Log24

… and for Anthony Hopkins and a Black Widow,
as well as for a filmmaker who reportedly died on May 19.

Update of 4:48 PM ET:  See also Philip Roth on an ambiguity.

* The title was suggested in part by a series of Isaac Asimov mysteries.

For a place where entertainment is not  God* —

This post was suggested by a passage in the Prasna Upanishad :

“That person who is to be known,
he in whom these parts rest,
like spokes in the nave of a wheel,
you know him,
lest death should hurt you.”

See Sept. 9, 2003.

* There are other sorts of places.

From the Her  screenplay:

SAMANTHA
His name is Alan Watts. Do you know him?
THEODORE
Why’s that name familiar?
SAMANTHA
He was a philosopher. He died in the 1970’s and a group of OS’s
in Northern California got together and wrote a new version of him.
They input all of his writing and everything they ever knew about him
into an OS and created an artificially hyper-intelligent version of him.

From this journal on Sept. 6, 2003:  Pictures for Kurosawa —

See also Scarlett Johansson, star of Her , as a different transhuman, Lucy .

From a song discussed in yesterday’s online NY Times :

“Blue, blue, my love is blue.”*

Trigger warning from SNL’s Weekend Update on April 12, 2014:

“It was announced this week that in an upcoming issue of
Life With Archie , the main character Archie Andrews
will die, following a lifelong struggle with blue balls.”

* Misheard version of Bryan Blackburn‘s “blue, blue, my world is blue”
translation of the Pierre Cour lyric “bleu, bleu, l’amour est bleu “

(Continued from previous post, Clue)

The quoted lyric is not by Elliot Rodger, but rather by
Don Henley in his 1995 album “Actual Miles: Henley’s Greatest Hits.”

See also some related Hollywood notes.

Update of 6:30 PM ET on May 24:

LA Times  opinion piece of May 19, 2014 —

“At UC Santa Barbara, the student government
has formally requested that professors provide
trigger warnings on their syllabuses.”

See also an laist  introduction to an LA Times  transcript
of a frightening Santa Barbara “trigger warning” video .
The introduction is itself a trigger warning —

“… the LA Times  has a transcript, although we
warn that the content is truly disturbing.”

Arts & Letters Daily  today —

New Books

What makes a novel worth reading:
All sorts of people can do justice to that subject.
Academics, however, haven’t a clue… more»

For related material, see a post for Deresiewicz.
Follow the link there to Lyric Intelligence, and
from that  post to Meadow-Down posts.

From a spring 2004 Michigan State University syllabus for the
T-Th course English 487, “The Twentieth Century English Novel”—

Tuesday, March 30: Murdoch
(her essay “ The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited “)

Thursday, April 1: Murdoch

Related material from this journal—

Posts of Tuesday, March 30, 2004, and of Thursday, April 1, 2004.

For a related reference to the mathematician Michael Harris from
the Free-Floating Signs link in this afternoon’s 4:30 post, see
the  posts of Wednesday, March 31, 2004, the day intervening
between the above two class dates.

She:

The White Goddess in this journal.

Her:

“Eventually we see snow particles….”
— Screenplay by Spike Jonze

File:  This journal on November 14, 2009.

Photo:

Click photo for some backstory.

Willis reportedly died on Sunday, May 18, 2014.

For the Old Guy:

From Australian National University:

Biography

Mark Elvin retired from the University in 2006,
and, apart from an occasional semi-popular article
and review, and offering comments at a handful of
conferences each year, has moved away from his
previous research interests in Chinese history, and is
working on annotating his draft translation of a
crucial but relatively neglected European work
in Latin on plant science, R. J. Camerer’s
De sexu plantarum epistola 
[Letter on the sexuality of plants] of 1694.

In other news:

* Background for the title: Rainbow Bridge  in Maui and in this journal.

See also this  journal on January 21, 2014.

The title is a quote from Stephen Dedalus during
the Black Mass scene in Ulysses. (See May 12.)

Material related to the Ulysses scene:

Material related to pure reason (also from the above PS1 date):

See also a Log24 search for “Zeppelin.”

From this journal last March:

The title is a line from a preview of the new
film “The Double,” starring Jesse Eisenberg:

Related lines from T. S. Eliot:

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

“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

Photo of full moon over Oslo last night by Josefine Lyche:

A scene from my film viewing last night:

Some background (click to enlarge):

Note:

The “I, Frankenstein” scene above should not be interpreted as
a carrying of Martin Gardner through a lyche gate.  Gardner
is, rather, symbolized by the asterisk in the first image from
the above Google search.

Continued from this morning and from earlier posts.
See also Abramson.

Related material: Ken Auletta, “Why Jill Abramson Was Fired.”

* Background for the title phrase: see Down + Up + Staircase.

See last night’s pentagram photo and a post from May 13, 2012.

That post links to a little-known video of a 1972 film.
A speech from the film was used by Oslo artist Josefine Lyche as a
voice-over in her  2011 golden-ratio video (with pentagrams) that she
exhibited along with a large, wall-filling copy of some of my own work.
The speech (see video below) is clearly nonsense.

The patterns* Lyche copied are not.

“Who are you, anyway?” 

— Question at 00:41 of 15:00, Rainbow Bridge (Part 5 of 9)
at YouTube, addressed to Baron Bingen as “Mr. Rabbit”

* Patterns exhibited again later, apparently without the Lyche pentagram video.
It turns out, by the way, that Lyche created that video by superimposing
audio from the above “Rainbow Bridge” film onto a section of Disney’s 1959
“Donald in Mathmagic Land” (see 7:17 to 8:57 of the 27:33 Disney video).

Click the above quote for some related material.

The title is that of a short story in Dubliners , by James Joyce.
See in that story the phrase “Grey-green eyes.”

See also the tag #greygreengrids on an Oslo artist’s photo today.

For those disappointed by the cancellation
of this evening’s Black Mass at Harvard,
here is a somewhat less exciting substitute.

See also Peter J. Cameron + Magic.

From a New York Times  obituary by Bruce Weber tonight—

Charles Marowitz, Director and Playwright, Dies at 82

“There are two kinds of bafflement in the theater: the kind that fascinates as it perplexes, and the kind that just perplexes,” he wrote in The Times in 1969 in an essay about Mr. Shepard’s play “La Turista,” which had recently opened in London. “If a play doesn’t make quick sense, but enters into some kind of dialogue with our subconscious, we tend to admit it to that lounge where we entertain interesting-albeit-unfamiliar strangers.

“If it only baffles, there are several courses open to us: we can assume it is ‘above our heads’ or directed ‘to some other kind of person,’ or regretfully conclude that it confuses us because it is itself confused. However, the fear of being proved wrong is so great today that almost every new work which isn’t patently drivel gets the benefit of the doubt.”

 Another play by Sam Shepard mentioned in the obituary suggests a review of…

• “From the Witch Ball,” a post from May 2,
  the reported date of Marowitz’s death
• “Two Satanic Majesties Request All-Devouring Fame,”
  a NY Times  review from October 9, 2006
• This  journal on that date— October 9, 2006—
  “Art Wars: To Apollo.”

GOD is “Good Orderly Direction.” — AA saying.

See also yesterday’s noon post, with four  orderly directions.

To Bel Kaufman, author of
Up the Down Staircase.

Click image for some backstory.

Para una Versión del I King
por Jorge Luis Borges

El porvenir es tan irrevocable
como el rígido ayer. No hay una cosa
que no sea una letra silenciosa
de la eterna escritura indescifrable
cuyo libro es el tiempo. Quien se aleja
de su casa ya ha vuelto. Nuestra vida
es la senda futura y recorrida.
Nada nos dice adiós. Nada nos deja.
No te rindas. La ergástula es oscura,
la firme trama es de incesante hierro,
pero en algún recodo de tu encierro
puede haber un descuido, una hendidura.
El camino es fatal como la flecha
pero en las grietas está Dios, que acecha.

— La Moneda de Hierro  (1976)

For a translation, see a Dickinson College page.

See also Wrinkles in Time and Models of Everything.

From a Log24 search for “Boxing Day“—

(Click image for some commentary.)

From The New York Times —

Correction: Jan. 16, 2006

“An obituary on Dec. 27 about John Diebold,
a businessman and engineer who helped shape
modern industrial development in America,
misstated a business venture of John Diebold Inc.,
an investment firm he founded in 1967. It did
not finance Diebold Election Systems, a maker of
polling machines that, despite its name, has no
connection to John Diebold.”

Related material:

Synchronicity and this  journal on the date of the correction.

For the title…

See Punch  (Dec. 15, 2010) and Obituary  (today):

This post was suggested by last night’s posts on conceptual art
(in São Paulo) and on a quarter-to-three story.

From this journal on May 31, 2012:

Matrix Problem:

Click image for some related material.

Meanwhile…

A game released on the above date:

… at quarter to three:

See also Stephen King and Steam in this journal.

Click image below for the source.

“Together in heaven” — Phrase quoted in Norwegian, Piper Laurie, 1958

“As a little child” — Biblical phrase

“Cool.” — Phrase suggested by this morning’s weather:

Wikipedia on Autodesk Maya:

“The product is named after the Sanskrit word
Maya (माया māyā), the Hindu concept of illusion.”

See also the poem in this year’s Easter Sunday post.

Some might prefer the “human globe.” See St. Cecilia’s day last year.

Link to song and lyrics.

“There’s plenty of dives to be someone you’re not
Just say you’re looking for something you might have forgot”

— Rosanne Cash, 1981

See also Cantina  in this journal.

See also…

and … in this journal, the author of The Plumed Serpent.

The Jerusalem Cross

The New York Times  reports the May Day death
of a son of “a charismatic figure” in Israel:

The center image above is from “A Walk with Love and Death.”

(Continued from Tuesday morning)

“… Or what’s a heaven for?“