Log24

From yesterday morning —

“Play the numbers, play the odds
Play ‘Cry Me a River’ for the Lord of the gods”

— Bob Dylan at
https://genius.com/Bob-dylan-murder-most-foul-lyrics

This suggests . . .

Polydor 2001 566 —

See the search for an Inarticulate Square in this journal.

Or:  Shema, SXSW

Related reading —

"Do you know there is a deliberate sinister conspiracy at work?"

"No, but hum a few bars and I'll fake it."

A few bars —

* Not the Dark Tower of Stephen King, but that of the
University of Texas at Austin, back in time 50 years and a day.

The New York Times  on an arranger/composer who reportedly
died at 100 on Monday:

"By the 1950s he was the musical arranger for
'The Milton Berle Show' (originally 'Texaco Star Theater'),
NBC’s hit hourlong variety-comedy series."

Related Log24 posts —

Notes towards a Dark Tower (Aug. 2, 2016) and Maine to Mexico.

According to Wallace Stevens:

This  post was suggested by the following passage —

" … the Fano plane ,
a set of seven points
grouped into seven lines
that has been called
'the combinatorialist’s coat of arms.' "

— Blake Stacey in a post with tomorrow's date:

… and by Stacey at another weblog, in a post dated Jan. 29, 2019, …

"(Yes, Bohr was the kind of guy who would choose
the yin-yang symbol as his coat of arms.)"

Yes, Stacey is the kind of guy who would casually dismiss
Bohr's coat of arms. 

Related material — 

(See also Faust in Copenhagen in this  journal)—

» more

The previous post suggests a Log24 search for
Stevens + Sorbonne.  This yields …

"The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to 
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again. 
Does it move to and fro or is it of both 
At once?”

— Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (1942)

Par exemple , the previous post's title:  "Space Case."

Note —

See also the previous post, Notes towards the Inarticulate.

In memory of reporter Bob Simon —

NY Lottery midday Feb. 12, 2015:

788  2970.

In memory of reporter David Carr —

NY Lottery evening Feb. 12, 2015:

601  1469.

Remarks on Wallace Stevens's poem "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction"
from Michael Bryson—

Or the woman-hero…

From a Log24 post on June 1, 2004—

“A tongue-in-cheek comment by programmers is worth thinking about: ‘Sometimes you have a programming problem and it seems like the best solution is to use regular expressions; now you have two problems.’  Regular expressions are amazingly powerful and deeply expressive. That is the very reason writing them is just as error-prone as writing any other complex programming code.”

– David Mertz, Learning to Use Regular Expressions

Happy birthday to the late Willard Van Orman Quine.

“Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word….”

– Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

(Quoted here four years ago on October 2, 2006.)

From Wallace Stevens
On His Birthday

“Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word….”

— Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

Ennui

May there be an ennui
   of the first idea?
What else, prodigious scholar,
   should there be?

— Wallace Stevens,
   “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction“

Related material: The Line.

“Wallace Stevens’s remarkable oeuvre is a quasi-spiritual quest for the supreme fiction, for a poetry that ‘must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns’ and thus help modern man find meaning in a godless world. The poet’s role, for Stevens, is that of high priest of the imagination: it is the poet who ‘gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.’ ….
… Stevens’s hallmark ‘imagination-reality’ complex… is pursued almost obsessively in his poetry and prose of the 1940s. Parts of a World, published in 1942, and the poem-sequence of the same year, ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’ (‘Notes’ was subsequently collected in Transport to Summer in 1947), comprise a prolonged meditation in a time of war on poetry and the poet’s role, in the face of what Stevens, in his essay ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,’ terms ‘the pressure of reality.’ Parts of a World is riven by its competing vocabularies. A discourse of desire, of process, of the poet’s contemplation of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice, is elaborated in ‘the never-resting mind’ of ‘The Poems of Our Climate’ and in ‘The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,’ in which ‘It can never be satisfied, the mind, never’ [occurs]. A very different idiom, that of the ‘hero’ or ‘major man,’ the figure of capable imagination, dominates and directs such poems as ‘Mrs Alfred Uruguay,’ ‘Asides on the Oboe’ and ‘Examination of the Hero in a Time of War,’ where

    Summer, jangling
         the savagest diamonds and
    Dressed in its
         azure-doubled crimsons,
    May truly bear
         its heroic fortunes
    For the large,
         the solitary figure.”

— Lee M. Jenkins,
    University College Cork,
   “Wallace Stevens,”
    The Literary Encyclopedia,
    9 Dec., 2004.

For some related serious, but less solemn, remarks, click on the above date.

24 Years Later: 

In memory of John Lennon
and Diamond Darrell Abbott

This time slot was reserved at noon on Wednesday, Dec. 8, but this entry was made at about 4:35 PM on Thursday, Dec. 9.

“A dead shepherd brought
tremendous chords from hell
And bade the sheep carouse.”

Split

The first idea was not our own. Adam
in Eden was the father of Descartes.

— Wallace Stevens,
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

A very interesting web site at
Middle Tennessee State University
relates the Stevens quote
to two others:

“The sundering we sense, between nature and culture, lies not like a canyon outside us but splits our being at its most intimate depths the way mind breaks off from body. It is still another version of that bitter bifurcation long ago decreed: our expulsion from Eden. It differs from the apparently similar Cartesian crease across things in the fact that the two halves of us once were one; that we did not always stand askance like molasses and madness–logically at odds–but grew apart over the years like those husbands and wives who draw themselves into different corners of contemplation.”

— William Gass,
“The Polemical Philosopher”

“The experiment [to make rationality primary] reached the reductio ad absurdum following the attempt by Descartes to solve problems of human knowledge by giving ontological status to the dichotomy of thinking substance and extended substance, that is subject and object. Not only were God and man, sacred and secular, being and becoming, play and seriousness severed, but now also the subject which wished to unite these fragmented dichotomies was itself severed from that which it would attempt to reconcile.”

— David Miller, God and Games

“Which is it then? For Gass, the Cartesian schism is a post- lapsarian divorce-in progress, only apparently similar to the expulsion from paradise. For Stevens the fault is primordial and Descartes only its latter-day avatar. For Miller, Descartes is the historical culprit, the patriarch of the split.”

— The Evil Genius Notebook,
by David Lavery

Opening of the Graves

colporteur