… recently, a Hofstadterian in the Department of Homeland Security (what a fascism-reeking title that is) warned darkly of the threat posed by those who are “antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority,” a category capacious enough to have included, over the years, such right-wing extremists as Dorothy Day, Norman Mailer, and Paul Goodman.
Sunday, October 13, 2013
La-La Land …
… Paranoia Will Destroy Ya | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A thought for today …
The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment's thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important.
— Albert Jay Nock, born on this date in 1870
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Materialism, Minds and Quantum Mechanics
Materialism is an atheistic philosophy that says that all of reality is reducible to matter and its interactions. It has gained ground because many people think that it’s supported by science. They think that physics has shown the material world to be a closed system of cause and effect, sealed off from the influence of any non-physical realities --- if any there be. Since our minds and thoughts obviously do affect the physical world, it would follow that they are themselves merely physical phenomena. No room for a spiritual soul or free will: for materialists we are just “machines made of meat.”
Quantum mechanics, however, throws a monkey wrench into this simple mechanical view of things.
Gender Speculation and Genesis
Most readers of the biblical account of the creation of people assume that the first human being created was male, but the Bible’s account of human is, in fact, frustratingly ambiguous. This ambiguity led to some fascinating midrashic interpretations of Genesis 1:26-27, which recounts God’s creation of humankind.
And God said, “Let us make man [adam] in our image, after our likeness. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth.” And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male [zakhar] and female [nekeivah] He created them.” (NJPS)Since the word adam is not used previously in the Bible, there is no evidence that this word must denote a male. Indeed, the explanatory phrase, “male and female He created them,” could be read as clarifying what the nature of this adam actually was.
To this end, a number of rabbinic passages preserve what may have been a popular interpretation of this passage, which indicates that the first human actually comprised of both genders
Saying what hadn't been said before …
… Duke Ellington, King of Jazz - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
What makes Ellington's music sound so powerfully, unmistakably individual? To begin with, he was the first jazz composer to write music that used the still-new medium of the big band with the same coloristic imagination brought by classical composers to their symphonic works. "You know, Stan Kenton can stand in front of a thousand fiddles and a thousand brass and make a dramatic gesture, and every studio arranger can nod his head and say, 'Oh, yes, that's done like this,' " said André Previn, one of his best-informed admirers. "But Duke merely lifts his finger, three horns make a sound, and I don't know what it is!"
Happy birthday …
… Truth, Peace, Compassion — Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes — Identity Theory. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It is my conviction that there is no way to peace – peace is the way.
Hear, hear …
… Tom Stoppard: Information is light | Stage | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
When the phone-hacking story broke, a former newspaper executive said it was just a case of a rogue reporter. When I read that, I knew this wasn't a bad cough, it was cancer. Nobody could hazard something so unlikely without reason to believe that it would be colluded in by others. The nexus of politicians, police and newspaper executives, the poison fruit of, respectively, fear, corruptibility and remorseless commercial competition, was a fall from grace at the very heart of the freedoms hard-won long before I was a schoolboy agog with pride at being British. Had it not been for a handful of reporters on the Guardian, who had a place to stand, would that triple nexus ever have been levered apart, given the politicians' fear of the press, the goalkeeper's fear of the penalty? As the denials unravelled, only the Guardian, the Financial Times and the Independent were keeping the story alive until it could not be ignored.
A thought for today …
On the question of relating to our fellowman — our neighbor's spiritual need transcends every commandment. Everything else we do is a means to an end. But love is an end already, since God is love.
— Edith Stein, born on this date in 1891
Making stories...
...Talking With Alice Munro
“I think it was the idea that, as a writer, you spend your whole life being an observer and then trying to make a record of what you’ve observed, and you may think, when you’ve gotten older—or old, as I am—that you’ve missed being an ordinary person. You’ve missed all the things that maybe you think most people spend their lives at …. And I think I had made a vow that that’s what I was going to do … the ordinary-person route …. But,” she said, laughing, “I didn’t prove to be very talented at it, because after a while I started writing again.”
Friday, October 11, 2013
Why he means so much to many …
… W. H. Auden: poet, friend, panacea by Neilson MacKay - The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It’s tricky to see a title like What Ezra Pound Can Do For You sticking. Even William Carlos Williams, H. D., and T. S. Eliot might have trouble pulling it off. They do plenty for us, of course, but they are not our friends. (Still, I’ve always seen Auden as more of an uncle, like an agnate of Richard Griffiths’ Uncle Monty from the 1987 black comedy Withnail and I, whose stockpile of camp aphorisms—including “It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, ‘I will never play the Dane’”—are about as Audenesque as you can get.)
More Updike, via GKC ...
James Wood, for one, has disparaged Updike's disingenuous theological staginess. As these stories testify, Wood is right to note the lack of gripping metaphysical debate in Updike's fiction. Belief is too secure, too confident, and—like that retriever—too creaturely to muster up the agonies of a Dostoevsky or the fierce apologetics of an O'Connor. Perhaps Updike's early loves, the benign P. G. Wodehouse and the bumptious G. K. Chesterton, loom too influential.Another review of Updike's Collected Stories
Getting used to diminishment …
…Penelope Lively: 'So this is old age' | Books | The Guardian.
I know whereof she speaks. I was at the doctor's today.
I know whereof she speaks. I was at the doctor's today.
Northern light …
… Nobel Alice - Isak. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
She's compared often to Chekhov, but that's a sloppy comparison, only suggesting that they both were astounding writers who wrote short stories; Munro stories and Chekhov stories are hugely different animals. Munro stories longer and more narrated -- less dialogue -- than Chekhov's. They tend to move more in time. The people who take up the space of her stories are typically modest country women from southwestern Ontario. Her stories are particular, with a genius for detail, while opening up into ambiguous, sweeping spaces.
More on Gladwell -- His Style of Thinking ...
Duncan Watts uses Lazarsfeld's ruse to frame the central concern of "Everything Is Obvious": that common sense is a shockingly unreliable guide to truth and yet we rely on it virtually to the exclusion of other methods of reasoning...
He is especially interested in the mistakes we make when we reason about how people influence one another—such as our tendency to think of groups in terms of representative or important members rather than as whole entities. The writings of New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell take heavy fire in "Everything Is Obvious." ...
"The Tipping Point" reads so well that its explanations have been widely accepted. At first blush they seem novel, but they mainly reflect what common sense tells us about how social networks work. The problem with the Hush Puppies story is that the computational analysis of actual networks, such as a study that Mr. Watts conducted of 74 million Twitter message chains, shows that influencers, if they exist, are more common and less special than Mr. Gladwell thinks. Paying Kim Kardashian $10,000 to tweet about a product may well buy less buzz than paying 10,000 ordinary Twitter users $1 each. The Hush Puppies tale is a just-so story written after the fact—and an example of what Mr. Watts calls the "special people" fallacy.
More On GKC - His Style of Writing ...
What I discovered is that the Chestertonian style of writing was particularly well suited to the content at hand. How shall one write a book on a philosophical or theological subject for a popular audience? The content itself seems dry, and yet for the enthusiast it is the most stimulating subject of all. As Chesterton wrote, “People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum and safe. There never was anything so perilous and exciting as orthodoxy.”
A sinner, definitely …
… like the rest of us, as he would be the first to admit: GKC: Saint, Maybe; Anti-Semite, No. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The moviewriter …
… Cormac McCarthy Gets His First Original Film Made - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Conflicted atheism …
… Mind and Cosmos - Reformation21. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The core thesis of Mind and Cosmos can be simply stated. Darwinian materialism has failed to account for several undeniable features of human existence: consciousness, reason, meaning, and moral values. The problem is not that the answers haven't yet been found, but rather thatthe paradigm itself precludes any satisfactory answers. All attempts to explain the mental and the moral in terms of the physical have been unsuccessful, and will continue to be. What is needed is not a novel Darwinian materialist solution, but rather a wholesale rejection of that paradigm in favor of a non-materialist (but non-supernaturalist) paradigm.THis is an excellent piece of analysis. Read the whole thing.
A thought for today …
I think any writer is a fool if he doesn't do it for money. There needs to be some kind of incentive in addition to the project. It all goes together. It's fun to sit there and think of characters and get them into action, then be paid for it. I can't believe it when writers tell me 'I don't want to show my work to anybody'.
— Elmore Leonard, born on this date in 1925
Thursday, October 10, 2013
I KNEW IT!
American Biblical scholar Joseph Atwill will be appearing before the British public for the first time in London on the 19th of October to present a controversial new discovery: ancient confessions recently uncovered now prove, according to Atwill, that the New Testament was written by first-century Roman aristocrats and that they fabricated the entire story of Jesus Christ.
...
About Joseph Atwill: Joseph Atwill is the author of the best-selling book "Caesar's Messiah" and its upcoming sequel "The Single Strand."
Well, why not?
… Why Are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy? — Christine Gross-Loh — The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
It is definitely an improvement over logical positivism.
It is definitely an improvement over logical positivism.
Backstory …
… Inside the legendary Gay Talese story 'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold' - latimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A thought for today …
Next to the word 'Nature,' 'the Great Chain of Being' was the sacred phrase of the eighteenth century, playing a part somewhat analogous to that of the blessed word 'evolution' in the late nineteenth.
— Arthur O. Lovejoy, born on this date in 1873
'Cause You, Reader, Are Too Dumb ...
Perhaps ... perhaps I am the one who is naive, but I was honestly very surprised by these recent quotes. I had thought Gladwell was inadvertently misunderstanding the science he was writing about and making sincere mistakes in the service of coming up with ever more "Gladwellian" insights to serve his audience. But according to his own account, he knows exactly what he is doing, and not only that, he thinks it is the right thing to do.A Gladwell parody here:
...Richard is dyslexic. Most people would consider it to be a disadvantage. But Richard worked very hard, got a bit lucky and founded his Virgin empire. Richard could not have done this had he not been dyslexic. Having dyslexia is actually a blessing and anyone who has the condition and has not become a billionaire should be ashamed...
Extraordinary Liturgy, Humble Participants ...
The “people of Summorum Pontificum”—that is, those who find the pre-conciliar liturgy, liberalized by Pope Benedict XVI with his 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, to be better suited to their spiritual needs—are fully mobilizing for a second pilgrimage to Rome, to take place October 24-27....
To learn a little more about this year’s event, I spoke with its coordinator and international spokesman, Guillaume Ferluc, a journalist for the well-known web portal Paix Liturgique. He also discussed at length the signs of hope he sees today in the worldwide community of traditional Catholics....What new challenges for the traditional world, in your opinion, can we expect with the new pontificate?Ferluc: We are convinced that the history of the Church did not end either in 1962 or with the pontificate of Pope Benedict. The new pontificate of Pope Francis is, perhaps, urging us to reflect on how the liturgy and tradition of the Church are not only for a small group, an elite, as is misunderstood by many.One could also argue, following the call of Pope Francis, that the traditional liturgy of the Church—with all its splendor which reveals to us the presence of God—is actually a liturgy that leads us to be humble. In the traditional liturgy, the actuosa participatio—active participation of the faithful—is a humble participation, made of silence, adoration, kneeling, supplication, thanks: many attitudes that are not so different from those of the man in trouble asking for help, of the person who is suffering.
Wednesday, October 09, 2013
The L.A. Times Won't Publish Letters From ...
"deniers" of anthropogenic global warming: the letters editor explains why:
Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published. Saying "there's no sign humans have caused climate change" is not stating an opinion, it's asserting a factual inaccuracy.
Library Of The Future ...
The formal notions of what constitutes a library are being readjusted, as many make predictions about what the Library Of The Future will look like. The most dramatic prediction—that physical copies will cease to exist—may never come to pass. But the shift to digital shows no sign of slowing.
A new library opened last week in Bexar County Texas called BiblioTech. It's no ordinary library: Instead of stack of books and old magazine archives, BiblioTech is a digital-only hub that has 10,000 e-books, 600 e-readers, and close to 100 computer stations. It is the digital learning center techies have long been promised.
FYI …
… Why bossa nova is 'the highest flowering of Brazilian culture' | Music | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Worth noting …
Author Stephen Byler sent me an email yesterday in which he said he had been in touch with Joel Whitney about Whitney's Salon piece "The Paris Review, the Cold War, and the CIA." Stephen and I had talked about it, an I had remarked that it was maybe the best thing the CIA had ever done. Whitney text messahed Ste[hen the following comment:
I fear so.
Whitney's essay is listed in Best American Essays of 2013 as among the Notable Essays of 2012. (So is "Time Crystals,: an essay of mine that was published in Boulevard.)
"My brother said the same: namely, that starting lit mags is better than assassinations. It would be nice if they were one or the other. The fact is they started lit mags to avoid blowback while ramping up their assassinations and coups. And it got writers/lovers of freedom confused about whether they were allowed to oppose the assassinations without being called red or communist or pink or Stalinist.They were afraid that calling out the CIA might hurt their writing careers.The fear persists."
I fear so.
Whitney's essay is listed in Best American Essays of 2013 as among the Notable Essays of 2012. (So is "Time Crystals,: an essay of mine that was published in Boulevard.)
RIP …
… Stanley Kauffmann, the New Republic's Film Critic of 54 Years, Dies at 97 | Criticwire.
There's a link to his take-down of In Cold Blood. Well worth reading.
There's a link to his take-down of In Cold Blood. Well worth reading.
Basic texts …
… Ruth Wisse on Jewish Humour | Five Books | Five Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… when you read [Tevye] on the page he really is a standup comic. He is speaking to Mr. Sholem Aleichem so that they have formed a kind of magic circle, a cultural island, within a sea of change. They are this stable unit, Mr Sholem Aleichem is the audience but he is a very important audience because he is the entrepreneur who is taking these heavy monologues and publishing them. It's an extremely complicated work in the way it is fashioned. It seems simple and straightforward — the man telling the story is so amiable and so forth — but it is one of the most perpetually fascinating texts because of the various levels of interaction between the character and the listener and in relation to the devastation that he is describing. The trajectory of the plot is totally downward from the first story to the end, it becomes more and more tragic. He is bereft of everything that was important to him. But he remains a speaker. He is the one who keeps reinterpreting all that happens, and it's through his eyes that you see this. So, in a sense, nothing is taken away from him because he is the one who has the last word. I think Jewish readers began to see themselves in this model. They would quote him. They would see themselves as a people who — as long as they were in possession of the narrative — it didn't really matter all that much what happened.
Is this a big deal ?
… Why Don't More Americans Win the Nobel Prize? : The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Well, they haven't given it to Torgny Lindgren, either, and he's a Swede.
Well, they haven't given it to Torgny Lindgren, either, and he's a Swede.
In case you wondered …
… How to Paint Like Vermeer, as Explained by a San Antonio Techie. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I suspect there's more to it.
I suspect there's more to it.
A thought for today …
An adult life...is a slowly emerging design, with shifting components, occasional dramatic disruptions, and fresh creative arrangements.
― Jill Ker Conway, born on this date in 1934
Tuesday, October 08, 2013
Talking Head ...
... in New York there has been no public rejection of the culture that led to the financial crisis. Instead, there has been tacit encouragement of the banking industry's actions from figures like Mayor Bloomberg. The nation's largest financial institutions are almost all still around, still "too big to fail" and as powerful as ever. One might hope that enlightened bankers might emulate the Medicis and fund culture-makers – both emerging artists and those still in school – as a way of ensuring a continued talent pool that would invent stuff and fill the world with ideas and inspiration, but other than buying blue-chip art for their walls and donating to some institutions what is, for them, small change, they don't seem to be very much interested in replenishing the talent pool.David Byrne on the decline of New York City's cultural vibrancy
...
A thought for today …
The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism.
— John Cowper Powys, born on this date in 1872
Monday, October 07, 2013
Rehab …
… Wales prepares to resurrect the reputation of Dylan Thomas | Books | The Observer. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Hmm …
… Why I’m still a Catholic - Salon.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… he didn’t even hesitate before replying: “The Church has given me God’s love, God’s true presence. When I receive the Eucharist … I receive the Body and Blood of Jesus, who loves me and welcomes all people to his table — the same Jesus who is asking me to do what I can to feed the hungry, help the poor, love my neighbors. I know that I need a relationship with him and that I need to share his love with others. That’s why I’m Catholic. That’s why I stay.”Well, yes.
Nothing surprising here …
… given this fascist regime: ACLU says ATF blocks whistleblower book on scandal.
Hmm …
… Language Log — What did Justice Scalia mean?
Yes, the meanings of words do change. But when you read a text composed two centuries ago, the meaning you want is the one in use at that time.
Yes, the meanings of words do change. But when you read a text composed two centuries ago, the meaning you want is the one in use at that time.
Innovation …
… New E-Book Lending Service Aims To Be Netflix For Books : All Tech Considered : NPR. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Not with a bang, but a whimper …
… Hitching to Gomorrah — Theodore Dalrymple. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In that moment, I realised the absurdity of the supposed categorical imperative to tell the truth on all occasions, as Kant would have us believe, irrespective of circumstances. There are situations in which there are higher values than truth, or at least than truth-telling, as every doctor has eventually to learn.
Ah, but you do, Bryan …
… Bryan Appleyard — Malcolm Gladwell: I Don’t Get It. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I had some things to say about Gladwell some years ago: Deep …
… in the first chapter he tells the story of David and Goliath and then concludes by saying ‘almost everything about it is wrong’. But he does not then show it is wrong, he simply shows it in a different light. He also writes about education, arguing that it is a myth that small class sizes are necessarily a virtue. He then jeers at a private school called Hotchkiss in Connecticut for advertising small classes. One would expect him to justify this by giving some figures about Hotchkiss results, but he does not.
I had some things to say about Gladwell some years ago: Deep …
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)