Log24

Dwight Garner today on the late Milan Kundera:

"Kundera’s novels, especially his later ones, could be abstract and
heavy-handed. His characters, at times, were little more than chess pieces.
Their author could be pretentious. His work is filled with observations such as:
'In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia,
even the guillotine.' But his best fiction retains its moments of sweep and power."

Illustration for Florence King's 1989 review of The Eight , a  novel 
by Katherine Neville that features prominently the date April 4.

See also "Dissolution" in this  journal.

Katherine Neville, author of The Eight —

"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."

in The Magic Circle , Ballantine paperback, 1999, p. 339.

An Eight  for Katherine Neville —

For Katherine Neville, author of The Eight

Literary Meditation for the Feast of  SS Peter and Paul

Background:  McLuhan on analogy.

See a publication offering facsimiles of the original 4×6 cards
of John Shade's "Pale Fire," as Nabokov described them.

Regarding these card proportions, note that 4/6 = 333/500, approximately —
the proportions of the text box in a post from yesterday.

"Continue a search for thirty-three and three" — Katherine Neville.

These rather pointless, but vaguely poetic, analogies were suggested by …

• Yesterday morning's "The Corrections," a post
  featuring spider ballooning and a dead poet, and
   
• "Blue Dream," a post of Feb. 11, 2006.

— From Katherine Neville's novel The Eight  (1988)

Related logic —

Enlarge the above.  Detail:

"His story is tragic and fascinating, but also
an interesting symbol for the 20th century."

— "Pawn Sacrifice" review by Jordan Hoffman,
     Sept. 18, 2015

See as well William J. Lombardy's obituary in 
today's online New York Times .

Other symbols —

Logo for a current New York Times  series —

A 1989 New York Times  illustration for Florence King's review of The Eight , 
a  novel by Katherine Neville that features prominently the date April 4 —

Illustration by Rodrigo Shopis

See also recent posts now tagged Five Movements for Lombardy.

Illustration for Florence King's 1989 review of The Eight , a  novel 
by Katherine Neville that features prominently the date April 4.

Madeleine L'Engle meets Captain America —

This is from a Jan. 27, 2012, post on mathematics and narrative.

Related literary criticism by the late Florence King —

"Given all the historical personages the author whistles in,
one more won't hurt. Nicolas Boileau, the 17th-century
French literary critic, gave writers a piece of advice that
Ms. Neville could use: 'Make not your tale of accidents
too full / too much variety will make it dull / Achilles' rage
alone, when wrought with skill /Abundantly does a whole
"Iliad" fill.' "

— NY Times  review of The Eight , a novel by Katherine Neville

Under the Volcano:
A Bottle, a Door, a Box

See also Glory Season (Nov. 12, 2005) and Unique Figure (April 12, 2011).

Update of 11:22 AM —

Today in History —

"On December 21, 1937, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'
premiered to a record-breaking audience at the Carthay Circle
Theatre in Los Angeles."

Related material:  The Red Book.

"To Carthage then I came"

— The Waste Land , by T. S. Eliot

"To Carthage I came, where
  there sang all around me in my ears
  a cauldron of unholy loves."

 — Confessions  of St. Augustine, Book III

Click to enlarge.

See also Apollo in this  journal.

“Nine is a very powerful Nordic number.”

— Katherine Neville, who deserves some sort of prize for literature.

— Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,”
translated by Douglas Scott, in Existence and Being  ,
Regnery, 1949

“Nine is a very powerful Nordic number.”

— Katherine Neville, The Magic Circle

See also Arcade Fire in this journal.

From a search for Mirror-Play in this journal:

That search was suggested by a much lengthier
search, for Core, that itself was suggested
by yesterday's post (on Katherine Neville's birthday)
titled A Philosopher's Stone.

See, too, Tom Hanks (shown above as symbologist
Robert Langdon) in "Lucky Guy" (reviewed by TIME
yesterday), and a related poem:

Yes, you! You’re the Lucky One…

Prospective purchasers of the poet's work
may consult a press release from LSU Press
dated 4/4/2013. The poet died, apparently*
unlamented by his publisher, on 3/30.

* But only  apparently.

Narrative Sequence

In today's New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews a summer thriller by Kevin Guilfoile.  The Thousand  is in the manner of Dan Brown's 2003 The Da Vinci Code  or of Katherine Neville's 1988 The Eight .

From the review—

What connects these disparate events, it turns out, is a sinister organization called the Thousand, made up of followers of the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras (yes, the same Pythagoras associated with the triangle theorem that we learned in school).

As Mr. Guilfoile describes it, this organization is part Skull and Bones, part Masonic lodge, part something much more twisted and nefarious….

The plot involves, in part,

… an eccentric artist’s mysterious masterwork, made up of thousands of individually painted tiles that may cohere into an important message….

Not unlike the tiles in the Diamond Theory cover (see yesterday's post) or, more aptly, the entries in this journal.

Two definitions–

"In Dante's Inferno  the Harrowing of Hell is mentioned in Canto IV by the pilgrim's guide Virgil." —Wikipedia

"The Easter Vigil…. is held in the hours of darkness between sunset on Holy Saturday and sunrise on Easter Day." —Wikipedia

Two more, of acronyms coined by Philip Rieff—

"Rieff is critical of the present 'pop' culture that glories in the 'primacies of possibility' and prefers 'both/and' to 'either/or.' … the 'via'— the 'vertical in authority'—… teaches us our place as we assent to and ascend on via’s ladder." —Philip Manning

Related material:

VIA CRUCIS

The infinity symbol, as sketched in a touching
attempt at scholarship by the late
"both/and" novelist David Foster Wallace—

The Cartesian cross—

The lemniscate—

Lemniscate with Cartesian cross—

The Magic Lyre

The front page of tomorrow's New York Times Book Review is devoted to a new novel titled Angelology.

Detail of the front page, top right corner–

"…this will be popular for fans of such historical thrillers as… Katherine Neville's The Eight." —Library Journal

The New York Times review is more flattering– "a terrifically clever thriller– more Eco than Brown…."

Related historical remarks–

the symbology novels of Dan Brown and…

TIME magazine cover, issue
dated March 15, 2010–
"History Maker: How Tom Hanks is
redefining America's past"

For some theological background to
this post and today's noon post,
see the use of the word "harrowing"
in this journal — particularly on
April 19, 2003– Holy Saturday.

Katherine Neville, author of perhaps the greatest bad novel of the twentieth century, The Eight, has now graced a new century with her sequel, titled The Fire. An excerpt:

“Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior century, by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a pioneering mountain lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and massive tree trunks chinked together, it was a huge log cabin that was shaped like an octagon– patterned after a hogan or sweat lodge– with many-paned windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a vast, architectural compass rose.
……..
From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau, I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks, licked by the rosy morning light. On a clear day like this, I could see all the way to Mount Hesperus– which the Diné call Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain. One of the four sacred mountains created by First Man and First Woman.

Together with Sisnaajinii, white mountain (Mt. Blanca) in the east; Tsoodzil, blue mountain (Mt. Taylor) in the south, and Dook’o’osliid, yellow mountain (San Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked out the four corners of Dinétah– ‘Home of the Diné,’ as the Navajo call themselves.

And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was standing on: Four Corners, the only place in the U.S. where four states– Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona– come together at right angles to form a cross.”

Hour of the Wolf

Today is Schicksalstag, the “day of fate” in German history.

This entry’s time slot, 3:00 AM ET– which some say is the beginning of “the hour of the wolf*”– was reserved earlier for some entry appropriate to the day. (Actual time of this entry: about 12:48 PM ET).

Related material
from Aug. 6, 2006:

Game Boy     Click on picture for details. “Nine is a very powerful Nordic number.” — Katherine Neville http://www.dict.cc/?s=Einsatz:   to put one’s back into something bei etwas Einsatz zeigen to up the ante den Einsatz erhöhen to debrief den Einsatz nachher besprechen to be on duty im Einsatz sein mil.to be in action im Einsatz sein to play for high stakes mit hohem Einsatz spielen

* “Wolf” — See the etymological notes
in The Shining of May 29.

Works and Days

Hesiod, Works and Days:

“So, after all, there was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two…. For one fosters evil war and battle, being cruel: her no man loves; but perforce, through the will of the deathless gods, men pay harsh Strife her honour due.”

OnWar.com:

On this date in 1944, “A bitter civil war broke out in Athens….”

Paul Preuss, Secret Passages:

“Cambridge was colder and darker and offered even fewer distractions than before the war. By June, 1943, Minakis had done the maths tripos with honors…. He read Cavafy and Seferis and T.S. Eliot:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate…

Minakis was happy for his colleagues when the war ended but felt little on his own account or that of the country he had left; the Greek government was a British prop that could not feed its people, the Communists and the Monarchists were at one another’s throats like savage dogs, and civil war was inevitable.

Better to return to grim Cambridge….”

“There will be time, there will be time“–

— Katherine Neville, The Eight

   See also the previous entry.

"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."
— Katherine Neville, author of The Eight,

Star Wars,
continued

The Eight

Lest the reader of the previous entry mistakenly take Katherine Neville’s book The Eight more seriously than Fritz Leiber’s greatly superior writings on eightness, here are two classic interpretations of Leiber’s “spider” or “double cross” symbol:

This symbol consists of
two triangles

representing
male and female,
fire and water,
up and down,
etc., etc., etc.

For some deeper properties
of the number eight, see a
Log24.net entry of 4/4/03.

The Eight Revisited

“…search for thirty-three and three…”

— The Black Queen in The Eight, by Katherine Neville, Ballantine Books, January 1989, page 140 

Samuel Beckett on Dante and Joyce:

“Another point of comparison is the preoccupation with the significance of numbers….  Thus the poem is divided into three Cantiche, each composed of 33 Canti….”

— “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” in James Joyce/Finnegans Wake: A Symposium (1929), New Directions paperback, 1972

Into the Dark Woods:  

“– Nel mezzo del bloody cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai in…”
— Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947, beginning of Chapter VI

Dante Alighieri Academy:

“‘The Divine Comedy’ celebrates Dante’s journey of knowledge to God through life: hell, purgatory and paradise. Dante Alighieri Academy continues Dante’s Christian philosophy of education….”

Chorus of the Damned:

I don’t know where it is we’re goin’
and God knows if I ever will,
but what a way this is to get there.
I got those archetypal, rubber-room,
astral-plane Moebius strip blues.
I got those in-and-out, round-about,
which way’s out Moebius strip blues.

© 1997 by C.K. Latham

Added March 3, 2003, 6:00 AM:

For a less confused song, click this Glasgow site.