Q: "What have I lived for?"
— Last words of Larry Hart,
according to
St. Mark's Episcopal Church,
Washington, DC.
From the final New York Times of 2004:
"As the longtime aide-de-camp of the composer and producer Jule Styne, she assisted in the fabled 1952 rebirth of 'Pal Joey,' easing the tension between the composer, Richard Rodgers, and the book writer, John O'Hara."
— A Force Behind
the Broadway Scenes
The Dark Door
From Log24.net, Dec. 22, 2003:
“One, two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door.
Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen.”
— Dylan Thomas,
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
“The day after Christmas
turned out to be a living nightmare.”
— Arthur C. Clarke, Dec. 27, 2004
Adapted from the logo of the
Arthur C. Clarke Foundation:
Dabo claves regni caelorum. By silent shore
Ripples spread from castle rock. The metaphor
For metamorphosis no keys unlock.
— “Endgame,” Steven H. Cullinane,
November 7, 1986
8:00:00
For related iconology, see Star Wars and
Show Business according to Fritz Leiber.
Geometry Update
Added a new section,
“How the MOG works,” to
Geometry of the 4×4 Square.
The Longest Night
This year’s longest night (either Dec. 20-21 or Dec. 21-22, I don’t know which) is over. (See Frost’s famous poem describing that night.) No notable news to report, although it seems a good sign that many churches held a “Longest Night” (“Blue Christmas”) service around this time. Elvis would be pleased.
Today’s New York Times on a rabbi who died in Jerusalem on Sunday, Dec. 5:
“In the 1950’s, he was a vocal advocate for the relaxation of New York City’s blue laws, which forbade many kinds of commerce on Sundays but not on Saturdays. The laws were repealed in the 1970’s. Solomon Joseph Sharfman was born on Nov. 1, 1915, in Treblinka, Poland; his family immigrated to the United States five years later. His father, Rabbi Label Sharfman, worked as a shochet, or ritual slaughterer….”
Saturday’s lottery numbers from Pennsylvania, the State of Grace:
A Sunday Sermon:
Related material:
(See Song in Red and Gray
and The Dot and the Line.)
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
— Wallace Stevens,
"The American Sublime"
The Times Online on the artist Agnes Martin,
who died Dec. 16 in Taos, New Mexico:
"At a glance, or from a distance, her work looks like nothing at all. Square canvases are so palely touched with colour they might almost be blank. Considered slowly and carefully and close-up, however, the whole surface comes alive."
"The restraint and formal regularity of Martin’s work has led her often to be grouped with the Minimalists. She shares something of their self-effacing rigour and their concern with the material qualities of art, but she herself preferred to be seen in the context of the Abstract Expressionist painters who were her own contemporaries and early artistic models. Like them she may have seen abstract art as the means to a distinctively American sublime…."
"Taos had been a magnet for artists since the last years of the 19th century. D. H. Lawrence famously spent time there in the 1920s. 'Never shall I forget the Christmas dances at Taos,' he wrote, 'twilight, snow, the darkness coming over the great wintry mountains and the lonely pueblo.'"
From today's New York Times:
Agnes Martin, Abstract Painter, Dies at 92
Background: entry of 7 PM Wednesday.
Nothing Nothings
(Again)
Background: recent Log24 entries (beginning with Chorus from the Rock on Dec. 5, 2004) and Is Nothing Sacred? (quotations compiled on March 9, 2000).
From an obituary of Paul Edwards, a writer on philosophy, in this morning's New York Times:
"Heidegger's Confusions, a collection of Professor Edwards's scholarly articles, was published last month by Prometheus."
Edwards, born in Vienna in 1923 to Jewish parents, died on December 9.
Some sites I visited earlier this evening, before reading of Edwards's death:
Judeo-Christian Heritage:
The Wiener Kreis
The meditation below was suggested by this passage:
“… the belief that any sensible discourse had to be formulated within the rules of the scientific language, avoiding the non sense of the ordinary language. This belief, initially expressed by Wittgenstein as aphorisms, was later formalized by the Wiener Kreis [Vienna Circle] as a ‘logical construction of the world’….”
“Deeply Vulgar”
— Epithet applied in 2003 to
Harvard President Lawrence Summers.
“Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge.”
— Vladimir Nabokov
|
In today’s Crimson:
Only moderately vulgar, with its sniggering pop-culture reference. But it should be
Frankfurter Professor of Law.
|
|
Those seeking relief from
Judeo-Christian vulgarity may enjoy
the Buddhist Suzanne Vega’s
|
|
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“Mercilessly tasteful”
— Andrew Mueller
Three in One
“The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them.”
— “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,”
by Wallace Stevens
Ideas, Stories, Values:
Literati in Deep Confusion
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live….
We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas‘ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”
Interview with Joseph Epstein:
“You can do in stories things that are above those in essays,” says Epstein. “In essays and piecework, you are trying to make a point, whereas in stories you are not quite sure what the point is. T.S. Eliot once said of Henry James, ‘He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it,’ which, I think, is the ultimate compliment for an author. Stories are above ideas.”
Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, Sept. 12, 2004:
“You are entering a remarkable community, the Harvard community. It is a community built on the idea of searching for truth… on the idea of respect for others….
… we practice the values we venerate. The values of seeking truth, the values of respecting others….”
“… Hegel discusses ‘culture’ as the ‘world of self-alienated spirit.’ The idea seems to be that humans in society not only interact, but that they collectively create relatively enduring cultural products (stories, dramas, and so forth) within which they can recognise their own patterns of life reflected.”
The “phantasmagoria” of Didion seems related to the “phenomenology” of Hegel…
From Michael N. Forster, Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit:
“This whole system is conceived, on one level at least, as a defense or rational reworking of the Christian conception of God. In particular, its three parts are an attempt to make sense of the Christian idea of a God who is three in one — the Logic depicting God as he is in himself, the Philosophy of Nature God the Son, and the Philosophy of Spirit God the Holy Spirit.”
and, indeed, to the phenomenology of narrative itself….
From Patrick Vert,
The Narrative of Acceleration:
“There are plenty of anecdotes to highlight the personal, phenomenological experience of railway passage…
… a unique study on phantasmagoria and the history of imagination. The word originates [in] light-projection, the so-called ghost-shows of the early 19th century….
… thought becomes a phantasmagorical process, a spectral, representative location for the personal imagination that had been marginalized by scientific rationalism….
Truly, ‘immediate experience is [or becomes] the phantasmagoria of the idler’ [Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Page 801.]….
Thought as phantasm is a consequence of the Cartesian split, and… a further consequence to this is the broad take-over of perceptual faculty…. What better example than that of the American railway? As a case-study it offers explanation to the ‘phantasmagoria of the idler’….
This phantasmagoria became more mediated over time…. Perception became increasingly visually oriented…. As this occurred, a narrative formed to encapsulate the phenomenology of it all….”
For such a narrative, see
the Log24.net entries of
November 5, 2002, 2:56 AM,
November 5, 2002, 6:29 AM,
January 3, 2003, 11:59 PM,
August 17, 2004, 7:29 PM,
August 18, 2004, 2:18 AM,
August 18, 2004, 3:00 AM, and
November 24, 2004, 10:00 AM.
So Set ‘Em Up, Joe
For Sinatra’s birthday:
One For His Baby,
One More for the Road, and
The Twelve Steps of Christmas.
“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
Log24.net on Monday:
|
Zen and the Trinity (See entries of Zen: The Trinity: |
New York Times on Friday:
 |
Gray Particular
in Hartford
From Wallace Stevens,
"The Rock, Part III:
Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn" —
The rock is
the gray particular of man's life,
The stone from which
he rises, up–and–ho,
The step to
the bleaker depths of his descents…
From this morning's
New York Times obituaries—
leve Gray, a painter admired for his large-scale, vividly colorful and lyrically gestural abstract compositions, died on Wednesday in Hartford. He was 86.
The cause was a massive subdural hematoma suffered after he fell on ice and hit his head on Tuesday outside his home in Warren, Conn., said his wife, the writer Francine du Plessix Gray.
*******************************
Jackson Mac Low, a poet, composer and performance artist whose work reveled in what happens when the process of composition is left to carefully calibrated chance, died on Wednesday….
… in 1999 [he] received the Wallace Stevens Award, which carries a $100,000 prize, from the Academy of American Poets.
A Wallace Stevens Award,
in Seven Parts:
I. From a page linked to in
Tuesday's entry White Christmas:
"A bemused Plato reasoned that nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? In our own day Martin Heidegger ventured that das Nichts nichtet — 'the nothing nothings' — evidently still sensing a problem."
— W. V. Quine in Quiddities
II. "As if nothingness
contained a métier…"
— Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"
III. "Massive subdural hematoma"
— Three-word poem
performed on Tuesday
in Connecticut
IV. mé·tier n.
- An occupation, a trade, or a profession.
- Work or activity for which a person is particularly suited; one's specialty.
[French, from Old French mestier, from Vulgar Latin misterium, from Latin ministerium. See ministry.]
Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
V. "ho"
— Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"
VI. Francine du Plessix Gray…
From the
Archives of the
New York Review of Books:
July 16, 1992: Splendor and Miseries, review of
Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 by Alain Corbin, translated by Alan Sheridan
La Vie quotidienne dans les maisons closes, 1830–1930 by Laure Adler
Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France by Charles Bernheimer
Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era by Hollis Clayson
VII. From an entry of April 29, 2004:
"… a 'dead shepherd who brought
tremendous chords from hell
And bade the sheep carouse' "
(p. 227, The Palm
at the End of the Mind:
Selected Poems and a Play.
Ed. Holly Stevens.
New York: Vintage Books, 1990)
— Reuters, story of 2:04 PM ET today
The Devil Came Up
to Cambridge
From a Log24 entry of Friday, December 3, 2004:
"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
From this morning's New York Times:
|
BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn., Dec. 8 (AP) – Ralph Blizard, a renowned fiddler who began his career playing on the radio, died here on Friday [Dec. 3, 2004], according to a funeral home in Kingsport. He was 85.
Mr. Blizard started playing at age 7. He began his career on the radio in In 2002, Mr. Blizard was inducted into the American Fiddlers Hall of Fame…. [He] was a founder of the Traditional Appalachian Music Heritage Association. |
In memory of Mr. Blizard:
|
From Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier, 367-368:
They consulted and twisted the pegs again to make the dead man's tuning, and they then set in playing a piece slightly reminiscent of Bonaparte's Retreat, which some name General Washington's tune. This was softer, more meditative, yet nevertheless grim as death. When the minor key drifted in it was like shadows under trees, and the piece called up something of dark woods, lantern light. It was awful old music in one of the ancient modalities, music that sums up a culture and is the true expression of its inner life. Birch said, Jesus wept. The fit's took them now. None of the Guard had ever heard fiddle and banjo played together in that tuning, nor had they heard playing of such strength and rhythm applied to musical themes so direful and elegiac. Pangle's use of the thumb on the fifth string and dropping to the second was an especial thing of arrogant wonder. It was like ringing a dinner bell, yet solemn. His other two fingers worked in a mere hard, groping style, but one honed to brutish perfection. Stobrod's fingers on the fiddle neck found patterns that seemed set firm as the laws of nature. There was a deliberation, a study, to their clamping of the strings that was wholly absent from the reckless bowing of the right hand. What lyric Stobrod sang recounted a dream — his or some fictive speaker's — said to have been dreamed on a bed of hemlocks and containing a rich vision of lost love, the passage of awful time, a girl wearing a mantle of green. The words without music would have seemed hardly fuller in detail than a telegraphic message, but together they made a complete world. When the song fell closed, Birch said to Teague, Good God, these is holy men. Their mind turns on matters kept secret from the likes of you and me. |
In memory of John Lennon
and Diamond Darrell Abbott
This time slot was reserved at noon on Wednesday, Dec. 8, but this entry was made at about 4:35 PM on Thursday, Dec. 9.
“A dead shepherd brought
tremendous chords from hell
And bade the sheep carouse.”
White Christmas
Starring W. V. Quine as
the Ghost of Christmas Past
“Birthday, death-day —
what day is not both?”
— John Updike
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live….
We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”
Zen and the Trinity
(See entries of December 6, 2002.)
Zen: The time is now 3:00:00 PM.
The Trinity: “Three illustrations will suffice.”
Chorus from
The Rock
Author Joan Didion is 70 today.
On Didion’s late husband, John Gregory Dunne:
“His 1989 memoir Harp includes Dunne’s early years in Hartford and his Irish-Catholic family’s resentment of WASP social superiority: ‘Don’t stand out so that the Yanks can see you,’ he wrote, ‘don’t let your pretensions become a focus of Yank merriment and mockery.'”
— The Hartford Courant, August 4, 2002
From a Hartford Protestant:
The American Sublime
How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
Blinking and blank?But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?— Wallace Stevens
A search of the Internet for “Wallace Stevens” + “The Rock” + “Seventy Years Later” yields only one quotation…
Log24 entries of Aug. 2, 2002:
From “Seventy Years Later,” Section I of “The Rock,” a poem by Wallace Stevens:
A theorem proposed
between the two —
Two figures in a nature
of the sun….
From page 63 of The New Yorker issue dated August 5, 2002:
“Birthday, death-day —
what day is not both?”
— John Updike
From Didion’s Play It As It Lays:
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes. I watch a hummingbird, throw the I Ching but never read the coins, keep my mind in the now.
— Page 8
From Play It As It Lays:
I lie here in the sunlight, watch the hummingbird. This morning I threw the coins in the swimming pool, and they gleamed and turned in the water in such a way that I was almost moved to read them. I refrained.
— Page 214
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
One heart will wear a Valentine.
— Sinatra, 1954
From Midnight, Dec. 28, 2002:
|
Kylie |
Our site music for today is Ravel’s classic, “Bolero.” For bolero purposes, some may prefer Kylie Minogue’s rendition of “Locomotion.” |
Related material:
 |
|
From a synopsis of Cinderella:
“Cinderella is in the Palace garden and is found by the Prince, who is dejected at the lack of success in the quest and throws the slipper away. Happily the Godmother (hidden in the bushes) catches it and replaces it on the bench next to the Prince, just as he remembers he should try it on Cinderella.
Crimson
on St. Cecilia’s Day
“… from the Age that is past,
To the Age that is waiting before.”
— Samuel Gilman, “Fair Harvard“
Published by The Harvard Crimson
on Monday, November 22, 2004:
|
Dylan Performs By KATHERINE CHAN Shouts of “Make way! Moses is here!” filled a restless crowd as legendary musician Bob Dylan closed off his College tour last night jamming in front of a sold out audience of Harvard undergraduates and Cambridge residents…. The turnout for last night’s two-hour show was greater than many of the student audience members anticipated… But despite the legendary hits and massive crowds, several students said they were disappointed with the show. “I love Bob Dylan. I just don’t know what he’s saying,” said Alexander A.C. De Carvalho ’08. |
Click on picture
for details.
From an entry of October 29, 2004:
|
“Each epoch has its singer.” “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….” “You said you’d never compromise |
From The New York Times today:
“It’s official, I guess. Forty years after he recorded it, Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was just named the greatest rock ‘n’ roll song of all time….”
Triple Play
(See entry of All Hallows’ Eve, 2004.)
On December 3…
In 1947, the Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire” opened on Broadway.
In 1953, the musical “Kismet” opened on Broadway.
In 1960, the musical “Camelot” opened on Broadway.
— AP, Today in History
(See entry of Nov. 22 with this title.)
In San Juan Ixtayopan, Mexico,
Wednesday, a procession from a church
to the site where two federal policemen
were lynched on Tuesday, Nov. 23.
1. |
2. |
3. |
4. |
The Poem of Pure Reality
"We seek
The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation,
straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object,
to the object
At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is…."
— Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" IX,
from The Auroras of Autumn (1950)
(Collected Poems, pp. 465-489)
I have added new material to Geometry of the 4×4 Square, including links to a new commentary on a paper by Burkard Polster.
"It is a good light, then, for those
That know the ultimate Plato,
Tranquillizing with this jewel
The torments of confusion."
— Wallace Stevens,
Collected Poetry and Prose, page 21,
The Library of America, 1997
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