Log24

See also Harvard ex-president Faust on Hogwarts
and (like the above photo, also on Aug. 13) …

* See previous instances of the title in this journal.

Harvard Gazette , March 4th, 2013:

"Winfrey will speak on May 30 during Commencement day’s
Afternoon Exercises, which serve as the annual meeting of
the Harvard Alumni Association. The exercises will take place
in the Tercentenary Theatre of Harvard Yard,
between Memorial Church and Widener Library."

On the 1977 Octavia Butler novel Mind of My Mind :

"The first chapter in a history that Butler has already taken up
at a much later stage in Patternmaster  (1976).
Mind of My Mind  begins with Doro, a ruthless mutant
as old as the pyramids who has spent the last 4,000 years
trying to breed a race in his own image. The culminating
experiment is his daughter Mary. But, to Doro's astonishment,
Mary's first instinct on attaining her full powers is to begin
building a mental community— a Pattern— out of the
wretched thousands of Doro's half-telepathic failures
and partial successes. Despite some ragged moments,
Butler is clearly on to a promising vein— something like
Zenna Henderson's 'People' stories without their
saccharine silliness. There's a lot of intrinsic energy in the
Pattern idea, and one wants to see where this erratic, gifted
storyteller will pick it up next."

— Kirkus Reviews , Vol. XLV, No. 8 (1977), p. 453.

See this journal on Butler's dies natalis , the feast of St. Matthias, 2006.

Those who prefer Eastern approaches to religion may consult
Robert Thurman and his daughter Uma.

"Oprah, Uma. Uma, Oprah." — David Letterman

At Random

Today’s birthday: poet Stanley Kunitz  —

“I’m Stanley Kunitz. I live in New York City. I published my first book of poems some 70 years ago. Back in 1926, I was roaming through the stacks of the Widener Library at Harvard. While I was walking through the section on English poetry of the 19th century, I just at random lifted my arm and picked a book off the shelf. It was… an author I was not familiar with, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The page that I turned to and began to read was a page devoted to a poem called “God’s Grandeur.” I couldn’t believe what I was reading when I opened this book and started reading that poem. It really shook me, because it was unlike anything else I had ever read before. When I started reading it, suddenly that whole book became alive to me. It was filled with such a lyric passion. It was so fierce and eloquent, wounded and yet radiant, that I knew that it was speaking directly to me and giving me a hint of the kind of poetry that I would be dedicated to for the rest of my life.”