Clancy and I saw the Kroller-Muller travelling
Van Gogh-Mondrian exhibit at the High
Museum yesterday. In addition to being considerably entranced by Van
Gogh’s Cemetery in the Rain, Paris
1886 (what’s happening
in the middle?), I was ensorcelled by van der Leck’s stained glass
ironic encomium to the mining industry (couldn’t find an online image,
though I’m exceptionally lazy when looking for them).
In the High’s permanent collection is one of the most beguiling of Ralph
Albert Blakelock’s
landscapes
as well. I wonder if Lovecraft knew of Blakelock, who went quite mad.
Is Timothy Burke being fair
to this
review
of Alias by Virginia Heffernan? No. No, he’s not.
Let’s examine one offending paragraph:
Let’s be honest. Many of us don’t like comic books and have feigned
interest in their jumpy bif-bam fighting scenes and the way they
redeem loser guys, only to impress and minister to those loser guys.
And now we can admit that while the redemption dynamic - little X-Men
boys finding in their eccentricity and loneliness a superpower - is
touching, there’s nothing duller than listening to someone explain, in
all seriousness, the Syndicate and the Shadow Force and the Hard Drive
and the Plutonium Lance. And the characters: lame. One is good and the
other is evil, and then one is evil pretending to be good, and then
one is good pretending to be evil.
This
story
made me wonder about which of the world’s militaries are currently
deploying or have the ability to deploy high-intensity lasers on the
battlefield to blind the enemy. You can read a report on the matter
here.
But what I’m really curious about at the moment is whether Dennis Gabor
envisioned any military applications for the hologram.
I read his The Last Season in a chain retailer yesterday. Early on,
and I didn’t note the citation, but early on he notes that Detroit was
not a very good team. Granted, this was before they acquired Rasheed
Wallace, but I wonder if his ghostwriter or his editor might have caught
that.
Similarly, he at one point says that Kareem Rush was, after Kobe, the
best athlete on the team. A hundred or so pages later, that honor goes
to Devean George.
As I drove through this area looking for a bank earlier today, I noted
the following two items: there’s a commemorative plaque of a visit by
Thackeray to the city in the 1850s. It states that he thought the twenty
guineas he earned as a speaking fee was the easiest money he ever made
and that the slaves looked happy.
Shortly thereafter, I saw a grim woman holding a sign outside the
Planned Parenthood office that read “‘we do not want word to go out that
we want to exterminate the Negro population’ – Margaret Sanger 1939.”
This is, of course, so out-of-context as to make a creationist
blush,
but where was a camera?
Furthermore, even passing familiarity with Jordan’s biography would be
enough for you to know that he had a comfortable middle-class
upbringing. His dad worked at GE.
And “Jordan was the most selfish gunner in NBA history.” What? Have you
ever heard of George Gervin? Bob McAdoo? Dominique Wilkens? As for
Bryant being a “much better pure shooter,” did you notice that the only
time Jordan had a field goal percentage of 40% was when he turned 40?
Did you get paid for this column? I’ll pass over you comparing Lamar
Odom to Scottie Pippen in silence.
After getting an oil change, I stopped by a previously unvisited
bookstore in the Chamblee area and purchased an omnibus edition of
Charles Fort along with the latest Le Carre.
Opening it at random in the coffeeshop, I came across the following
passage: “Almost anybody reading this account will perhaps regretfully,
perhaps not, say farewell to our idea of the teleported boy” (706). Fort
had been considering the notion that Hauser had possibly been teleported
from a different time or space into Nuremberg, a possibility that I
don’t think Herzog explored in his film, to my personal continuing
regret.
The dissection of Hauser’s brain in the final scene of this film reveals
unusual development in the cerebrum, and Hauser’s murder is clearly the
rage of Caliban at seeing himself in the mirror. Though the idea of a
human deprived of language and being reintegrated into the society is
fairly common, are they instances of the reverse–of a lingual explorer
finding a small colony or tribe of non-speaking humans?
Did Leibniz, Bruno, Wilkins, Boehme, et al, have any interest in the
feral human? Would such a being be infused with traces at least of the
original tongue, of the ability to sense things’ true names? Cf. Hal’s
state at the end/beginning of Infinite Jest and the story “Another
Pioneer” in Oblivion. Also Auster’s The New York Trilogy.
The former Calpundit has some
harsh
things to say about this L.A. Timespiece
by Michael Gorman, the president-elect of the ALA. Drum’s main criticism
is that there is no rational grounds for Gorman to object to an
initiative that will make it easier for scholars to do what they already
do in physical libraries. Gorman argues that the process of digitization
will encourage the improper use of scholarly knowledge, turning instead
into mere decontextualized information.