Log24

“… an internal ‘360’ review — in which staff members
offer anonymous feedback — revealed negative evaluations….”

— The New York Times  today on MOCA, the
Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art

History of the “360 review” —

“The origins are with the German Reichswehr around 1930,
when the military psychologist Johann Baptist Rieffert
developed a methodology to select officer candidates.”

— Wikipedia

Related material suggested by a Harvardwood email today
reporting a recent alumni death —

See also CV Books.

The title is a phrase I encountered today in a search for background
on the anonymous Wikipedia user whose first “user talk” page is as
follows —

See also CrazyMinecart88 at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CrazyMinecart88 .

“… the disclosure of knowledge as it is
intimately bound up with identity work”

— “Awarding the self in Wikipedia : Identity work
and the disclosure of knowledge,” by Daniel Ashton.
First Monday, Volume 16, Number 1 – 3 January 2011.

Some mine cart  “identity work” of my own —

“When men and women pour so much alcohol into themselves
that they destroy their lives, they commit a most unnatural act.”

— Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions , Step Six

Thirty-year medallion from
Alcoholics Anonymous —

Error Icon —

Context —

For greater depth on this topic, see the previous post.

For less depth, see a post of January 18, 2005.

“We are not saints.” — Alcoholics Anonymous , Chapter 5

The New York Times  on AA’s co-founder Bill Wilson in 1934:

Click for the rest of the story.

Meanwhile…

Related journalism—

"What's the 'S'  stand for?" — Amy Adams

An earlier (noon) version of this post showed a photo of a
heartbreakingly beautiful young woman I encountered on
the Web today by chance. Perhaps it is best if she remains
anonymous here.

A detail taken today from her Facebook page:

Location of a nightclub in Bucharest

Related material: Shining Forth by myself and Malcolm Lowry,
and Lucifer  by Mihai Eminescu.

See also this journal "about 3 weeks ago."

For C. S. Lewis, who was born on this date in 1898,
and Natalie Wood, who died on this date in 1981

"He was accustomed to receiving manuscripts from strangers…."
— C. P. Snow on mathematician G. H. Hardy

"Whoever you are— I have always depended on
the kindness of strangers." — A Streetcar Named Desire

From this journal on September 24, 2012—

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." — Yogi Berra

This evening's NY Lottery numbers were 375 and 3141.

Subjective interpretations—

There seems to be only one relevant result of a Google search for "375 Log24"—

There are, however, two  relevant interpretations of the number 3141—

1. The Saturday Evening Post  3/1/41 article by Jack Alexander on AA—

"The members of Alcoholics Anonymous do not pursue or coddle
a malingering prospect, and they know the strange tricks of the alcoholic
as a reformed swindler knows the art of bamboozling."

2. Post number 3141 in this  journal— Aesthetics for Jesuits.

From a writer's requiem—

"Algis points out that at the end of each story, there should be a moment of validation, a place where a person in authority makes some sort of statement that lets the reader know that the story has reached its conclusion." —David Farland, June 9, 2008

Paraphrase of a version by an anonymous reader at Amazon.com (see previous post)—

"… someone who has no other vested interest in the story… steps forward and says 'He's dead, Jim' or 'Who was that masked man?'"

Moments of validation from today's midday NY Lottery— 4639 and 575.

For "He's dead, Jim," see April 6, 1939* (4/6/39) at St. Joseph's Church in Springfield, Mass.

For "Who was that masked man?," see the Mark of Zorro in Post  575.

* This was a Maundy Thursday, not the Good Friday indicated in the linked narrative.

From a short story:

"In the desert you can remember your name,
'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain."

— America

See also June 12, 2005,  September 11, 2007, and Something Anonymous.

"A New York Jew imitates D. H. Lawrence at his peril."

The Center

Anonymous Woman

Adapted from Harvard Crimson
March 2008 photo by Isabella N. Lai
at the Harvard Women's Center

See also …

Yeats –
“the centre cannot hold,”

Stevens –
“the center of resemblance,”

and Zelazny –
“center loosens,
forms again elsewhere.”

For material related to the Dec. 29, 2010, posts Toy Stories and True Grid —

See Theological Points of Tron: Legacy, by the anonymous blogger hilbertthm90.

An excerpt —

Another story told in the movie is how this girl was about to be destroyed by the evil guys only to find “the father” standing over her after she blacked out and he “saved her”. The father’s disk contains all the information about everything in the grid, so in a sense the father is omniscient. Clearly the father is a stand in for the Biblical God since he creates a whole universe and is omniscient (and by some of the actions he performs in the movie, he seems omnipotent as well). I don’t think the Christian parallels are all in my head.

There is some sketchy theology that occurs that might be in my head, though. The “real world” outside of the grid seems to be a symbol for heaven. If this is true, it presents a very interesting theological point.

Compare and contrast —

Woody and Buzz  from Christmas Day, 2010 —

Update of 8:55 PM — Related material from today's  Ghost Light weblog —

See also today's New York midday lottery number, 596, as it appears in a search
for "legacy code" in this journal. It is China's code for its first nuclear test.

Today's evening New York number is less alarming — 401, suggesting the date
4/01 — i.e., April Fools' Day.

An Honest Question:

“Did the Catholic Church just jump the shark by electing Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger? This is an honest question… not a slam.”

— Anonymous user at an online forum on April 19, 2005

A Munificent Answer:

No. That leap of faith was taken long before, on November 1, 1950. See the note below.

Catholic Encyclopedia:

“The Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 15 August….

…has a double object: (1) the happy departure of Mary from this life; (2) the assumption of her body into heaven. It is the principal feast of the Blessed Virgin….

Note: By promulgating the Bull Munificentissimus Deus, 1 November, 1950, Pope Pius XII declared infallibly that the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was a dogma of the Catholic Faith.”

Also on today’s date (AP, Today in History)–

“In 1998, 29 people were killed by a car bomb that tore apart the center of Omagh, Northern Ireland; a splinter group calling itself the Real IRA claimed responsibility.”

On the same day in 1998, The New York Times published Sarah Boxer’s century-end summary:

From a summary of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness:

“The human can never know being as it truly is, for to do that, one would have to be the thing itself. To know a rock, we have to be the rock (and of course, the rock, as a being-in-itself, lacks consciousness). Yet the being-for-itself sees and intuits the world through what is not present. In this way, the being-for-itself, already wholly free, also possesses the power of imagination. Even if absolute beauty (to Sartre, the absolute union of being and consciousness) cannot be apprehended, knowing it through its absence, as in the way one feels the emptiness left by a departed loved one, is its own truth.”

— Anonymous author at sparknotes.com

— Heraclitus in
   Death by Philosophy,
   by Ava Chitwood

Related material:

International Journal of the Classical Tradition—

“Ava Chitwood, ‘The Anonymous Philosopher of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain: A Heraclitean Hero in a Homeric World,’ IJCT 11 (2004-2005), pp. 232-243.

1997’s surprise best-seller, Cold Mountain, is the first novel of North Carolina native and travel writer, Charles Frazier. Two ancient Greek authors shape and drive the novel, set in the post-war Southern Appalachians of 1865. Homer’s Odyssey frames the novel: the hero Inman undergoes epic adventures after the war, has his own Penelope waiting, and travels back to a land as remote as any island, Cold Mountain, North Carolina. But fragments of an anonymous philosopher who can be identified as Heraclitus alienate Inman from the Homeric world around him and determine his fate. Ada, his Penelope, also casts off her shroud of tradition: impatient with the ‘glorious war,’ no longer content to wait, Ada plunges into the new business of living. And just as the archaic, post-Homeric Greek world produced new ways of living and thought, as exemplified by Heraclitus, so too does the post-bellum world of Cold Mountain, as exemplified by Inman and Ada; their struggle, and the novel’s tension, speak to and about all those caught between two worlds, epic and philosophic, whether driven by love or strife.”

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.

Seven

“Research & Ideas” memo from Harvard Business School dated April 17, 2006:

“The word experience comes from the Latin words ex pericolo, which mean ‘from danger.'”

— Etymology by Professor Joseph Badaracco of Harvard University.  Badaracco gives no evidence for his dubious claim.

Related (if only temporally):
Easter Monday, April 17, 2006.

      — Online Etymology Dictionary

The title of this entry refers to the time it was posted. Related references to seven: April 7, 2003, and today’s previous entry.

See also an entry from 2/29, 2004
(Leap Day and Oscar Night):

Harvard persons from parts of the university that are more scholarly than the Business School may sneer at the above-quoted Online Etymology Dictionary.  They can consult the following:

On “experience”

From J.L. Austin, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play:

“Scholars, such as Julius Pokorny (Indogermanisches Etymolgisches Worterbuch, 1959), trace ‘experience’ right back to hypothetical Indo-European base or root *per-, ‘to attempt, venture, risk,’ whence the Greek peira,”experience,” the source of our word ’empirical.’ It is also the verbal root which derives the Germanic *feraz, giving rise to Old English faer, “danger, sudden calamity,” whence Modern English ‘fear.’ Already, we see the ‘cognitive’ directions taken by * per-, through the Greek route, and affective ones, through the Germanic — which would have interested Dilthey, one may be sure! But more directly ‘experience’ derives, via Middle English and Old French, from the Latin experientia, denoting ‘trial, proof, experiment,’ itself generated from experiens, the present participle of experiri, ‘to try, test,’ from from ex-, ‘out’ + base per as in peritus, ‘experienced,’ ‘having learned by trying.’ The suffixed extended form of *per is peri-tlo-, whence the Latin periclum, periculum, “trial, danger, peril. Once more, we find experience linked with risk, straining towards ‘drama,’ crisis, rather than bland cognitive learning!”

“… Finally, ‘experiment,’ like ‘experience,’ is derived from Latin experiri “to try or test.” If we put these various senses together we have a ‘laminated’ semantic system focused on ‘experience,’ which portrays it as a journey, a test (of self, of suppositions about others), a ritual passage, an exposure to peril or risk, a source of fear. By means of experience, we ‘fare’ ‘fearfully’ through ‘perils,’ taking ‘experimental’ steps. …” (17-18)

The above is taken from an anonymous weblog entry.  The author of the entry identified the source as From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play.  The author of the entry falsely stated that the author of this book was J. L. Austin.  In fact, the book was written by Victor Turner, apparently the same philosophical sociologist whom we encountered in the previous entry and in the Log24 entry for the recent feast of St. Max Black.  Turner may have been quoting Austin; pages from the book are not available online.  Another author, however, says the quotation is by Turner himself.  See Rena Fraden’s Imagining Medea, pp. 218-219.

Today’s previous entry is a sort of “ritual passage” for a Nobel Prize winner. For a ritual passage more directly related to Professor Badaracco, see the Brookline TAB obituary of his 23-year-old daughter, who died on Monday, August 21, 2006.  According to today’s online Harvard Crimson, “she was walking along Hammond Street in Newton [Mass.] when an 84-year-old driver jumped the curb and struck her.”

From her Brookline TAB obituary of Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006:

“Funeral services will be held Friday [Aug. 25, 2006] at 10 a.m. at St. Mary’s of the Assumption Church, at 67 Harvard St.

The family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Centro Romero Community Center in Chicago: 6216 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL 60660.”

Snippets:
A Reply to John Updike

See Updike on digitized snippets.

The following four snippets were pirated from the end of MathPages Quotations, compiled by Kevin Brown.

They are of synchronistic interest in view of the previous two Log24 entries, which referred (implicitly) to a Poe story and (explicitly) to Pascal.

"That is another of your odd notions,"
said the Prefect, who had the fashion
of calling everything 'odd' that was
beyond his comprehension, and thus
lived amid an absolute legion of 'oddities.'
                             Edgar Allan Poe

I knew when seven justices could not
take up a quarrel, but when the parties
were met themselves, one of them
thought but of an If,  as, 'If you said so,
then I said so'; and they shook hands
and swore brothers. Your If is the only
peacemaker; much virtue in If.
                             Shakespeare

I have made this letter longer than usual
because I lack the  time to make it shorter.
                             Blaise Pascal

S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo
non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
                             Dante, 1302

For translations of the Dante (including one by Dorothy Sayers), see everything2.com.

An anonymous author there notes that Dante describes a flame in which is encased a damned soul. The flame vibrates as the soul speaks:

If I thought that I were making
Answer to one that might return to view
The world, this flame should evermore
    cease shaking.

But since from this abyss, if I hear true,
None ever came alive, I have no fear
Of infamy, but give thee answer due.

-- Dante, Inferno, Canto 27, lines 61-66,
    translated by Dorothy Sayers

Updike says,

“Yes, there is a ton of information on the web but much of it is grievously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, I have the impression, to inflame what is most informally and non-critically human about us. Our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant aw-shucks, disarming in its modesty.”

Note Updike’s use of “inflame.”

For an aw-shucks version of “what is most informally and non-critically human about us,” as well as a theological flame, see both the previous entry and the above report from Hell.

Note that the web serves also to correct material that is inaccurate, unedited, unattributed, and juvenile. For examples, see Mathematics and Narrative. The combination of today’s entry for Pascal’s birthday with that web page serves both to light one candle and to curse the darkness.

An anonymous commenter’s answer: “The title character announces the coming of the end, suffers mockery and condemnation, and ends up saving the world through his actions.”

(The “real” answer: “The music for each was composed by John Debney.”)

Place

“Critics have compared Mr. Stone to Conrad, Faulkner, Hemingway, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, Nathanael West; all apt enough, but there’s a James T. Farrell, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett strain as well – a hard-edged, lonely intelligence that sets bright promise off against stark failure and deals its mordant hand lightly. In A Flag for Sunrise (1981), an anthropologist observes: ‘There’s always a place for God. . . . There is some question as to whether He’s in it.'”

—  Jean Strouse on Robert Stone

“When times are mysterious
Serious numbers will always be heard
And after all is said and done
And the numbers all come home
The four rolls into three
The three turns into two
And the two becomes a
One”

— Paul Simon,
    “When Numbers Get Serious,” from
    “Hearts and Bones”  album, 1983

“Hickory Dickory Dock….”

— Anonymous folk tune

The Last Word

Beethoven Week on the BBC ended at midnight June 10.

“With Beethoven, music did not grow up, it regressed to adolescence. He was a hooligan who could reduce Schiller’s Ode to Joy to madness, bloodlust, and megalomania.”

— Arts and Letters Daily, lead-in to an opinion piece in The Guardian of Tuesday, June 7, 2005:

Beethoven Was a Narcissistic Hooligan “If Beethoven had dedicated his obvious talents to serving the noble Pythagorean view of music, he might well have gone on to compose music even greater than that of Mozart. You can hear this potential in his early string quartets, where the movements often have neat conclusions and there is a playfulness reminiscent of Mozart or Haydn. If only Beethoven had nourished these tender shoots instead of the darker elements that one can also hear. For the darkness is already evident in the early quartets too, in their sombre harmonies and sudden key changes. As it was, however, his darker side won out; compare, for example, the late string quartets. Here the youthful humour has completely vanished; the occasional signs of optimism quickly die out moments after they appear and the movements sometimes end in uncomfortably inconclusive cadences…. In A Clockwork Orange it is the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that echoes in the mind of Alex whenever he indulges in one of his orgies of violence. Alex’s reaction may be rather extreme, but he is responding to something that is already there in this dark and frenzied setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy; the joy it invites one to feel is the joy of madness, bloodlust and megalomania. It is glorious music, and seductive, but the passions it stirs up are dark and menacing.” — Dylan Evans, former Lacanian psychotherapist (pdf) and now head of the undergraduate robotics program at the University of the West of England.

Speak for yourself, Dylan.

“Evil did not have the last word.”

—  Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005

Evil may have had the last word in Tuesday’s Guardian, but now that Beethoven Week has ended, it seems time for another word.

For another view of Beethoven, in particular the late quartets, see the Log24 Beethoven’s Birthday entry of December 16, 2002:

See also the previous entry.
 

Song

"Each epoch has its singer."
— Jack London, Oakland, California, 1901

"Anything but the void. And so we keep hoping to luck into a winning combination, to tap into a subtle harmony, trying like lock pickers to negotiate a compromise with the 'mystery tramp,' as Bob Dylan put it…."
— Dennis Overbye, Quantum Baseball,
    New York Times, Oct.  26, 2004

"You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp,
    but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into
    the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to
    make a deal?"
— Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone

"About a century ago scientists began to realize that beneath the too, too solid veneer of what had passed for reality for 2,000 years there was some pretty funny and fuzzy business going on….

Most of us, I suspect, would rather believe that the devil is running things than that no one is in charge, that our lives, our loves, World Series victories, hang on the whims of fate and chains of coincidences, on God throwing dice, as Einstein once referred to quantum randomness….

[But] we are people, with desires and memories and a sense of humor – not Ping Pong balls."
— Dennis Overbye, Quantum Baseball,
    New York Times, Oct.  26, 2004

"You can be replaced by some Ping Pong balls and a dictionary."
— Anonymous source, March 29, 2001

Popcorn Theology

Today is the birthday of Star Wars director George Lucas and also the date of Frank Sinatra’s death.

Two notes that may be
suitable for the occasion —

From All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Atlanta:

POPCORN THEOLOGY
“On Friday, May 14 at 7:00 p.m. in Ellis Hall, Popcorn Theology is pleased to present Chicago. This is a cautionary tale set during the Great Depression of the 1930s, told with sharp satire and black humor.”

From Chicago photographer Art Shay:

His Kind of Town 

“We are not saints”
— Alcoholics Anonymous

The Empty Center

From Stephen Mitchell, foreword to
The Enlightened Heart:
An Anthology of Sacred Poetry:

“We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle
    and knows,”
Robert Frost wrote,
looking in from the outside.
Looking out from the inside,
    Chuang-tzu wrote,
“When we understand, we are at
    the center of the circle,
and there we sit while Yes and No
    chase each other
around the circumference.”
This anonymous center—
which is called God
in Jewish, Christian, and Moslem cultures,
and Tao, Self, or Buddha
in the great Eastern Traditions—
is the realest of realities.

From Wallace Stevens’s
A Primitive Like an Orb:

The essential poem
    at the center of things….

We do not prove
    the existence of the poem.
It is something seen and known
    in lesser poems.

From Namkaran Samskar:

There is only one center in existence;
the ancients used to call it
Tao, Dharma, God.

Those words have become old now;
you can call it Truth.

There is only one center of existence.

Passing the Crown

Today’s New York Times Book Review vilifies author John O’Hara as a “jerk.”  Earlier this week, the Times called him a “lout.”  These attacks amount to a virtual crown of thorns. For commentary on these attacks by the Times (a publication generally more sympathetic to Jews than to Catholics), see

The Crucifixion of John O’Hara.

But there is, to use a term of Harvard philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, “compensation.”

Today’s New York Times Magazine paints an excellent portrait of Harvard President Larry Summers.  This portrait, by author James Traub, is less than flattering.  Traub notes that Summers is “a blunt and overbearing figure,” and quotes an anonymous faculty friend of Summers as saying that many on campus “just despise him. The level of the intensity of their dislike for him is just shocking.”

Traub notes that at Harvard, “Despite the protections of tenure, virtually all of Summers’s critics were too afraid of him to be willing to be quoted by name.”

At Yale, however, at least one professor has dared to criticize Summers openly.

In the Boston Globe on August 14, Alex Beam, Globe columnist, quoted Yale music professor John Halle as saying that Summers, an economist, “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. By all accounts, he is a deeply vulgar individual….”

These remarks suggest the following illustrations, based on today’s Times Book Review and Times Magazine, of a thorny crown being thoughtfully passed to a new generation.

Temptation

In memory of Nina Simone, a singer who died April 21, whose autobiography was titled (after the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song) I Put a Spell on You, and in honor of Aaron Spelling, producer of “Satan’s School for Girls,” whose birthday is today, I suggest the following three cultural milestones.

First, an accurate, if tasteless, recounting of Scripture at a Christian site that correctly notes that Satan may appear as “an angel of light”… rather like Aaron Spelling?  This site also offers, as background music, a lame parody of the evils of Rock ‘n’ Roll in the form of a midi of “Fire” that would hardly tempt even someone Hell-bent on sinning. 

Second, a book, The Club Dumas, by Arturo Perez-Reverte, the basis of the Roman Polanski film “The Ninth Gate.”  This book is notable for the way it skillfully, and perhaps accurately, depicts Satan as an “angel of light” who does not resemble Aaron Spelling in the least.   This Satan could really tempt me.

Finally, my favorite music video of all time: the 1988 Kylie Minogue “Locomotion.”  If the Devil could now look, sing, and dance like Kylie in 1988, I would be lost.  Fortunately, perhaps, the days when Kylie could make me fall in love with one glance are now over.  Still, if I had to fall, I would much rather do it with Kylie than with Spelling.  As she herself says,  

“It’s better the Devil you know.”

For more on Kylie, trains, and death, see the Jan. 3 entry The Shanghai Gesture. 

The locomotive image is courtesy of a website that may, in view of the subject of this entry, prefer to remain anonymous.

He Ain’t Heavy

Songwriter Tom Glazer, 88, died Friday, February 21, 2003.  From his New York Times obituary:

“Tom Glazer occasionally speculated about meeting St. Peter at the Pearly Gates and being asked what he accomplished in music.”

Glazer:

From the official Department of Defense
Korean War Commemoration website:

Also from the New York Times:

“In 1957 he composed songs and background music for ‘A Face in the Crowd,’ a film directed by Elia Kazan.”

“His brother, who spelled his name Sidney Glazier, died in December. He produced the 1968 movie version of ‘The Producers.'”

St. Peter: 

Welcome to The Music Staff.

Beethoven’s Birthday

“Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132, is one of the transcendent masterworks of the Western classical tradition. It is built around its luminous third movement, titled ‘Holy song of thanksgiving by one recovering from an illness.’

In this third movement, the aging Beethoven speaks, clearly and distinctly, in a voice seemingly meant both for all the world and for each individual who listens to it. The music, written in the ancient Lydian mode, is slow and grave and somehow both a struggle and a celebration at the same time.

This is music written by a supreme master at the height of his art, saying that through all illness, tribulation and sorrow there is a strength, there is a light, there is a hope.”

—  Andrew Lindemann Malone

“Eliot’s final poetic achievement—and, for many, his greatest—is the set of four poems published together in 1943 as Four Quartets…. Structurally—though the analogy is a loose one—Eliot modeled the Quartets on the late string quartets of Beethoven, especially… the A Minor Quartet; as early as 1931 he had written the poet Stephen Spender, ‘I have the A Minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.'”

— Anonymous author at a
Longman Publishers website

“Each of the late quartets has a unique structure, and the structure of the Quartet in A Minor is one of the most striking of all. Its five movements form an arch. At the center is a stunning slow movement that lasts nearly half the length of the entire quartet…

The third movement (Molto adagio) has a remarkable heading: in the score Beethoven titles it ‘Hymn of Thanksgiving to the Godhead from an Invalid,’ a clear reflection of the illness he had just come through. This is a variation movement, and Beethoven lays out the slow opening section, full of heartfelt music. But suddenly the music switches to D major and leaps ahead brightly; Beethoven marks this section ‘Feeling New Strength.’ These two sections alternate through this movement (the form is A-B-A-B-A), and the opening section is so varied on each reappearance that it seems to take on an entirely different character each time: each section is distinct, and each is moving in its own way (Beethoven marks the third ‘With the greatest feeling’). This movement has seemed to many listeners the greatest music Beethoven ever wrote. and perhaps the problem of all who try to write about this music is precisely that it cannot be described in words and should be experienced simply as music.”

—  Eric Bromberger,
Borromeo Quartet program notes 

In accordance with these passages, here is a web page with excellent transcriptions for piano by Steven Edwards of Beethoven’s late quartets:

The 16 String Quartets.

Our site music for today, Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Opus 132, Movement 3 (1825), is taken from this web page.

Readings for the Oct. 18
Feast of St. Luke

A fellow Xangan is undergoing a spiritual crisis. Well-meaning friends are urging upon her all sorts of advice. The following is my best effort at religious counsel, meant more for the friends than for the woman in crisis.

Part I… Wallace Stevens 

From Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:

Ox Emblematic of St. Luke. It is one of the four figures which made up Ezekiel’s cherub (i. 10). The ox is the emblem of the priesthood….

   The dumb ox. St. Thomas Aquinas; so named by his fellow students at Cologne, on account of his dulness and taciturnity. (1224-1274.)
   Albertus said, “We call him the dumb ox, but he will give one day such a bellow as shall be heard from one end of the world to the other.” (Alban Butler.)

From Wallace Stevens, “The Latest Freed Man“:

It was how the sun came shining into his room:
To be without a description of to be,
For a moment on rising, at the edge of the bed, to be,
To have the ant of the self changed to an ox
With its organic boomings, to be changed
From a doctor into an ox, before standing up,
To know that the change and that the ox-like struggle
Come from the strength that is the strength of the sun,
Whether it comes directly or from the sun.
It was how he was free. It was how his freedom came.
It was being without description, being an ox.

Part II… The Rosy Cross

Readings:

• Brautigan, Richard, The Hawkline Monster, Simon and Schuster, 1974…
  Just for the pleasure of reading it… A compelling work of fiction on spiritual matters that includes a conversion to Rosicrucianism in its concluding chapter.
• Browning, Vivienne (Betty Coley, ed).
  My Browning Family Album. With a Foreword by Ben Travers, and a Poem by Jack Lindsay Springwood, London, 1979…
  The Rosicrucian tradition in Australia (highly relevant background reading for the 1994 film “Sirens”). Includes a mention of Aleister Crowley, dark mage, who also figures (prominently) in….
• Wilson, Robert Anton, Masks of the Illuminati, Pocket Books, April 1981…
  James Joyce and Albert Einstein join in a metaphysical investigation.

  “He recited from the anonymous Muses Threnody of 1648:

  For we be brethren of the Rosy Cross
  We have the Mason Word and second sight
  Things for to come we can see aright.”

Part III… Stevens Again

A major critical work on Wallace Stevens that is not unrelated to the above three works on the Rosicrucian tradition:

Leonora Woodman, Stanza My Stone: Wallace Stevens and the Hermetic Tradition, West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1983

From the Department of English, Purdue University:

Leonora Woodman came to Purdue in 1976. In 1979, she became Director of Composition, a position she held until 1986…. At the time of her death in 1991, she was in the midst of an important work on modernist poetry, Literary Modernism and the Fourth Dimension: The Visionary Poetics of D.H. Lawrence, H.D., and Hart Crane.

For more on Gnostic Christianity, see

• Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979), and
• Harold Bloom, Omens of Millenium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (Riverhead Books, 1996).