Log24

From a review by Dara Horn of …

Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, & Other Literary Essays
by Cynthia Ozick
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 224 pp., $25

"… the credo that has emerged throughout her career:
against idolatry, yes, but also in favor of the particular,
context, rootedness, the profound archaeological wells
from which no writer can be removed without removing
his or her greatest powers.

For Ozick herself, that archaeological well is not only Anglo-
American literature, but the far deeper well of Judaism." 

— "Cynthia Ozick:  Or, Immortality,"
Jewish Review of Books , Fall 2016

See also Michener's The Source  in this journal.

When Philosophy Mattered

A review of …

Continental Divide :  Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos
By Peter E. Gordon
(Harvard University Press, 426 pp., $39.95)

The reviewer: David Nirenberg in The New Republic .
The review, dated January 13, 2011, ran in the
February 3, 2011, issue of the magazine.

For remarks by a non-fictional Harvard professor, 
see the previous post.

See also Jews Telling Stories.

Continued .

From RIP, a post of Wednesday, March 16, 2016 —

See also earlier posts tagged Sermon Weekend.

From Balboa Press —

See "freeze the shifting phantasmagoria" in this journal.

"The Genesis of an Icon:
The Taiji  Diagram's Early History"
By François Louis
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
Vol. 63, No. 1 (June 2003), pp. 145-196

See also "arrowy, still strings" in this journal.

The phrase "binary opposition" in the previous post suggests
a review of some binary-related concepts —

Boole at Cork —

From a post on St. Finbarr's Day 2015 —

From http://www.chosentwo.com/buffy/quotes/harvest.php —

"And six sides to bounce it all off of."

"Symmetry, yes, but logic?"

— Photo caption in the New York Times  review of the 2008 Albee play
      at Princeton titled "Me, Myself & I"    

Above: Albee rests on Wittgenstein.

The late Edward Albee, as quoted today in The Telegraph :

“I tell my students, if you want to know something
about the structure of a play, listen to some Bach
preludes and fugues. I discovered classical music
when I was eight, nine, 10 years old, and I think
I learnt something about the nature of dramatic
structure from the nature of the music I was
listening to. I probably think of myself half the
time as a composer.”

See also  Box  as  Bach's.

(Continued)

"And six sides to bounce it all off of." 

* Spelling altered from the Stanford memorial page  
   to reflect the use of the term in this journal.

See the three dead Solomons in a Log24 post of May 8, 2016.

See also two posts from July on the day Solomon Feferman died —

A sample of the work of Feferman —

See also a tribute to Feferman respectively .

For Mrs.  Hyman, see the October Atlantic.

(C. K. Williams and Crazy Eddie)

Todd Gitlin on C. K. Williams, dead on 9/20, 2015 —

"He is unabashed about soul-search, as here (“Brain,” from Wait ) :

'I was traversing the maze of my brain;
corridors, corners, strange, narrow caverns, dead ends.
Then all at once my being like this in my brain,
this sense of being  my brain, became unbearable to me.
I began to wonder in dismay if the conclusion
I’d long ago come to that there can be nothing 
that might reasonably be postulated as
the soul apart from body and mind
was entirely valid.' "

Times Square on Crazy Eddie, reportedly dead on Sept. 10, 2016 — 

His prices …

"Every Story Has a Deadline"

— Cover of a novel,  Graveland

Quivering Antennae

This  journal on that date —

Or:  Elegy for Wiener Neustadt 

That town outside Vienna  was rather different in 1924,
the reported year of birth there of a woman whose obituary
appears in this evening's New York Times .

For the woman's later life, see the obituary.
See also a Log24 search for Times Square Church.

From the woman's reported date of death —

The New Yorker , issue dated Feb. 9, 2015 —

"After trying magic mushrooms in Cuernavaca, in 1960,
Leary conceived the Harvard Psilocybin Project, to study
the therapeutic potential of hallucinogens. His involvement
with LSD came a few years later."

Related viewing —

(Continued )

A 1984 master's thesis (PDF, 8+ MB) —

"Language, Linguistics, and Philosophy:
A Comparison of the Work of Roman Jakobson
and the Later Wittgenstein, with Some Attention
to the Philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce,"
by Miles Spencer Kimball.

Two pages from that thesis —

A Log24 noon post of June 29, 2016, The Mystery of O , 
links to the following passage —

This use of "O" is not a notation I recommend.

Online Vogue  today —

"For the first time, an exhibition at the Kunsthal Rotterdam—
'Peter Lindbergh: A Different Vision on Fashion Photography'—
will offer a robust survey of the photographer’s opus."

I find Lindbergh's early work as "Sultan" more interesting.

… For those taken aback by the tone of midnight's report
on the death of a 1960's counterculture figure.

See Didion's view of the counterculture in her classic
Slouching Towards Bethlehem .

A search in this journal for Didion + Nihilism yields …

Detail from the cover of the 1967 first issue of London's OZ magazine —

Other OZ news in Tuesday evening's online New York Times —

"Well, I tried to make it Sunday …" — America lyrics

In memory of the founder of the Eagle Forum 

The previous post suggests a Log24 search for
Stevens + Sorbonne.  This yields …

"The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to 
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again. 
Does it move to and fro or is it of both 
At once?”

— Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (1942)

Par exemple , the previous post's title:  "Space Case."

The New York Times  yesterday evening —

Butor reportedly died on August 24.

This journal on that date —

From Butor's obituary —

"He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne
under the phenomenologist
Gaston Bachelard, writing a thesis on
mathematics and the idea of necessity."

"In 2013 the Académie Française awarded
Mr. Butor its Grand Prix for his life’s work.

Explaining his philosophy in an interview
with the critic and television producer
Georges Charbonnier in 1965, Mr. Butor said,
'Every written word is a victory over death.' "

A search for Bachelard in this journal yields remarks
related to Bachelard's Poetics of Space  and to the above
phrase by Wallace Stevens.

Quoted here at 10 PM Pacific Time on Friday night —

"If I should die before I wake,
All my bone and sinew take
Put me in the compost pile
To decompose me for a while . . . ."

— Poem by Lee Hays

For the Church of Synchronology, a correction of
a recent New York Times  obituary by Daniel Lewis —

Actor Gene Wilder died early Monday, Aug. 29, not, as 
earlier reported, late Sunday, Aug. 28.

See also the last Log24 post of Sunday night, Aug. 28 (Angles of Vision)
and the first post of Monday morning, Aug. 29, 2016 (Roll Credits).

* For some reading related to the title, see an Evil Genius page
by the late David Lavery mentioning Colin Wilson's novel
The Mind Parasites .  Great entertainment for the tinfoil-hat crowd —

"More and more I feel like the narrator of Colin Wilson's 
The Mind Parasites , a phenomenologist who, along with
a dedicated group of compatriots, struggles clandestinely
to overthrow alien invaders that have secretly
taken captive the 'deep structure' of the human mind." 

CERN COURIER  May 28, 1999:

In hot pursuit of CP violation

"CP was a consolation prize for physicists.
At least it seemed so until 1964." 

"James W. Cronin, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics
for discovering a startling breakdown in what was assumed
to be the immutable symmetry of physical law, thereby
helping to explain the behavior and evolution of the universe
as a whole, died Aug. 25 in St. Paul, Minn. He was 84.

Dr. Cronin’s death was announced by the University of Chicago,
where he was a professor emeritus of physics as well as of
astronomy and astrophysics. No cause was reported."

— Martin Weil in The Washington Post , August 28, 2016

In Dead Earnest

(Poem by Lee Hays, performed by Pete Seeger)

If I should die before I wake,
All my bone and sinew take
Put me in the compost pile
To decompose me for a while . . . .

For a different sort of decomposition, see the previous post.