Log24

For more background, see the Log24.net entry of 3 AM Friday, the date of Meader’s death. See also a Boston Globe obituary that quotes John F. Kennedy: “Vaughn Meader was busy tonight, so I came myself.”

Note that Rousmaniere was John F. Kennedy’s roommate at Harvard.

Note, too, that Kennedy’s daughter Caroline attended Sister Salisbury’s school.

A memorial Mass for Sister Salisbury will be held on Monday, November 22, 2004, at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, 980 Park Avenue, at 5:30 pm.  

What does all this Camelot portend?   I do not know, but the following quote seems appropriate.

“Flores, flores para los muertos.”

— Tennessee Williams, 1947

Song

"Each epoch has its singer."
— Jack London, Oakland, California, 1901

"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…."
— Dennis Overbye, Quantum Baseball,
    New York Times, Oct.  26, 2004

"You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp,
    but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into
    the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to
    make a deal?"
— Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone

"About a century ago scientists began to realize that beneath the too, too solid veneer of what had passed for reality for 2,000 years there was some pretty funny and fuzzy business going on….

Most of us, I suspect, would rather believe that the devil is running things than that no one is in charge, that our lives, our loves, World Series victories, hang on the whims of fate and chains of coincidences, on God throwing dice, as Einstein once referred to quantum randomness….

[But] we are people, with desires and memories and a sense of humor – not Ping Pong balls."
— Dennis Overbye, Quantum Baseball,
    New York Times, Oct.  26, 2004

"You can be replaced by some Ping Pong balls and a dictionary."
— Anonymous source, March 29, 2001

Tasteful Tunes, continued:
Bush Does Garland

Paul Krugman in
today’s New York Times:

“On Monday The Wall Street Journal confirmed an earlier report that in 2002 the military drew up plans for a strike on the base of the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in an area of Iraq not under Saddam’s control. But civilian officials vetoed the attack – probably because they thought it might undermine political support for the war against Saddam. So Mr. Zarqawi, like Osama, was given the chance to kill another day.”

Hell Freezes Over
department:

In honor of this event, here is a recording of Sinatra singing “Sweet Caroline” (RealAudio, 782K) on the Fourth of July, 1974, aboard the U.S.S. Midway at the U.S. naval base in Yokosuka, Japan.

Bring ‘Em On

Iraqi Soldiers Found Dead
From Associated Press– 11:48 a.m.
Nearly 50 bodies were found, many killed execution style with gunshots to the back of the head.

Why America Is Losing Fallouja
By Alissa J. Rubin and Doyle McManus
Misjudgment, disagreement and shifting strategy fan the flames.

— Today’s LA Times

Date of Infamy,
continued

Today’s New York Times Sports:

“The weapons were bought by the police department for the Democratic National Convention this summer but were not used then.”

Photos of
Oct. 21, 2004:

Stop, children, what’s that sound? Sox Fans Riot

Reporting for duty

A Date Which Will
Live in Infamy

Today’s saint’s day:
St. Ursula

Today’s birthday:
Ursula K. Le Guin

Today’s Scripture:

Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance

Chapter 20:

“Then, on impulse, Phædrus went over to his bookshelf and picked out a small, blue, cardboard-bound book. He’d hand-copied this book and bound it himself years before, when he couldn’t find a copy for sale anywhere. It was the 2,400-year-old Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu. He began to read….

Phædrus read on through line after line, verse after verse of this, watched them match, fit, slip into place. Exactly. This was what he meant. This was what he’d been saying all along, only poorly, mechanistically. There was nothing vague or inexact about this book. It was as precise and definite as it could be. It was what he had been saying, only in a different language with different roots and origins. He was from another valley seeing what was in this valley, not now as a story told by strangers but as a part of the valley he was from. He was seeing it all.

He had broken the code.

He read on. Line after line. Page after page. Not a discrepancy. What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything.”

Wooing

“Cheering from Red Sox fans could be heard in the ninth, and when pinch-hitter Ruben Sierra grounded to second baseman Pokey Reese for the final out at 12:01 a.m., Boston players ran onto the field and jumped together in a mass huddle.

‘The greatest comeback in baseball history,’ Red Sox owner John Henry proclaimed.”

— Boston Red Sox Make History,
   AP 10/21/04

Film dialogue:

Will
So, when did you know, like,
that she was the one for you?

Sean
October 21st, 1975.

Will
Jesus Christ.
You know the f—in’ date?

See also the previous entry,
of 12:00:31 AM ET.

Today’s birthdays:

See Oct. 21, 2002.

Last Bell

And there is always one last light
   to turn out
   and one last bell to ring
And the last one out of the circus
   has to lock up everything.

— Mrs. Potter’s   Lullaby

No se puede vivir sin amar.

Star Wars,
continued

The Eight

Lest the reader of the previous entry mistakenly take Katherine Neville’s book The Eight more seriously than Fritz Leiber’s greatly superior writings on eightness, here are two classic interpretations of Leiber’s “spider” or “double cross” symbol:

This symbol consists of
two triangles

representing
male and female,
fire and water,
up and down,
etc., etc., etc.

For some deeper properties
of the number eight, see a
Log24.net entry of 4/4/03.

Show Business
according to Fritz Leiber

(Leiber's "Changewar" is my
favorite mythology.)

From the Changewar story
"No Great Magic" (1963) Part V:

Even little things are
turning out to be great things
and becoming intensely interesting.
Have you ever thought about
the properties of numbers?
— The Maiden

"I've had this idea– it's just a sort of fancy, remember– that if you wanted to time-travel and, well, do things, you could hardly pick a more practical machine than a dressing-room and a sort of stage and half-theater attached, with actors to man it…."

For the remainder of this section
of Leiber's story, see

Show Business.

Related material:
The previous entry,
The Eight, and
Now We See Wherein
Lies the Pleasure.

Narrative Theory

12:07:51 AM

An alternate version of
the previous entry’s illustration:

Hexagram 51: Shock, Shock

Introduction to Aesthetics

“Chess problems are the
hymn-tunes of mathematics.”
— G. H. Hardy,
A Mathematician’s Apology

“We do not want many ‘variations’ in the proof of a mathematical theorem: ‘enumeration of cases,’ indeed, is one of the duller forms of mathematical argument.  A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.

A chess problem also has unexpectedness, and a certain economy; it is essential that the moves should be surprising, and that every piece on the board should play its part.  But the aesthetic effect is cumulative.  It is essential also (unless the problem is too simple to be really amusing) that the key-move should be followed by a good many variations, each requiring its own individual answer.  ‘If P-B5 then Kt-R6; if …. then …. ; if …. then ….’ — the effect would be spoilt if there were not a good many different replies.  All this is quite genuine mathematics, and has its merits; but it just that ‘proof by enumeration of cases’ (and of cases which do not, at bottom, differ at all profoundly*) which a real mathematician tends to despise.

* I believe that is now regarded as a merit in a problem that there should be many variations of the same type.”

(Cambridge at the University Press.  First edition, 1940.)

Brian Harley in
Mate in Two Moves:

“It is quite true that variation play is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the soul of a problem, or (to put it more materially) the main course of the solver’s banquet, but the Key is the cocktail that begins the proceedings, and if it fails in piquancy the following dinner is not so satisfactory as it should be.”

(London, Bell & Sons.  First edition, 1931.)

Starflight

In memory of
Jacques Derrida and James Chace,
both of whom died in Paris on
Friday, Oct. 8, 2004, and of
Orson Welles, who died
on this date in 1985

Orson Welles

Mate in 2  V. Nabokov, 1919

"The black king has three white flight squares, without mates being provided for these flights, which suggests giving him a fourth. 1. Bg2 therefore presents itself, especially when you notice that it prepares mates for all the flights, and for the king remaining on its original square.

1. Bg2

Kxc6 2. Nfe5 mate
Ke6   2. Nd4  mate
Kc4   2. Nd2  mate  
Ke4   2. Nd4  mate  
fxg3  2. Ng5  mate

The five variations together are the theme,  'starflight.'  (With orthogonal squares it is called plus- or cross-flight.)"

— Open Chess Diary, 1999,
   by Tim Krabbé, Amsterdam

For an appropriate bishop, see

Riddle.
 

Derrida Dead

“Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-born, French intellectual who became one of the most celebrated and unfathomable philosophers of the late 20th century, died Friday at a Paris hospital, the French president’s office announced. He was 74.”

— Jonathan Kandell, New York Times

“There is no teacher but the enemy.”

— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game,
   Tor paperback reprint, 1994, p. 262

Belief

KERRY: “I’m going to be a president who believes in science.”

KERRY: “I’m a Catholic – raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life, helped lead me through a war, leads me today.”

BUSH: “Trying to decipher that.”

Behush the Bush

James Joyce statue, Zurich

“There’s where. First.
We pass through grass
behush the bush to.”
— Final page of
Finnegans Wake

“… we all gain an appreciation of how each of us can provide readings that others are blind to and how each of us is temporarily blind to other feasible readings. Reading the text becomes a communal act of discovery….

No one has much to say, for now, about the grass reference….”

— Reading Finnegans Wake (1986)

The phrase “snake in the grass” seems relevant, as does the opening of Finnegans Wake:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s….

Related material:

Joyce and Tao,

Why Me?,

Serpent’s Tail Publishing,



and, for Matt Damon,
whose birthday is today —

The Joyce Identity.

Absolute Full Spin Mode

In today’s news:

“Kerry… said Bush and Cheney
were in ‘absolute full spin mode.'”

Today’s midday
California lottery number:

525.
Related material–
5/25, 2003:

Star Wars and
Matrix of the Death God. 

For similar theological remarks,
see yesterday’s
Spin the Numbers.

Prize

This years’s Nobel Prize for literature goes to Elfriede Jelinek.

Related material:

1. No Pain, No Gain —
   on the film of Jelinek’s autobiographical novel about a masochist, The Piano Teacher
2. Charles Rosen —
   “When I was writing a review of Alban Berg‘s correspondence, I remarked to an elderly and very distinguished psychoanalyst that I was surprised by how many of Schoenberg’s students seemed to enjoy being so badly treated and humiliated by him. She replied, ‘I have no time to explain this just now, but I can assure you that there are a great many masochists and not nearly enough sadists to go around.'”
3. And so —
   The Wisdom of Ann Coulter

Metaphysics, cont.

“Logocentrism is… described by Derrida as a ‘metaphysics of presence.'”

1:00:00 AM:

Hickory dickory dock…

3:17:20 PM

Spin the Numbers

IN NOMINE PATRIS…

ET FILII…

ET SPIRITUS SANCTI…

“Heraclitus…. says:
‘The ruler whose prophecy
occurs at Delphi
oute legei oute kryptei,
neither gathers nor hides,
alla semainei, but gives hints.'”
— An Introduction to Metaphysics,
by Martin Heidegger,
Yale University Press paperback,
1959, p. 170

“The lord whose oracle is in Delphi
neither indicates clearly nor conceals,
but gives a sign.”
— Adolf Holl, The Left Hand of God,
Doubleday, 1998, p. 50

AMEN.

The Joyce Identity,
or Treadstone vs. Blarneystone

From The Bourne Identity:

ABBOTT: Can you really bring him in?
CONKLIN: I think we’re past that, don’t you? What, do you have a better idea?
ABBOTT: Well, so far, you’ve given me nothing but a trail of collateral damage from Zurich to Paris. I don’t think I could do much worse.

CONKLIN: Well why don’t you go upstairs and book a conference room. Maybe you can talk him to death.

Tea Privileges

On Janet Leigh,
 who died Sunday:

On the redesigned
Museum of Modern Art,
11 West 53rd Street:

“… the ultimate judgment will have to wait: Taniguchi himself told a MoMA curator who’d complimented him that considering the building without the art in it is like admiring the tea cup without the green tea. Next month the museum will have art on the walls and crowds in the galleries—and then the tea ceremony will begin.”

— Cathleen McGuigan, Newsweek,
    issue dated Oct. 11, 2004

Related material:

Review of A Man and His Art, a book of paintings by Frank Sinatra:

“… he’s a solid abstractionist with an excellent eye for color, composition and geometric precision.”

— Booklist (Jan. 15, 1992)

“Blue Eyes took his Sunday painting seriously.”

— Eric Banks in Artforum Magazine,
    September 2004

See also
Art Wars.

Today’s birthday: Anne Rice.

Vampire Quality

To Jacques Levy, cont. 

and

to Richard Avedon, cont.

 Levy directed “Red Cross,”
a Sam Shepard play that is
said to be about
“the vampire quality
of language.”
_____________________

From Under the Volcano,
Chapter II:

Hotel Bella Vista
Gran Baile Noviembre 1938
a Beneficio de la Cruz Roja.
Los Mejores Artistas del radio en accion.
No falte Vd.

Jesse McKinley in today’s New York Times:

“In a surprise entry to the fall season, Sam Shepard – actor, playwright and sexagenarian heartthrob – has written a new, sharp-elbowed farce….

The play, ‘The God of Hell,’ was written over the summer by Mr. Shepard, 60, who wanted to stage it before the Nov. 2 election….

In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Shepard said that the play was ‘a takeoff on Republican fascism, in a way,’ and that he thought it would be more pertinent if seen during the presidential campaign.”

See The Script:
“Vanity is definitely my favorite sin.”

Ig Nobel
Literature Prize:

Copies of
Lord of the Last Days
and Lepanto

to John Kerry

for his blind support of scientism
as well as his ignorance of geography.

Related material:
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

Ig Nobel
Geography Prize

Background from David Brooks (NYT Magazine, Aug. 29, 2004):

“The war on Islamic extremism….
This has been miscast as a war on terror, but terror is just the means our enemies use. In reality, we’re fighting a war against a specific brand of Islamic extremism, a loose federation of ideologues who seek to dominate the Middle East and return it to the days of the caliphate.

We are in the beginning of this war, where we were against Bolshevism around 1905 or Fascism in the early 1930’s, with enemies that will continue to gain strength, thanks to the demographic bulge in the Middle East….”

On last night’s Ig Nobel ceremony at Harvard:

“Coming a week before their more noble cousins are announced in Stockholm, the awards have become a keenly contested, globally reported event.”

— The Guardian, Oct. 1 

From the Bush-Kerry debate last night:

“Kerry: The president just talked about Iraq as a center of the war on terror. Iraq was not even close to the center of the war on terror before the president invaded it.”

As David Brooks has pointed out, the so-called war on terror is actually a war on an Islamic extremism that seeks to dominate the Middle East.  The United States government may deny, and Kerry may decry, the strategy of building permanent bases at the very center of the Middle East, Iraq (shown above), but such a strategy seems not without merit if the long-term strategic interests of the United States are placed ahead of political considerations.

Kerry’s apparent ignorance of such a strategy’s merits entitles him to this year’s Ig Nobel prize in geography– the above map.

Dedication added on
Oct. 4, 2004, 2:25 PM:

To Richard Avedon, who died
on Oct. 1, 2004.  He said that
 “All photographs are accurate.
None of them is the truth.”

On originality– See
the comments.
_______________________

Originality Prize

A bag of Fritos to John Kerry…

“Kerry contributed most of the night’s fairly original phrases, including the suggestion that invading Iraq in retaliation to Sept. 11 was like Franklin Roosevelt invading Mexico in response to Pearl Harbor.”

— Noel Holston at Newsday.com

Log24.net illustration following Whoopi Goldberg’s “bush” remarks and John Mellencamp’s “bandito” song at a Kerry fundraiser last summer:

Log24.net two years ago on this date:

… y el no estar del todo en una acción
y es el Cantar de los Cantares
y es el amor que te ama