July 9, 2004

• Scoop

  This afternoon I came across, in a briefcase I seldom use, two books I had not looked at since I bought them last month:

  • The Footprints of God,
    a recently published paperback by Greg Iles, a writer who
    graduated from Trinity High School, Natchez, Mississippi, in 1979, and
    from the University of Mississippi in Oxford in 1983.
  • Sanctuary, by the better-known Mississippi writer William Faulkner.

  At the time I purchased the books, indeed until I looked up Iles on the
  Web today, I was not aware of the Mississippi connection.  Their
  physical connection, lying together today in my briefcase, is, of
  course, purely coincidental.  My view of coincidence is close to
  that of Arthur Koestler, who wrote The Challenge of Chance and The Roots of Coincidence, and to that of Loren Eiseley, who wrote of a dice game and of “the Other Player” in his autobiography, All the Strange Hours.

  A Log24 entry yesterday referred to a comedic novel on the role of chance in physics, Cosmic Banditos. 
  Today’s New York Times quotes an entertainer who referred to President
  Bush yesterday, at a political fund-raiser, as a bandito.  Another
  coincidence… this one related directly to the philosophy of coincidences expounded jokingly in Cosmic Banditos.

  I draw no conclusions from such coincidences, but they do inspire me to
  look a little deeper into life’s details — where, some say, God
  is.  Free association on these details, together with a passage in
  Sanctuary, inspired the following collage:

  
  
  
  Related Texts

  Faulkner on a trinity of women
  in Sanctuary (Ch. 25):

  “Miss Reba emerged from behind the
  screen with three glasses of gin. ‘This’ll put some heart into
  us,’ she said. ‘We’re setting here like three old sick cats.’ 
  They bowed formally and drank, patting their lips.  Then they
  began to talk.  They were all talking at once,* again in half-completed sentences, but without pauses for agreement or affirmation.”

  “In Defense of the Brand“:

  “When I was helping Frito corn chips expand its core user group in the
  mid-’90s, we didn’t ask Frito-Lay to just wave the Fritos banner. The brand
  was elevated to a place where it could address its core users in a way that
  was relevant to their lifestyle. We took the profile of the audience and
  created a campaign starring Reba McEntire. It captured the brand’s essence,
  and set Frito eaters amidst good music, good people, and good fun.”

  Song lyric, Reba McEntire:

  “I might have been born
  just plain white trash,
  but Fancy was my name.”

  Loren Eiseley,
  Notes of an Alchemist:

  I never found
  the hole in the wall;
  I never found
  Pancho Villa country
  where you see the enemy first.
  – “The Invisible Horseman”

  * A significant phrase. See

  We Are the Key:
  The Shining of December 13,
  and
  Naturalized Epistemology.

  • 7:11 pm
  • 5 Comments