Log24

Happy birthday to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

One of the scenes from "Spencer" shows a Christmas weigh-in
at Sandringham with a staircase, and landing, in the background.

Another landing — On the staircase between the first and second
floors at Skillmans in Bemus Point, NY, where in a summer not too
many years ago I saw displayed a copy of Dorm Room Feng Shui .

I ordered this book online and enjoyed it when it arrived.

On the cover is a 3×3 array of images, with the caption "You are here"
in the center square.

Interpret this as you will.

"Where whirled and well"

— Conrad Aiken, Great Circle

And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

— T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"
 

About the Centre:

See also Dorm Room.

“Inside the church, the grief was real. Sen. Edward Kennedy’s voice caught as he read his lovely eulogy, and when he was done, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg stood up and hugged him. She bravely read from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest‘ (‘Our revels now are ended. We are such stuff as dreams are made on‘). Many of the 315 mourners, family and friends of the Kennedys and Bessettes, swallowed hard through a gospel choir’s rendition of ‘Amazing Grace,’ and afterward, they sang lustily as Uncle Teddy led the old Irish songs at the wake.”

— Newsweek magazine, issue dated August 2, 1999

The Ba gua (Chinese….) are eight diagrams used in Taoist cosmology to represent a range of interrelated concepts. Each consists of three lines, each either ‘broken’ or ‘unbroken,’ representing a yin line or a yang line, respectively. Due to their tripartite structure, they are often referred to as ‘trigrams’ in English. —Wikipedia

Part III:

Above: detail from the cover of…

The Freshmen, Part II

From the Daily Princetonian,
Feb. 3, 2004:

Caption: Cate Edwards' Princeton friends support her and her father.

"… when Sen. John Edwards, father of Cate Edwards '04, decided to run for president, the troop of 17 students sacrificed tans and theses to pile into a fleet of minivans headed to New Hampshire….

    These volunteers… were on a first name basis with the man who had helped them move into freshman dorm rooms and had discussed Senate votes with them over Chinese food."

Log24 May 22, 2004:

From Chuck Polisher's
I Ching Lexicon:

"It's claimed that
if you take a mirror
and look backwards
into a well,
you'll see your future
down in the water."

— Cold Mountain,
     Vintage paperback, 1998,
page 48

"Goin' to Carolina in my mind…"
— James Taylor