When novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace committed suicide earlier this year, The Onion responded with one of their characteristically brilliant headlines. They claimed that, in honor of the author of Infinite Jest, a 1079-page-long novel (with footnotes) about a film so entertaining that everyone who watches it becomes enraptured and cannot do anything but watch it endlessly for the rest of their lives, “NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace’s Death.” Not likely, but, then again, mentioning Wallace in the same breath as Rush Limbaugh isn’t so likely either.

As it happens, Wallace had extremely Catholic tastes, and, despite a nearly complete difference in temperament and political outlook, he could appreciate Limbaugh’s accomplishments. In face, he referred to Limbaugh as “a host of extraordinary, once-in-a-generation talent and charisma—bright, loquacious, witty, complexly authoritative—whose show’s blend of news, entertainment, and partisan analysis became the model for legions of imitators.” This isn’t the list of adjectives that would occur to the workaday liberal when considering the person and phenomenon that is Rush Limbaugh, but Wallace could appreciate something unique when he saw it. Could you do what Limbaugh does? Here’s how Wallace describes the job:

To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want—with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential—a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you’re saying—which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you’re speaking.) Plus, ideally, what you’re saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself—your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you’re discussing. And it gets even trickier…

This passage occurs in a remarkable 2005 article that Wallace published in The Atlantic magazine about talk radio, and republished, in expanded form, in his essay collection Consider the Lobster. It’s entitled “Host,” and it’s one of his great essays, showcasing his particular talent remarkably well: following a thought that may occur to most of us as a fleeting consideration with unbelievable tenacity, teasing out every nuance. Read the whole thing here.

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The Bhagavad Gita is one of the most famous religious texts in the world. In 700 verses, it recounts a conversation between the god and charioteer Krishna and the Pandava prince and archer Arjuna. The conversation takes place on a battlefield at Kurukshetra, right before the fighting begins. Unsure that he should continue with the battle that would kill so many, Arjuna argues to Krishna that he should not fight. Krishna responds with an argument in favor of action and duty. For thousands of years, massive commentaries have been written on this short text, purporting to find a complete philosophy of life and the afterlife in it. But none of those commentaries is nearly as massive as the work in which the Bhagavad Gita is contained. That work is the great Hindu epic known as the Mahabharata. It is 74,000 verses long, ten times longer than both Homeric Epics – The Iliad and The Odyssey – combined. The Gita, tucked away in the middle of Box Six of the Mahabharata is less than one percent of the total.

The Mahabharata is the epic tale of Iron Age (or “Vedic”) India, and focuses on the Kurukshetra war—a conflict between the clans of Kauravas and the Pandavas for the throne of Hastinapura. A number of translations of this work are available or in progress. The poet P. Lai has recently completed a verse translation, and two prose translations are currently in progress. One, by the University of Chicago Press, was begun in the early 1980′s by the scholar J. A. B. van Buitenen, but was put on hold for 20 years after he died in 1983. The press has recently begun releasing new volumes again. In addition, a complete translation of the Mahabharata is going to be included in the Clay Sanskrit Library from New York University Press. The Clay Library aims to be the Sanskrit equivalent of Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library. The Loeb Library, published in small green hardcovers, provides Greek and Latin texts with facing page translations of the major works of Ancient Greece and Rome. In addition to the Mahabharata, the Clay Library is producing a complete translation of the other major Hindu epic — the Ramayana — as well as other religious, poetic and philosophical works. It promises to be a great resource for Devoted Intellectuals everywhere. Visit it here.

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Between 1910 and 1913, the Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published one of the landmark works of Analytic philosophy: the Principia Mathematica. Over the course of three volumes Russell and Whitehead purport to derive all of the major principles of mathematics from a series of simple axioms, and logical proofs leading from these simple beginnings to greater and greater complexity. They propose a self-contained system of mathematics that admits of no error and no paradox. It was one of the great landmarks of philosophy, mathematics, and logic, and in 1931 a 25-year-old German mathematician named Kurt Gödel proved the whole thing wrong.

Russell and Whitehead attempted to build mathematics into a self-contained logical system. Gödel didn’t simply find an error or inconsistency in their work—that could have been corrected easily enough. Gödel went much, much farther: he proved that every formal system has inherent limitations, the Principia among many others.

The fundamental idea behind Gödel’s proof is that every logical system contains a version of the paradoxical statement “This sentence is false.” (Think that one through for a minute.) Therefore, deriving a complete system of mathematics from a set of axioms (the goal of the Principia) is inherently impossible. This is a very important result to philosophers, logicians and mathematicians, but in 1999 it became a pop culture phenomena. Douglas Hofstadter made the idea famous in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach. It’s a brilliant and long-ranging book, delving into the illusions you can see in M. C. Escher’s prints (like the one above), the complexities you can hear in J. S. Bach’s fugues, and the paradoxes of Gödel’s proof. I heartily recommend it to all Devoted Intellectuals. However, I’d start by reading another book first. Hofstadter claims that he first became entranced with Gödel’s proof when he read an explanation of it written by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman at the age of fourteen. After the success of his book, Nagel and Newman’s work was republished with an introduction by Hofstadter. It’s tough going at times (The Devoted Intellectual is still confused about “Gödel Numbers”), but Gödel’s Proof is a project every Devoted Intellectual should tackle.

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Between 1910 and 1913, the Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published one of the landmark works of Analytic philosophy: the Principia Mathematica. Over the course of three volumes Russell and Whitehead purport to derive all of the major principles of mathematics from a series of simple axioms, and logical proofs leading from these simple beginnings to greater and greater complexity. They propose a self-contained system of mathematics that admits of no error and no paradox. It was one of the great landmarks of philosophy, mathematics, and logic, and in 1931 a 25-year-old German mathematician named Kurt Gödel proved the whole thing wrong.

Russell and Whitehead attempted to build mathematics into a self-contained logical system. Gödel didn’t simply find an error or inconsistency in their work—that could have been corrected easily enough. Gödel went much, much farther: he proved that every formal system has inherent limitations, the Principia among many others.

The fundamental idea behind Gödel’s proof is that every logical system contains a version of the paradoxical statement “This sentence is false.” (Think that one through for a minute.) Therefore, deriving a complete system of mathematics from a set of axioms (the goal of the Principia) is inherently impossible. This is a very important result to philosophers, logicians and mathematicians, but in 1999 it became a pop culture phenomena. Douglas Hofstadter made the idea famous in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach. It’s a brilliant and long-ranging book, delving into the illusions you can see in M. C. Escher’s prints (like the one above), the complexities you can hear in J. S. Bach’s fugues, and the paradoxes of Gödel’s proof. I heartily recommend it to all Devoted Intellectuals. However, I’d start by reading another book first. Hofstadter claims that he first became entranced with Gödel’s proof when he read an explanation of it written by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman at the age of fourteen. After the success of his book, Nagel and Newman’s work was republished with an introduction by Hofstadter. It’s tough going at times (The Devoted Intellectual is still confused about “Gödel Numbers”), but Gödel’s Proof is a project every Devoted Intellectual should tackle.

What Do You Think? »

       

Robert Moses was the “master builder” of New York City, and his reputation today largely stems from Robert Caro’s 1974 biography, The Powerbroker. Moses was the driving force (no pun intended) behind the Triborough and Verrazano Narrows bridges; the Brooklyn-Queens and Staten Island expressways; UN Headquarters and Lincoln Center. Urban planners debate Moses’ legacy to this day, and New Yorkers live it. Slightly less well-known is the impact Robert Moses had on baseball.

One of the greatest rivalries in New York sports history was that between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, who played out of Manhattan. In 1951, the two teams battled for the pennant, a battle that ended with one of the most famous moments in baseball. In the third game of a three-game playoff, the Giants won with a ninth-inning home run by Bobby Thomson. The run had a famous name: “The Shoot Heard ‘Round the World.” That rivalry came to an end, however, less than a decade later, when both teams moved to California.

The Dodgers played out of an old and shabby stadium called Ebbets Field, and team owner Walter O’Malley wanted a new stadium. He also knew where he wanted it: on the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, Moses had other plans for the corner. He wanted a parking garage, and he wanted to Dodgers to move to Queens. O’Malley said no, and took his team to Los Angeles. But Moses still got his stadium in Queens. It was called Shea; it was the home of the Mets; and it saw its last game earlier this year.

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A new edition of The Intellectual Devotional, this time with a focus on Modern Culture, is now available in stores. (Click here to pre-order your copy.) As well as continuing to expand on posts from the General Edition, “The Devoted Intellect” blog will introduce and expand on material from the Modern Culture devotional. Today’s entry on Martin Scorsese is from the “Film” section.

Over the past few years, film lovers throughout the world, and Chicago film lovers in particular, have received a steady-stream of sad news about one of the greatest film lovers of all time: Roger Ebert. In 2002, Ebert was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Over the next few years, he endured a number of operations and a few close calls. In 2006, he stopped appearing on his iconic show after his latest operation made it impossible for him to speak. But he was not completely silenced. Ebert returned to print with his review of The Queen (he gave it a thumbs up) and, in 2008, he released a book about one of his heroes: Martin Scorsese.

In 1967, Ebert reviewed Scorsese’s film I Call First. It was one of the first reviews Ebert wrote, and the first Scorsese received. Ebert described the film as a landmark in American cinema: a synthesis of the technical achievement of traditional films like Marty and On the Waterfront and the freshness and spontaneity of experimental films like The Connection and Shadows. Without reservation, Ebert called the I Call First “a great moment in American film.” And who produced this moment? “Remarkably, writer-director Martin Scorsese is only 25 years old, and this is his first film.” Ebert was the same age, and also at the beginning of his career. Over the next four decades, Scorsese would direct some of the greatest films, and Ebert would always be close behind with his opinion.

The culmination of this relationship is Scorsese, Ebert’s comprehensive study of the director. The book begins with the fact that the two men were born only five months apart, but the comparison Ebert draws runs deeper. Both men were raised Roman Catholic, attended Catholic schools, learned the Catechism by rote, and did all of this in the days before Vatican II. “We were baffled by the concept of Forever, and asked how it was that God could have no beginning and no end.” They both took their Catholic sensibility to the movies, and all of us — Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Hindus and unbelievers — are richer for it.

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