"But the first thing I felt when rereading Oliver’s work was frustration. Though almost uniformly straightforward and sincere, her poetry is vastly uneven in quality, demonstrating little thematic or stylistic growth over the long arc of her career. In the dullest poems, her trademark simplicity can seem like the result of lazy writing, bloated with abstractions that hurry the reader toward unearned epiphany. It wasn’t just that these poems didn’t require all my hard-won hermeneutic tools to be understood; it was that they seemed to actively thwart them, resisting my scalpel like polished stones." — Maggie Millner
Tired of Maggie's farm?
Try Adrienne Rich on stonecutting —
Now, you intelligence
So late dredged up from dark
Upon whose smoky walls
Bison took fumbling form
Or flint was edged on flint–
Now, careful arriviste,
Delineate at will
Incisions in the ice.
Be serious, because
The stone may have contempt
For too-familiar hands,
And because all you do
Loses or gains by this:
Respect the adversary,
Meet it with tools refined,
And thereby set your price.
— From the Adrienne Rich poem
"The Diamond Cutters." (1955)
Comments Off on For Cairo Sweet: Yale Review on Abstractions and Epiphanies
INT. JONATHAN MILLER'S CLASSROOM - MORNING
Inspirational posters line the walls.
A VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY banner hangs
above a dry erase board, on which is
written MR. MILLER - CREATIVE WRITING . . . .
Comments Off on At Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 4-14)
Some stories within the above "unending net" of nonsensical narratives
suggested a post related to earlier work of the actor who plays Principal Dort
in Wednesday Season 2 and to the Venetian Ball in that Netflix series . . .
and, slightly more seriously, to the Venice Film Festival of 2025 —
Comments Off on Venice for Mann: Allusions to Illusions
Emma Watson dazzles in TWO
jaw-dropping designer looks
on the final day of Venice Film Festival
as she swaps a green Emilia Wickstead
mini dress for a Gucci number
The swap reportedly took place at
"the luxurious Hotel Excelsior."
9:22 PM Saturday, September 6, 2025 (GMT+2)
Time in Venice, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy
Related reading . . .
"Jarmusch lulls us into thinking this part will be the exception
to the theme of virtual estrangement, just through the bond
between the twins that seems to return instantly after an
unspecified but seemingly considerable amount of time apart.
But the increasing evidence of how much they didn’t know
about their unconventional parents ties the film together in
an elegant full circle. As does Anika’s nonchalant cover of the
Dusty Springfield classic, 'Spooky,' their mother’s favorite song."
— David Rooney, August 31, 2025,10:30 AM review of
"Father Mother Sister Brother," winner of the Golden Lion
at this evening's awards ceremony in Venice.
Comments Off on Soundtrack from Walpurgisnacht 2008
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.
If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because
they are made with ideas.
— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology(1940).
Overlapping Ideas
5:39 PM Saturday, September 6, 2025 (GMT+2)
Time in Venice, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy
The "art world power broker" of the previous post and a favorite artist
"often dined together, she driving downtown to meet him in her yellow
Volkswagen Beetle, after which she would drop him off at one of his
late-night haunts…." — The New York Times
Related art tales . . .
Wikipedia on a soccer-wear company —
"The Hummel logo is a stylized bumblebee,
as Hummel is German for "bumblebee".
" The Four Elements are used in Buddhist texts to both elucidate the concept of suffering (dukkha) and as an object of meditation. The earliest Buddhist texts explain that the four primary material elements are the sensory qualities solidity, fluidity, temperature, and mobility; their characterisation as earth, water, fire, and air, respectively, is declared an abstraction – instead of concentrating on the fact of material existence, one observes how a physical thing is sensed, felt, perceived.[24]"
24. Dan Lusthaus, "What is and isn't Yogacara." He specifically discusses early Buddhism as well as Yogacara. "What is and isn't Yogacara". Archived from the original on 31 March 2010. Retrieved 12 January 2016..
Christian —
Milton’s Paradise Lost:
Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixt
Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds . . .
"A satellite image captures an unknown object
sitting on the Antarctic snow. Cryptologist
Julian Rome, a teacher at the University of
California, Berkeley, is invited to investigate
the mystery." — Wikipedia
"Tony Rome is an ex-cop turned private investigator
who lives on a powerboat in Miami, Florida, called
‘Straight Pass’. This is a reference to the fact that
Tony also has a gambling problem." — Wikipedia
To some, more interesting narratives might include
"Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning" as a
narrative elaboration of a Howard Hughes favorite,
"Ice Station Zebra."
Comments Off on Narratives for Letterman: “Julian, Tony . . . Tony, Julian.”
That 2001 compilation contrasted the cultural approach of John O'Hara
(whose title From the Terrace appeared in today's previous post) with
that of Nathanael West (author of The Day of the Locust).
Some further cultural notes more in the spirit of West than of O'Hara —
"It is night on the fourth of the curving terraces, high above the sea.
The stars are full out, known and unknown. Dante is halfway up the mountain….
It is half through the poem; half the whole is seen and said: hell, where grace
is not known but as a punishment; purgatory where grace and punishment are
two manners of one fact."
— Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, Faber and Faber, 1943
Last night on Wednesday Season 2 , Episode 5 of 8 —
"The origin of the many so-called artificial intelligences now invading our
work lives and swarming our personal devices can be found in an oddball
experiment in 1950 by Claude Shannon. Shannon is known now as the
creator of information theory, but then he was an obscure mathematician
at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York’s West Village."
* For some cultural guidance that seems actually helpful , vide https://aiching.app/iching/hexagram-29/ .
(Some may question to what extent this "AI Ching" app
actually uses AI, but its remarks on Hexagram 29 seem
at least harmless, compared to some other AI oracles.)
Comments Off on More Cultural Guidance* from AI Overview!
In its five-and-a-half-minute research and reasoning process
Grok was able to reference a post from this weblog, but it missed
the correct answer to the prompt — Cullinane's "four-color
decomposition theorem" in the following weblog image:
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"Over 21 days of talking with ChatGPT, an otherwise
perfectly sane man became convinced that he was
a real-life superhero. We analyzed the conversation.
. . . We received a full export of all of Allan Brooks’s conversations
with an OpenAI chatbot and analyzed a subset of the conversations
starting from May 6, 2025, when he began the chat about pi."
Students of myth may regard this hexagonal figure as a
snowflake . . . or, with a seventh dot added at the center,
a cube. For a religious interpretation of the snowflake,
see Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain. For a
more secular, but still miraculous, interpretation of the
cube, see the oeuvre of R. T. Curtis . . . and Octad Space —
A tour guide describes stations of the cross in Jerusalem:
"Ibrahim pointed down the cobbled street to a half circle of bricks
set in the street. 'There is where Jesus began to carry the cross.
Down the street is the Chapel of Flagellation, where the Roman
soldiers whipped Jesus, set on him a crown of thorns, and said,
"Hail, King of the Jews!" Then Pilate led him to the crowd and cried,
"Ecce homo! Behold the man!" '
Ibrahim delivered this information with the excitement of a man
reading bingo numbers in a nursing home."
* Hunt's unreality bunker is not unlike that of the Footprints of God hero.
An obituary yesterday for feminist programming pioneer Stephanie Shirley,
who in her early career presented herself in correspondence as "Steve,"
together with a CHE article on Milton, suggests a review of material
related to the fictional dramatic death of a programmer and the real death
of John Conway.
“There are dark comedies. There are screwball comedies.
But there aren’t many dark screwball comedies.
And if Nora Ephron’s Lucky Numbers is any indication,
there’s a good reason for that.”
— Todd Anthony, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
"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. That is why those who studied the occult arts were either fools or doomed. Fools if they were wrong, and most were; doomed if right. The forerunners know, and stay away."
"Wishin' on a falling star, waitin' for the early train Sorry boy, but I've been hit by a purple rain Aw, come on Joe, you can always change your name Thanks a lot son, just the same"
“It would have been a great disappointment to me
if Vibration did not somewhere make itself felt,
for all scientific mystics either vibrate in person or
find themselves resonant with cosmic vibrations….”
