Posted 9/30/2008 at 1:14 AM |
x Posted 9/29/2008 at 12:00 AM |
Buffalo Soldier Part I: Retired pastor William W. McDermet III on the editorial page of Saturday's Buffalo News (Warren E. Buffett, chairman): "In the 1940s, there was no Internet or television, so after school I amused myself with a snack of graham crackers and milk, maybe a comic book or a Tinkertoy project. Yet what was really exciting was a frequent ring of the doorbell, which mother answered, followed by the request: 'Can Billy come out and play?'" Part II: Excerpt from Fritz Leiber's Washington Post, Sheri Jennings, ROME -- "It's early autumn in 1944, and the Nazis are advancing on the Italian front...." Posted 9/28/2008 at 2:02 AM |
Posted 9/27/2008 at 6:00 PM |
Christmas Knot for T.S. Eliot's birthday (Continued from Sept. 22-- "A Rose for Ecclesiastes.") From Kibler's "Variations on a Theme of Heisenberg, Pauli, and Weyl," July 17, 2008: "It is to be emphasized that the 15 operators... are underlaid by the geometry of the generalized quadrangle of order 2.... In this geometry, the five sets... correspond to a spread of this quadrangle, i.e., to a set of 5 pairwise skew lines...." -- Maurice R. Kibler, July 17, 2008 For ways to visualize this quadrangle, see Inscapes.
Posted 9/26/2008 at 3:17 PM |
Gates of Hell (continued from the birthday this year of Pope Benedict XVI)
"'I took a course in modern poetry when I was back at the university,'
he began. 'We read six authors-- Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Stevens, and
Gallinger-- and on the last day of the semester, when the prof was feeling a
little rhetorical, he said, "These six names are written on the century, and all
the gates of criticism and Hell shall not prevail against them.''" The last poet of the six is fictional. The name "Zelazny" might be subsituted for "Gallinger." It won't happen, but I wouldn't mind if it did. Posted 9/22/2008 at 7:20 PM |
A Tale "... told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" -- Quoted here Sept. 14 "We've got to get ourselves back to the garden." -- Quoted here Sept. 10
Related material: "Heidegger's philosophy of Dasein, his model of the ego, reminds me
of... the ancient temple of Jerusalem.... in the innermost chamber, the
holy of holies, the room was completely empty. The essence of Dasein,
similarly, is nothingness, a fact that it tries to hide by assuming the
trappings of existence."
-- Heinz Pagels, "Nothing is the great mystery. It cannot be described. Words can try
to touch it. Zen may be such a word and Tao, Christ, Allah, Buddha, and
others. There is a word called 'God.'" -- Janwillem van de Wetering, A Glimpse of Nothingness See also
Posted 9/21/2008 at 2:56 PM |
The Revelation Game (continued from Sept. 8)
Related material: Posted 9/21/2008 at 7:11 AM |
A Story of Sorts Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais Related material: The American President, American Beauty, and the time of this entry, 11:27 AM EDT Posted 9/20/2008 at 11:27 AM |
In memory of James Crumley, author of One to Count Cadence, and of Paul Flynn, a former president of USA Today. On Thursday, the date of Flynn's death, for the first time in months I bought a copy of USA Today. Earlier that morning I had posted The Religion of Journalism.
Posted 9/20/2008 at 1:09 AM |
Toward the Light O dark dark dark They all go into the dark -- Four Quartets This morning's NY Times obituaries: (Click to enlarge.) "I love those Bavarians... so meticulous." Related material: Church of the Forbidden Planet, Campaign Song, At the Apollo. Posted 9/19/2008 at 2:02 AM |
x Posted 9/18/2008 at 3:15 PM |
Journalism
Related material: "We seem to be caught in a squirrel cage, running as hard as possible and getting nowhere. At times like this, almost anyone will find real help in writing the feelings and thoughts down in a journal or notebook.... Later on we shall look at other ways in which a journal record is important." -- Fr. Morton Kelsey, The Other Side of Silence See also Tuesday's Church of the Forbidden Planet and the journal entry of October 9, 2005, which contains both the thoughts of Joan Didion on Hoover Dam and the following meditation:
Posted 9/18/2008 at 7:25 AM |
"Surely some revelation is at hand" -- W. B. Yeats "Obama stands revealed as a typical Democratic politician with the same laundry list of suppositions and policy stances that all his predecessors have shared: there's an unbroken line from Obama's speech all the way back to FDR." -- Mark Heuring, conservative Catholic writer, on August 28, 2008 (St. Augustine's Day) "The United States presidential election of 1932 took place as the effects of the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression were being felt intensely across the country. President Hoover's popularity was falling as voters felt he was unable to reverse the economic collapse.... Franklin D. Roosevelt saw that Hoover's failure to deal with these problems could be used as a platform for his own election...." -- Wikipedia today Posted 9/18/2008 at 12:00 AM |
I Love LA -- Randy Newman "It's the year 2007 in Los Angeles... ...a new sitcom, Church Windows" Detail: Related material from Epiphany 2007: Picture of Nothing. Happy 78, Anne Francis. Posted 9/16/2008 at 9:00 AM |
On John McCain's presidential campaign eight years ago: "He always pauses a second for effect and then says: 'I'm going to tell you something. I may have said some things here today that maybe you don't agree with, and I might have said some things you hopefully do agree with. But I will always. Tell you. The truth.' This is McCain's closer, his last big reverb on the six-string as it were. And the frenzied standing-O it always gets from his audience is something to see. But you have to wonder. Why do these crowds from Detroit to Charleston cheer so wildly at a simple promise not to lie? Well, it's obvious why. When McCain says it, the people are cheering not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him. They're cheering the loosening of a weird sort of knot in the electoral tummy. McCain's resume and candor, in other words, promise not empathy with voters' pain but relief from it. Because we've been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It's ultimately just about that complicated. It hurts. We learn this at like age four-- it's grownups' first explanation to us of why it's bad to lie ('How would you like it if...?'). And we keep learning for years, from hard experience, that getting lied to sucks-- that it diminishes you, denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world. Especially if the lies are chronic, systemic, if experience seems to teach that everything you're supposed to believe in's really just a game based on lies.... ... It's painful to believe that the would-be 'public servants' you're forced to choose between are all phonies... who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they've just got to believe you're an idiot." Part II: Macbeth by William Shakespeare Related material: Log24 last Wednesday Posted 9/14/2008 at 3:09 PM |
Hitler on Democracy The Fuehrer's wisdom seems especially appropriate today, in light of John McCain's recent "sex education for kindergarteners" and "lipstick" ads: "... thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.... The grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down." "I'm Joseph Goebbels, and I approve this message." Posted 9/10/2008 at 1:06 PM |
Posted 9/10/2008 at 4:40 AM |
Posted 9/9/2008 at 1:00 PM |
Related material:
Update at noon, Sept. 9, 2008: Tabori, a Jew from Hungary and former screenwriter ("No Exit"), died at 93 on July 23, 2007. For related material on another Jew from Hungary click on the black monolith (also known as the Halmos tombstone). Posted 9/8/2008 at 2:25 PM |
The Revelation Game (continued from August 18):
Related material: The Man Who Would be King Stanza My Stone: Wallace Stevens and the Hermetic Tradition Posted 9/8/2008 at 5:01 AM |
The entry it leads to: Related material: A eulogy for the late editor Robert Giroux: "How many masterpieces Mr. Giroux discovered will be
for the future to
decide. As he himself insisted, it can take decades for a book to
become a classic. Still, one of the first books he edited is now on any
list of the century’s
best: To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson’s 1940
masterwork on the rise of socialist thinking. Mr. Giroux judged the
manuscript to be nearly flawless."
Posted 9/7/2008 at 6:23 PM |
Pro Bono Related material: Hitler's Still Point, U2's Achtung Baby album -- -- and The Bangles' Different Light: See also "Oooh, oooh, (oooh) oooh" -- The Bangles, "September Gurls," and Random Thoughts for St. Patrick's Eve. Posted 9/7/2008 at 3:16 PM |
Bringing Change to Washington First in War, First in Peace...
Change for Washington: For the details, see yale.edu/lawweb: "As important to Chinese civilization as the Bible is to Western
culture, the I Ching or Book of Changes is one of the
oldest treasures of world literature. Yet despite many commentaries
written over the years, it is still not well understood in the
English-speaking world. In this masterful [sic] new interpretation, Jack
Balkin returns the I Ching to its rightful place....
\
Jack M. Balkin Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, and the founder and director of Yale's Information Society Project. His books and articles range over many different fields...." Posted 9/7/2008 at 7:09 AM |
Posted 9/7/2008 at 5:01 AM |
Adult Books "Madeleine’s adult books-- including the autobiographical titles that eventually would be grouped together as the Crosswicks Journals-- A Circle of Quiet (1971), The Summer of the Great-Grandmother (1974), The Irrational Season (1976), and Two-Part Invention (1988)-- were edited by Robert Giroux. If Roger Straus was FSG’s [Farrar, Straus & Giroux's] worldly sophisticate presiding over editorial meetings, Bob Giroux was the white-haired, rosy-cheeked favorite uncle (if you happened to have an erudite uncle who had edited T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Isaac Bashevitz Singer, Elizabeth Bishop, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy)."On Robert Giroux, who died early this morning: "the gold standard of literary taste."For a less demanding standard, see today's previous entry. Posted 9/5/2008 at 6:23 PM |
For Mike Hammer Block That Metaphor "Michael Hammer, an engineer and author on management who helped popularize the 're-engineering' movement in the 1990s, died Thursday [Sept. 4, 2008]. A spokesman for Mr. Hammer's consulting firm, Hammer and Co., said Mr. Hammer died from cranial bleeding that began Aug. 22 while he was vacationing in Massachusetts. He was 60 years old. Mr. Hammer was the co-author of the bestselling management book Reengineering the Corporation and founder and president of Hammer and Co., Cambridge, Mass." "An engineer by training, Hammer focused on the operational nuts and bolts of business.Hammer's relentless pursuit of 'why?' drove his entire career. 'My modus operandi is simple,' he once wrote, 'though not always easy to carry out. I take nothing at face value. I approach all business issues and practices with the same skepticism: Why?' A funeral will be held at 9:30 a.m. Friday, Sept. 5 in Stanetsky Memorial Chapel, 1668 Beacon St., Brookline. Interment will follow at the Shaarei Tefillah Section of the Chevra Shaas Cemetery at Baker Street Jewish Cemeteries in West Roxbury." -- web.mit.eduRelated material: From today: Outside the Box "I need a photo opportunity, I want a shot at redemption. Don’t want to end up a cartoon In a cartoon graveyard..." -- Paul Simon Posted 9/5/2008 at 2:45 AM |