Blessed are the
Peacemakers Q: "What have I lived for?" -- Last words of Larry Hart,A: The Quest for the 36. From the final New York Times of 2004: "As the longtime aide-de-camp of the composer and producer Jule Styne, she assisted in the fabled 1952 rebirth of 'Pal Joey,' easing the tension between the composer, Richard Rodgers, and the book writer, John O'Hara." -- A Force Behind Posted 12/31/2004 at 4:00 AM |
The Dark Door From Log24.net, Dec. 22, 2003: "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 -- Dylan Thomas, "The day after Christmas -- Arthur C. Clarke, Dec. 27, 2004 Adapted from the logo of the Dabo claves regni caelorum. By silent shore -- "Endgame," Steven H. Cullinane, Posted 12/29/2004 at 12:00 PM |
8:00:00 For related iconology, see Star Wars and Posted 12/25/2004 at 8:00 AM |
Geometry Update Added a new section, Posted 12/22/2004 at 7:59 AM |
The Longest Night This year's longest night (either Dec. 20-21 or Dec. 21-22, I don't know which) is over. (See Frost's famous poem describing that night.) No notable news to report, although it seems a good sign that many churches held a "Longest Night" ("Blue Christmas") service around this time. Elvis would be pleased. Posted 12/22/2004 at 7:20 AM |
Sunday Sermon
on Saturday's Numbers Today's New York Times on a rabbi who died in Jerusalem on Sunday, Dec. 5: "In the 1950's, he was a vocal advocate for the relaxation of New York City's blue laws, which forbade many kinds of commerce on Sundays but not on Saturdays. The laws were repealed in the 1970's. Solomon Joseph Sharfman was born on Nov. 1, 1915, in Treblinka, Poland; his family immigrated to the United States five years later. His father, Rabbi Label Sharfman, worked as a shochet, or ritual slaughterer...." Saturday's lottery numbers from Pennsylvania, the State of Grace: Saturday Midday: 144 Saturday Evening: 360 A Sunday Sermon: "Once upon a time there was a sensible straight line who was hopelessly
in love with a beautiful dot. But the dot, though perfect in every way,
only had eyes for a wild and unkempt squiggle. All of the line's
romantic dreams were in vain, until he discovered . . . angles! Now,
with newfound self-expression, he can be anything he wants to be--a
square...."
Related material: (See Song in Red and Gray and The Dot and the Line.) Posted 12/19/2004 at 2:56 PM |
Christmas Dance at Taos
One grows used to the weather, The landscape and that; And the sublime comes down To the spirit itself, The spirit and space, The empty spirit In vacant space. -- Wallace Stevens, "The American Sublime" The Times Online on the artist Agnes Martin, who died Dec. 16 in Taos, New Mexico: "At a glance, or from a distance, her work looks like nothing at all. Square canvases are so palely touched with colour they might almost be blank. Considered slowly and carefully and close-up, however, the whole surface comes alive." "The restraint and formal regularity of Martin’s work has led her often to be grouped with the Minimalists. She shares something of their self-effacing rigour and their concern with the material qualities of art, but she herself preferred to be seen in the context of the Abstract Expressionist painters who were her own contemporaries and early artistic models. Like them she may have seen abstract art as the means to a distinctively American sublime...." "Taos had been a magnet for artists since the last years of the 19th century. D. H. Lawrence famously spent time there in the 1920s. 'Never shall I forget the Christmas dances at Taos,' he wrote, 'twilight, snow, the darkness coming over the great wintry mountains and the lonely pueblo.'" Posted 12/17/2004 at 9:00 PM |
From today's New York Times: Agnes Martin, Abstract Painter, Dies at 92 Background: entry of 7 PM Wednesday. Posted 12/17/2004 at 12:05 PM |
Nothing Nothings Background: recent Log24 entries (beginning with Chorus from the Rock on Dec. 5, 2004) and Is Nothing Sacred? (quotations compiled on March 9, 2000). From an obituary of Paul Edwards, a writer on philosophy, in this morning's New York Times: "Heidegger's Confusions, a collection of Professor Edwards's scholarly articles, was published last month by Prometheus."Edwards, born in Vienna in 1923 to Jewish parents, died on December 9. Some sites I visited earlier this evening, before reading of Edwards's death:
Posted 12/16/2004 at 3:00 AM |
Judeo-Christian Heritage: The meditation below was suggested by this passage: "... the belief that any sensible discourse had to be formulated within the rules of the scientific language, avoiding the non sense of the ordinary language. This belief, initially expressed by Wittgenstein as aphorisms, was later formalized by the Wiener Kreis [Vienna Circle] as a 'logical construction of the world'...." "Deeply Vulgar" -- Epithet applied in 2003 to "Examples are the stained-glass
Those seeking relief from "Mercilessly tasteful" Posted 12/15/2004 at 7:00 PM |
Three in One "The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them." -- "The Relations between Poetry and Painting," Posted 12/13/2004 at 1:00 AM |
Ideas, Stories, Values:
Interview with Joseph Epstein:
Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, Sept. 12, 2004: "You are entering a remarkable community, the Harvard community. It is a community built on the idea of searching for truth... on the idea of respect for others.... "... Hegel discusses 'culture' as the 'world of self-alienated spirit.' The idea seems to be that humans in society not only interact, but that they collectively create relatively enduring cultural products (stories, dramas, and so forth) within which they can recognise their own patterns of life reflected." The "phantasmagoria" of Didion seems related to the "phenomenology" of Hegel... From Michael N. Forster, Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit: "This whole system is conceived, on one level at least, as a defense or rational reworking of the Christian conception of God. In particular, its three parts are an attempt to make sense of the Christian idea of a God who is three in one -- the Logic depicting God as he is in himself, the Philosophy of Nature God the Son, and the Philosophy of Spirit God the Holy Spirit." and, indeed, to the phenomenology of narrative itself.... From Patrick Vert, "There are plenty of anecdotes to highlight the personal, phenomenological experience of railway passage... For such a narrative, see November 5, 2002, 2:56 AM, Posted 12/12/2004 at 7:59 PM |
So Set 'Em Up, Joe For Sinatra's birthday: Posted 12/12/2004 at 2:45 AM |
Review "Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday...." -- Bernard Holland in the New York Times of Monday, May 20, 1996 Log24.net on Monday:
New York Times on Friday: Posted 12/10/2004 at 2:14 PM |
Gray Particular in Hartford From Wallace Stevens, "The Rock, Part III: Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn" -- The rock is the gray particular of man's life, The stone from which he rises, up--and--ho, The step to the bleaker depths of his descents... From this morning's New York Times obituaries-- leve Gray, a painter admired for his large-scale, vividly colorful and lyrically gestural abstract compositions, died on Wednesday in Hartford. He was 86. The cause was a massive subdural hematoma
suffered after he fell on ice and hit his head on Tuesday outside his
home in Warren, Conn., said his wife, the writer Francine du Plessix
Gray. ******************************* ... in 1999 [he] received the
Wallace Stevens Award, which carries a $100,000 prize, from the Academy
of American Poets. A Wallace Stevens Award, I. From a page linked to in
II. "As if nothingness III. "Massive subdural hematoma" IV. mé·tier n. V. "ho" -- Wallace Stevens, "The Rock" VI. Francine du Plessix Gray... From the Archives of the New York Review of Books: VII. From an entry of April 29, 2004: -- Wallace Stevens as quoted by Michael Bryson (p. 227, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1990) Posted 12/10/2004 at 3:00 AM |
Posted 12/9/2004 at 4:44 PM |
Rock On "Flowers and a bottle of Rogue 'Dead Guy Ale' sit on a rock outside of the Alrosa Villa nightclub in Columbus, Ohio, December 9, 2004. A man charged on stage and opened fire at a heavy metal band and fans at the crowded bar, killing four people and wounding two others before being killed by police, officials said on Thursday. Photo by Matt Sullivan/Reuters" -- Reuters, story of 2:04 PM ET today Posted 12/9/2004 at 4:44 PM |
String Theory: The Devil Came Up to Cambridge From a Log24 entry of Friday, December 3, 2004: "Anything
but the void. And so we keep hoping to luck into a winning combination,
to tap into a subtle harmony, trying like lock pickers to negotiate a
compromise with the 'mystery tramp,' as Bob Dylan put it...." From this morning's New York Times:
In memory of Mr. Blizard:
Posted 12/9/2004 at 4:44 AM |
24 Years Later: In memory of John Lennon and Diamond Darrell Abbott This time slot was reserved at noon on Wednesday, Dec. 8, but this entry was made at about 4:35 PM on Thursday, Dec. 9. "A dead shepherd brought Posted 12/8/2004 at 12:00 PM |
White Christmas Starring W. V. Quine as "Birthday, death-day --
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live.... Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling." -- Joan Didion, The White Album
Posted 12/7/2004 at 1:00 PM |
Posted 12/7/2004 at 10:00 AM |
Zen and the Trinity (See entries of December 6, 2002.) Zen: The time is now 3:00:00 PM. The Trinity: "Three illustrations will suffice." Posted 12/6/2004 at 3:00 PM |
Chorus from The Rock Author Joan Didion is 70 today. On Didion's late husband, John Gregory Dunne: "His 1989 memoir Harp includes Dunne's early years in Hartford and his Irish-Catholic family's resentment of WASP social superiority: 'Don't stand out so that the Yanks can see you,' he wrote, 'don't let your pretensions become a focus of Yank merriment and mockery.'" -- The Hartford Courant, August 4, 2002 From a Hartford Protestant: The American Sublime A search of the Internet for "Wallace Stevens" + "The Rock" +
"Seventy Years Later" yields only one quotation...
A theorem proposed
From Didion's Play It As It Lays: Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes. I watch a hummingbird, throw the I Ching but never read the coins, keep my mind in the now.From Play It As It Lays: I lie here in the sunlight, watch the hummingbird. This morning I threw the coins in the swimming pool, and they gleamed and turned in the water in such a way that I was almost moved to read them. I refrained.
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself, The spirit and space, The empty spirit In vacant space. Posted 12/5/2004 at 3:00 PM |
From Midnight, Dec. 28, 2002:
Related material:
From a synopsis of Cinderella:
"Cinderella is in the Palace garden and is found by the Prince, who is
dejected at the lack of success in the quest and throws the slipper
away. Happily the Godmother (hidden in the bushes) catches it and
replaces it on the bench next to the Prince, just as he remembers he
should try it on Cinderella. Posted 12/4/2004 at 3:00 PM |
X At midnight: A letter for "Once upon a time Posted 12/4/2004 at 12:00 AM |
Crimson "... from the Age that is past, Published by The Harvard Crimson
From an entry of October 29, 2004:
From The New York Times today: Posted 12/3/2004 at 2:56 PM |
Triple Play (See entry of All Hallows' Eve, 2004.) On December 3... In 1953, the musical "Kismet" opened on Broadway. In 1960, the musical "Camelot" opened on Broadway. -- AP, Today in History Posted 12/3/2004 at 1:09 PM |
Flores, Flores Para los Muertos (See entry of Nov. 22 with this title.) In San Juan Ixtayopan, Mexico, Wednesday, a procession from a church to the site where two federal policemen were lynched on Tuesday, Nov. 23.
-- Cuartoscuro.com Posted 12/3/2004 at 2:01 AM |
The Poem of Pure Reality
"We seek -- Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) I have added new material to Geometry of the 4x4 Square, including links to a new commentary on a paper by Burkard Polster.
"It is a good light, then,
for those
-- Wallace Stevens,
Posted 12/2/2004 at 8:23 PM |