In memory of For further details, click See, too, last year's entries "... he might add under his breath, Posted 12/31/2003 at 8:00 PM |
Personal Jesus
For an excellent dramatic portrayal of C. S. Lewis, see the film "Shadowlands," starring Sir Anthony Hopkins. For Sir Anthony Hopkins Your Own Personal Jesus: Mark Vonnegut in The Jesus figure above is, As for "the sort of things Jesus said," "At one point, he decides that See the rather similar remarks of Jesus For further notes on Sunday, December 28, 2003 7:29 PM Season's Greetings from the "Warren Ellis' Die Puny Humans.... DPH leads to Sohma G. Dawling who in turn leads, Oppenheimer's Aria.
Sunday, December 28, 2003 2:00 PM Hostages Freed, Iran SaysThe Associated Press, TEHRAN, Iran -- Three European hostages seized in southeastern Iran earlier this month have been released, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Sunday. Bam....
Thank you, Ma'am. (See The Magdalene Code, 12/26. Another entry not without relevance Posted 12/31/2003 at 3:07 PM |
Toy "If little else, the brain is an educational toy. While it may be a frustrating plaything -- one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them -- it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled; you don't have to put it together on Christmas morning. The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometimes they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have 'lost your marbles,' not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain. One brain game that is widely, if poorly, played is a gimmick called 'rational "I took the number twenty-four and there's twenty-four ways of expressing the numbers one, two, three, four. And I assigned one kind of line to one, one to two, one to three, and one to four. One was a vertical line, two was a horizontal line, three was diagonal left to right, and four was diagonal right to left. These are the basic kind of directions that lines can take.... the absolute ways that lines can be drawn. And I drew these things as parallel lines very close to one another in boxes. And then there was a system of changing them so that within twenty-four pages there were different arrangements of actually sixteen squares, four sets of four. Everything was based on four. So this was kind of a... more of a... less of a rational... I mean, it gets into the whole idea of methodology." Yes, it does. Posted 12/27/2003 at 10:21 PM |
ART WARS, St. Stephen's Day: The Magdalene Code Got The Da Vinci Code for Xmas. From page 262:
Related Log24 material -- The Da Vinci Code, pages 445-446:
Related Log24 material -- Posted 12/26/2003 at 7:59 PM |
Sequel to previous 4 entries: A Christmas Carol Current phase of the moon, And I remember that we went singing carols once, a night or two before Christmas Eve, when there wasn’t the shaving of a moon to light the secret, white-flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind made through the drive-trees noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe web-footed men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house. ‘What shall we give them?’ Dan whispered. ‘"Hark the Herald"? ‘‘Christmas comes but Once a Year"?’ ‘No,’ Jack said: ‘We’ll sing "Good King Wenceslas." I’ll count three.’ One, two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door. Good King Wenceslas looked out And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, suddenly joined our singing: a small, dry voice from the other side of the door: a small, dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely and bright; the gramophone was playing; we saw the red and white balloons hanging from the gas-bracket; uncles and aunts sat by the fire; I thought I smelt our supper being fried in the kitchen. Everything was good again, and Christmas shone through all the familiar town. ‘Perhaps it was a ghost,’ Jim said. 'Perhaps it was trolls,’ Dan said, who was always reading. ‘Let’s go in and see if there’s any jelly left,’ Jack said. And we did that. Broadcasts by Dylan Thomas (first published 1952) Posted 12/22/2003 at 8:00 PM |
California Earthquake By Peter Henderson December 22, 2003 07:06 PM ET LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California's largest earthquake in four years struck on Monday, causing Planet Earth to ring "like a bell" and mountains to grow a foot (30 cm) taller, geologists said on Monday. The magnitude 6.5 quake hit near the coastal city of San Simeon.... "Rosebud." Posted 12/22/2003 at 7:59 PM |
An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.5 rocked the California coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco on Monday. "Would you like something to read?" -- Dylan Thomas, Posted 12/22/2003 at 4:16 PM |
After the Long Night Posted 12/22/2003 at 2:14 PM |
The Longest Night Tonight will be Time Magazine, Posted 12/21/2003 at 1:00 PM |
White, Geometric, and Eternal This afternoon's surfing: Prompted by Edward Rothstein's own Fides et Ratio encyclical in today's NY Times, I googled him. At the New York Review of Books, I came across the following by Rothstein: "... statements about TNT can be represented within TNT: the formal system can, in a precise way, 'talk' about itself." This naturally prompted me to check what is on TNT on this, the feast day of St. Emil Artin. At 5 PM this afternoon, we have Al Pacino in "The Devil's Advocate" -- a perfect choice for the festival of an alleged saint. Preparing for Al, I meditated on the mystical significance of the number 373, as explained in Zen and Language Games: the page number 373 in Robert Stone's theological classic A Flag for Sunrise conveys the metaphysical significance of the phrase "diamonds are forever" -- "the eternal in the temporal," according to Stone's Catholic priest. This suggests a check of another theological classic, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Page 373 there begins with the following description of prewar Berlin: "white and geometric." This suggests the following illustration of a white and geometric object related to yesterday's entry on Helmut Wielandt: Figure 1 (This object, which illustrates the phrase "makin' the changes," also occurs in this morning's entry on the death of a jazz musician.) A further search for books containing "white" and "geometric" at Amazon.com yields the following: Figure 2 From Mosaics, by "A risco fountain in Mexico city, begun circa 1740 and made up of Mexican pottery and Chinese porcelain, including Ming. The delicate oriental patterns on so many different-sized plates and saucers [are] underlined by the bold blue and white geometric tiles at the base." Note that the tiles are those of Diamond Theory; the geometric object in figure 1 above illustrates a group that plays a central role in that theory. Finally, the word "risco" (from Casa del Risco) associated with figure 2 above leads us to a rather significant theological site associated with the holy city of Santiago de Compostela: Figure 3 Vicente Risco's Figure 3 shows James Joyce (alias Dedalus), whose daughter Lucia inspired the recent entry Jazz on St. Lucia's Day -- which in turn is related, by last night's 2:45 entry and by Figure 1, to the mathematics of group theory so well expounded by the putative saint Emil Artin. "His lectures are best described as If Pynchon plays the role of devil's advocate suggested by his creation, in Gravity's Rainbow, of the character Emil Bummer, we may hope that Rota, no longer in time but now in eternity, can be persuaded to play the important role of saint's advocate for his Emil. Update of 6:30 PM 12/20/03: Riddled: The Absolutist Faith White and Geometric, but not Eternal. Posted 12/20/2003 at 5:00 PM |
Quarter to Three "You've got to be true to your code." In memory of Webster Young, From my entry of 12/16/03,
"Now you has jazz." Webster Young was a jazz trumpeter. In 1957, Young was featured on -- Adam Bernstein, "One for my baby, Posted 12/20/2003 at 2:45 AM |
For St. Emil's Day On this date in 1962, Emil Artin died. He was, in his way, a priest of Apollo, god of music, light, and reason. The previous entry dealt with permutation groups, in the context of a Jan. 2004 AMS Notices review of a book on the mathematics of juggling. It turns out that juggling is, in fact, related to Artin's theory of "braid groups." For details, see Juggling Braids. For more on Apollo, see my entry of 1/09. Posted 12/20/2003 at 1:09 AM |
Happy Birthday, Helmut Wielandt
In light of my entry on change-ringing of this date last year, the above AMS Notices cover may serve to illustrate what Heidegger so memorably dubbed the For details on the illustration, (Wielandt was an expert Posted 12/19/2003 at 10:00 PM |
Christmas Concert "And now what you've all -- Conclusion of the film "Cosi" Related material: The Ring and the Rings: Wagner vs. Tolkien, by Alex Ross, in The New Yorker, current (Dec. 22-29) issue. Tolkien, Wagner, Nationalism, and Modernity, from a 2001 Seattle Opera House conference. Posted 12/18/2003 at 6:29 PM |
Saint Louis Today is the feast day of Saint Louis Untermeyer, who died on December 18, 1977. Here are some links in his memory: His anthology, Modern British Poetry, his anthology, Modern American Poetry, and a brief biography at http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/. I grew up with a paperback Untermeyer anthology that I loved. He may have been middlebrow, but he taught me more than many more refined authors. Any religion that says Untermeyer is not a saint can go, as far as I am concerned, straight to Hell. Posted 12/18/2003 at 1:00 AM |
Fighting Chance "Give faith a fighting chance." On this date in 1959, the film "On the Beach" opened worldwide. From a site on Nevil Shute, author of the book on which the film was based:
Another film, based on an author who certainly opposed Communist enslavement, opens worldwide today: the final installment of Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings." To give, as Lee Ann Womack recommends, this author's theological views a fighting chance, see a Christianity Today article, Saint J. R. R. the Evangelist. Personally, I have come to believe that Tolkien's religion, Roman Catholicism, is more like Grima Wormtongue's than like Gandalf's. Material related to this view may be found in my journal archive for March 2003. For some philosophical remarks that avoid the lunacy of Christianity, see Faith. Another admirable work by the author of these eminently sensible remarks, Richard Robinson of Oriel College, Oxford, is one of the best books I have ever encountered: Posted 12/17/2003 at 3:00 PM |
Kaleidoscope turning... See, too, Blue Matrices, and Song for the Posted 12/16/2003 at 2:24 PM |
Jazz on St. Lucia's Day December 13, Saturday, was
Kaleidoscope turning... -- Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat Washington Post, Names and Faces, "A Christmas concert at the Vatican may not be the best place to criticize the Catholic Church for the sexual abuse scandals that have plagued it for the past few years. Or maybe it's the perfect place. Musician Lauryn Hill did just that while performing there Saturday night. The Grammy winner read a statement during the concert that scolded the church and its leaders.... La Repubblica newspaper quoted her as saying, 'I realize some of you may be offended by what I'm saying, but what do you say to the families who were betrayed by the people in whom they believed?' ... The Vatican said Sunday it had no comment."
"Now you has jazz." Related entries: Posted 12/16/2003 at 1:08 AM |
Hell to Heaven From Hotel Point: On a novel, Dow Mossman's Evidence of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The Dow Mossman character (Dawes Williams) sitting in the Rio Grande tearing pages out of his notebooks. (We get the pages, reproduced somewhat tediously in near-agate type.) Somewhere the ex-Consul Geoffrey Firmin gets mention. Mythic drinking and death in Mexico, vaguely “Jungian.”...
From Norma Jean Thompson: "... the Town House Restaurant on Central and Morningside [in Albuquerque]: 'It's like going backwards in time to the late 1950s; you'd think you'd meet Frank Sinatra in there. You can drown in the big red leather booths, and if you're lucky, they'll take out their private family stock of brandy. Wonderful Greek salads, steaks and potatoes for lunch or dinner. Time stops in there, right off Route 66.' " From wcities.com: On the Town House Lounge & Restaurant in Albuquerque: "Try the three-inch Baklava and feel like you have died and gone to heaven..." AMEN. See, too, the film "Stone Reader" Posted 12/14/2003 at 3:43 PM |
Riddle From Robert Stone's Damascus Gate: "God... that Great (See the Web site "Stone, not Wood.") Christianity may be a religion of lies, but it sometimes has a certain charm. If in fact there is a heaven, part of it must strongly resemble Paris in the 1890's, as suggested by the picture below. From today's New York Times: "The Very Rev. Sturgis Lee Riddle, dean emeritus of the American Episcopal Cathedral in Paris, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was 94. His death was reported on the cathedral's Web site." From the cathedral's Web site,
"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you." "There is never any ending to Paris...." See, too, my Paris-related entry for December 9, the date of Riddle's death, and recall that in Wild Palms, "the much sought-after Go chip [is] the missing link in the Senator's bid to be immortal, 'like Jesus.' " Scene from Wild Palms Posted 12/14/2003 at 2:01 AM |
We Are the Key: For James and Lucia Joyce In the Orbit of Genius -- "Once, when her mother asked if Joyce should visit her in the sanatorium, Lucia said, 'Tell him I am a crossword puzzle, and if he does not mind seeing a crossword puzzle, he is to come out.' " Compare and contrast From Roger Zelazny's Eye of Cat: "A massive, jaguarlike form with a single, gleaming eye landed on the vehicle's hood forward and to the front. It was visible for but an instant, and then it sprang away. The car tipped, its air cushion awry, and it was already turning onto its side before he left the trail. He fought with the wheel and the attitude control, already knowing that it was too late. There came a strong shock accompanied by a crunching noise, and he felt himself thrown forward. necess yet again from bridge of brainbow oyotecraven stare decesis on landaway necessity timeslast the arnings ent and tided turn yet beastfall nor mindstorms neither in their canceling sarved cut the line that binds ecessity towarn and findaway twill open pandorapack wishdearth amen amenusensis opend the mand of min apend the pain of durthwursht vernichtung desiree tolight and eadly dth cessity sesame We are the key." Posted 12/13/2003 at 2:02 PM |
For Sinatra's Birthday Sinatra made as good use as anyone in the past century of the 12-note tempered scale, so the above seems a reasonably apt tribute on this, his 12/12 birthday. Posted 12/12/2003 at 4:07 PM |
Rough Beast The title is a reference to the horse in yesterday's entry of 6:13 PM. The time of that entry, 6:13, is a deliberate reference* to the date of a June 13, 2003, entry, for the birthday of W. B. Yeats. That entry contains the following -- Behold a Pale Horse: which leads to... "It was not a mere soldier's courage, like gripping a weapon and charging the foe: it was like charging Death itself on his pale horse. Even at his best, his island parrot, the better loved of the two, spoke no word he was not taught to speak by his master. How then has it come about that this man of his, who is a kind of parrot and not much loved, writes as well as or better than his master? For he wields an able pen, this man of his, no doubt of that. Like charging Death himself on his pale horse. His own skill, learned in the counting house, was in making tallies and accounts, not in turning phrases. Death himself on his pale horse: those are words he would not think of. Only when he yields himself up to this man of his do such words come." -- J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize Lecture Posted 12/11/2003 at 1:15 PM |
Putting Descartes Before Dehors "Descartes déclare que c'est en moi, non hors de moi, en moi, non dans le monde, que je pourrais voir si quelque chose existe hors de moi." For further details, see ART WARS. Posted 12/10/2003 at 6:13 PM |
Tru Story From the Internet Broadway Database entry on the play Tru, starring Robert Morse: "Setting: Truman Capote's For Lewis Allen, producer of Tru, who died on Monday, the Buddhist holy day Rohatsu... Robert Morse again performs "In My Room" (see previous entry), but this time the space he describes is the complex plane. Capote collected paperweights; the complex plane is an apt setting for what might be called "paperweights of eternity" -- i.e., Riemann spheres. Click on the spheres for a larger version, the work of Anders Sandberg. Posted 12/10/2003 at 1:44 PM |
Street of the Fathers From Bruce Wagner's Wild Palms -- Robert Morse sings in Kyoto Coordinates for a 4x4 space:
From Today's birthdays: Kirk Douglas Posted 12/9/2003 at 11:11 AM |
Dream of Youth Today is the feast day of In his honor, here are two links: The Jugendtraum and Posted 12/8/2003 at 11:11 PM |
Dead Poets Society On Friday, December 5, 2003, I picked up a copy of An Introduction to Poetry, by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, 8th ed., at a used book sale for 50 cents. The previous entry concerns a poem by Buson I found in that book, and contains a link on Kennedy's name to a work suitable for this holiday season. As additional thanks for the poem, here are links to a two-part interview with Gioia: "A poem need not shout to be heard." Posted 12/8/2003 at 1:11 AM |
Happy Rohatsu "The Buddha was enlightened on the eighth of December when he looked up at the morning star, the planet we call Venus." -- Shodo Harada Roshi, Dharma Talk
Commentary on poetry of Buson:
For more on Zen, see the For more on a Temple Bell, see the For more on Venus, see the For more on the morning star, see the Posted 12/8/2003 at 12:00 AM |
The Last Samurai "The 'Samurai Grandmother' Singer was the author of For some background on " 'I might look like a little old grandma, but I'm no pushover,' she told a reporter last year, just before tossing back another shot of Bushmills Irish whiskey, her libation of choice." "Occasionally threatened, Singer refused to back down. In a 2002 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, she told how, at 80, she had frightened off someone who'd been leaving menacing notes in her mailbox."
Posted 12/7/2003 at 1:11 PM |
Annals of Education: Eyes on the Prize Dialogue from "Good Will Hunting" -- Will: He used to just put a belt, Location, Location, Location See, too, Dick Morris on triangulation. Posted 12/7/2003 at 2:45 AM |
For Joan Didion on her birthday From "On Keeping a Notebook" (1966)
From a 1994 interview with Tommy Lee Jones by Bryant Gumbel:
Joan Didion: "That's my old football number." Posted 12/5/2003 at 1:06 PM |