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):
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."
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."
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"
Recent Comments