The Interpreter’s House

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Second Part, “The Interpreter’s House“–

“When the Interpreter had shown them this, He has them into the very best room in the house; a very brave room it was. So He bid them look round about, and see if they could find anything profitable there. Then they looked round and round; for there was nothing there to be seen but a very great spider on the wall: and that they overlooked.

MERCY. Then said Mercy, Sir, I see nothing; but Christiana held her peace.

INTER. But, said the Interpreter, look again, and she therefore looked again, and said, Here is not anything but an ugly spider, who hangs by her hands upon the wall. Then said He, Is there but one spider in all this spacious room? Then the water stood in Christiana’s eyes, for she was a woman quick of apprehension; and she said, Yea, Lord, there is here more than one. Yea, and spiders whose venom is far more destructive than that which is in her. The Interpreter then looked pleasantly upon her, and said, Thou hast said the truth. This made Mercy blush, and the boys to cover their faces, for they all began now to understand the riddle.‌74‌

Then said the Interpreter again, “The spider taketh hold with their hands (as you see), and is in kings’ palaces’ (Prov. 30:28). And wherefore is this recorded, but to show you, that how full of the venom of sin soever you be, yet you may, by the hand of faith, lay hold of, and dwell in the best room that belongs to the King’s house above!‌75‌

CHRIST. I thought, said Christiana, of something of this; but I could not imagine it all. I thought that we were like spiders, and that we looked like ugly creatures, in what fine room soever we were; but that by this spider, this venomous and ill-favoured creature, we were to learn how to act faith, that came not into my mind. And yet she has taken hold with her hands, as I see, and dwells in the best room in the house. God has made nothing in vain.”

Related material:

The spider metaphor in
Under the Volcano
(April 10, 2004) and
an AP obituary
from yesterday.

The Child Trap

See E! Online, March 18 — Lindsay Lohan Remembers Parent Trap Mum

See also
 

For those who like such things, an excellent Marxist analysis of Watchmen from another fan:

Whitson, Roger. “Panelling Parallax: The Fearful Symmetry of Alan Moore and William Blake.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies Vol. 3 No. 2 (2007). Dept. of English, University of Florida.

Whitson’s subject, Alan Moore, is the author of the Watchmen graphic novel. Moore’s style seems less suited to the Forth family pictured above than to Lindsay Lohan fans– who may also enjoy another graphic novel by Moore, Lost Girls.

More Lohan material related to her role in “Georgia Rule“–

Further background:

“The film realizes that if people actually fought crime, they’d most likely be crazy. Take The Comedian for an example. He fights crime, sure. He’s also a raging alcoholic.” –“‘Watchmen’ a flawed masterpiece,” by Ryan Michaels

See also the following expanded version of a link from Sunday morning, March 22:

“Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas– only I don’t exactly know what they are!…. Let’s have a look at the garden first!”

— A passage from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The “garden” part– but not the “ideas” part– was quoted by Jacques Derrida in Dissemination in the epigraph to Chapter 7, “The Time before First.”

“‘For you… he… we aren’t meaning…’ She was almost stammering, as if she were trying to say several things at once…. Suddenly she gave a little tortured scream. ‘O!’ she cried, ‘O! I can’t keep up! it keeps dividing! There’s too many things to think of!'”

— A passage from Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion, Chapter 12.

“He was thinking faster than he had ever done, and questions rose out of nothing and followed each other– what was to will? Will was determination to choose– what was choice? How could there be choice, unless there was preference, and if there was preference there was no choice, for it was not possible to choose against that preferring nature which was his being; yet being consisted in choice, for only by taking and doing this and not that could being know itself, could it indeed be; to be then consisted in making an inevitable choice, and all that was left was to know the choice, yet even then was the chosen thing the same as the nature that chose, and if not… So swiftly the questions followed each other that he seemed to be standing in flashing coils of subtlety, an infinite ring of vivid intellect and more than intellect, for these questions were not of the mind alone but absorbed into themselves physical passion and twined through all his nature on an unceasing and serpentine journey.”

— A passage from The Place of the Lion, Chapter 10.

“Do you like apples?“

— Good Will Hunting

“The Ambition of the Short Story,” the essay by Steven Millhauser quoted here on Tuesday, September 30, is now online.

On John McCain’s presidential campaign eight years ago:

“He always pauses a second for effect and then says: ‘I’m going to tell you something. I may have said some things here today that maybe you don’t agree with, and I might have said some things you hopefully do agree with. But I will always. Tell you. The truth.’ This is McCain’s closer, his last big reverb on the six-string as it were. And the frenzied standing-O it always gets from his audience is something to see. But you have to wonder. Why do these crowds from Detroit to Charleston cheer so wildly at a simple promise not to lie?

Well, it’s obvious why. When McCain says it, the people are cheering not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him. They’re cheering the loosening of a weird sort of knot in the electoral tummy. McCain’s resume and candor, in other words, promise not empathy with voters’ pain but relief from it. Because we’ve been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It’s ultimately just about that complicated. It hurts.

We learn this at like age four– it’s grownups’ first explanation to us of why it’s bad to lie (‘How would you like it if…?’). And we keep learning for years, from hard experience, that getting lied to sucks– that it diminishes you, denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world. Especially if the lies are chronic, systemic, if experience seems to teach that everything you’re supposed to believe in’s really just a game based on lies….

… It’s painful to believe that the would-be ‘public servants’ you’re forced to choose between are all phonies… who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they’ve just got to believe you’re an idiot.”

From Drummers for Jesus:

Serpent Cymbal
 

 http://www.serpentcymbals.com

“Explosive, complex, full and dark. The first cymbal with VIBRATO. Nothing else comes close!

Serpent Cymbals enters the special effects cymbal market with a stunning new cymbal boasting a radical new sound and design. ‘This cymbal sounds like a cross between a china cymbal, crash cymbal, gong and thunder sheet with a stick of dynamite tossed in for fun’….”

A Flag for Sunrise

The title of the Robert Stone
novel comes from Emily Dickinson:

A Wife -- at daybreak I shall be --
Sunrise -- Hast thou a Flag for me?
At Midnight, I am but a Maid,
How short it takes to make a Bride --
Then -- Midnight, I have passed from thee
Unto the East, and Victory --

Midnight -- Good Night! I hear them call,
The Angels bustle in the Hall --
Softly my Future climbs the Stair,
I fumble at my Childhood's prayer
So soon to be a Child no more --
Eternity, I'm coming -- Sire,
Savior -- I've seen the face -- before!

In keeping with the spirit of previous Log24 entries, here is today’s Pennsylvania Lottery commentary.  This afternoon’s entry suggests an interpretation of today’s numbers as comments on the new film “Georgia Rule.”

Today’s mid-day number, 384, is the number of symmetries of the tesseract, a geometric figure illustrated on the cover of the novel The Gameplayers of Zan (see, for instance, May 10, 2007).  That novel suggests an interpretation of today’s evening number, 952, as addressing (literally) the subject of Life.

See the address mathforum.org/library/view/952.html.

From that address:

“The Game of Life is played on a field of cells, each of which has eight neighbors (adjacent cells). A cell is either occupied (by an organism) or not. The rules for deriving a generation from the previous one are these: Death – If an occupied cell has 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 occupied neighbors, the organism dies (0, 1: of loneliness; 4 thru 8: of overcrowding). Survival – If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation. Birth – If an unoccupied cell has three occupied neighbors, it becomes occupied.”

Relevance to the film “Georgia Rule”: lonesomeness, generations, and the Lord’s name–

Georgia is a “lonesome and decent widow in wholesome Hull, Idaho…. her framed motto is ‘Count Your Blessings’ and she’s ready to ram [a] soap bar into your mouth if you insult the Lord’s name.” –David Elliott, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 11, 2007

There is not universal agreement on just what is the Lord’s name. Perhaps it includes the number 952.

From The Gameplayers of Zan:

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago– first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone.”

From Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations:

“Nothing can be produced out of nothing.”
— 10th edition, 1919, page 952

See also “Zen and Language Games“
and “Is Nothing Sacred?“

Seven

“Research & Ideas” memo from Harvard Business School dated April 17, 2006:

“The word experience comes from the Latin words ex pericolo, which mean ‘from danger.'”

— Etymology by Professor Joseph Badaracco of Harvard University.  Badaracco gives no evidence for his dubious claim.

Related (if only temporally):
Easter Monday, April 17, 2006.

      — Online Etymology Dictionary

The title of this entry refers to the time it was posted. Related references to seven: April 7, 2003, and today’s previous entry.

See also an entry from 2/29, 2004
(Leap Day and Oscar Night):

Harvard persons from parts of the university that are more scholarly than the Business School may sneer at the above-quoted Online Etymology Dictionary.  They can consult the following:

On “experience”

From J.L. Austin, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play:

“Scholars, such as Julius Pokorny (Indogermanisches Etymolgisches Worterbuch, 1959), trace ‘experience’ right back to hypothetical Indo-European base or root *per-, ‘to attempt, venture, risk,’ whence the Greek peira,”experience,” the source of our word ’empirical.’ It is also the verbal root which derives the Germanic *feraz, giving rise to Old English faer, “danger, sudden calamity,” whence Modern English ‘fear.’ Already, we see the ‘cognitive’ directions taken by * per-, through the Greek route, and affective ones, through the Germanic — which would have interested Dilthey, one may be sure! But more directly ‘experience’ derives, via Middle English and Old French, from the Latin experientia, denoting ‘trial, proof, experiment,’ itself generated from experiens, the present participle of experiri, ‘to try, test,’ from from ex-, ‘out’ + base per as in peritus, ‘experienced,’ ‘having learned by trying.’ The suffixed extended form of *per is peri-tlo-, whence the Latin periclum, periculum, “trial, danger, peril. Once more, we find experience linked with risk, straining towards ‘drama,’ crisis, rather than bland cognitive learning!”

“… Finally, ‘experiment,’ like ‘experience,’ is derived from Latin experiri “to try or test.” If we put these various senses together we have a ‘laminated’ semantic system focused on ‘experience,’ which portrays it as a journey, a test (of self, of suppositions about others), a ritual passage, an exposure to peril or risk, a source of fear. By means of experience, we ‘fare’ ‘fearfully’ through ‘perils,’ taking ‘experimental’ steps. …” (17-18)

The above is taken from an anonymous weblog entry.  The author of the entry identified the source as From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play.  The author of the entry falsely stated that the author of this book was J. L. Austin.  In fact, the book was written by Victor Turner, apparently the same philosophical sociologist whom we encountered in the previous entry and in the Log24 entry for the recent feast of St. Max Black.  Turner may have been quoting Austin; pages from the book are not available online.  Another author, however, says the quotation is by Turner himself.  See Rena Fraden’s Imagining Medea, pp. 218-219.

Today’s previous entry is a sort of “ritual passage” for a Nobel Prize winner. For a ritual passage more directly related to Professor Badaracco, see the Brookline TAB obituary of his 23-year-old daughter, who died on Monday, August 21, 2006.  According to today’s online Harvard Crimson, “she was walking along Hammond Street in Newton [Mass.] when an 84-year-old driver jumped the curb and struck her.”

From her Brookline TAB obituary of Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006:

“Funeral services will be held Friday [Aug. 25, 2006] at 10 a.m. at St. Mary’s of the Assumption Church, at 67 Harvard St.

The family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Centro Romero Community Center in Chicago: 6216 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL 60660.”

The Great Bartender
by Peter Viereck (1948)

Being absurd as well as beautiful,
Magic– like art– is hoax redeemed by awe.
(Not priest but clown,
     the shuddering sorcerer
Is more astounded than
     his rapt applauders:
“Then all those props and Easters
     of my stage
Came true?  But I was joking all the time!”)
Art, being bartender, is never drunk;
And magic that believes itself, must die.
My star was rocket of my unbelief,
Launched heavenward as
     all doubt’s longings are;
     It burst when, drunk with self-belief,
I tried to be its priest and shouted upward:
“Answers at last!  If you’ll but hint
     the answers
For which earth aches, that famous
     Whence and Whither;
Assuage our howling Why? with final fact.”

— As quoted in The Practical Cogitator,
   or The Thinker’s Anthology,
   Selected and Edited by
   Charles P. Curtis, Jr., and
   Ferris Greenslet,
   Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged,
   With a new Introduction by
   John H. Finley, Jr.,
   Houghton Mifflin Company,
   Boston, 1962

The dates of Viereck’s birth and death are according to this morning’s New York Times.

“As in Monopoly, the fortunes of
the Boardwalk depend on the roll of
the dice.  It’s the final stop on the
game board, the crown jewel….”

— Eileen Smith, Sept. 6, 2004

A link from Log24 last night:

A Throw of the Dice:
The Life of Stéphane Mallarmé

From Log24 on Aug. 29, 2003:

“My wife took, unnoticed, this picture, unposed, of me in the act of writing a novel…. The date (discernible in the captured calendar) is February 27, 1929. The novel, Zashchita Luzhina (The Defense), deals with the defense invented by an insane chess player….”
— Vladimir Nabokov, note to photograph following page 256 in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, Vintage International paperback, August 1989

— Quoted in The Matthias Defense

From a site titled Meaning of the Twentieth Century —

“Freeman Dyson has expressed some thoughts on craziness. In a Scientific American article called ‘Innovation in Physics,’ he began by quoting Niels Bohr. Bohr had been in attendance at a lecture in which Wolfgang Pauli proposed a new theory of elementary particles. Pauli came under heavy criticism, which Bohr summed up for him: ‘We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that is not crazy enough.’ To that Freeman added: ‘When a great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer, himself, it will be only half understood; to everyone else, it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope!’ “

— Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe, 1979, pp. 146, 147

It is my hope that the speculation, implied in The Matthias Defense, that the number 162 has astonishing mystical properties (as a page number, article number, etc.) is sufficiently crazy to satisfy Pauli and his friend Jung as well as the more conventional thinkers Bohr and Dyson.

— Log24.net, Feast of St. Mark, 2003

See also The Black Queen and The Eight.
 
In accordance with the theology of the previous entry, based on Zein’s list of the most common Chinese characters, here are some meanings of

[si4] {sì} /to watch/to wait/to examine/to spy/
[si4] {sì} /to seem/to appear/similar/like/to resemble/
[si4] {sì} /until/wait for/
[si4] {sì} /rhinoceros indicus/
[si4] {sì} /four/
[si4] {sì} /(surname)/wife of older brother/
[si4] {sì} /Buddhist temple/
[si4] {sì} /6th earthly branch/9-11 a.m./
[si4] {sì} /stream which returns after branching/
[si4] {sì} /place name/snivel/
[si4] {sì} /offer sacrifice to/
[si4] {sì} /hamper/trunk/
[si4] {sì} /plough/ploughshare/
[si4] {sì} /four (fraud-proof)/market/
[si4] {sì} /to feed/
[si4] {sì} /to raise/to rear/to feed/
[si4] {sì} /team of 4 horses/
[si4 bai3 wan4] {sì bǎi wàn} /four million/
[si4 bai3 yi4] {sì bǎi yì} /40 billion/
[si4 cao2] {sì cáo} /feeding trough/
[si4 cao3] {sì cǎo} /forage grass/
[si4 chu4] {sì chù} /all over the place/everywhere and all directions/
[si4 chuan1] {sì chuān} /Sichuan province, China/
[si4 chuan1 sheng3] {sì chuān shěng} /(N) Sichuan, a south west China province/
[si4 de5] {sì de} /seem as if/rather like/
[si4 fang1] {sì fāng} /four-way/four-sided/
[si4 fen1 zhi1 yi1] {sì fēn zhī yī} /one-quarter/
[si4 fu2] {sì fú} /servo/
[si4 fu2 qi4] {sì fú qì} /server (computer)/
[si4 ge4 xiao3 shi2] {sì gè xiǎo shí} /four hours/
[si4 hu5] {sì hu} /apparently/to seem/to appear/as if/seemingly/
[si4 hu5 hen3 an1 quan2] {sì hu hěn ān quán} /to appear (to be) very safe/
[si4 ji1] {sì jī} /to watch for one's chance/
[si4 ji4] {sì jì} /(n) the four seasons/
[si4 liao4] {sì liào} /feed/fodder/
[si4 lun2 ma3 che1] {sì lún mǎ chē} /chariot/
[si4 men2 jiao4 che1] {sì mén jiào chē} /sedan (motor car)/
[si4 mian4 ba1 fang1] {sì miàn bā fāng} /in all directions/all around/far and near/
[si4 mian4 ti3] {sì miàn tǐ} /tetrahedron/
[si4 miao4] {sì miào} /temple/monastery/shrine/
[si4 nian2] {sì nián} /four years/
[si4 nian2 qian2] {sì nián qián} /four years previously/
[si4 nian2 zhi4 de5 da4 xue2] {sì nián zhì de dà xué} /four-year university/
[si4 qian1] {sì qiān} /four thousand/4 000/
[si4 shi2] {sì shí} /forty/40/
[si4 shi2 duo1] {sì shí duō} /more than 40/
[si4 shi2 liu4] {sì shí liù} /forty six/46/
[si4 shi2 san1] {sì shí sān} /43/forty three/
[si4 shi4 er2 fei1] {sì shì ér fēi} /(saying) appeared right but actually was wrong/
[si4 tian1] {sì tiān} /four days/
[si4 xiao4 fei1 xiao4] {sì xiào fēi xiào} /(saying) resemble a smile yet not smile/
[si4 xue3] {sì xuě} /snowy/
[si4 yang3] {sì yǎng} /to raise/to rear/
[si4 yang3 zhe3] {sì yǎng zhě} /feeder/
[si4 yuan4] {sì yuàn} /cloister/
[si4 yue4] {sì yuè} /April/fourth month/
[si4 yue4 shi2 qi1 hao4] {sì yuè shí qī hào} /April 17/
[si4 zhi1] {sì zhī} /(n) the four limbs of the body/
[si4 zhou1] {sì zhōu} /all around/

— ktmatu.com Chinese-English dictionary

Women’s History Month, continued:

Crimson
on St. Cecilia’s Day

“… from the Age that is past,
To the Age that is waiting before.”
— Samuel Gilman, “Fair Harvard“

Published by The Harvard Crimson
on Monday, November 22, 2004:

From an entry of October 29, 2004:

From The New York Times today:

“It’s official, I guess. Forty years after he recorded it, Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was just named the greatest rock ‘n’ roll song of all time….”

It’s Alive!

“People once worried about the boundary between the living and the nonliving. Today, the boundary seems meaningless….”

— Attributed to Francis Crick
    (now among the nonliving) 

Opening of
the above novel:

“My name is David Tennant, M.D.
I’m professor of ethics at the
University of Virginia Medical School,
and if you’re watching
this tape, I’m dead.”

From a public-relations newsletter
of the University of Southern California’s
Health Sciences Campus
dated April 20, 2001:

See also the previous entry,
on Anderson’s arrest Friday
on charges of child molestation.

For the origin of the title GATTACA,
see The Diamond Code. 

— Claudia Luther and Elaine Dutka,
   Los Angeles Times staff writers

Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront:

Terry Malloy: “It wasn’t him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, ‘Kid, this ain’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson.’ You remember that? ‘This ain’t your night’! My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors on the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville! You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for the short-end money.”
Charley Malloy: “Oh, I had some bets down for you. You saw some money.”
Terry Malloy: “You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charley.”

Sylvester Stallone in Rocky:

Kierkegaard on death:

“I have thought too much about death not to know that he cannot speak earnestly about death who does not know how to employ (for awakening, please note) the subtlety and all the profound waggery which lies in death.  Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is.  To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be, utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death.”

— Works of Love,
   Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324

For more on “the thought of the eternal,”  see the discussion of the number 373 in Directions Out and Outside the World, both of 4/26/04.

“… as an inscription over the graveyard gate one could place ‘No compulsion here’ or ‘With us there is no compulsion.’ “

— Works of Love,
   Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324

“In the summer of 1943 I was eight, and my father and mother and small brother and I were in Peterson Field in Colorado Springs.  A hot wind blew through that summer…. There was not much to do…. There was an Officers’ Club, but no swimming pool; all the Officers’ Club had of interest was artificial blue rain behind the bar.  The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching it, and so we went, my brother and I, to the movies.

We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened Quonset hut which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice.  Heard him tell a girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, ‘at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.’  As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.  Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

… When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it.  And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free. could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.”

— Joan Didion,
   “John Wayne: A Love Song,” 1965

“He is home now. He is free.”

— Ron Reagan, Friday, June 11, 2004

“Beware, therefore, of the dead!  Beware of his kindness; beware of his definiteness, beware of his strength; beware of his pride!  But if you love him, then remember him lovingly, and learn from him, precisely as one who is dead, learn the kindness in thought, the definiteness in expression, the strength in unchangeableness, the pride in life which you would not be able to learn as well from any human being, even the most highly gifted.”

— Works of Love,
   Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 328

Passion

From the previous entry:

 1.
Oscar:
military phonetic
for the letter
‘O’

From an entry of Dec. 21, 2002, some background in literary theory:

At the Oscars Sunday night, a thought attributed by Billy Crystal to Sean Connery:

“Pussy Galore! I just got it! That’s vulgar.”

For further background, see

Passing the Crown (Aug. 24, 2003) and

The Agony and the Ya-Ya (Oct. 4, 2002).

Government by Crackpots

Morning briefing:

Paul Krugman on Laurie Mylroie in today’s New York Times…

Get Me Rewrite!,

Peter Bergen in the Washington Monthly…

Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons’
Favorite Conspiracy Theorist,

and Cecil Adams in the Chicago Reader on…

Leo Strauss and
the Neocon Crackpots.

Strauss lectured on Plato at the University of Chicago.  For more on Plato and philosophy at the University of Chicago, see the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Dream of the Unified Field

Quartet:

Shanavasa, Ananda,
Jorie Graham, Robert Louis Stevenson 

“Shanavasa asked Ananda,

‘What is the fundamental uncreated essence of all things?’ “

— Jorie Graham,
    “Relativity: A Quartet”
    in The Dream of the Unified Field:
    Selected Poems 1974-1994,
    Ecco Press, 1995

“Ananda to Shanavasa:
 ‘Buddha is Alive! Buddha is Alive!’

 Shanavasa to Upagupta:
 ‘Space is Consumed by Flaming Space.’ “

 — Table of Contents, Living Buddha Zen

Cover illustration
by Stephen Savage,
NY Times Book Review,
Feb. 2 (Candlemas), 2003

“We live the time that a match flickers.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson, Aes Triplex

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on this date in 1850.

The Shining of Park Place

Today is the birthday of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., writer, dean of Harvard Medical School, father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and author of at least seven hymns.

It is also the feast day of Saint Lewis Henry Redner, author of the tune now known as “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”  Redner was church organist for Phillips Brooks, who wrote the “Bethlehem” lyrics but then published the hymn under the facetious name “St. Louis,” a deliberate misspelling of Redner’s name.

Redner died on August 29, 1908, at the Marlborough Hotel in Atlantic City.

Since Holmes Sr. was both a poet and the father of a famous lawyer, a reference to poet-lawyer Wallace Stevens seems in order.

To wit:

“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel
instead of the hymns….”

— Wallace Stevens,
“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”

From Best Atlantic City Hotels:

Bally’s Park Place, located at Park Place and Boardwalk, partially stands on the site of the former Marlborough Hotel.

For some background on the theology of hotels, see Stephen King’s classic The Shining and my own note, Shining Forth.

Let us pray that any haunting at the current Park Place and Boardwalk location is done by the blessed spirit of Saint Lewis Redner.

Atlantic City

Bally’s Park Place

Wallace Stevens

Postscript of 7:11 PM —

From an old Dave Barry column:

“Beth thinks the casinos should offer more of what she described as ‘fun’ games, the type of entertainment-for-the-whole-family activities that people engage in to happily while away the hours. If Beth ran a casino, there would be a brightly lit table surrounded by high rollers in tuxedos and evening gowns, and the air would be charged with excitement as a player rolled the dice, and the crowd would lean forward, and the shout would ring out…

‘He landed on Park Place!’ “

Charles Lindbergh seems to have done
just that.  See yesterday’s entry

Spirit

and today’s New York Times story

Lindbergh the Family Man.

Mr. Holland’s Week

On Monday, August 18, 2003,
a New York Times editor wrote
the following headline
for a book review:

Bending Over Backward
for a Well-Known Lout.

The word “lout” here refers to
author John O’Hara, who often
 wrote about his native Pennsylvania.

A Queer Religion

August 4 headline:

Gay bishop on way to win

This suggests the following theological meditation by a gay Christian:

Amen to the conclusion, at least.

The author of this meditation, “Pharsea,” is a “traditional Catholic” and advocate of the Latin Mass — just like Mel Gibson.  One wonders how Gibson might react to Pharsea’s theology.

As for me… I always thought there was something queer about that religion.

Fearful Meditation —

A follow-up to yesterday
afternoon's entry of

O fearful meditation! Where, alack,
Shall time's best jewel from time's chest lie hid?

— Shakespeare, Sonnet 65

Pop Culture's answer:

"Flashes of fire,
a raging flame!"
— Song of Solomon

Click on the album title "0304" for details.

A different answer:

Highballs

“If you can bounce high,
bounce for her too….”
 – F. Scott Fitzgerald, epigraph to
The Great Gatsby

Magazine purchased at
newsstand May 14, 2003:

A Whiff of Camelot
as ‘West Wing’
Ends an Era

– New York Times,
 May 14, 2003

Song title from the
June Carter Cash album “Press On“:

“Gatsby’s Restaurant”

From The Great Gatsby, Chapter Four:

“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.
“This is a nice restaurant here,”
said Mr. Wolfsheim, looking at the
Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling.

Presbyterian Nymph:

Mimi Beardsley, JFK playmate,
in the news on May 15, 2003 

On JFK’s plane trips:
“Whenever the President traveled,
members of the press staff traveled as well.
You always have a press secretary
and a couple of girls traveling….
 Mimi, who obviously couldn’t perform
 any function at all, made all the trips!”

Apparently there was some function….

“Don’t forget the coffee!”
– Punchline from the film
  “Good Will Hunting.”

Being and Time

Heidegger’s birthday: September 26.

Einstein’s birthday: March 14.

Fred Zinnemann, who won an Oscar
for directing “From Here to Eternity“:

Zinnemann’s birthday: today, April 29.

In honor of Zinnemann, a cheerful man, who died on Einstein’s birthday in 1997, our site music today is the cheerful Gershwin tune “Our Love Is Here To Stay.” In honor of Olivia Newton-John (granddaughter of physicist Max Born), who notably portrayed the Muse Terpsichore in “Xanadu”^◊ and who shares a September 26 birthday with Gershwin, T. S. Eliot, and Heidegger, today’s midi of “Our Love” has a special arrangement. Ms. Newton-John might wish to commemorate the romance (“Passionate!” — Yale University Press) of Hannah Arendt, a Jewish political theorist, and Heidegger, a Catholic Nazi, by listening to “Our Love” on the acoustic bass and glockenspiel.†

Terpsichore is the Muse of Dance.
See also Einstein’s first paper on relativity:
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,”
Annalen der Physik,

September 26, 1905.

^◊ Not to be confused with an Orson Welles
film based on the life of
William Randolph Hearst,
whose birthday is also today.

† Glockenspiel means “bell-play.”
See Metaphysics for Tina.

Sixteen

war protesters, handcuffed together, blocked traffic near 47th Street and 5th Avenue in New York City Wednesday.  They chanted “Occupation is a Crime, Free Iraq and Palestine!”

— Newsday, March 26, 2003

Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is known as the diamond district (or, in Buddhist parlance, “Diamond Way”).

“Is it safe?” — Sir Laurence Olivier, 1976

Ideal of Hell:
The Burning of Columbia

On February 17, 1865, United States troops entered Columbia, SC.

“By midnight the whole town (except the outskirts) was wrapped in one huge blaze…. My God! what a scene! …. Such a scene as this with the drunken fiendish soldiers in their dark uniforms, infuriated, cursing, screaming, exulting in their work, came nearer the material ideal of hell than anything I ever expect to see again.”

— Diary of Emma LeConte, 17, of Columbia

Happy Presidents’ Day.

Inaugural Address for Cullinane College (undelivered):

The Prisoner

Cullinane College was scheduled to open its doors officially on January 29, 2003.  The following might have been an appropriate inaugural address.

From The Prisoner: Comments
 on the Final Episode, “Fall Out”:

“When the President asks for a vote, he says: ‘All in favor.’ But he never asks for those opposed. (Though it appears that none will be opposed — and though he says its a democratic assembly, it is hardly that. The President even says that the society is in a ‘democratic crisis,’ though without democracy present, it’s just a sham.)

#48/Young Man sings ‘Dry Bones,’, which is his rebellion (notice its chaotic effect on ‘society’). But then the song gets taken over, ‘polished,’ and sung by a voice-over (presumably set up by #1). Does this mean that society is stealing the thunder (i.e. the creative energy) of youth, and cheapening it, or does it mean that youth is just rebelling in the same way that their fathers did (with equal ineffectiveness)? Perhaps it is simply a comment on the ease with which society can deal with the real rebellion of the 1960’s, which purported to be led by musicians; one that even the Beatles said was impossible in ‘Revolution.'”

President: Guilty! Read the Charge!

#48 is guilty, of something, and then the society pins something on him.”

The Other Side of the Coin

Excerpt from the poem that Robert Frost (who died on this date in 1963) meant to read at the 1961 inauguration of John F. Kennedy:

It makes the prophet in us all presage
The glory of a next Augustan age
Of a power leading from its strength and pride,
Of young ambition eager to be tried,
Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.

I greatly prefer Robinson Jeffers’s “Shine, Perishing Republic“:

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
    heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, 
    and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember….

See also the thoughts on Republic vs. Empire in the work of Alec Guinness (as Marcus Aurelius and as Obi-Wan Kenobi).

Our Town:
No There There?

Paul Newman, scheduled for his last performance in “Our Town” today, said in 1961:

“With that fifteen hundred, I could have beat him. That’s all I needed Charlie…You’d love to keep me hustlin’ for ya, huh, wouldn’t ya? I mean, a couple more years with me scufflin’ around, in them little towns and those back alleys, you might make yourself enough to get a little pool room back in Oakland – six tables and a handbook on the side…Lay down and die by yourself.”

— Fast Eddie Felson in “The Hustler“

For another view of Oakland, see

Super Bowl XXXVII Live!

Gertrude Stein on Oakland, California:

“There is no there there.”

Well, maybe a little pool room….

Through a Soda-Fountain Mirror, Darkly

For Piper Laurie on Her Birthday

“He was part of my dream, of course —
but then I was part of his dream, too!”

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, Chapter XII (“Which Dreamed It?”) quoted as epigraph to a script for the film Pleasantville, which features a soda fountain from the 1950’s.

“Scenes from yesteryear are revisited through the soda-fountain mirror, creating such a fluid pathway between the past and present that one often becomes lost along the way.”

— Caroline Palmer’s review of “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” 

The above quotations are related to the 1952 film Has Anybody Seen My Gal?, in which James Dean makes a brief appearance at a 1920’s soda fountain. The film is chiefly notable for displaying the beauty of Piper Laurie, but a subplot is also of iterest.  Charles Coburn, a rich man visiting incognito a timeless town* rather like Pleasantville or Riverdale, takes up painting and is assisted by the young Gigi Perreau, who, as I recall, supplies him with the frame from a Circe Soap ad displayed in a shop window.

For more on a fictional rich character and Circe — indeed, enough for a soap — see my note of January 11, 2003, “The First Days of Disco,” and the sequel of January 12, 2003, “Ask Not.”  In the manner of magic realism, the adventures in the earlier entry of Scrooge McDuck and Circe are mirrored by those in the later entry of C. Douglas Dillon and Monique Wittig.

For a less pleasant trip back in time, see the later work of Gigi Perreau in Journey to the Center of Time (1967).  One viewer’s comment:

This is the worst movie ever made. I don’t want to hear about any of Ed Wood’s pictures. This is it, this is the one. Right here. The bottom of the deepest pit of cinema hell.

Happy birthday, Miss Laurie.

*Rather, in fact, like “Our Town.”  Here is John Lahr on a current production of that classic:

“The play’s narrator and general master of artifice is the Stage Manager, who gives the phrase ‘deus ex machina’ a whole new meaning. He holds the script, he sets the scene, he serves as an interlocutor between the worlds of the living and the dead, calling the characters into life and out of it; he is, it turns out, the Author of Authors, the Big Guy himself. It seems, in every way, apt for Paul Newman to have taken on this role. God should look like Newman: lean, strong-chinned, white-haired, and authoritative in a calm and unassuming way—if only we had all been made in his image!”

— The New Yorker, issue of Dec. 16, 2002

If Newman is God, then Miss Laurie played God’s girlfriend.  Nice going, Piper.

Culinary Theology

A comment on "Whirligig," the previous entry:

From my favorite theologian, Jimmy Buffett:

"Well good God Almighty,
which way do I steer for my

Chorus:
Cheeseburger in paradise (paradise)
Makin' the best of every virtue and vice (paradise)
Worth every damn bit of sacrifice (paradise)
To get a cheeseburger in paradise
To be a cheeseburger in paradise
I'm just a cheeseburger in paradise!"

For some, paradise — or at least the gateway to paradise — is at Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

From a one-act version (p. xvi) of
"The Night of the Iguana":

"MISS JELKES: Is this the menu? (She has picked up a paper on the table.)

SHANNON: Yes, it's the finest piece of rhetoric since Lincoln's Gettysburg Address."

"Cheeseburger In Paradise, Puerto Vallarta, opened for business on November 7, 1999." — The same date, mentioned in last night's "Whirligig" entry, that Fox Studios Australia opened in Sydney with a song by Kylie Minogue. 

New from Miracle Pictures
– IF IT’S A HIT, IT’S A MIRACLE! –

Pi in the Sky
for Michaelmas 2002

“Fear not, maiden, your prayer is heard.
Michael am I, guardian of the highest Word.”

— A Michaelmas Play

Contact, by Carl Sagan:

Chapter 1 – Transcendental Numbers

  In the seventh grade they were studying “pi.” It was a Greek letter that looked like the architecture at Stonehenge, in England: two vertical pillars with a crossbar at the top. If you measured the circumference of a circle and then divided it by the diameter of the circle, that was pi. At home, Ellie took the top of a mayonnaise jar, wrapped a string around it, straightened the string out, and with a ruler measured the circle’s circumference. She did the same with the diameter, and by long division divided the one number by the other. She got 3.21. That seemed simple enough.

  No one had ever called Ellie stupid before and she found herself bursting into tears….

  After school she bicycled to the library at the nearby college to look through books on mathematics. As nearly as she could figure out from what she read, her question wasn’t all that stupid. According to the Bible, the ancient Hebrews had apparently thought that pi was exactly equal to three. The Greeks and Romans, who knew lots of things about mathematics, had no idea that the digits in pi went on forever without repeating. It was a fact that had been discovered only about 250 years ago. How was she expected to know if she couldn’t ask questions? But Mr. Weisbrod had been right about the first few digits. Pi wasn’t 3.21. Maybe the mayonnaise lid had been a little squashed, not a perfect circle. Or maybe she’d been sloppy in measuring the string. Even if she’d been much more careful, though, they couldn’t expect her to measure an infinite number of decimals.

  There was another possibility, though. You could calculate pi as accurately as you wanted. If you knew something called calculus, you could prove formulas for pi that would let you calculate it to as many decimals as you had time for. The book listed formulas for pi divided by four. Some of them she couldn’t understand at all. But there were some that dazzled her: pi/4, the book said, was the same as 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + …, with the fractions continuing on forever. Quickly she tried to work it out, adding and subtracting the fractions alternately. The sum would bounce from being bigger than pi/4 to being smaller than pi/4, but after a while you could see that this series of numbers was on a beeline for the right answer. You could never get there exactly, but you could get as close as you wanted if you were very patient. It seemed to her

a miracle

 Cartoon by S.Harris

that the shape of every circle in the world was connected with this series of fractions. How could circles know about fractions? She was determined to learn

calculus.

  She had caught a glimpse of something majestic.

Chapter 24 – The Artist’s Signature

  The anomaly showed up most starkly in Base 2 arithmetic, where it could be written out entirely as zeros and ones. Her program reassembled the digits into a square raster, an equal number across and down. Hiding in the alternating patterns of digits, deep inside the transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of noughts.

  The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover

a miracle

— another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn’t matter what you look like, or what you’re made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you’ll find it. It’s already here. It’s inside everything. You don’t have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons… there is an intelligence that antedates the universe. The circle had closed. She found what she had been searching for.

Song lyric not in Sagan’s book:

Will the circle be unbroken
by and by, Lord, by and by?
Is a better home a-waitin’
in the sky, Lord, in the sky?

“Contact,” the film: 

In memory of Kim Hunter,
who died on 9/11, 2002:

A transcription of a journal note from 1996…

“Bush once joked that he picked Sununu because his surname rhymed with “deep doo-doo.” — Dan Goodgame, Time magazine, May 21, 1990	For a time, Sununu wrote stories and poems for children. Concord lawyer Ned Helms recalls that when his wife fell ill, Sununu gave her a book of poems that he said he enjoyed, by Sylvia Plath.
Do do that voodoo that you do so well. One summer when I played in a small stock company, after the last curtain had come down we would clear the stage and then put on records of Viennese waltzes. We’d dance wildly, joyfully… — Madeleine L’Engle, Victoria Magazine, November 1995	We’re arranging to have the children baptized on Sunday afternoon, March 25, by the way. Although I honestly dislike, or rather, scorn the rector. I told you about his ghastly H-bomb sermon, didn’t I, where he said this was the happy prospect of the Second Coming and how lucky we Christians were compared to the stupid pacifists and humanists and “educated pagans” who feared being incinerated, etc., etc. I have not been to church since. I felt it was a sin to support such insanity even by my presence. — Sylvia Plath, March 12, 1962. Amen.
[The bathroom door opens and Stella comes out. Blanche continues talking to Mitch.] Oh! Have you finished? Wait — I’ll turn on the radio. [She turns the knobs on the radio and it begins to play “Wien, Wien, nur du allein.” Blanche waltzes to the music with romantic gestures. Mitch is delighted and moves in awkward imitation like a dancing bear. Stanley stalks fiercely through the portieres into the bedroom. He crosses to the small white radio and snatches it off the table. With a shouted oath, he tosses the instrument out the window.]	Colby’s nickname among some of his subordinates at CIA is said to be “The Bookkeeper.”
Alabama plans female chain gangs Friday, April 26, 1996, story: MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The Montgomery prison system is preparing to snap shackles around the ankles of women prisoners, creating female chain gangs in the state that revived male leg-iron crews last year.	I will try to finish my novel and a second book of poems by Christmas. I think I’ll be a pretty good novelist, very funny — my stuff makes me laugh and laugh, and if I can laugh now it must be hellishly funny stuff. — Sylvia Plath, October 12, 1962
	An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew, A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. 1962 — Everybody’s doin’ a brand new dance now; I know you’re gonna like it if you give it a chance now… So come on, c’mon, and do the locomotion with me!

Trifecta

Born today: Arthur Koestler,
former Communist and writer on parapsychology

From To Ride Pegasus, by Anne McCaffrey, 1973: 

“Mary-Molly luv, it’s going to be accomplished in steps, this establishment of the Talented in the scheme of things. Not society, mind you, for we’re the original nonconformists…. and Society will never permit us to integrate.  That’s okay!”  He consigned Society to insignificance with a flick of his fingers.  “The Talented form their own society and that’s as it should be: birds of a feather.  No, not birds.  Winged horses!  Ha!  Yes, indeed. Pegasus… the poetic winged horse of flights of fancy.  A bloody good symbol for us.  You’d see a lot from the back of a winged horse…”

“Yes, an airplane has blind spots.  Where would you put a saddle?”  Molly had her practical side.

He laughed and hugged her.  Henry’s frequent demonstrations of affection were a source of great delight to Molly, whose own strength was in tactile contacts. 

“Don’t know.  Lord, how would you bridle a winged horse?”

“With the heart?”

“Indubitably!”  The notion pleased him.  “Yes, with the heart and the head because Pegasus is too strong a steed to control or subdue by any ordinary method.” 

Born today:  Darryl F. Zanuck,
producer of “Viva Zapata!”

Director Eliza Kazan consults with scriptwriter John Steinbeck about the production of “Viva Zapata!” in Cuernavaca, Mexico:

When John woke, I asked him, “Isn’t the Syndicate of Film Technicians and Workers here Communist-dominated?”

Elia Kazan on Darryl Zanuck’s insistence that Zapata’s white horse be emphasized:

Darryl made only one suggestion that he was insistent on. He’d stolen it, no doubt, from an old Warner western, but he offered it as if it were pristine stuff. “Zapata must have a white horse,” he said, “and after they shoot him, we should show the horse running free in the mountains — get the idea? A great fade-out.” We got the idea, all right. Darryl was innocent about the symbol in his suggestion, but so enthusiastic about the emotion of it that he practically foamed at the mouth. John’s face was without expression. Actually, while I thought it was corny, the idea worked out well in the end. 

Born today: comedian Bob Newhart

Birthdate of film producer Darryl F. Zanuck

Among Zanuck’s films were “All about Eve” and “Viva Zapata!”

Bright Star

I do not have a photograph of Lucero Hernandez, the subject of my journal notes

Shining Forth and

Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

In keeping with Zanuck’s commandment that “The kid stays in the picture!” — The photo at left, of a very young actress, captures some of Lucero’s beauty.

Center for Global Education,
Augsburg College 

Semester-abroad Program in Mexico

“The program is based in Cuernavaca, a city known for its perennial springtime (70-80 degrees). Cuernavaca, the capital of the state of Morelos, is about 50 miles south of Mexico City. Both the city and the state are important in Mexican history: the palace of the conqueror Hernan Cortez borders the central plaza in Cuernavaca and Morelos is known as “the cradle of the Mexican revolution” of 1910 led by Emiliano Zapata, who was born in a small town near Cuernavaca. A city of more than one million, Cuernavaca is also known for its innovative grass-roots education programs, economic cooperatives, and base Christian communities inspired by liberation theology.” 

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