If she said "Eat my dust!" I would be tempted.
And then there is Pullman . . .
Thursday, August 17, 2023
Marcela with Red Riding Hood
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Friday, December 23, 2022
Scope and Depth
"The book I came back to
George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I couldn’t cope with it
as a student; it wasn’t until I was grown up, and married,
and a parent, and trying to teach it myself, that I realised
its majestic scope and depth." — Philip Pullman in
The Guardian, Fri 23 Dec 2022 05.00 EST
Another instance of scope and depth —
"The Amber Spyglass" Log24 post of Wednesday.
See also other references here to Middlemarch.
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Thursday, December 22, 2022
For “Dark Materials” Fans: The Monkey Trial
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Wednesday, December 21, 2022
Digitally Assisted Fiction . . .
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Tuesday, December 20, 2022
For Fans of “The Story Theory of Truth” . . .
(See earlier posts referring to that theory.)
Catching up to Pullman's Oct. 3 remark . . .
See Log24 posts now tagged October 1-2-3.
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Monday, December 19, 2022
Mathematics and Narrative, Continued . . .
“Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln . . .”
Midrash from Philip Pullman . . .
"The 1929 Einstein-Carmichael Expedition"
I prefer the 1929 Emch-Carmichael expedition —
This is from . . .
“By far the most important structure in design theory
is the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24).”
— “Block Designs,” by Andries E. Brouwer
(Ch. 14 (pp. 693-746) of Handbook of Combinatorics,
Vol. I, MIT Press, 1995, edited by Ronald L. Graham,
Martin Grötschel, and László Lovász, Section 16 (p. 716))
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“Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln . . .”
“Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln . . .”
Wednesday, December 8, 2021
For the Dark Matter Holy Office of Philip Pullman —
The Big White Hashtag:
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Tuesday, June 15, 2021
The 7-11 Culture War
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Saturday, June 5, 2021
Times Square Logic
Dialogue from Season 1, Episode 8 of "His Dark Materials" —
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Asriel: And the serpent said, "You shall not surely die, for the Authority doth know that on that day that ye eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened, your daemons shall assume their true form and ye shall be as…" Both: "… gods, knowing good and…" Lyra: "… evil." Asriel: "… Dust ." You see? They have been trying to convince us for centuries that we are born guilty. And that we have to spend a lifetime atoning for the crime of eating an apple. Is there any proof for this heinous stain, this shame, this guilt? No, not at all. We are to take it on faith, and on the word of the Authority. But Dust… Dust is an elementary particle that we can record, measure, study.
Read more at: |
Related material: Times Square Logic. Log24 posts now tagged
"Times Square Logic" include two from April 7, 2015, the date of
Geoffrey Lewis's death.
Lewis played, notably, "Hard Case Williams" in Lust in the Dust (1984).
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Monday, September 30, 2019
Multiplicity on Michaelmas
"We need a multiplicity of viewpoints."
— Philip Pullman in a New Yorker interview
published yesterday
See as well Pullman's "Golden Compass"
in posts tagged
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Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Saturday, May 5, 2018
Hume, Parfit. Parfit, Hume.
"And were all my perceptions removed by death,
and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love,
nor hate, after the dissolution of my body, I should
be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is
further requisite to make me a perfect nonentity."
— Book I, Part IV, Section vi of
A Treatise of Human Nature
— Detail from the ending of Philip Pullman's
graphic novel "Mystery of the Ghost Ship"
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Friday, August 12, 2016
Dustbucket Physics
Peter Galison, a Harvard professor, is a defender of
the Vienna Circle and the religion of Scientism.
From Galison's “Structure of Crystal, Bucket of Dust,” in
Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative ,
edited by Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur, pp. 52-78
(Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 2012) …
Galison's final paragraph —
"Perhaps, then, it should not surprise us too much if,
as Wheeler approaches the beginning-end of all things,
there is a bucket of Borelian dust. Out of this filth,
through the proposition machine of quantum mechanics
comes pregeometry; pregeometry makes geometry;
geometry gives rise to matter and the physical laws
and constants of the universe. At once close to and far
from the crystalline story that Bourbaki invoked,
Wheeler’s genesis puts one in mind of Genesis 3:19:
'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou
return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken:
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.' "
For fans of Scientism who prefer more colorful narratives —
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Thursday, August 11, 2016
Logic of the Dust
"Dust is a fictional elementary particle that is of
fundamental importance within the story."
— Wikipedia on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy
A review of posts tagged Kabbalah yields —
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"If all that 'matters' are fundamentally mathematical relationships, then there ceases to be any important difference between the actual and the possible. (Even if you aren't a mathematical Platonist, you can always find some collection of particles of dust to fit any required pattern. In Permutation City this is called the 'logic of the dust' theory.)….
— Danny Yee, review of Permutation City , |
See also in this journal a search for Dark Matter.
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Thursday, April 14, 2011
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Sunday August 16, 2009
Return to Paradise
(Title of a New Yorker
essay dated June 2, 2008)
Kenneth Bacon, an advocate for refugees, died yesterday at 64 on the Feast of the Assumption.
In his honor, we may perhaps be justified in temporarily ignoring the wise saying "never assume."
From a defense of the dogma of the Assumption:
"On another level, the Assumption epitomizes the reconciliation of the material and spiritual world, as the human Mary enters 'body and soul to heavenly glory.' Carl Jung, the transpersonal psychologist, concluded that the doctrine of the Assumption reflected an acceptance of the physical world."
For other such reconciliations, see
- The New Yorker on Milton meeting Galileo: "Though Milton was the much younger man, in some ways his world system seems curiously older than the astronomer’s empirical universe."
-
This journal on Milton's world system: the four qualities "hot, cold, moist, and dry" and the four elements "Sea, Shore, Air, and Fire."
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds…. - This journal's "For Galois on Bastille Day" reconciles, if only in a literary way, physical and non-physical worlds. The work of Evariste Galois allows us to depict an analogue of Milton's (and Philip Pullman's) physical world of dark materials within the purely mathematical world of finite groups. (For a less literary connection between physical and mathematical worlds, see this journal on Bastille Eve.)
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Sunday, June 28, 2009
Sunday June 28, 2009
Thanks for a reference
to this story go to
Robert Bringhurst,
in his own way a
Cleric of the Grammaton.
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Friday, June 26, 2009
Friday June 26, 2009
Apocatastasis Now
I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you in at Heavens gate,
Built in Jerusalems wall.
— WILLIAM BLAKE
"In 'Apocatastasis Now: A Very Condensed Reading of William Blake's Jerusalem' (
— The Year's Work in English Studies, 2003: Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. 493-547
Related material:
| Thriller |
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From the website of Philip Pullman, president of The Blake Society:
"I must create a System…"
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For more dark materials
from the Halloween season
of 2005 — in fact, from the
very date of Pullman's lecture–
see Darkness Doubled.
from the Halloween season
of 2005 — in fact, from the
very date of Pullman's lecture–
see Darkness Doubled.
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Friday, December 21, 2007
Friday December 21, 2007
My books are about
Killing God
— Philip Pullman
Killing God
— Philip Pullman
God was apparently not
available this week;
record producer Joel Dorn,
who died on Monday,
will have to do.
"… when you get the feel of it, and the record actually transports you back to that time, then it's a real explanation of what's going on… of what went on. And here I think you can– it's one thing to get the music, it's another thing to get the place and the people and the interaction. When it's really right, the audience is the fifth member of a quartet." —Joel Dorn
In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd….
—The Midrash Jazz Quartet
Live Even and Odd….
—The Midrash Jazz Quartet
"Philosophers ponder the idea
of identity: what it is to
give something a name
on Monday and have it
respond to that name
on Friday."
—Bernard Holland in
The New York Times,
Monday, May 20, 1996
"Daddy's like
an old knight."
–Allison in "Meet Joe Black"
For Joe Black himself,
see the previous entry.
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Wednesday, January 15, 2003
Wednesday January 15, 2003
Conversations in Hell
Part I: Locating Hell
"Noi siam venuti al loco ov' i' t'ho detto
che tu vedrai le genti dolorose
c'hanno perduto il ben de l'intelletto."
"We have come to where I warned you
we would find
Those wretched souls who no longer have
The intellectual benefits of the mind."
From a Harvard student's weblog:
Heard in Mather I hope you get gingivitis You want me to get oral cancer?! Goodnight fartface Turd. Turd. Turd. Turd. Turd. Make your own waffles!! Blah blah blah starcraft blah blah starcraft blah starcraft. It's da email da email. And some blue hair! Oohoohoo Izod! 10 gigs! Yeah it smells really bad. Only in the stairs though. Starcraft blah blah Starcraft fartface. Yeah it's hard. You have to get a bunch of battle cruisers. 40 kills! So good! Oh ho ho grunt grunt squeal. I'm getting sick again. You have a final tomorrow? In What?! Um I don't even know. Next year we're draggin him there and sticking the needle in ourselves.
" … one more line / unravelling from the dark design / spun by God and Cotton Mather"
— Robert Lowell
Part II: The Call of Stories
From a website on college fund-raising:
• “The people who come to us bring their stories. They hope they tell them well enough so that we understand the truth of their lives.”—Robert Coles, Harvard professor, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination
• “If there’s anything worth calling theology, it is listening to people’s stories, listening to them and cherishing them.”—Mary Pellauer, quoted in Kathleen Norris’ Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
From a website on "The West Wing":
THE LONG GOODBYE
9pm 2003-01-15
In a special episode guest written by playwright Jon Robin Baitz, C.J. (Allison Janney) reluctantly returns to Dayton, Ohio, to speak at her 20th high school class reunion…"
From a website illustrating language in Catholic religious stories:
"Headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, the Sisters of the Precious Blood is a Catholic religious congregation…"
From a Catholic religious story by J. R. R. Tolkien:
"It shone now as if verily it was
wrought of living fire.
'Precious, precious, precious!' Gollum cried.
'My Precious! O my Precious!'"
From a website on Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials:
"'Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all."
From the same website, a short story:
"Philip Pullman was born in Norwich on
19th October 1946."
Part III: My Story
For a different story, see my weblog of
19th October 2002:
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Saturday, October 19, 2002
What is Truth? |
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