Foucault's Pendulum discussion
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Discussion thread 5: Chapter 39 to end of Chapter 53
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LOL, Book title: 'Leopard Without Eyelashes' :D Eco has such a cute sense of humor.Eco is quite clever with wrapping things he wants to chat about, into the folds of narrative; for instance, one of his themes is how human wishful thinking tends to pervade and even steer a lot of what we do. The vanity publishing is one example, and our perception of the existence of 'magic' is another; and Eco brings 'magic' in a lot doesn't he? Look how he even manages to slip it into the discussion of the 'Metals' book:
"Primitive medicine. Influence of the zodiac on the different parts of the body, with the corresponding curative herbs. And minerals, including metals. The doctrine of the cosmic signatures. Those were times when the boundary between magic and science was rather ill-defined."
Ha ha, this man is priceless:" I'd love to have your homunculus, and then we could keep it like a dachshund. It's easy, the book says: you just have to collect a little human seed in a test tube. That wouldn't be hard for you—don't blush, silly. Then you mix it with hippomene, which is some liquid that is excreted—no, not excreted—what's the word?"
"Secreted," Diotallevi suggested.
"Really? Anyway, pregnant mares make it. I realize that's a bit harder to get. If I were a pregnant mare, I wouldn't like people coming to collect my hippomene, especially strangers, but I think you can buy it in packages, like joss sticks. "
Oh golly, I just have to post all the humorous bits: " Also, besides the manuscripts, I have letters that offer revelations on the connections between Joan of Arc and the Sibylline Books, between Lilith the Talmudic demon and the hermaphroditic Great Mother, between the genetic code and the Martian alphabet, between the secret intelligence of plants, cosmology, psychoanalysis, and Marx and Nietzsche in the perspective of a new angelology, between the Golden Number and the Grand Canyon, Kant and occultism, the Eleusian mysteries and jazz, Cagliostro and atomic energy, homosexuality and gnosis, the golem and the class struggle.
Heh heh heh heh. He forgot the Hollow Earth and Bigfoot and the crop circles, which are connected with the Bible, UFO's and the Bermuda Triangle, and not necessarily in that order.
I like the parallel between the initiation / preparation to scalp the punter by the charlatan we see in chapter 38 and that we see in chapters 46/47.
Jan-Maat wrote: "I like the parallel between the initiation / preparation to scalp the punter by the charlatan we see in chapter 38 and that we see in chapters 46/47."Ha, you mean that the tables are somewhat turned?
I'd actually posted a post regarding some of the discussion they have there, a while ago, which GR promptly swallowed as soon as I posted it; so I'm still trying to recover from the nerdrage re that.
In any case, it was something to this effect:
Take the height of the pyramidion, multiply it by the height of the whole pyramid, multiply the total by ten to the fifth, and we obtain the circumference of the earth. What's more, if you multiply the perimeter of the base by twenty-four to the third divided by two, you get the earth's radius. Further, the area of the base of the pyramid multiplied by ninety-six times ten to the eighth gives us one hundred and ninety-six million eight hundred and ten thousand square miles, which is the surface area of the earth.
Heh heh, I'm sure that if you took the height of the pyramidion and multiplied it by certain numbers and divided it by other numbers, then you'd get the depth of the sea in various places, the distance between Stonehenge and Easter Island, and/or between Stonehenge and the moon, or the moon and Jupiter, the sun and Mars, the Bermuda triangle and the Orion constellation, or the diameter of the base of one of the pyramids in South America.
I'm sure people who enjoy doing arithmetic calculations could have lots of fun working back from various distances and diameters and circumferences to get back to the height of the pyramidion.
Well Manutius is a scam operation isn't it? It gives people what they want or think they want but at a cost. Likewise Aglie and his operation. The funny thing is that the Manutius group start out assuming that they can use Aglie in their scam but don't see how they are swallowed up in his game.I best not get too ahead of where we are though...but what Manutius is doing with their literary prizes and encyclopaedias perhaps plays into the theme of semiotics too, publishing as the production of social rather than literary value?
That kind of discussion of the mystical spatial relationship between different places reminds me of the study on the location of the former Woolworths stores in the uk:
http://standupmaths.com/woolworths/
Jan-Maat wrote: "Well Manutius is a scam operation isn't it? It gives people what they want or think they want but at a cost. Likewise Aglie and his operation. The funny thing is that the Manutius group start ou..."Yip at least Amazon really sells to customers, which is more than what one could say of Manutius. :P
The Woolworths study is too funny. The next thing I would like to see studied, is the patterns formed and conclusions to be made from the locations of the various Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets over the world. Or Mc Donalds...
Traveller wrote: "Heh heh, I'm sure that if you took the height of the pyramidion and multiplied it by certain numbers and divided it by other numbers, then you'd get the depth of the sea in various places, the distance between Stonehenge and Easter Island, …"Exactly—the same thing I said about the numerology when Diotallevi first starts encouraging Ardenti.
There are certain numbers and ratios in architecture that have significance, like the golden ratio, and there are provable relationships in things like stone circles where one can see that year after year the same astronomical sightings can be made, but this sort of thing is setting your conclusions before your premise.
"He does envy Mr Tom Brooks though, who with 1500 locations, had almost twice as much data to pull meaningless patterns from."
ROFL!
Studying KFC or McDonalds lacks the interest of historicity that one sees in a study of the ancient Woolies cult, though.
Yes, KFC and Mc Donalds haven't moved completely to the internet yet, in the sense that you can still drive there and buy directly from them, so their drive-in outlets will probably be around quite a while longer than some general chain stores, for which Amazon's got most of that market already... ;)
I really enjoyed the story about the two war veterans, btw. :)
"See here: if you look at the world in a certain way, everything is connected to everything else."Significative reflection when Agliè and Diotallevi are discussing the importance of numerical correspondences as symbols to provide meaning because Eco seems to be hinting the human need to search for meaning and some sort of certainty in their lives in one way or another: either through occultism, analysis of symbols or Cabbalist wisdom...what matters is to find meaning in the end, even if it doesn't exist, and I wonder...at what cost?
(view spoiler)
Nice comments, Dolors. :)I've opened the next section which goes up to chapter 72, so that you can post your further comments, here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Thank you Trav, much appreciated! :)
Btw, I wonder which 'creature held up against the sky' Casaubon refers to as being similar to the one in Riccardo's work of art:
Picasso's work: "Guernica"
De Angelis says:"But in my reading, I've learned that in 1929 a certain Vivian Postel du Mas and Jeanne Canudo founded a group called Polaris, which was inspired by the myth of the King of the World.
Wikipedia says, about Valentine de Saint-Point:
At the end of 1924, accompanied by Vivian Postel du Mas and Jeanne Canudo, the widow of her former lover, Saint-Point moved to Cairo where her fame had preceded her. She joined a group of young writers and essayists, who organized debates, conferences and theatrical events. She wrote for various newspapers such as Liberty, and lectured. Along with Jeanne Canudo, she created a "center idéiste" which combines elements of her "College of Elites". End of 1925, she launched the publication of the Phoenix, a review the East's rebirth which cast a critical eye on Western policies in the Near and Middle East. She took up the causes of the Muslim world and Arab nationalism, challenging European imperialism and the cultural hegemony of the West.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin...
but it says nothing about a group called Polaris.
Up to know, most of the mumbo-jumbo in the book had felt a bit unreal to me. If I had not personally become involved in a group that believed weird things earlier in my life, I would have found it hard to believe that people in this day and age could still believe in baloney like all of this.
However, looking for a reference to Polaris, I found this very interesting magazine: http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articl...
OMG, They are here, today, in the very area in which I live (well, not exactly as Sweden has distanced herself somewhat from the EU).I don't know if you saw at the very bottom of the article, but the authors are the very same that Dan Brown has credited with being his primary inspiration. Sigh!! Yes, Traveller, it does seems people are just as gullible today as in any time in the past.
Ruth wrote: "OMG, They are here, today, in the very area in which I live ..."You'd better start watching your back, Ruth! :O
It's amazing what we don't see, (like Eco seems to imply many times) simply because we're not looking for it.
Ruth wrote: "OMG, They are here, today, in the very area in which I live (well, not exactly as Sweden has distanced herself somewhat from the EU)."They're probably here, too, but my eyes glaze too much when I try to read something like that. Like Traveller, innoculated to such things early in life.
I just suddenly made a connection, not apparently related to anything I've actually recently read (I've just finished chapter 51).Way back, before Casaubon even worked for Garamond, we met Ardenti, who disappeared after talking to an 'expert' named Rakosky. Then Casaubon goes to Brazil and meets Aglié who doesn't quite pretend to be the Comte de Saint-Germain, who anyone familiar with the legends of Saint-Germain would recognize also goes by the name of Rákóczi (or variant spellings). And we know Aglié has a local residence.
Coinky-dink? I think not.
Oh, FHS, it gets even more complicated. Following links, I find attributed to St-Germain: "La Très Sainte Trinosophie, The Most Holy Trinosophia, or The Most Holy Threefold Wisdom, is a French esoteric book, allegedly authored by Alessandro Cagliostro or the Count of St. Germain"I don't imagine it's really necessary to investigate further to ascertain that this is the same Cagliostro that Eco has already mentioned more than once.
Yes, I linked to that Cagliostro elsewhere, it's definitely this one, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessand..., because later on in the book, Eco mentions him in connection with the Necklace affair that you can read about in the Wikipedia article.Regarding Saint-Germain and Rákóczi : (view spoiler)
Looking at that quote again, I think I probably read a bit much into it. I read "Alessandro Cagliostro or the Count of St. Germain" as " Cagliostro AKA the Count of St. Germain", where it probably meant "either… Cagliostro or … St. Germain", but still there's a connection, even if not an identity.
In Chapter 39, we have just realized that Manutius is a vanity press for SFA's, the equivalent of what today would be an SPA. And wow, doesn't Manutius's motto sound scarily close to that of Amazon's?
"Manutius isn't interested in readers.... The main thing, Signor Garamond says, is to make sure the authors remain loyal to us. We can get along fine without readers."