Log24

A search in Log24 for Wallace Stevens's phrase
"the A B C of Being" suggests a related search, for
"Happy Birthday, Wallace Stevens." That search
in turn suggests a search for "Maori."

“Literature begins with geography.”

— Attributed to Robert Frost

Welcome to 9/6 — "Too Clever by Half" Day.

Related imagery … "ABC Art."

Related philosophy … "Krell Lab."

Two deaths on Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2016 —

In memory of game show figure Alan Thicke —

Minimal ABC Art.

In memory of game theory author Thomas Schelling —

Barbara Rose in a Log24 search for Princeton + Art.

Grosses Treffen

See also Log24 on the above Berlin date — April 16, 2016 —

For some historical background, see
the post ABC Art of November 8, 2015.

Log24 art (colored Unicode symbols) from the above date of death:

"Click the red symbol, and …"

— Adapted from "The Matrix."

From posts now tagged Blue Note —

                                                               Album cover by Richard Ward

A field in China —

The following link was suggested by today’s previous post
and by the ABC TV series “Resurrection” scheduled to start
at 9 PM ET Sunday, March 9, 2014 —

Field Dream

"… in Speedtalk it was… difficult not  to be logical."

— Robert A. Heinlein in Gulf 

Related material: ABC TV at 9 PM ET
on Sunday, March 9, 2014… 3/09.

See also page  309 in the previous post, Outside the Box.

Shades of Plan 9.

In memory of the translator of Foucault's Pendulum ,
who reportedly died on Tuesday, November 12th—

A detail from an image search (2 MB) linked to here 
on that date:

See also Milano  in this journal.

"Is our children learning?"
— George W. Bush, January 11, 2000 (according to TIME)

"… our politics seems so tough right now, and
 facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day…."
— Barack Obama, October 16, 2010 (according to whitehouse.gov)

The same Obama quotation appeared in The New York Times.

Related material on facts and science and argument —

"If you’re interested in particle physics and not regularly reading
 Tommaso Dorigo’s blog, you should be."
 — Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong , March 21, 2009

Click on the above for further details.

See also Plotting Obama's Passage to India (AP)

In memory of Dutch author Harry Mulisch…

The Discovery of Heaven

Mulisch died at his home in Amsterdam on the evening of October 30.

The Discovery of Heaven  was made into a film in 2001 by Jeroen Krabbé,
brother of Tim Krabbé. The latter is the author of the novel The Cave
(1997, first published in English in 2000 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

The Cave  is notable for a phrase, "a hole in time."

See also "starflight" in this journal.

On a novel by this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature:

“In Snow, translated by Maureen Freely, the line between playful farce and gruesome tragedy is very fine. For instance, the town’s newspaper publisher, Serdar Bey, prints an article describing Ka’s public performance of his poem ‘Snow.’ When Ka protests that he hasn’t written a poem called ‘Snow’ and is not going to perform it in the theater, Serdar Bey replies: ‘Don’t be so sure. There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens…. Quite a few things do happen only because we’ve written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about.’ And sure enough….”

— Margaret Atwood in the New York Times Book Review of Aug. 15, 2004

Related material:

Miniature

(Thursday, Oct. 12, 2006)

and a novel by
the author of the
above review,
Margaret Atwood:

Click on pictures for details.

(Rosh Hashanah began at sundown September 22; Yom Kippur begins at sundown October 1.  —holidays.net)

Mark Finkelstein today:
 

"Today comes more evidence of the left's painful struggle to deal with its diminished standing and repeated rejection at the polls. In the subscription-required Why Voters Like Values, [New York] Times columnist Judith Warner claims that "the Christian right's ability to stir voter passions is based not on values, but on psychology." Warner describes having bravely gone inside the belly of the conservative beast, recently attending a Values Voters Summit in DC, and declaring it "imbued with so much intolerance and hate." This is presumably in contrast with liberal love-ins, where Bush & Co. are regularly depicted as liars, murderers, Hitlers, etc.

She later describes a schadenfreude-provoking scene of the day after Kerry's 2004 defeat, picking through the rubble with Harvard psychology professor emeritus, Jerome Kagan, who tried to console Warner and presumably himself. As she describes it:

"Our conversation drifted to the Republicans' 'values' [note scare quotes] agenda, and Kagan's belief that values sell because they're an antidote to the endemic mental health problem of our time: depression.

"'Humans demand that there be a clear right and wrong,' he said. 'You've got to believe that the track you've taken is the right track. You get depressed if you're not certain as to what it is you're supposed to be doing or what's right and wrong in the world."

"People need to divide the world into good and evil, us and them, Kagan continued. To do otherwise– to entertain the possibility that life is not black and white, but variously shaded in gray– is perhaps more honest, rational and decent. But it's also, psychically, a recipe for disaster."

Got it? Liberalism is "more honest, rational and decent" than conservativism, but that's just not what the benighted public wants. They're looking for political Prozac, a Manichean worldview they can cling to, and that's what conservatism cunningly offers.

Less controversial values are provided by yesterday evening's Pennsylvania lottery— namely, the values 4, 5, and 6.

For a discussion of these values under the guise of musical intervals, see Professor Kagan again, in a paper (pdf) he wrote with Marcel R. Zentner, "Infants' Perception of Consonance and Dissonance in Music" (Infant Behavior & Development, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1998):

Adults judge as most consonant either the octave (difference of 12 semitones) [or the unison, difference of 0 semitones], the fifth (7 semitones), or the major third (4 semitones).

Illustration (see also yesterday evening):

Notes and frequency ratios

The paper discusses consonant intervals
as an example of alleged
"perceptual universals."

Related material on universals
suitable for today, the Feast of
St. Michael and All Angels:

Shining Forth and
Midsummer Eve's Dream.

The material in Shining Forth
is also related, tangentially, to the
following presentation of the
Warner "values" essay
in today's online New York Times:

The above three Times items,
taken together, suggest that
those in search of "values"
should consult Betty Suarez:

Click on picture for further details.

Strange Bedfellows

Ted Berkman, author of books about the Israeli military, died at 92 on May 12, 2006.

Dennis Hevesi in today’s New York Times:

“In World War II he served as the Middle East chief of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1946, as a radio correspondent for ABC, he provided an eyewitness account of the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Jewish terrorists.”

He also worked as a screenwriter (with his brother-in-law Raphael Blau) on the films “Girl of the Night” (1960), starring Anne Francis, and  “Bedtime for Bonzo” (1951), starring Diana Lynn.

These are two of my all-time favorite actresses, and I am grateful to Berkman for providing them with roles.  I am less grateful for his Zionist politics.  Who he is in bed with now, God only knows.

Anne Francis

Diana Lynn

Plagiarist or Fraud?

The weekly Harvard Independent points out that Kaavya Viswanathan’s recent novel may have been ghostwritten.  Therefore the ghostwriter, rather than the purported author, may have committed the original plagiarism.  Viswanathan maintains that she herself wrote the novel, and said that “any phrasing similarities… were completely unintentional and unconscious.” (Harvard Crimson, April 24)  (The use of ghostwriters is not generally called plagiarism, although one definition says plagiarism is “passing off someone else’s work as your own.”  This would of course make all recent U.S. presidents guilty of the crime.)

Related material:

• ABC News Nightline:
  Harvard Writer Not First to
  Strike a Similar Pose
• The Harvard Plagiarism Archive

Part I

For a Christian meditation on Captain Kangaroo, see the Log24 entries of Jan. 24, 2004.

Part II

“Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, begins at sunset.”
— Today in History, Associated Press

A Rosh Hashana catechism:

    Question

(See Chorus from the Rock.)

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?
— Wallace Stevens,
   “The American Sublime”

    Answer

“Spear Daddy!” in yesterday’s entry,
Happy Birthday, Wallace Stevens

“The locomotive bringing a trainload of philosophers to Bologna hissed and ground to a standstill in the long Appenine dusk to have its headlamps lit and to be dressed in the standards of the city and the university.”

The train wreck at 12:50 pm local time (6:50 AM EST) Friday, Jan. 7, 2005, 25 miles north of Bologna.

A northbound freight train collided with a passenger train traveling south from Verona to Bologna.

From an essay on Davenport I found Friday morning, well before I learned on Friday afternoon (Eastern Standard Time) of the train wreck:

“A disciple of Ezra Pound, he adapts to the short story the ideogrammatic method of The Cantos, where a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols replaces that of logical sequence. This grammar allows for the grafting of particulars into a congeries of implied relation without subordination. In contrast to postmodernists, Davenport does not omit causal connection and linear narrative continuity for the sake of an aleatory play of signification but in order to intimate by combinational logic kinships and correspondences among eras, ideas and forces.”

American Heaven

Headlines from today’s Google News:

Singer Jan Berry, 62; Half of Surf Music Duo

Screeching for heaven at Mach 7

March 25 news story:

“The promise of 70 virgins in paradise and the equivalent of about $20 was all it took to convince a Palestinian teenager to turn himself into a suicide bomber…”

A more modest paradise, from a Jan Berry obituary today:

With Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, William Jan Berry co-wrote the lyrics for “Surf City” with its lines about taking the station wagon to a place where there are “two girls for every boy.”*

* Theological footnote for feminists:
In some other regions of American Heaven, there may be two boys for every girl.

The Hairy Palm Academy

The previous two entries were prompted by a picture in the Washington Post of Spain’s Interior Minister, a member of the secular arm of the Legion of Christ.

Both entries mentioned a school run by the Legion of Christ, the Royal Palm Academy.  As the following excerpt from my March 20 entry indicates, a different sort of palm might also be honored by the Legion — the hairy palm.

“Los Legionarios de Cristo…  es una organización fundada en 1941 en Méjico por el padre Marcel [Marcial] Maciel (rehabilitado por el Vaticano en 1958 tras ser acusado de ayudarse en sus visiones con ampollas de morfina; también fue acusado de pederastia, le gustaba masturbar a jovencitos y que ellos le masturbaran a él).”

— PPnuncamas.org

Related readings from The New York Review of Books, issue dated April 8, 2004:

God in the Hands of Angry Sinners, by Garry Wills, on the Legion of Christ and on Mel Gibson flogging his God,

and a related article, a review of

Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation.

It seems the founder of the Legion of Christ, like many other Catholic priests, may have regarded masturbation as a group sport rather than solitary recreation.

For further details, see an ABC News 20/20 story dated April 26, 2002:

Priestly Sin, Cover-Up

When approached by ABC News’s Brian Ross in Rome with questions of allegations against Father Marcial Maciel, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became visibly upset and actually slapped Ross’s hand. — ABCNEWS.com

Men of Respect

“I caught Alan Dershowitz defending Martha Stewart on ABC TV this morning. Most Americans who pay any attention at all to the news of her trial think she is being charged with insider trading. She is not. She is accused of asserting her innocence to federal prosecutors who accused her of insider trading. She is on trial for allegedly lying about her innocence.

Think about that. The Constitution supposedly gives us the presumption of innocence. A federal bureaucrat shows up and says, in effect, ‘We haven’t defined insider trading yet, Mrs. Stewart, but we think you’re guilty of it and should go to prison for it.’ Martha says ‘I’m innocent’ and for that she’s prosecuted.

Dershowitz was right on the money when he announced on ABC, ‘This is like the Soviet Union!’ “

— Thomas DiLorenzo, February 4, 2004

DiLorenzo is a professor of economics
at Loyola College in Maryland.

Dershowitz is a professor of law
at Harvard.

School Book Depository

“Many people look at the Kennedy assassination as a turning point, when people started realizing and thinking and believing their government would lie to them and lie to them repeatedly,” said Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

— AP, Dallas, Nov. 21, 2003

Better late than never.

Sewage

From The New Yorker magazine, issue dated August 11, 2003:

For more on this alleged “sewage,” click on the names mentioned.

Those who wish may easily find sites attacking some of these commentators (particularly Bob Grant).

Others may feel that the word “sewage” might be better applied to The New Yorker itself under the recent editorship of Tina Brown.  See

Tina Brown and the Coming Decline
of Celebrity Journalism

at the

Columbia Journalism Review.

City of God

Today's site music is

Nous Voici Dans La Ville.

The central aim of Western religion —

"Each of us has something to offer the Creator... 
the bridging of                  
masculine and feminine,                       
life and death. It's redemption.... 
nothing else matters." 
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998) 

The central aim of Western philosophy —

                 Dualities of Pythagoras 
                 as reconstructed by Aristotle: 

                 Limited     Unlimited                      
                 Odd         Even           
                 Male        Female                    
                 Light       Dark                 
                 Straight    Curved                   
                 ... and so on .... 

"Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy."
— Jamie James in
   The Music of the Spheres (1993)

"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd….
And the song of love's recision
is the music of the spheres."
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in
   City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)

Today is the feast of St. Johann Sebastian Bach.

Every Boy Has a Daddy

Today is the Feast of Saint Peter.

The most timely quote I know of for today’s religious observances is from Oh What a Web They Weave, by F. John Loughnan:

“Every boy has a daddy.“

This was written as part of an attack on the father of a Latin-Mass Catholic who authored the website Ecclesia Militans, which has the logo

Note the resemblance to the Iron Cross.

Soldier of Fortune magazine, April 2002, contains a brief discussion of the German motto “Gott mit uns” that is relevant to the concept of The Church Militant.

Soldier of Fortune,
April 2002

The actor on the cover, Mel Gibson, also serves to illustrate our meditation for today, “Every boy has a daddy.”  See Christopher Noxon’s article in the New York Times Magazine of March 9, 2003:

Is the Pope Catholic… Enough?

Noxon attacks Gibson’s father Hutton — like his son Mel, a Latin-Mass Catholic, and author of

Is the Pope Catholic?

A related “Every boy has a daddy” attack appears in the June 2003 issue of Playboy magazine.  An entertaining excerpt from this attack on Joseph P. Kennedy, father of JFK, may be found at Orwell Today.  

Finally, let us meditate on the ultimate “Every boy has a daddy” attack — by novelist Robert Stone on the alleged father of Jesus of Nazareth:

The New York Times Magazine article mentioned above was prompted, in part, by Mel Gibson’s current movie production, “The Passion,” about the final 12 hours in the (first, or possibly second) life of Jesus.  If I were producing a Passion play, as Peter I would certainly cast Stone.

See also the 11 PM sequel to the above.

DAY OF THE MOTHER SHIP
Part II: A Mighty Wind

I just saw the John Travolta film “Phenomenon” for the first time.  (It was on the ABC Family Channel from 8 to 11.)

Why is it that tellers of uplifting stories (like Zenna Henderson, in “Day of the Mother Ship, Part I,” or the authors of “Phenomenon” or the Bible) always feel they have to throw in some cockamamie and obviously false miracles to hold people’s attention?

On May 11 (Mother’s Day), Mother Nature got my attention with a mighty wind waving the branches of nearby trees, just before a tornado watch was issued for the area I was in.  This made me recall a Biblical reference I had come across in researching references to “Our Lady of the Woods” for my Beltane (May 1) entry. 

Isaiah 7:2

…And his heart was moved, and the heart of his people, as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind.

This is what I thought of on May 11 watching branches swaying in the wind on Mother’s Day — which some might regard as a festival of Our Lady of the Woods.  John Travolta in “Phenomenon” sees a very similar scene partway through the picture; then, at the end, explains to his girlfriend how the swaying branches made him feel — without mentioning the branches — by asking her to describe how she would cradle and rock a child in her arms.  At the very end of the film, she herself is reminded of his question by the swaying branches of another tree.

Events like these are miracle enough for me.

Holiday Affair

From a site recommended by oOMisfitOo:

In The Star of Bethlehem: The Legacy of the Magi (Rutgers University Press, 1999), Michael R. Molnar explains how the purchase of a $50 Roman coin led him to discover the real date of Jesus’s birth.

The coin that provided the clue portrayed Aries the Ram looking back at a star.

From Molnar’s own site, Star of Bethlehem:

“On April 17, 6 BC, two years before King Herod died, Jupiter emerged in the east as a morning star in the sign of the Jews, Aries the Ram.”

Therefore, according to Molnar, today is Christmas.  Accordingly, let us sing a (slightly improved) carol in memory of the late Murray L. Bob (see April 15 entries):

God rest ye, merry gentleman.

Let us also voice a rousing chorus of one of my personal all-time favorites, in memory of a film director (see previous entry), who gave us a vision of Robert Mitchum (Ram) and Sarah Miles (“Lady Caroline Lamb“) united in marriage (Ding-Dong):

Who put the Ram in the
Ram-a-Lamb-a Ding-Dong?

Why, David Lean, of course.

Update of April 21, 2003:

When You Care Enough
to Send the Very Best

“Jan Scott, 88, a television art director and production designer who had won 11 Emmy Awards, died April 17 at her home in Hollywood Hills, Calif. The cause of death was not reported.

She started working in television in the 1950s and earned her first Emmy nomination in 1956 for a “Hallmark Hall of Fame” production. Her first Emmy Award came in 1968 for her work as an art director for “Kismet,” which appeared on ABC. Her last Emmy was awarded in 1989 for “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” on NBC.”

— The Washington Post, April 21, 2003

Miss Sauvé

Homily on Flannery O’Connor

for the Sunday following Corpus Christi Day, 2002:

The part of her fiction that most fascinates me, then and now, is what many critics referred to as “the grotesque,” but what she herself called “the reasonable use of the unreasonable.” [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, eds. (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1969)] 

 A modest example comes to mind. In a short story  ….  the setting sun appears like a great red ball, but she sees it as “an elevated Host drenched in blood” leaving a “line like a red clay road in the sky.” [Flannery O’Connor, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” from A Good Man is Hard to Find (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971)] 

In a letter to a friend of hers, O’Connor would later write, “…like the child, I believe the Host is actually the body and blood of Christ, not just a symbol. If the story grows for you it is because of the mystery of the Eucharist in it.” In that same correspondence, O’Connor relates this awkward experience:

I was once, five or six years ago, taken by [Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick] to have dinner with Mary McCarthy…. She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went and eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say…. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [McCarthy] said that when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable. [Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor (Vintage: New York, 1979) 124-125] 

….There is, of course, something entirely preposterous and, well, unreasonable, almost grotesque, about the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. We claim, with a perfectly straight face, to eat the body and drink the blood of the Eternal Word of God, the second person of the Most Holy Trinity who, according to some, shouldn’t even have a body to begin with. But therein lies precisely the most outlandish feature of the Eucharist: namely, that it embodies the essential scandal of the Incarnation itself.  

             — Friar Francisco Nahoe, OFM Conv.

From James Joyce

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

Chapter 3 :

Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?

— Here he is! Here he is!

From The Gazette, Montreal,

of Sunday, August 20, 1995, page C4:

“Summer of ’69,” a memoir by Judy Lapalme on the death by accidental drowning of her 15-year-old younger brother:

“I had never tasted pizza until Jeff died.  Our family, of staunch Irish Catholic stock with more offspring than money, couldn’t cope with the luxury or the spice.

The Hallidays, neighbors from across the street, sent it over to us the day after the funeral, from Miss Sauvé’s Pizzeria, on Sauvé St., just east of Lajeunesse St. in Ahuntsic.  An all-dressed pizza with the hard hat in the centre….

I was 17 that summer and had just completed Grade 12 at Holy Names High School in Rosemont….

…. Jeff was almost 16, a handsome football star, a rebellious, headstrong, sturdy young man who was forever locking horns with my father…. On Friday, Aug. 1, Jeff went out on the boat… and never came back….    

The day after the funeral, a white Volkswagen from Miss Sauvé’s Pizzeria delivered a jumbo, all-dressed pizza to us. The Hallidays’ daughter,  Diane, had been smitten with Jeff and wanted to do something special.

My father assured us that we wouldn’t like it, too spicy and probably too garlicky. There could not be a worse indictment of a person to my father than to declare them reeking of garlic. 

The rest of us tore into the cardboard and began tasting this exotic offering — melted strands of creamy, rubbery, burn-your-palate mozzarrella that wasn’t Velveeta, crisp, dry, and earthy mushrooms, spicy and salty pepperoni sliding off the crust with each bite, green peppers…. Bread crust both crisp and soggy with tomato sauce laden with garlic and oregano. 

It was an all-dressed pizza, tasted for the first time, the day after we buried Jeff….

The fall of 1969, I went to McGill…. I never had another pizza from Miss Sauvé’s.  It’s gone now — like so many things.”

     Ten thousand places

AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

   — Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889

American Literature Web Resources:

Flannery O’Connor

She died on August 3, 1964 at the age of 39.

In almost all of her works the characters were led to a place where they had to deal with God’s presence in the world.

She once said “in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or statistics, but by the stories it tells. Fiction is the most impure and the most modest and the most human of the arts.”

Encounter – 02/17/2002:

Flannery OConnor – Southern Prophet:

… When a woman wrote to Flannery O’Connor saying that one of her stories “left a bad taste in my mouth,” Flannery wrote back: “You weren’t supposed to eat it.”

Etes-vous sauvé?