He was a person who set an extraordinary example that has lasted 2,000 years, which is pretty inspiring when you think about it.” Not really. If that is all Jesus was (or is), then he is just another entry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, to be read or not, according to one’s inspirational need. C.S. Lewis brilliantly dealt with this watered-down view of Jesus and what He did in the book “Mere Christianity.” Said Lewis, who thought about such things at a far deeper level than Howard Dean, “I’m trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I can’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God – or else a madman or something worse.” |
For an excellent dramatic portrayal of C. S. Lewis, see the film “Shadowlands,” starring Sir Anthony Hopkins.
For Sir Anthony Hopkins
on his birthday —
Your Own Personal Jesus:
Mark Vonnegut in
British Columbia, 1970
The Jesus figure above is,
if not the Son of God,
the son of novelist Kurt Vonnegut —
not a bad alternative.
As for “the sort of things Jesus said,”
consider this from a summary of
the younger Vonnegut’s
The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity —
“At one point, he decides that
his thoughts are responsible for
an earthquake in California….”
See the rather similar remarks of Jesus
in Mark 11:23.
For further notes on
theology, lunacy, and earthquakes,
see the previous entries, starting with
The Longest Night, Dec. 21, 2003,
and ending with the two Dec. 28 entries
below, both related to the recent Iran
earthquake (and, by implication, to the
quote from Robert Stone in the entries
Stone, not Wood, and Riddle).
Sunday, December 28, 2003 7:29 PM
Season’s Greetings from the
Institute for Advanced Study,
in keeping with the theme of
the previous entry.
“Warren Ellis’ Die Puny Humans….
Worth looking at.”
DPH leads to Sohma G. Dawling
who in turn leads,
via r. sakamoto, to
Oppenheimer’s Aria.
For the aria, after you click on
the above link, click on the
picture at the resulting site
Sunday, December 28, 2003 2:00 PM
Hostages Freed, Iran Says
The Associated Press,
December 28, 2003, 11:46 AM EST
TEHRAN, Iran — Three European hostages seized in southeastern Iran earlier this month have been released, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Sunday.
The $6 million ransom demand was not paid, another Iranian official said.
Drug smugglers seized the hostages — two from Germany and one from Ireland — Dec. 2… as they bicycled to the city of Zahedan from
Bam….
 |
Detail:
|
Thank you, Ma’am.
(See The Magdalene Code, 12/26.
For the “Wham,” see Rosebud, 12/22,
and later entries.)
Another entry not without relevance
is that of 3/07.
Comments Off on Wednesday December 31, 2003
Sunday, August 10, 2003
Sunday August 10, 2003
Death of a Holy Man
Part I: An American Religion
Hiroshima Mayor Says
US Worships Nukes
“HIROSHIMA — Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba warned that the world is moving toward war and accused Washington of ‘worshipping’ nuclear weapons during Wednesday’s ceremony marking the 58th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city….
… the Hiroshima mayor blamed the United States for making the world a more uncertain place through its policy of undermining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
‘A world without nuclear weapons and war that the victims of the atomic bomb have long sought for is slipping into the shadows of growing black clouds that could turn into mushroom clouds at any moment,’ Akiba said. ‘The chief cause of this is the United States’ nuclear policy which, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear strike and by starting research into small ‘useable’ nuclear weapons, appears to worship nuclear weapons as God.’ “
— Mainichi Shimbun, Aug. 6, 2003
Part II: Holy Men and
Sons of Bitches
“I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”
— Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,
Director of Los Alamos
John Steinbeck describing Cannery Row in Monterey:
“Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.”
“Now we are all sons of bitches.”
— Dr. Kenneth Bainbridge,
Director of Trinity Test
Part III: Death of a Holy Man
|
The New York Times, Aug. 10, 2003: Atom-Bomb Physicist Dies at 98 “Henry A. Boorse, a physicist who was one of the original scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project in the development of the atomic bomb, died on July 28 in Houston, where he lived…. Dr. Boorse was a consultant to the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to 1958 and to the Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1951 to 1955. He and Lloyd Motz wrote a two-volume work, The World of the Atom (1966), and — with Jefferson Hane Weaver — a one-volume book, The Atomic Scientists (1989).” |
From a review of The Atomic Scientists:
“… the authors try to add a personal element that can excite the reader about science.”
For more excitement, see Timequake, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.