Friday, June 21, 2024
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
The Thirteenth Novel
John Updike on Don DeLillo's thirteenth novel, Cosmopolis —
" DeLillo’s post-Christian search for 'an order at some deep level'
has brought him to global computerization:
'the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative . . . . ' "
— The New Yorker , issue dated March 31, 2003
On that date ….
Related remark —
" There is a pleasantly discursive treatment
of Pontius Pilate’s unanswered question
‘What is truth?’ "
— Coxeter, 1987, introduction to Trudeau’s
The Non-Euclidean Revolution
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Saturday, June 4, 2016
Mythos
Previous references in this journal to the "Church of Synchronology"
suggest a review of that phrase's source —
"The fine line between hokum and rational thinking
is precisely the point of The Lost Time Accidents ;
a brick of a book not just because of its length but
because of the density of both the prose and the
ideas it contains.
It is, in a nutshell, a sweeping historical novel that's
also a love story but is rooted in time-travel
science fiction and takes on as its subject
the meaning of time itself. This is no small endeavor."
— Janelle Brown in The Los Angeles Times
on February 4, 2016
See also …
- the previous post,
- DeLillo's new novel Zero K , and
- posts now tagged Black Diamond Logo …
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Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Null Point
This evening's previous post links to an earlier post
on a book by DeLillo. This suggests a review
of DeLillo's most recent book, Zero K .
A title I prefer: that of this post, Null Point. *
For related mathematics, see Zero System .
* Wikipedia —
The Kelvin scale is an absolute,
thermodynamic temperature scale
using as its null point absolute zero,
the temperature at which
all thermal motion ceases in the
classical description of thermodynamics.
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Thursday, September 5, 2013
An Effective Team:
Underworld and Evolution
This journal on 9/11, 2009 —
Poster for Kate Beckinsale in a film
released on 9/11, 2009 —
For Qohen Leth — A quotation from
this journal on 9/11, 2009 —
"Time and chance
happeneth to them all."
— Ecclesiastes 9:11
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Thursday, July 15, 2010
Brightness at Noon, continued
"What exactly was Point Omega?"
This is Robert Wright in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
Wright is discussing not the novel Point Omega by Don DeLillo,
but rather a (related) concept of the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
My own idiosyncratic version of a personal "point omega"—
The circular sculpture in the foreground
is called by the artist "The Omega Point."
This has been described as
"a portal that leads in or out of time and space."
For some other sorts of points, see the drawings
on the wall and Geometry Simplified—
The two points of the trivial affine space are represented by squares,
and the one point of the trivial projective space is represented by
a line segment separating the affine-space squares.
For related darkness at noon, see Derrida on différance
as a version of Plato's khôra—
The above excerpts are from a work on and by Derrida
published in 1997 by Fordham University,
a Jesuit institution— Deconstruction in a Nutshell—
For an alternative to the Villanova view of Derrida,
see Angels in the Architecture.
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