Log24

Continued from 12:03 PM.

See also 12/03 last year.

Suggested by a story in today's Harvard Crimson —

"You want Frye's with that?"

Bead-Game Structuralism:
Excerpts from Comments by Robert de Marrais
on Interpenetration and The Raw and the Cooked

Click the image below for the webpage:

The Flickr source of the above hashtags photo,
titled "Lots of Hash" —

See also this journal on the date the photo was taken.

#Source

Triple Crown

“The tug of an art that unapologetically sees itself as on a par with science and religion is not to be underestimated…. Philosophical ambition and formal modesty still constitute Minimalism’s bottom line.”

— Michael Kimmelman, April 2, 2004 

________________

From Hans Reichenbach‘s

The Rise of Scientific Philosophy:

Ch. 18 – The Old and the New Philosophy

“The speculative philosophers allotted to art a dignified position by putting art on a par with science and morality: truth, beauty and the good were for them the triple crown of human searching and longing.”

Ch. 15 – Interlude: Hamlet’s Soliloquy

“I have good evidence.  The ghost was very conclusive in his arguments.  But he is only a ghost.  Does he exist?  I could not very well ask him.  Maybe I dreamed him.  But there is other evidence….

It is really a good idea: that show I shall put on.  It will be a crucial experiment.  If they murdered him they will be unable to hide their emotions.  That is good psychology.  If the test is positive I shall know the whole story for certain.  See what I mean?  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, my dear logician.
    I shall know it for certain?  I see your ironical smile.  There is no certainty….
   There I am, the eternal Hamlet.  What does it help me to ask the logician….?  His advice confirms my doubt rather than giving me the courage I need for my action.  One has to have more courage than Hamlet to be always guided by logic.”

________________

On this Holy Thursday, the day of Christ’s Last Supper, let us reflect on Quine’s very pertinent question in Quiddities (under “Communication”):

“What transubstantiation?”

“It is easiest to tell what transubstantiation is by saying this: little children should be taught about it as early as possible. Not of course using the word…because it is not a little child’s word. But the thing can be taught… by whispering…”Look! Look what the priest is doing…He’s saying Jesus’ words that change the bread into Jesus’ body. Now he’s lifting it up. Look!”

From “On Transubstantiation” by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, Collected Philosophical Papers, V.III: Ethics, Religion, and Politics, 1981, Univ. of Minnesota Press, as quoted in the weblog of William Luse, Sept, 28, 2003

A perhaps more credible instance of transubstantiation may be found in this account of Anscombe on the Feast of Corpus Christi:

“In her first year at Oxford, she converted to Catholicism. In 1938, after mass at Blackfriars on the Feast of Corpus Christi, she met Peter Geach, a young man three years her senior who was also a recent convert to Catholicism. Like her, Geach was destined to achieve eminence in philosophy, but philosophy played no role in bringing about the romance that blossomed. Smitten by Miss Anscombe’s beauty and voice, Geach immediately inquired of mutual friends whether she was ‘reliably Catholic.’ Upon learning that she was, he pursued her and, swiftly, their hearts were entangled.”

— John M. Dolan, Living the Truth

Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and
    lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through
    the features of men’s faces.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Concluding reflections for Holy Thursday:

Truth, Beauty, and The Good

Art is magic delivered from
the lie of being truth.
 — Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia,
London, New Left Books, 1974, p. 222
(First published in German in 1951.)

The director, Carol Reed, makes…
 impeccable use of the beauty of black….
— V. B. Daniel on The Third Man 

I see your ironical smile.
— Hans Reichenbach (see above)

Adorno, The Third Man, and Reichenbach
are illustrated below (l. to r.) above the names of cities with which they are associated. 

In keeping with our transubstantiation theme, these three cities may be regarded as illustrating the remarks of Jimmy Buffett

on culinary theology.

Moulins Rouges

Today is the birthday of composer Michel Legrand (“The Windmills of Your Mind”) and of philologist Wilhelm Grimm (Grimms’ Fairy Tales).

See the following past entries:

October 6, 2002: “Twenty-first Century Fox”

November 7, 2002: “Endgame”

November 8, 2002: “Religious Symbolism at Princeton”

January 5, 2003: “Whirligig”

January 5, 2003: “Culinary Theology”

January 6, 2003: “Dead Poet in the City of Angels”

January 31, 2003: “Irish Fourplay”

February 1, 2003; “Time and Eternity”

February 5, 2003: “Release Date”

Doctorow’s Epiphany

E. L. Doctorow is 72 today.

In the Garden of Adding…

The above is a phrase from The Midrash Jazz Quartet in Doctorow’s novel City of God.

Tonight’s site music is “Black Diamond.”

William T. Noon, S.J., Chapter 4 of Joyce and Aquinas, Yale University Press, 1957:

  A related epiphanic question, second only in interest to the question of the nature of epiphany, is how Joyce came by the term. The religious implications would have been obvious to Joyce: no Irish Catholic child could fail to hear of and to understand the name of the liturgical feast celebrated on January 6. But why does Joyce appropriate the term for his literary theory? Oliver St. John Gogarty (the prototype of the Buck Mulligan of Ulysses)… has this to say: “Probably Father Darlington had taught him, as an aside in his Latin class — for Joyce knew no Greek — that ‘Epiphany’ meant ‘a shining forth.'”

From Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining:

Danny Torrance: Is there something bad here?
Dick Hallorann: Well, you know, Doc, when something happens, you can leave a trace of itself behind. Say like, if someone burns toast. Well, maybe things that happen leave other kinds of traces behind. Not things that anyone can notice, but things that people who “shine” can see. Just like they can see things that haven’t happened yet. Well, sometimes they can see things that happened a long time ago. I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years. And not all of ’em was good.

From a website on author Willard Motley:

“Willard Motley’s last published novel is entitled, Let Noon Be Fair, and was actually published post-humously in 1966. The story line takes place in Motley’s adopted country of Mexico, in the fictional fishing village of Las Casas, which was based on Puerta [sic] Vallarta.”

See also “Shining Forth” and yesterday’s entry “Culinary Theology.”

 

Culinary Theology

A comment on "Whirligig," the previous entry:

From my favorite theologian, Jimmy Buffett:

"Well good God Almighty,
which way do I steer for my

Chorus:
Cheeseburger in paradise (paradise)
Makin' the best of every virtue and vice (paradise)
Worth every damn bit of sacrifice (paradise)
To get a cheeseburger in paradise
To be a cheeseburger in paradise
I'm just a cheeseburger in paradise!"

For some, paradise — or at least the gateway to paradise — is at Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

From a one-act version (p. xvi) of
"The Night of the Iguana":

"MISS JELKES: Is this the menu? (She has picked up a paper on the table.)

SHANNON: Yes, it's the finest piece of rhetoric since Lincoln's Gettysburg Address."

"Cheeseburger In Paradise, Puerto Vallarta, opened for business on November 7, 1999." — The same date, mentioned in last night's "Whirligig" entry, that Fox Studios Australia opened in Sydney with a song by Kylie Minogue.