If you say so

"The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. A few clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of one human eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a doubtful journey in the exact and deliberate shape of a note of interrogation. I have seen both these things myself within the last few days. Nelson does die in the instant of victory; and a man named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man named Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide. In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen."

— G.K. Chesterton, "The Blue Cross" in Favorite Father Brown Stories, 3-4

Friends and advisers

Roger Fry, from his 1926 essay "Art and Commerce":

“What I constate is the fact that advertisement has, in recent times, taken on a new complexion. It is tinged with a new poetry — a new romance. It is no longer the severely practical affair it once was; it brings about a new relation between the public and the great limited liability companies. There is a note of affectionate zeal for the public in their communications. The big companies pose as friends and advisers of the public, they appear filled with concern for their welfare, they would even educate them and show them the way to higher and better things. The Underground tells the slum dweller of the beauties of nature in the country, it reveals the wonders of animal life at the Zoo, it inspires the historical sense by pictures of old London. The great railway combines tell of the glories of provincial England, and inspire an enthusiasm for the grandeur of modern locomotives. In fact, each of these great concerns tries to build up in the public imagination an image of something almost personal — and as such they begin to claim almost the loyalty and allegiance of the public they exploit.”

— from Art and the Market: Roger Fry on Commerce in Art, ed. Craufurd D. Goodwin, 121

On a related note, the season finale of Mad Men was excellent.

Brody, critic and man

My co-interview (with Leo Goldsmith) of Godard biographer Richard Brody is up now at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

I liked his earlier stuff

before the epistemological break.

Office Party Crashers

Normally this would go on my Latour blog, but it's too good, and too relevant to my daily experience as a scholar, not to record here:

"A project is called innovative if the number of actors that have to be taken into account is not a given from the outset. If that number is known in advance, in contrast, the project can follow quite orderly, hierarchical phases; it can go from office to office, and every office will add the concerns of the actors for which it is responsible. As you proceed along the corridor, the size or degree of reality grows by regular increments. Research projects, on the other hand, do not have such an elegant order: the crowds that were thought to be behind the project disappear without a word; or, conversely, unexpected allies turn up and demand to be taken into account. It's like a reception where the invited guests have failed to show; in their place, a bunch of unruly louts turn up and ruin everything."

— Aramis, or the Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter, 72

R.I.P. Claude Lévi-Strauss

Oh dear. This just in.

Happy Halloween

My review of the 1977 horror movie Hausu, in which I managed not to use the words "batshit insane," is up now at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.