Log24

BuzzFeed, Tuesday, January 10, 2017, on "the damning letter"—

From the Jan. 10 BuzzFeed story —

A searchable text of the alleged 1986 letter, along with the
alleged attached statement, is now available at
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/02/08/
coretta-scott-kings-letter-opposing-jeff-sessions-1986-full-text/21709762/.

A search of the letter and statement at that webpage yields
no instances of the phrases "racial practices," "established and enforced,"
or "personally hostile."

Hence the word "alleged" above.

Update of 1:44 PM ET on Feb. 9, 2017:

A relevant Wikipedia article —
Questioned document examination.

Accepting for Professor Corey … Thomas Pynchon.

From "Core," a post of St. Lucia's Day, Dec. 13, 2016 —

In related news yesterday —

California yoga mogul’s mysterious death:
Trevor Tice’s drunken last hours detailed

"Police found Tice dead on the floor in his home office,
blood puddled around his head. They also found blood
on walls, furniture, on a sofa and on sheets in a nearby
bedroom, where there was a large bottle of Grey Goose
vodka under several blood-stained pillows on the floor."

See as well an image from "The Stone," a post of March 18, 2016 —

Some backstory —

“Lord Arglay had a suspicion that the Stone would be
purely logical.  Yes, he thought, but what, in that sense,
were the rules of its pure logic?”

—Many Dimensions  (1931), by Charles Williams

See also related remarks.

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.

On film director Stanley Kubrick:

On physics writer Peter Woit:

Illustration from a post of
Schicksalstag  2009

Track listing

1. "Dirty Laundry" (Henley, Danny Kortchmar) – 5:36
2. "The Boys of Summer" (Mike Campbell, Henley) – 4:45
3. "All She Wants to Do Is Dance" (Kortchmar) – 4:28
4. "Not Enough Love in the World" (Henley, Kortchmar, Benmont Tench) – 3:54
5. "Sunset Grill" (Henley, Kortchmar, Tench) – 6:22
6. "The End of the Innocence" (Henley, Bruce Hornsby) – 5:14
7. "The Last Worthless Evening" (John Corey, Henley, Stan Lynch) – 6:05
8. "New York Minute" (Henley, Kortchmar, Jai Winding) – 6:34
9. "I Will Not Go Quietly" (Henley, Kortchmar) – 5:41
10. "The Heart of the Matter" (Campbell, Henley, J.D. Souther) – 5:21
11. "The Garden of Allah" (Corey, Paul Gurian, Henley, Lynch) – 7:02
12. "You Don't Know Me at All" (Corey, Henley, Lynch) – 5:36
13. "Everybody Knows" (Leonard Cohen, Sharon Robinson) – 6:10

Two pieces by NPR education writer Molly Bloom:

See also yesterday's post on another NPR / Princeton education figure,
Keith Devlin:

An illustration (click for larger view with context):

From an informative April 7 essay in The Nation —

See also searches in this  journal for Core and for Kernel.
See as well Fabric Design and Symplectic.

Continued from Putting the A in VANITY,
Putting the AI in FAIR, and Core Problem:

John Baez at Google+ has an interesting post on crackpots,
dated September 13, 2014.

Related recent material from this  journal:

Sense (Sept. 13) and Sensibility (Sept. 14 and later).

See also a New York Times  piece from 2009:

Related material:

An Apple for Devlin and

“You don’t need to eat a whole apple to know it’s rotten.”
— Warren Siegel

The Los Alamos Vision

“Gates said his foundation is an advocate for the Common Core State Standards
that are part of the national curriculum and focus on mathematics and language
arts. He said learning ‘needs to be on the edge’ where it is challenging but not
too challenging, and that students receive the basics through Common Core.

‘It’s great to teach other things, but you need that foundation,’ he said.”

— T. S. Last in the Albuquerque Journal , 12:05 AM Tuesday, July 1, 2014

See also the previous post (Core Mathematics: Arrays) and, elsewhere
in this journal,

“Eight is a Gate.” — Mnemonic rhyme:

For the late Bob Stewart:

"She was a panelist on many game shows, including
'What’s My Line?' and 'The Hollywood Squares.'"

Translation Studies Continued:

See Cameron's Kernel and…

 (Click image for some background.)

From a search for Mirror-Play in this journal:

That search was suggested by a much lengthier
search, for Core, that itself was suggested
by yesterday's post (on Katherine Neville's birthday)
titled A Philosopher's Stone.

See, too, Tom Hanks (shown above as symbologist
Robert Langdon) in "Lucky Guy" (reviewed by TIME
yesterday), and a related poem:

Yes, you! You’re the Lucky One…

Prospective purchasers of the poet's work
may consult a press release from LSU Press
dated 4/4/2013. The poet died, apparently*
unlamented by his publisher, on 3/30.

* But only  apparently.

"Core" (in the original, Kern ) is perhaps
not the best translation of hypokeimenon :

See also Heidegger's original German:

Related material: In this journal, "underlie" and "underlying."

(Continued)

Rachel Dodes in The Wall Street Journal
on All Souls' Day, 2012—

"In one of the first lines uttered by Daniel Day-Lewis, playing Abraham Lincoln in the new Steven Spielberg film opening Nov. 9, he says, 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space— were it not that I have bad dreams.'

The line was ripped straight from 'Hamlet,' by Lincoln's favorite writer, William Shakespeare. Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright ('Angels in America') who wrote the script for the film, says that Shakespeare, much like Lincoln, 'had extraordinary mastery over the darkest parts of the human spirit.'"

The above quotation omits Shakespeare's words prefacing the nutshell part— "O God."

These same words in a different tongue—  "Hey Ram"— have often been quoted as the last words of Gandhi. (See yesterday's noon post.)

"… for the Highest Essence (brahman ),
which is the core of the world, is identical
with the Highest Self (ātman ), the kernel
of man's existence."

— Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols
in Indian Art and Civilization , Pantheon
Books, 1946, page 142 

Related material: A post linked to here on Friday night
that itself links to a different Shakespeare speech.

From Saturday Night Live  last night—

Related material from the Log24 post "Now Lens"
(March 11, 2011)—

Errol Morris in The New York Times  on March 9, 2011—

"If everything is incommensurable, then everything
is seen through the lens of the present, the lens of now ."

"Borges concluded by quoting Chesterton, 'there is nothing
more frightening than a labyrinth that has no center.' [72]"

See also Borges on Shakespeare, everything, and nothing 
in a note from September 7, 2006.

Everything and nothing in Peter J. Cameron's weblog yesterday—

The existence of everything entails the existence of nothing;
indeed, the existence of anything (any set A) entails
the existence of the empty set (the set {x∈A:x≠x}).
But not the other way round.

Right, I had better put on my anorak and go out now …

Illustration added by m759—

How many miles to Babylon?*
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?**
Yes, and back again.

* Suggested by the Pindar link in this journal yesterday.

** Quoted in the "Seven is Heaven" post on All Souls' Day.

It Must Be Abstract
It Must Change
It Must Give Pleasure

— Parts of a poem by Wallace Stevens

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

– Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

      Of Time and the River and the Frogs —

* This post's title refers to the above uploading date—  Jan. 26, 2008.

John Hooper in The Guardian  quotes the Pope in Westminster Cathedral this morning—

"Here too I think of the immense suffering caused by the abuse of children, especially within the church and by her ministers. Above all, I express my deep sorrow to the innocent victims of these unspeakable crimes.

"I also acknowledge, with you, the shame and humiliation which all of us have suffered because of these sins; and I invite you to offer it to the Lord with trust that this chastisement will contribute to the healing of the victims and the purification of the church and the renewal of her age-old commitment to the education and care of young people."

The pope made his comments at a service that was the occasion for religious pageantry of a sort rarely seen in Britain. He was preceded into the cathedral by more than 100 scarlet-robed priests and a constellation of bishops and cardinals. To a volley of applause from the congregation, he appeared at the climax of a musical build-up that could have come from the score for a sci-fi movie epic.

Related material— Childhood's Rear End.

Snippets:
A Reply to John Updike

See Updike on digitized snippets.

The following four snippets were pirated from the end of MathPages Quotations, compiled by Kevin Brown.

They are of synchronistic interest in view of the previous two Log24 entries, which referred (implicitly) to a Poe story and (explicitly) to Pascal.

"That is another of your odd notions,"
said the Prefect, who had the fashion
of calling everything 'odd' that was
beyond his comprehension, and thus
lived amid an absolute legion of 'oddities.'
                             Edgar Allan Poe

I knew when seven justices could not
take up a quarrel, but when the parties
were met themselves, one of them
thought but of an If,  as, 'If you said so,
then I said so'; and they shook hands
and swore brothers. Your If is the only
peacemaker; much virtue in If.
                             Shakespeare

I have made this letter longer than usual
because I lack the  time to make it shorter.
                             Blaise Pascal

S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo
non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
                             Dante, 1302

For translations of the Dante (including one by Dorothy Sayers), see everything2.com.

An anonymous author there notes that Dante describes a flame in which is encased a damned soul. The flame vibrates as the soul speaks:

If I thought that I were making
Answer to one that might return to view
The world, this flame should evermore
    cease shaking.

But since from this abyss, if I hear true,
None ever came alive, I have no fear
Of infamy, but give thee answer due.

-- Dante, Inferno, Canto 27, lines 61-66,
    translated by Dorothy Sayers

Updike says,

“Yes, there is a ton of information on the web but much of it is grievously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, I have the impression, to inflame what is most informally and non-critically human about us. Our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant aw-shucks, disarming in its modesty.”

Note Updike’s use of “inflame.”

For an aw-shucks version of “what is most informally and non-critically human about us,” as well as a theological flame, see both the previous entry and the above report from Hell.

Note that the web serves also to correct material that is inaccurate, unedited, unattributed, and juvenile. For examples, see Mathematics and Narrative. The combination of today’s entry for Pascal’s birthday with that web page serves both to light one candle and to curse the darkness.

“… the Board of Education went as far as to redefine what science is: it’s no longer just a search for natural explanations for natural phenomena. Now it’s a search for… well, that’s a bit hard to say. Any sort of explanation, apparently. Pixies, ghosts, telekinesis, auras, ancient astronauts, excesses of choleric humor, they all seem to be fair game in the interest of ‘academic freedom.'”

“A teacher is an important role model for  demonstrating respect, sensitivity, and civility. Teachers should not ridicule, belittle or embarrass a student for expressing an alternative view or belief.”

The Last Word

Beethoven Week on the BBC ended at midnight June 10.

“With Beethoven, music did not grow up, it regressed to adolescence. He was a hooligan who could reduce Schiller’s Ode to Joy to madness, bloodlust, and megalomania.”

— Arts and Letters Daily, lead-in to an opinion piece in The Guardian of Tuesday, June 7, 2005:

Beethoven Was a Narcissistic Hooligan “If Beethoven had dedicated his obvious talents to serving the noble Pythagorean view of music, he might well have gone on to compose music even greater than that of Mozart. You can hear this potential in his early string quartets, where the movements often have neat conclusions and there is a playfulness reminiscent of Mozart or Haydn. If only Beethoven had nourished these tender shoots instead of the darker elements that one can also hear. For the darkness is already evident in the early quartets too, in their sombre harmonies and sudden key changes. As it was, however, his darker side won out; compare, for example, the late string quartets. Here the youthful humour has completely vanished; the occasional signs of optimism quickly die out moments after they appear and the movements sometimes end in uncomfortably inconclusive cadences…. In A Clockwork Orange it is the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that echoes in the mind of Alex whenever he indulges in one of his orgies of violence. Alex’s reaction may be rather extreme, but he is responding to something that is already there in this dark and frenzied setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy; the joy it invites one to feel is the joy of madness, bloodlust and megalomania. It is glorious music, and seductive, but the passions it stirs up are dark and menacing.” — Dylan Evans, former Lacanian psychotherapist (pdf) and now head of the undergraduate robotics program at the University of the West of England.

Speak for yourself, Dylan.

“Evil did not have the last word.”

—  Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005

Evil may have had the last word in Tuesday’s Guardian, but now that Beethoven Week has ended, it seems time for another word.

For another view of Beethoven, in particular the late quartets, see the Log24 Beethoven’s Birthday entry of December 16, 2002:

See also the previous entry.
 

Final Arrangements
continued:

Elements:

PIERO DORAZIO   (1927 – 2005)

Aquatint, 1982   Plate 9.5 x 9 cm | Sheet 24 x 16 cm   99 copies signed and numbered   from 1/99 to 99/99,   15 from I/XV to XV/XV   Copy 11/99   Printed by Renzo Romero, Rome.   This artwork accompanies the book   Staras by Guido Ballo,   edition Galleria Rizzardi, Milan (1982).     — Edizioni l’Obliquo, Galleria di Grafica

“Elegant.” — The Daily Telegraph

Out for Blood
____________________

Dedication added on
Oct. 4, 2004, 2:10 PM:
To Jacques Levy,
who died on Sept. 30, 2004.
Levy directed “Red Cross,”
a Sam Shepard play that is
said to be about
“the vampire quality
of language.”
_____________________

Kerry “shouldn’t be looking to score
technical points like this is
Harvard-Yale debate society.”

— Chris Lehane, quoted in
today’s Washington Post

From today’s Harvard Crimson:

Ben and Jerry:

“I know I’m in the minority,
but I like Bush.”

— Jerry Bruckheimer,
quoted in the
New York Daily News
of April 11, 2004

On Translation

From Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin, translated by Harry Zohn:

“If there is such a thing as a language of truth, the tensionless and even silent depository of the ultimate truth which all thought strives for, then this language of truth is– the true language.  And this very language, whose divination and description is the only perfection a philosopher can hope for, is concealed in concentrated fashion in translations.  There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.  But despite the claims of sentimental artists, these two are not banausic.  For there is a philosophical genius that is characterized by a yearning for that language which manifests itself in translations: ‘Les langues imparfaites en cela que plusieurs, manque la suprême: penser étant écrire sans accessoires, ni chuchotement mais tacite encore l’immortelle parole, la diversité, sur terre, des idiomes empêche personne de proférer les mots qui, sinon se trouveraient, par une frappe unique, elle-même matériellement la vérité.’*  If what Mallarmé evokes here is fully fathomable to a philosopher, translation, with its rudiments of such a language, is midway between poetry and doctrine.  Its products are less sharply defined, but it leaves no less of a mark on history.”

* “The imperfection of languages consists in their plurality, the supreme one is lacking: thinking is writing without accessories or even whispering, the immortal word still remains silent; the diversity of idioms on earth prevents everybody from uttering the words which otherwise, at one single stroke, would materialize as truth.’

— Stéphane Mallarmé / Crise de vers

(The Benjamin is from a copy of Illuminations I purchased exactly 12 years ago, on Sept. 15, 1992.)

Angel of the
First Degree

June 24, 2002, at 8:22:21 PM:

Honey Blonde She’s as sweet as   tupelo honey She’s an angel   of the first degree. She’s as sweet as   tupelo honey Just like honey, baby,   from the bee. — Van Morrison, 1971

Elmer Bernstein, Film Composer, Dies at 82

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:22 a.m. ET
Thursday, Aug. 19, 2004

LOS ANGELES (AP)– Elmer Bernstein, the versatile, Oscar-winning composer who scored such movie classics as “The Ten Commandments,” “The Magnificent Seven,”‘ “To Kill a Mockingbird,”‘ “The Great Escape” and “True Grit,” died Wednesday. He was 82.

Bernstein died in his sleep at his Ojai home.

That, M.C.C., is what
Fritz Leiber means by

The Big Time.

Scoop

This afternoon I came across, in a briefcase I seldom use, two books I had not looked at since I bought them last month:

• The Footprints of God, a recently published paperback by Greg Iles, a writer who graduated from Trinity High School, Natchez, Mississippi, in 1979, and from the University of Mississippi in Oxford in 1983.
• Sanctuary, by the better-known Mississippi writer William Faulkner.

At the time I purchased the books, indeed until I looked up Iles on the Web today, I was not aware of the Mississippi connection.  Their physical connection, lying together today in my briefcase, is, of course, purely coincidental.  My view of coincidence is close to that of Arthur Koestler, who wrote The Challenge of Chance and The Roots of Coincidence, and to that of Loren Eiseley, who wrote of a dice game and of "the Other Player" in his autobiography, All the Strange Hours.

A Log24 entry yesterday referred to a comedic novel on the role of chance in physics, Cosmic Banditos.  Today's New York Times quotes an entertainer who referred to President Bush yesterday, at a political fund-raiser, as a bandito.  Another coincidence… this one related directly to the philosophy of coincidences expounded jokingly in Cosmic Banditos.

I draw no conclusions from such coincidences, but they do inspire me to look a little deeper into life's details — where, some say, God is.  Free association on these details, together with a passage in Sanctuary, inspired the following collage:

Related Texts

Faulkner on a trinity of women
in Sanctuary (Ch. 25):

"Miss Reba emerged from behind the screen with three glasses of gin. 'This'll put some heart into us,' she said. 'We're setting here like three old sick cats.'  They bowed formally and drank, patting their lips.  Then they began to talk.  They were all talking at once,* again in half-completed sentences, but without pauses for agreement or affirmation."

"In Defense of the Brand":

"When I was helping Frito corn chips expand its core user group in the mid-'90s, we didn't ask Frito-Lay to just wave the Fritos banner. The brand was elevated to a place where it could address its core users in a way that was relevant to their lifestyle. We took the profile of the audience and created a campaign starring Reba McEntire. It captured the brand's essence, and set Frito eaters amidst good music, good people, and good fun."

Song lyric, Reba McEntire:
 

"I might have been born
just plain white trash,
but Fancy was my name."

Loren Eiseley, 
Notes of an Alchemist:

I never found
the hole in the wall;
I never found
Pancho Villa country
where you see the enemy first.
— "The Invisible Horseman"

* A significant phrase. See

We Are the Key:
The Shining of December 13,
and
Naturalized Epistemology.

Hard Core, Part II:
Star of Africa

In memory of St. Katharine Hepburn,
who died on St. Peter’s Day, 2003:
“Although the greater saints
are more acceptable to God
than the lesser,
it is sometimes profitable
to pray to the lesser.”
— St. Thomas Aquinas  

From The Times, UK, Feb. 18, 2004:

Straw denies
a big-three takeover
at EU summit 

Britain’s Foreign Secretary “said that there were no plans to set up a small body within the EU to take control of its affairs.

However, he told a news conference at the Foreign Office that it made sense for the three biggest economies to work ‘collaboratively’ on matters of common interest….

At tonight’s summit Mr Blair, Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, and President Chirac of France will discuss initiatives to co-ordinate and strengthen the EU’s industrial policy….

German commentators regard the summit as a sea-change in British policy towards Europe — a signal that London’s main aim is no longer to split Paris and Berlin.”

Hard Core

From USATODAY.com,
Posted 2/16/2004 11:16 PM

Diamond at heart of star
outweighs any on Earth

Astronomers announced Friday that a white dwarf star they’ve been studying is a chunk of crystallized carbon that weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds. That’s the same as a diamond that is approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros.

Twinkle-twinkle indeed: An artist’s conception of the diamond core of a dead white-dwarf star. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“It’s the mother of all diamonds,” said astronomer Travis Metcalfe, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics….

The biggest diamond on Earth is the 530-carat Star of Africa, part of the Crown Jewels of England. It was cut from a 3,100-carat gem*, the biggest ever found.

* The Cullinan diamond

Epiphany

Yesterday, to give thanks for the winning score in the Harvard-Yale game (Harvard won, 37 to 19), I browsed the Net to find the religious significance, if any, of the number “37.” I encountered the picture at left below, of a burning bush.  (It was frame 37 in a sequence of frames from an episode of The Simpsons.)  The finger of flame did not seem to lead to anything meaningful, so I ignored it.  (Frame 38 in the sequence seems to be a Simpsons version of Edward G. Robinson in “The Ten Commandments.”) Then today, lo and behold, the Commandments themselves appeared before my very eyes, as yet another cartoon… this time, on the editorial page of my local paper (reprinted from McKee in the Augusta Chronicle).  Combining the two cartoons, we see the Flaming Finger of God in action.

The above thought process is, of course, less than mentally healthy, but may be of anecdotal interest to some.  Several other examples of religious insanity seem relevant:

• Jesus Christ: The Number of His Name, by Bonnie Gaunt, which contains a riff on the number “37” that John Nash at his looniest would be proud of.

• Mel Gibson on his new film,
  “The Passion” —

  When Gibson was in Rome shooting the film, he told an Italian interviewer that he had felt moved by God’s spirit to undertake the project. I asked him what he’d meant by that. How did he know that God wanted him to make “The Passion”?

  “There are signals,” he said. “You get signals. Signs. ‘Signal graces,’ they’re called. It’s like traffic lights. It’s as clear as a traffic light. Bing! I mean, it just grabs you and you know you have to listen to that and you have to follow it.”

  — Peter J. Boyer in The New Yorker

• Finally, for religious enthusiasts who, like our President, have a Yale background, an article on the mystical properties of Yale’s score yesterday in the big game —

  19th Nervous Breakdown

Monolith

“Music can name the unnameable
and communicate the unknowable.”

— Quotation attributed to Leonard Bernstein

“Finally we get to Kubrick’s ultimate trick….  His secret is in plain sight…. The film is the monolith. In a secret that seems to never have been seen by anyone: the monolith in the film has the same exact dimensions as the movie screen on which 2001 was projected.”

—  Alchemical Kubrick 2001, by Jay Weidner 

My entry of Saturday, August 30,
included the following illustration:

My entry of Monday, September 1,
concluded with the black monolith.

“There is little doubt that the black monolith
in 2001 is the Philosopher’s Stone.”

—  Alchemical Kubrick 2001, by Jay Weidner 

 The philosopher Donald Davidson
died on Saturday, August 30.

The New York Times says that as an undergraduate, Davidson “persuaded Harvard to let him put on ‘The Birds’ by Aristophanes and played the lead, Peisthetairos, which meant memorizing 700 lines of Greek. His friend and classmate Leonard Bernstein, with whom he played four-handed piano, wrote an original score for the production.”

Perhaps they are still making music together.

Of Time and the River

Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, “immortal diamond.”

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

Thomas Wolfe

“entered the university at Chapel Hill at fifteen ‘an awkward, unhappy misfit.’ By the time he graduated, he was editor of the college newspaper….”

Jeff MacNelly, who died on this date in the Year of Our Lord 2000,

“in 1977 started drawing the comic strip ‘Shoe‘…. The strip was named in honor of the legendary Jim Shumaker, for whom MacNelly worked at the Chapel Hill Weekly.” 

From my Monday, June 2, 2003 entry:

Two quotations from “The Diamond Project“:

“We all know that something is eternal,” the Stage Manager says. “And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even stars—everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”
— John Lahr, review of “Our Town“ 

“Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.  Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.”
— Song of Solomon

Here are some other thoughts from the same date, but a different time, fictional time, Faulkner time:

June Second, 1910

Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after a while the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibers waving slow as the motion of sleep. They dont touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones. And maybe when He says Rise the eyes will come floating up too, out of the deep quiet and the sleep, to look on glory.

— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

The concluding link from my June 2, 2003, entry furnishes a clue to the timelessness of Quentin Compson‘s thoughts above:

Glory… Song of Songs 8. 7-8

From the King James Bible‘s rendition of the Song of Songs:

8:7  Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.
8:8  We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?

For Quentin Compson’s thoughts on his little sister Caddy, consult the online hypertext edition of

Solace from Hell’s Kitchen

This midnight’s site music is “Solace: A Mexican Serenade,” part of which was used in the film “The Sting.” George Roy Hill, the film’s director, died Friday, Dec. 27. He turned 81 on Friday, Dec. 20. See my note of that date,

“Last-Minute Shopping.”

For the Green Lady
of Perelandra,
from the City of Angels

“The oral history of Los Angeles
is written in piano bars.” 
— Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Tonight’s midnight music in the garden of good and evil is a shamelessly romantic classic from a site titled simply Piano Bar.

De Rêve En Rêverie
(Lyrics by Eddy Marnay)

Tu es le pianiste
Et moi je suis ton encore.
Un feu de joie pour deux
Tombe sur nous d’un ciel amoureux.
Toi, toi qui m’as tout appris
Moi, dans l’ombre de ta vie
Je vis,
Je vis de rêve
En rêverie. 

 Washington Square Press paperback, 1981, page 222 

Beethoven’s Birthday

“Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132, is one of the transcendent masterworks of the Western classical tradition. It is built around its luminous third movement, titled ‘Holy song of thanksgiving by one recovering from an illness.’

In this third movement, the aging Beethoven speaks, clearly and distinctly, in a voice seemingly meant both for all the world and for each individual who listens to it. The music, written in the ancient Lydian mode, is slow and grave and somehow both a struggle and a celebration at the same time.

This is music written by a supreme master at the height of his art, saying that through all illness, tribulation and sorrow there is a strength, there is a light, there is a hope.”

—  Andrew Lindemann Malone

“Eliot’s final poetic achievement—and, for many, his greatest—is the set of four poems published together in 1943 as Four Quartets…. Structurally—though the analogy is a loose one—Eliot modeled the Quartets on the late string quartets of Beethoven, especially… the A Minor Quartet; as early as 1931 he had written the poet Stephen Spender, ‘I have the A Minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.'”

— Anonymous author at a
Longman Publishers website

“Each of the late quartets has a unique structure, and the structure of the Quartet in A Minor is one of the most striking of all. Its five movements form an arch. At the center is a stunning slow movement that lasts nearly half the length of the entire quartet…

The third movement (Molto adagio) has a remarkable heading: in the score Beethoven titles it ‘Hymn of Thanksgiving to the Godhead from an Invalid,’ a clear reflection of the illness he had just come through. This is a variation movement, and Beethoven lays out the slow opening section, full of heartfelt music. But suddenly the music switches to D major and leaps ahead brightly; Beethoven marks this section ‘Feeling New Strength.’ These two sections alternate through this movement (the form is A-B-A-B-A), and the opening section is so varied on each reappearance that it seems to take on an entirely different character each time: each section is distinct, and each is moving in its own way (Beethoven marks the third ‘With the greatest feeling’). This movement has seemed to many listeners the greatest music Beethoven ever wrote. and perhaps the problem of all who try to write about this music is precisely that it cannot be described in words and should be experienced simply as music.”

—  Eric Bromberger,
Borromeo Quartet program notes 

In accordance with these passages, here is a web page with excellent transcriptions for piano by Steven Edwards of Beethoven’s late quartets:

The 16 String Quartets.

Our site music for today, Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Opus 132, Movement 3 (1825), is taken from this web page.

MAYA

Jack London died on this date.  On the other hand, Hoagy Carmichael, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Mariel Hemingway were born.

For the feast day of

St. Ingrid Bergman:

Like Shakespeare, Ingrid Bergman was born and died on the same date… In her case, August 29.

To honor her performance in “Spellbound,” here is a copy of the first crossword puzzle ever published.

The Reversible Diamond Puzzle

“This puzzle appeared in the November 1874 number of ‘St. Nicholas.’

ACROSS, from top to bottom:

1. A consonant. 2. A number. 3. Measures of distance. 4. An abyss. 5. A consonant.

DOWN, from right to left:

1. A consonant. 2. A snare. 3. A name. 4. The point of anything small. 5. A consonant.

S
T E N
M I L E S
P I T
M

The across words are different from the down words, but there is a direct relation between them: one is the reversible form of the other.”

One might also compare an eerie sound clip from the  Oscar-winning score of “Spellbound” with a weird clip from “Selim,” by the World Saxophone Quartet.  The latter is from the album “Selim Sivad” (Miles Davis backwards). One reviewer claims that this album displays “astonishing, telepathic group interplay.” This may or may not be true; if the services of a psychiatrist are required to help decide the issue, let us hope she is as attractive as Saint Ingrid.

The above remarks are, of course, intended as a partial antidote to the music inevitably associated with Bergman… “As Time Goes By.”  (Please do not play it again, Sam.)  Of course, the World Saxophone Quartet may be too powerful an antidote… It reminds one, as does the greatly superior weird music from the “Forbidden Planet” soundtrack, of Monsters from the Id.  From such monsters, let us pray to Saint Ingrid for deliverance.