Saturday, May 16, 2009
Something to think about ...
... HOW TO: Publish Your Blog on the Amazon Kindle. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Not a comic book ...
... Bertrand Russell's mathematical quest adds up to unlikely graphic novel hit. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Thought for the day ...
The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.- Søren Kierkegaard
Friday, May 15, 2009
Friday night video ...
... Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer." This dates to 1986. I was 44 going on 45. He was a mere 36. He looks now, if not older than I, at least as old. I admire him for not trying to disguise that. I admire myself for the same reason. To do otherwise would be to give in to fear. I never give in to fear. I'd be too scared.
This is a good video. Some of those music videos were good, original works of art.
This is a good video. Some of those music videos were good, original works of art.
Tackling true mystery ...
... Peter Stothard on An act in three tragedies. (Hat tip, Judith Fitzgerald.)
A post in which ...
... I tend to agree with Malcolm Gladwell: What if Newspapers Had Just Been Invented?
Boss, an obelisk!
... Holy Mystery! Mayhem at the Vatican. (Hat tip, Karen Heller.)
One good thing about being a retired book editor is that I won't have to sit through a screening of this film. I did have to sit through one of The Da Vinci Code. I remember marveling that the film was even worse than the book.
One good thing about being a retired book editor is that I won't have to sit through a screening of this film. I did have to sit through one of The Da Vinci Code. I remember marveling that the film was even worse than the book.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
For Bryan ...
... why baseball is interesting: The Secret of the Curve Ball Picked World's Best Illusion.
Staying power ...
... Always Wright.
Maybe a better explanation for the statuette in the preceding post is that some neolithic original came along and just did what nobody had done before.
Maybe a better explanation for the statuette in the preceding post is that some neolithic original came along and just did what nobody had done before.
Surely a classic ...
... Full-Figured Statuette, 35,000 Years Old, Provides New Clues to How Art Evolved. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Actually, the headline notwithstanding, neither the article nor the statuette provides any clue as to how art "evolved," if by evolve we mean slow incremental development. "The inspiration and symbolism behind the rather sudden flowering have long been debated by art historians." That "sudden flowering" sounds like another example of Stephen Jay Gould's "punctuated equilibria" to me. "Scholars speculate that these Venus figurines, as they are known, were associated with fertility beliefs or shamanistic rituals." That's the problem with prehistory: There's never any history to back it up. Subtract from this article what is presumed and speculated, and what exactly do we know for sure? Not a hell of a lot.
Thought for the day ...
Religion is the everlasting dialogue between humanity and God. Art is its soliloquy.- Franz Werfel
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
William Maxwell
While I would not go so far as to call William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) "one of the great books of our age" (as Michael Ondaatje has), this is a special novel, dark and understated. I enjoyed reading it, and found myself moved by its simple - but always poignant - passages:
"And some things, once they are done," writes Maxwell, "can't be undone."
I'd be interested to learn more about Maxwell's critical reception.
"And some things, once they are done," writes Maxwell, "can't be undone."
I'd be interested to learn more about Maxwell's critical reception.
From Oxford Journals ...
... Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Two good ideas ...
... Maxine on Ethics of science communication on the web.
Mark Vernon on Proof: we need better questions on religion and science.
That should cut down on the number of science articles in newspapers.Those interpreting science for the public, whether journalists, educators or other communicators, should use peer review as a benchmark.
Mark Vernon on Proof: we need better questions on religion and science.
No happy Buddha, please ...
... Buddhism and the dangers of pick'n'mix religion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Interrupted blogging ...
I have a deadline to meet, so I won't be blogging until afterward. Back later.
Thought for the day ...
Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.- G.K. Chesterton
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Authenticity ...
... WISE BLOOD as Catalyst for Spiritual Autobiography.
The Hound of Heaven tracks us down in mysterious ways - and for His own purposes.
The Hound of Heaven tracks us down in mysterious ways - and for His own purposes.
Comparison shopping ...
... Escape from Oneself. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
My own choice is Lawrence Durrell's. I think he captures better than the others do Cavafy's spirit.
My own choice is Lawrence Durrell's. I think he captures better than the others do Cavafy's spirit.
The human spirit ...
... Martha Mason, Who Wrote Book About Her Decades in an Iron Lung, Dies at 71. (Hat tip, Joseph Chovanes.)
From Alpha ...
... to omega: Stephen Wolfram Reveals Radical New Formula for Web Search. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Dave also sends along this: New Search Tool Aims at Answering Tough Queries, but Not at Taking on Google.
Dave also sends along this: New Search Tool Aims at Answering Tough Queries, but Not at Taking on Google.
Thought for the day ...
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.- Henri Bergson
Monday, May 11, 2009
Consummate artist ...
... meets perfect beauty: Death in Venice">Now read this! Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
I'm a Tonio Kröger fan myself. But I haven't read any of them since I was studying German in college.
I'm a Tonio Kröger fan myself. But I haven't read any of them since I was studying German in college.
Quite a lady ...
... Richard Holmes on The Great de Staël. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
... de Staël's own life, for all its social and moneyed privilege, all its Romantic razzamatazz, has deep tragic elements of frustration and brooding loss. Much of this is prophesied in her earlier and now little-read novel Delphine (1802), whose heroine does indeed commit suicide. Far too long to appeal to modern readers, it nevertheless contains many haunting self-contained fragments, such as the five-page tale subtitled "The Reasons Why Léontine de Ternan Decided to Become a Nun." This opens:
I was once a very beautiful woman, and I am now fifty years old. These two absolutely ordinary facts have been the cause of everything I have ever felt in life.
Just the facts ...
... A Sleuth Goes to the Library. (Hat tip, Paul Davis.)
Maybe he should have sent them to school.
... we learn that Milton's three daughters did not, as legend has it, serve as adoring amanuenses to the blind poet when he was writing "Paradise Lost" but instead were illiterates whose rebellious behavior so infuriated their father that he left them nothing in his will.
Maybe he should have sent them to school.
A book for our times ...
... The masterpiece that killed George Orwell. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I was not aware - at least not consciously - that it was Orwell who compared good prose to a clear window pane.
I was not aware - at least not consciously - that it was Orwell who compared good prose to a clear window pane.
Thought for the day ...
What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.- Robertson Davies
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Kindly disposed so far ...
... to The Kindly Ones: Littel’s big book may be a masterpiece.
Franklin's complete review is here.
Michiko Kakutani was not alone in her dislike of this book, however. Ruth Franklin, in the New Republic, had this to say about it:A review cannot convey how deeply unpleasant the experience of reading The Kindly Ones is. This is one of the most repugnant books I have ever read. Some may put aside its philosophical and aesthetic confusions, and take its utterly persuasive evocation of depravity as a sign of achievement. But if getting under the skin of a murderer were sufficient to produce a masterpiece, then Thomas Harris would be Tolstoy.
Franklin's complete review is here.
Interesting exercise ...
... Holding College Chiefs to Their Words. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I have to say I thought most of them sounded pretty pedestrian - except for Amy Gutmann's, which sounded pretentious. The standout, it seemed to me, was the one the guy from Wesleyan wrote:
... Roth decided to take a risk, telling a story of his brother who died at age five, before Mr. Roth was born. His older brother's portrait hung in their childhood home.
"I was to heal the wounds caused by the death of that beautiful little boy in the picture," he wrote. "Yet I was also to remain the trace of those wounds."
Bryan is cheered ...
... and that's always good to know: Hitch, Fish and Tel.
That probably helped him cope with The Morbid Age.
That probably helped him cope with The Morbid Age.
Those layers of editors ...
... and fact-checkers at work again: Wikipedia hoax points to limits of journalists' research. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A key part of the argument for maintaining traditional journalism is that its trained reporters can perform research and investigations that the untrained masses can't, and the content they produce is run by editors and fact-checkers. The revelation that their research is often no more sophisticated than an average Web surfer's, and that the fact checking can be nonexistent, really doesn't help that argument much.I guess not.
A pause ...
...for a poem (as Shameless would say):
Still Life
There is nowhere
We can meet, the city
Gray as clouds, streets
Emptier than air, and we
Can never tell everything
We should, for that would lead
To silence. And so we cannot
Stay, but dare not go, remaining
To each other dear, though
Never any longer near.
Still Life
There is nowhere
We can meet, the city
Gray as clouds, streets
Emptier than air, and we
Can never tell everything
We should, for that would lead
To silence. And so we cannot
Stay, but dare not go, remaining
To each other dear, though
Never any longer near.
Thought for the day ...
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.- W. H. Auden
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Judith has my number ...
... as her comment proves.
Here is Patrick's post (thanks to Dave): `The Rebellion of Particulars'.
And here is mine, linking to Judith's: Word from Judith ...
Here is Patrick's post (thanks to Dave): `The Rebellion of Particulars'.
And here is mine, linking to Judith's: Word from Judith ...
Cover girl ...
That's Maud Newton on the cover of Narrative magazine's spring issue. Just scroll down. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Word from Judith ...
... Sic transit gloria mundi ( this is a must read).
But see also, on an entirely different note, Philip Larkin's judicial legacy.
But see also, on an entirely different note, Philip Larkin's judicial legacy.
Girly man?
... A tale of romance by the king of chick lit – Napoleon Bonaparte. (Hat tip, Paul Davis.)
Emma online ...
... Madame Bovary Meets the Mouse Click. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
This brings to mind a joke about Minnie, Mickey and Goofy, but I won't fo there.
Dave also sends along: The Next Age of Discovery.
This brings to mind a joke about Minnie, Mickey and Goofy, but I won't fo there.
Dave also sends along: The Next Age of Discovery.
Thought for the day ...
Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.- Georges Bernanos
Friday, May 08, 2009
Some elaboration ...
... for Bryan, who recently had something to say about the Texas governor's position regarding state sovereignty: NOW IT’S TENNESSEE.
The list of states is interesting. Dave's and mine are there, and neither was part of the Confederacy. And just in case anyone forgets, West Virginia was not a part of the Confederacy. It is the part of Virginia that decended from Virginia when Virginia joined the Confederacy. And, Kentucky colonels notwithstanding, Kentucky wasn't part of the Confederacy, either.
Two books ...
... one extraordinary, the other not: Thomas Mann's house of exiles.
There is, first and foremost, Thomas Mann, a creature of such superb habit and indurated routine as to have made himself – as though belonging to another species – almost impervious to distraction: a few magniloquent sentences in the morning, soup (teeth trouble) and a cigar at lunchtime (“smoked Personality cigars”); in the afternoon, correspondence and a walk with one of a relay of the dogs of those years (in another Windsor touch, one was driven to him, cross-country, by Sybille Bedford; in addition, “Thomas was always a keen recorder of the dogs he met”); in the evening, gramophone music or reading aloud or a trip to the theatre and then taking down whatever book it was time for (“Thomas read Rimbaud”), in an unlikely and even rather perverse display of nihil humanum. It’s hard to understand just how famous and successful Mann was in the America of the 1940s: the difficult novels all Book of the Month Club bestsellers (The Magic Mountain named “one of the twenty-five most influential books of the first half of the twentieth century”, somewhere, oddly, behind Marx’s Das Kapital – it was all that long ago); the sell-out lecture tours to the back of beyond (“a busy program, full of high-mindedness”, Juers notes) negotiated on a mild regimen of uppers and downers; the regular frisson of being recognized by a waiter or a train conductor; the malingering and the coddling and the catarrh, and, apparently discomfiting or embarrassing – embarrassment was always a big item in Mann’s emotional Haushalt – erotic agitation, an unwelcome rogue sensation, brought on now by sea air, now by beer, now by Princeton; leading an existence that was basically already halfway to Michael Jackson’s: “Stopping en route in Colorado Springs, they were served a meal that was prepared according to Goethe’s lunch with Lotte in Thomas’s novel”.
The debate continues ...
... and Bryan weighs in: Ink Will Win. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Me? I have no idea what the outcome of all this will be. But there was a time when there really weren't any professional writers. Maybe there will be such a time again.
This week's batch ...
... of TLS Letters: Opera and theatre in Britain, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Praying and smoking, and more.
Maybe not gentlemen ...
... but not blokes, either: Gentility Takes a Holiday. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
True.... for anyone who recalls Kenneth Tynan as he actually was -- flamboyant, witty, histrionic, star-struck, kinky, silly-clever -- it is hard to suppress a smile on being told that his life and work are "a monument to blokedom."
Thought for the day ...
I suddenly saw that all the time it was not I who had been seeking God, but God who had been seeking me. I had made myself the centre of my own existence and had my back turned to God.- Bede Griffiths
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Just bow down ...
... and obey: The deification of Earth.
The real threat we face these days is the tyranny of the intelligentsia.
Lovelock is 90 years old this year – and most people’s great-grandfathers are a mix of interesting experiences and wacky views. What is really worrying, though, is the uncritical adulation that he receives for his books in many quarters, despite - or, more likely, because of - his shrivelled view of humanity and his take-it-or-leave-it approach to democracy. Far too many people in high places and the media share Lovelock’s view that only smart people like them should be running things, while the rest of us should do as we are told, trying our best not to leave too big a footprint on the face of Gaia.
The real threat we face these days is the tyranny of the intelligentsia.
Partisan antiquarian ...
... Poet homes in on an ancient vision.
Cavafy manages in these translations to animate a range of antique characters in a poetic idiom that seems for the most part to avoid the taint of anachronism. He evokes not so much the pastness of the past as its presence.
My own favorite among Cavafy's poems is Thermopylae.
Book, e-books, and consciousness ...
... Kindle, books and being in the world.
This is the simgle most intelligent discussion of this issue that I have read.
This is the simgle most intelligent discussion of this issue that I have read.
Out there ...
... Changing your mind about consciousness. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
What [Noë] does show is why the reductionist notion that brain states are mental states ain't ever going to solve the hard problem. Consciousness is more like dancing than digestion. It is something that is done or achieved by our being in the world.
Basically, he advocates a phenomenological line. Creatures, even simple ones, are not machines mechanically performing tasks but are organisms with desires and designs on their environment. The brain supports our involvement with the world but it is not the author of our experience.
See also this.
Our research indicates that our only way of comprehending God, asking questions about God, and experiencing God is through the brain. But whether or not God exists "out there" is something that neuroscience cannot answer. For example, if we take a brain image of a person when she is looking at a picture, we will see various parts of the brain being activated, such as the visual cortex. But the brain image cannot tell us whether or not there actually is a picture out there or whether the person is creating the picture in her own mind. To a certain degree, we all create our own sense of reality. Getting at what is really real is the tricky part.
As I have pointed out here more than once, if someone comes running at you with an ax, you will experience a rush of adrenalin. Our bodies' reactions are determined by the nature of our experiences, not the other way around.
Thought for the day ...
Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.- Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
End time ...
... A review of Mary Beard's The Fires of Vesuvius: Buried Pleasure. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A good guy ...
... Huston Smith’s Wonderful Life. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I happen to agree that it is better to accentuate what the different faiths have in common.
I happen to agree that it is better to accentuate what the different faiths have in common.
A Mary Beard roundup ...
... Reviewing: the nastiness test.
... Burgled! (This isn't good.)
... Should the poet laureate answer questions?
... Burgled! (This isn't good.)
... Should the poet laureate answer questions?
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