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Monthly Archives: October 2010

London Lecture Series: Philosophy and the Arts.

All 15 of the Institute’s lectures are free and open to the public.

The next thing you know…or do you?

Our bodies are not finished products but works in progress, works continually being dismantled and repaired, rebuilt and restored, destroyed and healed at every moment in the act of living.

A damp squib on your Titanic analogies, Mr. Pinch.

It is a great metaphor, partly because it is so easy to envision. There is human kind, adrift on the open sea, busily patching away at the rickety ship even as the next storm approaches. It is heroic and pathetic at the same time. But there is never opportunity for anyone on the boat to get a bird’s eye view.

Two views of the new laureate, one up-close.

He made his decisive spiritual break with the Left plain with a short novel called The Real Life of Alejandro Meyta, which specifically linked radical Leftist thinking to the impulse to terrorism.

Angels in the architecture and the writing on the wall.

All the letters look like buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer, jumbled up in Brazilian proximities.

Noted: James Joyce – a 'Mécanique' man and a Léger fan.

“Ballet Méchanique,” conceived as a soundtrack to a film by Fernand Léger but ultimately performed on its own, serves as a rare example of modern music Joyce admired.

Noted: How to tell a good publisher from a lousy one.

At heart, publishers exist to create more value for writers than writers can (or wish to) create for themselves.

Noted: For Sarah Bernhardt, inspiration was the trick.

Sarah seems to have taken a more businesslike approach to prostitution.

Noted: Has college creative writing gone terminal?

Unlike other fine arts, which perhaps have more stringent MFA policies, writers can still become insanely successful without any institutional hand holding.

Levytation, in a few easy steps.

The Levytator, by Prof. Jack Levy. Very uplifting.

Noted: Sam Harris, meet Jeremy Bentham.

…the premise of Harris’s all-we-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins.

Noted: Stephen Hawking, the ages of ages, and that metaphysical moment.

Cosmology, evolutionary biology, and all the other natural sciences offer accounts of change; they do not address the metaphysical questions of creation.