A reference in the title there to F. Crick and L. E. Orgel’s “Directed
Panspermia” (Icarus 19 [July 1973]: 341-346), mentioned in the same
footnote as this “For the general idea of life on Earth having arisen
from extraterrestrial activity [. . .] an idea also elaborated in the
Strugatsky brothers’ [. . .] Roadside Picnic” (Steven J. Dick, The
Biological Universe Cambridge, 1996. 377n104).
I’m not sure what Dick means here. I’m writing something short about
Lem’s narrative theory, or presuppositions at least, in his brief essay
on the book; but I thought briefly of the moulages being an advance unit
that cause the rest of the world to be distorted into being, a temporal
and stochastic paradox that may make sense of the Golden Ball.
Sorel even suggests that Galileo perhaps derived his interest in the
laws of gravitational acceleration from the type of constant force
presented by the monarchy, with its power swelling under his eyes every
day. (Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 29).
I wonder if Sorel was the first person to make that observation.
Probably not. It may remind you of “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize.” It may not.
Two articles from the Washington
Post
and from Seymour Hersh in the New
Yorker. Though
it feels somewhat overoptimistic at best, I’m currently subscribing to
the bluster theory. I think it’s self-evident enough that there are no
viable military options that the administration is working hard on a
little “Madman” theory. And “explosive carrying dogs?” That’s a sure
sign.
Hersh has also been tipped very hard about tactical nuclear weapons,
which seems to me to fit the scenario.
Comes to us from Michael Saler’s “Modernity, Disenchantment, and the
Ironic
Imagination”:
“Why can’t I find a single copy of my own monograph in any bookstore,
but I can find many copies of Hamlet translated into Klingon?”
I appreciate Saler’s citation of Vaihinger there. A review of C. K.
Ogden’s translation from The Journal of Philosophy, hoping that the
Germans will become acquainted with American pragmatist thought, notes
“the existence of intellectual pursuits in America other than
suppressing of the theory of evolution and the consumption of beer,” on
which latter point I should note how amused I was by Habermas’s example
in Theory of Communicative Action of the Bavarian workers taking their
mid-morning (9:00 AM) beer break.
Phillip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles recognized by Perry
Anderson:
In reality, the front of opinion that pressed for an assault on Iraq
was far broader than a particular Republican faction. It included many
a liberal and Democrat. Not merely was the most detailed case for
attacking Saddam Hussein made by Kenneth Pollack, a functionary of the
Clinton Administration. What remains by a long way the most sweeping
theorization of a program for American military intervention to
destroy rogue regimes and uphold human rights round the world is the
work of Philip Bobbitt, nephew of Lyndon Johnson and another and more
senior ornament of the national security apparatus under Clinton.
Beside the 900 pages of his magnum opus, The Shield of Achilles, a
work of vast historical ambition that ends with a series of dramatic
scenarios of the coming wars for which America must prepare, the
writers of The Weekly Standard are thin fare.
“This right here beats anything I have ever seen,” Sheriff Tom Alexander
told the Asheville Citizen-Times, which reported that victims may have
come from as far away as South America These
incidents,
like the well-publicized case in Germany a few years ago, admit of no
sociological explanation. They are bubbles of evanescence, chance beyond
our ability to perceive. Our flawed intuitions about probability and
causality are the subject of a good deal of Lem’s writings–note that
the translator of The Chain of Chance gave it that overly descriptive
title instead of the cognate “Catarrh.” This is yet another topic I’d
like to address in the upcoming discussion, with specific reference
perhaps to Investigation.
I’m back from my first-ever Four Cs in Chicago, and I wanted to let the
sporting world know that I would have bet unlimited amounts of money on
UCLA at halftime of the Gonzaga game. Despite being down by fifteen or
however many it was, I was certain that there were going to come back
and win, though I was a bit startled by how close it actually was. I’d
like to see Morrison coming off the bench for Phoenix next year, though
I don’t think that’s likely; and I’m not sure how successful he’s going
to be otherwise.
Denis Johnson’s story “There Comes after Here,” published in the April
1972 Atlantic (which also features a disapproving review of Straw
Dogs by David Denby, cf. his current NY’er review of V for Vendetta),
ends with a woman, beset by the quasi-naturalistic forces
stage-managed
in A History of Violence having a religious revelation on her bus to
Pennsylvania. I can’t remember if this incident was directly
incorporated into Angels or is merely similar; but it is clearly a
moment of lunatic transcendence. (Imagine if Cronenberg had directed the
adaptation of Jesus’ Son. Already Dead would also be worth
contemplating.)
While reading this
article
about the prospects of a nuclear Iran, I noted that Kennedy estimated
the odds of a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Event as “‘‘between 1
in 3 and even.”
Using either that or some other potential apocalypse, can you think of
fictional scenarios in which the world is somehow recreated as it would
be imagined to be, through simulation technology or similar, and a
character recognizes that the true life is absent? Not The Matrix,
more like The Man in the High Castle in that the disaster has to be a
counterfactual real.
[xp@tv]
I’ve noticed that when a stage magician with my name is on your
television, I get hundreds of google searches from you. Though I doubt
you will find much of what you’re looking for here, I do want to mention
that I’m working my way through all the volumes of Lynn Thorndike’s A
History of Magic and Experimental Science, which is not the same thing
at all.