Related reading —
Some art from a different rural location in October 1983 —
Reading The Human Stain —
But wait, there's more!
The book , unlike the movie, doesn't have …
See Peplowski and The Human Stain in a post of Sept. 15, 2007.
Related material: "In the desert, you can remember your name" and …
Click image to enlarge.
Addendum of 10:30 PM ET November 22 —
The caption was inadvertently omitted from the above Black Rock City image.
It was as follows:
Prof. Coleman Silk introducing freshmen to academic values
“The communication
of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
… and for Anthony Hopkins and a Black Widow,
as well as for a filmmaker who reportedly died on May 19.
Update of 4:48 PM ET: See also Philip Roth on an ambiguity.
* The title was suggested in part by a series of Isaac Asimov mysteries.
(The final quote above is bogus. Stevens did write "Death is the mother
of beauty," but the "perishable" part is from a lesser poet, Billy Collins.)
For the duende of this post's title, see a dance.
The dance suggests a 1956 passage by Robert Silverberg—
"There was something in the heart of the diamond—
not the familiar brown flaw of the others, but something
of a different color, something moving and flickering.
Before my eyes, it changed and grew.
And I saw what it was. It was the form of a girl—
a woman, rather, a voluptuous, writhing nude form
in the center of the gem. Her hair was a lustrous blue-black,
her eyes a piercing ebony. She was gesturing to me,
holding out her hands, incredibly beckoning from within
the heart of the diamond.
I felt my legs go limp. She was growing larger, coming closer,
holding out her arms, beckoning, calling—
She seemed to fill the room. The diamond grew to gigantic size,
and my brain whirled and bobbed in dizzy circles.
I sensed the overpowering, wordless call."
— "Guardian of the Crystal Gate," August 1956
For similar gestures, see Nicole Kidman's dance in "The Human Stain."
New Game
In memory of a Jesuit who died on February 22 (see yesterday's "For the Ides of March")–
“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."
— M. A. Foster, The Gameplayers of Zan
"… for Othello, no less than his creator Shakespeare, death without speechmaking is almost unthinkable."
— "Walter Ong," by Jeet Heer (Book & Culture, July/August 2004)
"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood…."
— Jesuit quote at David Lavery's weblog today
See also this journal on February 22, the date of the Jesuit death. A post on that date mentions Ong and his teacher McLuhan, and displays a McLuhan figure related to the "joke" quote above–
Click figure for background.
Ong discussed "agonistic" culture.
See "Sunday's Theater" and a film
based on the novel discussed there–
Prof. Coleman Silk introduces
freshmen to academic values
For academic gameplayers who prefer
less emotionally challenging subjects,
there is Othello Online —
Scenes from
The Human Stain —
Menin, the word
in Greek on the
professor’s
blackboard,
means “wrath“…
New York Times today–
"Plot Would Thicken, if the
Writers Remembered It"
"We've lost the plot!"
— Slipstream
Excerpt from Fritz Leiber's Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it's cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I'd hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, "Look, Buster, do you want to live?"…. Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.
Bordered version The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent…. … "Here is how it stacks up: You've bought your way with something other than money into an organization of which I am an agent…." "It's a very big organization," she went on, as if warning me. "Call it an empire or a power if you like. So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist. It has agents everywhere, literally. Space and time are no barriers to it. Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future, but also the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees." "I. G. Farben?" I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor. She didn't rebuke my flippancy, but said, "And it isn't the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name." "Which is?" I asked. "The Spiders," she said. That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly. I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me– something like that. She watched me. "You might call it the Double Cross," she suggested, "if that seems better." |
Related material:
the previous entry.
(See September 15. )
"The communication
of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living."
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
The Boston Globe,
Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2007-
Professors: Post Your Syllabi
Professors should post their course syllabi before move-in, not after class has started The Harvard Crimson
Published On Friday, September 14, 2007 12:54 AM
"Classes start in three days, and that means it’s time to… examine course syllabi– that is if you can find them…." More >> |
The Course Begins:
Larry Summers, former president
of Harvard, was recently invited,
then disinvited, to speak at a
politically correct UC campus.
A Guest Lecturer Speaks:
Illustration of the Theme:
Clarinetist Ken Peplowski
plays "Cry Me a River"
as Nicole Kidman focuses
the students' attention.
A sample Holy Spook,
Kurt Vonnegut, was introduced
by Peplowski on the birthday
this year of Pope Benedict XVI.
"Deeply vulgar"
— Academic characterization
of Harvard president Summers
"Do they still call it
the licorice stick?"
— Kurt Vonnegut
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