Log24

Kernel and Moonshine

"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."

— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness

Some background—

An image from yesterday's search
God, TIme, Hopkins

"We got tom-toms over here bigger than a monster
Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla"

— "Massive Attack"

"I'm just checking your math on that. Yes, I got the same thing."

— "The Social Network"

"Live… Uh, check that… From New York, it's Saturday Night! "

From this morning's New York Times…

 "On November 12th and 13th, 2010,
  a meeting of Roman Catholic bishops
  convened to respond to the growing demand
  for exorcism rites."
  — Trailer for the film "The Rite," which opens today

Meanwhile, in this  journal on November 12th and 13th, 2010… Award Show Story.

Related material — God, Time, Hopkins and a Faustian link from November 12th.

Update of 9:57 AM 1/28— The Faustian link suggests readings from
James G. Hart's The Person and the Common Life  (Kluwer Academic, 1992).

See pages 1,  2,  3,  4,  and  5, and note especially the spider metaphor on page 5 —

Click to enlarge.

Related material: Daniel Bell on the City of Heaven
and the Louvin Brothers' "Cash on the Barrelhead."

Click for obit.

Background:

Hexagram 61
and
Still Point.

* Notably, of the film "Downfall" (Der Untergang ).
   "Has time rewritten every line?" —Streisand

"The ladder to the City of Heaven can no longer be a 'faith ladder,' but an empirical one," he wrote, "a utopia has to specify where one wants to go, how to get there, the costs of the enterprise, and some realization of, and justification for the determination of who is to pay."

— AP on Daniel Bell, Harvard professor of sociology, who died yesterday at 91

Early Nothing

Manohla Dargis on film director Fritz Lang in The New York Times  (online Jan. 21, 2011, printed Jan. 23)—

"Hollywood endings can be beautiful fibs, but in Lang’s movies the glossy smiles and fade-outs feel forced. You can almost feel him pulling at them, trying to bring them back into the dark where they belong. The miracle of his Hollywood era is that, even when the screenplays tried to force his work in one direction, he managed to take them into richer, more complex realms with a style that was alternately baroque and stripped down and peopled with characters whose cynicism was earned. Every so often, though, he did strike screenwriting gold, notably in 'The Big Heat,' his 1953 crime masterwork. 'Say, I like this, early nothing,' a mink-swaddled Gloria Grahame says of a hotel room. Everyone really is a critic."

Here comes everyone .

Hymn Noir

"This is that 'once in a lifetime,'
this is the thrill divine."

— Dorcas Cochran, "Again"

Background—

Today's previous post as well as Loretta's Rainbow,
the "hole in the record" theme in The Third Wor*d War,
"Is Nothing Sacred?," and James Joyce's Birthday, 2009.

See also "the name of the story" in this journal.

For Brian Rust, "father of modern discography,"
who died on Twelfth Night, 2011—

A song.

Related material— a video of the song—
Ida Lupino in "Road House" (1948) singing "Again."

See also this journal's Twelfth Night posts. (Note particularly the 4/01 link.)

"In the work of Ramanujan, the number 24 appears repeatedly.
This is an example of what mathematicians call magic numbers,
which continually appear, where we least expect them,
for reasons that no one understands."

— Michio Kaku, Hyperspace, Oxford U. Press, 1994, p. 173

See also "A Reappearing Number," this journal, July 4, 2010.

Yesterday's afternoon post—

"'Two distinguished philosophers from the heart of the profession
  offer a meditation on the meaning of life….'"

Today's funeral Mass for Sargent Shriver,
tonight's review in the New York TImes  of a singer
from the Kollege of Musical Knowledge,
and today's New York lottery numbers suggest the following links—

8/15 and 9/10.

Background— see Natural Hustler in this journal.

    This is from All Things Shining— "Conclusion: Lives Worth Living in a Secular Age"

Review of a 1968 novel by Wilfrid Sheed, who died today—

Sheed on his boyhood in My Life as a Fan: A Memoir —

"So it was back to… tinkering with my batting stance and praying that some one of my aged neighbors would miraculously rear back and give birth, like Sarah in the Bible, to a boy who would even more miraculously emerge at about my own age and not turn out to be a butterfly collector or other form of creep." (Simon & Schuster, 1993; in 2001 edition, page 84)

See also Shadow (September 23rd) —

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain" — John Shade in Pale Fire , a novel by butterfly collector Vladimir Nabokov

—as well as Intermediate Cubism and Ironic Butterfly.

"This is called the transformation of things."

The New York Times  now offers a sequel to its philosophy series "The Stone"—

"a sword that heals."

From the Times  City Room this afternoon—

Click to enlarge

"One wild rhapsody a fake for another."

— Wallace Stevens, "Arrival at the Waldorf," in Parts of a World  (1942)

"Not any or every death is an end, or birth a beginning."

— J. M. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel

Some related philosophy in  a novel —

For some background, see "New School for Social Research" and "Orozco" in this journal.

See also the brief biography of Bernstein in a document about a meeting last month
in the Orozco Room at the New School.

From 6/22, 2010 —

    I would argue that at least sometimes, lottery numbers may be regarded,
    according to Bernstein's definition, as story statements.

From 7/02, 2010 —

Where Entertainment Is God  continues...

New York Lottery today— Midday 710, Evening 563.

This suggeests a scientific note from the date 7/10  (2009) and the page number 563 from Dec. 29—

Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society , October 2002, p. 563:

“To produce decorations for their weaving, pottery, and other objects, early artists experimented with symmetries and repeating patterns.  Later the study of symmetries of patterns led to tilings, group theory, crystallography, finite geometries, and in modern times to security codes and digital picture compactifications.  Early artists also explored various methods of representing existing objects and living things.  These explorations led to… [among other things] computer-generated movies (for example, Toy Story ).”

– David W. Henderson, Cornell University

For a different perspective on Toy Story , see the Dec. 29 post.

Other entertainments — The novel Infinite Jest  and two versions of "Heeere's Johnny !" —

            From Stanley Kubrick and from today's New York Times :

See also All Things Shining  and the lottery theology of Jorge Luis Borges.