Sunday, November 14, 2021
When Meta Excites
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Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Not So New
"I just found me a brand new box of matches …"
— Soundtrack of the trailer for "Ocean's 8"
"… matchwood, immortal diamond …." —
Click the above definitions for further information.
See as well Blue Diamond in this journal.
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Saturday, February 6, 2010
Conceptual Art
The Plane of Time
From tomorrow's NY Times Book Review, Geoff Dyer's review of DeLillo's new novel Point Omega is now online—
"The book begins and ends with Douglas Gordon’s film project '24 Hour Psycho' (installed at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 2006), in which the 109-minute Hitchcock original is slowed so that it takes a full day and night to twitch by. DeLillo conveys with haunting lucidity the uncanny beauty of 'the actor’s eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets,' 'Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her.' Of course, DeLillo being DeLillo, it’s the deeper implications of the piece— what it reveals about the nature of film, perception and time— that detain him. As an unidentified spectator, DeLillo is mesmerized by the 'radically altered plane of time': 'The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.'
This prologue and epilogue make up a phenomenological essay on one of the rare artworks of recent times to merit the prefix 'conceptual.'"
Related material:
Steering a Space-Plane
(February 2, 2003)
Holly Day
(February 3, 2010)
Attitude Adjustment
(February 3, 2010)
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
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Thursday, December 8, 2005
Thursday December 8, 2005
Matchwood
The New York Times
Book Review,
Sunday, February 2, 2003:
Cover illustration
by Stephen Savage
‘A Box of Matches’:
A Miniaturist’s
Novel of Details
In Nicholson Baker’s novel,
things not worth noticing
eventually become
all there is to notice.
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Monday, February 17, 2003
Monday February 17, 2003
Saint Faggot’s Day
“During the European Inquisitions, faggot referred to the sticks used to set fires for burning heretics, or people who opposed the teachings of the Catholic Church. Heretics were required to gather bundles of sticks (‘faggots’) and carry them to the fire that was being built for them. Heretics who changed their beliefs to avoid being killed were forced to wear a faggot design embroidered on their sleeve, to show everyone that they had opposed the Church.”
— Handout
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N.Y. Times Feb. 2, 2003
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Head White House speechwriter Michael Gerson:
“In the last two weeks, I’ve been returning to Hopkins. Even in the ‘world’s wildfire,’ he asserts that ‘this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,/Is immortal diamond.’ A comfort.”
— Vanity Fair, May 2002, page 162
“At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds….”
— William Butler Yeats, “Byzantium”
On this date in 1600, Saint Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy by the Roman Catholic Church.
He was resurrected by Saint Frances Yates, who went to her reward on the feast day of Saint Michael and All Angels, 1981.
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Sunday, February 2, 2003
Sunday February 2, 2003
Steering a Space-Plane
Head White House speechwriter Michael Gerson:
“In the last two weeks, I’ve been returning to Hopkins. Even in the ‘world’s wildfire,’ he asserts that ‘this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,/Is immortal diamond.’ A comfort.”
— Vanity Fair, May 2002, page 162
Yesterday’s note, “Time and Eternity,” supplies the “immortal diamond” part of this meditation. For the “matchwood” part, see the cover of The New York Times Book Review of February 2 (Candlemas), 2003:
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N.Y. Times Feb. 2, 2003
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See also the Times’s excerpt from Baker‘s first chapter,
about “steering a space-plane.”
For the relationship of Hopkins to Eastern religions,
see “Out of Inscape,” by Robert Morris.
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