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Sunday, August 11, 2002
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What Are the Odds of That?
Today's New York Times Magazine has an excellent article about the human impulse to see conspiracy in coincidence. It does a fantastic job of taking an abstract and counterintuitive concept and making it very clear. My own view of the conspiracy theories that I've heard suggested is best summed up in this quote:
"It's like an archer shooting an arrow and then drawing a circle around it," Falk says. "We give it meaning because it does mean something--to us."
The dialectic between conspiracy and coincidence is perhaps most fruitfully explored in the work of Thomas Pynchon, who poses it as the tension between paranoia and nihilism. It is in Gravity's Rainbow, his most thorough and explicit elaboration of these themes, that he points out that the opposite of everything being connected and there being a grand plan behind everything (paranoia) is nothing being connected and there being no plan (nihilism). That is, belief is the basis of paranoia, or vice versa.
2:57:17 PM 
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We Were Once Able to Survive Without Cell Phones, Weren't We?
Anyone in New York who has ever stood on a checkout line behind someone who was having a phone conversation and who was acting as if the request to pay were an inappropriate interruption of that conversation will be happy to learn that there are no viable plans to extend cell phone service to the subway.
11:24:11 AM
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When Was the Last Time You Slept in the Backseat of Your Parents Car?
Today they re-ran the Peanuts cartoon that was the earliest, and perhaps most complete, instance of a work of art saying what I felt. This cartoon contains the whole arc of my emotional life--all that I've longed for, all that I haven't had, and all that I still wrestle with. But then again, I've been accused of reading too much into Peanuts cartoons before.
11:15:23 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Morgan N. Sandquist.
Last update: 11/2/03; 10:25:37 AM.
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