Log24

The 7/11 Meditation.

From a New York Times  obituary today —

From Piligrimage: The Book of the People  by Zenna Henderson
(a 1961 collection, published by Doubleday, of earlier stories) —

But all things have to end, and I sat one May afternoon, 
staring into my top desk drawer, the last to be cleaned out, 
wondering what to do with the accumulation of useless 
things in it. But I wasn’t really seeing the contents of the 
drawer, I was concentrating on the great weary emptiness 
that pressed my shoulders down and weighted my mind. 
“It’s not fair,” I muttered aloud and illogically, "to show 
me Heaven and then snatch it away.” 

“That’s about what happened to Moses, too, you know.” 

My surprised start spilled an assortment of paper clips 
and thumb tacks from the battered box I had just picked up. 

“Well forevermore!” I said, righting the box. "Dr. Curtis! 
What are you doing here?” 

"Returning to the scene of my crime,” he smiled, coming 
through the open door.

This is from Henderson's "Pottage," a story first published in 1955.

Continued from August 2, 2019
( a date suggested by the following search ) —

An image from “The 7/11 Meditation” ( Log24  on August 2, 2019 ) —

The search suggested above on 7/11, 2018, yields . . .

Continued from Zen and Language Games
(a post of May 2, 2003, written on March 1, 2002)

From The Harvard Crimson  on St. Andrew's Day 2017 —

See also a larger, clearer view of the titles in the above file photo.

Dialogue suggested by the above Harvard Crimson  line
"I am a book today . . . . I know it all." —

A problem child* of sorts in the 2017 film "Gifted" —

Mary- "Maybe this school isn't as great as you think it is."

Mary is returned to the place of her examination.

Professor- "Mary, you knew that the problem was incorrect, 
            why didn't you say anything?"

Mary- "Frank says I'm not supposed to correct older people. 
       Nobody likes a smart-ass."

* "Problem Child" was a working title related to a novel
    Heinlein wrote in 1941, Beyond This Horizon —

"Archimedes thought that he could move the world
if only he could get outside of it, and the same idea
inspires writers in the transcendental genre of fiction.
Find some place sufficiently far out and put your fulcrum there."

— The late Jerry Fodor, who reportedly died on Nov. 29, 2017

Or: "Use the Source, Luke"

Adelman reportedly died on Wednesday, November 22, 2017.

Made-up quote from an imaginary celebrity 
in today's online New York Times —

"Lighten up and enjoy the act, snowflake."

Related material —

Ending Credits, a Log24 post of Jan. 26, 2015.

In memory of a Brooklyn art figure who reportedly killed himself
on November 9, 2017 —

From an obituary linked to here  in a post, "Information from the Middle 
of the Night," at 2:02 AM ET on June 23, 2017 —

"In 1976, Ms. DeAk, with Mr. Robinson, Sol LeWitt and
Lucy Lippard, helped found Printed Matter, a publisher
and distributor of artists’ books."

"A version of this article appears in print on June 23, 2017,
on Page B15 of the New York edition with the headline:
Edit DeAk, a Champion of Artists Outside the Mainstream,
Dies at 68."

Related material —

Published today —

        One man's Bunk  is another man's  Dissident Gardens .

<meta property="article:published" itemprop="datePublished"
content="2017-11-12T12:05:08-05:00" />

Related entertainment —

See today's New York Times  Rogin obituary.

"What happens next?"
Good question.

See also this  journal on November 4.

Influenz , by Paul Klee —

(Continued from the previous post, The Trojan Pony.)

Thanks to Emily Wilson and Wyatt Mason for an excellent
discussion in today's online New York Times  on Wilson's
new translation of Homer's Odyssey  (to be released Nov. 7).

A detail from the Wilson-Mason article —

• The translation of the Greek adjective polytropos  as
  " Herbert Bates’s 'of many changes.' "  [Links added.]

See as well …

Above: Frank Langella in “Starting Out in the Evening” Right: Johnny Depp in “The Ninth Gate“

“One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood
in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis
is usually a mirage.”

– “Is Fiction the Art of Lying?” by Mario Vargas Llosa,
New York Times  essay of October 7, 1984

For the title plan, see Sisteen in this journal.

(Continued.)

Jaws for Frank

Part I: October 8, 2010

Above: Frank Langella in "Starting Out in the Evening" Right: Johnny Depp in "The Ninth Gate"

Part II: Noon Today

"The rest is the madness of art."

See also Patterns in the Carpets
and Saturday's Shadows.

New York Lottery today—

Without imagination, these digits are a meaningless jumble.

With  imagination…

608 might refer to June 8, the Saint's Day  of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
        (See the date July 29, 2002, that appeared in an earlier post today
         as the publication date of Geometrical Landscapes . In this
         journal, a post on that date, "At Random," referred to Hopkins.)

8516 might refer to 8/5/1916. A check of a hometown newspaper
         on that date yields…
         "St. Joseph's Garden Party and Bazaar 22, 23, 24.
          Pictures. Everybody Welcome. Admission to Garden Ten Cents"

And in the evening…

937 might refer to a post on the nihilistic philosophy of Joan Didion, and

7609 might refer to an occurrence of these digits in a link 
          to "7/11" in a post from the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola last year.

For a more cynical view of lottery hermeneutics, see
"High on RAM (overload)," by Jo Lyxe.

Happy birthday to Stevie Nicks.

On Harvard's Memorial Church in 2007—

Related material from the entertainment world—

Phoenix Senior: "As the plaque reads, this is John Harvard,
founder of Harvard University in 1638. It's also called
the Statue of Three Lies. What are the three lies?"

— "The Social Network"

Also on November 4, 2007—

Roberta Smith in today's New York Times —

"… the argument that painting may ultimately be about
little more than the communication of some quality of
light and space, however abstract or indirect."

— Review of "Rooms With a View" at the Met

Lowry —

Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano

Hollywood —

Related material —

Friday, October 8, 2010 m759 @ 12:00 PM   Starting Out in the Evening … and Finishing Up at Noon This post was suggested by last evening's post on mathematics and narrative and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning's New York Times . Above: Frank Langella in "Starting Out in the Evening" Right: Johnny Depp in "The Ninth Gate" "One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage." – "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?"* by Mario Vargas Llosa,     New York Times  essay of October 7, 1984 * The Web version's title has a misprint—    "living" instead of "lying."

"You've got to pick up every stitch…"

(A sequel to last night's "For Taylor")

On Joan Tewkesbury, who wrote the script for the 1975 film "Nashville"—

She urges writers to continue to generate new ideas
and new material. "Keep writing. The hardest thing
is to sell one script and not have another to follow it with."

One script— Yesterday's link titled "An Ordinary Evening in Tennessee"

Another— "A Point of Central Arrival"

Related material from last October—

Friday, October 8, 2010 m759 @ 12:00 PM   Starting Out in the Evening … and Finishing Up at Noon This post was suggested by last evening's post on mathematics and narrative and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning's New York Times . Above: Frank Langella in "Starting Out in the Evening" Right: Johnny Depp in "The Ninth Gate" "One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage." – "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?"* by Mario Vargas Llosa,     New York Times  essay of October 7, 1984 * The Web version's title has a misprint—    "living" instead of "lying."

"You've got to pick up every stitch…"

* A former governor of Tennessee who died at 80 yesterday in Nashville

Lottery hermeneutics for yesterday's numbers—

PA— Midday 711, Evening 039.

NY— Midday 440, Evening 704.

Simple interpretive methods— numbers as dates and as hexagram numbers— yield 7/11, hexagram 39, and 7/04.

The reader may supply his own interpretations of 7/11 and 7/04; for hexagram 39, see Wilhelm's commentary—

"The hexagram pictures a dangerous abyss lying before us
  and a steep, inaccessible mountain rising behind us."

— and the cover of Cold Mountain—

Adapted from cover of
German edition of Cold Mountain

This suggests revisiting The Edge of Eternity (July 5, 2005).

The hermeneutics of the NY midday 440 is more difficult. A Google search suggests that a Log24 post for Epiphany 2004, "720 in the Book," might yield a clue to the 440 riddle.

By all means, let us 440.

The New York Times
November 6, 2007

More on the Career of
the Genius Who Boldly
Compared Himself to God

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

“Picasso… once said…

‘… No wonder his [Picasso’s] style is so ambiguous. It’s like God’s. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things. The same with this sculptor….’

The comparison to God, like the use of the third person, was deliberate, of course.”

Of Modern Poetry

The poem of the mind
    in the act of finding
What will suffice ….
                            … It has
To construct a new stage.
    It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor,
    slowly and
With meditation, speak words
    that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear
    of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it
    wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible
    audience listens,
Not to the play, but to
    itself, expressed
In an emotion as of
    two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.
   The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark….

— Wallace Stevens in
    Parts of a World, 1942

Of Modern Metaphysics

“For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.

First, [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration] there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father.

Second, there is the Creative Energy [or Activity] begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.

Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.

And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without other: and this is the image of the Trinity.”

— Concluding speech of St. Michael the Archangel in a 1937 play, “The Zeal of Thy House,” by Dorothy Sayers, as quoted in her 1941 book The Mind of the Maker. That entire book was, she wrote, an expansion of St. Michael’s speech.

Related material:

• Dana Wilde, “An Introduction to Reading Wallace Stevens as a Poet of the Human Spirit” (from The Antigonish Review, published by St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia; Issue 109, online version undated– perhaps Spring 1997)

• Trinities for Hollywood (Oct. 24) and Something Anonymous (Oct. 25– Picasso’s birthday)

• A 1990 note, The Maker’s Gift.

In response to this morning’s Wizard-of-Id example (see 1:22 PM entry) of a political Bob-Hope-style Christian wisecrack (a style more apt to make me gag than laugh), some further quotations:

I need a photo-opportunity, I want a shot at redemption. Don’t want to end up a cartoon In a cartoon graveyard. — Paul Simon

Laurance Rockefeller

The Washington Post on the gigolo candidate in Boston Monday:

“In a lunch speech to more than 1,000 women who had donated $500 to $2,000 to his campaign or the Democratic Party, Kerry was joined on stage by his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry….  He focused his comments on improving health care and creating more jobs — notions that he said ‘are not Democratic values. They’re not Republican values. They are American values.’ “

Let us pass over Kerry’s ignorance of the difference between desiderata (things considered desirable) and values (principles, standards, or qualities considered desirable).

A definition of “values” in a different sense, one that might appeal to the late St. Laurance Rockefeller, dead on 7/11, who majored in philosophy at Princeton:

“In an artistical composition, the character of any one part in its relation to other parts and to the whole — often used in the plural: as, the values are well given, or well maintained.”

— Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, 1913

Rockefeller is, I hope, now in a place where he can discuss this definition with Bach as it applies to, say, that composer’s “Goldberg Variations.”

Here below, another sort of Goldberg Variations seems appropriate to the times we live in …

The following composition was inspired by Whoopi Goldberg’s remarks at last Thursday’s Radio City Music Hall Democratic Party fund-raiser.

Sources:

Ike Turner, Bad Dreams album,
Mom’s Apple Pie album (X-rated),
and Log24 entries of
July 9-10 and July 12.

Update of 3:17 AM July 13, 2004:

A place in Heaven next to St. Laurance
seems to have been reserved:

Lamed-Vavnik

Click on the above for further details.

“Jane Marie Law, professor of world religions at Cornell, who spoke at the funeral April 23 at Temple Beth-El in Ithaca, said Fuller had told her she believed a society is judged not by its artistic or scientific achievements but ‘by how it treats its prisoners.’ “

— Cornell Chronicle, April 29, 2004