See "Black Door" posts. See also "Monolith."
Thursday, May 16, 2024
Sunday, January 28, 2024
For Miller’s Girl:* The Black Door (by Matisse)
Thursday, March 9, 2023
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* "Miller's Girl" is the title of a film released on Jan. 26 that
appeared in the Log24 post "Xmas Pattern" of Jan. 13, 2024.
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Thursday, March 9, 2023
Sylvia Kristel at the Black Door
In memory of film auteur Bert I. Gordon, who reportedly
died at 100 yesterday —
"Make me young again." — Attributed to Kilgore Trout
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Monday, June 19, 2023
The Original Portable Door
"… a cardboard tube, more or less the same length as
the inner core of a toilet roll, but thicker. He frowned,
took the roll out, laid it on the desk and poked up it
with the butt end of a pencil. Something slid out.
It looked like a rolled-up black plastic dustbin liner;
but when he unfolded it, he recognised it as the funny
sheet thing he’d found in the strongroom and briefly
described as an Acme Portable Door, before losing
his nerve and changing it to something less facetious."
— Holt, Tom. The Portable Door . Orbit. Kindle Edition.
According to goodreads.com, the Holt book was
"first published March 6, 2003."
Compare and contrast the "portable door" as a literary device
with the "tesseract" in A Wrinkle in Time (1962).
See also this journal on March 6, 2003.
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Monday, April 3, 2023
Behind the Red Door, a Red Curtain
From "The Color Out of Nevermore," an April 1 post —
A detail from the final Log24 post of March 2023 —
"Wednesday, some red doors
should not be painted black."
From Arts & Letters Daily today —
A rather different curious case —
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Friday, June 23, 2023
A Little Drama
The broken pencil in a Dial illustration of June 20 —
"I could a tale unfold . . ." — Hamlet's father's ghost
"Thus the entire little drama, from crystallized carbon
and felled pine to this humble implement, to this
transparent thing, unfolds in a twinkle."
— Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things
"… a cardboard tube, more or less the same length as
the inner core of a toilet roll, but thicker. He frowned,
took the roll out, laid it on the desk and poked up it
with the butt end of a pencil. Something slid out.
It looked like a rolled-up black plastic dustbin liner;
but when he unfolded it, he recognised it as the funny
sheet thing he’d found in the strongroom and briefly
described as an Acme Portable Door, before losing
his nerve and changing it to something less facetious."
— Holt, Tom. The Portable Door . Orbit. Kindle Edition.
According to goodreads.com, the Holt book was
"first published March 6, 2003."
See also this journal on March 6, 2003, in a search for
Michelangelo Geometry.
Punchline of the above little drama —
"Try the other end of the pencil, Liz."
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Thursday, June 22, 2023
Unfolded Drama
"I could a tale unfold . . ." — Hamlet's father's ghost
"Thus the entire little drama, from crystallized carbon
and felled pine to this humble implement, to this
transparent thing, unfolds in a twinkle."
— Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things
"… a cardboard tube, more or less the same length as
the inner core of a toilet roll, but thicker. He frowned,
took the roll out, laid it on the desk and poked up it
with the butt end of a pencil. Something slid out.
It looked like a rolled-up black plastic dustbin liner;
but when he unfolded it, he recognised it as the funny
sheet thing he’d found in the strongroom and briefly
described as an Acme Portable Door, before losing
his nerve and changing it to something less facetious."
— Holt, Tom. The Portable Door . Orbit. Kindle Edition.
According to goodreads.com, the Holt book was
"first published March 6, 2003."
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Tuesday, June 20, 2023
… And of Evolution
(Continued from the previous post, Annals of Devolution)
The above seems an improved version of the
beach romp in the 2023 film of "The Portable Door."
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Saturday, April 1, 2023
The Color Out of Nevermore
A detail from the final Log24 post of March 2023 —
"Wednesday, some red doors
should not be painted black."
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Sunday, February 5, 2023
Dimensions
A Logo for Riri —
The above Nick Romano passage is from Knock on Any Door,
a 1947 novel by Willard Motley. Another Motley novel about
Chicago, from 1958 . . .
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Page 41 The city was a blue-black panther that slunk along beside them. The tall, skyscraper night-grass hemmed them in. The thousand neon animal eyes watched their going. Page 67 The blue-black panther of a city watched their going. The un- blinking neon animal eyes watched their going. Thousands of neon signs lit their way. In an alley behind West Madison Street half an Page 68 hour before, a bum, drunk, had frozen to death lying in the back doorway of a pawnshop. The blue-black panther crouched over him. Page 70 First the creak of ice as an automobile goes by. Then the frown into your room of the red brick building across the street, its windows frosted over like cold, unfriendly eyes. Then a bum stumbling along trying to keep warm. Now a drunk, unevenly. And the wind like the howling voice of the blue-black panther, hunting, finding. And the clanging of impersonal streetcars. And each bar of neon, cold, dead. No message. The clown takes his bow and it is Christmas Day. Page 79 The blue-black panther followed them, sniffing at their heels. Page 106 Above them the blue-black panther lay on the roof of a tenement house, its feline chin on the cornice, its yellow-green eyes staring down onto the black night street of Maxwell. Its tail, wagging slowly back and forth, was like a lasso, a noose, sending little shivers of pebbles rolling loosely across the roof. Page 154 Then he went down to the Shillelagh Club. Through the pane, in the crowded, noisy place, he saw her. She was sitting at a table near the back, alone. Her cigarette had fallen from her lips and rolled away from her on the table top. It had burned itself to a long gray ash. Her head hung loosely on her neck as if she was asleep. A half-empty glass of beer was in front of her. Please, Mother, please come out, he prayed to her. And he stood next door to the tavern, waiting, his small shoulders drawn in, his head down in shame. And often he walked to the window and stood on tiptoe. She was still there. In the same position. He waited. He would be late to school tomorrow. He waited, keeping the long vigil. He waited. Twelve years old. And the thousand neon-animal eyes stared at him savagely. He waited. The blue-black panther lashed out its tail, flicking its furry tip against his ankles. He waited. Page 250 Alongside the blue-black patrol wagon the blue-black panther walks majestically. Page 262 Outside the door the blue-black panther rubs its back like a house cat. Page 409 Nick held the cigarette listlessly. The smoke curled up his wrist and arm like a snake. The blue-black panther licked his hand. |
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Wednesday, October 26, 2022
The Big Rock
Big Rock
"I'm going to hit this problem
with a big rock."
– Mathematical saying, quoted here
on St. Peter's Day 2008
"I see a red door and I want it painted black" — The Rolling Stones
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Friday, May 6, 2022
Use Your Noodle (For Byron Gogol*)
An essay from . . .
The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design Wittgenstein’s Architecture The universe of texts can be seen as a landscape. In it one can make out mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes, castles, farmyards and inner-city slums. On the horizon of the scene visualized in this way, the Bible and Homer appear as gigantic ice-covered mountains. The vast, tranquil lake of Aristotle’s texts, where fishermen idly throw their nets and philologists row their boats, occupies a part of the valley bottom. There, the tumbling waterfall of Nietzsche is captured by the broad river of modern pragmatism. Towering above everything, the Gothic cathedral of St Thomas Aquinas’s Summae dominates the cathedral square of the city, in which the roofs and gables of Baroque speculations jostle one another. In the suburbs of this city, one catches sight of the Romantic, Realist and Modernist housing-blocks and factories of more recent litera¬ ture; somewhat apart from all these stands a small, apparently insignificant house resembling scaffolding more than a finished building: Wittgenstein’s building. This little house is called the Tractatus. This name isn’t the product of a one-track mind. For when one enters the house, one notices immediately that this is not a place that has lost track of things. Quite the opposite: It is a place of mirror- images. The house stands on six foundation pillars which support one another by means of cross-beams organized in a hierarchy. In the middle, however, there rises a seventh pillar whose function it is to cut through the building and free it from the ground. So the house with all its corners, angles and joints is protected, armoured and impregnable. And yet, and for that very reason, it is threatened with collapse and disappearance without trace – condemned in advance and from the outset. The building is set out: It consists of propositions. Every proposition presupposes all the preceding ones and is itself the 76 presupposition of all the following propositions. Proposition by proposition, anyone who enters progresses through the prescribed rooms, and his step is supported by consistencies. Suddenly, with one proposition, one single proposition, the ground gives way beneath his feet. He falls head first into the abyss. Wittgenstein’s house is situated in a suburb of that city whose cathedral square is dominated by the towers of Thomas Aquinas’s cathedral. The small, modest pillars of Wittgenstein’s house support one another according to the same logico- philosophical method as the pillars of the cathedral support one another. But there appears to be a world of difference between the cathedral and the little house: The cathedral is a ship pointing in the direction of heaven, and the little house is a trap-door pointing in the direction of a bottomless abyss. But be careful: May Thomas Aquinas not have been right in saying after his revelation that everything he had written before was like straw? May not the heaven above the cathedral be the same black hole as the abyss beneath the little house? May not Wittgenstein’s little house be the cathedral of today? And those mirrors whose images simultaneously mirror one another, may they not be our equivalent of stained-glass windows? The landscape portrayed in this essay, it goes without saying, is a metaphor. Is it possible to identify it as Vienna? And is it possible for anyone entering Wittgenstein’s little house in that unlikely place to make out a hint of the unsayable? What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. 77 |
Click the above image to enlarge.
See as well . . .
Update of 2:40 AM May 7, 2022 —
Flusser's seven "pillars" appear to be the main sections of the Tractatus
— numbered 1 through 7, with many intermediate numbered passages.
For a more geometric meditation on "the shape of things," see other
posts tagged "Shape Constant" in this journal.
*Byron Gogol is a tech magnate in the HBO series "Made for Love."
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Wednesday, February 23, 2022
Leaving the Farm
From the current online New Yorker , a barnyard elegy:
From the top of the New Yorker homepage tonight:
Locking the barn door after the chandelier is gone —
(Click to enlarge.)
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Tuesday, June 15, 2021
For Francisco Franco and Stephen King:
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Sunday, June 14, 2020
PC Language Game
The above Nat Friedman is not to be confused with
the Nat Friedman of “Hyperseeing,” discussed here June 12.
“One game is real and one’s a metaphor.
Untold times this wisdom’s come too late.
Battle of White has raged on endlessly.
Everywhere Black will strive to seal his fate.
Continue a search for thirty-three and three.
Veiled forever is the secret door.”
— Katherine Neville, aka Cat Velis, in The Eight,
Ballantine Books, January 1989, page 140
Related literary remarks —
The Old Man and the Bull
The Old Man and the Topic
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Friday, June 12, 2020
Log Lady
“Just as these lines that merge to form a key
Are as chess squares; when month and day are four;
Don’t risk another chance to move to mate.
One game is real and one’s a metaphor.
Untold times this wisdom’s come too late.
Battle of White has raged on endlessly.
Everywhere Black will strive to seal his fate.
Continue a search for thirty-three and three.
Veiled forever is the secret door.”
— Katherine Neville, aka Cat Velis, in The Eight,
Ballantine Books, January 1989, page 140
“One game is real and one’s a metaphor” —
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Saturday, January 21, 2017
Auguration
Cover art: "Still Life with Rock and Leaf,"
by David Ligare, oil on canvas, 1994
"Remembering speechlessly we seek
the great forgotten language,
the lost lane-end into heaven,
a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.
Where? When?" — Thomas Wolfe
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Saturday, October 10, 2015
The Mirror of Understanding
From The Snow Queen , by Hans Christian Andersen —
|
SEVENTH STORY. What Took Place in the Palace of the Snow Queen, and What Happened Afterward The walls of the palace were of driving snow, and the windows and doors of cutting winds. There were more than a hundred halls there, according as the snow was driven by the winds. The largest was many miles in extent; all were lighted up by the powerful Aurora Borealis, and all were so large, so empty, so icy cold, and so resplendent! Mirth never reigned there; there was never even a little bear-ball, with the storm for music, while the polar bears went on their hindlegs and showed off their steps. Never a little tea-party of white young lady foxes; vast, cold, and empty were the halls of the Snow Queen. The northern-lights shone with such precision that one could tell exactly when they were at their highest or lowest degree of brightness. In the middle of the empty, endless hall of snow, was a frozen lake; it was cracked in a thousand pieces, but each piece was so like the other, that it seemed the work of a cunning artificer. In the middle of this lake sat the Snow Queen when she was at home; and then she said she was sitting in the Mirror of Understanding, and that this was the only one and the best thing in the world. Little Kay was quite blue, yes nearly black with cold; but he did not observe it, for she had kissed away all feeling of cold from his body, and his heart was a lump of ice. He was dragging along some pointed flat pieces of ice, which he laid together in all possible ways, for he wanted to make something with them; just as we have little flat pieces of wood to make geometrical figures with, called the Chinese Puzzle. Kay made all sorts of figures, the most complicated, for it was an ice-puzzle for the understanding. In his eyes the figures were extraordinarily beautiful, and of the utmost importance; for the bit of glass which was in his eye caused this. He found whole figures which represented a written word; but he never could manage to represent just the word he wanted–that word was "eternity"; and the Snow Queen had said, "If you can discover that figure, you shall be your own master, and I will make you a present of the whole world and a pair of new skates." But he could not find it out. "I am going now to warm lands," said the Snow Queen. "I must have a look down into the black caldrons." It was the volcanoes Vesuvius and Etna that she meant. "I will just give them a coating of white, for that is as it ought to be; besides, it is good for the oranges and the grapes." And then away she flew, and Kay sat quite alone in the empty halls of ice that were miles long, and looked at the blocks of ice, and thought and thought till his skull was almost cracked. There he sat quite benumbed and motionless; one would have imagined he was frozen to death. …. |
Related material:
This journal on March 25, 2013:
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Tuesday, April 8, 2014
The Gioconda Smile
From Log24 on Feb. 26, 2008 —
|
“Many dreams have been The Return of the Author, On Sartre’s Les Mots – “Writing helps him find his own place within this vast comedy. He does not take to writing seriously yet, but he is eager to write books in order to escape the comedy he has been compelled to take part in.” |
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Thursday, May 24, 2012
Dark, Dark, Dark
|
From her left arm hung a black handbag that closed with a drawstring and from which protruded the tip of a silvery object about which I found myself apprehensively curious. Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question. The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent.
 Except for the bangs she wore her hair pinned up. Her ears were flat, thin-edged, and nicely shaped, with the long lobes that in Chinese art mark the philosopher. Small square silver flats with rounded corners ornamented them. Her face might have been painted by Toulouse-Lautrec or Degas. The skin was webbed with very fine lines; the eyes were darkly shadowed and there was a touch of green on the lids (Egyptian?—I asked myself); her mouth was wide, tolerant, but realistic. Yes, beyond all else, she seemed realistic. |
|
You’re not afraid to show yourself at your lowest ebb. In Lit, you stop breast-feeding because you’ve started drinking again. You describe yourself hiding in a closet with a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of Listerine, and a spit bowl. It’s not a proud moment. The temptation in Lit was to either make myself seedy or show some glamour. But there wasn’t any. It was just dark, dark, dark for days. Ugly. Were you surprised by how deeply people related to this dark stuff? If I’m doing my job then I’m able to make the strange seem familiar. Bad memoirs try to make the strange stranger, to provide something for people to gawk at. I try to create an experience where no matter how bizarre something is, it seems normal. I don’t want readers to balk, I want them to be in the experience. My goal isn’t for people to go, “Oh, poor little Mary Karr,” but rather to have the reader go, “I can be an asshole too,” or just to have enthusiasm for the possibility for change. |
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Thursday, October 14, 2010
Synchronicity
This journal on October 12 (the traditional Columbus day)—
"The text is a two-way mirror
that allows me to look into
the life and times of the reader."
– The French Mathematician
(Galois), by Tom Petsinis
It is not clear how this is supposed to work.
However, there is synchronicity and the New York Lottery—
October 12, 2010—
Midday 765, Evening 365 —
Life and Times.
Life
|
From Log24 on April 21, the date of Mark Twain’s death– Psychoshop, by Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny:
The Pennsylvania Lottery
and hence Log24, 9/23 (2007), and page 765 of From Here to Eternity (Delta paperback, 1998):
|
Times
|
See "Seasons of Love" from the musical "Rent." |
See also Mark 15:38— "And the veil of the temple…"
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Saturday, July 10, 2010
Class of 64
Samuel Beckett on Dante and Joyce:
"Another point of comparison is the preoccupation
with the significance of numbers."
"If I'd been out 'til quarter to three
Would you lock the door,
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?"
Happy birthday to Sue Lyon (Night of the Iguana, 1964)
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Wednesday, December 2, 2009
I thought I heard them say, “Welcome to…”
| The William James Hotel paper at William James Studies "There are at least two well known examples that James employs to illustrate what is meant by this formulation of pragmatism. Returning here to pragmatic method, the second of these, drawn from the Italian thinker Giovanni Papini, is meant to illustrate how this method is compatible with a number of varying results, that is, how this method is one of pluralism.26 With a remarkable illustration of the meaning of pragmatism, we are asked to understand James's pragmatic method as being like a hotel corridor, one whose doors lead to numerous rooms in which there are thinkers involved with numerous types of projects and pursuits. There could, for example, be a metaphysical idealist in one room and a committed anti-metaphysical thinker in another, both in the same hotel. In any case, James holds that his pragmatic method remains neutral with regard to the various types of thought taking place within the rooms.27 The hotel represents a great deal of the world of thinking.28 The various rooms represent individual philosophies. Of course, the corridor represents pragmatism, which is the connection between these, the philosophical method of choice and action. We might also say that pragmatism affords us our one chance at escaping the isolation of the individual rooms. This corridor method allows one to move from one concept or theory to another concept or theory. It does so insofar as it offers a concrete manner in which to comprehend, enter, or 'penetrate' a given theory, and in which to step outside of the theory so to test and contrast it with other theories. That is, to enter or leave their various rooms, the varying occupants must employ the pragmatic method. Accordingly, we see that, for James, pragmatism is not a set doctrine. Again, it is a method, one that allows for a great many differing views to co-exist under the same umbrella, for pragmatism '…has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method.'"29
|
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Levi-Strauss Died…
… on Friday, October 30, 2009 ………
(known to some as “Devil’s Night”)………
according to The New York Times
…
A search in this journal for “Levi-Strauss” yields various entries, the most recent being “Autistic Enchantment” (Sept. 3, 2009).
Related material:
Today’s New York Times on autism
(A Powerful Identity, a Vanishing Diagnosis)
and Log24 on enchantment.
An instance of the latter (from Feb. 15, 2008):
Door
Step:
“Many dreams have been
brought to your doorstep.
They just lie there
and they die there.”
— Lyricist Ray Evans,
who died at 92
one year ago today
Associated Press –
Feb. 15, 2008
Today in History –
Thought for Today:
“Like all dreamers I confuse
disenchantment with truth.”
disenchantment with truth.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Postscript of Nov. 3, 2009:
For more confusion, see
the works of Claude Levi-Strauss.
But according to The Telegraph, Levi-Strauss
died on Saturday, Oct. 31, All Hallows’ Eve.
According to Le Monde, he may have died
even later, on Sunday, Nov. 1, All Saints’ Day.
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Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Tuesday August 4, 2009
Just What We Need
Thomas Pynchon's new novel
Inherent Vice comes out today.
Title of a review in
The New York Times:
Another Doorway to the
Paranoid Pynchon Dimension
More interesting doorways:
An Aleph for Pynchon (July 9)
Click on the doorway for details.
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|
|
The Aleph (July 8)
Click on the aleph for details.
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Saturday, April 25, 2009
Saturday April 25, 2009
April is Awareness Month
for both
Mathematics and Autism.
for both
Mathematics and Autism.
Welcome to the
Black Hole Café
"Our lifelong friendship made me not only an admirer of the depth, scholarship, and sheer energy of his mathematical work (and of his ceaseless activities as an editorial entrepreneur on behalf of mathematics) but one in awe of his status as the ultimate relaxed sophisticate."
|
Psychoshop
by Alfred Bester
|
"After Davis and Hersh,
it will be hard to uphold
the Glasperlenspiel
view of mathematics."
— Gian-Carlo Rota
it will be hard to uphold
the Glasperlenspiel
view of mathematics."
— Gian-Carlo Rota
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon
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Sunday, November 16, 2008
Sunday November 16, 2008
Art and Lies
Observations suggested by an article on author Lewis Hyde– "What is Art For?"– in today's New York Times Magazine:
Margaret Atwood (pdf) on Lewis Hyde's
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art —
"Trickster," says Hyde, "feels no anxiety when he deceives…. He… can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation." (71) As Hyde says, "… almost everything that can be said about psychopaths can also be said about tricksters," (158), although the reverse is not the case. "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.
Related material:
The Trickster
and the Paranormal
and
Martin Gardner on
a disappearing cube —
|
"What happened to that… cube?"
Apollinax laughed until his eyes teared. "I'll give you a hint, my dear. Perhaps it slid off into a higher dimension." "Are you pulling my leg?" "I wish I were," he sighed. "The fourth dimension, as you know, is an extension along a fourth coordinate perpendicular to the three coordinates of three-dimensional space. Now consider a cube. It has four main diagonals, each running from one corner through the cube's center to the opposite corner. Because of the cube's symmetry, each diagonal is clearly at right angles to the other three. So why shouldn't a cube, if it feels like it, slide along a fourth coordinate?" — "Mr. Apollinax Visits New York," by Martin Gardner, Scientific American, May 1961, reprinted in The Night is Large |
For such a cube, see
ashevillecreative.com
this illustration in
The Religion of Cubism
(and the four entries
preceding it —
Log24, May 9, 2003).
Beware of Gardner's
"clearly" and other lies.
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Saturday, June 21, 2008
Saturday June 21, 2008
For Mary Gaitskill
(See Eight is a Gate and
Faith, Doubt, Art, and
The New Yorker.)
A sructure from
today's previous entry:
|
Everyone comes to Rick's.
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Sunday, May 25, 2008
Sunday May 25, 2008
Wechsler Cubes
"Confusion is nothing new."
— Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
— Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
Part I:
Magister Ludi
Magister Ludi
Hermann Hesse's 1943 The Glass Bead Game (Picador paperback, Dec. 6, 2002, pp. 139-140)–
"For the present, the Master showed him a bulky memorandum, a proposal he had received from an organist– one of the innumerable proposals which the directorate of the Game regularly had to examine. Usually these were suggestions for the admission of new material to the Archives. One man, for example, had made a meticulous study of the history of the madrigal and discovered in the development of the style a curved that he had expressed both musically and mathematically, so that it could be included in the vocabulary of the Game. Another had examined the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar's Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns. Or again some fanatic had once more unearthed some new cabala hidden in the musical notation of the fifteenth century. Then there were the tempestuous letters from abstruse experimenters who could arrive at the most astounding conclusions from, say, a comparison of the horoscopes of Goethe and Spinoza; such letters often included pretty and seemingly enlightening geometric drawings in several colors."
Part II:
A Bulky Memorandum
A Bulky Memorandum
From Siri Hustvedt, author of Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)– What I Loved: A Novel (Picador paperback, March 1, 2004, page 168)–
A description of the work of Bill Wechsler, a fictional artist:
"Bill worked long hours on a series of autonomous pieces about numbers. Like O's Journey, the works took place inside glass cubes, but these were twice as large– about two feet square. He drew his inspiration from sources as varied as the Cabbala, physics, baseball box scores, and stock market reports. He painted, cut, sculpted, distorted, and broke the numerical signs in each work until they became unrecognizable. He included figures, objects, books, windows, and always the written word for the number. It was rambunctious art, thick with allusion– to voids, blanks, holes, to monotheism and the individual, the the dialectic and yin-yang, to the Trinity, the three fates, and three wishes, to the golden rectangle, to seven heavens, the seven lower orders of the sephiroth, the nine Muses, the nine circles of Hell, the nine worlds of Norse mythology, but also to popular references like A Better Marriage in Five Easy Lessons and Thinner Thighs in Seven Days. Twelve-step programs were referred to in both cube one and cube two. A miniature copy of a book called The Six Mistakes Parents Make Most Often lay at the bottom of cube six. Puns appeared, usually well disguised– one, won; two, too, and Tuesday; four, for, forth; ate, eight. Bill was partial to rhymes as well, both in images and words. In cube nine, the geometric figure for a line had been painted on one glass wall. In cube three, a tiny man wearing the black-and-white prison garb of cartoons and dragging a leg iron has
— End of page 168 —
opened the door to his cell. The hidden rhyme is "free." Looking closely through the walls of the cube, one can see the parallel rhyme in another language: the German word drei is scratched into one glass wall. Lying at the bottom of the same box is a tiny black-and-white photograph cut from a book that shows the entrance to Auschwitz: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. With every number, the arbitrary dance of associations worked togethere to create a tiny mental landscape that ranged in tone from wish-fulfillment dream to nightmare. Although dense, the effect of the cubes wasn't visually disorienting. Each object, painting, drawing, bit of text, or sculpted figure found its rightful place under the glass according to the necessary, if mad, logic of numerical, pictorial, and verbal connection– and the colors of each were startling. Every number had been given a thematic hue. Bill had been interested in Goethe's color wheel and in Alfred Jensen's use of it in his thick, hallucinatory paintings of numbers. He had assigned each number a color. Like Goethe, he included black and white, although he didn't bother with the poet's meanings. Zero and one were white. Two was blue. Three was red, four was yellow, and he mixed colors: pale blue for five, purples in six, oranges in seven, greens in eight, and blacks and grays in nine. Although other colors and omnipresent newsprint always intruded on the basic scheme, the myriad shades of a single color dominated each cube.
The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself– that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes, lines, and loops on a page."
Part III:
Wechsler Cubes
(named not for
Bill Wechsler, the
fictional artist above,
but for the non-fictional
David Wechsler) –
(named not for
Bill Wechsler, the
fictional artist above,
but for the non-fictional
David Wechsler) –
|
From 2002:
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest. |
Part IV:
A Magic Gallery
A Magic Gallery
|
ZZ
Figures from the
Poem by Eugen Jost:
Mit Zeichen und Zahlen
Numbers and Names,
With numbers and names English translation A related poem:
Alphabets
From time to time
But if a savage
— Hermann Hesse (1943), |
Comments Off on Sunday May 25, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
Friday April 25, 2008
Destabilizing
the Locus
the Locus
"It is the intention
of this piece
to destabilize the locus
of that authorial act…."
of this piece
to destabilize the locus
of that authorial act…."
— Yale art student
Aliza Shvarts,
quoted today in
The Harvard Crimson
From Log24 on
March 14:
|
Rite of Spring
From the online
Related material:
A figure from
— and
The center referred
See also Yeats —
Stevens —
and Zelazny —
|
Related material
from Google:
|
JSTOR: Killing Time
|
Other ways
of killing time:
|
From Log24 on April 21, the date of Mark Twain's death–
Psychoshop, by Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny:
The Pennsylvania Lottery
and hence Log24, 9/23 (2007), and page 765 of From Here to Eternity (Delta paperback, 1998):
|
Comments Off on Friday April 25, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
Monday April 21, 2008
A Fresh Perspective
“… if thou bring thy gift
to the altar, and
there rememberest….”
Matthew 5:23-24
The following meditations were inspired by an ad today in the online New York Times obituaries section–
“Been somewhere interesting? Tell us about it for a chance to win a trip for 2 to Paris.”
Country song, quoted here Dec. 17, 2003–
“Give faith a fighting chance.”
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano–
“I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night…. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it? …And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart.”
From an obituary of mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota linked to here on April 18, the anniversary of Rota’s death:
Gian-Carlo Rota
“He always brought a very fresh
perspective on philosophical issues.”
Final Arrangements, continued–
April 21, 2008:
Odd Couples
Click image to enlarge.
From a novel, Psychoshop, quoted here in an entry on the Pope’s birthday, “The Gates of Hell” —
His manner was all charm and grace; pure cafe society….
He purred a chuckle. “My place. If you want to come, I’ll show you.”
“Love to. The Luogo Nero? The Black Place?”
“That’s what the locals call it. It’s really Buoco Nero, the Black Hole.”
“Like the Black Hole of Calcutta?”
“No. Black Hole as in astronomy. Corpse of a dead star, but also channel between this universe and its next-door neighbor.”
“Here? In Rome?”
“Sure. They drift around in space until they run out of gas and come to a stop. This number happened to park here.”
Comments Off on Monday April 21, 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Wednesday April 16, 2008
Poetry for Physicists:
The Gates of Hell
From the obituary of physicist John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton:
In the fall of 1967, he was invited to give a talk…. As he spoke, he… [mentioned] something strange… what he called a gravitationally completely collapsed object. But such a phrase was a mouthful, he said, wishing aloud for a better name. "How about black hole?" someone shouted from the audience.
That was it. "I had been searching for just the right term for months, mulling it over in bed, in the bathtub, in my car, wherever I had quiet moments," he later said. "Suddenly this name seemed exactly right." He kept using the term, in lectures and on papers, and it stuck.
From Log24 last year on this date ("Happy Birthday, Benedict XVI"):
"Know the one about the Demiurge and the Abridgment of Hope?"
— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise, Knopf, 1981, the final page, 439
— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise, Knopf, 1981, the final page, 439
From Dante, The Inferno, inscription on the gates of Hell:
"Abandon all hope, ye who enter."
From Psychoshop, an unfinished novel by Alfred Bester completed by Roger Zelazny:
His manner was all charm and grace; pure cafe society….
He purred a chuckle. "My place. If you want to come, I'll show you."
"Love to. The Luogo Nero? The Black Place?"
"That's what the locals call it. It's really Buoco Nero, the Black Hole."
"Like the Black Hole of Calcutta?"
"No. Black Hole as in astronomy. Corpse of a dead star, but also channel between this universe and its next-door neighbor."
"Here? In Rome?"
"Sure. They drift around in space until they run out of gas and come to a stop. This number happened to park here."
"How long ago?"
"No one knows," he said. "It was there six centuries before Christ, when the Etruscans took over a small town called Roma and began turning it into the capital of the world."
Related material:
Log24 on
narrative–
Life of the Party
(March 24, 2006),
and
'Nauts
(March 26, 2006)
Comments Off on Wednesday April 16, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Wednesday February 27, 2008
The Plot
"Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men,
but rather of their folly"
— Four Quartets
"Dear friends, would those of you who know what this is all about please raise your hands? I think if God is dead he laughed himself to death. Because, you see, we live in Eden. Genesis has got it all wrong– we never left the Garden. Look about you. This is paradise. It's hard to find, I'll grant you, but it is here. Under our feet, beneath the surface, all around us is everything we want. The earth is shining under the soot. We are all fools. Ha ha! Moriarty has made fools of all of us. But together– you and I, tonight– we'll bring him down."
— George C. Scott as Justin Playfair
The earth is shining
under the soot…
under the soot…
Ah! bright wings
"Whoever owns the Boeing 707
parked on La Brea Avenue,
your landing lights are on."
parked on La Brea Avenue,
your landing lights are on."
[John Travolta runs on stage
and rushes for the door.]
For a religious interpretation
of the number 707, see
To Announce a Faith
(All Hallows' Eve, 2006)
and the following link
to a Tom Stoppard line
from the previous entry:
"Heaven, how can I
believe in Heaven?"
she sings at the finale.
"Just a lying
rhyme for seven!"
Comments Off on Wednesday February 27, 2008
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Tuesday February 26, 2008
Sitcom
Some thoughts from
the preceding Friday,
the birthday of actor
Kevin “You’re Next“
McCarthy:
|
“Many dreams have been “Writing helps him find his own place within this vast comedy. He does not take to writing seriously yet, but he is eager to write books in order to escape the comedy he has been compelled to take part in.”
|
Related material:
The obituary of Burghardt
and The Four Last Things.
“Hell is other people.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre,
No Exit
With a laugh track.
Comments Off on Tuesday February 26, 2008
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Sunday February 17, 2008
Big Time
New York Times today–
"Plot Would Thicken, if the
Writers Remembered It"
"We've lost the plot!"
— Slipstream
|
Excerpt from Fritz Leiber's Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it's cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I'd hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, "Look, Buster, do you want to live?"…. Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.
Bordered version The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent…. … "Here is how it stacks up: You've bought your way with something other than money into an organization of which I am an agent…." "It's a very big organization," she went on, as if warning me. "Call it an empire or a power if you like. So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist. It has agents everywhere, literally. Space and time are no barriers to it. Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future, but also the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees." "I. G. Farben?" I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor. She didn't rebuke my flippancy, but said, "And it isn't the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name." "Which is?" I asked. "The Spiders," she said. That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly. I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me– something like that. She watched me. "You might call it the Double Cross," she suggested, "if that seems better." |
Related material:
the previous entry.
Comments Off on Sunday February 17, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
Friday February 15, 2008
Door
Step:
“Many dreams have been
brought to your doorstep.
They just lie there
and they die there.”
— Lyricist Ray Evans,
who died at 92
one year ago today
Associated Press –
Today in History –
Thought for Today:
“Like all dreamers I confuse
disenchantment with truth.”
–Jean-Paul Sartre
disenchantment with truth.”
–Jean-Paul Sartre
The Return of the Author, by Eugen Simion:
On Sartre’s Les Mots —
“Writing helps him find his own place within this vast comedy. He does not take to writing seriously yet, but he is eager to write books in order to escape the comedy he has been compelled to take part in.
The craft of writing appeared to me as an adult activity, so ponderously serious, so trifling, and, at bottom, so lacking in interest that I didn’t doubt for a moment that it was in store for me. I said to myself both ‘that’s all it is’ and ‘I am gifted.’ Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth.”
This is given in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1999) as
Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
Also from the AP’s
Today in History —
Today’s Birthdays:
Actor Kevin McCarthy is 94.
Related material:
Hopkins at Heaven’s Gate
(In context: October 2007)–
“Dolly’s Little Diner–
Home from Home”
Comments Off on Friday February 15, 2008
Monday, July 16, 2007
Monday July 16, 2007
Confirmation
“They took all the trees,
put ’em in a tree museum
and they charged the people
a dollar and a half just to see ’em”
From an article (full version contains spoiler) on Bridge to Terabithia:
“In the book, a girl named Leslie Burke moves in next door to a chore-ridden farm boy, Jess Aarons, and imagines for him a kingdom she names Terabithia. Over a fall and winter, they ride the bus home from school together (sharing a seat in spite of catcalls from schoolmates), dump their backpacks at the edge of the road, and run across an empty field to the edge of a creek bed, where ‘someone long forgotten had hung a rope.’ They use the rope to swing across the gully into Terabithia, a wooded glade that Leslie makes magic….”
Art by Wendell Minor from the cover
of Magic Time, by Doug Marlette
From Bridge to Terabithia:
“I know”– she was getting excited– “it could be a magic country like Narnia, and the only way you can get in is by swinging across on this enchanted rope.” Her eyes were bright. She grabbed the rope. “Come on,” she said.
LOS ANGELES – Roger Cardinal Mahony, leader of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese, the nation’s largest, apologized yesterday for what he called a “terrible sin and crime” as the church confirmed it would pay a record $660 million to people sexually abused by priests.
“Magic Time”—Mary Karr,
“Facing Altars:
Poetry and Prayer“–“There is a body
on the cross
in my church.”
Comments Off on Monday July 16, 2007
Saturday, December 9, 2006
Saturday December 9, 2006
Death on the Feast
of Saint Nicholas
Quotation from Log24 on
September 14, 2003–
of Saint Nicholas
Quotation from Log24 on
September 14, 2003–
Readings on Aesthetics for the
Feast of the Triumph of the Cross:
“We’re not here to stick a mirror on you. Anybody can do that, We’re here to give you a more cubist or skewed mirror, where you get to see yourself with fresh eyes. That’s what an artist does. When you paint the Crucifixion, you’re not painting an exact reproduction.”
— Julie Taymor on “Frida” (AP, 10/22/02)
|
“Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent [above], painted by Francisco Goya (1746-1828) in 1788, is one of the most astonishing works in an oeuvre replete with remarkable images. In the decade and a half since its inclusion in Robert Rosenblum‘s survey* of nineteenth-century art, this canvas has become widely known among scholars and their students. Rosenblum, following a line of interpretation that dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, uses this painting to support a symptomatic reading of Goya’s art, which he describes as ‘the most sharply accurate mirror of the collapse of the great religious and monarchic traditions of the West.'”
— Andrew Schulz in The Art Bulletin, Dec. 1, 1998 * 19th-Century Art, by H. W. Janson and Robert Rosenblum, 1984 |
on Wednesday,
the Feast of St. Nicholas.
the Feast of St. Nicholas.
For more on
St. Francis Borgia, see
In Lieu of Rosebud.
Comments Off on Saturday December 9, 2006
Thursday, September 7, 2006
Thursday September 7, 2006
Today’s Birthday:
Elizabeth I of England
Elizabeth I of England
“What, nephew,” said the king,
“is the wind in that door?”
SIR THOMAS MALORY
Le Morte d’Arthur
— Epigraph to
A Wind in the Door,
by Madeleine L’Engle
Vaine the ambition of Kings,
Who seeke by trophies and dead things,
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.
— John Webster,
The Devil’s Law Case
From Eliot’s
The Waste Land,
Part II, “A Game of Chess”:
| I think we are in rats’ alley | 115 |
| Where the dead men lost their bones |
116 |
| “What is that noise?” | 117 |
| The wind under the door. | 118 |
| “What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?” |
119 |
| Nothing again nothing. | 120 |
Eliot’s note:
118. Cf. Webster: “Is the wind
in that door still?”
The line cited in Eliot’s note
is from John Webster’s
The Devil’s Law Case,
3.2.162.
Saturday, September 2, 2006
Saturday September 2, 2006
Today's birthdays:
Salma Hayek
("Frida")
"Shinin' like a diamond
she had tombstones
in her eyes."
(For the above figures,
see Log24, 5/17/06,
"Tombstone," and
Log24, 9/13/03,
"For the Man in Black.")
and Keanu Reeves
("Constantine")
(For the above figure,
see Log24, 2/18/05,
"In Hoc Signo.")
Related material:
"Un cofre de gran riqueza
Hallaron dentro un pilar,
Dentro del, nuevas banderas
Con figuras de espantar."
"A coffer of great richness
In a pillar's heart they found,
Within it lay new banners,
With figures to astound."
For some further details, see
the brief Log24 narrative
"Indiana Jones and
the Hidden Coffer" as well as
Symmetry Framed and
the design of the doors
to Rick's Cafe Americain:
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Saturday December 10, 2005
Prequel on
Saint Cecilia’s Day
“Death itself would start
working backward.”
— Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia
Celebrity Obits, Nov. 22, 2005 —
Intelligence and
Counterintelligence
(continued):
| Aldous Huxley & C.S. Lewis both died on Nov.22, 1963. For some reason, their deaths went largely unnoticed… | The doors of perception lead to Narnia | November 22, 08:51:20am |
| Shemp Howard died 50 years ago today | Moe | November 22, 09:17:18am |
See also the previous entry, and this follow-up:
“Shattuck’s death on Thursday… was reported by his nephew, John Shattuck, head of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, The Boston Globe reported Saturday.”
Related material:
“The White Witch rules Narnia,
and has brought to it
the Hundred Years of Winter.”
— The Narnia Academy
and the foundation of the
David Morrell Counterintelligence Library:
Shemp
Comments Off on Saturday December 10, 2005
Saturday December 10, 2005
Roger Shattuck, Scholar, Is Dead at 82
In his honor, some excerpts from previous entries:
I just subscribed to The New York Review of Books online for another year,
prompted by my desire to read Roger Shattuck on Rimbaud….
"How did this poetic sensibility come to burn so bright?"
The Shattuck piece is from 1967, the year of The Doors' first album.
(See Death and the Spirit, Part II.)
|
The photo of Nicole Kidman
is from Globe Song
(Log24, Jan. 18, 2005).
The Times says Shattuck died
on Thursday (Dec. 8, 2005).
Here, from 4:00 AM on the
morning of Shattuck's death,
is a brief companion-piece
to Eight is a Gate:
|
From Carole A. Holdsworth, Tanner may have stated it best:
“V. is whatever lights you to
(Tony Tanner, page 36,
She's a mystery |
She's in midnight blue,
still the words ring true;
woman in blue
got a hold on you.
Comments Off on Saturday December 10, 2005
Friday, November 18, 2005
Friday November 18, 2005
It’s still the same old story,
a fight for love and…
a fight for love and…
Glory
Wikipedia on the tesseract:
“Glory Road (1963) included the foldbox, a hyperdimensional packing case that was bigger inside than outside.”
Robert A. Heinlein in Glory Road:
“Rufo’s baggage turned out to be a little black box about the size and shape of a portable typewriter. He opened it.
And opened it again.
And kept on opening it– And kept right on unfolding its sides and letting them down until the durn thing was the size of a small moving van and even more packed….
… Anyone who has studied math knows that the inside does not have to be smaller than the outside, in theory…. Rufo’s baggage just carried the principle further.”
And opened it again.
And kept on opening it– And kept right on unfolding its sides and letting them down until the durn thing was the size of a small moving van and even more packed….
… Anyone who has studied math knows that the inside does not have to be smaller than the outside, in theory…. Rufo’s baggage just carried the principle further.”
Johnny Cash: “And behold, a white horse.”
On The Last Battle, a book in the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis:
“… there is much glory in this wonderfully written apocalypse. Tirian, looking into the stable through the hole in the door, says, ‘The stable seen from within and the stable seen from without are two different places.’ Digory answers, ‘Its inside is bigger than its outside.’ It is the perceptive Lucy who voices the hope that is in us, ‘In our world, too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.'”
Lewis said in “The Weight of Glory”—
“Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them.”
On enchantments that need to be broken:
See the description of the Eater of Souls in Glory Road and of Scientism in
- and the C. S. Lewis classic,
That Hideous Strength.
Comments Off on Friday November 18, 2005
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Sunday January 16, 2005
Death and the
Spirit, Part II
Readings
Are you a lucky little lady
in The City of Light
Or just another lost angel…
City of Night
— Jim Morrison, L.A. Woman
Fourmillante cité,
cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour
raccroche le passant
— Baudelaire,
Les Fleurs du Mal,
and
Notes to The Waste Land
"When you got the mojo, brother —
when you're on the inside —
the world is fantastic."
— Pablo Tabor in Robert Stone's
A Flag for Sunrise,
Knopf, 1981, p. 428
|
Now it was Avril's turn to understand and he was frightened out of his wits.
"The Science of Luck," he said cautiously. "You watch, do you? That takes a lot of self-discipline." "Of course it does, but it's worth it. I watch everything, all the time. I'm one of the lucky ones. I've got the gift. I knew it when I was a kid, but I didn't grasp it." The murmur had intensified. "This last time, when I was alone so long, I got it right. I watch for every opportunity and I never do the soft thing. That's why I succeed." Avril was silent for a long time. "It is the fashion," he said at last. "You've been reading the Frenchmen, I suppose? Or no, no, perhaps you haven't. How absurd of me." "Don't blether." The voice, stripped of all its disguises, was harsh and naive. "You always blethered. You never said anything straight. What do you know about the Science of Luck? Go on, tell me. You're the only one who's understood at all. Have you ever heard of it before?" "Not under that name." "I don't suppose you have. That's my name for it. What's its real name?" "The Pursuit of Death." |
Anagrams
In memory of Danny Sugerman,
late manager of The Doors:
Danny Sugerman
Photo by
Frank Alan Bella, 2002
"Mr Mojo Risin" = "Jim Morrison."
"Audible Era" = "Baudelaire."
"Bad Rumi" = "Rimbaud."
From the dark jungle
as a tiger bright,
Form from the viewless Spirit
leaps to light.
— Rumi, "Reality and Appearance,"
translated by R. A. Nicholson
(See also Death and the Spirit
from Twelfth Night, 2005, the date
of Danny Sugerman's death.)
Comments Off on Sunday January 16, 2005
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Wednesday December 29, 2004
The Dark Door
From Log24.net, Dec. 22, 2003:
“One, two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door.
Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen.”
— Dylan Thomas,
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
“The day after Christmas
turned out to be a living nightmare.”
— Arthur C. Clarke, Dec. 27, 2004
Adapted from the logo of the
Arthur C. Clarke Foundation:
Dabo claves regni caelorum. By silent shore
Ripples spread from castle rock. The metaphor
For metamorphosis no keys unlock.
— “Endgame,” Steven H. Cullinane,
November 7, 1986
Comments Off on Wednesday December 29, 2004
Saturday, November 20, 2004
Saturday November 20, 2004
Janet's Tea Party
From October 5, 2004:
|
For Janet Leigh,
who died on Sunday, Oct. 3, 2004:
On the redesigned "… the ultimate judgment will have to wait: Taniguchi himself told a MoMA curator who'd complimented him that considering the building without the art in it is like admiring the tea cup without the green tea. Next month the museum will have art on the walls and crowds in the galleries—and then the tea ceremony will begin." — Cathleen McGuigan, Newsweek, |
The art of Theo van Doesburg suggests
the following "tea party" mini-exhibit:
the following "tea party" mini-exhibit:
From |
  
From the book Tangram
|
Comments Off on Saturday November 20, 2004
Tuesday, October 5, 2004
Tuesday October 5, 2004
Tea Privileges
On Janet Leigh,
who died Sunday:
|
MARCO — What’s your last name? ROSIE — Chaney. I’m production assistant for a man named Justin who had two hits last season. I live on 54th Street, a few doors from the Modern Museum of Art, of which I’m a “tea privileges” member, no cream. I live at 53 West 54th Street, apartment 3B. Can you remember that? MARCO — Yes. ROSIE — El Dorado 5-9970. Can you remember that? MARCO — Yes. |
On the redesigned
Museum of Modern Art,
11 West 53rd Street:
“… the ultimate judgment will have to wait: Taniguchi himself told a MoMA curator who’d complimented him that considering the building without the art in it is like admiring the tea cup without the green tea. Next month the museum will have art on the walls and crowds in the galleries—and then the tea ceremony will begin.”
— Cathleen McGuigan, Newsweek,
issue dated Oct. 11, 2004
Related material:
Review of A Man and His Art, a book of paintings by Frank Sinatra:
“… he’s a solid abstractionist with an excellent eye for color, composition and geometric precision.”
— Booklist (Jan. 15, 1992)
“Blue Eyes took his Sunday painting seriously.”
— Eric Banks in Artforum Magazine,
September 2004
See also
Art Wars.
Comments Off on Tuesday October 5, 2004
Sunday, September 5, 2004
Sunday September 5, 2004
Symmetry and Change
in the Dreamtime
Notes from the Journal
of Steven H. Cullinane
Summary:
| Aug 31 2004 07:31:01 PM |
Early Evening, Shining Star |
 |
| Sep 01 2004 09:00:35 AM |
Words and Images |
 |
| Sep 01 2004 12:07:28 PM |
Whale Rider |
 |
| Sep 02 2004 11:11:42 AM |
Heaven and Earth |
 |
| Sep 02 2004 07:00:23 PM |
Whale Road |
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| Cinderella’s Slipper |
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| Sep 03 2004 10:01:56 AM |
Another September Morn |
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| Noon |
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| De Nada |  |
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| Ite, Missa Est |  |
Symmetry and Change, Part 1…
Early Evening,
Shining Star
Hexagram 01
The Creative:
The Image
Heaven
Heaven
The movement of heaven
is full of power.
Click on picture
for details.
The Clare Lawler Prize
for Literature goes to…
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For the thoughts on time |
Symmetry and Change, Part 2…
Words and Images
Hexagram 35
Progress:
The Image
Fire
Earth
The sun rises over the earth.
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“Oh, my Lolita. I have only words “This is the best toy train set “As the quotes above by Nabokov and Welles suggest, we need to be able to account for the specific functions available to narrative in each medium, for the specific elements that empirical creators will ‘play with’ in crafting their narratives.” |
For
James Whale
and
William French Anderson —
Words
In the Spirit of
Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs:
Stay for just a while…
Stay, and let me look at you.
It’s been so long, I hardly knew you.
Standing in the door…
Stay with me a while.
I only want to talk to you.
We’ve traveled halfway ’round the world
To find ourselves again.
September morn…
We danced until the night
became a brand new day,
Two lovers playing scenes
from some romantic play.
September morning still can
make me feel this way.
Look at what you’ve done…
Why, you’ve become a grown-up girl…
— Neil Diamond
Images
In the Spirit of
September Morn:
The Last Day of Summer:
Photographs by Jock Sturges
“In 1990, the FBI entered Sturges’s studio and seized his work, claiming violation of child pornography laws.”
Related material:
and
Log24 entries of
Aug. 15, 2004.
Those interested in the political implications of Diamond’s songs may enjoy Neil Performs at Kerry Fundraiser.
I personally enjoyed this site’s description of Billy Crystal’s remarks, which included “a joke about former President Clinton’s forthcoming children’s
“Puff, puff, woo, woo, off we go!”
Symmetry and Change, Part 3…
Hexagram 28
Preponderance of
the Great:
The Image
Lake
Wind
The lake rises
above the trees.
“Congratulations to Clare Lawler, who participated very successfully in the recently held Secondary Schools Judo Championships in Wellington.”
For an explanation of this entry’s title, see the previous two entries and
Oxford Word
(Log24, July 10, 2004)
Symmetry and Change, Part 4…
Heaven and Earth
Hexagram 42
Increase:
The Image
Wind
Thunder
Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase.
“This time resembles that of
the marriage of heaven and earth”
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|
|
you gotta ride it like you find it.
Get your ticket at the station
of the Rock Island Line.
in Rock Island, Illinois
“What it all boiled down to really was everybody giving everybody else a hard time for no good reason whatever… You just couldn’t march to your own music. Nowadays, you couldn’t even hear it… It was lost, the music which each person had inside himself, and which put him in step with things as they should be.”
— The Grifters, Ch. 10, 1963, by
James Myers Thompson
“The Old Man’s still an artist
with a Thompson.”
— Terry in “Miller’s Crossing”
For some of “the music which
each person had inside,”
click on the picture
with the Thompson.
It may be that Kylie is,
in her own way, an artist…
with a 357:
(Hits counter at
The Quality of Diamond
as of 11:05 AM Sept. 2, 2004)
For more on
“the marriage of heaven and earth,”
see
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.
Symmetry and Change, Part 5…
Whale Road
Hexagram 23
Splitting Apart:
The Image
Mountain
Earth
The mountain rests
on the earth.
“… the plot is different but the monsters, names, and manner of speaking will ring a bell.”
— Frank Pinto, Jr., review of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf
Other recommended reading, found during a search for the implications of today’s previous entry, “Hexagram 42”:
This excellent meditation
on symmetry and change
comes from a site whose
home page
has the following image:
Symmetry and Change, Part 6…
Cinderella’s Slipper
Hexagram 54
The Marrying Maiden:
The Image
Thunder
Lake
See
“… a Thoreau-like retreat
by a nearby lake….
Both men have
a ‘touch of the poet’….
The symmetry is perfect.”
by a nearby lake….
Both men have
a ‘touch of the poet’….
The symmetry is perfect.”
Symmetry and Change, Part 7…
Another September Morn
Hexagram 56:
The Wanderer
The Image
Fire
Mountain
Fire on the mountain,
Run boys run…
Devil’s in the House of
The Rising Sun!
Friday, September 3, 2004
Symmetry and Change, Part 8…
Hexagram 25
Innocence:
The Image
Heaven
Thunder
Friday, September 3, 2004
Symmetry and Change, Part 9…
Hexagram 49
Revolution:
The Image
the image of Revolution.
“I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night…. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it? …And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart.”
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Friday, September 3, 2004
Symmetry and Change, conclusion…
Ite, Missa Est
Hexagram 13
Fellowship With Men:
The Image
Heaven
Fire
“A pretty girl —
is like a melody —- !”
For details, see
A Mass for Lucero.
Comments Off on Sunday September 5, 2004
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
Wednesday September 1, 2004
Symmetry and Change, Part 2…
Words and Images
Hexagram 35
Progress:
The Image
Fire
Earth
The sun rises over the earth.
|
“Oh, my Lolita. I have only words “This is the best toy train set “As the quotes above by Nabokov and Welles suggest, we need to be able to account for the specific functions available to narrative in each medium, for the specific elements that empirical creators will ‘play with’ in crafting their narratives.” |
For
James Whale
and
William French Anderson —
Words
In the Spirit of
Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs:
Stay for just a while…
Stay, and let me look at you.
It’s been so long, I hardly knew you.
Standing in the door…
Stay with me a while.
I only want to talk to you.
We’ve traveled halfway ’round the world
To find ourselves again.
September morn…
We danced until the night
became a brand new day,
Two lovers playing scenes
from some romantic play.
September morning still can
make me feel this way.
Look at what you’ve done…
Why, you’ve become a grown-up girl…
— Neil Diamond
Images
In the Spirit of
September Morn:
The Last Day of Summer:
Photographs by Jock Sturges
“In 1990, the FBI entered Sturges’s studio and seized his work, claiming violation of child pornography laws.”
Related material:
and
Log24 entries of
Aug. 15, 2004.
Those interested in the political implications of Diamond’s songs may enjoy Neil Performs at Kerry Fundraiser.
I personally enjoyed this site’s description of Billy Crystal’s remarks, which included “a joke about former President Clinton’s forthcoming children’s
Comments Off on Wednesday September 1, 2004
Tuesday, August 3, 2004
Tuesday August 3, 2004
Science and Fiction:
Attica to GATTACA
“There is no gene for fate.”
— Vincent, a character in
the 1997 film GATTACA
The film GATTACA was discussed in a Log24 entry for Saturday, July 31, 2004– the date of death of Frank Smith, also known as Big Black, a prominent figure in the events at Attica in 1971. He died in Kinston, North Carolina, a town of about 24,000 about halfway between Raleigh and the Atlantic Ocean.
See today’s 6:01 AM entry for some details of Mr. Smith’s life. In his memory, here are three links.
The first is to
Screening DNA:
Exploring the
Cinema-Genetics Interface,
by Stephen Nottingham
This online book, from which the above GATTACA quote was taken, discusses genetics in film more generally… Specifically, from Part 7 of Screening DNA:
In Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace–
“Midi-chlorians are essentially genes for the force, which determine whether one will become either a Jedi or else a dark shadow of one. In particular, they evoke mitochondrian genes, as mitochondria once lived symbiotically in human cells. Mitochondria are a cell’s energy-producing ‘power plant,’ in which a positive mutation could lead to an individual having greater strength and stamina. Mitochondrial genes are also now known to control many critical stages in human development.“
The second link in memory of Mr. Smith, one he would probably prefer, is to another book, less academic in nature, that also deals with mitochondria:
|
A Wind in the Door, From Chapter 3, The stranger was dark, dark as night and tall as a tree, and there was something in the repose of his body, the quiet of his voice, which drove away fear. Charles Wallace stepped towards him. “Who are you?” “A Teacher.” Charles Wallace’s sigh was longing. “I wish you were my teacher.” “I am.” The cello-like voice was calm, slightly amused. |
The third link is to the aforementioned
Wind.
Comments Off on Tuesday August 3, 2004
Saturday, July 31, 2004
Saturday July 31, 2004
For the Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola:
In God’s Name
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“If Trinity is everything you say it is,” she said, “then why in God’s name would it be based in North Carolina?” This I hadn’t expected. “Aren’t you the top Jungian analyst in the world?” “Well… one of them.” “Why are you based in North Carolina?” |
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“Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?” |
Comments Off on Saturday July 31, 2004
Sunday, July 25, 2004
Sunday July 25, 2004
His Way
Suggested by George Steiner’s phrase in the previous entry, “as in inverse canons”–
- A revision of Theme and Variations to include a midi of Bach’s variations on the Goldberg ground
-
The following from the screenplay of Cold Mountain—
EXT. BLACK COVE FARM. DAY. A beautiful day,
the farm peaceful.
Inman walks up the path
to the farmhouse….
He knocks on the door.
Monroe answers.MONROE
Mr. Inman.INMAN
Reverend.MONROE
What can I do for you?Inman hovers, awkward.
Ada appears, awkward.INMAN
I have some sheet music.
Belonged to my father.
No use to me.Ada comes forward,
takes the package.****** LATER *******
INT. PARLOUR.
BLACK COVE FARM. DAY.At the piano, Ada unwraps
the package of music.
Inside the first book of music,
there’s a picture of Inman.
Some of the music has left its
imprint on the picture, the notes
like a melody over Inman’s face.
Ada picks them out on the piano.
-
(Fourteen Canons on the First Eight Notes of the Goldberg Ground)
-
Bach in the original —
-
“Bach in the Original” —
Comments Off on Sunday July 25, 2004
Saturday, May 22, 2004
Saturday May 22, 2004
Star Wars
In memory of Melvin J. Lasky, editor, 1958-1990, of the CIA-funded journal Encounter:
“Once called as lively, and as bitchy, as a literary cocktail party, Encounter published articles of unrivalled authority on politics, history and literature.”
Lasky died on Wednesday, May 19, 2004. From a journal entry of my own on that date:
This newly-digitized diagram is from a
paper journal note of October 21, 1999.
Note that the diagram’s overall form is that of an eight-point star. Here is an excerpt from a Fritz Leiber story dealing with such a star, the symbol of a fictional organization:
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Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, “Look, Buster, do you want to live?” Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question. The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent. … “Here is how it stacks up: You’ve bought your way with something other than money into an organization of which I am an agent….” “It’s a very big organization,” she went on, as if warning me. “Call it an empire or a power if you like. So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist. It has agents everywhere, literally. Space and time are no barriers to it. Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future, but also the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees.” “I. G. Farben?” I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor. She didn’t rebuke my flippancy, but said, “And it isn’t the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name.” “Which is?” I asked. “The Spiders,” she said. That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly. I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me—something like that. She watched me. “You might call it the Double Cross,” she suggested, “if that seems better.” — Fritz Leiber, |
From last year’s entry,
Indiana Jones and the Hidden Coffer,
of 6/14:
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From Borges’s “The Aleph“:
From The Hunchback of Notre Dame:
Lena Olin and Harrison Ford |
Finally, from an excellent site
on the Knights Templar,
a quotation from Umberto Eco:
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When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches move us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime. — “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage” (1984) from Travels in Hyperreality |
Comments Off on Saturday May 22, 2004
Thursday, January 8, 2004
Thursday January 8, 2004
Natasha’s Dance
| “… at the still point, there the dance is….”
“… to apprehend — T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets |
It seems, according to Eliot’s criterion, that the late author John Gregory Dunne may be a saint.
Pursuing further information on the modular group, a topic on which I did a web page Dec. 30, 2003, the date of Dunne’s death, I came across a review of Apostol’s work on that subject (i.e., the modular group, not Dunne’s death, although there is a connection). The review:
“A clean, elegant,
absolutely lovely text…”
Searching further at Amazon for a newer edition of the Apostol text, I entered the search phrase “Apostol modular functions” and got a list that included the following as number four:
Natasha’s Dance:
A Cultural History of Russia,
which, by coincidence, includes all three words of the search.
For a connection — purely subjective and coincidental, of course — with Dunne’s death, see The Dark Lady (Jan. 1, 2004), which concerns another Natasha… the actress Natalie Wood, the subject of an essay (“Star!“) by Dunne in the current issue of the New York Review of Books.
The Review’s archives offer another essay, on science and religion, that includes the following relevant questions:
“Have the gates of death
been opened unto thee?
Or hast thou seen the doors
of the shadow of death?”
From my December 31 entry:
In memory of
John Gregory Dunne,
who died on
Dec. 30, 2003:
For further details, click
on the black monolith.
Monday, December 22, 2003
Monday December 22, 2003
Sequel to previous 4 entries:
A Christmas Carol
by Dylan Thomas
Current phase of the moon,
from the U.S. Naval Observatory:
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And I remember that we went singing carols once, a night or two before Christmas Eve, when there wasn’t the shaving of a moon to light the secret, white-flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind made through the drive-trees noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe web-footed men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house.
‘What shall we give them?’ Dan whispered.
‘”Hark the Herald”? ‘‘Christmas comes but Once a Year”?’
‘No,’ Jack said: ‘We’ll sing “Good King Wenceslas.” I’ll count three.’
One, two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door.
Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen.
And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, suddenly joined our singing: a small, dry voice from the other side of the door: a small, dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely and bright; the gramophone was playing; we saw the red and white balloons hanging from the gas-bracket; uncles and aunts sat by the fire; I thought I smelt our supper being fried in the kitchen. Everything was good again, and Christmas shone through all the familiar town.
‘Perhaps it was a ghost,’ Jim said.
‘Perhaps it was trolls,’ Dan said, who was always reading.
‘Let’s go in and see if there’s any jelly left,’ Jack said. And we did that.
Broadcasts by Dylan Thomas
(first published 1952)
Comments Off on Monday December 22, 2003
Sunday, September 14, 2003
Sunday September 14, 2003
Skewed Mirrors
Readings on Aesthetics for the
Feast of the Triumph of the Cross
Part I —
Bill Moyers and Julie Taymor
Director Taymor on her own passion play (see previous entry), "Frida":
"We always write stories of tragedies because that's how we reach our human depth. How we get to the other side of it. We look at the cruelty, the darkness and horrific events that happened in our life whether it be a miscarriage or a husband who is not faithful. Then you find this ability to transcend. And that is called the passion, like the passion of Christ. You could call this the passion of Frida Kahlo, in a way."
— 10/25/02 interview with Bill Moyers
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From transcript MOYERS: What happened to you in Indonesia. TAYMOR: This is probably it for me. This is the story that moves me the most…. I went to Bali to a remote village by a volcanic mountain on the lake. They were having a ceremony that only happens only every 10 years for the young men. I wanted to be alone. I was listening to this music and all of a sudden out of the darkness I could see glints of mirrors and 30 or 40 old men in full warrior costume– there was nobody in this village square. I was alone. They couldn't see me in the shadows. They came out with these spears and they started to dance. They did, I don't know, it felt like an eternity but probably a half hour dance. With these voices coming out of them. And they danced to nobody. Right after that, they and I went oh, my God. The first man came out and they were performing for God. Now God can mean whatever you want it to mean. But for me, I understood it so totally. The detail on the costumes. They didn't care if someone was paying tickets, writing reviews. They didn't care if an audience was watching. They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. MOYERS: How did you see the world differently after you were in Indonesia? |
From transcript ….They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. It was…it was the most important thing that I ever experienced. … ………………….. MOYERS: Now that you are so popular, now that your work is… TAYMOR: [INAUDIBLE]. MOYERS: No, I'm serious. Now that you're popular, now that your work is celebrated and people are seeking you, do you feel your creativity is threatened by that popularity or liberated by it? TAYMOR: No, I think it's neither one. I don't do things any differently now than I would before. And you think that sometimes perhaps if I get a bigger budget for a movie, then it will just be the same thing… MOYERS: Ruination. Ruination. TAYMOR: No, because LION KING is a combination of high tech and low tech. There are things up on that stage that cost 30 cents, like a little shadow puppet and a lamp, and it couldn't be any better than that. It just couldn't. Sometimes you are forced to become more creative because you have limitations. …. |
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TAYMOR: Well I understood really the power of art to transform. I think transformation become the main word in my life. Transformation because you don't want to just put a mirror in front of people and say, here, look at yourself. What do you see? You want to have a skewed mirror. You want a mirror that says you didn't know you could see the back of your head. You didn't know that you could amount cubistic see almost all the same aspects at the same time. It allows human beings to step out of their lives and to revisit it and maybe find something different about it. |
It's not about the technology. It's about the power of art to transform. I think transformation becomes the main word in my life, transformation. Because you don't want to just put a mirror in front of people and say, here, look at yourself. What do you see? You want to have a skewed mirror. You want a mirror that says, you didn't know you could see the back of your head. You didn't know that you could…almost cubistic, see all aspects at the same time. And what that does for human beings is it allows them to step out of their lives and to revisit it and maybe find something different about it. |
Part II —
Inside and Outside: Transformation
(Research note, July 11, 1986)
|
Click on the above typewritten note to enlarge.
Summary of
Parts I and II:
See also
Geometry for Jews.
"We're not here to stick a mirror on you. Anybody can do that, We're here to give you a more cubist or skewed mirror, where you get to see yourself with fresh eyes. That's what an artist does. When you paint the Crucifixion, you're not painting an exact reproduction."
— Julie Taymor on "Frida" (AP, 10/22/02)
"She made 'real' an oxymoron,
she made mirrors, she made smoke.
She had a curve ball
that wouldn't quit,
a girlfriend for a joke."
— "Arizona Star," Guy Clark / Rich Alves
Comments Off on Sunday September 14, 2003
Thursday, January 30, 2003
Thursday January 30, 2003
Poetic Justice:
The Peacock Throne
Yesterday was the death day of two proponents of Empire: George III (in 1820) and Robert Frost (in 1963). Lord Byron argued that the King slipped through heaven's gate unobserved while a friend distracted St. Peter with bad poetry. We may imagine, on this dark night of the soul, Frost performing a similar service.
Though poets of the traditional sort may still perform such services in Heaven, here on earth they have been superseded by writers of song lyrics. An example, Roddy Frame (formerly of the group "Aztec Camera"), was born on yesterday's date in 1964. A Frame lyric:
Transformed by some strange alchemy,*
You stand apart and point to me
And point to something I can't see….
Namely:
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The Back Door to Heaven
For poetic purposes, we may think of surreptitious entry into Heaven as being conveniently accomplished through a portal like the above back door, which is that of a small hotel in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
This is not your average Motel 6 back door. As a former New York Times correspondent has written,
"Over the years, the guest list has drawn the likes of Prince Philip and the Shah of Iran, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. But informality still reigns."
This small hotel (or its heavenly equivalent), whose gardens are inhabited by various exotic birds, including peacocks, may still be haunted by the late Shah, who apparently styled himself "King of Kings and Emperor of the Peacock Throne." Of course, the ghost of the King of Kings, after entering the garden of Paradise, may not be able to resume his former human shape. He might still, however, be among those greeted by his fellow Emperor, George III, with the famous words
*For more on alchemy and Cuernavaca, see
my journal note "The Black Queen."
Comments Off on Thursday January 30, 2003
Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Wednesday January 29, 2003
|
Inaugural Address |
|
Cullinane College was scheduled to open its doors officially on January 29, 2003. The following might have been an appropriate inaugural address.
From The Prisoner: Comments
on the Final Episode, “Fall Out”:
“When the President asks for a vote, he says: ‘All in favor.’ But he never asks for those opposed. (Though it appears that none will be opposed — and though he says its a democratic assembly, it is hardly that. The President even says that the society is in a ‘democratic crisis,’ though without democracy present, it’s just a sham.)
#48/Young Man sings ‘Dry Bones,’, which is his rebellion (notice its chaotic effect on ‘society’). But then the song gets taken over, ‘polished,’ and sung by a voice-over (presumably set up by #1). Does this mean that society is stealing the thunder (i.e. the creative energy) of youth, and cheapening it, or does it mean that youth is just rebelling in the same way that their fathers did (with equal ineffectiveness)? Perhaps it is simply a comment on the ease with which society can deal with the real rebellion of the 1960’s, which purported to be led by musicians; one that even the Beatles said was impossible in ‘Revolution.'”
President: Guilty! Read the Charge!
#48 is guilty, of something, and then the society pins something on him.”
The Other Side of the Coin
|
The Weinman Dime |
From the CoinCentric website: In 1916, sculptor Adolph A. Weinman produced a new design for the dime called the Liberty Head type. The motif features Miss Liberty facing left, wearing a Phrygian cap with wings, symbolizing “liberty of thought”. The word “LIBERTY” encircles her head, with “IN GOD WE TRUST” and the date below her head. The reverse depicts Roman fasces, a bundle of rods with the center rod being an ax, against a branch in the background. It is a symbol of state authority, which offers a choice: “by the rod or by the ax”. The condemned was either beaten to death with the rods or allowed the mercy of the ax. The words “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” and “ONE DIME” surround the border. “E PLURIBUS UNUM” appears at the lower right. |
Excerpt from the poem that Robert Frost (who died on this date in 1963) meant to read at the 1961 inauguration of John F. Kennedy:
It makes the prophet in us all presage
The glory of a next Augustan age
Of a power leading from its strength and pride,
Of young ambition eager to be tried,
Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.
I greatly prefer Robinson Jeffers’s “Shine, Perishing Republic“:
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out,
and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember….
See also the thoughts on Republic vs. Empire in the work of Alec Guinness (as Marcus Aurelius and as Obi-Wan Kenobi).
Saturday, October 12, 2002
Saturday October 12, 2002
She's a…
Twentieth Century Fox
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Columbus Day Dinner Dance Date: Sat Oct 12, 2002 Time: 6:30pm-??? Italian American Club of Southern Nevada 2333 East Sahara Ave., Las Vegas, NV 89104 Live music by Boyd Culter's 5-Piece band, prime rib dinner, and dancing at the Italian-American Club of Southern Nevada. All are welcome to attend. Tickets are only $25 and must be purchased in advance. Cost: $25.00 For More information Call 457-3866 or visit Web Site |
In honor of this dance, of Columbus, and of Joan Didion, this site's music for the weekend is "Spinning Wheel." For the relevance of this music, see Chapter 65 (set in Las Vegas) of Didion's 1970 novel Play It As It Lays, which, taken by itself, is one of the greatest short stories of the twentieth century.
The photograph of Didion on the back cover of Play It (taken when she was about 36) is one of the most striking combinations of beauty and intelligence that I have ever seen.
She's the queen of cool
And she's the lady who waits.
— The Doors, "Twentieth Century Fox," Jan. 1967
Play It As It Lays is of philosophical as well as socio-literary interest; it tells of a young actress's struggles with Hollywood nihilism. For related material, see The Studio by Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne. A review of Dunne's book:
"Not since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West has anyone done Hollywood better."
High praise indeed.
Comments Off on Saturday October 12, 2002
Thursday, September 12, 2002
Thursday September 12, 2002
In memory of Kim Hunter,
who died on 9/11, 2002:
A transcription of a journal note from 1996…
National Dance Week
Thursday, May 2, 1996
National Day of Prayer will be observed at noon today, Thursday, May 2, at City Hall.
| “Bush once joked that he picked Sununu because his surname rhymed with “deep doo-doo.” — Dan Goodgame, Time magazine, May 21, 1990 |
For a time, Sununu wrote stories and poems for children. Concord lawyer Ned Helms recalls that when his wife fell ill, Sununu gave her a book of poems that he said he enjoyed, by Sylvia Plath. | ||||
Do do that voodoo that you do so well.One summer when I played in a small stock company, after the last curtain had come down we would clear the stage and then put on records of Viennese waltzes. We’d dance wildly, joyfully… |
We’re arranging to have the children baptized on Sunday afternoon, March 25, by the way. Although I honestly dislike, or rather, scorn the rector. I told you about his ghastly H-bomb sermon, didn’t I, where he said this was the happy prospect of the Second Coming and how lucky we Christians were compared to the stupid pacifists and humanists and “educated pagans” who feared being incinerated, etc., etc. I have not been to church since. I felt it was a sin to support such insanity even by my presence. — Sylvia Plath, March 12, 1962. Amen. |
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| [The bathroom door opens and Stella comes out. Blanche continues talking to Mitch.] Oh! Have you finished? Wait — I’ll turn on the radio. [She turns the knobs on the radio and it begins to play “Wien, Wien, nur du allein.” Blanche waltzes to the music with romantic gestures. Mitch is delighted and moves in awkward imitation like a dancing bear. Stanley stalks fiercely through the portieres into the bedroom. He crosses to the small white radio and snatches it off the table. With a shouted oath, he tosses the instrument out the window.] |
Colby’s nickname among some of his subordinates at CIA is said to be “The Bookkeeper.” |
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Alabama plans
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I will try to finish my novel and a second book of poems by Christmas. I think I’ll be a pretty good novelist, very funny — my stuff makes me laugh and laugh, and if I can laugh now it must be hellishly funny stuff. — Sylvia Plath, October 12, 1962 |
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