Log24

Narration by the fictional schoolgirl Pagan Moore in a novel
apparently first published on March 4, 2004 —

Update at 1:37 PM ET the same day —

A check for the source of the above speech yields …

"Apollo is a symbol for the male, the rational, the young, and the civilized.
The Furies represent the female, the violent, the old, and the primal."

This passage is from
https://www.gradesaver.com/the-eumenides/study-guide/themes.
From the citation data there —
"By Borey, Eddie. 'The Eumenides Themes.'
GradeSaver, 24 October 2000 Web."

Ben Lerner on Judd's art at Marfa —

"as if the installation were waiting to be visited
 by an alien or god" — 10:04: A Novel

Oslo artist Josefine Lyche's public Instagram today —

See also Space (May 13, 2015).

Part I, Midday —

Yesterday's midday NY Lottery "689" suggests (from April 3, 2005)—

689

[fú] blessing, good fortune

In the May Smithsonian  magazine— "What Defines a Meme?"

Related — Seven is Heaven…

* For the connection to Apollo, see Oct. 9, 2006.

"It seems fitting that a handsome, professional and future-minded
space drama in fine color, like 'Marooned,' should open a new
jewel box of a theater, the Ziegfeld."

— Howard Thompson in The New York Times , Dec. 19, 1969

A related film tells of a real-life April 1970 sequel 
to the 1969 film "Marooned."

Then there is my own "jewel box" picture with three horses . . .

http://m759.net/wordpress/?s="October+9"+Apollo

Paul Valéry, "Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci,"
La Nouvelle Revue , Paris, Vol. 95 (1895)—

"Regarded thus, the ornamental conception is to the individual arts
what mathematics is to the other sciences. …the objects chosen
and arranged with a view to a particular effect seem as if disengaged
from most of their properties and only reassume them in the effect,
in, that is to say, the mind of the detached spectator. It is thus
by means of an abstraction that the work of art can be constructed,
and is more or less easy to define according as the elements borrowed
from reality for it are more or less complex. Inversely it is by a sort of
induction, by the production of mental images, that all works of art are
appreciated, and this production must equally be more or less active,
more or less tiring, according as it is set in motion by a simple interlacing
on a vase or a broken phrase by Pascal."

— Translated by Thomas McGreevy (Valéry's Selected Writings,
     New Directions, 1950)

Related art —

• Departure dates in "Where Gravity Makes You Float,"
  by Oslo artist Josefine Lyche
• Apollo and Niobe at the Meadow
• "Enter the Matrix" game

See also a theater review of a Walpurgisnacht 2008
Brooklyn Academy of Music production —

The New York Times  on the Walpurgisnacht production —

"Specifically grim but never merely glum, the production fully taps
the self-conscious theatricality of the play ('I’m warming up for
my last soliloquy,' Hamm announces toward the end) without
letting us forget that its strange figures are appallingly real,
enacting a grotesque pantomime of humanity’s hungry need to
distract itself by wresting order, meaning and a sliver of satisfaction —
just one more sugarplum, please, or maybe a Vicodin — from
the formless, aimless, timeless nothingness of life."

— Charles Isherwood

See also the recent post Apollo and the Furies.

From the posts of October 9 four years ago —

The title is from a poem in The New Yorker  last December —

. . . pip trapped inside, god’s
knucklebone . . . .

The conclusion of yesterday's Google Image Search for Göpel Inscape —

See also "Pray to Apollo" in this journal.

See the "symbol of Apollo" in the previous post
as well as posts tagged on050730, and
Conrad H. Roth on "The E at Delphi."

* The now-famous Oscars accountant

The previous post dealt with one of the 64 symbols
(in a redesigned format) of the ancient Chinese classic 
The I Ching .

For those who prefer to be guided by programmed
responses to alphabetical  symbols …

A lyric by Ira Gershwin —

A cinematic "T" —

See also "T for Texas" in this journal and
George Clooney's recent attempt to commercialize
both the space program and the letter Omega: 

From a post of May 13, 2015 —

Do you know where your watch is?

From a post of May 13, 2015 —

From the recent film "Interstellar" —

Click to enlarge.

See also Apollo in this  journal.

“Nine is a very powerful Nordic number.”

— Katherine Neville, who deserves some sort of prize for literature.

— Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,”
translated by Douglas Scott, in Existence and Being  ,
Regnery, 1949

Or: Corrections

Factually Incorrect:

Ed Koch in the Las Vegas Sun , May 26, 2014:

“In addition to Pearl, Bob’s other cousin, Bill Bailey,
was a song and dance man who was the inspiration
for the hit song ‘Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home.’
In fact, when William Bailey went into show business,
he took the nickname ‘Bob’ to avoid any confusion
with his older, more established cousin Bill.”

(Links added for greater depth.)

Politically Incorrect:

Correction:

From a New York Times  obituary by Bruce Weber tonight—

Charles Marowitz, Director and Playwright, Dies at 82

“There are two kinds of bafflement in the theater: the kind that fascinates as it perplexes, and the kind that just perplexes,” he wrote in The Times in 1969 in an essay about Mr. Shepard’s play “La Turista,” which had recently opened in London. “If a play doesn’t make quick sense, but enters into some kind of dialogue with our subconscious, we tend to admit it to that lounge where we entertain interesting-albeit-unfamiliar strangers.

“If it only baffles, there are several courses open to us: we can assume it is ‘above our heads’ or directed ‘to some other kind of person,’ or regretfully conclude that it confuses us because it is itself confused. However, the fear of being proved wrong is so great today that almost every new work which isn’t patently drivel gets the benefit of the doubt.”

 Another play by Sam Shepard mentioned in the obituary suggests a review of…

• “From the Witch Ball,” a post from May 2,
  the reported date of Marowitz’s death
• “Two Satanic Majesties Request All-Devouring Fame,”
  a NY Times  review from October 9, 2006
• This  journal on that date— October 9, 2006—
  “Art Wars: To Apollo.”

Or perhaps the Richman.

Roger Richman, agent who represented image rights for the
estates of celebrities, reportedly died on October 9, 2013.

This journal on that date —

* For the title, see Apollo + Outram in this journal.

"Got to keep the loonies on the path."

— Lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon

For those who, like Tom Stoppard, prefer the dark side—

Not quite so dark—

"And then one day you find ten years have got behind you."

— Lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon

This journal ten years ago, on August 25, 2003—

"A view of New Haven, say…." —

"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
John Outram, architect 

A similar version of this Apollonian image —

  Detail:

Related material for the loonies:

"the spirit's alchemicana."

This post was suggested by other weblogs' 
posts on Owen Barfield* quoted here recently, by
the Apollo Guidance Computer (see below and
MIT Technology Review), and by James Joyce:

"Unsheathe your dagger definitions." — Ulysses

* See The Appearances (Sept. 20, 2009), for
   a correction of Quine by Barfield.

From "The Talented," a post of April 26, 2011—

And for Josefine Lyche—

Unity in Multiplicity —

Pink  in Wikipedia

Tracking Shot

Related material—

See also this journal's September 2009 posts.

This  post was suggested by today's previous post and by today's NY Lottery.
For some background to the ioncinema.com post numbered 4210 above,
see, in conjunction with the page headed "Azazel" linked to here earlier today,
the ioncinema.com post numbered 5601.

From the post numbered 460 in this  journal—

At the still point… from the film "Absolute Power" :

Photo credit – Graham Kuhn

I’ve heard of affairs that are strictly plutonic,
But diamonds are a girl’s best friend!

— Marilyn Monroe, modeling a Freudian slip

Today is Commencement Day at MIT.

Well, perhaps not quite nothing.

The above pictures were posted here on the day the following book was published—

The lives of the nine Jews in the above book amount to more than Yau's "nothing."

Note, however, that claims by Jews (see Jill Abramson yesterday) 
that their secular publications constitute a substitute for religion
and contain only "absolute truth" should be viewed with at least one
raised eyebrow.

Abramson's remark yesterday that her promotion to New York Times  executive editor
was like "ascending to Valhalla" had a religious flavor worthy of yesterday's
Feast of the Ascension.

In related news from yesterday's Times—

See also a symbol related to Apollo, to nine, and to "nothing"—

A minimalist 3×3 matrix favicon—

This may, if one likes, be viewed as the "nothing"
present at the Creation.  See Jim Holt on physics.

"It's going to be accomplished in steps, this establishment of the Talented in the scheme of things."
— Anne McCaffrey, Radcliffe ’47, To Ride Pegasus

"Character, as we have stated, is revealed through action.
We are not yet telepathic; we must embody even the most intellectual traits
and express them physically."
— The Craftsmen of Dionysus: An Approach to Acting  by Jerome Rockwood

Dionysus Meets Apollo
in "Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould"—

Step I — Tiny Dancer in My Hand (0.48.46)

Step II — The Bridge (0.52.46)

Step III — Liftoff (1.27.37)

From the author of The Abacus Conundrum—

Harlan Kane's sequel to The Apollo Meme—

THE KRISTEN EFFECT

"Thus the universal mutual attraction between the sexes is represented."
— Hexagram 31

Benoît Mandelbrot died on Oct. 14.
 

— New York Lottery on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2010

Related material on 109: See 1/09, 2009.
Related material on 060: See Hexagram 60 of the I Ching  and…

Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art—

"Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)

What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….

The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation  and art  all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254)  If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist.  Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.

New York Lottery on Saturday, July 17, 2010—

Midday 049, Evening 613.

Related material:

Hexagram 49 and 6/13.

A quotation from this journal on 6/13—

"Christianity offers the critic a privileged ontological window…."

— Aaron Urbanczyk's 2005 review of Christ and Apollo 
    by William Lynch, S.J., a book first published in 1960

Picture from today's New York Times  (page ST1 in New York edition)—

Robert Byrd, longest-serving member of Congress, dead at 92

CNN – Dana Bash, Mike Roselli – ‎7 minutes ago‎ at Google News

“What on earth is a 'concrete universal'?"
— Said to be an annotation (undated)
by Robert M. Pirsig of A History of Philosophy,
by Frederick Copleston, Society of Jesus.

From Aaron Urbanczyk's 2005 review of Christ and Apollo  by William Lynch, S.J., a book first published in 1960—

"Lynch's use of analogy vis-a-vis literature provides, in a sense, a philosophical basis to the theoretical paradox popularized by W. K. Wimsatt (1907-1975), which contends that literature is a sort of 'concrete universal.'"

The following figure has often been
offered in this journal as a symbol of Apollo—

Arguments that it is, rather, a symbol of Christ
may be left to the Society of Jesus.

One possible approach—
Urbanczyk's review says that
"Christianity offers the critic
   a privileged ontological window…."

"The world was warm and white when I was born:
Beyond the windowpane the world was white,
A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,
Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light."

— Delmore Schwartz

“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

— President Obama yesterday

It is not entirely clear what these “childish things” are. Perhaps the young nation’s “childish things” that the new President refers to are part of what Robert Stone memorably called “our secret culture.” Stone was referring to Puritanism, which some advocates of the new religion of Scientism might call “childish.” I do not. Lunatic, perhaps, but not childish.

Related meditations:

A year ago yesterday, on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008, the mid-day lottery for New York State was 605.

A midrash in the Judeo-Christian tradition of paranoia a year ago today suggested that 605 might be a veiled reference to “God, the Devil, and a Bridge,” a weblog entry on mathematician André Weil.

Continuing in this vein a year later, we are confronted with the mid-day New York lottery for yesterday:

Benedict XVI, before he became Pope:

“… a purely harmonious concept of beauty is not enough…. Apollo, who for Plato’s Socrates was ‘the God’ and the guarantor of unruffled beauty as ‘the truly divine’ is absolutely no longer sufficient.”

Tom O’Bedlam:

“I know more than Apollo….“

Wikipedia:

“The lapis manalis (Latin: ‘stone of the Manes‘) was a name given to two sacred stones used in the Roman religion. One covered a gate to Hades, abode of the dead….

One such stone covered the mundus Cereris, a pit thought to contain an entrance to the underworld….

The… mundus was located in the Comitium, on the Palatine Hill. This stone was ceremonially opened three times a year, during which spirits of the blessed dead (the Manes) were able to commune with the living. The three days upon which the mundus was opened were August 24, October 5, and November 8. Fruits of the harvest were offered to the dead at this time.”

In The Garden of Allah

"But not, perhaps,
in the Garden of Apollo":

— "Garden Party" —
Log24, April 9, 2007

Related material:

"When, on the last day of February 1953 Francis told her excitedly of the double helix discovery, she took no notice: 'He was always saying that kind of thing.' But when nine years later she heard the news of the Nobel Prize while out shopping, she immediately rushed to the fishmonger for ice to fill the bath and cool the champagne: a party was inevitable."

— Matt Ridley on Odile Crick (The Independent, July 20, 2007), who drew what "may be the most famous [scientific] drawing of the 20th century, in that it defines modern biology," according to Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla quoted by Adam Bernstein in The Washington Post, July 21, 2007

See also "Game Boy"
(Log24 on the Feast
of the Transfiguration–
August 6, 2006):

Prime Blue

“To the two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we owe our recognition that… there is a tremendous opposition, as regards both origins and aims, between the Apolline art of the sculptor and the non-visual, Dionysiac art of music.”
— The Birth of Tragedy,
    by Friedrich Nietzsche,
    Penguin, 1993, page 14.
    Quoted in “A Mass for Lucero.”

Half the Answer:
Commentary by spookytruth
from Log24, 2/22/2005:

“I mean, come on, Hunter, a stupid bullet through the head??? how creative, you brain-addled simpleton… if you take the assignment, if you are going to hook up your afterlife keyboard and transmit back and tell us about what it is REALLY like out there, if you decided to let your electric-shock fingers hot wire us the truth of the afterlife… if you really planned to tell us the answer to our ultimate, emotional question…… ‘does God prefer beer, wine, or a shot of whiskey.’ well, if that is what you decided to do well then, for God’s sake, don’t forget (oh, wait, yeah, you already DID FORGET, you half-baked, half brained, half witted, half-a-loaf, half pint pin head, you forgot, THE JOURNEY IS HALF THE ANSWER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

On Dionysus:

“For wine, he loves to view
    his altars stain,
 But prime blue ruin*–
    goes against the grain.”
— page 69, Jack Randall’s Diary

  *name “given by
   the modern Greeks to gin“
— page 4, Jack Randall’s Diary

Rosalind Krauss
in "Grids," 1979:

"If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World, for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter.  They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit.  From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.

Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."

"He was looking at
the nine engravings
and at the circle,
checking strange
correspondences
between them."
— The Club Dumas,1993

"And it's whispered that soon
if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us
to reason."
— Robert Plant,1971

The nine engravings of
The Club Dumas
(filmed as "The Ninth Gate")
are perhaps more an example
of the concrete than of the
universal.

An example of the universal*–
or, according to Krauss, a
"staircase" to the universal–
is the ninefold square:

"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
— John Outram, architect    

For more on the field
of reason, see
Log24, Oct. 9, 2006.

A reasonable set of
"strange correspondences"
in the garden of Apollo
has been provided by Ezra Brown
in a mathematical essay (pdf).

Unreason is, of course,
more popular.

* The ninefold square is perhaps a "concrete universal" in the sense of Hegel:

"Two determinations found in all philosophy are the concretion of the Idea and the presence of the spirit in the same; my content must at the same time be something concrete, present. This concrete was termed Reason, and for it the more noble of those men contended with the greatest enthusiasm and warmth. Thought was raised like a standard among the nations, liberty of conviction and of conscience in me. They said to mankind, 'In this sign thou shalt conquer,' for they had before their eyes what had been done in the name of the cross alone, what had been made a matter of faith and law and religion– they saw how the sign of the cross had been degraded."

— Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, "Idea of a Concrete Universal Unity"

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon   
 

From A Mass for Lucero:

“To the two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we owe our recognition that… there is a tremendous opposition, as regards both origins and aims, between the Apolline art of the sculptor and the non-visual, Dionysiac art of music.”
— The Birth of Tragedy, by Friedrich Nietzsche, Penguin, 1993, page 14

“Melody, then, is both primary and universal.” (Author’s italics)
— Nietzsche, op. cit., page 33

“…in so far as he interprets music in images, he himself lies amidst the peaceful waves of Apolline contemplation….”
— Nietzsche, op. cit., page 35

Apolline Contemplation

From The Miracle of the Bells, by Russell Janney, Prentice-Hall, 1946, page 333–

“He was singing softly:
‘A pretty girl–
 is like a melody—- !‘
 But that was always
 Bill Dunnigan’s
 Song of Victory….
 Thus thought the…
 press agent for
‘The Garden of the Soul.'”