September 6, 2006 – 11:03 pm
This working-for-a-living thing has me all worn out, so for tonight, rather than offer the eloquent and persuasive post I had planned, in which I shall reassure those readers whom I seem to have upset with recent political posts that I am not Bull Connor or Curtis LeMay, I offer an engaging, if somewhat macabre, link dedicated to the grotesquely fascinating world of mummies. Enjoy.
September 5, 2006 – 11:20 pm
Well, it had to end sometime. The delightful two-month break occasioned by the infinitely avoidable death (wilful murder, more like) of PubSub has come to an end, and I find myself back in harness, this time for a large software company in midtown. I like my new coworkers – they are bright and friendly – and the work seems interesting, but I do have to say it is a bit of a jolt to be back in shoes and long pants, and to exchange the slow rhythm of the tides for the screeching chaos of Manhattan. This new outfit is also by far the most corporate environment in which I have ever found myself, after decades in the recording studio followed by five years of small startups, and I feel like Tarzan in a dinner jacket. But with two kids in college, there are bills to pay, so we adapt.
My biggest worry is having no time for reading, writing, quiet contemplation, and unhurried, healthful exercise; I think spending the summer as a “gentleman of leisure” spoiled me no end. But I’m not complaining, appearances to the contrary – I am well aware how very lucky I was to have that much-needed break, and as my dear mum used to say, the only real peace in this world is on the other side of the churchyard gate. So for now, with freedom out of reach, it’s farewell to the beach, and back into the breach.
September 4, 2006 – 10:52 pm
It’s been a long day, and having just got in from a long drive back to Brooklyn from Cape Cod, I’m rather too worn out to say much tonight.
But I do want to note with shock and sorrow the bizarre and untimely death of Steve Irwin. He was a delightful character, and an iconic figure in his native Australia. His fearless and hyperkinetic enthusiasm, his genuine love of animals (and his immense skill in handling them), and his goofy smile, khaki shorts and broad Aussie accent won him millions of fans the world over (I was one too, in case you can’t tell), and I join them all in mourning his loss.
September 3, 2006 – 9:45 pm
It was a damp and blustery day in Wellfleet yesterday, as the low-pressure system dubbed Ernesto passed to our west. With high pressure to the east, the resulting gradient made for strong winds blowing in from the Atlantic onto the Cape Cod backshore. I dropped by the beach at Newcomb Hollow with my trusty Sony Cybershot, and snapped the image below:
the elements rage
But a still picture really doesn’t do it justice. As it happens my little camera will take movies as well, so if you’d like to, you can download brief clip – complete with poorly recorded audio – here. (Best to right-click the link and choose “Save Target As”, then save and run the file on your machine.)
September 2, 2006 – 3:09 pm
Jess Kaplan calls my attention to some new writing about our presence in Iraq by Christopher Hitchens – with whom I usually find myself agreeing – over at Foreign Affairs.
August 30, 2006 – 10:58 pm
A few days ago I wrote a post about Robert Wright’s book Nonzero, in response to Kevin Kim’s thoughts about the idea of telelology in evolution. Earlier this evening a new commenter, a blogger who goes by the nickname ‘gordsellar’ stopped by to offer some worthwhile remarks in that post’s discussion thread. I moseyed over to peek at his site, eclexys – which, being obviously the work of a curious and intelligent person, has since been added to the waka waka waka sidebar – and found an interesting item about a marvelous animal you might very well never have heard of: the tardigrade. How I can have written hundreds of posts over the last year and a half without mentioning this cuddly little creature, I can’t imagine.
August 29, 2006 – 10:45 pm
Our Sun is about five billion years old, which is about halfway through its expected lifespan. A star begins as a collapsing cloud of gas, mostly hydrogen, and when the ball has grown dense enough under the pressure of its own gravitation, the hydrogen atoms begin to fuse into helium, liberating a tremendous amount of energy. This outward force acts as a counterbalance to the crushing inward pull of gravity, and the star settles into a comfortable equilibrium. Over time, fusion reactions occur between helium atoms as well, and begin working their way up through a series of elements, and the star takes on a layered structure, with the more massive elements toward the core. You might think that the more hydrogen a star starts off with – in other words, the more massive the star is – the longer it would last, but in fact it goes the other way, because the increased gravitional pressure due to the extra mass causes the fusion reactions to proceed more rapidly, more than making up for the extra “fuel”. The really big stars burn very brightly, very violently, and very briefly indeed compared to a modest specimen like ours: in contrast to the ten-billion-year lifespan of our Sun, giant stars may burn for less than a million years.
August 28, 2006 – 3:12 pm
In an ongoing discussion over at Maverick Philosopher, one of the interlocutors has made the assertion, in defense of dualism, that the human mind must be more than the physical activity of the brain, because the brain is a finite physical system, and the mind of Man, allegedly, is infinite. To quote from the thread over at Dr. Vallicella’s place:
Because the human mind is not bounded, it cannot be physical.
Sounds good. We all have the feeling that we can accommodate any new concept that comes before us (though, on reflection, a peek at contemporary political discourse might be sufficient rebuttal), and adjust our behavior with limitless flexibility. But why do we think so? What makes us so sure?
August 27, 2006 – 5:59 pm
Today, having returned to Wellfleet from Brooklyn late last evening, I arose early and made my way to Indian Neck Beach, which forms the eastern shore of Wellfleet Harbor. My arrival coincided, not accidentally, with the lowest extremity of the tide, and as I expected I found the legendary oyster beds fully exposed, beckoning as winsomely as Goya’s Maja.
August 27, 2006 – 5:37 pm
Well, I’ve gone and got myself into another tussle over at Maverick Philosopher, which is one reason I’ve been confecting such weightless froth over here.
These arguments never get anywhere – if it were possible, at our current stage of development, to answer such questions as the mind-body problem, we’d have done so already – but I just can’t help myself. If you’d like to drop by over there and razz the opposition, here’s the link.
August 26, 2006 – 11:00 pm
I’m not much of a “morning person”. I’ve often felt that my brain is rather like those big lights that are used in school gyms; the ones that do almost nothing when they are first switched on, and then gradually fade up to dazzling brightness over an interval of ten minutes or so. The analogy is far from perfect: my brain takes a good deal longer than ten minutes to warm up, and I wouldn’t say that I ever get anywhere near “dazzling brightness”. But you get the idea.
Well, as it turns out, the brain does indeed boot itself up in stages, in a fashion similar to the way a computer gets going: first the operating system itself must be loaded, and only after that can applications be run. This sequence of operations in the brain is managed by the thalamus, which acts as a sort of concierge for sensory impressions, and which is itself activated by, and subsequently distributes, the chemical known as nitric oxide.
Now as it happens, nitric oxide is an important molecule for the body’s regulation of blood flow, and it is by controlling the delivery of this magic molecule to another essential organ that the sought-after medicament Viagra is able to get such, um, outstanding results.
Learn more here.
August 25, 2006 – 3:45 pm
Here is further proof that some people simply don’t get out enough: a Flash-based simulation of that ancient (and I’m ancient enough myself to have two of them gathering dust in a closet) proto-PC, the Commodore 64.
August 25, 2006 – 1:07 pm
My old friend, the painter and art collector Patrick Goldsmith – whose peregrinations have taken him often to the remotest East – took up, a few years back, the art of the sonnet, and a collection of his work is available online. Called The Wayfarer Sonnets, they are intended as companions to the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, and I do hope you will take a look. You can find them, in print or downloadable form, here. Just the thing for those of you with a Tao jones.
August 24, 2006 – 10:54 pm
Well, I suppose everyone is commenting on this today, but I won’t let that stop me. Property values on Pluto plummeted today as the icy worldlet, long considered a bit of an arriviste by solar system Brahmins like Jupiter and Venus, had its status demoted from “planet” to “dwarf planet”.
August 23, 2006 – 5:58 pm
One of the greatest benefits of blogging is the opportunity one has to converse with, and learn from, people that one might otherwise never have met. Scott Carson, professor of philosophy at Ohio University and author of the blog An Examined Life, has taken the trouble to respond to my comments on his post about the defensibility of torture. He makes some excellent criticisms of my post, and I am very grateful to him for taking the time to do so.
August 22, 2006 – 11:06 pm
On the heels of yesterday’s depressing link from Eugene, from Duncan Werner comes an item from the Washington Post about the sad state – verging on downright illiteracy – of many of today’s college students. The author, one Michael Skube, a professor of journalism at Elon College, describes a recent experience:
We were talking informally in class not long ago, 17 college sophomores and I, and on a whim I asked who some of their favorite writers are. The question hung in uneasy silence. At length, a voice in the rear hesitantly volunteered the name of . . . Dan Brown.
No other names were offered. The author of “The DaVinci Code” was not just the best writer they could think of; he was the only writer they could think of.
Read it and weep, friends.
August 21, 2006 – 10:38 pm
From Eugene Jen comes a link to a dispiriting item by Bernard Lewis, who is perhaps the West’s preeminent scholar of the Islamic world. In this brief article Lewis gives us another good reason to be concerned about Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technology, namely that the idea of “mutual assured destruction” that has acted so far to prevent nations from engaging in nuclear war might be not a deterrent to the apocalyptically minded rulers of Iran, but an inducement. He even suggests that August 22nd might be a worrisome date, for historical reasons.
For someone as erudite and level-headed as Lewis to be making this point is unnerving, to say the least. Read the article here.
August 20, 2006 – 11:37 pm
There is more I’d like to say about Robert Wright’s Nonzero, and I’ll be getting to it tomorrow, most likely, but meanwhile I’ve just begun reading The Ancestor’s Tale, by Richard Dawkins.
August 18, 2006 – 11:49 am
The multidimensional Kevin Kim, over at his one-of-a-kind weblog Big Hominid’s Hairy Chasms has posted a response to my mention of Robert Wright’s book Nonzero. In his post Kevin calls into question the idea of any directionality or purpose to biological evolution, making common cause in this regard with the late Stephen Jay Gould. Kevin writes:
[…I] wonder whether Wright isn’t making a mistake similar to that made by certain process theologians– people who (1) look at events happening in the “cream of the crop” of the evolutionary tumult and (2) mistakenly conclude that evolution at this top layer somehow represents a universal telos. I think human arrogance tends to suggest the “ladder” paradigm to us when we assess natural phenomena: we can’t help seeing ourselves as some sort of culmination of natural (or supernatural) processes. My own view is that life and mind are not representative of any telos at all: they are simply stochastic occurrences. Most of this cosmos, pretty though it be, is not alive.
Closed systems tend toward greater entropy over time. Within those closed systems, regions of anti-entropic activity may arise, but the overarching history of those systems is foreordained to follow the path of the “thermodynamic arrow,” as Stephen Hawking calls it. That is why, in a (theoretically) closed system like our universe, tiny pockets of life can form while most of the universe remains (as far as we know) abiotic. Billions or trillions of years hence, all that life will disintegrate as entropy settles more comfortably into its ancient throne. Those tiny pockets of life, then– those little bits of animated telos– are no evidence of a larger cosmic end or purpose. They– we– are a brief spark in the Nabokovian blackness: here and gone. The pessimist views this state of affairs with rue; the man of religion, by contrast, knows this means that each moment is absolutely precious. Life’s finitude and frailty are what give it its value.
Kevin, writing with customary eloquence, makes some very good points, and most of all I agree with his remarks about what gives life its value. But I think that he is missing the point made by Wright in his book, and is wrongly conflating the idea of telos with the possibility of there being a directionality, an “arrow”, to Darwinian evolution.
August 17, 2006 – 11:25 pm
An item in the English newspaper The Guardian has touched off a heated controversy. The piece refers to the airline-bombing plot that British authorites nipped in the bud last week, and says that the key witness in the case, one Rashid Rauf, a British citizen, revealed what he knew only after he was “broken” under interrogation by Pakistani questioners, which suggests rather strongly that he was tortured. The information obtained, however, most likely prevented the murder of thousands in simultaneous midair bombings. The question, of course, is whether the benefit thus achieved justifies the use of methods from which compassionate people and humane societies recoil in horror.
August 16, 2006 – 11:22 pm
I had put it aside for a while (I tend to have too many books going at once), but have just finished reading Nonzero – The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright. It is quite brilliant, and I highly recommend it.
“The Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg once ended a book on this note: ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.’ Far be it from me to argue with a great physicist about how depressing physics is. For all I know, Weinberg’s realm of expertise, the realm of inanimate matter, really does offer no evidence of higher purpose. But when we move into the realm of animate matter — bacteria, cellular slime molds, and, most notably, human beings — the situation strikes me as different. The more closely we examine the drift of biological evolution and, especially, the drift of human history, the more there seems to be a point to it all. Because in neither case is ‘drift’ really the right word. Both of these processes have a direction, an arrow. At least, that is the thesis of this book.”
August 15, 2006 – 10:26 pm
One of the topics in which there is keen interest around these parts is the infinitely perplexing question of consciousness – what it is, whence it arises, and just where it fits into the Big Picture.
The hallmark of consciousness is subjectivity; the existence of an awareness that experiences are happening to. Many belive that this subjectivity is ontologically irreducible; that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the objective phenomenological world we all share and our individual conscious experiences of it. The only consciousness we can know confidently to exist is our own; we assume that others are conscious as well (if nothing else, it seems unsociable not to), but we have no way to be sure. Is there, in fact, any objective way to detect consciousness? At Princeton University there is a group who are investigating this question from a new angle.
August 12, 2006 – 10:16 pm
I am downright chopfallen this evening upon hearing some sad news from across the pond: there will be no conger cuddling in Lyme Regis, England, this year.
I’m sure that most of you have been following this exciting sport for ages; perhaps some of you have even been lucky enough to attend in person. But for those few of you who haven’t – perhaps due to a decades-long coma or a lengthy stretch in solitary – here’s the story.
August 11, 2006 – 9:54 pm
I wrote yesterday about the irritating tendency of affluent left-leaning types here in Wellfleet and back home in Park Slope to speak in glowing terms of the many blessings that Fidel Castro (whose current status is reminiscent of Schroedinger’s famous Cat) has showered upon the fortunate citizens of Cuba. The fact that the island is an impoverished police state, where dissidents languish in dungeons, and whence people flee by the thousands in leaky boats whenever restrictions on leaving the country are lifted, is usually passed over unmentioned, so that the discussion may focus on Cuba’s fantastic health-care system, which of course puts ours to shame, and which is an enlightening example of the benign vision of the saintly Maximum Leader.
Startlingly, the vaunted Cuban health-care infrastructure actually falls somewhat short of its reputation. Have a look over here.
August 10, 2006 – 10:35 pm
As readers of these pages will know, I spend a good deal of time in the lovely seaside village of Wellfleet, out on the far end of Cape Cod. Demographically Wellfleet is an interesting mixture; its flinty and hard-working year-round population of fewer than 3,000 swells to almost 20,000 in the summertime, as affluent vacationers flock to its sheltered inlets, freshwater ponds, art galleries, theater productions, excellent restaurants, and of course its spectacular Atlantic beaches, framed by towering dunes.
August 9, 2006 – 10:51 pm
We’ve all heard the suggestion that a roomful of monkeys hammering randomly away at typewriters would, given billions of years, recreate the complete works of Shakespeare. (A “typewriter”, for those of you whose brows are wrinkled solely by bafflement, is an antique mechanical device that generated crumpled sheets of paper.) It’s an interesting idea, but if you’re like me, you’ve just been too busy to try it out.
Well, the wait is over. Take a look at this. It’s not exactly instant gratification; thus far the sedulous simian simulacra have only got as far as the first 24 letters from “Henry IV, Part II”. But, as someone once said, “how poor are they that have not patience.”
August 8, 2006 – 11:10 pm
The English clergyman and philosopher William Paley (1743-1805), who among his many other achievements was also the Christ’s College senior wrangler of 1763, is probably best known for his analogy of the “watchmaker”, which was an argument from nature for the existence of God.
August 6, 2006 – 11:27 pm
Today marks a sorrowful anniversary: it was on August 6th, 1945 that the city of Hiroshima was pulverized by the “Little Boy”, the first of two atomic weapons hurled in fury upon the Japanese at the close of World War II. More than two hundred thousand people died. A melted image of the Buddha I […]
correspondent has been shuttling back and forth between Wellfleet and sweltering Gotham, getting in in the wee hours, sleeping little, coping with a variety of unrestful obligations, and generally ignoring his bloggardly duties. I apologize to all, and do hope that by Tuesday or so life will once more be unruffled and serene, as there are a number of meaty posts in the queue.
Meanwhile, do browse our extensive archives, and rest assured that we’ll be back in harness shortly.
August 1, 2006 – 11:12 pm
One of the little pleasures of growing older – and they are admittedly not numerous – is that you hold things in living memory that, as far as the hyperkinetic larvae who seem to be taking over the world these days are concerned, never even existed. One of these, for doddering old fossils such as your humble correspondent, is the musical satire of Tom Lehrer.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, in his Best of the Web newsletter of July 25th (I’m just getting around to reading it now), calls our attention to something rather odd in an NBC Nightly News video clip from the evening of the 24th. The report, by NBC’s Beirut bureau chief Richard Engel, is a tour of the havoc wrought in Lebanon by Israeli air strikes, and at one point the camera crew visits the flattened financial district of Sidon. On screen briefly are what appear to be uncut sheets of U.S. $100 bills. This is more than a little odd, Taranto points out:
Now, it’s possible to buy uncut sheets from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, at premiums ranging from 12.5% to 275% over face value–but apparently only in denominations of up to $50. Anyhow, somehow we doubt these were collectibles.
Hezbollah is known to be involved in counterfeiting of US currency, and this may well be an example of their work. Read the item here.
Many on the secular left have for quite a while been complaining, with not inconsiderable justification, of the deepening partnership here in America between fundamentalist Christians and the political right. While I would stop (far) short of characterizing the U.S.A. under the current administration as a “theocracy” as many of my blue-state neighbors might, there is no question that church and state have got awfully cozy lately, a trend that I imagine will be good, in the long run, for neither. From my old friend Jess Kaplan comes an AOL news item about the pastor of an evangelical megachurch who feels the same way, if perhaps for different reasons, and who has quite publicly staked out a contrary position.
I’m allowing myself a little slack here in the dog days of July and August; excessive heat tends to randomize the syntactic patterns of my little grey cells, and I have learned to be wary of attempting ambitious cogitative efforts under such conditions, as they often go badly awry, with unpredictable results. Readers, therefore, will most likely notice a temporary dropoff in both quantity and quality as I withdraw, at least partially, into estivation here in Wellfleet (which for me is going to consist of lolling on beaches, swimming in ponds, imbibing libations cooling and potent, and thinking shallow and largely non-sequential thoughts).
Ah, P.J. O’Rourke. If you are old enough you might remember him as a contributor to (in fact the managing editor of) The National Lampoon , way back in the seventies. I hadn’t read anything of his since I read Parliament of Whores some years ago, but while I was absorbing a post of Bill Vallicella’s on the topic of “gender-neutral language” earlier this evening I found, in a comment, a link to a review by O’Rourke of an academic volume called Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language of the Association of American University Presses.
The great Ukiyo-e master Katsushika Hokusai is perhaps best known for a series of prints called 36 Views of Mt. Fuji. These images vary greatly in their depiction of the mountain; in some of them, Fuji-san is the focus of the picture, while in many others it is a barely noticeable feature off in the distance. The images show people working, playing, on the street, in town, in the country, on boats, and so forth. But the great volcano is there, somewhere, in every frame, and the set gives, in its distributed way, a sense of what a powerful presence the mountain is. Its snowclad, tapering summit often seems to float in a sea of purple mist, as though it belonged more to the heavens than the world below; at the same time, though, it is a looming token of subterranean power and mystery, and an insistent reminder of the ungraspably enormous scale at which the life of the Earth proceeds, and of Nature’s majestic indifference to the fleeting life of Man.
Tonight finds your correspondent once again in Seattle, Washington, at the end of a long day.
From my daughter Chloë, an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, comes a link to an interesting item at the UM website. The story is about physics professor Mark Newman, who left the Sante Fe Institute to join the UM faculty, and his work with maps and networks.
I suppose I’ll weigh in on the situation on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, although I tend to shy away from politics in these pages. In short, my view is that Israel is doing exactly what it ought to be doing, and ought to keep doing it for a little while longer. I offer a few thoughts, none of them particularly original.
I have quite a few old chess books on my shelves – I have a hard time passing them up whenever I see a street vendor selling them, and they tend to accumulate. The other day, in the wee hours of the morning, weary but not yet ready to retire, I pulled a couple of volumes at random and settled in with a board and an adult beverage, looking forward to browsing a bit and perhaps playing over a master game or two. The two books I had happened to choose were The Book of the Nottingham International Chess Tournament, 10th to 28th August, 1936, With Annotations and Analysis by A. Alekhine (probably the best tournament book ever, given the quality of the annotation, and that the field included Alekhine, Capablanca, Lasker, Fine, Tartakower, Vidmar, Bogoljuboff, Flohr, Reshevsky, Euwe, and Botvinnik, among others), and a wonderful collection called The Treasury of Chess Lore, by that most beloved of all chess writers, Fred Reinfeld.
This weekend we held our little farewell gathering in Oceanside, CA for my mother Alison. I’ll give a brief account for the many of you who either knew her or who, having followed the sad story of her final weeks in these pages, have written with kind words of support and sympathy.
Well, we’re back from my mother‘s memorial service out in Oceanside, CA. It was everything we could have hoped for, and I will be writing about it shortly.
We flew back from San Diego to JFK on American Airlines earlier today, and we had a female captain (which is still quite unusual), by the name of Linda Parks. She did an excellent job, of course; in particular, she made an outstandingly smooth landing. She even got us home a little faster than her male counterparts usually do, because she didn’t mind stopping someone to ask directions.
Once again, waka waka waka may lie fallow for a couple of days, as Nina and I are flying out to California tomorrow for a memorial service for my mother. This is going to be a difficult weekend all around, especially for my father, and there might not be many opportunities to write, though if I can I will.
We’ll be back in New York on Monday.
I hate to keep harping on this topic, but the weather here in New York today has been particularly unpleasant. The air seems oddly compressed, and even more saturated and viscous than usual – as though it contained not just the usual summertime admixture of water vapor and filth, but also maybe some mule sweat or hog saliva. There was not the slightest breeze, most of the day, to stir the fetid broth, and the sun, visible at times through its nubilous veil, brought the whole dolorous mess to a slow and sultry simmer as the dreary day wore on. The psychological effect – to drain one of all joy, hope, or sense of purpose – is also deepened, for those who have spent a summer in New York before, and haven’t managed to repress the memory, by the certain knowledge that worse is yet to come.
My lovely wife Nina and I spent the evening in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, where the New York Philharmonic Orchestra kicked off their summer concert series with a program of Tchaikovsky and Dvořák.
In today’s New York Times, former chess champion Garry Kasparov, who has forsaken competitive chess for pro-democratic political activism, challenges the Western democracies to take “a tougher stand” against the increasing trend toward authoritarianism in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Garik writes:
Opposition activists and journalists are routinely arrested and interrogated. The Kremlin, in complete control of the judiciary, loots private businesses and then uses state-controlled companies to launder the money abroad.
Mr. Bush and Europe’s leaders apparently believe it is best to disregard such unpleasantness for the sake of receiving Russia’s cooperation on security and energy. This cynical and morally repugnant stance has also proven ineffective. Just as in the old days, Moscow has become an ally for troublemakers and anti-democratic rulers around the world. Nuclear aid to Iran, missile technology to North Korea, military aircraft to Sudan, Myanmar and Venezuela, and a budding friendship with Hamas: these are the West’s rewards for keeping its mouth shut about human rights in Russia.
Read the entire essay here.
I’ve finished reading George Beke’s book Digging Up the Dog: The Greek Roots of Gurdjieff’s Esoteric Ideas, and must recommend it again, not only for those who are curious about Gurdjieff’s teaching, but also for those who wish a deeper understanding of Christian symbolism. Many familiar Christian ideas – the Trinity, the Twelve Stations of the Cross, even the word Alleluia – represent much older knowledge and traditions that found their way to us by way of the Greeks. Gurdjieff, who sometimes described his teachings as “esoteric Christianity”, once said, when asked about the connection between ancient Greece and the modern Church:
Everything Christian came from old Greek, then they spoil. All, all, comes from Greek.
As I’ve mentioned before, I am fond of books, and have a hard time passing an outdoor bookseller’s table (and here in Gotham they are everywhere) without picking something up. As a result they are all over my house; I simply don’t have enough bookshelves to contain them all, so they tend to accumulate in piles in less-trafficked areas. Every so often I make some attempt at reorganizing them, and the process takes much, much longer than it ought, because exhuming them from their dusty desuetude is like meeting old friends, and I wind up just sitting on the floor reading.
Today, while looking for something in the computer room upstairs, I noticed a forgotten pile of books, and second from the top was an old favorite: the Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, by David Wells (no, not the former Yankee hurler).
My friend George Beke, a tireless and erudite scholar of esoteric teachings, has just sent me a copy of his new book Digging Up the Dog: The Greek Roots of Gurdjieff’s Esoteric Ideas. In this slim volume George shares with us the fruits of his decades of research into the occult legacy of the Pythagoreans and Plato – which are often considered by modern Western thinkers to be merely mathematical and philosophical teachings – and their relation to the complex system for inner development brought forth a century ago by Gurdjieff. I look forward to reading it and commenting on it here. You can order a copy of your own – I can promise you that if you are curious about such things you will not be disappointed – here.
Things should be getting back to normal around here tomorrow, but having just got home to Brooklyn after a long day of driving in the rain, I think that tonight we’ll just have a few links from the mailbag. First, from Jess Kaplan comes a patriotic little Java applet with an appealing Big Apple theme. Next we have, courtesy of Mike Zaharee (formerly of PubSub‘s Granite State Research Kitchen), further evidence, as if any were necessary, of what mischievous little imps the North Koreans are, and finally, thanks to Jon Mandell, we have a glimpse of the amusing discomfiture at Wikipedia as the fractious online organism tries to equilibrate in the wake of Enron blackguard Ken Lay‘s unlamented demise.
Happy Independence Day to all from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where, in a remarkable cessation of hostilities, even the local cetaceans made an appearance in today’s town parade.
