Log24

7/13:

(Rosh Hashanah began at sundown September 22; Yom Kippur begins at sundown October 1.  —holidays.net)

Mark Finkelstein today:
 

"Today comes more evidence of the left's painful struggle to deal with its diminished standing and repeated rejection at the polls. In the subscription-required Why Voters Like Values, [New York] Times columnist Judith Warner claims that "the Christian right's ability to stir voter passions is based not on values, but on psychology." Warner describes having bravely gone inside the belly of the conservative beast, recently attending a Values Voters Summit in DC, and declaring it "imbued with so much intolerance and hate." This is presumably in contrast with liberal love-ins, where Bush & Co. are regularly depicted as liars, murderers, Hitlers, etc.

She later describes a schadenfreude-provoking scene of the day after Kerry's 2004 defeat, picking through the rubble with Harvard psychology professor emeritus, Jerome Kagan, who tried to console Warner and presumably himself. As she describes it:

"Our conversation drifted to the Republicans' 'values' [note scare quotes] agenda, and Kagan's belief that values sell because they're an antidote to the endemic mental health problem of our time: depression.

"'Humans demand that there be a clear right and wrong,' he said. 'You've got to believe that the track you've taken is the right track. You get depressed if you're not certain as to what it is you're supposed to be doing or what's right and wrong in the world."

"People need to divide the world into good and evil, us and them, Kagan continued. To do otherwise– to entertain the possibility that life is not black and white, but variously shaded in gray– is perhaps more honest, rational and decent. But it's also, psychically, a recipe for disaster."

Got it? Liberalism is "more honest, rational and decent" than conservativism, but that's just not what the benighted public wants. They're looking for political Prozac, a Manichean worldview they can cling to, and that's what conservatism cunningly offers.

Less controversial values are provided by yesterday evening's Pennsylvania lottery— namely, the values 4, 5, and 6.

For a discussion of these values under the guise of musical intervals, see Professor Kagan again, in a paper (pdf) he wrote with Marcel R. Zentner, "Infants' Perception of Consonance and Dissonance in Music" (Infant Behavior & Development, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1998):

Adults judge as most consonant either the octave (difference of 12 semitones) [or the unison, difference of 0 semitones], the fifth (7 semitones), or the major third (4 semitones).

Illustration (see also yesterday evening):

Notes and frequency ratios

The paper discusses consonant intervals
as an example of alleged
"perceptual universals."

Related material on universals
suitable for today, the Feast of
St. Michael and All Angels:

Shining Forth and
Midsummer Eve's Dream.

The material in Shining Forth
is also related, tangentially, to the
following presentation of the
Warner "values" essay
in today's online New York Times:

The above three Times items,
taken together, suggest that
those in search of "values"
should consult Betty Suarez:

Click on picture for further details.

Immovable Feast

Today is the feast of Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, Archangels.

Today’s evening lottery number in the state of Grace was 546… or, digit by digit, 5 – 4 – 6.  Acoustic interpretation by frequency ratios: E, C, G.

Grace

Background on today’s noon entry:

1. “Macau’s economy is based largely on tourism, namely gambling.” —Wikipedia
2. The mid-day lottery today in the state of Grace: 313.

Background on today’s morning entry:

1. Log24 on 3/13, 2006:

   Note the… description
   of Christmas Eve 1900,
   and the remark that
   “Ici, le jour, c’est comme
   dans une église.”

2. Une église:
   The American Cathedral in Paris.

From Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday“– “Prophesy to the wind,     to the wind only for only The wind will listen.     And the bones sang chirping With the burden of the grasshopper,     saying….”          From The Man in the High Castle: “Juliana said, ‘Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?’ ‘You have a disconcertingly superstitious way of phrasing your question,’ Hawthorne said. But he had squatted down to witness the coin throwing. ‘Go ahead,’ he said; he handed her three Chinese brass coins with holes in the center. ‘I generally use these.’ She began throwing the coins; she felt calm and very much herself. Hawthorne wrote down her lines for her. When she had thrown the coins six times, he gazed down and said: ‘Sun at the top. Tui at the bottom. Empty in the center.’ ‘Do you know what hexagram that is?’ she said. ‘Without using the chart?’ ‘Yes,’ Hawthorne said. ‘It’s Chung Fu,’ Juliana said. ‘Inner Truth. I know without using the chart, too. And I know what it means.'” Our Lady of Judgment Day “One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.” — Emerson, Ch. VII, “Works and Days,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. VII, Society and Solitude (1870)

For a Dark Lady,
Soledad O’Brien,
Who Turns 40 Today:

Jerezana, by Paco de Lucia
(Requires RealPlayer and broadband)

From a 1967 album.

For a more recent look at de Lucia,
see his Cositas Buenas video
(wmv format) at flamenco-world.com.

At Midnight

“At midnight
   on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds,
   nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames
   begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot
   singe a sleeve.”

— From Byzantium, by
    William Butler Yeats

“The only hope, or else despair
    Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre–
    To be redeemed from fire by fire.”

— From Four Quartets, by
    Thomas Stearns Eliot

“Look around you. There is an eerie sense of Panic in the air, a silent Fear and Uncertainty that comes with once reliable faiths and truths and solid Institutions that are no longer safe to believe in…”

— Prepare for the Weirdness, by Hunter S. Thompson, quoted in a sermon for Pentecost Sunday, 2005

“If you passed, you got to live, and if you failed you were burned alive on a pyre that’s now the Transgender Studies Building.”

— Baccalaureate address at the interfaith worship service, Princeton University, on Pentecost Sunday, June 4, 2006

Review:

“At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement….”

A Sermon for Sartre

A sequel to
Les Mots:
Les Nombres

 “Words and numbers
are of equal value,
for, in the
cloak of knowledge,
one is warp
and the other woof.”
— The princesses
Rhyme and Reason
in The Phantom Tollbooth,
by Norton Juster, 1961

Lotteries 9/11/06	Midday	Evening
NY	394	628
PA	527	916

“Time and chance
happeneth to them all.”

— Ecclesiastes 9:11

Hermeneutics:

The numbers may be regarded
as coordinates in a map
of one spatial dimension
(a road dimension:
394 – Chautauqua, NY)
and of three
temporal dimensions
(birthday dimension 6/28,
Sartre dimension 5/27,
religious dimension 9/16).

This interpretation is of course
rather arbitrary, but so are most
interpretations.

Related material:
Sontag and Sartre this morning
and Sontag on Sunday.

Update of 1:29 AM 9/12:

 
“HASS-D”– Click here.

Sontag’s Sermon
continued from yesterday

Conclusion:

“My image of myself since age 3 or 4– the genius-schmuck. I allow one to pay off the other. Develop relationships to satisfy principally one or the other….

Sartre (cf. ‘Les Mots’) the only other person I know of who had this ‘certainty’ of genius. Living already a posthumous life, even as a childhood. (The childhood of a famous man.)

A kind of suicide– with the ‘work’ of genius you know you’ll do when adult your tombstone. The most glorious tombstone possible.

Sartre was very ugly– and knew it. So he didn’t have to develop ‘the schmuck’ to pay off the others for being ‘the genius.’ Nature had taken care of the problem for him. He didn’t have to invent a cause of failure or rejection by others. As I did, by making myself ‘stupid’ in personal relations. (For ‘stupid,’ also read ‘blind.’)”

— Susan Sontag in The New York Times Magazine yesterday

Meanwhile, back at MIT:

Doonesbury 9/11

Related material

from MIT’s School of
Humanities, Arts,
and Social Sciences
(SHASS),

and Log24 on
Sunday morning:

The Moralist:

“‘For the modern post-religious man,’ Susan Sontag wrote in a 1961 essay, ‘the religious museum, like the world of the modern spectator of art, is without walls; he can pick and choose as he likes, and be committed to nothing except his own reverent spectatorship.'”

— “The Moralist,” by Scott McLemee, The Boston Globe, July 16, 2006

The Moral:

The last words from the people in the towers and on the planes, over and over again, were ‘I love you.’  Over and over again, the message was the same, ‘I love you.’ …. Perhaps this is the loudest chorus from The Rock:  we are learning just how powerful love really is, even in the face of death.”

— The Rev. Kenneth E. Kovacs

ART WARS
continued:

Sontag’s Sermon

Sources:
This morning’s Log24 entry,
today’s New York Times Magazine,
and today’s Doonesbury.

Related material:

My Life among the Deathworks:
Illustrations of the
Aesthetics of Authority,
by Philip Rieff,
Sontag’s ex-husband.

See also Nicole Kidman in
the 2004 remake of
The Stepford Wives.

x

The Board

On chess and fiction:

“As Boileau-Narcejac* admirably said: ‘The creator invents the chessboard, the serial writer invents the moves.'” —Moez Lahmedi 

* Quoted by Marc Lits in Pour lire le roman policier, Bruxelles-Paris, De Boeck-Duculot, 1989, p. 7. 

The Moves

 “Problems are the poetry of chess.
 They demand from the composer
 the same virtues that characterize
 all worthwhile art:
 originality, invention,
 harmony, conciseness,
 complexity, and
 splendid insincerity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

In his honor, a small correction will be made this morning to the Wikipedia article on Harvard University.  The date of the founding of Harvard will be changed from today, September 8, to the apparently more correct date October 28 (1636).

“… the Massachusetts
Great and General Court…
on Oct. 28, 1636, set aside
400 pounds for that
     ‘schoale or colledge….'”

— TIME, Sept. 28, 1936

“Only through time
   time is conquered.”
— T. S. Eliot

Update of 7:14 PM Sept. 8:

Democracy has prevailed, and my correction has now been made politically correct.

Here is my comment at Wikipedia:

I see that Daniel P. B. Smith has changed the article in accordance with his earlier suggestion. This is at least an improvement. Enemies of Harvard’s political correctness may be amused by the fact that in the summary box, the college motto Veritas (Truth) is followed immediately by a Harvard lie.

“What, nephew,” said the king,
“is the wind in that door?”
SIR THOMAS MALORY
Le Morte d’Arthur

— Epigraph to
A Wind in the Door,
by Madeleine L’Engle

Vaine the ambition of Kings,
Who seeke by trophies and dead things,
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.

— John Webster,
The Devil’s Law Case

From Eliot’s
The Waste Land,

Part II, “A Game of Chess”:

I think we are in rats’ alley	115
Where the dead men       lost their bones	116
“What is that noise?”	117
The wind under the door.	118
“What is that noise now?        What is the wind doing?”	119
Nothing again nothing.	120

Eliot’s note:
118. Cf. Webster: “Is the wind
in that door still?”

The line cited in Eliot’s note
is from John Webster’s
The Devil’s Law Case,
3.2.162.

for Isak Dinesen,
who died in 1962
on this date

 Meanwhile…

 

Click on pictures for details.

Happy birthday, Robert M. Pirsig.

Readings for the hour of the wolf:

1. The Shining of May 29 (2002) and
2. For John F. Kennedy’s Birthday (2006).

Yesterday was Arthur Koestler’s birthday.

 “By groping toward the light
we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is
around us.”

— Arthur Koestler,
The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118

Happy Six

continued from
6/6/6

Click on picture
for details.

See also Saturday’s entry
and Sunday’s Pennsylvania
mid-day lottery:
666.

Related material:

Bright Star

(Monday, March 28, 2005),
the Log24 entries
for the following Friday
(April 1, 2005), and
the Pennsylvania lottery
evening number for that
Friday, April Fools’ Day:
666.

Today’s birthday:
the late Joan Aiken,
author of
The Shadow Guests.
(See Devil’s Night, 2005.)