Log24

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Saturday January 31, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:07 am
Catholic Schools Week

Today is the conclusion of
 Catholic Schools Week.

From one such school,
Cullinane College:

Cullinane College school spirit

Cullinane students
display school spirit

Related material:
 

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

 

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe

That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page:

Stephen Dedalus is my name,
Ireland is my nation.
Clongowes is my dwellingplace
And heaven my expectation.

He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe?

Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?

 

Alfred Bester, Tiger! Tiger!:

 

Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination

"Guilty! Read the Charge!"
— Quoted here on
January 29, 2003

The Prisoner,
Episode One, 1967:
"I… I meant a larger map."
— Quoted here on
January 27, 2009

 

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Sunday December 14, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am
Ideas and Steps

“Somehow it seems to
fill my head with ideas
 only I don’t exactly know
what they are!…. Let’s have
 a look at the garden first!”

— A passage from
Through the Looking-Glass

“… it’s going to be
 accomplished in steps,
this establishment of
the Talented
 in the scheme of things.”

Anne McCaffrey

On the seven steps of Charles Williams:

“If we assume Williams was responding to a psychological need to express himself, then we may also assume that Williams wrote these seven steps in compliance with Jung’s theory that an author, who believes strongly enough in some set of ideas, has to write about them.”

— Dennis L. Weeks (a former student of Walter J. Ong, S. J.) in Steps Toward Salvation: An Examination of Coinherence and Substitution in the Seven Novels of Charles Williams (New York, Peter Lang Publishing, 1991), page 9

On the twelve steps of Christmas:

So set ’em up, Joe…

Friday, December 12, 2008

Friday December 12, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:24 pm
Back to the Garden
of Forking Paths

“Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas– only I don’t exactly know what they are!…. Let’s have a look at the garden first!”

— A passage from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The “garden” part– but not the “ideas” part– was quoted by Jacques Derrida in Dissemination in the epigraph to Chapter 7, “The Time before First.”

“‘For you… he… we aren’t meaning…’ She was almost stammering, as if she were trying to say several things at once…. Suddenly she gave a little tortured scream. ‘O!’ she cried, ‘O! I can’t keep up! it keeps dividing! There’s too many things to think of!'”

— A passage from Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion, Chapter 12.

“He was thinking faster than he had ever done, and questions rose out of nothing and followed each other– what was to will? Will was determination to choose– what was choice? How could there be choice, unless there was preference, and if there was preference there was no choice, for it was not possible to choose against that preferring nature which was his being; yet being consisted in choice, for only by taking and doing this and not that could being know itself, could it indeed be; to be then consisted in making an inevitable choice, and all that was left was to know the choice, yet even then was the chosen thing the same as the nature that chose, and if not… So swiftly the questions followed each other that he seemed to be standing in flashing coils of subtlety, an infinite ring of vivid intellect and more than intellect, for these questions were not of the mind alone but absorbed into themselves physical passion and twined through all his nature on an unceasing and serpentine journey.”

— A passage from The Place of the Lion, Chapter 10.

Do you like apples?

Good Will Hunting

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Wednesday November 19, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 5:01 pm

"Through the unknown,
remembered gate…."

Four Quartets

(Epigraph to the introduction,
Parallelisms of Complete Designs
by Peter J. Cameron,
Merton College, Oxford)

"It's still the same old story…."
— Song lyric

The Great GatsbyChapter 6:

"An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through."

There is a link to an article on St. Olaf College in Arts & Letters Daily  today:

"John Milton, boring? Paradise Lost  has a little bit of something for everybody. Hot sex! Hellfire! Some damned good poetry, too…" more»

The "more" link is to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

For related material on Paradise Lost  and higher education, see Mathematics and Narrative.

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Saturday October 4, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am
In a Nutshell:

“The Ambition of the Short Story,” the essay by Steven Millhauser quoted here on Tuesday, September 30, is now online.

“Hoo ha!” cries the novel.
Here ah come!

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Sunday September 14, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:09 pm
Part I:
McCain

by David Foster Wallace


On John McCain’s presidential campaign eight years ago
:

“He always pauses a second for effect and then says: ‘I’m going to tell you something. I may have said some things here today that maybe you don’t agree with, and I might have said some things you hopefully do agree with. But I will always. Tell you. The truth.’ This is McCain’s closer, his last big reverb on the six-string as it were. And the frenzied standing-O it always gets from his audience is something to see. But you have to wonder. Why do these crowds from Detroit to Charleston cheer so wildly at a simple promise not to lie?

Well, it’s obvious why. When McCain says it, the people are cheering not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him. They’re cheering the loosening of a weird sort of knot in the electoral tummy. McCain’s resume and candor, in other words, promise not empathy with voters’ pain but relief from it. Because we’ve been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It’s ultimately just about that complicated. It hurts.

We learn this at like age four– it’s grownups’ first explanation to us of why it’s bad to lie (‘How would you like it if…?’). And we keep learning for years, from hard experience, that getting lied to sucks– that it diminishes you, denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world. Especially if the lies are chronic, systemic, if experience seems to teach that everything you’re supposed to believe in’s really just a game based on lies….

… It’s painful to believe that the would-be ‘public servants’ you’re forced to choose between are all phonies… who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they’ve just got to believe you’re an idiot.”

Part II:
Macbeth
by William Shakespeare

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Related material:
Log24 last Wednesday

Friday, July 25, 2008

Friday July 25, 2008

56 Triangles

Greg Egan's drawing of the 56 triangles on the Klein quartic 3-hole torus

John Baez on
Klein's quartic:

"This wonderful picture was drawn by Greg Egan with the help of ideas from Mike Stay and Gerard Westendorp. It's probably the best way for a nonmathematician to appreciate the symmetry of Klein's quartic. It's a 3-holed torus, but drawn in a way that emphasizes the tetrahedral symmetry lurking in this surface! You can see there are 56 triangles: 2 for each of the tetrahedron's 4 corners, and 8 for each of its 6 edges."

Exercise:

The Eightfold Cube: The Beauty of Klein's Simple Group

Click on image for further details.

Note that if eight points are arranged
in a cube (like the centers of the
eight subcubes in the figure above),
there are 56 triangles formed by
the 8 points taken 3 at a time.

Baez's discussion says that the Klein quartic's 56 triangles can be partitioned into 7 eight-triangle Egan "cubes" that correspond to the 7 points of the Fano plane in such a way that automorphisms of the Klein quartic correspond to automorphisms of the Fano plane. Show that the 56 triangles within the eightfold cube can also be partitioned into 7 eight-triangle sets that correspond to the 7 points of the Fano plane in such a way that (affine) transformations of the eightfold cube induce (projective) automorphisms of the Fano plane.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Thursday May 29, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:14 am
The Diadem
of Death

Washington Post Death Notices:

Dead on
St. Sarah’s Day,
May 24 —

Sophie B. Altman

Star of David in Washington Post death notice of Sophie B. Altman

Sophie B. Altman at Christmas 2006 dinner at DeCarlo's

Mother-in-law of
Wonder Woman
Lynda Carter
and founder and
producer of TV’s
It’s Academic

In Memoriam:

LOS TRES REYES MAGOS
Rubén Darío

—Yo soy Gaspar. Aquí traigo el incienso.
Vengo a decir: La vida es pura y bella.
Existe Dios. El amor es inmenso.
¡Todo lo sé por la divina Estrella!

—Yo soy Melchor. Mi mirra aroma todo.
Existe Dios. El es la luz del día.
¡La blanca flor tiene sus pies en lodo
y en el placer hay la melancolía!

—Soy Baltasar. Traigo el oro. Aseguro
que existe Dios. El es el grande y fuerte.
Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.

—Gaspar, Melchor y Baltasar, callaos.
Triunfa el amor, ya su fiesta os convida.
¡Cristo resurge, hace la luz del caos
y tiene la corona de la Vida!

THE THREE KINGS

I am Caspar. I bring with me the myrrh,
And have this to say: Life is pure and beautiful.
There is a God. His love is immense.
I can see all by the divine Star!

I am Melchior. My frankincense perfumes the air.
There is a God. He is the light of day.
The whitest flower has its stem in the mire
And in joy is also found sorrow!

I am Balthasar. I bring the gold. And I
Assure you: There is a God, great and mighty.
And I know this from the pure light
That radiates from the Diadem of Death.

Caspar, Melchior, Balthasar — say no more.
Love is triumphant, and beckons you to His feast:
Christ is born! The Chaos He has turned to light,
And he wears the crown of Life!

Midrash:

Wonder Woman and the Secret of the Magic Tiara

Wonder Woman and the Secret of the Magic Tiara-- The End

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Sunday May 25, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 6:30 pm
Hall of Mirrors

Epigraph to
Deploying the Glass Bead Game, Part II,”
by Robert de Marrais:

“For a complete logical argument,”
Arthur began
with admirable solemnity,
“we need two prim Misses –”
“Of course!” she interrupted.
“I remember that word now.
And they produce — ?”
“A Delusion,” said Arthur.

— Lewis Carroll,
Sylvie and Bruno

Prim Miss 1:

Erin O’Connor’s weblog
“Critical Mass” on May 24:

Roger Rosenblatt’s Beet [Ecco hardcover, Jan. 29, 2008] is the latest addition to the noble sub-genre of campus fiction….

Curricular questions and the behavior of committees are at once dry as dust subjects and areas ripe for sarcastic send-up– not least because, as dull as they are, they are really both quite vital to the credibility and viability of higher education.

Here’s an excerpt from the first meeting, in which committee members propose their personal plans for a new, improved curriculum:

“… Once the students really got into playing with toy soldiers, they would understand history with hands-on excitement.”

To demonstrate his idea, he’d brought along a shoe box full of toy doughboys and grenadiers, and was about to reenact the Battle of Verdun on the committee table when Heilbrun stayed his hand. “We get it,” he said.

“That’s quite interesting, Molton,” said Booth [a chemist]. “But is it rigorous enough?”

At the mention of the word, everyone, save Peace, sat up straight.

“Rigor is so important,” said Kettlegorf.

“We must have rigor,” said Booth.

“You may be sure,” said the offended Kramer. “I never would propose anything lacking rigor.”

Smythe inhaled and looked at the ceiling. “I think I may have something of interest,” he said, as if he were at a poker game and was about to disclose a royal flush. “My proposal is called ‘Icons of Taste.’ It would consist of a galaxy of courses affixed to several departments consisting of lectures on examples of music, art, architecture, literature, and other cultural areas a student needed to indicate that he or she was sophisticated.”

“Why would a student want to do that?” asked Booth.

“Perhaps sophistication is not a problem for chemists,” said Smythe. Lipman tittered.

“What’s the subject matter?” asked Heilbrun. “Would it have rigor?”

“Of course it would have rigor. Yet it would also attract those additional students Bollovate is talking about.” Smythe inhaled again. “The material would be carefully selected,” he said. “One would need to pick out cultural icons the students were likely to bring up in conversation for the rest of their lives, so that when they spoke, others would recognize their taste as being exquisite yet eclectic and unpredictable.”

“You mean Rembrandt?” said Kramer.

Smythe smiled with weary contempt. “No, I do not mean Rembrandt. I don’t mean Beethoven or Shakespeare, either, unless something iconic has emerged about them to justify their more general appeal.”

“You mean, if they appeared on posters,” said Lipman.

“That’s it, precisely.”

Lipman blushed with pride.

“The subject matter would be fairly easy to amass,” Smythe said. “We could all make up a list off the top of our heads. Einstein–who does have a poster.” He nodded to the ecstatic Lipman. “Auden, for the same reason. Students would need to be able to quote ‘September 1939[ or at least the last lines. And it would be good to teach ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ as well, which is off the beaten path, but not garishly. Mahler certainly. But Cole Porter too. And Sondheim, I think. Goya. Warhol, it goes without saying, Stephen Hawking, Kurosawa, Bergman, Bette Davis. They’d have to come up with some lines from Dark Victory, or better still, Jezebel. La Dolce Vita. Casablanca. King of Hearts. And Orson, naturally. Citizen Kane, I suppose, though personally I prefer F for Fake.”

“Judy!” cried Heilbrun.

“Yes, Judy too. But not ‘Over the Rainbow.’ It would be more impressive for them to do ‘The Trolley Song,’ don’t you think?” Kettlegorf hummed the intro.

Guernica,” said Kramer. “Robert Capa.” Eight-limbed asterisk

“Edward R. Murrow,” said Lipman.

“No! Don’t be ridiculous!” said Smythe, ending Lipman’s brief foray into the world of respectable thought.

“Marilyn Monroe!” said Kettlegorf.

“Absolutely!” said Smythe, clapping to indicate his approval.

“And the Brooklyn Bridge,” said Booth, catching on. “And the Chrysler Building.”

“Maybe,” said Smythe. “But I wonder if the Chrysler Building isn’t becoming something of a cliche.”

Peace had had enough. “And you want students to nail this stuff so they’ll do well at cocktail parties?”

Smythe sniffed criticism, always a tetchy moment for him. “You make it sound so superficial,” he said.

Prim Miss 2:

Siri Hustvedt speaks at Adelaide Writers’ Week– a story dated March 24, 2008

“I have come to think of my books as echo chambers or halls of mirrors in which themes, ideas, associations continually reflect and reverberate inside a text. There is always point and counterpoint, to use a musical illustration. There is always repetition with difference.”

A Delusion:

Exercise — Identify in the following article the sentence that one might (by unfairly taking it out of context) argue is a delusion.

(Hint: See Reflection Groups in Finite Geometry.)

A. V. Borovik, 'Maroids and Coxeter Groups'

Why Borovik’s Figure 4
is included above:

Euclid, Peirce, L’Engle:
No Royal Roads.

For more on Prim Miss 2
and deploying
the Glass Bead Game,
see the previous entry.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/images/asterisk8.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. And now, perhaps, his brother Cornell Capa, who died Friday.

 Related material: Log24 on March 24– Death and the Apple Tree— with an excerpt from
George MacDonald, and an essay by David L. Neuhouser mentioning the influence of MacDonald on Lewis Carroll– Lewis Carroll: Author, Mathematician, and Christian (pdf).

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Thursday May 22, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:07 pm
For Indiana Jones
on Skull Day

Cover of Hamlet, Revenge! by Michael Innes

841: Dublin founded by
        Danish [?] Vikings

9/04: In a Nutshell: The Seed

(See also Hamlet’s Transformation.)

Hagar the Horrible and NY Lottery for Thursday, May 22, 2008: Midday 841, Evening 904

The moral of this story,
 it’s simple but it’s true:
Hey, the stars might lie,
 but the numbers never do.

Mary Chapin Carpenter  

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Sunday April 6, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:12 am
For Sunrise

Charlton Heston as Ben-Hur in the New York Times online obituaries, morning of April 6, 2008

Click image to enlarge.

The above tableau, from this morning's
New York Times obituary page,
suggests the following meditations:

1. "Mickey Mouse will see you dead."
   — Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise
 
2. "Free!"
 
3. "I graduated in Alabama,
     Alaska, Arizona…."

These three meditations are
consistent with the fable of the
mice and the lion in The Lion,
The Witch, and the Wardrobe

and with the speech of
Aslan at the conclusion of
The Narnia Chronicles:

"The term is over: the holidays
have begun. The dream is
ended: this is the morning."

The rather depressing
"Death Notices" box
that has attracted
Charlton Heston's gaze
in the online obituaries
pictured above might
be replaced as follows:

A Hexagram for Charlton Heston-- Number 35: The sun rises above the earth

The Heston classic pictured
above is, let us recall,
based on a book titled
Ben-Hur: A Tale of
the Christ
.

"I know this man!"
— Charlton Heston

Time of this entry:
2:12:35.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Sunday February 24, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Labyrinth of Solitude

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080224-Chapel.jpg

Chapel, Cuernavaca, Mexico

“A labyrinthine man never seeks
the truth, but always, only, his Ariadne….
Who besides myself knows what Ariadne is?”

Nietzsche,
epigraph to Ariadne’s Lives,
by Nina daVinci Nichols
(See yesterday’s entry.)

Related material:

Entries of Feb. 13
and Feb. 19 at Log24
and the entry of Feb. 13 at

Ariachne’s Broken Woof

Troilus and Cressida in Act 5, Scene 2:

“And yet the spacious breadth of this division
Admits no orifex for a point as subtle
As Ariachne’s broken woof to enter.
Instance, O instance! strong as Pluto’s gates;
Cressid is mine, tied with the bonds of heaven:
Instance, O instance! strong as heaven itself;
The bonds of heaven are slipp’d, dissolved, and loosed….”

See also Slipstream: “We’ve lost the plot!

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Sunday December 30, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm
The Christmas Tiger

Part I:
The Gauntlet

On Jonah Goldberg's new book Liberal Fascism– an attack on, among others, Woodrow Wilson:

"'… at some point,' Goldberg writes, 'it is necessary to throw down the gauntlet, to draw a line in the sand, to set a boundary, to cry at long last, "Enough is enough."'"
 

The Goldberg declaration is from a review in today's New York Times titled "Heil Woodrow!"

 


Part II:
Uncle Duke
Goes to Washington

Today's Doonesbury:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071230-Doonesbury2.jpg


Part III:
A Holiday Tradition

Dialogue from the classic Capra film "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"–

SUMMERS: When the country needs men up there who know and have courage as it never did before, he's just gonna decorate a chair and get himself honored.

DARRELL: Oh, but he'll vote! Sure. Just like his colleague tells him to.

DIZ: "Yes, sir," like a Christmas tiger. He'll nod his head and vote…

REPORTERS: "Yes."

DIZ: You're not a Senator! You're an honorary stooge! You ought to be shown up!

The film starred
James Stewart,
Princeton
Class of 1932.


Part IV:
The Tigers of Princeton

The Christmas evening Pennsylvania Lottery 4-digit number was 0666, the Christian "number of the beast." For the beast itself, see the Dec. 3 Log24 entry "Santa's Polar Opposite?" with its link to a discussion of a metaphorical tiger at the South Pole. A more realistic version of the beast appeared in the news on Christmas evening.

The Christmas number may also be interpreted as a reference to 6/6/6, the graduation date of the Class of 2006 at Princeton University.


Part V:
"Heil Woodrow!"

As noted above, this title from a book review in today's New York Times refers to Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States (1913-1921) and President of Princeton University (1902-1910).

A suitable heraldic emblem
to accompany the Goldberg Heil:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071230-Shield.jpg

The Princeton Shield

For another heraldic emblem
related, if only in this journal,
to Princeton, see
Religious Symbolism
at Princeton:

Goldberg might prefer,
for his Heil,
the following variation:

Fahne,
S. H. Cullinane,
Aug. 15, 2003

Dr. Mengele,
according to
Hollywood

Click on the Fahne (flag)
for further details.

Goldberg might also enjoy

An Unsuitable Santa:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070628-Santa.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Santa from Aaron Sorkin's
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

Related material:

Taking Christ to Studio 60
 

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Wednesday December 26, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
A Wonderful Life

Part I:
 
Language Games

 
on December 19:

 

http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071219-StanLilith.jpg

See also the noir entry on
"Nightmare Alley" for
Winter Solstice 2002,
as well as a solstice-related
commentary on I Ching
Hexagram 41, Decrease.

Part II:

Language Game
on Christmas Day

Pennsylvania Lottery
December 25, 2007:

PA Lottery Christmas Day: Mid-day 041 and 2911, Evening 173 and 0666
 

Part III:
 
A Wonderful Life

The Pennsylvania Lottery on Christmas at mid-day paired the number of the I Ching Hexagram 41, "Decrease," with the number 2911, which may be interpreted as a reference to I Chronicles 29:11
 
"Thine, O LORD is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O LORD, and thou art exalted as head above all."

 

This verse is sometimes cited as influencing the Protestant conclusion of the Lord's Prayer:

"Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever" (Mt 6.13b; compare 1 Chr 29.11-13)….

This traditional epilogue to the Lord's prayer protects the petition for the coming of the kingdom from being understood as an exorcism, which we derive from the Jewish prayer, the Kaddish, which belonged at the time to the synagogical liturgy.

World Alliance of Reformed Churches

The Pennsylvania Lottery on Christmas evening paired 173 with the beastly number 0666.  The latter number suggests that perhaps being "understood as an exorcism" might not, in this case, be such a bad thing. What, therefore, might "173" have to do with exorcism?  A search in the context of the phrase "language games" yields a reference to Wittgenstein's Zettel, section 173:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071226-Zettel.jpg

From Charles L. Creegan, Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard:

Language-games give general guidelines of the application of language. Wittgenstein suggests that there are innumerably many language-games: innumerably many kinds of use of the components of language.24 The grammar of the language-game influences the possible relations of words, and things, within that game. But the players may modify the rules gradually. Some utterances within a given language-game are applications; others are 'grammatical remarks' or definitions of what is or should be possible. (Hence Wittgenstein's remark, 'Theology as grammar'25 – the grammar of religion.)

The idea of the 'form of life' is a reminder about even more basic phenomena. It is clearly bound up with the idea of language. (Language and 'form of life' are explicitly connected in four of the five passages from the Investigations in which the term 'form of life' appears.) Just as grammar is subject to change through language-uses, so 'form of life' is subject to change through changes in language. (The Copernican revolution is a paradigm case of this.) Nevertheless, 'form of life' expresses a deeper level of 'agreement.' It is the level of 'what has to be accepted, the given.'26 This is an agreement prior to agreement in opinions and decisions. Not everything can be doubted or judged at once.

This suggests that 'form of life' does not denote static phenomena of fixed scope. Rather, it serves to remind us of the general need for context in our activity of meaning. But the context of our meaning is a constantly changing mosaic involving both broad strokes and fine-grained distinctions.

The more commonly understood point of the 'Private Language Argument' – concerning the root of meaning in something public – comes into play here. But it is important to show just what public phenomenon Wittgenstein has in mind. He remarks: 'Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning.'27

24
Investigations, sec. 23.
25
Investigations, sec. 373; compare Zettel, sec. 717.
26
Investigations, p. 226e.
27
Zettel, sec. 173. The thought is expressed many times in similar words.

And from an earlier chapter of Creegan:

The 'possibility of religion' manifested itself in considerable reading of religious works, and this in a person who chose his reading matter very carefully. Drury's recollections include conversations about Thomas à Kempis, Samuel Johnson's Prayers, Karl Barth, and, many times, the New Testament, which Wittgenstein had clearly read often and thought about.25 Wittgenstein had also thought about what it would mean to be a Christian. Some time during the 1930s, he remarked to Drury: 'There is a sense in which you and I are both Christians.'26 In this context it is certainly worth noting that he had for a time said the Lord's Prayer each day.27

Wittgenstein's last words were: 'Tell them I've had a wonderful life!'28

25
Drury (1981) 'Conversations with Wittgenstein,' in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, pp. 112ff.
26
Drury, 'Conversations,' p. 130.
27
Drury, 'Some notes,' p. 109.
28
Reported by Mrs. Bevan, the wife of the doctor in whose house Wittgenstein was staying. Malcolm, Memoir, p. 81.

Part IV:  

L'Envoi

For more on the Christmas evening
number of the beast, see Dec. 3:
  "Santa's Polar Opposite?" —

"Did he who made the Lamb
make thee?
"

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Thursday December 20, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am

From Drummers for Jesus:

Serpent Cymbal
 
http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071220-Cymbal.jpg
 http://www.serpentcymbals.com

“Explosive, complex, full and dark. The first cymbal with VIBRATO. Nothing else comes close!

Serpent Cymbals enters the special effects cymbal market with a stunning new cymbal boasting a radical new sound and design. ‘This cymbal sounds like a cross between a china cymbal, crash cymbal, gong and thunder sheet with a stick of dynamite tossed in for fun’….”

Pa-rum-pa
  pum pum.”


Devil’s Advocate

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Thursday October 11, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
The Nobel Prize
in Literature

this year goes to the author
of The Golden Notebook
and The Cleft.

Related material:
The Golden Obituary
and Cleavage —
Log24, Oct. 9, 2007

Art History, 1955: Scenes from Bad Day at Black Rock

Background from 1947:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071011-Cleavage.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Further details:

WheelThe image “http://www.log24.com/log/images/asterisk8.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Quoted by physics writer
Heinz Pagels at the end of
The Cosmic Code
:

“For the essence and the end
Of his labor is beauty… one beauty,
the rhythm of that Wheel….”

— Robinson Jeffers

From Holy Saturday, 2004:

The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it.  The road, which was terrible and full of potholes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine.  Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down.  It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage!  Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country…”

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947. (Harper & Row reissue, 1984, p. 15)

Comment by Stephen Spender:

“There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell.  But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ.  The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.”

— Introduction to Under the Volcano


 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI

Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as

“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….

59 … The perichoresis  or ‘circumincessio,’ is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.”


 “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 146, translated by Walter Kaufmann


William Golding:

 “Simon’s head was tilted slightly up.  His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him. 

‘What are you doing out here all alone?  Aren’t you afraid of me?’

Simon shook.

‘There isn’t anyone to help you.  Only me.  And I’m the Beast.’

Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words.

‘Pig’s head on a stick.’

‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head.  For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter.  ‘You knew, didn’t you?  I’m part of you?  Close, close, close!’ “


“Thought of the day:
You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar… if you’re into catchin’ flies.”

Alice Woodrome, Good Friday, 2004

Anne Francis,
also known as
Honey West:

“Here was finality indeed,
and cleavage!”

Under the Volcano

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/images/asterisk8.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. For further details of
the wheel metaphor, see

Rock of Ages

(St. Cecilia’s Day, 2006).

Friday, July 6, 2007

Friday July 6, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 pm
Mearingstone, or:
 
“Last to the Lost,”
continued from
July 1, 2007


Finnegans Wake 293:

Vieus Von DVbLIn, ’twas one of dozedeams
a darkies ding in dewood) the Turnpike under
the Great Ulm (with Mearingstone in Fore
ground). 1 Given now ann linch you take enn
all. Allow me! And, heaving alljawbreakical
expressions out of old Sare Isaac’s 2 universal
of specious aristmystic unsaid, A is for Anna
like L is for liv. Aha hahah, Ante Ann you’re
apt to ape aunty annalive! Dawn gives rise.
Lo, lo, lives love! Eve takes fall. La, la, laugh
leaves alass! Aiaiaiai, Antiann, we’re last to
the lost, Loulou! Tis perfect. Now (lens

“with Mearingstone in Fore ground….
we’re last to the lost, Loulou!”

Desconvencida at Blogspot -- Monolito -- Midnight July 1-2, 2007

Midnight, July 1-2, 2007
Click on image for details.

Sunday, July 1, 2007

Sunday July 1, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:27 pm
Mozart
by the Numbers

PA Lottery June 30, 2007: Mid-day 221, Evening 127

2/21


A Superficial Beauty:

Structural Certainty:

murphy plant, murphy grow, a maryamyria- 10
meliamurphies, in the lazily eye of his lapis, 11

12
Geometry lesson 13

14
Uteralterance or Vieus Von DVbLIn, ’twas one of dozedeams 15
the Interplay of a darkies ding in dewood) the Turnpike under 16
Bones in the the Great Ulm (with Mearingstone in Fore 17
Womb. ground). 1 Given now ann linch you take enn 18
all. Allow me! And, heaving alljawbreakical 19
expressions out of old Sare Isaac’s 2 universal 20
The Vortex. of specious aristmystic unsaid, A is for Anna 21
Spring of Sprung like L is for liv. Aha hahah, Ante Ann you’re 22
Verse. The Ver- apt to ape aunty annalive! Dawn gives rise. 23
tex. Lo, lo, lives love! Eve takes fall. La, la, laugh 24
leaves alass! Aiaiaiai, Antiann, we’re last to 25
the lost, Loulou! Tis perfect. Now (lens 26

Finnegans Wake, Book II,
    Episode 2, page 293


1/27

“Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours. Beyond a superficial beauty and structural certainty, Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st century. Let him rest.” —Norman Lebrecht

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Thursday June 21, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 12:07 pm

Let No Man
Write My Epigraph

(See entries of June 19th.)

"His graceful accounts of the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello illuminated the works’ structural logic as well as their inner spirituality."

Allan Kozinn on Mstislav Rostropovich in The New York Times, quoted in Log24 on April 29, 2007

"At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction…. the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity."

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River, quoted in Log24 on June 9, 2005

"… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it. (It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)"

— Peter J. Cameron, "The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups" (pdf)

"… donc Dieu existe, réponse!"

— Attributed, some say falsely,
to Leonhard Euler
 
"Only gradually did I discover
what the mandala really is:
'Formation, Transformation,
Eternal Mind's eternal recreation'"

(Faust, Part Two, as
quoted by Jung in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

 

Wolfgang Pauli as Mephistopheles

"Pauli as Mephistopheles
in a 1932 parody of
Goethe's Faust at Niels Bohr's
institute in Copenhagen.
The drawing is one of
many by George Gamow
illustrating the script."
Physics Today

 

"Borja dropped the mutilated book on the floor with the others. He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle, checking strange correspondences between them.

'To meet someone' was his enigmatic answer. 'To search for the stone that the Great Architect rejected, the philosopher's stone, the basis of the philosophical work. The stone of power. The devil likes metamorphoses, Corso.'"

The Club Dumas, basis for the Roman Polanski film "The Ninth Gate" (See 12/24/05.)


"Pauli linked this symbolism
with the concept of automorphism."

The Innermost Kernel
 (previous entry)

And from
"Symmetry in Mathematics
and Mathematics of Symmetry
"
(pdf), by Peter J. Cameron,
a paper presented at the
International Symmetry Conference,
Edinburgh, Jan. 14-17, 2007,
we have

The Epigraph–

Weyl on automorphisms
(Here "whatever" should
of course be "whenever.")

Also from the
Cameron paper:

Local or global?

Among other (mostly more vague) definitions of symmetry, the dictionary will typically list two, something like this:

• exact correspondence of parts;
• remaining unchanged by transformation.

Mathematicians typically consider the second, global, notion, but what about the first, local, notion, and what is the relationship between them?  A structure M is homogeneous if every isomorphism between finite substructures of M can be extended to an automorphism of M; in other words, "any local symmetry is global."

Some Log24 entries
related to the above politically
(women in mathematics)–

Global and Local:
One Small Step

and mathematically–

Structural Logic continued:
Structure and Logic
(4/30/07):

This entry cites
Alice Devillers of Brussels–

Alice Devillers

"The aim of this thesis
is to classify certain structures
which are, from a certain
point of view, as homogeneous
as possible, that is which have
  as many symmetries as possible."

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."

Madeleine L'Engle 

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Tuesday May 15, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:55 am
A Flag for Sunrise

The title of the Robert Stone
novel comes from Emily Dickinson:

A Wife -- at daybreak I shall be --
Sunrise -- Hast thou a Flag for me?
At Midnight, I am but a Maid,
How short it takes to make a Bride --
Then -- Midnight, I have passed from thee
Unto the East, and Victory --

Midnight -- Good Night! I hear them call,
The Angels bustle in the Hall --
Softly my Future climbs the Stair,
I fumble at my Childhood's prayer
So soon to be a Child no more --
Eternity, I'm coming -- Sire,
Savior -- I've seen the face -- before!

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Saturday May 12, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:07 am
Artistic Vision

Last night's entry "A Midrash for Hollywood" discussed a possible interpretation of yesterday's Pennsylvania Lottery numbers– mid-day 384, evening 952.

In memory of a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter who died yesterday, here is another interpretation of those numbers.

First, though, it seems appropriate to quote again the anonymous source from "Heaven, Hell, and Hollywood" on screenwriters– "You can be replaced by some Ping Pong balls and a dictionary."  An example was given illustrating this saying.  Here is another example:

Yesterday's PA lottery numbers in the dictionary–

Webster's New World Dictionary,
College Edition, 1960–

Page 384: "Defender of the Faith"
Related Log24 entries:
"To Announce a Faith," Halloween 2006,
and earlier Log24 entries from
that year's Halloween season

Page 952: "monolith"
Related Log24 entries:
"Shema, Israel," and "Punch Line"
(with the four entries that preceded it).

It may not be entirely irrelevant that a headline in last night's entry– "Lonesome No More!"– was linked to a discussion of Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick, that a film version of that novel starred Jerry Lewis, and that yesterday afternoon's entry quoted a vision of "an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis."

 

See also April 7, 2003:

 

April is Math Awareness Month.
This year's theme is "mathematics and art."

"Art isn't easy."
— Stephen Sondheim    

Friday, May 11, 2007

Friday May 11, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 pm
Today’s Lottery Commentary:

Lonesome No More!

In keeping with the spirit of previous Log24 entries, here is today’s Pennsylvania Lottery commentary.  This afternoon’s entry suggests an interpretation of today’s numbers as comments on the new film “Georgia Rule.”

Pennsylvania Lottery today:
Mid-day 384
Evening 952

Today’s mid-day number, 384, is the number of symmetries of the tesseract, a geometric figure illustrated on the cover of the novel The Gameplayers of Zan (see, for instance, May 10, 2007).  That novel suggests an interpretation of today’s evening number, 952, as addressing (literally) the subject of Life.

See the address mathforum.org/library/view/952.html.

From that address:

“The Game of Life is played on a field of cells, each of which has eight neighbors (adjacent cells). A cell is either occupied (by an organism) or not. The rules for deriving a generation from the previous one are these: Death – If an occupied cell has 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 occupied neighbors, the organism dies (0, 1: of loneliness; 4 thru 8: of overcrowding). Survival – If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation. Birth – If an unoccupied cell has three occupied neighbors, it becomes occupied.”

Relevance to the film “Georgia Rule”: lonesomeness, generations, and the Lord’s name–

Georgia is a “lonesome and decent widow in wholesome Hull, Idaho…. her framed motto is ‘Count Your Blessings’ and she’s ready to ram [a] soap bar into your mouth if you insult the Lord’s name.” –David Elliott, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 11, 2007

There is not universal agreement on just what is the Lord’s name. Perhaps it includes the number 952.

From The Gameplayers of Zan:

“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago– first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone.”

From Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations:

“Nothing can be produced out of nothing.”
— 10th edition, 1919, page 952

See also “Zen and Language Games
and “Is Nothing Sacred?

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Tuesday December 12, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:22 am
The State of Grace,
Author of
Hamlet

Today’s Harvard Crimson:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061212-Crimson.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The texts in question are said
to be manuscripts of
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,”
and “The Library of Babel.”

The latter deals (like
The Mountains of Pi“)
with literature that can
be seen as the result
of a random process–
such as the lottery in
another story by Borges.

A less sinister lottery
is that of Pennsylvania–
known to some as
 “the Keystone State.”
I prefer to think of it as
the State of Grace.”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051016-Mont.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Click on picture for details.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061212-PAlottery.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The “NITE” number 108 leads us
naturally to 1/08:

 Sunday, January 08, 2006

For Stephen Hawking’s Birthday

Epigraphs to the classic novel Cosmic Banditos:

God does not play dice with the universe. –Albert Einstein

Not only does God play dice with the universe, but sometimes he throws them where they cannot be seen. –Stephen Hawking

Today’s Pennsylvania Lottery numbers:

Mid-day 722 7/22, Feast of St. Mary Magdalene.
Evening 399 Page 399, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations of 1919.

 

This (and yesterday’s “DAY” number 133)
suggests we consult page 133 of
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
of 1919.  At the top of this
page we find…

“O day and night,
but this is wondrous strange!”

Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5

Another figure from 1/08,
St. Mary Magdalene, might,
adapting the words of Borges,
offer the following observation:

“Shakespeare’s text and the lottery’s
are verbally identical, but the second
is almost infinitely richer.
(More ambiguous, detractors will
  say, but ambiguity is richness.)”

Related material: 11/22.

Monday, December 4, 2006

Monday December 4, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am
180, 932 –
The Musical!

“You gotta be
true to your code.”
— Sinatra

NY Lottery, 2006:

Dec. 3 Mid-day – 180
Dec. 3 Evening – 932

Yesterday’s entry suggested that
the date, December 3, might be
appropriate for some sort of
Broadway production.

Yesterday evening’s NY lottery
number, 932, suggests*
(via Google) that a visit to
the castle Wildeck
is in order.

This castle is now the home
of the Buchdruck-Museum
honoring Johannes Gutenberg.

For an appropriate Broadway
production, see today’s
New York Times:

Gutenberg! The Musical!

Yesterday’s mid-day NY lottery
number, 180, suggests, in the
above context, the German term
Umkehrung.  A casual web search
on this term (+ “reversal,”
then, refining the search,
+ “Theocritus”) leads
to the following material,
which I personally find of
much greater interest than
the above Broadway production.

(Such web searches are made
possible by a technological
revolution comparable to that
of Gutenberg… Broadway may
perhaps look forward to…
Google! The Musical!“)

Google Search 12/4/06
Results 12 of about 14
for umkehrung theocritus. (0.07 seconds) 

JSTOR: Theocritus

I12: on ‘transference’ by Theocritus of refined motifs to uncouth peasants, is in reality a parody, a devastating ‘Umkehrung‘ of the real thing,

JSTOR: A Theophany
in Theocritus

A THEOPHANY IN THEOCRITUS IN a masterly study of the language and motifs of epithet I The completeness and precision of the Umkehrung (for this term cf.

*ZSCHOPAU, a town in the kingdom of Saxony, on the left bank of the Zschopau…. It contains… a castle (Wildeck), built by the Emperor Henry I in 932.” —From the classic 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911)

(The date 932 may or may not be accurate, but still serves nicely as what has been called elsewhere “an instance of the fingerpost.”)

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Wednesday August 30, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Seven

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

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

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

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

experience

1377, from O.Fr. experience, from L. experientia “knowledge gained by repeated trials,” from experientem (nom. experiens), prp. of experiri “to try, test,” from ex- “out of” + peritus “experienced, tested.” The v. (1533) first meant “to test, try;” sense of “feel, undergo” first recorded 1588.

      — Online Etymology Dictionary

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

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

Vita Brevis

“In many ways, the arts are the highest achievements of man.”

— Harvard President
   Lawrence H. Summers,
   Feb. 26, 2004 

”We intensively train children in the Arts and ritual because deep down we know that these are the only things that really MATTER. This is what we must share first with the young, in case they DIE.”

— Lucy Ellmann, Dot in the Universe, quoted in today’s [2/29/04] New York Times

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

On “experience”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Saturday August 19, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:14 pm
For Jill St. John
On Her Birthday:
 
Cleavage Term
Revisited
 
 

“… a point of common understanding between the classic and romantic worlds. Quality, the cleavage term between hip and square, seemed to be it.”


“During his distinguished 17-year tenure as director of the theatre program at Fordham University, Sacharow was recalled by faculty colleagues as ‘exceedingly collegial, understanding, sympathetic and very, very funny.'”

— Obituary of Lawrence J. Sacharow at Fordham University, a Jesuit institution

See also Log24 on August 14,
the date of Sacharow’s death,
and on April 10, 2004:

“Here was finality indeed,
and cleavage!”

Under the Volcano  

Friday, May 19, 2006

Friday May 19, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 am
Peter Viereck

August 5, 1916 – May 13, 2006


The Great Bartender
by Peter Viereck (1948)

Being absurd as well as beautiful,
Magic– like art– is hoax redeemed by awe.
(Not priest but clown,
     the shuddering sorcerer
Is more astounded than
     his rapt applauders:
“Then all those props and Easters
     of my stage
Came true?  But I was joking all the time!”)
Art, being bartender, is never drunk;
And magic that believes itself, must die.
My star was rocket of my unbelief,
Launched heavenward as
     all doubt’s longings are;
     It burst when, drunk with self-belief,
I tried to be its priest and shouted upward:
“Answers at last!  If you’ll but hint
     the answers
For which earth aches, that famous
     Whence and Whither;
Assuage our howling Why? with final fact.”

— As quoted in The Practical Cogitator,
   or The Thinker’s Anthology
,
   Selected and Edited by
   Charles P. Curtis, Jr., and
   Ferris Greenslet,
   Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged,
   With a new Introduction by
   John H. Finley, Jr.,
   Houghton Mifflin Company,
   Boston, 1962

The dates of Viereck’s birth and death are according to this morning’s New York Times.

Related material:

Five Log24 entries
ending May 13,
 the date of Viereck’s death.

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Tuesday April 11, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:33 pm
Dallas

Part I,

from
The Circle is Unbroken,
May 2003:
 
Highballs

“If you can bounce high,
bounce for her too….”
 – F. Scott Fitzgerald,
epigraph to
The Great Gatsby

Magazine purchased at
newsstand May 14, 2003:

A Whiff of Camelot
as ‘West Wing’
Ends an Era

– New York Times,
 May 14, 2003

Song title from the
June Carter Cash
album “Press On“:

“Gatsby’s Restaurant”

From The Great Gatsby,
Chapter Four:

“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.
“This is a nice restaurant here,”
said Mr. Wolfsheim, looking at the
Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling.

Presbyterian Nymph:

Mimi Beardsley, JFK playmate,
in the news on May 15, 2003 

On JFK’s plane trips:
“Whenever the President traveled,
members of the press staff
traveled as well.
You always have a press secretary
and a couple of girls traveling….
 Mimi, who obviously couldn’t perform
 any function at all, made all the trips!”

Apparently there was some function…

“Don’t forget the coffee!”
– Punchline from the film
  “Good Will Hunting.”
Part II:

Today’s birthday:
Joel Grey

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060411-Grey1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Grey in “Conundrum,”
the final episode of Dallas

Related material:

Log24 on March 20, 2006

The image �http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051019-TwoSides.jpg� cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

— and the 5 previous entries.

Saturday, March 11, 2006

Saturday March 11, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Holy the Firm
by Annie Dillard

    Esoteric Christianity, I read, posits a substance.  It is a created substance, lower than metals and minerals on a “spiritual scale” and lower than salts and earths, occurring beneath salts and earths in the waxy deepness of planets, but never on the surface of planets where men could discern it; and it is in touch with the Absolute, at base.  In touch with the Absolute!  At base.  The name of this substance is Holy the Firm.
    Holy the Firm: and is Holy the Firm in touch with metals and minerals?  With salts and earths?  Of course, and straight on up, till “up” ends by curving back.  Does something that touched something that touched Holy the Firm in touch with the Absolute at base seep into ground water, into grain; are islands rooted in it, and trees?  Of course.
    Scholarship has long distinguished between two strains of thought which proceed in the West from human knowledge of God.  In one, the ascetic’s metaphysic, the world is far from God.  Emanating from God, and linked to him by Christ, the world is yet infinitely other than God, furled away from him like the end of a long banner falling.  This notion makes, to my mind, a vertical line of the world, a great chain of burning.  The more accessible and universal view, held by Eckhart and by many peoples in various forms, is scarcely different from pantheism: that the world is immanation, that God is in the thing, and eternally present here, if nowhere else.  By these lights the world is flattened on a horizontal plane, singular, all here, crammed with heaven, and alone.  But I know that it is not alone, nor singular, nor all.  The notion of immanence needs a handle, and the two ideas themselves need a link, so that life can mean aught to the one, and Christ to the other.
    For to immanence, to the heart, Christ is redundant and all things are one.  To emanance, to the mind, Christ touches only the top, skims off only the top, as it were, the souls of men, the wheat grains whole, and lets the chaff fall where?  To the world flat and patently unredeemed; to the entire rest of the universe, which is irrelevant and nonparticipant; to time and matter unreal, and so unknowable, an illusory, absurd, accidental, and overelaborate stage.
    But if Holy the Firm is “underneath salts,” if Holy the Firm is matter at its dullest, Aristotle’s materia prima, absolute zero, and since Holy the Firm is in touch with the Absolute at base, then the circle is unbroken.  And it is.  Thought advances, and the world creates itself, by the gradual positing of, and belief in, a series of bright ideas.  Time and space are in touch with the Absolute at base.  Eternity sockets twice into time and space curves, bound and bound by idea.  Matter and spirit are of a piece but distinguishable; God has a stake guaranteed in all the world.  And the universe is real and not a dream, not a manufacture of the senses; subject may know object, knowedge may proceed, and Holy the Firm is in short the philosopher’s stone.

    These are only ideas, by the single handful.  Lines, lines, and their infinite points!  Hold hands and crack the whip, and yank the Absolute out of there and into the light, God pale and astounded, spraying a spiral of salts and earths, God footloose and flung.  And cry down the line to his passing white ear, “Old Sir!  Do you hold space from buckling by a finger in its hole?  O Old!  Where is your other hand?”  His right hand is clenching, calm, round the exploding left hand of Holy the Firm.

— Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, Harper & Row 1977, reissued by Harper Perennial Library in 1988 as a paperback, pp. 68-71.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Tuesday February 21, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:32 am

Now Lens

  murphy plant, murphy grow, a maryamyria-   10
  meliamurphies, in the lazily eye of his lapis,   11
      12
  Geometry lesson   13
      14
Uteralterance or Vieus Von DVbLIn, 'twas one of dozedeams   15
the Interplay of a darkies ding in dewood) the Turnpike under   16
Bones in the the Great Ulm (with Mearingstone in Fore   17
Womb. ground). 1 Given now ann linch you take enn   18
  all. Allow me! And, heaving alljawbreakical   19
  expressions out of old Sare Isaac's 2 universal   20
The Vortex. of specious aristmystic unsaid, A is for Anna   21
Spring of Sprung like L is for liv. Aha hahah, Ante Ann you're   22
Verse. The Ver- apt to ape aunty annalive! Dawn gives rise.   23
tex. Lo, lo, lives love! Eve takes fall. La, la, laugh   24
  leaves alass! Aiaiaiai, Antiann, we're last to   25
  the lost, Loulou! Tis perfect. Now (lens   26

Finnegans Wake, Book II,
Episode 2, page 293

Related material:
Fours and 1132

Monday, June 13, 2005

Monday June 13, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 pm

Cliffs of Moher

My father’s father,
    his father’s father, his —
Shadows like winds

Go back to a parent before thought,
    before speech,
At the head of the past.

They go to the cliffs of Moher
    rising out of the mist….

— Wallace Stevens,
   “The Irish Cliffs of Moher”

A Portrait of the Artist
 as a Young Man
,
James Joyce, Chapter 5:

As he came back to the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step, Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at him from the pale loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius’s enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the company, a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled books of secret subtle wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of apostleship. It seemed as if he used the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, without joy in their handling or hatred of that in them which was evil but turning them, with a firm gesture of obedience back upon themselves and for all this silent service it seemed as if he loved not at all the master and little, if at all, the ends he served. SIMILITER ATQUE SENIS BACULUS, he was, as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man’s hand, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather, to lie with a lady’s nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace.

The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin.

–When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? he asked.

–From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a fortnight if I am lucky.

–These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.

See also Kahn’s The Art and Thought of Heraclitus and the references to a “Delian diver” in Chitwood’s Death by Philosophy.

From
Death by Philosophy:

“Although fragments examined earlier may enable Heraclitus’ reader to believe that the stylistic devices arose directly from his dislike of humanity, I think rather that Heraclitus deliberately perfected the mysterious, gnomic style he praises in the following  fragment.

31. The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor hides, but  indicates. (fr. 93)

Heraclitus not only admires the oracular style of delivery, but recommends it; this studied ambiguity is, I think, celebrated and alluded to in the Delian diver comment. For just as the prophecies of the Delian or Delphic god are at once obscure and darkly clear, so too are the workings of the Logos and Heraclitus’ remarks on it.”

Related material:
A Mass for Lucero.

That web page concludes with a reference to esthetics and a Delian palm, and was written three years ago on this date.

Today is also the date of death for Martin Buber, philosophical Jew.

Here is a Delphic saying in memory of Buber:

“It is the female date that is considered holy, and that bears fruit.”

—  Steven Erlanger,
    New York Times story,
    dateline Jerusalem, June 11

Saturday, June 11, 2005

Saturday June 11, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:25 pm

Evil

Some academics may feel that a denunciation of an essay by one of their fellow academics as "evil" (see this morning's entry The Last Word) goes too far.

Here is a followup to that entry.

From the Riviera Presbyterian Church, a sermon quoting Madeleine L’Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time:
 

For a moment there was the darkness of space, then another planet. The outlines of this planet were not clean and clear. It seemed to be covered with a smoky haze. Through the haze Meg thought she could make out the familiar outlines of continents like pictures in her Social Studies books. "Is it because of our atmosphere that we can't see properly?" she asked anxiously. "No, Meg, yyou know thattt itt iss nnott tthee attmosspheeere," Mrs. Which said. "Yyou mmusstt bee brrave."

"It's the Thing!" Charles Wallace cried. "It's the Dark Thing we saw… when we were riding on Mrs. Whatsit's back!" "Did it just come?" Meg asked in agony, unable to take her eyes from the sickness of the shadow which darkened the beauty of the earth. Mrs. Whatsit sighed. "No, Meg. It hasn't just come. It has been there for a great many years. That is why your planet is such a troubled one." "I hate it!" Charles Wallace cried passionately. "I hate the Dark Thing!" Mrs. Whatsit nodded. "Yes, Charles dear. We all do." "But what is it?" Calvin demanded. "We know that it's evil, but what is it?" "Yyouu hhave ssaidd itt!" Mrs. Which's voice rang out. "Itt iss Eevill. Itt iss thee Ppowers of Ddarrkknessss!" "But what's going to happen?" Meg's voice trembled. "Oh, please, Mrs. Which, tell us what's going to happen!" "We will continue tto ffight!" Something in Mrs. Which's voice made all three of the children stand straighter, throwing back their shoulders with determination, looking at the glimmer that was Mrs. Which with pride and confidence. "And we're not alone, you know, children," came Mrs. Whatsit, the comforter. "All through the universe it's being fought, all through the cosmos… and some of our very best fighters have come right from your own planet, and it's a little planet, dears, out on the edge of a little galaxy." 

"Who have some of our fighters been?" Calvin asked. "Oh, you must know them dear," Mrs. Whatsit said. Mrs. Who's spectacles shone out at them triumphantly, "And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not." "Jesus!" Charles Wallace said. "Why, of course, Jesus!" "Go on, Charles, love. There were others. All your great artists. They've been lights for us to see by." "Leonardo da Vinci?" Calvin suggested tentatively. "And Michelangelo?" "And Shakespeare," Charles Wallace called out, "and Bach! And Pasteur and Madame Curie and Einstein!" Now Calvin's voice rang with confidence. "And Schweitzer and Gandhi and Buddha and Beethoven and Rembrandt and St. Francis!" "Watch!" the Medium told them. The earth with its fearful covering of dark shadow swam out of view and they moved rapidly through the Milky Way. And there was the Thing again. Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure. No shadows. No fear. Only the stars and the clear darkness of space, quite different from the fearful darkness of the Thing. "You see!" the Medium cried, smiling happily. "It can be overcome! It is being overcome all the time!"

And it is. Lift up your hearts, lift up your heads, catch the ball, practice Advent, see in the dark. You are a city set on a hill, whose light cannot be hid. said Jesus, and he believed it.

 

Amen.

Thursday, June 9, 2005

Thursday June 9, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:45 pm
Kernel of Eternity

continued

"At that instant he saw,
in one blaze of light,
an image of unutterable conviction….
the core of life, the essential pattern
whence all other things proceed,
the kernel of eternity."

— Thomas Wolfe,
Of Time and the River

From "The Relations between
Poetry and Painting," by Wallace Stevens:

"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety…. It was from the point of view of… [such a] subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."

As yesterday's entry "Kernel of Eternity" indicated, the word "kernel" has a definite meaning in mathematics.  The Klein four-group, beloved of structural anthropologists and art theorists, is a particularly apt example of a kernel. (See PlanetMath for details.)

Diagrams of this group may have influenced Giovanni Sambin, professor of mathematical logic at the University of Padua; the following impressive-looking diagram is from Sambin's

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/SambinBP1Pic2A.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Sambin argues that this diagram reflects some of the basic structures of thought itself… making it perhaps one way to describe what  Klee called the "mind or heart of creation." 

But this verges on what Stevens called the sacerdotal.  It seems that a simple picture of the "kernel of eternity" as the four-group, a picture without reference to logic or philosophy, and without distracting letters and labels, is required.  The following is my attempt to supply such a picture:

Klein four-group

This is a picture of the four-group
as a permutation group on four points.
Pairs of colored arrows indicate the three
transformations other than the identity,
which may be regarded either as
invisible or as rendered by
the four black points themselves.

Update of 7:45 PM Thursday:

Review of the above (see comments)
by a typical Xanga reader:

"Ur a FUCKIN' LOSER!!!!!  LMFAO!!!!"

For more merriment, see
The Optical Unconscious
and
The Painted Word.

A recent Xangan movie review:

"Annakin's an idiot, but he's not an idiot because that's the way the character works, he's an idiot because George Lucas was too lazy to make him anything else. He has to descend to the Daaaahk Side, but the dark side never really seems all that dark. He kills children, but offscreen. We never get to see the transformation. One minute he cares about the republic, the next he's killing his friends, and then for some reason he's duelling with Obi Wan on a lava flow. Who cares? Not me….

So a big ol' fuck you to George Lucas. Fuck you, George!"

Both Xangans seem to be fluent in what Tom Wolfe has called the "fuck patois."

A related suggestion from Google:

Give Dad a photo gift

These remarks from Xangans and Google
 suggest the following photo gift,
based on a 2003 journal entry:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050609-Fahne.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Wednesday, June 8, 2005

Wednesday June 8, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:00 pm

Kernel of Eternity

Today is the feast day of Saint Gerard Manley Hopkins, “immortal diamond.”

“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being–the reward he seeks–the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it. (It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation group of the affine space.)”

— Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)

“… donc Dieu existe, réponse!

— attributed, some say falsely, to Leonhard Euler

Tuesday, June 7, 2005

Tuesday June 7, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:26 pm

Blair Insists
EU Treaty Not Dead

From BBC News:

Is it me or have we all been locked in a Monty Python sketch this week? …

Dutch Voter: Hello, I wish to complain about this treaty what I voted for not half an hour ago.

Eurocrat: Oh yes, the EU Constitution. What, uh… what’s wrong with it?

DV: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. Its dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!

E: No, no, uh… what we need now is a period of reflection.

DV: Look matey, I know a dead treaty when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.

E: No, no it’s not dead, it’s being ratified. Remarkable treaty, the EU Constitution, innit, eh? 300 pages!

DV: The verbosity don’t enter into it, my lad. It’s stone dead. It’s passed on! This treaty is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If the senior politicians hadn’t been ramming it down our throats, it’d be pushing up daisies! It’s off the table. It’s kicked the waste paper basket. It’s in the shredder. It’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible! THIS IS AN EX-TREATY!

E: Well, I’d better replace it then. [takes a quick peek around Brussels]

E: Sorry squire, I’ve had a look around Brussels, and uh, we’re right out of treaties.

DV: I see. I see, I get the picture.

E: I’ve got a Charter of Fundamental Rights.

DV: Pray, does it lead us to an increasingly united federation of nation states?

E: Not really.

DV: WELL IT’S HARDLY A BLOODY REPLACEMENT THEN, IS IT?

Jonathan Rowles, Fleet

Monday, May 23, 2005

Monday May 23, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Elementary Art

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050523-Dorazio3.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Piero Dorazio, 1982

From the J. Paul Getty Trust:

"I've recently had it brought to my attention that the current accepted primary colors are magenta, cyan, and yellow. I teach elementary art and I'm wondering if I really need to point out that fact or if I should continue referring to the primary colors the way I always have — red, yellow, and blue! Anyone have an opinion?"

Color vs. Pigment
("CMYK" at Whatis.com):

"There is a fundamental difference between color and pigment. Color represents energy radiated…. Pigments, as opposed to colors, represent energy that is not absorbed…."

Illustrations from
Color Box Applet:
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050523-Mixing.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Another good background page
for elementary color education:
Colored Shadow Explorations.A good starting point for
non-elementary education:

 

 

The "Color" category in Wikipedia.Further background:

From "The Relations between
Poetry and Painting," by Wallace Stevens:

"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: 'I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall' or 'Planes in color. . . . The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.' The conversion of our Lumpenwelt  went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."

From Bester's The Deceivers (1981):

He stripped, went to his Japanese bed in the monk's cell,
thrashed, swore, and slept at last, dreaming crazed

p a t t e r n s
a t t e r n s
t t e r n s
t e r n s
e r n s
r n s
n s
s

Saturday, May 21, 2005

Saturday May 21, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:29 pm
Icarus at Boardwalk

“As in Monopoly, the fortunes of
the Boardwalk depend on the roll of
the dice.  It’s the final stop on the
game board, the crown jewel….”

Eileen Smith, Sept. 6, 2004

A link from Log24 last night:

A Throw of the Dice:
The Life of Stéphane Mallarmé

From Log24 on Aug. 29, 2003:

Atlantic City

‘He landed on Park Place!’

Charles Lindbergh seems to have done
just that.  See yesterday’s entry

Spirit.

From today’s online New York Times:

4 Killed as Small Plane Crashes
in Coney Island

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050521-ConeyIslandCrash.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

What moral may be drawn from these
narratives, I do not know.

For Mallarmé‘s own views, see
Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard.

Friday, May 6, 2005

Friday May 6, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:18 am
Crystalline

"In Francis Ford Coppola's film, Col. Kurtz tells how after his medics inoculated a small village, the Reds chopped off every child's left arm. 'My God, the genius of that. The genius,' Kurtz said. 'The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure! And then I realized they were stronger than me because they could stand it.'"

Col. David Hackworth
    on Tuesday, April 9, 2002.
    Col. Hackworth died at 74
    on Wednesday, May 4, 2005.

   Related Log24 entries:

   The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050506-GrCross.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Click on pictures for details.

Monday, April 4, 2005

Monday April 4, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:04 am
Fourth Day of the Fourth Month,
4:04:04

“My wife took, unnoticed, this picture, unposed, of me in the act of writing a novel…. The date (discernible in the captured calendar) is February 27, 1929. The novel, Zashchita Luzhina (The Defense), deals with the defense invented by an insane chess player….”
— Vladimir Nabokov, note to photograph following page 256 in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, Vintage International paperback, August 1989

— Quoted in The Matthias Defense

From a site titled Meaning of the Twentieth Century —

“Freeman Dyson has expressed some thoughts on craziness. In a Scientific American article called ‘Innovation in Physics,’ he began by quoting Niels Bohr. Bohr had been in attendance at a lecture in which Wolfgang Pauli proposed a new theory of elementary particles. Pauli came under heavy criticism, which Bohr summed up for him: ‘We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that is not crazy enough.’ To that Freeman added: ‘When a great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer, himself, it will be only half understood; to everyone else, it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope!’ “

Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe, 1979, pp. 146, 147

It is my hope that the speculation, implied in The Matthias Defense, that the number 162 has astonishing mystical properties (as a page number, article number, etc.) is sufficiently crazy to satisfy Pauli and his friend Jung as well as the more conventional thinkers Bohr and Dyson.

— Log24.net, Feast of St. Mark, 2003

See also The Black Queen and The Eight.
 
In accordance with the theology of the previous entry, based on Zein’s list of the most common Chinese characters, here are some meanings of

character 162:

[si4] {sì} /to watch/to wait/to examine/to spy/
[si4] {sì} /to seem/to appear/similar/like/to resemble/
[si4] {sì} /until/wait for/
[si4] {sì} /rhinoceros indicus/
[si4] {sì} /four/
[si4] {sì} /(surname)/wife of older brother/
[si4] {sì} /Buddhist temple/
[si4] {sì} /6th earthly branch/9-11 a.m./
[si4] {sì} /stream which returns after branching/
[si4] {sì} /place name/snivel/
[si4] {sì} /offer sacrifice to/
[si4] {sì} /hamper/trunk/
[si4] {sì} /plough/ploughshare/
[si4] {sì} /four (fraud-proof)/market/
[si4] {sì} /to feed/
[si4] {sì} /to raise/to rear/to feed/
[si4] {sì} /team of 4 horses/
[si4 bai3 wan4] {sì bǎi wàn} /four million/
[si4 bai3 yi4] {sì bǎi yì} /40 billion/
[si4 cao2] {sì cáo} /feeding trough/
[si4 cao3] {sì cǎo} /forage grass/
[si4 chu4] {sì chù} /all over the place/everywhere and all directions/
[si4 chuan1] {sì chuān} /Sichuan province, China/
[si4 chuan1 sheng3] {sì chuān shěng} /(N) Sichuan, a south west China province/
[si4 de5] {sì de} /seem as if/rather like/
[si4 fang1] {sì fāng} /four-way/four-sided/
[si4 fen1 zhi1 yi1] {sì fēn zhī yī} /one-quarter/
[si4 fu2] {sì fú} /servo/
[si4 fu2 qi4] {sì fú qì} /server (computer)/
[si4 ge4 xiao3 shi2] {sì gè xiǎo shí} /four hours/
[si4 hu5] {sì hu} /apparently/to seem/to appear/as if/seemingly/
[si4 hu5 hen3 an1 quan2] {sì hu hěn ān quán} /to appear (to be) very safe/
[si4 ji1] {sì jī} /to watch for one's chance/
[si4 ji4] {sì jì} /(n) the four seasons/
[si4 liao4] {sì liào} /feed/fodder/
[si4 lun2 ma3 che1] {sì lún mǎ chē} /chariot/
[si4 men2 jiao4 che1] {sì mén jiào chē} /sedan (motor car)/
[si4 mian4 ba1 fang1] {sì miàn bā fāng} /in all directions/all around/far and near/
[si4 mian4 ti3] {sì miàn tǐ} /tetrahedron/
[si4 miao4] {sì miào} /temple/monastery/shrine/
[si4 nian2] {sì nián} /four years/
[si4 nian2 qian2] {sì nián qián} /four years previously/
[si4 nian2 zhi4 de5 da4 xue2] {sì nián zhì de dà xué} /four-year university/
[si4 qian1] {sì qiān} /four thousand/4 000/
[si4 shi2] {sì shí} /forty/40/
[si4 shi2 duo1] {sì shí duō} /more than 40/
[si4 shi2 liu4] {sì shí liù} /forty six/46/
[si4 shi2 san1] {sì shí sān} /43/forty three/
[si4 shi4 er2 fei1] {sì shì ér fēi} /(saying) appeared right but actually was wrong/
[si4 tian1] {sì tiān} /four days/
[si4 xiao4 fei1 xiao4] {sì xiào fēi xiào} /(saying) resemble a smile yet not smile/
[si4 xue3] {sì xuě} /snowy/
[si4 yang3] {sì yǎng} /to raise/to rear/
[si4 yang3 zhe3] {sì yǎng zhě} /feeder/
[si4 yuan4] {sì yuàn} /cloister/
[si4 yue4] {sì yuè} /April/fourth month/
[si4 yue4 shi2 qi1 hao4] {sì yuè shí qī hào} /April 17/
[si4 zhi1] {sì zhī} /(n) the four limbs of the body/
[si4 zhou1] {sì zhōu} /all around/

ktmatu.com Chinese-English dictionary

Saturday, March 12, 2005

Saturday March 12, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:21 am

Women’s History Month, continued:

My Dark Lady

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050312-Cleo.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“Form the turtle!”
— Rex Harrison

See also Philadelphia Story.

Friday, February 25, 2005

Friday February 25, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:53 am

Mr. Holland’s Week,
continued

“Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday regardless of what might have changed in the interim. Medical science tells us that the body’s cells replace themselves wholesale within every seven years, yet we tell ourselves that we are what we were.

The question is widened and elongated in the case of the Juilliard String Quartet.”

Bernard Holland in the New York Times,
    Monday, May 20, 1996

“Robert Koff, a founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet and a concert violinist who performed on modern and Baroque instruments, died on Tuesday at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 86….

Mr. Koff, along with the violinist Robert Mann, the violist Raphael Hillyer and the cellist Arthur Winograd, formed the Juilliard String Quartet in 1946….”

Allan Kozinn in the New York Times,
    Friday, February 25, 2005

“One listened, for example, to the dazed, hymnlike beauty of the F Major’s Lento assai, and then to the acid that Beethoven sprinkles all around it. It is a wrestling match, awesome but also poignant. Schubert at the end of his life had already passed on to another level of spirit. Beethoven went back and forth between the temporal world and the world beyond right up to his dying day.”

Bernard Holland in the New York Times,
    Monday, May 20, 1996

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Related material: Elegance and the following description of Beethoven’s last quartet.

Program note by Eric Bromberger:

String Quartet in F major, Op. 135
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Born December 16, 1770, Bonn
Died March 26, 1827, Vienna

This quartet – Beethoven’s last complete composition – comes from the fall of 1826, one of the blackest moments in his life. During the previous two years, Beethoven had written three string quartets on commission from Prince Nikolas Galitzin, and another, the Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131, composed between January and June 1826. Even then Beethoven was not done with the possibilities of the string quartet: he pressed on with yet another, making sketches for the Quartet in F major during the summer of 1826.

At that point his world collapsed. His twenty-year-old nephew Karl, who had become Beethoven’s ward after a bitter court fight with the boy’s mother, attempted suicide. The composer was shattered: friends reported that he suddenly looked seventy years old. When the young man had recovered enough to travel, Beethoven took him – and the sketches for the new quartet – to the country home of Beethoven’s brother Johann in Gneixendorf, a village about thirty miles west of Vienna. Here, as he nursed Karl back to health, Beethoven’s own health began to fail. He would get up and compose at dawn, spend his days walking through the fields, and then resume composing in the evening. In Gneixendorf he completed the Quartet in F major in October and wrote a new finale to his earlier Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 130. These were his final works. When Beethoven return to Vienna in December, he took almost immediately to bed and died the following March.

One would expect music composed under such turbulent circumstances to be anguished, but the Quartet in F major is radiant music, full of sunlight – it is as if Beethoven achieved in this quartet the peace unavailable to him in life. This is the shortest of the late quartets, and many critics have noted that while this music remains very much in Beethoven’s late style, it returns to the classical proportions (and mood) of the Haydn quartets.

The opening movement, significantly marked Allegretto rather than the expected Allegro, is the one most often cited as Haydnesque. It is in sonata form – though a sonata form without overt conflict – and Beethoven builds it on brief thematic fragments rather than long melodies. This is poised, relaxed music, and the finale cadence – on the falling figure that has run throughout the movement – is remarkable for its understatement. By contrast, the Vivace bristles with energy. Its outer sections rocket along on a sharply-syncopated main idea, while the vigorous trio sends the first violin sailing high above the other voices. The very ending is impressive: the music grows quiet, comes to a moment of stasis, and then Beethoven wrenches it to a stop with a sudden, stinging surprise.

The slow movement – Beethoven carefully marks it Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo – is built on the first violin’s heartfelt opening melody; the even slower middle section, full of halting rhythms, spans only ten measures before the return of the opening material, now elaborately decorated. The final movement has occasioned the most comment. In the manuscript, Beethoven noted two three-note mottoes at its beginning under the heading Der schwer gefasste Entschluss: “The Difficult Resolution.” The first, solemnly intoned by viola and cello, asks the question: “Muss es sein?” (“Must it be?”). The violins’ inverted answer, which comes at the Allegro, is set to the words “Es muss sein!” (“It must be!”). Coupled with the fact that this quartet is virtually Beethoven’s last composition, these mottoes have given rise to a great deal of pretentious nonsense from certain commentators, mainly to the effect that they must represent Beethoven’s last thoughts, a stirring philosophical affirmation of life’s possibilities. The actual origins of this motto are a great deal less imposing, for they arose from a dispute over an unpaid bill, and as a private joke for friends Beethoven wrote a humorous canon on the dispute, the theme of which he then later adapted for this quartet movement. In any case, the mottoes furnish material for what turns out to be a powerful but essentially cheerful movement. The coda, which begins pizzicato, gradually gives way to bowed notes and a cadence on the “Es muss sein!” motto.

Friday, December 3, 2004

Friday December 3, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm

Crimson
on St. Cecilia’s Day

“… from the Age that is past,
To the Age that is waiting before.”
— Samuel Gilman, “Fair Harvard

Published by The Harvard Crimson
on Monday, November 22, 2004:

Dylan Performs
for Sold-Out Crowd

By KATHERINE CHAN
Harvard Crimson Contributing Writer

Shouts of “Make way! Moses is here!” filled a restless crowd as legendary musician Bob Dylan closed off his College tour last night jamming in front of a sold out audience of Harvard undergraduates and Cambridge residents….

The turnout for last night’s two-hour show was greater than many of the student audience members anticipated…

But despite the legendary hits and massive crowds, several students said they were disappointed with the show.

“I love Bob Dylan. I just don’t know what he’s saying,” said Alexander A.C. De Carvalho ’08.

Recommended reading
for Harvard students:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041203-Lyrics.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Click on picture
for details.

From an entry of October 29, 2004:

“Each epoch has its singer.”
Jack London, Oakland, California, 1901

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

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

From The New York Times today:

“It’s official, I guess. Forty years after he recorded it, Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was just named the greatest rock ‘n’ roll song of all time….”

Saturday, October 16, 2004

Saturday October 16, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 am

Midnight in the Garden
continued

Umberto Eco,
Foucault’s Pendulum,
page 176:

Here, too, you entered through a little garden…

Amparo drew me aside as we went in.  “I’ve figured it out,” she said.  “That tapir at the lecture talked about the Aryan age, remember?  And this one talks about the decline of the West.  Blut und Boden, blood and earth.  It’s pure Nazism.”

“It’s not that simple, darling.  This is a different continent.”….

If the outside was seedy, the inside was a blaze of violent colors.  It was a quadrangular hall, with one area set aside for the dancing of the cavalos.  The altar was at the far end, protected by a railing, against which stood the platform for the drums, the atabaques.  The ritual space was still empty….

Atabaque – a large tom-tom
that is used in Afro-Brazilian
religious celebrations”

The Sounds of Samba
at Yale

 The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041016-Atabaque.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Atabaque

“Of African origin, and made of jacarandá wood in a conical shape. A calfskin head covers the top of the drum. It is used a lot in capoeria and candomblé and umbanda rituals all over Brazil. There are three kinds of atabaques: Rum, Rumpi, and Lê. Rum has the deepest sound and is a solo drum; Rumpi has a medium sound, and Lê is the highest. These three hold the beat.”

Like the beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom….

— Cole Porter, “Night and Day

Your feats end enormous,
    your volumes immense,
(May the Graces I hoped for
    sing your Ondtship song sense!),
Your genus its worldwide,
    your spacest sublime!
But, Holy Saltmartin,
    why can’t you beat time?

In the name of the former
    and of the latter
    and of their holocaust. Allmen.

Saturday, July 31, 2004

Saturday July 31, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:01 pm

It’s Alive!

“People once worried about the boundary between the living and the nonliving. Today, the boundary seems meaningless….”

— Attributed to Francis Crick
    (now among the nonliving) 

Opening of
the above novel:

“My name is David Tennant, M.D.
I’m professor of ethics at the
University of Virginia Medical School,
and if you’re watching
this tape, I’m dead.”

From a public-relations newsletter
of the University of Southern California’s
Health Sciences Campus
dated April 20, 2001:

Discussing the Ethics
of Frankenstein

W. French Anderson, the physician and scientist who carried out the first human gene therapy clinical trial, will discuss the ethical issues involved in human genetic engineering and how science fiction has shaped the public’s perception of this budding new technology, Thursday, May 3, at noon, in USC’s Mayer Auditorium.

The lecture, titled “Frankenstein, GATTACA and Gene Therapy,” is free and open to the public. Mayer Auditorium is located on USC’s Health Sciences campus.

In his talk, Anderson will analyze the book Frankenstein and its filmic progeny and discuss how the Frankenstein story has captured the public’s imagination. He will also examine the ethical and moral issues raised by the book and movies and address the charge that, like Dr. Frankenstein, today geneticists are attempting to play God.

Anderson will evaluate the 1997 movie GATTACA, a cautionary tale about injustice in a 21st century society run by genetically “superior” elites. Anderson, who was a scientific consultant for the movie and is now proposing to carry out the first in utero gene therapy trial, will discuss the impact of GATTACA on the public’s understanding of genetic engineering.

See also the previous entry,
on Anderson’s arrest Friday
on charges of child molestation.

For the origin of the title GATTACA,
see The Diamond Code

Friday, July 2, 2004

Friday July 2, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:25 pm
Contender

“Jack Nicholson has said he believes, as do many actors, that when Brando’s gone, everyone moves up a place.”


Claudia Luther and Elaine Dutka,
  
Los Angeles Times staff writers


Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront:

Terry Malloy: “It wasn’t him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, ‘Kid, this ain’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson.’ You remember that? ‘This ain’t your night’! My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors on the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville! You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for the short-end money.”
Charley Malloy: “Oh, I had some bets down for you. You saw some money.”
Terry Malloy: “You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charley.”

Sylvester Stallone in Rocky:

 “I can’t beat him. But that don’t bother me. The only thing I want to do is to go the distance, that’s all. Because if that bell rings and I’m still standing, then I’m gonna know for the first time in my life, see, that I wasn’t just another bum from the neighborhood.”

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Tuesday June 15, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:00 pm

Kierkegaard on death:

“I have thought too much about death not to know that he cannot speak earnestly about death who does not know how to employ (for awakening, please note) the subtlety and all the profound waggery which lies in death.  Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is.  To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be, utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death.”

Works of Love,
  
Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324

For more on “the thought of the eternal,”  see the discussion of the number 373 in Directions Out and Outside the World, both of 4/26/04.

“… as an inscription over the graveyard gate one could place ‘No compulsion here’ or ‘With us there is no compulsion.’ “

Works of Love,
  
Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324

“In the summer of 1943 I was eight, and my father and mother and small brother and I were in Peterson Field in Colorado Springs.  A hot wind blew through that summer…. There was not much to do…. There was an Officers’ Club, but no swimming pool; all the Officers’ Club had of interest was artificial blue rain behind the bar.  The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching it, and so we went, my brother and I, to the movies.

We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened Quonset hut which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice.  Heard him tell a girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, ‘at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.’  As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.  Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

… When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it.  And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free. could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.”

— Joan Didion,
   “John Wayne: A Love Song,” 1965

“He is home now. He is free.”

— Ron Reagan, Friday, June 11, 2004

“Beware, therefore, of the dead!  Beware of his kindness; beware of his definiteness, beware of his strength; beware of his pride!  But if you love him, then remember him lovingly, and learn from him, precisely as one who is dead, learn the kindness in thought, the definiteness in expression, the strength in unchangeableness, the pride in life which you would not be able to learn as well from any human being, even the most highly gifted.”

Works of Love,
   Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 328

Saturday, April 10, 2004

Saturday April 10, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:23 am

Harrowing

“The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it.  The road, which was terrible and full of potholes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine.  Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down.  It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage!  Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country …”

— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947. (Harper & Row reissue, 1984, p. 15)

Comment by Stephen Spender:

“There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell.  But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ.  The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.”

— Introduction to Under the Volcano


 Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI

Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as

“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….

59 … The perichoresis  or ‘circumincessio,’ is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.”


 “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 146, translated by Walter Kaufmann


William Golding:

 “Simon’s head was tilted slightly up.  His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him. 

‘What are you doing out here all alone?  Aren’t you afraid of me?’

Simon shook.

‘There isn’t anyone to help you.  Only me.  And I’m the Beast.’

Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words.

‘Pig’s head on a stick.’

‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head.  For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter.  ‘You knew, didn’t you?  I’m part of you?  Close, close, close!’ “


“Thought of the day:
You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar… if you’re into catchin’ flies.”

Alice Woodrome, Good Friday, 2004

Anne Francis,
also known as
Honey West:

“Here was finality indeed,
and cleavage!”

Under the Volcano

From the official
     Anne Francis Web Site:   

   Come into my parlor….

For some background,
see the use of the word
“spider” in Under the Volcano:

WRIDER/ESPIDER:
THE CONSUL AS ARTIST IN
UNDER THE VOLCANO,

by Patrick A. McCarthy.

See, too, Why Me?

Tuesday, March 2, 2004

Tuesday March 2, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:01 pm

Passion

From the previous entry:

 1.
Oscar:
military phonetic
for the letter
‘O’

From an entry of Dec. 21, 2002, some background in literary theory:

“I know what ‘nothing’ means….”
— Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays

“How do you solve a problem like Maria?”
— Oscar Hammerstein II

“…problems can be solved by manipulating just two symbols, 1 and 0….” 
— George Johnson, obituary of Claude Shannon

“The female and the male continue this charming dance, populating the world with all living beings.” 
— Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Penguin Arkana paperback, 1999, Chapter 17, “Lingam/Yoni” 

“According to Showalter’s essay*, ‘In Elizabethan slang, ‘nothing’ was a term for the female genitalia . . . what lies between maids’ legs, for, in the male visual system of representation and desire…. Ophelia’s story becomes

the Story of O — the zero, the empty circle or mystery of feminine difference, the cipher of female sexuality to be deciphered by feminist interpretation.’ (222)* Ophelia is a highly sexual being…”

— Leigh DiAngelo,
   Ophelia as a Sexual Being

*Showalter, Elaine. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford. Boston: Bedford Books of St.Martin’s Press, 1994. 220-238.

At the Oscars Sunday night, a thought attributed by Billy Crystal to Sean Connery:

“Pussy Galore! I just got it! That’s vulgar.”

For further background, see

Passing the Crown (Aug. 24, 2003) and

The Agony and the Ya-Ya (Oct. 4, 2002).

Friday, February 20, 2004

Friday February 20, 2004

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 am

The Da Vinci Code
and
Symbology at Harvard

The protagonist of the recent bestseller The Da Vinci Code is Robert Langdon, "a professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard University."  A prominent part in the novel is played by the well-known Catholic organization Opus Dei.  Less well known (indeed, like Langdon, nonexistent) is the academic discipline of "symbology."  (For related disciplines that do exist, click here.) What might a course in this subject at Harvard be like?

Harvard Crimson, April 10, 2003:

While Opus Dei members said that they do not refer to their practices of recruitment as "fishing," the Work’s founder does describe the process of what he calls "winning new apostles" with an aquatic metaphor.

Point #978 of The Way invokes a passage in the New Testament in which Jesus tells Peter that he will make him a "fisher of men." The point reads:

" ‘Follow me, and I will make you into fishers of men.’ Not without reason does our Lord use these words: men—like fish—have to be caught by the head. What evangelical depth there is in the ‘intellectual apostolate!’ ”

IMAGE- Escher, 'Fishes and Scales'

IMAGE- Cullinane, 'Invariance'

Exercise for Symbology 101:

Describe the symmetry
in each of the pictures above.
Show that the second picture
retains its underlying structural
symmetry under a group of
322,560 transformations.

Having reviewed yesterday's notes
on Gombrich, Gadamer, and Panofsky,
discuss the astrological meaning of
the above symbols in light of
today's date, February 20.

Extra credit:

Relate the above astrological
symbolism to the four-diamond
symbol in Jung's Aion.

Happy metaphors!

Robert Langdon

Friday, February 6, 2004

Friday February 6, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:35 am

Government by Crackpots

Morning briefing:

Paul Krugman on Laurie Mylroie in today’s New York Times

Get Me Rewrite!,

Peter Bergen in the Washington Monthly

Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons’
Favorite Conspiracy Theorist
,

and Cecil Adams in the Chicago Reader on…

Leo Strauss and
the Neocon Crackpots
.

Strauss lectured on Plato at the University of Chicago.  For more on Plato and philosophy at the University of Chicago, see the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Friday, November 28, 2003

Friday November 28, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:31 pm

Understanding Media

BBC News, March 2, 2002:

"The Reverend Billy Graham has apologised for a taped conversation with former President Nixon in which he said the Jewish 'stranglehold' of the media was ruining the United States and must be broken."

"The ‘propaganda model’ of media operations laid out and applied by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media postulates that elite media interlock with other institutional sectors in ownership, management and social circles, effectively circumscribing their ability to remain analytically detached from other dominant institutional sectors. The model argues that the net result of this is self-censorship without any significant coercion." 

A Critical Review and Assessment of
   Herman and Chomsky’s ‘Propaganda Model'
   by Jeffery Klaehn,
   European Journal of Communication,
   2002,
Vol 17(2): 147–182. 

"We are in a war of ideas."

— Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
   Oct. 24, 2003


Toby Ziegler
of West Wing

THE WEST WING
"NIGHT FIVE"

WRITTEN BY: AARON SORKIN

Transcription from http://communicationsoffice.tripod.com
/3-13.txt

Episode 3.13 — "Night Five"
Original Airdate: February 6, 2002

**************************

PORTION OF THE TRANSCRIPT
DEALING WITH A
UN FOREIGN POLICY SPEECH

**************************

TOBY
Our goal is to proclaim American values.

ANDY
This speech isn't supposed to be about ideology. It's supposed to be about reality.

TOBY
I think the President will decide what the speech is suppose to be about, but the reality is, the United States of America no longer sucks up to reactionaries, and our staunch allies will know what we mean.

ANDY
We don't have any staunch allies in the Arab world; just reluctant ones.  We've a coalition held together with duct tape! A coalition without which we cannot fight!

TOBY
Nobody's blowing off the coalition, and that coalition will be plenty strong….

ANDY
What's Egypt going to think? Or Pakistan?

TOBY
That freedom and democracy are coming soon to a theatre near them, so get dressed.

He sits on the edge of his desk.

ANDY
…. this one moment in time, you have to
get off your horse and just… simply put – be nice to the Arab world.

TOBY
Be nice?

ANDY
Yes.

TOBY
Well… How about when we, instead of
blowing Iraq back to the seventh century for harbouring terrorists and trying to develop nuclear weapons,
we just imposed economic sanctions and were reviled by the Arab world….

Supplemental reading:

Who Rules America?

Review of Abraham Foxman's
Never Again? The Threat of
The New Anti-Semitism
,
NY Times Book Review,
November 30, 2003
 

Thursday, November 13, 2003

Thursday November 13, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

Dream of the Unified Field

Quartet:

Shanavasa, Ananda,
Jorie Graham, Robert Louis Stevenson 

“Shanavasa asked Ananda,

‘What is the fundamental uncreated essence of all things?’ “

— Jorie Graham,
    “Relativity: A Quartet”
    in The Dream of the Unified Field:
    Selected Poems 1974-1994
,
    Ecco Press, 1995

“Ananda to Shanavasa:
 ‘Buddha is Alive! Buddha is Alive!’

 Shanavasa to Upagupta:
 ‘Space is Consumed by Flaming Space.’ “

 — Table of Contents, Living Buddha Zen


Cover illustration
by Stephen Savage,
NY Times Book Review,
Feb. 2 (Candlemas), 2003

“We live the time that a match flickers.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson, Aes Triplex

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on this date in 1850.

Friday, August 29, 2003

Friday August 29, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:07 pm

The Shining of Park Place

Today is the birthday of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., writer, dean of Harvard Medical School, father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and author of at least seven hymns.

It is also the feast day of Saint Lewis Henry Redner, author of the tune now known as “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”  Redner was church organist for Phillips Brooks, who wrote the “Bethlehem” lyrics but then published the hymn under the facetious name “St. Louis,” a deliberate misspelling of Redner’s name.

Redner died on August 29, 1908, at the Marlborough Hotel in Atlantic City.

Since Holmes Sr. was both a poet and the father of a famous lawyer, a reference to poet-lawyer Wallace Stevens seems in order.

To wit:

“We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel
instead of the hymns….”

— Wallace Stevens,
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven

From Best Atlantic City Hotels:

Bally’s Park Place, located at Park Place and Boardwalk, partially stands on the site of the former Marlborough Hotel.

For some background on the theology of hotels, see Stephen King’s classic The Shining and my own note, Shining Forth.

Let us pray that any haunting at the current Park Place and Boardwalk location is done by the blessed spirit of Saint Lewis Redner.

 

Atlantic City

Bally’s
Park Place

Wallace
Stevens

 

Postscript of 7:11 PM —

From an old Dave Barry column:

“Beth thinks the casinos should offer more of what she described as ‘fun’ games, the type of entertainment-for-the-whole-family activities that people engage in to happily while away the hours. If Beth ran a casino, there would be a brightly lit table surrounded by high rollers in tuxedos and evening gowns, and the air would be charged with excitement as a player rolled the dice, and the crowd would lean forward, and the shout would ring out…

‘He landed on Park Place!’ “

Charles Lindbergh seems to have done
just that.  See yesterday’s entry

Spirit

and today’s New York Times story

Lindbergh the Family Man.

 

Friday, August 22, 2003

Friday August 22, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:04 pm

Mr. Holland’s Week

On Monday, August 18, 2003,
a New York Times editor wrote
the following headline
for a book review:

Bending Over Backward
for a Well-Known Lout.

The word “lout” here refers to
author John O’Hara, who often
 wrote about his native Pennsylvania.

And in Three Days…

On Thursday, August 21, 2003,
the Pennsylvania Lottery
midday number was
 162.

For some other occurrences of this number,
see my entries of August 19, written
in honor of the birthday of
Jill St. John. 

The “three days” remark referred to above
is from another St. John (2:19), allegedly
the author of an account of the last days
of one Jesus of Nazareth.

Those who share Mel Gibson’s
taste for religious drama may
savor the following dialogue:

Jesus’ Response
to Dishonor

Dramatis Personae:

  • Narrator
  • Group 1
  • Group 2
  • Voice of Jesus
  • Voice of Doom
  • Voice of Hope

Narrator:  Those who had been healed did not join in with the throng at Jesus’ crucifixion who cried, “Crucify Him, crucify Him.”  ….

Voice of Doom:  It was a different story for the guilty ones who had fled from the presence of Jesus. 

Group 1:  The priests and rulers never forgot the feeling of guilt they felt that moment in the temple. 

Group 2:  The Holy Spirit flashed into their minds the prophets’ writings concerning Christ. Would they yield to this conviction?

Voice of Doom:  Nope!  They would have to repent first!   They would not admit that they were wrong!  They knew that they were dead wrong.  But they would not repent of it!  And because Jesus had discerned their thoughts, they hated Him.  With hate in their hearts they slowly returned to the temple.

Voice of Hope:  They could not believe their eyes when they saw the people being healed and praising God!  These guilty ones were convicted that in Jesus the prophecies of the Messiah were fulfilled. As much as they hated Jesus, they could not free themselves from the thought that He might be a prophet sent by God to restore the sacredness of the temple.

Voice of Doom:  So they asked Him a stupid question!   “What miracle can you perform to show us that you have the right to do what you did?”

Voice of Jesus:  “Destroy this temple and in three days I will build it again.”

Voice of Doom:  Those guys couldn’t believe it!

Philosophers ponder the idea of identity:
what it is to give something a name
on Monday
and have it respond to that name
on Friday….
— Bernard Holland, The New York Times,
Monday, May 20, 1996

“Ask a stupid question…”

For further details, see

The Crucifixion of John O’Hara

Monday, August 4, 2003

Monday August 4, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 am

A Queer Religion

August 4 headline:

Gay bishop on way to win

This suggests the following theological meditation by a gay Christian:

“I can’t resist but end by pointing out the irony of the doctrine of the Trinity as seen by gay eyes. Please don’t take what I say next too seriously. I don’t believe that gender is very important or that it is any more present in God than is ‘green-ness,’ however, I simply can’t resist.

The Trinity seems to be founded on the ecstatic love union of two male persons; the Father and the Son. If one takes this seriously it is incestuous pedophilia. There is no doubt that this union is generative (and so in the origin of the meaning ‘sexual’) in character, because from it bursts forth a third person: Holy Spirit; neuter in Greek, feminine in Hebrew! Whereas Islam detests the Catholic idea that the Blessed Virgin was ‘impregnated’ by God, as demeaning to the transcendence of God, the internal incestuous homosexuality that the doctrine of the Trinity amounts to should really offend more!

Any orthodox  account of the inner life of God is at best highly uncongenial to the paradigm of the heterosexual nuclear family. Amusingly, the contemporary Magisterium fails to notice this and even attempts to use the doctrine of the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son to bolster its conventional championing of ‘male-female complementarity’ and the centrality of procreation to all authentically ‘self-giving’ relationships. Absurdities will never cease!”

Amen to the conclusion, at least.

The author of this meditation, “Pharsea,” is a “traditional Catholic” and advocate of the Latin Mass — just like Mel Gibson.  One wonders how Gibson might react to Pharsea’s theology.

As for me… I always thought there was something queer about that religion.

Thursday, June 26, 2003

Thursday June 26, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:00 am

ART WARS:
Art at the Vanishing Point

From the web page Art Wars:

"For more on the 'vanishing point,'
or 'point at infinity,' see
Midsummer Eve's Dream."

On Midsummer Eve, June 23, 2003, minimalist artist Fred Sandback killed himself.

Sandback is discussed in The Dia Generation, an April 6, 2003, New York Times Magazine article that is itself discussed at the Art Wars page.

Sandback, who majored in philosophy at Yale, once said that

"Fact and illusion are equivalents."

Two other references that may be relevant:

The Medium is
the Rear View Mirror
,

which deals with McLuhan's book Through the Vanishing Point, and a work I cited on Midsummer Eve  …

Chapter 5 of Through the Looking Glass:

" 'What is it you want to buy?' the Sheep said at last, looking up for a moment from her knitting.

'I don't quite know yet,' Alice said very gently.  'I should like to look all round me first, if I might.'

'You may look in front of you, and on both sides, if you like,' said the Sheep; 'but you ca'n't look all round you — unless you've got eyes at the back of your head.'

But these, as it happened, Alice had not got: so she contented herself with turning round, looking at the shelves as she came to them.

The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things — but the oddest part of it all was that, whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite, empty, though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.

'Things flow about so here!' she said at last in a plaintive tone…."

 "When Alice went
     through the vanishing point
"
 

Tuesday, June 3, 2003

Tuesday June 3, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:04 am

Fearful Meditation —

A follow-up to yesterday
afternoon's entry of

03:04

O fearful meditation! Where, alack,
Shall time's best jewel from time's chest lie hid?

— Shakespeare, Sonnet 65

Pop Culture's answer:

"Flashes of fire,
a raging flame!"
Song of Solomon

Click on the album title "0304" for details.

A different answer:

03/04

Click on the date "03/04" for details.

Sunday, June 1, 2003

Sunday June 1, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:05 am
Yet Another False Statement
From Xanga.com:
 
60 Hours and Counting…
 
Xanga News
Thursday, May 29, 2003

Bandwidth Upgrade DONE!  We’re now up and running with the new bandwidth provider!  The site should be again working normally.  If you have a Personal URL, it might take another 12 hours or so for the DNS records to reach everyone else and for your site to be again reachable via the URL.  Thanks again for your patience during this upgrade that will greatly improve Xanga’s network. 2:03 PM

As of 12:30 PM (or earlier) Sunday, June 1, DONE!

Friday, May 16, 2003

Friday May 16, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:44 pm

Highballs

“If you can bounce high,
bounce for her too….”
 – F. Scott Fitzgerald, epigraph to
The Great Gatsby

Magazine purchased at
newsstand May 14, 2003:

A Whiff of Camelot
as ‘West Wing’
Ends an Era

– New York Times,
 May 14, 2003

Song title from the
June Carter Cash album “Press On“:

“Gatsby’s Restaurant”

From The Great Gatsby, Chapter Four:

“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.
“This is a nice restaurant here,”
said Mr. Wolfsheim, looking at the
Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling.

Presbyterian Nymph:

Mimi Beardsley, JFK playmate,
in the news on May 15, 2003 

On JFK’s plane trips:
“Whenever the President traveled,
members of the press staff traveled as well.
You always have a press secretary
and a couple of girls traveling….
 Mimi, who obviously couldn’t perform
 any function at all, made all the trips!”

Apparently there was some function….

“Don’t forget the coffee!”
– Punchline from the film
  “Good Will Hunting.”

Tuesday, April 29, 2003

Tuesday April 29, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:17 pm

Being and Time

http://www.log24.com/log/pix03/030429-BeingAndTime.jpg

Heidegger’s birthday: September 26.

Einstein’s birthday: March 14.

Fred Zinnemann, who won an Oscar
for directing “From Here to Eternity“:

Zinnemann’s birthday: today, April 29.

In honor of Zinnemann, a cheerful man, who died on Einstein’s birthday in 1997, our site music today is the cheerful Gershwin tune “Our Love Is Here To Stay.” In honor of Olivia Newton-John (granddaughter of physicist Max Born), who notably portrayed the Muse Terpsichore in “Xanadu” and who shares a September 26 birthday with Gershwin, T. S. Eliot, and Heidegger, today’s midi of “Our Love” has a special arrangement. Ms. Newton-John might wish to commemorate the romance (“Passionate!” — Yale University Press) of Hannah Arendt, a Jewish political theorist, and Heidegger, a Catholic Nazi, by listening to “Our Love” on the acoustic bass and glockenspiel.

Terpsichore is the Muse of Dance.
See also Einstein’s first paper on relativity:
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,”
Annalen der Physik,

September 26, 1905.

Not to be confused with an Orson Welles
film based on the life of
William Randolph Hearst,
whose birthday is also today.

Glockenspiel means “bell-play.”
See Metaphysics for Tina.

Friday, April 25, 2003

Friday April 25, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:59 pm

Mark

Today is the feast of Saint Mark.  It seems an appropriate day to thank Dr. Gerald McDaniel for his online cultural calendar, which is invaluable for suggesting blog topics.

Yesterday's entry "Cross-Referenced" referred to a bizarre meditation of mine titled "The Matthias Defense," which combines some thoughts of Nabokov on lunacy with some of my own thoughts on the Judeo-Christian tradition (i.e., also on lunacy).  In this connection, the following is of interest:

From a site titled Meaning of the Twentieth Century —

"Freeman Dyson has expressed some thoughts on craziness. In a Scientific American article called 'Innovation in Physics,' he began by quoting Niels Bohr. Bohr had been in attendance at a lecture in which Wolfgang Pauli proposed a new theory of elementary particles. Pauli came under heavy criticism, which Bohr summed up for him: 'We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that is not crazy enough.' To that Freeman added: 'When a great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer, himself, it will be only half understood; to everyone else, it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope!' "

Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe, 1979, pp. 146, 147

It is my hope that the speculation, implied in The Matthias Defense, that the number 162 has astonishing mystical properties (as a page number, article number, etc.) is sufficiently crazy to satisfy Pauli and his friend Jung as well as the more conventional thinkers Bohr and Dyson.  It is no less crazy than Christianity, and has a certain mad simplicity that perhaps improves on some of that religion's lunatic doctrines. 

Some fruits of the "162 theory" —

Searching on Google for muses 162, we find the following Orphic Hymn to Apollo and a footnote of interest:

27 Tis thine all Nature's music to inspire,
28 With various-sounding, harmonising lyre;
29 Now the last string thou tun'ft to sweet accord,
30 Divinely warbling now the highest chord….

"Page 162 Verse 29…. Now the last string…. Gesner well observes, in his notes to this Hymn, that the comparison and conjunction of the musical and astronomical elements are most ancient; being derived from Orpheus and Pythagoras, to Plato. Now, according to the Orphic and Pythagoric doctrine, the lyre of Apollo is an image of the celestial harmony…."

For the "highest chord" in a metaphorical sense, see selection 162 of the 1919 edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse (whose editor apparently had a strong religious belief in the Muses (led by Apollo)).  This selection contains the phrase "an ever-fixèd mark" — appropriately enough for this saint's day.  The word "mark," in turn, suggests a Google search for the phrase "runes to grave" Hardy, after a poem quoted in G. H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology.

Such a search yields a website that quotes Housman as the source of the "runes" phrase, and a further search yields what is apparently the entire poem:

Smooth Between Sea and Land

by A. E. Housman

Smooth between sea and land
Is laid the yellow sand,
And here through summer days
The seed of Adam plays.

Here the child comes to found
His unremaining mound,
And the grown lad to score
Two names upon the shore.

Here, on the level sand,
Between the sea and land,
What shall I build or write
Against the fall of night?

Tell me of runes to grave
That hold the bursting wave,
Or bastions to design
For longer date than mine.

Shall it be Troy or Rome
I fence against the foam
Or my own name, to stay
When I depart for aye?

Nothing: too near at hand
Planing the figured sand,
Effacing clean and fast
Cities not built to last
And charms devised in vain,
Pours the confounding main.

(Said to be from More Poems (Knopf, 1936), p. 64)

Housman asks the reader to tell him of runes to grave or bastions to design.  Here, as examples, are one rune and one bastion.

 


The rune known as
"Dagaz"

Represents
the balance point or "still point."


The Nike Bastion

 Dagaz: (Pronounced thaw-gauze, but with the "th" voiced as in "the," not unvoiced as in "thick") (Day or dawn.)

From Rune Meanings:

 Dagaz means "breakthrough, awakening, awareness. Daylight clarity as opposed to nighttime uncertainty. A time to plan or embark upon an enterprise. The power of change directed by your own will, transformation. Hope/happiness, the ideal. Security and certainty. Growth and release. Balance point, the place where opposites meet."

Also known as "the rune of transformation."

For the Dagaz rune in another context, see Geometry of the I Ching.  The geometry discussed there does, in a sense, "hold the bursting wave," through its connection with Walsh functions, hence with harmonic analysis.

 Temple of Athena Nike on the Nike Bastion, the Acropolis, Athens.  Here is a relevant passage from Paul Valéry's Eupalinos ou L'Architecte about another temple of four columns:

Et puis… Écoute, Phèdre (me disait-il encore), ce petit temple que j'ai bâti pour Hermès, à quelques pas d'ici, si tu savais ce qu'il est pour moi ! — Où le passant ne voit qu'une élégante chapelle, — c'est peu de chose: quatre colonnes, un style très simple, — j'ai mis le souvenir d'un clair jour de ma vie. Ô douce métamorphose ! Ce temple délicat, nul ne le sait, est l'image mathématique d'une fille de Corinthe que j'ai heureusement aimée. Il en reproduit fidèlement les proportions particulières. Il vit pour moi !

Four columns, in a sense more suited to Hardy's interests, are also a recurrent theme in The Diamond 16 Puzzle and Diamond Theory.

Apart from the word "mark" in The Oxford Book of English Verse, as noted above, neither the rune nor the bastion discussed has any apparent connection with the number 162… but seek and ye shall find.
 

Thursday, March 27, 2003

Thursday March 27, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:35 pm

Sixteen

war protesters, handcuffed together, blocked traffic near 47th Street and 5th Avenue in New York City Wednesday.  They chanted “Occupation is a Crime, Free Iraq and Palestine!”

Newsday, March 26, 2003

Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is known as the diamond district (or, in Buddhist parlance, “Diamond Way”).

“Is it safe?”
Sir Laurence Olivier, 1976

Monday, February 17, 2003

Monday February 17, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 am

Ideal of Hell:
The Burning of Columbia

On February 17, 1865, United States troops entered Columbia, SC.

“By midnight the whole town (except the outskirts) was wrapped in one huge blaze…. My God! what a scene! …. Such a scene as this with the drunken fiendish soldiers in their dark uniforms, infuriated, cursing, screaming, exulting in their work, came nearer the material ideal of hell than anything I ever expect to see again.”

Diary of Emma LeConte, 17, of Columbia

Happy Presidents’ Day.

Friday, February 14, 2003

Friday February 14, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:48 pm

Movie Date

For John and Klara von Neumann,
because they gave good parties:

"We gotta hurry or it's gonna be dark
'fore we get home!" 

Home Before Dark

A song by Judy Collins:

I won't be long
Don't worry about me
I'll be home before dark

Plato's Cave Valentine's Day Schedule

at UA Market Fair Movies,
 3521 Route 1
Princeton, NJ 08540 

Before-dark* showtime:

The Pianist, 5:30 PM

After-dark showtime:

The Recruit, 7:15 PM

* "Swiftly flow the years."

"Nothing is as it seems."

Friday, January 31, 2003

Friday January 31, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 6:20 pm

Irish Fourplay

"…something I once heard Charles M. Schulz say, 'Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.'"

 — William F. House

"Forewarned is four-armed."

— Folk saying

The painting at left is by Mary B. Kelly, a 1958 graduate of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College.

Kelly is an expert on portrayals of Goddess figures in art

Today in Australia is February First, the feast of St. Bridget.  As several websites note, St. Bridget is a combination of Christian saint and Goddess figure… rather like St. Sara (patron saint of Gypsies, also known as Kali) or like Sara Pezzini in the classic TV series "Witchblade."

"Aww… Irish foreplay."

— Sara Pezzini in Witchblade, Episode 6

"Mighty in the gift of purity
She was pleasing unto the Bridegroom on high."

Song of St. Bridget

"Brace yourself, Bridget."

— Definition of Irish foreplay

Saint Bridget's Cross:

Four people can form this cross by joining hands as shown.  Of course, a Goddess like Kali (shown above) or Sara Pezzini could do it all by herself.

 

For futher details, see The Swastika Goddess,  the history of Jews and the Roman Catholic Church, and the history of Irish neutrality in World War II.

Postscript  of 11 PM

The Goddess Bridget in Literature

The Goddess Bridget (or Brigid) is incarnated in two classic works of American literature —

  • The American patriot and Communist Party supporter Dashiell Hammett gave an unflattering portrayal of Brigid (O'Shaughnessy) in The Maltese Falcon.  For a Jungian analysis of the relationship between Sam Spade and Brigid, see the perceptive remarks of Ryan Benedetti:

"In Jungian terms, Brigid becomes a projection of Spade's anima, a contrasexual replica of his own face as expressed in someone of the opposite sex.

Spade wears a variety of masks in his work. Masking allows him to get underneath the scam most clients lay on him. He is closer to the darker side of his unconscious than any of the other characters in the book, and he is so, because of his role as shamus. His function in his society is to expose all of the underlying darkness of the human psyche."

One way of looking at animus and anima is through the following archetypes:

A diamond and its dual "whirl" figure —
or a "jewel-box and its mate"

  • Mark Twain, in Life on the Mississippi, describes the way Goddess Bridget (again, O'Shaughnessy) arranged the conveyance of her late husband to the next world:

 "D'ye mane to soy that Bridget O'Shaughnessy bought the mate to that joo-ul box to ship that dhrunken divil to Purgatory in?"

"Yes, madam."

"Then Pat shall go to heaven in the twin to it, if it takes the last rap the O'Flaherties can raise!"

Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Wednesday January 29, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:09 pm

Inaugural Address
for Cullinane College

(undelivered):

The Prisoner

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).

Sunday, January 26, 2003

Sunday January 26, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:55 pm

Our Town:
No There There?

Paul Newman, scheduled for his last performance in “Our Town” today, said in 1961:

“With that fifteen hundred, I could have beat him. That’s all I needed Charlie…You’d love to keep me hustlin’ for ya, huh, wouldn’t ya? I mean, a couple more years with me scufflin’ around, in them little towns and those back alleys, you might make yourself enough to get a little pool room back in Oakland – six tables and a handbook on the side…Lay down and die by yourself.”

— Fast Eddie Felson in “The Hustler

For another view of Oakland, see

Super Bowl XXXVII Live!


The Raiders take on the Buccaneers in Super Bowl XXXVII this afternoon.

Gertrude Stein on Oakland, California:

“There is no there there.”

Well, maybe a little pool room….

Friday, January 24, 2003

Friday January 24, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:30 am

Steps

John Lahr on a current production of "Our Town":

"The play's narrator and general master of artifice is the Stage Manager, who gives the phrase 'deus ex machina' a whole new meaning. He holds the script, he sets the scene, he serves as an interlocutor between the worlds of the living and the dead, calling the characters into life and out of it; he is, it turns out, the Author of Authors, the Big Guy himself. It seems, in every way, apt for Paul Newman to have taken on this role. God should look like Newman: lean, strong-chinned, white-haired, and authoritative in a calm and unassuming way—if only we had all been made in his image!"

The New Yorker, issue of Dec. 16, 2002

On this date in 1971, Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, died. 


Newman


Wilson

"Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way. If his arrangements would only stay put, if only people would do as he wished, the show would be great. Everybody, including himself, would be pleased. Life would be wonderful….

First of all, we had to quit playing God. It didn't work. Next, we decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director….

When we sincerely took such a position, all sorts of remarkable things followed….

We were now at Step Three."

Alcoholics Anonymous, also known as "The Big Book," Chapter 5 

Postscript of 5:15 AM, after reading the following in the New York Times obituaries:

"Must be a tough objective," says Willie to Joe as they huddle on the side of a road, weapons ready. "Th' old man says we're gonna have th' honor of liberatin' it."

"The old men know when an old man dies."

— Ogden Nash
 

Wednesday, January 22, 2003

Wednesday January 22, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:44 pm

Through a Soda-Fountain Mirror, Darkly

For Piper Laurie on Her Birthday

“He was part of my dream, of course —
but then I was part of his dream, too!”

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, Chapter XII (“Which Dreamed It?”) quoted as epigraph to a script for the film Pleasantville, which features a soda fountain from the 1950’s.

“Scenes from yesteryear are revisited through the soda-fountain mirror, creating such a fluid pathway between the past and present that one often becomes lost along the way.”

— Caroline Palmer’s review of “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” 

The above quotations are related to the 1952 film Has Anybody Seen My Gal?, in which James Dean makes a brief appearance at a 1920’s soda fountain. The film is chiefly notable for displaying the beauty of Piper Laurie, but a subplot is also of iterest.  Charles Coburn, a rich man visiting incognito a timeless town* rather like Pleasantville or Riverdale, takes up painting and is assisted by the young Gigi Perreau, who, as I recall, supplies him with the frame from a Circe Soap ad displayed in a shop window.

For more on a fictional rich character and Circe — indeed, enough for a soap — see my note of January 11, 2003, “The First Days of Disco,” and the sequel of January 12, 2003, “Ask Not.”  In the manner of magic realism, the adventures in the earlier entry of Scrooge McDuck and Circe are mirrored by those in the later entry of C. Douglas Dillon and Monique Wittig.

For a less pleasant trip back in time, see the later work of Gigi Perreau in Journey to the Center of Time (1967).  One viewer’s comment:

This is the worst movie ever made. I don’t want to hear about any of Ed Wood’s pictures. This is it, this is the one. Right here. The bottom of the deepest pit of cinema hell.

Happy birthday, Miss Laurie.

*Rather, in fact, like “Our Town.”  Here is John Lahr on a current production of that classic:

“The play’s narrator and general master of artifice is the Stage Manager, who gives the phrase ‘deus ex machina’ a whole new meaning. He holds the script, he sets the scene, he serves as an interlocutor between the worlds of the living and the dead, calling the characters into life and out of it; he is, it turns out, the Author of Authors, the Big Guy himself. It seems, in every way, apt for Paul Newman to have taken on this role. God should look like Newman: lean, strong-chinned, white-haired, and authoritative in a calm and unassuming way—if only we had all been made in his image!”

The New Yorker, issue of Dec. 16, 2002

If Newman is God, then Miss Laurie played God’s girlfriend.  Nice going, Piper.

 

Sunday, January 5, 2003

Sunday January 5, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:36 pm

Culinary Theology

A comment on "Whirligig," the previous entry:

 

When I hear 'red mill,'
I think Red Mill.

Red Mill
Burgers

Posted 1/5/2003 at 5:10 am
by
HomerTheBrave.

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. 

Thursday, November 21, 2002

Thursday November 21, 2002

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:23 pm

Pray

This brief heading echoes the title of the latest novel by Michael Crichton, perhaps the best-known member of the Harvard College class of 1964. In honor of that class and of Q (see the preceding entry), here is a condensed excerpt from a passage of Plato quoted by Q:

Socrates. ‘Should we not, before going, offer up a prayer to these local deities?’

‘By all means,’ Phaedrus agrees.

Socrates (praying): ‘Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, grant me beauty in the inward soul, and that the outward and inward may be at one!….

That prayer, I think, is enough for me.’

Phaedrus. ‘Ask the same for me, Socrates. Friends, methinks, should have all things in common.’

Socrates. ‘So be it…. Let us go.’

In accordance with this prayer, and with the coming of summer to Australia, that land beloved of Pan, this site’s music now returns to the theme introduced in my note of September 10, 2002, “The Sound of Hanging Rock.”

Wednesday, October 9, 2002

Wednesday October 9, 2002

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:40 am
 
To Apollo

On this date in 28 B.C. the Temple of Apollo
was dedicated on the Palatine Hill in Rome.

Horace, Odes, XXXI

Frui paratis et valido mihi,
Latoe, dones et precor integra
Cum mente nec turpem senectam
Degere nec cithara carentem.

O grant me, Phoebus, calm content,
Strength unimpaird, a mind entire,
Old age without dishonour spent,
Nor unbefriended by the lyre!

— The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace,
John Conington, translator.
London, George Bell and Sons, 1882.

Representations of Apollo: 

 

1

2

3

See also
The Angel in the Stone

"Everything is found 
and lost and buried 
and then found again"

— Tanya Wendling

Sunday, September 29, 2002

Sunday September 29, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:18 pm

New from Miracle Pictures
– IF IT’S A HIT, IT’S A MIRACLE! –

Pi in the Sky
for Michaelmas 2002

“Fear not, maiden, your prayer is heard.
Michael am I, guardian of the highest Word.”

A Michaelmas Play

Contact, by Carl Sagan:

Chapter 1 – Transcendental Numbers

  In the seventh grade they were studying “pi.” It was a Greek letter that looked like the architecture at Stonehenge, in England: two vertical pillars with a crossbar at the top. If you measured the circumference of a circle and then divided it by the diameter of the circle, that was pi. At home, Ellie took the top of a mayonnaise jar, wrapped a string around it, straightened the string out, and with a ruler measured the circle’s circumference. She did the same with the diameter, and by long division divided the one number by the other. She got 3.21. That seemed simple enough.

  The next day the teacher, Mr. Weisbrod, said that pi was about 22/7, about 3.1416. But actually, if you wanted to be exact, it was a decimal that went on and on forever without repeating the pattern of numbers. Forever, Ellie thought. She raised her hand. It was the beginning of the school year and she had not asked any questions in this class.
  “How could anybody know that the decimals go on and on forever?”
  “That’s just the way it is,” said the teacher with some asperity.
  “But why? How do you know? How can you count decimals forever?”
  “Miss Arroway” – he was consulting his class list – “this is a stupid question. You’re wasting the class’s time.”

  No one had ever called Ellie stupid before and she found herself bursting into tears….

  After school she bicycled to the library at the nearby college to look through books on mathematics. As nearly as she could figure out from what she read, her question wasn’t all that stupid. According to the Bible, the ancient Hebrews had apparently thought that pi was exactly equal to three. The Greeks and Romans, who knew lots of things about mathematics, had no idea that the digits in pi went on forever without repeating. It was a fact that had been discovered only about 250 years ago. How was she expected to know if she couldn’t ask questions? But Mr. Weisbrod had been right about the first few digits. Pi wasn’t 3.21. Maybe the mayonnaise lid had been a little squashed, not a perfect circle. Or maybe she’d been sloppy in measuring the string. Even if she’d been much more careful, though, they couldn’t expect her to measure an infinite number of decimals.

  There was another possibility, though. You could calculate pi as accurately as you wanted. If you knew something called calculus, you could prove formulas for pi that would let you calculate it to as many decimals as you had time for. The book listed formulas for pi divided by four. Some of them she couldn’t understand at all. But there were some that dazzled her: pi/4, the book said, was the same as 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + …, with the fractions continuing on forever. Quickly she tried to work it out, adding and subtracting the fractions alternately. The sum would bounce from being bigger than pi/4 to being smaller than pi/4, but after a while you could see that this series of numbers was on a beeline for the right answer. You could never get there exactly, but you could get as close as you wanted if you were very patient. It seemed to her

a miracle


 Cartoon by S.Harris

that the shape of every circle in the world was connected with this series of fractions. How could circles know about fractions? She was determined to learn

calculus.

  The book said something else: pi was called a “transcendental” number. There was no equation with ordinary numbers in it that could give you pi unless it was infinitely long. She had already taught herself a little algebra and understood what this meant. And pi wasn’t the only transcendental number. In fact there was an infinity of transcendental numbers. More than that, there were infinitely more transcendental numbers that ordinary numbers, even though pi was the only one of them she had ever heard of. In more ways than one, pi was tied to infinity.

  She had caught a glimpse of something majestic.

Chapter 24 – The Artist’s Signature

  The anomaly showed up most starkly in Base 2 arithmetic, where it could be written out entirely as zeros and ones. Her program reassembled the digits into a square raster, an equal number across and down. Hiding in the alternating patterns of digits, deep inside the transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of noughts.

  The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover

a miracle

— another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn’t matter what you look like, or what you’re made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you’ll find it. It’s already here. It’s inside everything. You don’t have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons… there is an intelligence that antedates the universe. The circle had closed. She found what she had been searching for.

Song lyric not in Sagan’s book:

Will the circle be unbroken
by and by, Lord, by and by?
Is a better home a-waitin’
in the sky, Lord, in the sky?

“Contact,” the film: 

Recording:

Columbia 37669

Date Issued:

Unknown

Side:

A

Title:

Can The Circle Be Unbroken

Artist:

Carter Family

Recording Date:

May 6, 1935

Listen:

Realaudio

Music courtesy of honkingduck.com.
 
For bluegrass midi version, click here.
 

The above conclusion to Sagan’s book is perhaps the stupidest thing by an alleged scientist that I have ever read.  As a partial antidote, I offer the following.

Today’s birthday: Stanley Kramer, director of “On the Beach.”

From an introduction to a recording of the famous Joe Hill song about Pie in the Sky:

“They used a shill to build a crowd… You know, a carny shill.”


Carny

Saturday, September 14, 2002

Saturday September 14, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

September 14:
Triumph of the Cross
and Death of
Princess Grace of Monaco

September 13 was the feast day of St. John Chrysostom

From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

“St. John Chrysostom more than once in his writings makes allusion to the adoration of the cross; one citation will suffice: ‘Kings removing their diadems take up the cross, the symbol of their Saviour’s death; on the purple, the cross; in their prayers, the cross; on their armour, the cross; on the holy table, the cross; throughout the universe, the cross. The cross shines brighter than the sun.'”

Today, September 14, is the feast day of the Triumph of

The Cross:

“The primitive form of the cross seems to have been that of the so-called ‘gamma’ cross (crux gammata), better known to Orientalists and students of prehistoric archæology by its Sanskrit name, swastika.” 

— The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume IV
Copyright © 1908
by Robert Appleton Company
Online Edition Copyright © 1999
by Kevin Knight
Nihil Obstat.
Remy Lafort, Censor
Imprimatur.
+John M. Farley,
Archbishop of New York

Later writers might choose to omit the above sentence, published in 1908, but, as Pilate said, “Quod scripsi, scripsi.”  For modern times, this quotation is perhaps best translated into German, the language of modern Pilates:

Was ich geschrieben habe,
habe ich geschrieben. 

It might well be accompanied by another translation from the same website, which renders the “Ora et labora” of St. Benedict as

Bete und arbeite!

and, indeed, by a classic quotation from twentieth-century German Christian thought:

ARBEIT MACHT FREI. 

Gate of Dachau

Thursday, September 12, 2002

Thursday September 12, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:56 pm

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…
— Madeleine L’Engle, Victoria Magazine, November 1995

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.
[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.”

Alabama plans
female chain gangs

Friday, April 26, 1996, story:

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The Montgomery prison system is preparing to snap shackles around the ankles of women prisoners, creating female chain gangs in the state that revived male leg-iron crews last year.

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
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew,
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.

1962 —

Everybody’s doin’ a brand new dance now;
I know you’re gonna like it if you give it a chance now…
So come on, c’mon, and do the locomotion with me!

Thursday, September 5, 2002

Thursday September 5, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:06 pm

Trifecta

Born today: Arthur Koestler,
former Communist and writer on parapsychology

From To Ride Pegasus, by Anne McCaffrey, 1973: 

“Mary-Molly luv, it’s going to be accomplished in steps, this establishment of the Talented in the scheme of things. Not society, mind you, for we’re the original nonconformists…. and Society will never permit us to integrate.  That’s okay!”  He consigned Society to insignificance with a flick of his fingers.  “The Talented form their own society and that’s as it should be: birds of a feather.  No, not birds.  Winged horses!  Ha!  Yes, indeed. Pegasus… the poetic winged horse of flights of fancy.  A bloody good symbol for us.  You’d see a lot from the back of a winged horse…”

“Yes, an airplane has blind spots.  Where would you put a saddle?”  Molly had her practical side.

He laughed and hugged her.  Henry’s frequent demonstrations of affection were a source of great delight to Molly, whose own strength was in tactile contacts. 

“Don’t know.  Lord, how would you bridle a winged horse?”

“With the heart?”

“Indubitably!”  The notion pleased him.  “Yes, with the heart and the head because Pegasus is too strong a steed to control or subdue by any ordinary method.” 

Born today:  Darryl F. Zanuck,
producer of “Viva Zapata!”

Director Eliza Kazan consults with scriptwriter John Steinbeck about the production of “Viva Zapata!” in Cuernavaca, Mexico:

When John woke, I asked him, “Isn’t the Syndicate of Film Technicians and Workers here Communist-dominated?”

Elia Kazan on Darryl Zanuck’s insistence that Zapata’s white horse be emphasized:

Darryl made only one suggestion that he was insistent on. He’d stolen it, no doubt, from an old Warner western, but he offered it as if it were pristine stuff. “Zapata must have a white horse,” he said, “and after they shoot him, we should show the horse running free in the mountains — get the idea? A great fade-out.” We got the idea, all right. Darryl was innocent about the symbol in his suggestion, but so enthusiastic about the emotion of it that he practically foamed at the mouth. John’s face was without expression. Actually, while I thought it was corny, the idea worked out well in the end. 

Born today: comedian Bob Newhart

 

If Kazan hadn’t directed “Viva Zapata!”…

Zanuck would have ended up shouting,

“I said a WHITE horse!”

Thursday September 5, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:36 am

Birthdate of film producer Darryl F. Zanuck

Among Zanuck’s films were “All about Eve” and “Viva Zapata!”

Bright Star

I do not have a photograph of Lucero Hernandez, the subject of my journal notes

Shining Forth and

Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

In keeping with Zanuck’s commandment that “The kid stays in the picture!” —

The photo at left, of a very young actress, captures some of Lucero’s beauty.

Center for Global Education,
Augsburg College
 

Semester-abroad Program in Mexico

“The program is based in Cuernavaca, a city known for its perennial springtime (70-80 degrees). Cuernavaca, the capital of the state of Morelos, is about 50 miles south of Mexico City. Both the city and the state are important in Mexican history: the palace of the conqueror Hernan Cortez borders the central plaza in Cuernavaca and Morelos is known as “the cradle of the Mexican revolution” of 1910 led by Emiliano Zapata, who was born in a small town near Cuernavaca. A city of more than one million, Cuernavaca is also known for its innovative grass-roots education programs, economic cooperatives, and base Christian communities inspired by liberation theology.” 

Sunday, August 4, 2002

Sunday August 4, 2002

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:52 pm

The Story Theory of Truth

versus

The Diamond Theory of Truth

One year ago today, Lorenzo Music, the voice of Carlton the doorman on Rhoda, died.  His eulogy from Valerie Harper:

 “Valerie’s heart is breaking, but Rhoda is certain that Carlton the doorman is giving St. Peter at the gate a run for his money.”

Today’s birthday: Logician John Venn

Appearing for the story theory…

Flannery O’Connor:

“In the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or statistics, but by the stories it tells. Fiction is the most impure and the most modest and the most human of the arts.”

Appearing for the diamond theory…

Mary McCarthy and G. H. Hardy:

From the Hollywood Investigator:

 On October 18, 1979, Mary McCarthy said on PBS’s Dick Cavett Show: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”

Don’t forget “a,” as in “a people is known” —

“Greek mathematics is permanent, more permanent even than Greek literature.  Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not.”

— G. H. Hardy in A Mathematician’s Apology

And a closing rebuttal from the story theory…

Martin Heidegger and Dean Martin: 

Words of wisdom from Martin Heidegger, Catholic Nazi:

“The nature of art is poetry.  The nature of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth…. In the work, truth is thrown toward… an historical group of men.”

Poetry, Language, Thought, page 75, translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper & Row paperback, 1975

And from Dean Martin, avatar of anti-art :

That’s Amore:

– Artist: Dean Martin as sung on “Dean Martin’s Greatest Hits”
– Capitol 4XL-9389
– peak Billboard position # 2 in 1953
– from the movie “the Caddy” starring Dean, Jerry Lewis, and Donna Reed
– Words and Music by Harry Warren and Jack Brooks

(In Napoli where love is King, when boy meets girl, here’s what they say)

When the moon hits your eye like a big-a pizza pie,
That’s amore!
When the world seems to shine like you’ve had too much wine,
That’s amore!

Saturday, July 20, 2002

Saturday July 20, 2002

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:04 pm

Welcome to your first post – you’re already publishing!

This post is private, so visitors can’t see it. To make it Public, click the “Private Entry” link below. Toggle it back to Private with another click.

To edit this post and turn it into your own unique first post, just click the “edit it” link, delete what you see, type what you want, and click “submit”. You can even create a whole new entry by clicking on “New Weblog Entry” in the toolbar above!

If you’re using Internet Explorer, you can use Ctrl-b for bold, Cntrl-i for italics, Cntrl-u for underline, or click “Create Hyperlink” to embed a link (Sorry, Netscape doesn’t support these features!). You can also use standard keyboard shortcuts to cut and paste: Ctrl-c to cut and Ctrl-v to paste.

There are lots of great ways to use and customize your weblog. Visit our Getting Started section for more ideas.

Good luck and have fun with your weblog!

P.S. Don’t forget to install the xTools button in your browser; it only takes a few seconds and lets you publish anytime, from anywhere on the Web… and it’s free!

« Newer Posts

Powered by WordPress