From Barb, A.A. “Three Elusive Amulets.” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 3:
There are few Graeco-Roman deities of such protean significance as
Hermes-Mercurius. He is the divine messenger and the psychopompos as
well as the god of business success—both honest and dishonest.
When I write my Dan Brown parody, it will definitely involve CEOs
wearing Gnostic cameos. Adam Gopnik’s recent review of books on Leonardo
Da Vinci in the New Yorker contains a line about how the perpetual
appeal of the occult in American life should not be mistaken for
religiosity. There is a relation, insufficiently charted, between this
appeal and commercial life.
I suspect that everyone with a blog has linked to this astounding
Seymour Hersh story,
about which I hope to have more to say later, but for right now I will
note that I saw Howard Hart, who’s quoted therein, on CSPAN a while ago;
and he suggested that the CIA could no longer recruit from Ivy League
type universities as much as they used to because of the left-wing bias
of the faculty there. There was also a hint that the current recruiting,
which he said came mostly from the South and the Midwest, was not what
it could be.
Philosophical works among [the Solipsists] are more or less of this
sort: “Does the scarab roll dung into a ball paradigmatically?” “If a
mouse urinates in the sea, is there a risk of shipwreck?” “Are
mathematical points receptacles for spirits?” “Is a belch an
exhalation of the soul?” “Does the barking of a dog make the moon
spotted?” and many other arguments of this kind, which are stated and
discussed with equal contentiousness. Their Theological works are:
“Whether navigation can be established in imaginary space.” “Whether
the intelligence known as Burach has the power to digest iron.”
“Whether the souls of the Gods have color.” “Whether the excretions of
Demons are protective to humans in the eighth degree.” “Whether drums
covered with the hide of an ass delight the intellect.”
From the “DNA of
Literature” series of
digitized Paris Review interviews (and why hasn’t Denis Johnson gotten
one of these yet?), I was pleased to read the following from Aldous
Huxley:
Maybe an immensely gifted artist–someone like Odilon Redon (who
probably saw the world like this all the time, anyhow)—maybe such a
man could profit by the lysergic acid experience, could use his
visions as models, could reproduce on canvas the external world as it
is transfigured by the drug.
Here’s the syllabus for
my above-titled course this semester.
I decided that the “Addiction and Necessity” course would be better
taught as my original idea, “The Pharmaceutical Imagination,” which
would primarily consider the rhetoric of debates about access to and the
development of drugs. I plan to teach it in the fall.
I very well may set up a course blog to be hosted right here at
jgoodwin.net., your one-stop shop, etc.
Roger Kimball makes the following claim in this
review of the
new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:
Today, alas, Leslie Stephen is known to many (to the extent that he is
known at all) solely as the father of Virginia Woolf. But Stephen’s
claim on our attention goes well beyond his paternity of that
poster-girl for twentieth-century feminism, department of snobbish
literary neurasthenia. Besides, if we’re going to bring up relatives,
why not start with a genuinely distinguished one. Stephen was also the
brother of James Fitzjames Stephen—another prodigy of Victorian
literary productivity—whose book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
(1873) is one of the sharpest and most relentless polemics in the
library of philosophical evisceration. Stephen made mincemeat of that
bible of libertarian permission, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, a
feat for which posterity has repaid him with a combination of neglect
and hostility.
Might link Gershenfeld’s When Things Think to the robot.
Last image of the husband in chains is clearly meant to be
symbolic–should also pay closer attention to what kind of memory
alteration the protag. has had.
UN again.
Soviet domination–penology.
Note “Lincoln’s Birthday”
“Of Relays and Roses”
32 our economy has come to depend on people getting married more than
once
Stanley Fish’s
article in the
Chronicle today might get (or has already gotten–don’t know yet) a
lot of attention among academic web log enthusiasts. He argues that
religion is the barycenter of both the private and public spheres, and
that academics better take notice (and have been taking notice) of this
vital energy.
“Announce a course with ‘religion’ in the title, and you will have an
overflow population. Announce a lecture or panel on ‘religion in our
time’ and you will have to hire a larger hall” writes Fish, and my inner
cynic wondered if the increases might be even larger if you substituted
“sex” there. I don’t think that’s as trivial as it seems. Sex provokes
interest because it’s exciting but also because it’s familiar. So might
it be with religion. A course on “hermeneutics” may not attract the same
audience simply because it’s a forbidding and boring-sounding word.
Via Grand Text
Auto I
discovered this wonderful site
devoted to Harry Stephen Keeler, who I’m sad to say, I had never heard
of until just a few minutes ago. Now I must track down and read all of
his works.
Could
Keeler have
known Propp or vice versa? I hope to have more to write about this anon.
The first story seems to be told by a dream in the character in the
second. Apparently the latter ties-in in some way with Neil Gaiman’s
Sandman, which I’ve actually never read. In fact, I’ve read nothing at
all by Gaiman. I feel somehow shamed writing that, but it’s true.
The second story is the type of backstory that a reader usually has to
imagine for himself when reading Wolfe’s fiction, so it’s unusual for
things to be as clear as they apparently are. I should interject here,
apropos of nothing really, that Wolfe comments in one of the short
essays in Castle of Days that Cromwell was one of the most evil men
who ever lived (will find the citation later).