Cut to the Chase.
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Infinite Jest
“1 + 2 + 3 + … = –1/12.”
Robin Williams and the Stages of Math
i) shock & denial
ii) anger
iii) bargaining
iv) depression
v) acceptance
And then…
vi) checking
vii) Joan Rivers:
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Friday, March 4, 2011
Infinite Jest
Two items from the August 5, 2005, anniversary
of the day Marilyn Monroe was found dead—
2. Literary Symbol —
See also related material on Hollywood.
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Thursday, May 6, 2010
Infinite Jest
Leg-Pulling
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"… to make the author manifestly unreliable"
Not to mention the reader.
Related material —
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Saturday, April 3, 2010
Infinite Jest
"Democrats– in conclusion– Democrats in America
were put on earth to do one thing– Drag the
ignorant hillbilly half of this country into the next
century, which in their case is the 19th."
Reply to Maher:
"Hell is other people."
— Jean-Paul Sartre
|
Related material: Dragging Maher into the 18th century– From
Related material– Lemniscate to Langlands (2004) |
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Wednesday, September 6, 2017
National Comedy
From a search in this journal for "More Holy Water" —
A post of January 7, 2011, has the following:
"Infinite Jest… now stands as the principal contender
for what serious literature can aspire to
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."
— All Things Shining, a work of pop philosophy
published January 4th
"You're gonna need a bigger boat."
— Roy Scheider in "Jaws"
"We're gonna need more holy water."
— "Season of the Witch"
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Monday, December 12, 2016
She Sings at the Finale
The title is from a post of last Thursday afternoon — Dec. 8, 2016.
An image from that post appeared here last year —
See also philosophy notes from Infinite Jest .
Some backstory —
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Wednesday, October 22, 2014
The Seventh Stage
Robin Williams and the Stages of Math
i) shock & denial
ii) anger
iii) bargaining
iv) depression
v) acceptance
And then…
vi) checking
vii) Joan Rivers
See also
- today’s previous post, Claves Regni Caelorum ,
- Robin Williams in “The Final Cut,” and
- a book with a related title (illustrated below).
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Saturday, September 6, 2014
But Seriously…
The previous post, Infinite Jest, suggests
a midrash on “–1/12” (i.e., minus one-twelfth):
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Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Labyrinth 23
The title refers to a search (see below)
suggested by three things—
- David Foster Wallace biographer D. T. Max—
"There's a note in one of my files where he says something like,
'Infinite Jest was just a means to Mary Karr's end, as it were.' " - "There is a body on the cross in my church ." —Mary Karr
- A body.
The search— Labyrinth 23.
(Within the search results, note particularly the post "The Infinity Point.")
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Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Apple Meets Pumpkin
The reported last words of
Apple founder Steve Jobs were
"Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."
In the spirit of these words, a
Google search from today—
See also…
- Lemniscate in this journal as well as
- Stone Junction and
- Infinite Jest .
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Tuesday, October 11, 2011
24 Hour DeLillo
Review of DeLillo's novel Point Omega—
"One difference between art and entertainment has to do with the speed of perception. Art deliberately slows and complicates reading, hearing, and/or viewing so that you’re challenged to re-think and re-feel form and experience. Entertainment deliberately accelerates and simplifies them so that you don’t have to think about or feel very much of anything at all except, perhaps, the adrenalin rush before dazzling spectacle. Although, of course, there can be myriad gradations between the former and latter, in their starkest articulation we’re talking about the distance between, say, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol…."
— Lance Olsen, March 1, 2010, in The Quarterly Conversation
Robert Hughes on fast and slow art—
"We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media. For no spiritually authentic art can beat mass media at their own game."
– Speech of June 1, 2004
Log24 on art speeds—
A Study in Art Education (June 15, 2007)
Twenty-four (March 13, 2011)
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Monday, May 30, 2011
Darkness at Noon
A Meditation on the NY Lottery of May 29
Yesterday's NY Lottery— Midday 981, Evening 275.
As noted in yesterday morning's linked-to post,
The Shining of May 29…
"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy ,
Random House, 1973, page 118
One interpretation of the mystic numbers revealed by the Lottery yesterday—
981 as the final page* of David Foster Wallace's famed novel Infinite Jest …
275 as a page in Wallace's non-fiction book about infinity Everything and More …
Gregory Chaitin points out that this is nonsense …
As noted elsewhere in this journal, I have a different concept of "math's absolute
Prince of Darkness"— and, indeed, of a "quest for Omega." (See posts of May 2010.)
Yesterday's numbers indicate a different struggle between darkness and light—
Light —
Darkness —
* From infinitesummer.org/archives/168 — "A note about editions:
As it turns out, all (physical) editions of Infinite Jest have 981 pages:
the one from 1996, the one from 2004, the paperback, the hardcover, etc.
A big thank you to the men and women in the publishing industry who
were kind and/or lazy enough to keep things consistent."
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Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Toy Story Variations
Where Entertainment Is God continues...
New York Lottery today— Midday 710, Evening 563.
This suggeests a scientific note from the date 7/10 (2009) and the page number 563 from Dec. 29—
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society , October 2002, p. 563:
“To produce decorations for their weaving, pottery, and other objects, early artists experimented with symmetries and repeating patterns. Later the study of symmetries of patterns led to tilings, group theory, crystallography, finite geometries, and in modern times to security codes and digital picture compactifications. Early artists also explored various methods of representing existing objects and living things. These explorations led to… [among other things] computer-generated movies (for example, Toy Story ).”
– David W. Henderson, Cornell University
For a different perspective on Toy Story , see the Dec. 29 post.
Other entertainments — The novel Infinite Jest and two versions of "Heeere's Johnny !" —
From Stanley Kubrick and from today's New York Times :
See also All Things Shining and the lottery theology of Jorge Luis Borges.
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Friday, January 7, 2011
Ayn Sof
(A continuation of this morning's Coxeter and the Aleph)
"You've got to pick up every stitch… Must be the season of the witch."
— Donovan song at the end of Nicole Kidman's "To Die For"
| Mathematics and Narrative, Illustrated | |
|
 Narrative |
"As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental.
For the Kabbala, the letter stands for the En Soph ,
the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes
the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show
that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; for Cantor's
Mengenlehre , it is the symbol of transfinite numbers,
of which any part is as great as the whole."
— Borges, "The Aleph"
From WorldLingo.com —
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"Infinite Jest… now stands as the principal contender
for what serious literature can aspire to
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."
— All Things Shining, a work of pop philosophy published January 4th
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." — Roy Scheider in "Jaws"
"We're gonna need more holy water." — "Season of the Witch," a film opening tonight
See also, with respect to David Foster Wallace, infinity, nihilism,
and the above reading of "Ayn Sof" as "nothingness,"
the quotations compiled as "Is Nothing Sacred?"
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Friday, February 12, 2010
Capital E
Where Entertainment is God, continued—
The following paragraphs are from a review by Piotr Siemion of Infinite Jest, a novel by David Foster Wallace. Illustrations have been added.
"Wallace was somehow able to twist together three yarns…. …there's a J.D Salinger for those who like J.D. Salinger. There's William Burroughs for those hardy souls who like some kick in their prose. And there's a dash of Kurt Vonnegut too. All three voices, though, are amplified in Infinite Jest beyond mere distortion and then projected onto Wallace's peculiar own three-ring circus….
… there's entertainment. Make it a capital E.
Illustration by Clint Eastwood
from Log24 post "E is for Everlast"
Infinite Jest revolves, among its many gyrations, around the story of the Entertainment, a film-like creation going by the title of 'Infinite Jest' and created shortly before his suicidal death by the young tennis star's father. The Entertainment's copies are now being disseminated clandestinely all over Wallace's funny America. Problem is, of course, that the film is too good. Anybody who gets to watch it becomes hooked instantly and craves only to watch it again, and again, and again, until the audience drops dead of exhaustion and hunger. Why eat when you're entertained by such a good movie? Wallace's premise brings you back to that apocryphal lab experiment in which rats were treated to a similar choice. When the rat pushed one button, marked FOOD, it would get a food pellet. The other button, marked FUN, would fire up an electrode rigged right into the orgasm center somewhere in the rat's cortex. Needless to add, one rat after another would drop dead from hunger, still twitching luridly and trying to finesse one last push of the button. Same thing in Wallace's story, especially that even those characters who have not seen the Entertainment yet, keep on entertaining themselves by different means."
The title of the Entertainment, "Infinite Jest," might also be applied to a BBC program featuring mathematician Peter J. Cameron. The program's actual title was "To Infinity and Beyond." It was broadcast the night of Feb. 10 (the date of this journal's previous post).
Few, however, are likely to find the Infinity program addictive. For closer approaches to Wallace's ideal Entertainment, see instead Dante (in the context of this journal's Feb. 4 posts on Cameron and the afterlife) and the BBC News.
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