Wag the Dogma
(continued from 2001) Ingrid Thulin and
Glenn Ford in "The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse": A sneering review from TIME Magazine, March 23, 1962:
TIME Magazine is still wearing the Ivy League sneer it displayed so impressively in 1962. A less dismissive summary from Answers.com:
In memory of Glenn Ford, a talented character actor who died at 90 yesterday, the opening paragraphs of an obituary in The Scotsman:
The business of narrative: From a narrative suggested by the name of The Scotsman's reporter and related, if only by association with Normandy, to Ford's "Four Horsemen" film:
The Vandaleur narrative may be of interest to fans of The Da Vinci Code. (Ford is said to have been a Freemason, a charter member of Riviera Lodge No. 780, Pacific Palisades, California.) For Catholics and others who prefer more traditional narratives: Illuminated parchment, Related material: Yesterday's entries, and Posted 8/31/2006 at 11:09 PM |
Party Phone
for Van Morrison A few words for M.C.C.:
From March 24, 2006:
"It's not the twilight zone no, -- Van Morrison, "Twilight Zone," Posted 8/31/2006 at 12:25 PM |
Seven "Research & Ideas" memo from Harvard Business School dated April 17, 2006: "The word experience comes from the Latin words ex pericolo, which mean 'from danger.'" -- Etymology by Professor Joseph Badaracco of Harvard University. Badaracco gives no evidence for his dubious claim. Related (if only temporally):
-- Online Etymology Dictionary The title of this entry refers to the time it was posted. Related references to seven: April 7, 2003, and today's previous entry. See also an entry from 2/29, 2004
Harvard persons from parts of the university that are more scholarly than the Business School may sneer at the above-quoted Online Etymology Dictionary. They can consult the following:
The above is taken from an anonymous weblog entry. The author of the entry identified the source as From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. The author of the entry falsely stated that the author of this book was J. L. Austin. In fact, the book was written by Victor Turner, apparently the same philosophical sociologist whom we encountered in the previous entry and in the Log24 entry for the recent feast of St. Max Black. Turner may have been quoting Austin; pages from the book are not available online. Another author, however, says the quotation is by Turner himself. See Rena Fraden's Imagining Medea, pp. 218-219. Today's previous entry is a sort of "ritual passage" for a Nobel Prize winner. For a ritual passage more directly related to Professor Badaracco, see the Brookline TAB obituary of his 23-year-old daughter, who died on Monday, August 21, 2006. According to today's online Harvard Crimson, "she was walking along Hammond Street in Newton [Mass.] when an 84-year-old driver jumped the curb and struck her." From her Brookline TAB obituary of Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006:
Posted 8/30/2006 at 7:00 PM |
The Seventh Symbol:
A Multicultural Farewell to a winner of the
"Doctor Jackson has identified Other versions of "... Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and others have pointed out how 'perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra, and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have been any algebra' ...." Posted 8/30/2006 at 10:07 AM |
The Hand of Grace "Only the hand of grace "Have you tried 22 tonight?" -- Rick in Casablanca Today's lottery in Pennsylvania Mid-day 229, evening 119. Related material: 2/29, 1/19. -- "To what serves Mortal Beauty?," "Cash it in, and don't come back." Posted 8/29/2006 at 7:21 PM |
Today's
Hollywood Birthday William Friedkin, Related material: Yesterday's entry on St. Augustine See also today's entry at noon. Posted 8/29/2006 at 3:09 PM |
Under God
Today's Washington birthday: Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona).
Posted 8/29/2006 at 12:00 PM |
Today's Sinner:
Augustine of Hippo, who is said to "He is, after all, not merely taking over a Neoplatonic ontology, but he is attempting to combine it with a scriptural tradition of a rather different sort, one wherein the divine attributes most prized in the Greek tradition (e.g. necessity, immutability, and atemporal eternity) must somehow be combined with the personal attributes (e.g. will, justice, and historical purpose) of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." -- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Augustine Here is a rather different attempt
Related material: Hitler's Still Point and Posted 8/28/2006 at 1:00 AM |
"... Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and others have pointed out how 'perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra, and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have been any algebra' ...." -- Max Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell U. Press, 1962, page 242, as quoted in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, by Victor Witter Turner, Cornell U. Press, paperback, 1975, page 25 Posted 8/27/2006 at 4:00 PM |
"Alcatraz, Spanish for pelican, was named Isla de los Alcatraces after the birds that were the island's only inhabitants." --Bay City Guide Related material Thomas Kuhn's "Pelican Brief":
...the movement of -- Wallace Stevens: Posted 8/26/2006 at 8:00 PM |
Today's birthday: Sean Connery "Poetry is an illumination of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock." -- Wallace Stevens, introduction to The Necessary Angel, 1951 Welcome. First edition, 1936 Posted 8/25/2006 at 9:29 AM |
A classic of mathematical history in this week's New Yorker begins, "On the evening of June 20th, several hundred physicists, including a Nobel laureate, assembled in an auditorium at the Friendship Hotel in Beijing for a lecture by the Chinese mathematician Shing-Tung Yau." The story, by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber, is now online. Related material Log24 on June 20th Beijing String begins, Posted 8/24/2006 at 4:00 AM |
"'Once upon a time' used to be a gateway to a land that was inviting precisely because it was timeless, like the stories it introduced and their ageless lessons about the human condition." -- Dorothea Israel Wolfson, Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2006 "It's quarter to three..." --Sinatra Posted 8/23/2006 at 2:45 AM |
Introductions An Introduction to Hamilton and Perelman's Work on the Conjectures of Poincare and Thurston (pdf, 155 pages). For a less detailed introduction, see an ICM 2006 press release (pdf, 3 pages) on Fields Medal winner Grigory Perelman. Related material: The previous entry, "Beginnings," and an introduction to the second-simplest two-dimensional geometry (Balanchine's Birthday, 2003). "How much story do you want?" Posted 8/22/2006 at 9:00 AM |
Beginnings "Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making." -- Clive Barker, Weaveworld "No mathematical subject lies closer to intuition than the geometry of two and three dimensions." -- Robert E. Greene, beginning an April 1998 review of Three-Dimensional Geometry and Topology, by William P. Thurston Thurston's book provides some background for today's opening lecture by Richard Hamilton, "The Poincare Conjecture," at the beginning of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid. Hamilton is likely to discuss the Poincare conjecture in the wider context of Perelman's recent work on Thurston's geometrization conjecture. In "The Eight Model Geometries," section 3.8 of his book, Thurston provides yet another beginning-- "What is a geometry?" Posted 8/22/2006 at 12:00 AM |
(Geometrization and Perelman) Posted 8/21/2006 at 9:00 AM |
Metaphysical Wonderlands "With no means to verify its truth, superstring theory, in the words of Burton Richter, director emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, may turn out to be 'a kind of metaphysical wonderland.' Yet it is being pursued as vigorously as ever, its critics complain, treated as the only game in town." -- "The Inelegant Universe," by George Johnson, in the Sept. 2006 Scientific American Some may prefer metaphysics of a different sort: "To enter Cervantes’s world, we cross a threshold that is Shakespearean and quixotic into a metaphysical wonderland where time expands to become space and vast vaulted distances bend back on themselves, where the threads of fiction and the strands of history shuttle back and forth in the great loom of the artist’s imagination." As wonderlands go, I personally prefer Clive Barker's Weaveworld. Posted 8/19/2006 at 4:28 PM |
For Jill St. John On Her Birthday: Cleavage Term Revisited "... a point of common understanding between the classic and romantic worlds. Quality, the cleavage term between hip and square, seemed to be it." "During his distinguished 17-year tenure as director of the theatre
program at Fordham University, Sacharow was recalled by faculty
colleagues as 'exceedingly collegial, understanding, sympathetic and
very, very funny.'"
-- Obituary of Lawrence J. Sacharow at Fordham University, a Jesuit institution "Here was finality indeed, -- Under the Volcano Posted 8/19/2006 at 1:14 PM |
Special Topics From a review by Liesl Schillinger in the Aug. 13 New York Times of a new novel by Marisha Pessl: Examination on "What is the meaning of the idea expressed by Yu Tsun that 'everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now.
Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen'? What
is the significance of the emphasis on the present moment, the here and
now? Is this related to the carpe diem ('seize the day')
idea? How? How is the present effectively connected to the past and the
future? How is the present associated simultaneously to choices,
actions, and consequences? How is the present moment relevant to the
idea of the 'forking paths'? What is the symbolic meaning of forking
paths when understood as a crossroads? What is a person confronted with
when standing at a crossroads? What are the implications of a choice of
road? May this be connected to the myth of Oedipus and its concerns
with human choices and supposed predestination? What is suggested by
the idea that 'in all fictional works, each time a man is confronted
with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in
the fiction of Ts'ui Pen, he chooses-- simultaneously-- all of them. He
creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves
also proliferate and fork'? What does it mean to make all choices at
once? What view of life do such beliefs embody?" Related material on physics:
Multiverse Peter Woit on the physics story in this week's TIME Physics and Narrative Related material on mathematics: Mathematics and Narrative Posted 8/17/2006 at 2:20 PM |
Under God continued from Friday Above left: Lieutenant Dan from "Forrest Gump" Above right: This week's TIME asks, "Who needs Harvard?" Well, maybe Lieutenant Dan. Perhaps he should heed the words of of Harvard student April H. N. Yee in Friday's Crimson: "Shrimping is a notoriously dangerous job." Related material: the previous entry. Posted 8/14/2006 at 5:30 PM |
Square and hip may each have a place in heaven; for a less pleasant destination, see the previous entry. __________________________________ * Update of 3 PM 8/14/06: See Forrest Gump on God in an Aug. 11 entry and the related paper
Posted 8/14/2006 at 3:17 AM |
Posted 8/13/2006 at 7:20 PM |
Happy Six (continued from New Year's Day, 2006) See David P. Roberts (1998) on Twin Sextic Algebras for a discussion of sextic twinning as an analogue of duality in vector spaces: Related material: R.T. Curtis, 2001: "A Fresh Approach to the Exceptional Automorphism and Covers of the Symmetric Groups" in The Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering. Posted 8/13/2006 at 6:00 PM |
Under God Adapted from August 7:
"Saomai, the Vietnamese name -- AP online tonight
Wind and thunder: For further details,
Posted 8/11/2006 at 11:07 PM |
Catechism Q - No more Mr. Nice Guy? A - Seven is heaven. Posted 8/11/2006 at 7:00 PM |
Posted 8/11/2006 at 2:16 PM |
Night Listener (See previous entry.) Thanks to Natalie at KHYI, 95.3 FM, Plano, Texas (hard country music), for just now playing A Fine Line, by Radney Foster: There's a curve in the highway, just south of town where a man has pulled over to figure life out with only his concience and the lonesome sound of diesels winding up grade he's got a wife and two kids, and they love him so he's got a woman down in georgia, and she's startin' to show he's damned if he leaves her, and he's sure damned if he don't and he wonders how life got this way cuase it's a fine line in between right and wrong yea he's been crossing over that border way too long he should've seen it coming at him right from the start now there aint' no escape from a broken heart now the call of the highway is a powerful thing like the pull of a lover, or a child in a swing gave his heart to two women only one wears his ring they're both gonna have his babies now so how do you confess, what words don't explain he never intended to cause this much pain now he feels like a farmer who went praying for the rain got more than he bargained from the clouds [chorus] he'll turn his car around tonight, go home and try to face the truth everyone involved's getting hurt, now there aint nothing he can do [chorus] Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase. Thus the superior man: If he sees good, he imitates it; If he has faults, he rids himself of them. -- Hexagram 42 (10:00:42 PM ET) Update of 11:08 PM ET... and, Natalie, for playing "Late Night Grande Hotel" just now, thanks big time. Posted 8/9/2006 at 10:00 PM |
Timeagain: 3:57 Revisited Question (NBC Nightly News this evening) Who is minding the Internet liquor store? Answer The Green Fairy: Kylie Minogue in "Moulin Rouge" Online news today at 3:57 PM: Robin Williams in Rehab Williams's most recent film is "The Night Listener." Related material -- For Your Listening Pleasure (Log24, 9/2/05 at 3:57 PM), and today's previous entry: "Time disappears with Tequila. It goes elastic, then vanishes." -- Kylie Minogue Posted 8/9/2006 at 7:20 PM |
Two-Bar Hook
Wikipedia on Mel Gibson: "The arrest was supported by... an open container... 75% full, labeled 'Cazador [sic] tequila' (a strong type of mezcal)." Today's New York Times: Refined Tequilas, Meant to be Savored: Photo by Lars Klove for The New York Times -- Essay by Eric Asimov, "Spirits of the Times" "Remember that we deal with Herb Alpert-- First album, 1962 cunning, baffling, and powerful." (Adapted from Chapter 5 of Alcoholics Anonymous) Related Material: "Tequila," by The Champs (1958) The Spirituality of Addiction and Recovery Kylie on Tequila: "Turns out she's a party girl who loves Tequila: 'Time disappears with Tequila. It goes elastic, then vanishes.'" Yvonne returns to the Bella Vista in Under the Volcano: "... a glass partition that divided the room (from yet another bar, she remembered now, giving on a side street)" David Sanborn (a reply to Alpert's Lonely Bull ): "Just listen to how he attacks the two-bar hook of 'Tequila.' After
planting it firmly in our brains, he finds new ending notes for each
measure; then he drops half a bar by an octave; then he substitutes a
new melodic detour for the first bar, retaining the second; then he
inverts that approach. He keeps twisting the phrase into new melodic
shapes, but he never obscures the original motif and he never loses the
beat." -- Review of Sanborn's album "Timeagain" by Geoffrey Himes in Jazz Times, June 2003 Update of 3:57 PM:
Robin Williams in Rehab "It may be that Kylie is, in her own way, an artist... with a 357." -- Symmetry and Change Posted 8/9/2006 at 2:02 PM |
The Crimson Passion From The Harvard Crimson today: Ned Lamont '76 faces voters "Lamont was a fourth generation legacy student whose great-grandfather-- Thomas W. Lamont, class of 1892-- was a partner at J.P. Morgan and the donor who gave Lamont Library its name." There was an article on "What are you looking at, sugar tits?" (Courtesy of Mel Gibson, Posted 8/8/2006 at 8:00 PM |
Clown "I need a photo-opportunity, I want a shot at redemption. Don't want to end up a cartoon In a cartoon graveyard."
Mel Gibson in Preferring text to gloss, he humbly served Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event, A clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown. -- The Comedian as the Letter C Related material: Mental Health Month, Day 27 Posted 8/8/2006 at 12:00 AM |
ART WARS continued Adapted from Rick McKee, Click on picture for details. "David Stuart, a University of Texas master of Maya writing, stopped by and tried to be helpful.... 'There's a playfulness to the script,' Dr. Stuart said.
'It was not a writing system that was necessarily there to be as clear
as it could be. It was communicating language, but it was doing it as
art.'" -- My Maya Crash Course "... apocalypto means to open up Posted 8/7/2006 at 12:00 PM |
Click on picture for details.
Score: "His music had of course come from Russian folk sources
and from Rimsky-Korsakov and from other predecessors, in the way that
all radical art has roots. But to be a true modernist, a cosmopolitan
in the twentieth century, it was necessary to seem to disdain
nationalism, to be perpetually, heroically novel-- the more aloof, the
better. 'Cold and transparent, like an "extra dry" champagne, which
gives no sensation of sweetness, and does not enervate, like other
varieties of that drink, but burns,' Stravinsky said about his own
Octet, Piano Concerto, and Piano Sonata. The description might be
applied to works by Picasso or Duchamp." -- Michael Kimmelman in Perhaps. "... like an 'extra dry' champagne, For more on the Posted 8/6/2006 at 7:00 PM |
Zen and the Art of Definition "Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer over the fence that ended the ballgame." --Robert M. Pirsig "How should we define goodness?" -- Title of an article (pdf) available online from Harvard. This article (Journal of Theoretical Biology 231 (2004) 107–120), examines goodness in the light of evolutionary dynamics as it involves altruism and social reputation, and concludes that goodness as an evolved social trait has two characteristics: those with good reputations are helped, those with bad reputations are not helped. This is expressed as follows. (English is apparently not the native language of the authors, from Kyushu University in Japan.) "One [feature of goodness] is that a player interacting with good persons are assessed by what he does. Cooperation with good individuals should be good and defection against good ones should be bad. The second feature should we consider with much emphasis: a good player who refused to help a bad person must be labeled good. This enables players facing cheaters to refuse help without worrying about the influence of the action on their own good reputation." In other words, "... a person in good standing falls into bad if and only if he fails to cooperate with an opponent in good standing. Even if he refuses to help an individual in bad standing, he does not lose his good standing. This is because the refusal is interpreted as punishment against a selfish individual (for studies on punishment, see Brandt and Sigmund (2003), Fehr and Gachter (2000), Fehr and Rockenbach (2003), and Henrich and Boyd (2001))." See also Harry Truman and Hiroshima, on this date in 1945. Related material: Posted 8/6/2006 at 2:14 PM |
John Huston was born 100 years ago on this date. Huston directed the film versions of The Night of the Iguana and Under the Volcano. "Borges' seminal short story El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) is an early example of many worlds in fiction." "Il faut cultiver notre jardin." -- Voltaire Posted 8/5/2006 at 2:00 PM |
ART WARS
continued "Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge." -- Vladimir Nabokov Today's New York Times: Jason Rhoades, 41, Maker of Transgressive Installations, Is Dead For some background on Rhoades's Manhattan gallerist, David Zwirner,
and his
UCLA art school teacher, Paul McCarthy, see
yesterday morning's The Frankfurter School. "UCLA is frequently described
as the power art school."
The New York Times Magazine
For more remarks related
to UCLA, art, and food,
see the Log24 entry for
Posted 8/5/2006 at 2:20 AM |
Quad by Samuel Beckett: Click on the figure for details. "I am always about in the Quad" --God (Rhyme attributed to Monsignor Ronald Arbuthnott Knox) Related material: the previous entry, an article subtitled "Beckett's Private Purgatories" in this week's New Yorker, Quine in Purgatory, and Logos and Logic. Posted 8/4/2006 at 9:00 PM |
The Double Cross The following symbol has been associated with the date December 1: Click on the symbol for details. That date is connected to today's date since Dec. 1 is the feast-- i.e., the deathday-- of a saint of mathematics: G. H. Hardy, author of the classic A Mathematician's Apology (online, pdf, 52 pp. ), while today is the birthday of three less saintly mathematical figures: Sir William Rowan Hamilton, For these birthdays, here is a more cheerful version of the above symbol: For the significance of this version, see Chinese Jar Revisited (Log24, June 27, 2006), a memorial to mathematician Irving Kaplansky (student of Mac Lane). This version may be regarded as a box containing the cross of St. Andrew. If we add a Greek cross (equal-armed) to the box, we obtain the "spider," or "double cross," figure of my favorite mythology: Fritz Leiber's Changewar. Posted 8/4/2006 at 2:00 PM |
The Presbyterian Exorcist In memory of Charles W. Dunn, Harvard Professor of Celtic Languages and Literatures Emeritus, who died July 24, 2006, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston at the age of 90. Dunn was master of Quincy House from 1966 to 1981. "'He brought a taste of Scotland to the House, initiating an annual rite of exorcism in September to cleanse the place of evil spirits, during which a Scots bagpiper led a march of residents around the courtyard and Charles intoned an incantation while waving a large baton, banishing ghosts and other harbingers of ill will. His leadership was at its best during magnificent evenings in the Master's lodging when he taught guests Scottish country dances. Students were fond of him, and he of them.' Born in Arbuthnott, Scotland, the son of a Presbyterian minister, Dunn began his schooling in Aberdeen and Edinburgh...." -- Harvard University Gazette online, Aug. 2, 2006 Related material: In Memory of Wallace Stevens, Posted 8/4/2006 at 4:01 AM |
ART WARS In memory of "Who is the fairest of them all?"
This question might Meyer Schapiro Professor
of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University (Ph.D., Harvard U., 1969). "The grid is a staircase to the Universal.... There is no painter in the West -- Rosalind Krauss in "Grids" "Nine is a very powerful Nordic number." Related material: Posted 8/4/2006 at 2:56 AM |
ART WARS The Frankfurter School From today's New York Times: A review of a current Manhattan art exhibition-- "It begins with a juxtaposition of early body-oriented videos by Mr. Nauman and Paul McCarthy, who, quickly following Mr. Nauman's lead, was in his studio in Los Angeles videotaping home-alone performance pieces by 1970. The contrast is pure Apollo-versus-Dionysus." More on Paul McCarthy from artandculture.com: "If you walk into a room and find everything you held dear in childhood degraded, chances are it's a Paul McCarthy installation. McCarthy is known for shocking, sexually charged pieces that feature benign cartoon and pop-culture characters -- Olive Oyl and Santa Claus, among others -- in a bacchanalia of blood and feces. The 1974 video 'Hot Dog' shoots to the heart of the adolescent 'gross-out' as McCarthy tapes his penis into a hot dog bun, then packs his pie hole full of franks and wraps himself in gauze. Another piece from the 70s called 'Sailor's Meat' finds the artist dressed as a blonde hooker smeared with blood and 'knowing' a pile of raw meat.... Critics often compare his work with that of the Viennese Actionists
whose performances were also characterized by gore, raw sexuality, and
abused food."
Related material: For an approach to art Posted 8/4/2006 at 2:12 AM |
Let Noon Be Fair Comment at Peter Woit's weblog today: "Would this be a good time to bring up the social habits of ancient Greek mathematicial philosophers?" Answer to this rhetorical question:
Related material:
Posted 8/3/2006 at 12:00 PM |
In memory of Wallace Stevens, Presbyterian saint, whose feast is today The following are extracts from recent reviews of On Late Style, a book by Edward Said. John Updike on Adorno and Said: "'The Tempest,' like Beethoven's late compositions, refuses, in Adorno's phrase, to 'reconcile in a single image what is not reconciled.' Said wrote, 'What I find valuable in Adorno is this notion of tension, of highlighting and dramatizing what I call irreconcilabilities.'" Edward Rothstein on late style: "Late style, Said suggests, expresses a sense of being out of place and time: it is a rejection of what is being offered. But listen to Beethoven or Strauss or Gould: the music is more like a discovery of place. That place is different from where one started; it may not even be what was once expected or desired. But it is there, in resignation and fulfillment, that late works take their stand, where even exile meets its end." The Jew wins. Posted 8/2/2006 at 6:23 PM |
The Crimson Passion continues. The Harvard Jesus: Crimson/Nancy K. Dutton Monday, Feb. 23, 2004 "If Jesus does come back, he will likely be
wearing a tie-dyed shirt, smoking a joint, flashing the peace sign and
rocking rose-tinted glasses.... Gibson never wants people to forget that we
are ultimately responsible for his Lord's crucifixion. And by
'people' I mean 'the -- Harvard Crimson, From the Harvard Crimson on the 2006 feast of St. Ignatius Loyola:
Related illustrations from Dec. 15, 2004:
Today's birthday: Peter O'Toole. Posted 8/2/2006 at 1:06 PM |
the process of determining
correspondences between concepts."
anything can be shown to
connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced."
-- Opening sentence of "Frere Jacques, Cuernavaca, -- John O'Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938 And now I was beginning to surmise: -- Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi Posted 8/2/2006 at 2:00 AM |
Highway 1
Revisited John Constantine, "I need a photo-opportunity,
This meditation is prompted by memories of suicidal alcoholics Hunter S. Thompson and Ernest Hemingway, as well as by the title of Mel Gibson's latest project, "Apocalypto." A search on Gibson's film title leads to this quotation: "And what does apocalypse mean? It means revelation: apocalypto means to open up and to show the truth. But it also means absolute violence, so the apocalypse is a violent revelation and a revelation of violence and immediately you see the relevance of this." It is by no means clear that "apocalypse" means "violence," let alone "absolute violence," except in the Christian tradition. For apocalyptic Christian violence, see "Apocalypse and Violence:
The Evidence from the Reception History of the Book of Revelation" (pdf), by Christopher Rowland of Oxford University. As for "the relevance of this," see the definition of "generative anthropology" (GA) at anthropoetics.ucla.edu/purpose.htm:
Compare with the remarks of Jung on Transformation Symbolism in the Mass: Antecedents and parallels are found for the ritual of the Christian religious Mass in Aztec, Mithraic and pagan religious practices. "The Aztecs make a dough figure of the god Huitzilopochtli, which is then symbolically killed, divided and consumed...." Mel Gibson's interest in religion and violence is well known. His film "Apocalypto," scheduled for release on Dec. 8, 2006, deals with human sacrifice among the Maya, rather than the Aztecs or Jews. (Cf. Abraham and "Highway 61 Revisited.") It seems unlikely that Mel will learn more about these issues in his recovery program. Too bad. Posted 8/1/2006 at 2:56 PM |
x Posted 8/1/2006 at 12:00 AM |