Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
Mental gymnastics first thing in the morning keeps the doctor away . . . well, at least those obsessive familial loops. What do I mean by “obsessive familial loops?” Oh, you know. Waking out of deep slumber and a dream where I couldn’t remember someone’s name standing right next to me as we watched a … Continue reading How To Wake Up With Gödel, Escher and Bach
I Am Alice. Possibly strange for a sixty-three-year-old man to write that he’s a seven-and-a-half-year-old girl. But not really. Alice replies to the Caterpillar’s question of identity with, I–I hardly know, sir, just at present –at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been … Continue reading “Drinking With Alice”
1. In “Consilience For Acrobats And Tumblers,” I wrote “My grandmother did her best to school me in playing the piano, and though practicing never took hold of me, I did love playing Bach’s Minuet in G Major, so I decided this was my choice and my bemused grandparents dutifully bought it for me.” This … Continue reading Notes Toward Tumbling / Mental Gymnastics for Beginners.
Introspection. That’s a tricky one. When I sat in my bedroom in my parent’s house on a street called Winchester in a subdivision named Sylvan Glen in a suburb named Troy in southeastern Michigan, a suburb which fashioned itself as the “City of Tomorrow . . . Today,” in the year nineteen-hundred and seventy-nine did … Continue reading Wait . . . What? . . . Make Mathematics Introspective?
In 1979 or was it 1980, my grandparents took me out for a monthly trip to the local bookstore where they would purchase a tome of my choosing. Maybe B. Dalton’s booksellers or Waldenbooks. Either at Oakland Mall or Somerset Mall in Troy, Michigan. This particular day I saw Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden … Continue reading Strange Loops and A Philosopher of Mathematical Infinity
A four-mile walk from Nacka to Kungsträdgården, brings me face to face with Joachim Beuckelaer’s Kitchen Scene With Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1565) in the Nationalmuseum. Words are exchanged between us and a conversation about the metaphysics of food ensues. Examining the fundamental nature of reality, the relationship between mind and … Continue reading The Metaphysics of Food: Kitchen Scenes With Spinoza, Brillat-Savarin And Def Leppard.
I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed … Continue reading Cosmic Horror, Jim Crow, And “The Thing In The White House” Just Won’t Go: Victor LaValle’s “The Ballad Of Black Tom.”
With HBO’s Lovecraft Country based on Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name offering a new episode each week, and Black Americans and protestors being shot and villainized as speakers at the Republican National Convention and pundits at Fox News call for more “law and order” (i.e. targeting Black Americans and the #BlackLivesMatter movement), it’s … Continue reading It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Lovecraft’s America: Victor LaValle’s “The Ballad Of Black Tom” And “The Thing In The White House” Is A Shoggoth. Episode 1.
Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes. Instants where everything stands still, instants of contemplation, of pure intuition, of mental void, of acceptance of the moral void. It is through such instants that he is capable of the supernatural. (11) As I read through Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, first … Continue reading The Supernatural Terror Of Simone Weil As Fiona Apple Fetches The Bolt Cutters.
I will tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 46) χάος in Greek means “infinite space, the expanse” and the “nether abyss, infinite darkness,” also “unformed matter.” In Hesiod‘s Theogony, we begin the … Continue reading Branches And Sky Unbecoming Or A Few Thoughts On Chaos.
