For some less Meta material from Marcela, see her Facebook site at
https://m.facebook.com/marrific/photos/?ref=page_internal&mt_nav=0 .
Related material from the Web —
". . . coming back to the real . . . ." — Wallace Stevens
— and from this journal —
"Coming Back" .
Recent posts on hotels and education suggest a review.
See “Child Buyer” in this journal.
From John Hersey’s The Child Buyer (1960):
“I was wondering about that this morning…
About forgetting. I’ve always had an idea that
each memory was a kind of picture,
an insubstantial picture. I’ve thought of it as
suddenly coming into your mind when you need it,
something you’ve seen, something you’ve heard,
then it may stay awhile, or else it flies out, then
maybe it comes back another time….
If all the pictures went out, if I forgot everything,
where would they go? Just out into the air? Into the sky?
Back home around my bed, where my dreams stay?”
“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns….”
— Wallace Stevens
— Postcard from eBay
From Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter I:
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See as well this journal on the above Sundance photo date —
“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns . . . .”
— Wallace Stevens, quoted in posts tagged Portal1937
Update of 12:35 PM ET the same day —
“When there’s nothing to believe in
Still you’re coming back,
you’re running back
You’re coming back for more
So put me on a highway….”
— Eagles, 1975
See also …
See as well Knuth in this journal.
"Spirit-guide of the algorithmic realm"
— Description of Donald Knuth by Siobhan Roberts, Dec. 17, 2018.
There are spirit guides and spirit guides.
"One of These Nights is the fourth studio album
by the Eagles, released in 1975." — Wikipedia
"It's not a lie if you believe it."
— Poster for "Operation Avalanche"
“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns . . . .”
— Wallace Stevens, quoted in posts tagged Portal1937
"Since he couldn’t find traditional backing for the film,
a group of well-wishers… financed it."
— William Grimes on the late Clive Donner
"We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns"
– Wallace Stevens
"There's a small hotel
With a wishing well"
The Discreet Charm
of Suzanne Vega
| We keep coming back and coming back To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns…. — Wallace Stevens |
"In the room the women come and go"
— Stephen King, The Shining:
"The Wasps' Nest"
The above was, like the
previous entry, suggested by
this morning’s monumentally
tasteless NY Times obit page.
The author of the
“pleasantly discursive”
remark has been called both
“King of Geometry” and
“King of Infinite Space.”
He lived in Toronto.
Detail of this morning’s Times
(click for larger version) —
(Corcoran.com is the website of
a New York City real estate firm.
Today’s Bing.com search image is
a view of the city from Central Park.)
“We keep coming back
and coming back/To the real….”
— Wallace Stevens
Back to the Real
Colum McCann on yesterday’s history:
“Fiction gives us access to a very real history.”
The Associated Press thought for today:
“Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.”
— John Hersey, American author (born on this date in 1914, died 1993).
From John Hersey’s The Child Buyer (1960):
“I was wondering about that this morning… About forgetting. I’ve always had an idea that each memory was a kind of picture, an insubstantial picture. I’ve thought of it as suddenly coming into your mind when you need it, something you’ve seen, something you’ve heard, then it may stay awhile, or else it flies out, then maybe it comes back another time…. If all the pictures went out, if I forgot everything, where would they go? Just out into the air? Into the sky? Back home around my bed, where my dreams stay?”
“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns….”
— Wallace Stevens
Postcard from eBay
From Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Chapter I:
|
“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“
Steven Rosen in The Boston Globe, Sunday, Nov. 26, 2006:
“Emilio Estevez still doesn’t know why, but one day in 2000 he and his brother Charlie Sheen found themselves doing a photo shoot at this city’s long-closed but still infamous Ambassador Hotel. It was where Senator Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot the night he won California’s crucial Democratic presidential primary in 1968.
The site made little sense for the film they were promoting, ‘Rated X,’ a feature about the real-life San Francisco pornographers Jim and Artie Mitchell…. he [Estevez] and Sheen co-starred as the Mitchell brothers.
‘It wasn’t something I had requested,’ Estevez says today of the photo shoot’s location. ‘It was perhaps the photographer. I never got to the bottom of it, but there I was.’
To him, it was one in a series of ‘divine interventions’ that gave him the inspiration to write and direct the new film ‘Bobby,’ which opened Thursday [Nov. 23, Thanksgiving Day 2006].”
Brothers
Bobby Kennedy and
John F. Kennedy
Brothers
Charlie Sheen and
Emilio Estevez
“We keep coming back
and coming back to the real:
To the hotel instead of
the hymns….”
For an account of the
Kennedy film in the
style of the
“West Wing” liberals,
see Larry King tonight.
For some deeper political
background from a more
authentic voice of the left, see
The Myth of the Kennedys.
Venus at
St. Anne's,
continued
In honor of
the film "Bobby,"
now playing.
("Venus at St. Anne's"
is the title of the final
chapter of
the C. S. Lewis classic
That Hideous Strength.)
Symbol of Venus
and
Symbol of Plato
Related symbols:
Click on pictures
for details related tp
the Feast of St. Anne
(July 26).
"The best theology today,
in its repudiation of a
rhetorical religious idealism,
finds itself in agreement
with a recurrent note
in contemporary poetry….
We keep coming back
and coming back/
To the real: to the hotel
instead of the hymns/
That fall upon it
out of the wind. We seek/
… Nothing beyond reality.
Within it/
Everything,
the spirit’s alchemicana….
(From 'An Ordinary Evening
in New Haven,'
in The Collected Poems
of Wallace Stevens….)
… Not grim/
Reality, but reality grimly seen….
(Ibid.)"
— "The Church's
New Concern with the Arts,"
by Amos N. Wilder,
Hollis Professor
of Divinity, Emeritus,
at Harvard Divinity School,
in Christianity and Crisis,
February 18, 1957.
 |
"All the truth in the world
adds up to one big lie."
In Hoc Signo
Sources:
Hellblazer: Highwater,
from a graphic-novel
series that is the source
of Keanu Reeves's latest
spiritual adventure —
Another source…
The home page of Donald E. Knuth.
.
"When there's nothing to believe in
Still you're coming back,
you're running back
You're coming back for more
So put me on a highway…."
— The Eagles, 1975
The Fog and the Fury
Headline and opening sentence of a column in the Washington Times:
“Job creation fog . . . and fury
Something must be done [to] restore jobs in U.S. manufacturing….”
So far, so good. But the columnist goes on to explain the recent loss of manufacturing jobs:
“Let’s be honest. Some of these manufacturing jobs will not be coming back because of structural changes in our economy. Manufacturers have been reducing payrolls, in middle management and on the production line, because they have found ways to produce more goods at far less cost, boosting profits for further expansion and fatter investor and worker pension dividends.”
Uh-huh.
Here is a different explanation (the “fury,” as opposed to “the fog”), from a March 10 column:
“Last week’s jobs report, with hundreds of thousands giving up the search for work, and manufacturing jobs disappearing for the 43rd straight month, jolted the White House. What is going on?
They’re calling it a jobless recovery. Wrong. Millions of jobs are being created. They’re just not being created here in the United States.
The reasons can be traced to these four acronyms: NAFTA, GATT, WTO, PNTR. These are the trade treaties and global institutions that have permitted the historic substitution of foreign labor for American labor, to the enrichment of the transnational companies that look upon the Congress as a wholly owned subsidiary….
For the Bush Republicans, the chickens are coming home to roost….
At a weekend conference on immigration and jobs hosted by The American Cause, which this writer chairs, one speaker blurted out that while he voted for Bush in 2000, he would never do so again. The room erupted in applause, though virtually all there were conservatives, and all had once been Goldwater-Nixon-Reagan Republicans.”
— Pat Buchanan, author of
A Republic, Not an Empire
Happy Ides, Caesar.
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.
“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 |
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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
and today’s New York Times story
Words Are Events
August 12 was the date of death of Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr., and the date I entered some theological remarks in a new Harvard weblog. It turns out that August 12 was also the feast day of a new saint… Walter Jackson Ong, of St. Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri, a Jesuit institution.
Today, August 25, is the feast day of St. Louis himself, for whom the aforementioned city and university are named.
The New York Times states that Ong was "considered an outstanding postmodern theorist, whose ideas spawned college courses…."
There is, of course, no such thing as a postmodern Jesuit, although James Joyce came close.
From The Walter J. Ong Project:
"Ong's work is often presented alongside the postmodern and deconstruction theories of Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, and others. His own work in orality and literacy shows deconstruction to be unnecessary: if you consider language to be fundamentally spoken, as language originally is, it does not consist of signs, but of events. Sound, including the spoken word, is an event. It takes time. The concept of 'sign,' by contrast, derives primarily not from the world of events, but from the world of vision. A sign can be physically carried around, an event cannot: it simply happens. Words are events."
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From a commonplace book "We keep coming back and coming back The poem of pure reality, untouched At the exactest point at which The eye made clear of uncertainty, Everything, the spirit's alchemicana The solid, but the movable, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) |
The web page where I found the Stevens quote also has the following:
|
Case 9 of Hekiganroku: A monk asked Joshu, Joshu said, Setcho's Verse: Its intention concealed, Setcho (980-1052), |
See also my previous entry for today,
"Gates to the City."
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