science, magic, madness

[Tom Beshear]

A copy of The Flamethrowers is on reserve at my local library. I shall keep it waiting no longer.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: alice wellintown 
  To: pynchon -l 
  Sent: Monday, April 22, 2013 5:56 AM
  Subject: Re: science, magic, madness


  This twelve-minute record is a montage of sound effects—mostly breaking glass, pouring rain, and thunder. Goldstein had all the right ingredients for myth: brilliant, cool, mysterious. He was hugely influential but ended up living in a trailer in East L.A., selling ice cream from a truck; the ice cream once melted completely when he had to wait in line for methadone, but he refroze it and sold it anyway. He died in 2003, and so his body of work is now, sadly, a bounded set.


  The first image I pinned up to spark inspiration for what would eventually be my novel_The Flamethrowers_ was of a woman with tape over her mouth. She floated above my desk with a grave, almost murderous look, war paint on her cheeks, blonde braids framing her face, the braids a frolicsome countertone to her intensity. The paint on her cheeks, not frolicsome. The streaks of it, dripping down, were cold, white shards, as if her face were faceted in icicles. I didn’t think much about the tape over her mouth (which is actually Band-Aids over the photograph, and not over her lips themselves). This image ended up on the jacket of The Flamethrowers, whose first-person narrator, introduced in this issue, in the story "Blanks" ,   is a young blonde woman. A creature of language, silenced.


  http://www.theparisreview.org/art-photography/6197/the-flamethrowers-rachel-kushner




  On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:51 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

    Paul Hazard’s magisterial, widely influential, and beloved intellectual history offers an unforgettable account of the birth of the modern European mind in all its dynamic, inquiring, and uncertain glory. Beginning his story in the latter half of the seventeenth century, while also looking back to the Renaissance and forward to the future, Hazard traces the process by which new developments in the sciences, arts, philosophy, and philology came to undermine the stable foundations of the classical world, with its commitment to tradition, stability, proportion, and settled usage. Hazard shows how travelers’ tales and archaeological investigation widened European awareness and acceptance of cultural difference; how the radical rationalism of Spinoza and Richard Simon’s new historical exegesis of the Bible called into question the revealed truths of religion; how the Huguenot Pierre Bayle’s critical dictionary of ideas paved the way for Voltaire and the Enlightenment, even as the empiricism of Locke encouraged a new attention to sensory experience that led to Rousseau and romanticism. Hazard’s range of knowledge is vast, and whether the subject is operas, excavations, or scientific experiments his brilliant style and powers of description bring to life the thinkers who thought up the modern world.

    The Crisis of the European Mind is the NYRB Classics Book Club selection for April 2013.

    http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/the-crisis-of-the-european-mind/



    On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:48 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

      Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

      Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature. 


      http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching




      On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:43 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

          "... applied science, purposeful and determined, and pure science, playful and freely curious, continuously support and stimulate each other. The great nation of the future will be the one which protects the freedom of pure science as much as it encourages applied science." 

          http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2876.htm



        On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:40 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

          http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22105898







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