Related material: Drinking Ochas.
Sunday, November 28, 2021
Wednesday, December 8, 2021
’Musement
Related material — Disparate Images :
Joan Didion, The White Album :
“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.
Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about
a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the
stories I had ever told myself, a common condition
but one I found troubling.”
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Sunday, December 5, 2021
Disparate Images
Flashback:
Detail of Instagram story last night by marrific:
Quoted here on today's date — Joan Didion's birthday —
Joan Didion, The White Album :
“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.Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about
a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the
stories I had ever told myself, a common condition
but one I found troubling.”
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Thursday, November 18, 2021
Story by a LA-LA Art Director
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Stories
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — Joan Didion
Yes, we do.
" 'Desertion' is the perfect story to make my case
that 1940s science fiction was often about the next
evolutionary step for our species." — James Wallace Harris, 9/18/21
From https://classicsofsciencefiction.com on Sept. 18, 2021 —
In “Paradise,” the mutants are that superior species,
ones who are waiting for normal humans to get their
act together. Mutants arrange for Tyler Webster
to get a kaleidoscope that will trick his brain into
opening its higher functionality. The kaleidoscope
is like the toys from the future in “Mimsy Were the
Borogoves” that trigger evolution in normal human
children.
See as well Mimsy and Kaleidoscope in this journal.
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Wednesday, June 3, 2020
Scripting Continues.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — Joan Didion
See Lippincott’s obituary in today’s online New York Times.
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Friday, May 29, 2020
Thursday, March 8, 2018
Stories
"We tell ourselves stories . . . ." — Joan Didion
New York Times Wire, 6:40 PM ET Thursday, March 8, 2018
3h ago
GRAY MATTER
How Lies Spread Online
They diffuse farther, faster and more broadly than the truth does.
4h ago
It’s True: False News Spreads Faster and Wider.
And Humans Are to Blame.
False claims posted on Twitter were 70 percent more likely
to be shared than the truth, researchers at M.I.T. found.
And people appear to prefer false news.
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Thursday, March 2, 2017
Stories
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." — Joan Didion
The New York Times Magazine online today —
"As a former believer and now a nonbeliever, Carrère,
seeking answers, sets out, in The Kingdom , to tell
the story of the storytellers. He is trying to understand
what it takes to be able to tell a story, any story.
And what he finds, once again, is that you have to find
your role in it."
— Wyatt Mason in The New York Times Magazine ,
online March 2, 2017
Like Tom Hanks?
Click image for related posts.
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Sunday, August 30, 2015
Lines
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." — Joan Didion
A post from St. Augustine's day, 2015, may serve to
illustrate this.
The post started with a look at a painting by Swiss artist
Wolf Barth, "Spielfeld." The painting portrays two
rectangular arrays, of four and of twelve subsquares,
that sit atop a square array of sixteen subsquares.
To one familiar with Euclid's "bride's chair" proof of the
Pythagorean theorem, "Spielfeld" suggests a right triangle
with squares on its sides of areas 4, 12, and 16.
That image in turn suggests a diagram illustrating the fact
that a triangle suitably inscribed in a half-circle is a right
triangle… in this case, a right triangle with angles of 30, 60,
and 90 degrees… Thus —
In memory of screenwriter John Gregory Dunne (husband
of Joan Didion and author of, among other things, The Studio )
here is a cinematric approach to the above figure.
The half-circle at top suggests the dome of an observatory.
This in turn suggests a scene from the 2014 film "Magic in
the Moonlight."
As she gazes at the silent universe above
through an opening in the dome, the silent
Emma Stone is perhaps thinking,
prompted by her work with Spider-Man …
"Drop me a line."
As he gazes at the crack in the dome,
Stone's costar Colin Firth contrasts the vastness
of the Universe with the smallness of Man, citing …
"the tiny field F2 with two elements."
In conclusion, recall the words of author Norman Mailer
that summarized his Harvard education —
"At times, bullshit can only be countered
with superior bullshit."
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Saturday, May 23, 2015
Art
"Is Fiction the Art of Lying?" by Mario Vargas Llosa
The above link is to a Google Books Search for references
to a 1984 piece in The New York Times .
To find the Times 's own version, change "Lying" to "Living."
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." — Joan Didion
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Friday, May 22, 2015
Colorful Tale
See a post of Nov. 17, 2011 — Void.
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
— Joan Didion, The White Album
See also John Gregory Dunne.
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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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Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Principles of Aesthetics
Or: Phantasmagoria Meets Pandemonium
Part I: Phantasmagoria
Rebecca Goldstein on first encountering Plato —
| “I was reading Durant’s section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)” |
| “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.” |
Part II: Pandemonium
Terry Teachout in Commentary on Oct. 1, 2014:
“When making art or writing about it, the aesthete
tries never to moralize. Nor will he look with favor
upon artists who do so, no matter whether their
particular brand of moralizing is religious or secular.
But he can and must be fully, intensely alive to the
moral force of art whose creators aspire merely to
make the world around us more beautiful, and in
so doing to pierce the veil of the visible and give us
a glimpse of the permanently true. That is his job:
to help make sense of the pandemonium amid which
we live.”
Rivka Galchen in The New York Times Sunday Book Review
issue of October 5, 2014 (online Sept. 30):
“The story describes honestly something that is,
which is very different from proposing what ought to be.”
See also Pandemonium in this journal.
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Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Ideas
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
The princess is caged in the consulate.
The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.
The naked woman on the ledge outside the window
on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or
the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be
‘interesting’ to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes
some difference whether the naked woman is about to
commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest
or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the
human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible
in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens.
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral
lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select
the most workable of the 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.”
This evening’s New York Lottery: 659 and 7326.
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Tuesday, August 5, 2014
The Omega Story
|
"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." |
See also a post from May 4, 2011 (the date, according to a Google
search, of untitled notes regarding a matrix called Omega).
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Thursday, November 17, 2011
Void
From "Elegy to the Void," by Cathleen Schine, New York Review of Books , issue dated Nov. 24, 2011—
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion famously wrote in The White Album . Blue Nights is about what happens when there are no more stories we can tell ourselves, no narrative to guide us and make sense out of the chaos, no order, no meaning, no conclusion to the tale. The book has, instead, an incantatory quality: it is a beautiful, soaring, polyphonic eulogy, a beseeching prayer that is sung even as one knows the answer to one’s plea, and that answer is: No.
Blue Nights is a sequel of sorts to The Year of Magical Thinking , Didion's story of the year following the death on December 30th, 2003, of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne.
Related material:
For some context, see
- Cosmic Banditos in this journal,
- the Fall 1997 newsletter of the Institute for Advanced Study,
- and Oppenheimer's Aria.
For a different link to that aria, see a journal entry dated December 28, 2003.
(Click link, scroll down.)
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Thursday, September 15, 2011
Life Story
(Continued from Tuesday's "A Story")
Tuesday's story, a collection of four random posts, was
suggested by Tuesday's NY lottery numbers.
That story leads, by association, to Frame Tale in
a post of 2:02 AM on Sunday, May 23, 2010. For related
material, see Death Story, a post of 9:40 PM that same Sunday.
Wednesday's numbers—
—suggest a counter-story…
Escape to Pine Mountain
A website on films about Latter-Day Saints (i.e., Mormons) asks
Was "Escape to Witch Mountain"
based on Zenna Henderson's "People" stories?
The lottery numbers above suggest the names of three women—
none, as far as I know, with any Mormon background—
who might rightly be called, without capital letters,
"latter-day saints"…
- Madeleine L'Engle (see 529 as the date 5/29),
- June Christy (a singer first recorded on 5/4/45), and
- Mary Rockwell Hook, architect of Pine Mountain
Settlement School, who died on 9/8/78.
These three lives, taken together, may serve as
an antidote to the Death Story mentioned above.
"We tell ourselves stories…" — Joan Didion
"Therefore choose life." —God
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Saturday, July 23, 2011
Story Theory (continued)
"We tell ourselves stories…." * — Joan Didion
in "The Fifth Element"
Priest Vito Cornelius: I… have… a different theory to offer you, sir.
President Lindberg: You have twenty seconds.
* See also Friday morning's post.
** Today's New York Times—
"A version of this op-ed appeared in print
on July 23, 2011, on page A19 of the New York
edition with the headline: The Great Evil." —
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Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Unity and Multiplicity
Continued from Crimson Walpurgisnacht.
Epigraphs— Two quotations from
Shakespeare's Birthday last year—
|
"I was reading Durant's section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)" |
|
"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." |
From Thomas Mann, "Schopenhauer," 1938, in Essays of Three Decades , translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter, Alfred A. Knopf, 1947, pp. 372-410—
Page 372: THE PLEASURE we take in a metaphysical system, the gratification purveyed by the intellectual organization of the world into a closely reasoned, complete, and balanced structure of thought, is always of a pre-eminently aesthetic kind. It flows from the same source as the joy, the high and ever happy satisfaction we get from art, with its power to shape and order its material, to sort out life's manifold confusions so as to give us a clear and general view.
Truth and beauty must always be referred the one to the other. Each by itself, without the support given by the other, remains a very fluctuating value. Beauty that has not truth on its side and cannot have reference to it, does not live in it and through it, would be an empty chimera— and "What is truth?"
….
Page 376: … the life of Plato was a very great event in the history of the human spirit; and first of all it was a scientific and a moral event. Everyone feels that something profoundly moral attaches to this elevation of the ideal as the only actual, above the ephemeralness and multiplicity of the phenomenal, this devaluation of the senses to the advantage of the spirit, of the temporal to the advantage of the eternal— quite in the spirit of the Christianity that came after it. For in a way the transitory phenomenon, and the sensual attaching to it, are put thereby into a state of sin: he alone finds truth and salvation who turns his face to the eternal. From this point of view Plato's philosophy exhibits the connection between science and ascetic morality.
But it exhibits another relationship: that with the world of art. According to such a philosophy time itself is merely the partial and piecemeal view which an individual holds of ideas— the latter, being outside time, are thus eternal. "Time"— so runs a beautiful phrase of Plato— "is the moving image of eternity." And so this pre-Christian, already Christian doctrine, with all its ascetic wisdom, possesses on the other hand extraordinary charm of a sensuous and creative kind; for a conception of the world as a colourful and moving phantasmagoria of pictures, which are transparencies for the ideal and the spiritual, eminently savours of the world of art, and through it the artist, as it were, first comes into his own.
From last night's online NY Times obituaries index—
"How much story do you want?" — George Balanchine
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Friday, April 23, 2010
Phantasmagoria
Today's NY Times obituaries —
Warnecke died April 17, last Saturday.
From an entry linked to on that date —
|
"I was reading Durant's section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)" |
|
"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." |
Happy Shakespeare's birthday.
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Wednesday, December 23, 2009
A Timely Question
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
— Joan Didion, The White Album,
quoted here on her birthday–
December 5th, 2006
Also on that date, a question
from answerbag.com:
“Do dyslexic devil worshippers
sell their souls to Santa?”
The Great Answer:
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Divine Comedy
The Story Theory of Truth
“We have a need to tell ourselves stories
that explain it all. We use these stories to
supply the metaphysics, without which
life seems pointless and empty.”
– David Brooks, NY Times of Nov. 10
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's website has quotes on her soon-to-be-published novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God—
"Hilarious"
"Savagely funny"
"Supremely witty"
"Rollicking"
Description of the novel–
"At the center: Cass Seltzer, a professor of psychology…."
Not to be confused with Professor Seltzer in Wanted or characters in the films of Matt Damon–
Related material–
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Saturday, November 14, 2009
For St. Lawrence O’Toole’s Day
“We have a need to tell ourselves stories
that explain it all. We use these stories to
supply the metaphysics,* without which
life seems pointless and empty.”
— David Brooks, NY Times of Nov. 10
“The story-teller of hell”
— Publisher’s promotional quotation
for The Nick Tosches Reader
* “the metaphysics“– This link leads to a web page at the Archdiocese of Dublin whose relevance to metaphysics is not obvious. Of course, from the point of view popular with viXra authors (see Thursday), everything is related to metaphysics. The link is to a homily that mentions Sr. Joan Chittester, O.S.B. A search on her works at Amazon.com leads to Welcome to the Wisdom of the World And Its Meaning for You: Universal Spiritual Insights Distilled from Five Religious Traditions. The title indicates that despite Chittester’s personal virtues, her book is, unlike the Tosches book above, less than first-rate. Still, a “meaning for you” is, in my case, not lacking. Continuing the search for a Joycean epiphany related to metaphysics, I found that the Chittester book‘s date of publication (by Eerdmans, the Grand Rapids Calvinist publisher) was July 24, 2007. For a metaphysical phrase on that date– “the Platonic ‘source of all images,'” see The Church of St. Frank. For metaphysics and the Church of some other saints, see the essay on the “metaphysics of goodness” linked to on the publication date of Chittester’s book.
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Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Wednesday October 24, 2007
Adieu:
A Story for Dobbs
A Story for Dobbs
Internet Movie Database on screenwriter Lem Dobbs:
"Trivia:
Son of painter R.B. (Ron) Kitaj.
Took his pseudonym from the character Humphrey Bogart played
in 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.'"
October 21 was the day
that R. B. Kitaj died.
For what Kitaj called
"midrashic glosses"
on the numbers and
the lucky sums, see
4/30, 5/12, and
Eight is a Gate.
"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.
Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling."
"He has come to be fascinated… by the kabbalah, finding in it parallels to the world of art and ideas. Every morning, after a long walk, he winds up at a Westwood café surrounded by pretty UCLA students where he studies the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, before working for an hour on his memoirs."
"There is no teacher
but the enemy."
— Orson Scott Card,
Ender's Game
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Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Tuesday December 5, 2006
Today in History
(via The Associated Press)
|
On this date (Dec. 5): In 1776, the first scholastic fraternity in America, Phi Beta Kappa, was organized at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. In 1791, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in Vienna, Austria, at age 35. In 2006, author Joan Didion is 72. |
“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.
Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”
An Alternate History
(based on entries of
the past three days):
“A FAMOUS HISTORIAN:
England, 932 A.D. —
A kingdom divided….”
|
A Story That Works
|
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Saturday, September 23, 2006
Saturday September 23, 2006
|
“A corpse will be — Under the Volcano,
“It has a ghastly familiarity,
like a half-forgotten dream.” — Poppy (Gene Tierney) in |
|
Temptation
|
|
“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. Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.” From Patrick Vert, “There are plenty of anecdotes to highlight the personal, phenomenological experience of railway passage… … a unique study on phantasmagoria and the history of imagination. The word originates [in] light-projection, the so-called ghost-shows of the early 19th century…. … thought becomes a phantasmagorical process, a spectral, representative location for the personal imagination that had been marginalized by scientific rationalism…. This phantasmagoria became more mediated over time…. Perception became increasingly visually oriented…. As this occurred, a narrative formed to encapsulate the phenomenology of it all….” For such a narrative, see |
| From a Christian fairy tale:
Aslan’s last words come at the end of The Last Battle: ‘There was a real railway accident […] Your father and mother and all of you are–as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands–dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’…. Aslan is given the last word in these quiet but emphatic lines. He is the ultimate arbiter of reality: “‘There was a real railway accident.'” Plato, in addition to the Christian tradition, lies behind the closing chapters of The Last Battle. The references here to the Shadowlands and to the dream refer back to an earlier explanation by Digory, now the Lord Digory: “[…] that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here: just as our world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. [….] Of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream. […] It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!” |
| “I was reading Durant’s section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)” |
Whether any of the above will be of use in comforting the families of those killed in yesterday morning’s train wreck in Germany is not clear. Pope Benedict XVI, like C. S. Lewis, seems to think Greek philosophy may be of some use to those dealing with train wrecks:
| “Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: ‘In the beginning was the logos.‘ This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, syn logo, with logos. Logos means both reason and word– a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist.”
— Remarks of the Pope at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12, 2006 |
Comments Off on Saturday September 23, 2006
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
Tuesday December 7, 2004
White Christmas
Starring W. V. Quine as
the Ghost of Christmas Past
“Birthday, death-day —
what day is not both?”
— John Updike
“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.
Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”
