August 2008
-
Go visit All Manner of Thing. This stuff rather interests me although I don’t understand much of it; one of the things I’d like to do when or if I get to retire is read a few pop-science books on contemporary physics. Ok, ok, the truth is that I really just wanted an excuse to…
-
A Few More Notes on Ayn Rand (Please excuse the bulleted list; there is still more to say here than I have time for, and this is a way of doing it more quickly.) What she got right. As I mentioned last week, I think she’s right to insist on appreciation and recognition of the…
-
I don’t mean to pretend that I feel a deep personal loss at the death of comedian Bernie Mac; celebrities die frequently and I don’t feel obliged to note their passing. I did watch his sitcom sometimes, although I’m generally not a fan of sitcoms, and he was sometimes very funny, and seemed a decent…
-
The Mermen are an instrumental trio roughly classified as neo-surf, but the relationship between their music and that of, say, Dick Dale (“Misirlou”) or The Chantays (“Pipeline”) is about like that between Beethoven’s symphonies and Haydn’s. This album might be described succinctly as Dick Dale meets Jimi Hendrix. The reverb and the minor-key melodies—that general…
-
The parallels and divergences are interesting. Both were intellectually gifted Jewish women, one born in a city which is now part of Poland, one in Petersburg (which I think, from what little I know of Russia, makes her pretty European). Rand disdained the very idea of God, came to America and had a successful career…
-
Today is the feast day of St. Dominic. Or yesterday was, if you’re in Europe or points east (from the American perspective), as it’s already past midnight for you. Tomorrow (or today—August 9) is St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein. These are two saints who mean a lot to me, especially the latter,…
-
She keeps reading my mind and then putting what’s there into words better than I can. Again, she’s talking about a comic (or, as some prefer, graphic novel). I don’t know that I want to read “a horror comic about an advertising designer being stalked across the Atlantic by a murderous child,” and if the…
-
I picked this up a day or so after finishing Atlas Shrugged, wanting something completely different, and that’s what I got. This novel comes to life instantly; within a few pages I was drawn into its world and felt that its characters—only two in the lengthy opening scene—were alive. The title had me expecting a…
-
He was a giant. I don’t have anything in particular to say that isn’t already being said wherever his passing has been noted, but I thought I ought to make some observance of it. If you have time and haven’t read his famous Harvard address, here it is. I’m feeling a little guilty because ISI…
-
Ayn Rand, Crank In a passage quoted in Leonard Peikoff’s introduction to Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand reveals that she misunderstands the nature of fiction. She refers to it as “a process of translating the abstract into the concrete,” but that’s not what it is, at all. Another writer for whom English was not his native…
Light On Dark Water 