Happy New Year from Steven Priest "... and the girl in the corner is everyone's mourner...." The Priest quotation appeared here on Grammy Night 2003 with another musical meditation: "Her wallet's filled with pictures, -- "Sweet Little Sixteen," Posted 12/31/2007 at 12:25 PM |
The Christmas Tiger Part I: The Gauntlet On Jonah Goldberg's new book Liberal Fascism-- an attack on, among others, Woodrow Wilson: "'... at some point,' Goldberg writes, 'it is necessary to throw down the gauntlet, to draw a line in the sand, to set a boundary, to cry at long last, "Enough is enough."'" The Goldberg declaration is from a review in today's New York Times titled "Heil Woodrow!" Part II: Uncle Duke Goes to Washington Today's Doonesbury: Part III: A Holiday Tradition Dialogue from the classic Capra film "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"-- SUMMERS: When the country needs men up there who know and have courage as it never did before, he's just gonna decorate a chair and get himself honored. Part IV: The Christmas evening Pennsylvania Lottery 4-digit number was 0666, the Christian "number of the beast." For the beast itself, see the Dec. 3 Log24 entry "Santa's Polar Opposite?" with its link to a discussion of a metaphorical tiger at the South Pole. A more realistic version of the beast appeared in the news on Christmas evening. The Christmas number may also be interpreted as a reference to 6/6/6, the graduation date of the Class of 2006 at Princeton University. Part V: "Heil Woodrow!" As noted above, this title from a book review in today's New York Times refers to Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States (1913-1921) and President of Princeton University (1902-1910). A suitable heraldic emblem to accompany the Goldberg Heil: The Princeton Shield For another heraldic emblem related, if only in this journal, to Princeton, see Religious Symbolism at Princeton: Goldberg might prefer, for his Heil, the following variation:
Click on the Fahne (flag) for further details. Goldberg might also enjoy An Unsuitable Santa: Santa from Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip Related material: Taking Christ to Studio 60 Posted 12/30/2007 at 1:00 PM |
x Posted 12/29/2007 at 7:21 PM |
The Gospel according to Harvard Business School: Last Temptation The New York Times today:
A Great Idea:
Related material: Plato's "Heaven of Ideas" Welcome to the Cave April 22, 2007 Posted 12/28/2007 at 7:11 AM |
Chronicles
"Fullness... Multitude."
-- The missing last words of Inman in Cold Mountain, added here on the Feast of St. Luke, 2004
II Chronicles 1:
On Quality7: In that night did God appear unto Solomon, and said unto him, Ask what I shall give thee. 8: And Solomon said unto God, Thou hast shewed great mercy unto David my father, and hast made me to reign in his stead. 9: Now, O LORD God, let thy promise unto David my father be established: for thou hast made me king over a people like the dust of the earth in multitude. 10: Give me now wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in before this people: for who can judge this thy people, that is so great? On Kirk Varnedoe "At 42-- a professor with no museum experience-- he was named curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. It was, and is, the most influential job in the fluid, insular, fiercely contentious world of modern art. Just two decades past his last Amherst game, the lineman from Savannah was sitting in the chair where the most critical decisions in his profession are made-- 'the conscientious, continuous, resolute distinction of quality from mediocrity,' according to his Olympian predecessor Alfred Barr. The Modern and its chief curator serve the American art establishment as a kind of aesthetic Supreme Court, and most of their rulings are beyond appeal." -- Hal Crowther Varnedoe, in his final
Mellon lecture at the National Gallery, quoted "Blade Runner"-- "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...." Frank Rich of The New York Times on the United States of America: "A country where entertainment is god." Rich's description may or may not be true of the United States, but it certainly seems true of The New York Times: Click on image to enlarge. Related material: Art Wars Posted 12/27/2007 at 8:22 AM |
A Wonderful Life Part I:
Language Games on December 19:
Part II: Language Game on Christmas Day Pennsylvania Lottery December 25, 2007: Part III: A Wonderful Life The Pennsylvania Lottery on Christmas at mid-day paired the number of the I Ching Hexagram 41, "Decrease," with the number 2911, which may be interpreted as a reference to I
Chronicles 29:11--
"Thine, O
LORD is the
greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the
majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine
is the kingdom, O LORD, and thou art exalted as head above all." This verse is sometimes cited as influencing the Protestant conclusion of the Lord's Prayer: "Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever" (Mt 6.13b; compare 1 Chr 29.11-13).... This traditional epilogue to the Lord's prayer protects the petition for the coming of the kingdom from being understood as an exorcism, which we derive from the Jewish prayer, the Kaddish, which belonged at the time to the synagogical liturgy. The Pennsylvania Lottery on Christmas evening paired 173 with the beastly number 0666.
The latter number suggests that perhaps being "understood
as an
exorcism" might not, in this case, be such a bad thing. What,
therefore, might
"173" have to do with exorcism? A search in the context of the
phrase "language games" yields a reference to Wittgenstein's Zettel,
section 173: From Charles L. Creegan, Wittgenstein
and Kierkegaard:
And from an earlier chapter of Creegan:
Part IV: For more on the Christmas evening "Did he who made the Lamb Posted 12/26/2007 at 12:00 PM |
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From Saturday's entry (Log24, Dec. 22, 2007) a link goes to-- The five entries of June 14, 2007. From there, the link "One Two Three Four, Who Are We For?" goes to-- Princeton: A Whirligig Tour (Log24, June 5, 2007). From there, the link "Taking Christ to Studio 60" goes to-- The five Log 24 entries prior to midnight Sept. 18, 2006. From there, the link "Log24, January 18, 2004" goes to-- A Living Church. From there, the link "click here" goes to-- In the Bleak Midwinter (Internet Movie Database)...
"... were it not that Related material: The New York Times online Ike Turner's "Devil Music," a composition and King of Infinite Space. Posted 12/24/2007 at 9:00 AM |
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x Posted 12/23/2007 at 8:48 AM |
Yesterday "Gosh, does this movie have it all or what?" -- The Washington Post, Dec. 21, 2007 "What." Related material: The five entries of 6/14. Posted 12/22/2007 at 8:00 AM |
"It has been said that the unexamined life isn't worth living. Nachman wasn't against examining his life, but then what was a life? .... ... As for 'a life,' it was what you
read about in newspaper obituaries. He didn't need one. He would return
to California and think only about mathematics." -- Leonard Michaels, "Cryptology" Posted 12/22/2007 at 7:59 AM |
My books are about Killing God -- Philip Pullman God was apparently not available this week; record producer Joel Dorn, who died on Monday, will have to do. "... when you get the feel of it, and the record actually transports you
back to that time, then it's a real explanation of what's going
on... of what went on. And here I think you can-- it's one thing to get
the music, it's another thing to get the place and the people and the
interaction. When it's really right, the audience is the fifth member
of a quartet." --Joel Dorn In the Garden of Adding live Even and Odd.... --The Midrash Jazz Quartet "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, Monday, May 20, 1996 "Daddy's like an old knight." --Allison in "Meet Joe Black" For Joe Black himself, see the previous entry. Posted 12/21/2007 at 1:00 PM |
Soft-Rock Jesus An entry in memory of... Reflections of a screenwriter: "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 in The White Album On Fogelberg's "Leader of the Band" tribute to his father: "Dan included his father's arrangement of 'The Washington Post March'.... Dan even showed up during the band's recording session to play cymbals...." "Gosh, does this movie have it all or what?" -- The Washington Post, Dec. 21, 2007 Such, Denise, is the language of love. Posted 12/21/2007 at 9:29 AM |
Soft-Rock Jesus An entry in memory of... Reflections of a screenwriter: "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 in The White Album On Fogelberg's "Leader of the Band" tribute to his father: "Dan included his father's arrangement of 'The Washington Post March'.... Dan even showed up during the band's recording session to play cymbals...." "Gosh, does this movie have it all or what?" -- The Washington Post, Dec. 21, 2007 Such, Denise, is the language of love. Posted 12/21/2007 at 9:26 AM |
From Drummers for Jesus: "Explosive, complex, full and dark. The first cymbal with VIBRATO. Nothing else comes close! Serpent Cymbals enters the special effects cymbal market with a stunning new cymbal boasting a radical new sound and design. 'This cymbal sounds like a cross between a china cymbal, crash cymbal, gong and thunder sheet with a stick of dynamite tossed in for fun'...." Posted 12/20/2007 at 10:00 AM |
Tutelary Figures An entry in memory of Dr. Joseph L. Henderson, Jungian analyst, who died on Nov. 17 at 104 (An obituary appears in today's New York Times.) Some remarks by Dr. Henderson: The myth of the hero is the most common and the best known myth in the world... classical mythology... Greece and Rome... Middle Ages... Far East... contemporary primitive tribes. It also appears in dreams... obvious dramatic... profound... importance. P. 101 And Stan Carlisle had See also the noir entry on "Nightmare Alley" for Winter Solstice 2002, as well as a solstice-related commentary on I Ching Hexagram 41, Decrease. Related material: Dr. Dyane N. Sherwood and Dr. Joseph L. Henderson, authors of Transformation of the Psyche (Routledge, Nov. 7, 2003) Dr. Henderson is said to have been, in his youth, a student of Thornton Wilder as well as of Dr. Jung. Posted 12/19/2007 at 9:00 AM |
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Mad Phaedrus Hillman also says thatMeets Mad Ezra "Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." --Phaedrus in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance This apparent conflict between eternity and time, fixity and motion, permanence and change, is resolved by the philosophy of the I Ching and by the Imagism of Ezra Pound. Consider, for example, the image of The Well
as discussed here on All Saints' Day 2003 and in the previous entry. As background, consider the following remarks of James Hillman in "Egalitarian Typologies Versus the Perception of the Unique," Part III: Persons as Images--
These remarks may help the reader to identify with Ada during her well-viewing in Cold Mountain (previous entry): "She was dazzled by light and shade, by the confusing duplication of reflections and of frames. All coming from too many directions for the mind to take account of. The various images bounced against each other until she felt a desperate vertigo...."If such complexity can be suggested by Hexagram 48, The Well, alone, consider the effect of the "cluster of fused ideas... endowed with energy" that is the entire 64-hexagram I Ching. Posted 12/16/2007 at 1:09 PM |
x Posted 12/15/2007 at 12:00 PM |
x Posted 12/15/2007 at 11:07 AM |
"Well, it changes." Nicole Kidman at a press conference for the London premiere of "The Golden Compass" on November 27: A related Log24 link from that same date, November 27: Deep Beauty See also Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- "Plato hadn’t tried to destroy areté. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made areté the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before. That was why the Quality that Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had seemed so close to Plato’s Good. Plato’s Good was taken from the rhetoricians. Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was that Plato’s Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." -- as well as Cold Mountain -- Page 48: "It's claimed that if you take a mirror and look backwards into a well, you'll see your future down in the water." "So in short order Ada found herself bent backward over the mossy well lip, canted in a pose with little to recommend it in the way of dignity or comfort, back arched, hips forward, legs spraddled for balance. She held a hand mirror above her face, angled to catch the surface of the water below. Ada had agreed to the well-viewing as a variety of experiment in local custom and as a tonic for her gloom. Her thoughts had been broody and morbid and excessively retrospective for so long that she welcomed the chance to run counter to that flow, to cast forward and think about the future, even though she expected to see nothing but water at the bottom of the well. She shifted her feet to find better grip on the packed dirt of the yard and then tried to look into the mirror. The white sky above was skimmed over with backlit haze, bright as a pearl or as a silver mirror itself. The dark foliage of oaks all around the edges framed the sky, duplicating the wooden frame of the mirror into which Ada peered, examining its picture of the well depths behind her to see what might lie ahead in her life. The bright round of well water at the end of the black shaft was another mirror. It cast back the shine of sky and was furred around the edges here and there with sprigs of fern growing between stones. Ada tried to focus her attention on the hand mirror, but the bright sky beyond kept drawing her eye away. She was dazzled by light and shade, by the confusing duplication of reflections and of frames. All coming from too many directions for the mind to take account of. The various images bounced against each other until she felt a desperate vertigo, as if she could at any moment pitch backward and plunge head first down the well shaft and drown there, the sky far above her, her last vision but a bright circle set in the dark, no bigger than a full moon. Her head spun and she reached with her free hand and held to the stonework of the well. And then just for a moment things steadied, and there indeed seemed to be a picture in the mirror." -- and Log24 on December 3 -- The above Chinese character stands for Hexagram 48, "The Well." For further details, click on the well. Posted 12/14/2007 at 9:00 AM |
Prime Suspect
Well, she was just seventeen... "Mazur introduced the topic of prime numbers with a story from Don Quixote in which Quixote asked a poet to write a poem with 17 lines. Because 17 is prime, the poet couldn't find a length for the poem's stanzas and was thus stymied." -- Undated American Mathematical Society news item about a Nov. 1, 2007, event
You know what I mean...
Or do you?
"I think transformation becomes the main word in my life, transformation. Because you don't want to just put a mirror in front of people and say, here, look at yourself. What do you see? You want to have a skewed mirror. You want a mirror that says, you didn't know you could see the back of your head. You didn't know that you could... almost cubistic, see all aspects at the same time. And what that does for human beings is it allows them to step
out of their lives and to revisit it and maybe find something different
about it." --Julie Taymor Related material: The previous two entries and Posted 12/13/2007 at 11:09 AM |
Found in Translation:
See also Art Wars.Words and Images From today's New York Times:
"Thomas P. Whitney, a former diplomat and writer on Russian affairs who was best known for translating the work of the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn into English, died on [Sunday] Dec. 2 in Manhattan. He was 90.... During World War II, he was an analyst in Washington with the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.... In the late 1960s and afterward, he bred thoroughbred horses.... On one occasion, Mr. Whitney took Mr. Solzhenitsyn to Saratoga
Racetrack...." -- Margalit Fox Related material: Words
"Lewis began with a number of haunted images...." "The best of the books are the ones... where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow." "'Everything began with images,' Lewis wrote...." Images
Yesterday's entry on from Sunday in the Park with Death,
--and from Log24 on the date
Personal Emblem The horses may refer to Posted 12/12/2007 at 9:00 AM |
The Solzhenitsyn Compass "The Golden Compass is a $180 million movie that opens this weekend.... In the book, the golden compass is actually called 'the alethiometer.' As any student of Greek would expect, this instrument has to do with alethia-- the truth. In the fourth chapter of the book, the Master of Jordan College tells Lyra, the protagonist of the story, that the alethiometer 'tells you the truth. As for how to read it, you'll have to learn by yourself.'" -- Sermon by Paul Lundberg, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Seminary, Tuesday, December 4, 2007. "Harvard's motto is Veritas. Many of you have already found out, and others will find out in the course of their lives, that truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it. This is the source of much discord. Also, truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter." -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, commencement address, Harvard University, June 8, 1978 Posted 12/11/2007 at 8:00 AM |
x Posted 12/9/2007 at 8:00 AM |
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Reflection Groups in Finite Geometry Posted 12/7/2007 at 12:00 PM |
A Reflection Group of Order 168 Posted 12/7/2007 at 6:20 AM |
x Posted 12/6/2007 at 9:00 AM |
Zeph Stewart, 86, a classics professor and former Lowell House master at Harvard, died, according to today's online Crimson, on Saturday. Related material: Saturday's Log24 entry "Plato's Horses" and its link to a Harvard education. Posted 12/5/2007 at 6:19 PM |
Posted 12/5/2007 at 6:19 AM |
X Posted 12/4/2007 at 3:26 PM |
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The above logo is from the I Ching Resources website. Hexagram 10 Treading (Conduct) Two Commentaries: 1. The standard Princeton University Press Wilhelm/Baynes text 2. An idiosyncratic interpretation from one "Rhett Butler" at I Ching Resources Rhett describes his experience with Hexagram 10 at the South Pole. This pole, like the abode of Santa, may serve to illustrate T. S. Eliot's remarks on "the still point of the turning world." Related material: Hitler's Still Point, The Still Point of the Turning World: Joan Didion and the Opposite of Meaning (Harper's, Nov. 2005), and Chorus from the Rock (Log24, Dec. 5, 2004). Posted 12/3/2007 at 9:00 AM |
Icarus Part I: Matisse The Wisdom of the Ego, by George E. Vaillant, Harvard University Press (1993) Cover illustration: "Icarus," from Jazz, by Henri Matisse Publisher's description of author: George E. Vaillant is Professor of Psychiatry; Director of the Study of Adult Development, Harvard University Health Services; and Director of Research in the Division of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital. A review: "This is a remarkable synthesis of the best current thinking on ego psychology as well as a many-faceted picture of what Robert White would call 'lives in progress.' It makes on its own not only a highly innovative contribution to ego psychology but an equally original and impressive contribution to longitudinal research. A remarkable and many-faceted work." -- The late George W. Goethals Part II:
Part III: Down to Earth The reviewer in Icarus, Part I, above, Dr. Goethals, was my teacher in a 1960-61 freshman seminar at Harvard. He admired the work of Harry Stack Sullivan. The cover of the Sullivan book below may serve to illustrate yesterday's "Plato's Horses" remarks. The ego defenses of today's Harvard students seem to need some strengthening. Perhaps Vaillant, Sullivan, and the philosophies of Pirsig and of Plato discussed in yesterday's entry may be of use in this regard. Related material: In the Details and The Crimson Passion. Posted 12/2/2007 at 9:00 AM |
Rhetoric, 1; Dialectic, 0. -- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig is describing the response of Phaedrus to an obnoxious member of the Academy in a discussion of Plato's figure of the horses and charioteer.) Wallace Stevens, opening lines of The Necessary Angel: "In the Phaedrus, Plato speaks of the soul in a figure. He says: Let our figure be of a composite nature-- a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteer of the gods are all of them noble, and of noble breed, while ours are mixed; and we have a charioteer who drives them in a pair, and one of them is noble and of noble origin, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble origin; and, as might be expected, there is a great deal of trouble in managing them. I will endeavor to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the immortal creature. The soul or animate being has the care of the inanimate, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing;-- when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and is the ruler of the universe; while the imperfect soul loses her feathers, and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground. We recognize at once, in this figure, Plato's pure poetry; and at the same time we recognize what Coleridge called Plato's dear, gorgeous nonsense. The truth is that we have scarcely read the passage before we have identified ourselves with the charioteer, have, in fact, taken his place and, driving his winged horses, are traversing the whole heaven." Stevens, who was educated at Harvard, adds: "Then suddenly we remember, it may be, that the soul no longer exists and we droop in our flight and at last settle on the solid ground. The figure becomes antiquated and rustic." Many who lack a Harvard education to make them droop will prefer to remember Robert Craig Knievel (Oct. 17, 1938 - Nov. 30, 2007) not as antiquated and rustic but as young and soaring. Related material: the previous entry (a story for Gennie). See also the entries for last February's Academy Awards night: Hollywood Sermon and Between Two Worlds. Posted 12/1/2007 at 2:45 AM |