Log24

Dinner Theater?

“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

From an entry of last Monday,
“Lynchburg Law” — 

Critic Frank Rich in Wednesday’s Times on a recent televised promotion:

“… it was a manufactured scandal, as over-the-top as a dinner theater production of ‘The Crucible.’ “

From a Friday, Nov. 19, entry:

“the Platonist… is more interested in deriving an abstraction of the object into a universal….”

— Radu Surdulescu, Form, Structure, and Structurality

From El Universal online today:

“Meanwhile, [Mexico] continued to deal with the savagery of Tuesday night’s televised lynchings, with some saying the media had exploited the occurrence.

‘This is a new and worrisome phenomenon,’ security analyst José Reveles said in an interview… ‘It’s like the evil offspring of all the violent exploitation in the media.’  ‘It was Fuenteovejuna,’ he said, referring to the work by the Spanish golden age playwright Lope de Vega in which an entire town covers up the slaying of a corrupt official.”

Frank Rich has the last word:

“A ‘moral values’ crusade that stands between a TV show this popular and its audience will quickly learn the limits of its power in a country where entertainment is god.”

Habeas Corpus

From St. Nicholas Versus the Volcano:

“The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella Vista bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar voice shouting a drunken lecture, this time on the topic of the rule of the Mexican railway that requires that  ‘A corpse will be transported by express!’ (Lowry, Under the Volcano).”

In honor of a particular corpse, from last Friday, November 19, here is part of a Log24 entry from that day:

“The meaning of the poem is ‘the full organized body of all the extension and intension that we can find in it.’ “
— Allen Tate

A corpse will be transported by express!

The corpse in question is that of a children’s book illustrator.  The following screenshot from today’s online New York Times illustrates both extension and, in light of the Lowry quotation above, intension.

Last Crusade?

From the Los Angeles Times:

Evangelist Billy Graham is scheduled to preach a four-day Crusade at the Pasadena Rose Bowl, beginning tonight.

I do not agree with Graham’s beliefs, but respect his sincerity.

As for the “moral values” that have caused such political confusion recently, some  Crusaders and I might agree on the importance of the following book:

Click on picture for details.

Blasphemy?

"You can turn groups
   into pretty pictures" —

Shown above are two ways of
picturing the octahedral group O,
also known as
the symmetric group S₄.

For further details, see
Diamond Theory.

11/11 11:11:11

Samuel Beckett on Dante and Joyce:

“Another point of comparison is the preoccupation with the significance of numbers. The death of Beatrice inspired nothing less than a highly complicated poem dealing with the importance of the number 3 in her life. Dante never ceased to be obsessed by this number. Thus the poem is divided into three Cantiche, each composed of 33 Canti…. Why, Mr. Joyce seems to say, should…. the Armistice be celebrated at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month? He cannot tell you because he is not God Almighty, but in a thousand years he will tell you… He is conscious that things with a common numerical characteristic tend towards a very significant interrelationship. This preoccupation is freely translated in his present work….”

— “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” in James Joyce/Finnegans Wake: A Symposium (1929), New Directions paperback, 1972

See also my entry from five years ago on this date:

Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

Updike on God

“In Exodus 3:14, when Moses asks God his name, the answer in Hebrew, ’Ehyeh-’Asher-’Ehyeh, has been commonly rendered I AM THAT I AM but could be, Alter reports, simply I AM, I AM.  An impression grew upon me, as I made my way through these obdurate old texts, that to the ancient Hebrews God was simply a word for what was: a universe often beautiful and gracious but also implacable and unfathomable.”

— John Updike, review of Robert Alter’s translation of The Five Books of Moses, in The New Yorker, issue dated Nov. 1, 2004, posted online Oct. 25, 2004

In memory of
“an ardent anti-Communist,”
Harry Fleischman,
dead at 90 on
All Saints’ Day:

The Hunt for
Red November

From USA Today

On November 1917:

“Lenin may have controlled Petrograd,
[but] Russia was a vast country
and he did not control vast areas.
These areas were openly hostile
to the Bolsheviks.”

Art critic Holland Cotter in today’s New York Times on the work of a contemporary artist:

“Although much of this art is intuitive in origin, an on-the-spot response to materials, little of it can be described as whimsical. Some of it is uninnocently weird: several of the dozens of small, labor-intensive pieces seem to be invaded by a creeping mold, or stained with organic substances, including blood.

Indeed, like Mozart’s opera, the work as a whole eludes conventional categories. Is ‘The Magic Flute’ a musical comedy, a redemptive pageant or a moral tract? Is it darling or dark? Is Mr. Tuttle doing drawing, collage, painting or sculpture? Process Art or Conceptual Art? Or something else? Are the results art about art, or art about everything, including art?”

Yesterday was the Feast of All Saints. Today is the Feast of All Souls.

Those of us who are not saints may profit from the writings of both the saintly Thomas Wolfe and the more secular Tom Wolfe.

From Log24.net on the Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, a quotation from St. Thomas Wolfe:

See also a Wolfe quotation from the Feast of St. Gerard Manley Hopkins in 2003. 

For the Feast of St. Thomas Wolfe himself, see the Log24 entries of Sept. 15 (the date of Wolfe’s death).

Readings more suited to today, All Souls’ Day, than to yesterday, All Saints’:

Bright Young Things,
Andrew at St. Andrews,
and, of course,
Under the Volcano.

Andrew at St. Andrews recommends the remarks, in The Guardian, of Tom Wolfe on today’s election.

The fact that the protagonist of Tom Wolfe’s new novel is a virgin from the hill country of North Carolina, combined with the above entry on Nell from the Feast of St. Ignatius, brings us back to the earlier Wolfe…  For the later, secular Wolfe on the earlier, saintly Wolfe, see