Presbyterian Poets Society
The Wrinkle in Time link in my previous entry led to a sermon for St.
Andrew's day, 2003, at the Riviera Presbyterian Church in Miami.
I belong to no church, but have a vague recollection of …
Literary Archaeology
"Mrs. Who's spectacles shone outat them triumphantly,'And the light
shineth in darkness;and the darknesscomprehended it not.' "-- A Wrinkle
in Time
See, too,
Shining Forth and The Shining of M…
To Be
A Jesuit cites Quine:
"To be is to be the value of a variable."
-- Willard Van Orman Quine, cited by Joseph T. Clark, S. J., in
Conventional Logic and Modern Logic: A Prelude to Transition,
Woodstock, MD: Woods…
The Horn at Midnight
(See the two previous entries.)
Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4:
HORATIO
I think it lacks of twelve.
HAMLET
No, it is struck.
HORATIO
Indeed? I heard it not: then it draws near the seasonWherein th…
Something is Rotten
See Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4.
"... the administration's reaction to Richard Clarke's Against All
Enemies provides more evidence of something rotten in the state of our
government."
-- Paul Krugman as…
Banach's Birthday
"A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a
better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and
the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories…
American Heaven
Headlines from today's Google News:
Singer Jan Berry, 62; Half of Surf Music Duo
Screeching for heaven at Mach 7
March 25 news story:
"The promise of 70 virgins in paradise and the equivalent of abou…
Real Enemies, Part II
"Even paranoids have real enemies."-- Saying attributed to Delmore
Schwartz
Hamas leader says Bushis the 'enemy' of God and Islam
-- Headline, USA Today, March 28, 2004
Real Enemies, Part I
"Even paranoids have real enemies."-- Saying attributed to Delmore
Schwartz
According to the Washington Post and Newsday today, the President's
persecutors now include
Paul O'Neill, formerly Bus…
President Queeg
"Over the weekend, Richard A. Clarke, Bush's former counterterrorism
coordinator, said Bush focused too little attention on al Qaeda before
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and too much on Iraq afterward. C…
The Hairy Palm Academy
The previous two entries were prompted by a picture in the Washington
Post of Spain's Interior Minister, a member of the secular arm of the
Legion of Christ.
Both entries mentioned a school run b…
Quid Pro Quack
(Headline of today'sMaureen Dowd column)
Quiddity:The essence, nature, or distinctive peculiarity, of a thing;
that which answers the question, Quid est? or, What is it?-Webster's
Revised Unabridged Dict…
Christendom Today
From PP Nunca Mas! --
20 de marzo:Todas contra la guerra
From today's Washington Post:
EU Taking Up Terrorism Issues
Security Officials Try to Forge'Europe-Wide Response' After Attacks By
John Bu…
Geometry of the 4x4 Square:
http://log24.com/theory/geometry.html
"There is such a thing as a tesseract."— A Wrinkle in Time
Rainbow's End
From theNorma Ballistics Calculator:
See alsoReadings for St. Patrick's Day.
State of Grace
Saint Mercedes McCambridge, who won an Oscar for "All the King's Men,"
died on March 2, 2004.
From an entry for that date:
O the days of the Kerry dancing....When the boys began to gather, i…
William H. Pickering,Dec. 24, 1910 - March
15, 2004
For details,click on theblack monolith.
AtHeaven'sGate
Readings forSt. Patrick's Day
Books:
Finnegans Wake (1939)
Gravity's Rainbow (1978)
Masks of the Illuminati (1981)
Quotations:
"Nature does not know extinction;all it knows is
transformation.Everything science has …
Anschaulichkeit
In memory of John W. Seybold, who died at 88 on Sunday, March 14,
2004....
Seybold is said to have originated the application of the phrase "what
you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) to computerized types…
The Spaniard
Madrid BombsShook VotersAnger at U.S. Fueled UpsetIn Wake of Terror
AttacksBy Glenn FrankelWashington Post Foreign ServiceTuesday, March
16, 2004
MADRID, March 15 -- The hand-lettered sign at the s…
More Bush Crookedness
Who is "reporter Karen Ryan"?
Lenten Meditations:The Logos Trilogy
Logos and Logic The Word in the Desert The Line
The Fog and the Fury
Headline and opening sentence of a column in the Washington Times:
"Job creation fog . . . and fury
Something must be done [to] restore jobs in U.S. manufacturing...."
So far, so good. But the c…
Clarity and Certainty"At the age of 12 I
experienced a second wonder of
a totally different nature: in a little book*
dealing with Euclidean plane geometry, which came into my hands at the
beginning of a schoolyear. He…
The Line
From a March 10, 2004, entry:
"Language was no more than a collection of meaningless conventional
signs, and life could absurdly end at any moment. [Mallarmé]
became
aware, in Millan’s* words, 'of t…
A Game ofTexas Hold'em
From Lou Dobbs Tonight, March 12, 2004:
DOBBS: A New Jersey company is suing President Bush and U.S. trade
representative Robert Zoellick for failing to protect American
manufacturers. …
St. Howard's Day
In memory of Howard Fast,author of Spartacus, who diedone year ago
today:
George W. Bush (left) andJohn Kerry (right) discuss theupcoming
presidential campaign.
Bush's Stalinist Justice
From Ashcroft the Nihilist:
"... victims had no idea just how rigged the federal court system
really has become until they actually were in the dock, protesting
their innocence (which federal l…
A Half-Right Leader
For the Record President Overstates Kerry's Record on Intelligence
Budget By Walter Pincus and Dana MilbankWashington Post Staff
WritersFriday, March 12, 2004 President Bush, in his first…
Sequel
From an entry of July 27, 2003...Catholic Tastes, Part I:
"...my despair with words as instruments of communion is often near
total."
-- Charles Small, Harvard '64 25th Anniversary Report, 1989 (See 1…
Men of Respect
Dershowitz
DiLorenzo
"I caught Alan Dershowitz defending Martha Stewart on ABC TV this
morning. Most Americans who pay any attention at all to the news of her
trial think she is being charge…
Split
The first idea was not our own. Adam in Eden was the father of
Descartes.
-- Wallace Stevens,Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
A very interesting web site atMiddle Tennessee State Universityrelates
the Stevens …
Ennui of the First Idea
The ennui of apartments described by Stevens in "Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction" (see previous entry) did not, of course, refer to the
"apartments" of incidence geometry. A more likely connectio…
Apartments
From Wallace Stevens,"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction":
It is the celestial ennui of apartmentsThat sends us back to the first
idea, the quickOf this invention; and yet so poisonous
Are the ravishments of tr…
Ridgepole
CBS News Sunday Morning today had a ridgepole ceremony for a house that
was moved from China to Salem, Massachusetts.
From the web page
Introduction to the I Ching--By Richard Wilhelm:
"He who has perceived…
Cognitive Blending
It seems that much of my effort here at Xanga can be described by these
two words.
Specifically, for an application of the "conceptual blending" of
Fauconnier and Turner to my journal entries of Feb.…
Signifying Nothing
Fred Benninger, the former chairman of MGM Grand and the MGM studio,
died at 86 at his home in Las Vegas on Sunday, Feb. 29, 2004.
"Mr. Benninger was well known in the business world for decades, but…
Songs for Shakespeare
from Willie and Waylon
From today's New York Times
by Ben Brantley
...."Dost thou know me, fellow?" thunders Christopher
Plummer, who is giving the performance of a lifetime in the titl…
ZZ
Mit Zeichen und Zahlen
vermessen wir Himmel und Erde
schwarz
auf weiss
schaffen wir neue Welten
oder gar Universen With numbers and nameswe measure heaven and
earthblackon whitewe create new worldsand univ…
Deep Play
In the previous entry, there was a reference to Carl Kaysen, former
director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and father of
Susanna Kaysen, author of Girl, Interrupted.
A search for further in…
An Association of Ideas
"The association is the idea." -- Ian Lee
"One of my teachers told me I was a nihilist... I took it as a
compliment." -- Susanna Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted
MIT biography of Carl Kaysen, Susann…
Super Tuesday
O the days of the Kerry dancing....When the boys began to gather, in
the glen of a summer's night.And the Kerry piper's tuning made us long
with wild delight.
For further details, see April 16, 20…
Passion
From the previous entry: 1.Oscar:military phoneticfor the letter'O'
From an entry of Dec. 21, 2002, some background in literary theory:
"I know what 'nothing' means...."— Maria Wyeth in Play It As It…