Update of 12:50 PM ET the same day —
"There is no o'clock in a cantina."
— William H. Gass on Malcolm Lowry.
Except when there is.
Update of 12:50 PM ET the same day —
"There is no o'clock in a cantina."
— William H. Gass on Malcolm Lowry.
Except when there is.
"On April 23, 2009 ….
'I’m reminded of the character in "The Silence of the Lambs,"
Hannibal Lecter, a very brilliant man,' the prosecutor said,
recognizing 'his ability to intelligently and articulately discuss
things occurring in society.'
'But at his core, as with Mr. Lecter at his core, he is a sociopath,'
the prosecutor said."
— David Stout in an obituary from this evening's online
New York Times
See also this journal on April 23, 2009, and
a figure from this morning's link Cantina —
.
Link to song and lyrics.
“There’s plenty of dives to be someone you’re not
Just say you’re looking for something you might have forgot”
— Rosanne Cash, 1981
See also Cantina in this journal.
Other approaches to the
eight-ray star figure
have been sketched in
various Log24 entries.
See, for instance, the
June 21 entries on
the Kyoto Prize for
arts and philosophy.
Quine won this prize
in 1996.
Quine’s figure, cited in an
argument against universals,
is also a classic symbol for
the morning or evening star.
This year’s winner
of the Kyoto Prize has
a more poetic approach
to philosophy:
“… the object sets up
a kind of frame or space or field
within which there can be epiphany.”
For one such frame or space,
a Mexican cantina, see
Shining Forth.
See also Damnation Morning and
The Devil and Wallace Stevens.
Charles Taylor. See
“Epiphanies of Modernism,”
Chapter 24 of Sources of the Self
(Cambridge U. Press, 1989, p. 477)
All Souls' Day
at the Still Point
From remarks on Denis Donoghue's Speaking of Beauty in the New York Review of Books, issue dated Nov. 20, 2003, page 48:
"The Russian theorist Bakhtin lends his august authority to what Donoghue's lively conversation has been saying, or implying, all along. 'Beauty does not know itself; it cannot found and validate itself — it simply is.' "
From The Bakhtin Circle:
"Goethe's imagination was fundamentally chronotopic, he visualised time in space:
Time and space merge … into an inseparable unity … a definite and absolutely concrete locality serves at the starting point for the creative imagination… this is a piece of human history, historical time condensed into space….
Dostoevskii… sought to present the voices of his era in a 'pure simultaneity' unrivalled since Dante. In contradistinction to that of Goethe this chronotope was one of visualising relations in terms of space not time and this leads to a philosophical bent that is distinctly messianic:
Only such things as can conceivably be linked at a single point in time are essential and are incorporated into Dostoevskii's world; such things can be carried over into eternity, for in eternity, according to Dostoevskii, all is simultaneous, everything coexists…. "
Bakhtin's notion of a "chronotope" was rather poorly defined. For a geometric structure that might well be called by this name, see Poetry's Bones and Time Fold. For a similar, but somewhat simpler, structure, see Balanchine's Birthday.
From Four Quartets:
"At the still point, there the dance is."
From an essay by William H. Gass on Malcolm Lowry's classic novel Under the Volcano:
"There is no o'clock in a cantina."
Into the Woods
From the Words on Film site:
"The proximal literary antecedents for Under the Volcano are Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, especially The Inferno, on the one hand, and on the other, the Faust legend as embodied in the dramatic poem Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the play Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe."
"In the opening page of the novel, we find the words "The Hotel Casino de la Selva stands on a slightly higher hill …" (Lowry, Volcano p. 3). "Selva" is one of the Spanish words for "woods." One of the cantinas in the novel is named El Bosque, and bosque is another Spanish word for "woods." The theme of being in a darkling woods is reiterated throughout the novel." |
Literary Florence |
Tonight's site music is "Children Will Listen,"
by Stephen Sondheim, from "Into the Woods."
Stephen Hawking is 61 today.
An appropriate gift might be a cassette version of
The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis,
narrated by John Cleese.
See also this review of Lewis's That Hideous Strength
and my entries of Dec. 31, 2002, and Jan. 4, 2003.
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