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Monday, March 16, 2026
Thursday, February 26, 2026
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Magic Mountain Dramarama
Act purposefully! Think rationally!
Play IT as IT lays!
Related Reading —
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Understanding Media
Likewise.com is now pix-media.com.
Adapted song lyric for Pennywise fans . . .
♫ "Floating . . . takes me away to where I'm going . . . ."
For a different, but not unrelated, Bellevue, see
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and WAIS Blocks.
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Friday, October 17, 2025
A Spell
"Time casts a spell on you but you won't forget me
I know I could have loved you but you would not let me"
— Stevie Nicks lyrics to an artist's video today.
Note the making of a matching pattern.
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Friday, September 26, 2025
Penguin Bridge
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Tuesday, February 18, 2025
February Poetics: Day 18
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Thursday, October 24, 2024
Space Vesper: “Shaken, Not Stirred”
A Tuesday dies natalis —
From the Log24 post "Verbum" (Saturday, February 18, 2017).
A different Tuesday —
Tuesday Weld in the 1972 film of Didion's Play It As It Lays :
Note the making of a matching pattern.
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Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Song Adaptation
Sinatra's "Three Coins in the Fountain" … Adapted —
From Didion’s Play It As It Lays :
Everything goes. I am working very hard at
not thinking about how everything goes.
I watch a hummingbird, throw the I Ching
but never read the coins, keep my mind in the now.
— Page 8
From Play It As It Lays :
I lie here in the sunlight, watch the hummingbird.
This morning I threw the coins in the swimming pool,
and they gleamed and turned in the water in such a way
that I was almost moved to read them. I refrained.
A purely visual version of Didion's three coins —
And then there is an adaptation of a Michael Jackson song —
"I'm looking at the dog in the mirror."
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Sunday, June 9, 2024
Art for Pilot Fish
The Pilot Fish
"That year the rich came led by the pilot fish.
A year before they would never have come.
There was no certainty then.
The work was as good and the happiness was greater
but no novel had been written, so they could not be sure.
They never wasted their time nor their charm
on something that was not sure. Why should they?"
Note the making of a matching pattern.
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Monday, May 27, 2024
♫ “This Old Man, He Played Two…”
Some literary background— Doctor Sax.
For The Pride of Lowell . . .
"Fewer letters, cheaper signs." … Business saying from CVS.
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Tuesday, May 21, 2024
Geometry for Belgium
Other matching patterns . . .
Tuesday Weld in the 1972 film of Didion's Play It As It Lays :
Note the making of a matching pattern.
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Tuesday, April 2, 2024
Where Madness Lies … and Sometimes Tells the Truth
Tuesday Weld in the 1972 film of Didion's Play It As It Lays :
Note the making of a matching pattern.
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Sunday, October 1, 2023
From the Vulgar Latin Muse — Pint, Pinter, Pinterest
"Pint comes from the Old French word pinte and perhaps ultimately
from Vulgar Latin pincta meaning 'painted,' for marks painted on
the side of a container to show capacity.*
* "Pint," Merriam-Webster.com. 2013. Retrieved 31 May 2013."
"Ride a painted pony . . ." — Play It as It Lays song
"I love you Mony Mony . . . ." — Another song
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Thursday, September 21, 2023
Ekphrasis*
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Friday, December 31, 2021
Fiction for Enola
From a Log24 search for "Strand" —
Related literary remarks —
From Didion’s Play It As It Lays :
Everything goes. I am working very hard at
not thinking about how everything goes.
I watch a hummingbird, throw the I Ching
but never read the coins, keep my mind in the now.
— Page 8
From Joni Mitchell —
"Don't it always seem to go . . . ."
From Wallace Stevens:
"Let be be finale of seem."
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Thursday, December 23, 2021
Refrain
From Didion’s Play It As It Lays :
Everything goes. I am working very hard at
not thinking about how everything goes.
I watch a hummingbird, throw the I Ching
but never read the coins, keep my mind in the now.
— Page 8
From Play It As It Lays :
I lie here in the sunlight, watch the hummingbird.
This morning I threw the coins in the swimming pool,
and they gleamed and turned in the water in such a way
that I was almost moved to read them. I refrained.
— Page 214
Didion and her husand John Gregory Dunne
wrote the screenplay for the 1976 version of
"A Star is Born."
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Monday, March 6, 2017
Reading the Coins
From Didion’s Play It As It Lays :
Everything goes. I am working very hard at
not thinking about how everything goes.
I watch a hummingbird, throw the I Ching
but never read the coins, keep my mind in the now.
— Page 8
From Play It As It Lays :
I lie here in the sunlight, watch the hummingbird.
This morning I threw the coins in the swimming pool,
and they gleamed and turned in the water in such a way
that I was almost moved to read them. I refrained.
— Page 214
From a search in this journal for "The Southwest Furthers" —
Hexagram 39:
|
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Sunday, November 9, 2014
Sermon
The Ideas
| “We tell ourselves stories in order to live…. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” — Joan Didion |
See Didion and the I Ching and posts tagged Plato in China .
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Thursday, July 21, 2011
The Race
|
An image related to See "As It Lays" in this journal.
(Not as it lies .) |
|
New York Times obituaries today—
Click to enlarge.
|
|
"That's GUY-ler, not GAY-ler."
See also Time and the River, Number of the Beast, and Story Theory.
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Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Wednesday June 10, 2009
Hello, Columbus
continued from
the two entries of
October 12, 2003:
Part I —
October 12, 2003 —
Above, an image from
Spinnin’ Wheel,
Spinnin’ True
Part II —
October 12, 2003 —
Above, an image from
Hello, Columbus
Part III —
June 10, 2009 —
Below, images from
a website:
“They all laughed at
Christopher Columbus…”
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Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Tuesday June 9, 2009
Recessional
"I know what
nothing means."
— Joan Didion,
Play It As It Lays
Faust
President Faust of Harvard on Joan Didion:
"She was referring to life as a kind of improvisation: that magical crossroads of rigor and ease, structure and freedom, reason and intuition. What she calls being prepared to 'go with the change.'"
"I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that."
From the same book:
"The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place."
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
For a magical crossroads at another university, see the five Log24 entries ending on November 25, 2005:
This holy icon
appeared at
N37°25.638'
W122°09.574'
on August 22, 2003,
at the Stanford campus.
Also from that date,
an example of clarity
in another holy icon —
|
|
— in honor of better days
at Harvard and of a member
of the Radcliffe Class of 1964.
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Tuesday February 24, 2009
Hollywood Nihilism
Meets
Pantheistic Solipsism
Meets
Pantheistic Solipsism
Tina Fey to Steve Martin
at the Oscars:
"Oh, Steve, no one wants
to hear about our religion
… that we made up."
|
From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 117:
… in 'The Pediment of Appearance,' a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer… A group of young men enter some woods 'Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.' Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the 'savage transparence,' the rude source of human life. In Stevens's world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men's search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that 'they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,' believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens's principles of the imagination. |
Superficially the young men's philosophy seems to resemble what Wikipedia calls "pantheistic solipsism"– noting, however, that "This article has multiple issues."
As, indeed, does pantheistic solipsism– a philosophy (properly called "eschatological pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism") devised, with tongue in cheek, by science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein.
Despite their preoccupation with solipsism, Heinlein and Stevens point, each in his own poetic way, to a highly non-solipsistic topic from pure mathematics that is, unlike the religion of Martin and Fey, not made up– namely, the properties of space.
"Sharpie, we have condensed six dimensions into four, then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands. Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three– you seem to be smart at such projections."
I closed my eyes and thought hard. "Zebbie, I don't think it can be done. Maybe Escher could have done it."
|
A discussion of Stevens's late poem "The Rock" (1954) in Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 120:
For Stevens, the poem "makes meanings of the rock." In the mind, "its barrenness becomes a thousand things/And so exists no more." In fact, in a peculiar irony that only a poet with Stevens's particular notion of the imagination's function could develop, the rock becomes the mind itself, shattered into such diamond-faceted brilliance that it encompasses all possibilities for human thought:
The rock is the gray particular of man's life,
The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho,
The step to the bleaker depths of his descents ...
The rock is the stern particular of the air,
The mirror of the planets, one by one,
But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist,
Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright
With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;
The difficult rightness of half-risen day.
The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near,
point A
In a perspective that begins again
At B: the origin of the mango's rind.
(Collected Poems, 528)
|
Stevens's rock is associated with empty space, a concept that suggests "nothingness" to one literary critic:
B. J. Leggett, "Stevens's Late Poetry" in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens— On the poem "The Rock":
"… the barren rock of the title is Stevens's symbol for the nothingness that underlies all existence, 'That in which space itself is contained'…. Its subject is its speaker's sense of nothingness and his need to be cured of it."
This interpretation might appeal to Joan Didion, who, as author of the classic novel Play It As It Lays, is perhaps the world's leading expert on Hollywood nihilism.
More positively…
Space is, of course, also a topic
in pure mathematics…
For instance, the 6-dimensional
affine space (or the corresponding
5-dimensional projective space)
over the two-element Galois field
can be viewed as an illustration of
Stevens's metaphor in "The Rock."
Heinlein should perhaps have had in mind the Klein correspondence when he discussed "some way to project six dimensions into three." While such a projection is of course trivial for anyone who has taken an undergraduate course in linear algebra, the following remarks by Philippe Cara present a much more meaningful mapping, using the Klein correspondence, of structures in six (affine) dimensions to structures in three.
Cara:
Here the 6-dimensional affine
space contains the 63 points
of PG(5, 2), plus the origin, and
the 3-dimensional affine
space contains as its 8 points
Conwell's eight "heptads," as in
Generating the Octad Generator.
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Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Tuesday February 3, 2009
"I know what 'nothing' means…."
— Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990 paperback, page 214
"In 1935, near the end of a long affectionate letter to his son George in America, James Joyce wrote: 'Here I conclude. My eyes are tired. For over half a century they have gazed into nullity, where they have found a lovely nothing.'"
— Lionel Trilling, "James Joyce in His Letters," Commentary, 45, no. 2 (Feb. 1968), abstract
"The quotation is from The Letters of James Joyce, Volume III, ed. Richard Ellman (New York, 1966), p. 359. The original Italian reads 'Adesso termino. Ho gli occhi stanchi. Da più di mezzo secolo scrutano nel nulla dove hanno trovato un bellissimo niente.'"
— Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics, by William M. Chace, Stanford U. Press, 1980, page 198, Note 4 to Chapter 9
"Space: what you damn well have to see."
— James Joyce, Ulysses
"What happens to the concepts of space and direction if all the matter in the universe is removed save a small finite number of particles?"
— "On the Origins of Twistor Theory," by Roger Penrose
"… we can look to the prairie, the darkening sky, the birthing of a funnel-cloud to see in its vortex the fundamental structure of everything…"
— Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon (See previous entry.)
"A strange thing then happened."
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Thursday, May 8, 2008
Thursday May 8, 2008
Star Wars
“JERUSALEM, May 7 (Reuters) –
Fireworks and military fanfare
launched Israel’s 60th anniversary
celebrations on Wednesday…”
Fireworks and military fanfare
launched Israel’s 60th anniversary
celebrations on Wednesday…”
Related material
from Tuesday:
“… someone was down sixty,
someone was up….”
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Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Tuesday May 6, 2008
In the Dreamtime
the Point Was Ten
the Point Was Ten
From Play It As It Lays,
the paperback edition of 1990
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) —
| Page 170: “… In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen, the only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin. By the end of a week she was thinking constantly 170
|
For further details
see yesterday’s entries.”In her half sleep
the point was ten….”
— Play It As It Lays
The Random House
signed first edition
of Norman Mailer’s
The Time of Our Time
(4 pounds, 1286 pages)
was published
ten years ago yesterday —
May 5, 1998:
Fireworks starburst
on the cover of
The Time of Our Time
Also from May 5, 1998:
File Photo in Mailer’s obituary —
(Photo by Bebeto Matthews
with Mailer obituary in
Toronto Globe and Mail)
with excerpt from the obituary,
by Richard Pyle
(Associated Press
Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007
at 8:20 AM EDT)
Related material:
Yesterday’s entries and
the time of this entry:
11:07:51 AM ET
51
THE JUDGMENT SHOCK brings success. Shock comes - oh, oh! Laughing words - ha, ha!
in light of…
| A: Mailer’s fireworks starburst on his book cover from ten years ago yesterday B: A real starburst in a story |
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Monday, May 5, 2008
Monday May 5, 2008
"All our words from loose using
have lost their edge."
— Ernest Hemingway
have lost their edge."
— Ernest Hemingway
Look Homeward, Norman
New York Lottery
May 5, 2008:
May 5, 2008:
The evening number,
411, may be interpreted
as 4/11. From Log24
on that date:
As for the mid-day number
098, a Google search
(with the aid of, in retrospect,
the above family tribute)
on "98 'Norman Mailer'"
yields
|
Amazon.com: The Time of Our Time (Modern Library Paperbacks …
With The Time of Our Time (1998) Norman Mailer has archetypalized himself and in the seven years since publication, within which films Fear and Loathing in …
|
From an unattributed
"editorial review" of
The Time of Our Time
at Amazon.com:
"editorial review" of
The Time of Our Time
at Amazon.com:
"Surely this sense of himself
as the republic's recording angel
accounts for the structure
of Mailer's anthology…."
Related material:
From Play It As It Lays,
the paperback edition of 1990
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) —
|
Page 170:
"… In her half sleep
By the end of a week she was thinking constantly
170
even one micro-second she would have what she had |
The number 411 from
this evening's New York Lottery
may thus be regarded as naming the
"exact point in space and time"
sought in the above passage.
For a related midrash
on the meaning of the
passage's page number,
see the previous entry.
For a more plausible
recording angel,
see Sinatra's birthday,
December 12, 2002.
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Monday May 5, 2008
Lottery Sermon
"And take upon's
the mystery of things
as if we were God's spies"
— King Lear
From Log24 on Aug. 19, 2003
and on Ash Wednesday, 2004:
a reviewer on
An Instance of the Fingerpost::
"Perhaps we are meant to
see the story as a cubist
retelling of the crucifixion."
From Log24 on
Michaelmas 2007:
Google searches suggested by
Sunday's PA lottery numbers
(mid-day 170, evening 144)
and by the above
figure of Kate Beckinsale
pointing to an instance of
the number 144 —
Related material:
Beckinsale in another film
(See At the Crossroads,
Log24, Dec. 8, 2006):
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow
There is such a thing
as a tesseract.
"It was only in retrospect
that the silliness
became profound."
— Review of
Faust in Copenhagen
From the conclusion of
Joan Didion's 1970 novel
Play It As It Lays —
"I know what 'nothing' means,
and keep on playing."
From Play It As It Lays,
the paperback edition of 1990
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) —
|
Page 170:
"By the end of a week she was thinking constantly
170
even one micro-second she would have what she had |
"The page numbers
are generally reliable."
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Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Tuesday July 31, 2007
Italian Director Antonioni
Dies at 94
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 31, 2007
Filed with The New York Times at 5:14 a.m. ET
“ROME (AP) — Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, best known for his movies ‘Blow-Up’ and ‘L’Avventura,’ has died, officials and news reports said Tuesday. He was 94.
The ANSA news agency said that Antonioni died at his home on Monday evening.
‘With Antonioni dies not only one of the greatest directors but also a master of modernity,’ Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said in a statement.
In 1995, Hollywood honored Antonioni’s career work– 25 films and several screenplays– with a special Oscar for lifetime achievement.”
Related material:
- “Zabriskie Point” (1970), a film by Antonioni.
“The name refers to Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, the location of the film’s famous desert love scene, in which members of the Open Theatre simulate an orgy.” —Wikipedia
- Play It As It Lays (1970), a novel by Joan Didion
- Log24: The Word in the Desert
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