Log24

The photo of Lauren German from “Standing Still” (2005) in the
previous post suggests some related material for comedians:

The above character-creator name “Neil Gaiman” occurs here
in a post from June 2013 —

The above footnote refers to . . .

More merriment:  Lauren German in a video of the related song
“Another One Bites the Dust.”

“The Devil Likes Metamorphoses.“

For Richard Marks, a film editor who reportedly died unexpectedly
at 75 in New York City on New Year's Eve —

Click to enlarge the inset.

Then …

And now.

… Continues.

"OK Baby, let's go dancing."
— Amy Adams in "American Hustle"

Click image below for some backstory.

Happy birthday to Uma Thurman.

Scene from "The Debt" (2010)

Scene from "Jolene" (2008)

Midrash on yesterday's midday NY lottery:

"Everybody's doin' a brand new dance now…"

(Continued from yesterday's posts, "Object of Beauty"
and "Amy's Shadow")

A winner of a Nobel Prize for X-ray crystallography stands
at the head of the New York Times  obituary list today.

In memoriam —

Some further background:

The Times  follows yesterday's egregious religious error
with an egregious scientific error:

"The technique developed by Dr. Karle and Herbert A. Hauptman,
called X-ray crystallography, is now routinely used by scientists…."

Karle was reportedly born in 1918, Hauptman in 1917.

Wikipedia on the history of X-ray crystallography:

"The idea that crystals could be used as a 
diffraction grating for X-rays arose in 1912…."

The Nobel Foundation:

"The Nobel Prize in Physics 1914 was awarded to
Max von Laue 'for his discovery of the diffraction of
X-rays by crystals.'"

"The Nobel Prize in Physics 1915 was awarded jointly to
Sir William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg 
'for their services in the analysis of crystal structure
by means of X-rays.'"

(Continued from St. Michael's Day 2010 and Groundhog Day 2011)

From an obituary  of playwright Doric Wilson in this afternoon's online New York Times—

In the early 1960s Mr. Wilson was one of the first resident playwrights at Caffe Cino— a coffeehouse considered by many to be the original Off Off Broadway performance space— on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village. Four productions by Mr. Wilson were staged there in 1961. Among them were “And He Made a Her,” in which Eve, of Adam and Eve, discovers that men objectify women, and “Now She Dances,” a caustic reshaping of Oscar Wilde’s trials for “gross indecency” in the 1890s as the story of Salome and John the Baptist….

Related material— Salome in this journal.

See also "Braids" from the date of Wilson's death.

It Goes to Show…*

* Context— ChuckBerry.com

From this journal —

A photo from that same day—

Related material: The links from this journal given above —

Harvard '64 and continued.

From a search in this journal . . .

Also related, but only very personally and indirectly, to Iceland . . .

“At the still point . . . .” — T. S. Eliot

At the still point… from the film "Absolute Power" :

Photo credit – Graham Kuhn

I’ve heard of affairs that are strictly plutonic,
But diamonds are a girl’s best friend!

— Marilyn Monroe, modeling a Freudian slip

Candle from Sense8 ,  Season 1,  Episode 1: “Limbic Resonance” —

“At the still point….” — T. S. Eliot

This post was suggested by the date — Jan. 2, 2019 —
of a YouTube video —

. . . and by a Log24 post, “Wolf as Lamb,” on that date.

The title refers to Frederick Seidel and
to a post of April 29, "At the Still Point."

See a Haaretz  story commemorating the Feb. 14,
1917, birthday of a crystallographer.

Related material in this journal —

At the Still Point (June 15, 2013):

The illustration is for those who, like Andy Magid and
Steven Strogatz in the March 2014 AMS Notices,
enjoy the vulgarization of mathematics.

Backstory: Group Actions (November 14, 2012).

"Everything's coming up Snow White."

— Anne Billson, May 14, 2013

For Charlize:

"Snow, Glass, Apples," by Neil Gaiman

* See Saturday's post At the Still Point

Backstory: The two previous Log24 posts
Raiders of the Lost Aleph (May 14) and
The Crying of Bucharest (May 15).

The following sequence of images was suggested by
Peter Woit's May 16 post "One Ring to Rule Them All."

Also from Devil's Night 2008:

From the May 16 Nobel Symposium talk discussed in
Woit's "One Ring to Rule Them All":

Related material:

All Souls' Day at the Still Point (Nov. 2, 2003) and

Frodo and the Oxford Murders (Oct. 13, 2011).

"… if you will, a cha-cha on the floor of the Grand Hotel Abyss."

— Harvard student's essay on Jack Nicholson in the ballroom of "The Shining"

"At the still point, there the dance is."

— Four Quartets

Related material on the transition from "Do" to "Be" on Friday, October 21st—

• A Log24 post
  
• An obituary
  

Tracking Shot

Related material—

See also this journal's September 2009 posts.

This  post was suggested by today's previous post and by today's NY Lottery.
For some background to the ioncinema.com post numbered 4210 above,
see, in conjunction with the page headed "Azazel" linked to here earlier today,
the ioncinema.com post numbered 5601.

From the post numbered 460 in this  journal—

At the still point… from the film "Absolute Power" :

Photo credit – Graham Kuhn

I’ve heard of affairs that are strictly plutonic,
But diamonds are a girl’s best friend!

— Marilyn Monroe, modeling a Freudian slip

A comment yesterday at Peter Woit's weblog—

Glenn says:
March 14, 2011 at 8:49 pm

Perhaps John G. Cramer’s prediction will come true after all?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_Bridge_(book)

Of course, in that case, the proof would exist on a world-line
inaccessible to any living observer.

New York Lottery—

Related material:

From the weblog of Cramer's daughter Kathryn on Feb. 28—

For 928. see the two posts from last year's 9/28 in this journal—

Midnight at the Still Point and Brightness at Noon.

At the Still Point…

Headline from a weblog at
the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—

8:07 AM March 24, 2010–

Obama, Netanyahu doing
a complicated little dance

Related recent quotation here–

See also

A Dance Results,

St. Augustine's Day 2006, and

Religious Symbolism at Harvard—

“A corpse will be
transported by express!“

(Ideograms for Guy Davenport;
see also previous entry.)

“At the still point,
there the dance is.”
— T. S. Eliot

Illustration from
Tuesday, April 22, 2003:

Temptation

Related material:
The Devil and Wallace Stevens

Romantic Interaction
continued…

(See previous entry.)

From today's Harvard Crimson:

"Pudding Show Features
Wild West Theme"

From yesterday's entry,
a tribute to Olivia Newton-John:

"At the still point,
there the dance is."
— T. S. Eliot

Xanadu (1980)

For related material, see

Balanchine's Birthday (1/9/03)
and Deep Game (6/26/04).

Romantic Interaction

(See previous entry.)

"At the still point,
 there the dance is."
— T. S. Eliot 

For Olivia Newton-John
on her birthday,
at 1:11:11 pm EDT

"Keep me suspended in time with you;
Don't let this moment die.
I get a feeling when I'm with you
None of the rules apply.
But I know for certain
Goodbye is a crime;
So love if you need me,
Suspend me in time."

— Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu

ART WARS
At the Still Point

“At the still point, there the dance is.”

— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets

Humphrey Carpenter in The Inklings, his book on the Christian writers J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams, says that

“Eliot by his own admission took the ‘still point of the turning world’ in Burnt Norton from the Fool in Williams’s The Greater Trumps.”

— The Inklings, Ballantine Books, 1981, p. 106

Carpenter says Williams maintained that

It is the Christian’s duty to perceive “the declared pattern of the universe” — the “eternal dance” of Williams’s story The Greater Trumps — and to act according to it.

— Paraphrase of Carpenter, pp. 111-112

“The sun is not yet risen, and if the Fool moves there he comes invisibly, or perhaps in widespread union with the light of the moon which is the reflection of the sun.  But if the Tarots hold, as has been dreamed, the message which all things in all places and times have also been dreamed to hold, then perhaps there was meaning in the order as in the paintings; the tale of the cards being completed when the mystery of the sun has opened in the place of the moon, and after that the trumpets cry in the design which is called the Judgement, and the tombs are broken, and then in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done.  Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known.  It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead.”

— The Greater Trumps, by Charles Williams, Ch. 14

If we must have Christians telling stories, let them write like Charles Williams.

Note that although Williams says the Fool Tarot card has no number, it is in fact often numbered 0. See

“The Fool as Zero.”

See also Sequel — about the work, life, and afterlife of Stan Rice, husband of Anne Rice (author of The Vampire Chronicles) — and the following story from today’s N.Y. Times:

The death and arrival at heaven’s gate
of The Producers‘ producer, Sidney Glazier,
on Dec. 14, 2002, is described in the web page
Eight is a Gate.
 

To Ophelia
at the Winter Solstice

Introduction

“There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling…

… is it of the Virgin’s silver beauty,
All fish below the thighs?
She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;
When, with her right hand she crooks a finger, smiling,
How many the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.

Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?”

— Robert Graves, “To Juan at the Winter Solstice”

Illustrations

The Virgin’s Beauty 

 On the Beach

A Maiden’s Prayer

Answered Prayer

Dialogue

Act III Scene ii:

Quotations

“Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?” 
— T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

“At the still point, there the dance is.” 
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“I know what ‘nothing’ means….”
— Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays

“How do you solve a problem like Maria?”
— Oscar Hammerstein II

“…problems can be solved by manipulating just two symbols, 1 and 0….” 
— George Johnson, obituary of Claude Shannon

“The female and the male continue this charming dance, populating the world with all living beings.” 
— Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess,
    Penguin Arkana paperback, 1999, Chapter 17,
    “Lingam/Yoni” 

“According to Showalter’s essay*, ‘In Elizabethan slang, ‘nothing’ was a term for the female genitalia . . . what lies between maids’ legs, for, in the male visual system of representation and desire…. Ophelia’s story becomes the Story of O — the zero, the empty circle or mystery of feminine difference, the cipher of female sexuality to be deciphered by feminist interpretation.’ (222)* Ophelia is a highly sexual being…”

— Leigh DiAngelo,
   “Ophelia as a Sexual Being“

S. H. Cullinane: “No shit, Sherlock.”

*Showalter, Elaine. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford. Boston: Bedford Books of St.Martin’s Press, 1994. 220-238.

Dénouement

Is that nothing between your legs or are you just happy to see me?

See also The Ya-Ya Monologues.