Today's Google Doodle, honoring soccer at the Paris games,
suggests a review of Hillman's "acorn theory" of the soul in
a Log24 post of September 10, 2022 . . .
"… I loved Gigi. It fed directly into my Francophilia.
I was convinced that at some future date, I, like
Gigi, would be trained as a courtesan. I, too, would
cause some hard case, experienced roué to abandon
his chill and irony." — Jessica Kardon
Related reading:
On Doctor Strange in Spider-Man: No Way Home —
"This all-powerful wizard really used 'Scooby-Doo' as a verb
meaning 'successfully pull off a series of physical challenges
against monsters who are real.' What in the dad-trying-to-
relate-to-his-distant-son hell? That's like pumping someone up
to kick a game-winning field goal by saying 'Charlie Brown this crap.'"
— Vinnie Mancuso at Collider , November 17, 2021
But seriously . . .
From posts tagged Frankfurter —
"Scooby-Doo this ."
"Bowden applied what he viewed as the lessons of the battlefield
to the football field. While bedridden with rheumatic fever at age 13,
he had listened to radio broadcasts telling of World War II battles,
and he later studied the campaigns of Patton, MacArthur and
Germany’s Erwin Rommel.
'They all demonstrate discipline,' Bowden once said, 'and that you
need reserves so that if you’re getting annihilated on one front, you
can attack somewhere else.' ” — Richard Goldstein
Amen.
See as well "Geometry Battlefield" in this morning's previous post.
“But perhaps its most iconic reinvention came with the longstanding
Marlboro Man campaign, which ran from 1963 to 1971. In an article
by Denver Post journalist Jim Carrier, who spent six months traveling
across the American West to meet former Marlboro Men, we’re told
that the campaign began in late 1954, when ad exec Leo Burnett asked
his top creatives, ‘What is the most masculine image in the U.S. today?’
According to Carrier, ‘Philip Morris, the fourth-largest American tobacco
company, wanted to create a filter cigarette to deal with the rising problem
of smoker’s cough and lung disease. But they had to overcome the early
image of filters as being for sissies.'”
Related story from The New York Times on Monday, March 1 —
Related flashback from this journal on Sunday, February 28 —
Lifetime Achievement —
“Eugene Telemachus Rossides (his middle name was for the son of
Odysseus and Penelope in the Odyssey ) was born in Brooklyn on
Oct. 23, 1927.” —
Click the horse to search this journal for Trojan .
From the 1984 New Orleans film Tightrope—
This post was suggested by the late Yale literary critic
Geoffrey Hartman, who reportedly died on March 14.
" 'Interpretation is like a football game,' Professor Hartman
wrote in 'The Voice of the Shuttle,' a 1969 essay."
— A 2016 obituary by Margalit Fox
The previous two posts touched on two academic
pursuits, mathematics and football. These are united
in the vesica piscis symbol. See posts tagged
"Universe of Discourse."
Two pieces by NPR education writer Molly Bloom:
See also yesterday's post on another NPR / Princeton education figure,
Keith Devlin:
An illustration (click for larger view with context):
From MAA columnist Keith Devlin yesterday :
"All very depressing. I fear that this state of affairs
will continue all the time US education continues to be
treated as a political football, with our nation’s children
and their teachers treated as pawns while various
groups fight political battles…."
“Once again, Harvard defeats Holy Cross.”
That post quoted Joseph Campbell describing a
“… matrix of the cosmic process, whether in the macrocosm
or in a microcosmic field of manifestation.”
Related material —
Macrocosm:
Microcosmic field of manifestation:
Once again, Harvard defeats Holy Cross.
See also a related remark by Norman Mailer, and Plan 9 in this journal.
Presumably the Holy Cross defeat will please art theorist Rosalind Krauss (below).
(Click to enlarge.)
From the 1984 New Orleans film Tightrope—
Related material: Walking the Tightrope and Transgressing.
The diamond from the Chi-rho page
of the Book of Kells —
The diamond at the center of Euclid's
Proposition I, according to James Joyce
(i.e., the Diamond in the Mandorla) —
“He pointed at the football
on his desk. ‘There it is.’”
– Glory Road
"Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge." —Nabokov
Suggested by yesterday's evening NY lottery—
Post 4248: The Hunt for Exemplary October, and
Post 942: Links for St. Benedict
Related material—
— Collins English Dictionary
See also…
Tiffany Case and…
The Diamond
in the Mandorla
“He pointed at the football
on his desk. ‘There it is.’”
– Glory Road
The New York Times today on a new show by tightrope artist Philippe Petit—
“He comes out of that really wonderful European tradition of street performance— it blends a boundary of what’s art and what’s life,” said Jay Wegman, the director of the Abrons Arts Center, who offered Mr. Petit the three-night run. “He’s also kind of mischievous, not in a threatening or evil way, but in a child’s way of teasing and having fun.”
For a much darker approach to street performance that also involves mischief and blended boundaries, see "Tightrope" (1984)—
Background: Men in Feminism , edited by Alice Jardine and
published by Taylor & Francis in 1987, "Walking the Tightrope
of Feminism and Male Desire," by Judith Mayne, page 64
See also yesterday's Another Opening and Football in this journal.
Austin Considine on a Tennessee tourist trap—
"It would be easy for a city slicker to assume this place misses its own punch lines."
It probably doesn't, but a certain academic tourist trap does .
A trio of Harvard hicks—
1. The chairman of the Harvard philosophy department, Sean D. Kelly—
"Football can literally bring meaning to life."
(See also Garry Wills on Kelly, Rite of Spring, and Heisman Trophy.)
2. A professor of English at Harvard, Marjorie Garber, in a deconstructive meditation—
Garber notes that the word "literature" has two meanings– the English department's meaning, and that of other departments' references to "the literature."
"Whenever there is a split like this, it is worth pausing to wonder why. High/low, privileged/popular, aesthetic/professional, keep/throw away. It seems as if the category of literature in what we might inelegantly call the literary sense of the word is being both protected and preserved in amber by the encroachment, on all sides, of the nonliterary literature that proliferates in professional-managerial culture. But literature has always been situated on the boundary between itself and its other."
— The Use and Abuse of Literature , published by Pantheon on March 29, 2011
3. The president of Harvard, Drew Faust—
A comment recently made to Faust—
“[A] tyrant wanted a crimson-tinged report that he was running a democracy, and for a price, a Harvard expert obliged…."
Her response—
"Faust replied that for her to say anything about this would make her 'scold in chief.'"
— University Diaries today. See the excellent commentary there.
The Harvard Crimson —Magic of Numbers:
|
Saturday night's game… Harvard vs. Brown at Providence—
Related philosophy about divine providence—
See also, from 2002, a note on "light inclosed in the dark" versus the late Harvard philosopher Barbara Johnson.
For some context on Harvard and "the Magic of Numbers" see Summer Reading from 2007.
An Ecumenical Hymn
For those who observed Yom Kippur at
Harvard's Memorial Church on Saturday,
September 18, 2010—
Friday night and the lights are low…
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day for
July 13, 2007— Manhattanhenge.
See also on July 13, 2007, in this journal, a post
for Harrison Ford's 65th birthday featuring the
ecumenical diamond-in-a-football religious symbol—
(A sequel to Rally Round the Flag and Gotta Know the Territory)
Click here for a bigger picture.
See also, in this journal, "a corpse will be transported by express."
Band pioneer William P. Foster died on Saturday, the Feast of St. Augustine.
Related material—
"Mexico, the place you thought you knew"— an ad in this morning's NY Times obituaries—
and the following literary passage—
To the leftist philosophers of Villanova
From "Make a Différance"
(Women's History Month, 2005)—
“He pointed at the football
on his desk. ‘There it is.’”
– Glory Road
Quodlibet*
Compare and contrast
the diamond in the football
with the jewel in the lotus.
* "A scholastic argumentation upon a subject chosen at will, but almost always theological. These are generally the most elaborate and subtle of the works of the scholastic doctors." —Century Dictionary
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Harvest Books paperback, 1950, pp. 248-249:
“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points; who whispers as he whispered to me that summer morning in the house where the corn comes up to the window, ‘The willow grows on the turf by the river. The gardeners sweep with great brooms and the lady sits writing.’ Thus he directed me to that which is beyond and outside our own predicament; to that which is symbolic, and thus perhaps permanent, if there is any permanence in our sleeping, eating, breathing, so animal, so spiritual and tumultuous lives.”
Up to the first semicolon, this is the Associated Press thought for today.
Related aesthetic philosophy from The Washington Post:
“Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself, a church of American pragmatism that deals with the material stuff of experience in the history of art. To understand these lectures, which began promising an argument about how abstraction works and ended with an almost medieval allegory of how man confronts the void, one has to understand that Varnedoe views the history of abstraction as a pastor surveys the flock.”
|
“He pointed at the football
on his desk. ‘There it is.'”
— Glory Road
See also
Hieron Grammaton
and
Epiphany 2007.
"I wasn’t expecting Ernst Gombrich, but surely three writers, among them, could inject a touch of class."
The "Jumper" theme, teleportation, has been better developed by three other writers– Bester, Zelazny, and King–
"As a long-time fan of both Alfie Bester and Roger Zelazny, I was delighted to find this posthumous collaboration. Psychoshop is, I think, true to both authors' bodies of work. After all, Bester's influence on Zelazny is evident in a a number of works, most notably Eye of Cat with its dazzling experimental typography so reminiscent of what Bester had done in The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination."
— Amazon.com customer review
"'This is the last call for Jaunt-701,' the pleasant female voice echoed through the Blue Concourse of New York's Port Authority Terminal."
— Stephen King, "The Jaunt"
|
From another "Jaunt-701"– Log24, Feb. 7:
The Football
Mandorla New York Lottery, 2008: "He pointed at the football "The |
"It's eternity in there,"
he said, and dropped dead….
— Stephen King, "The Jaunt"
Related material:
the previous entry.
New York Lottery, 2008:
"He pointed at the football
on his desk. 'There it is.'"
— Glory Road
"The Rock" —
Goodspeed:
"I'll do my best."
Mason:
"Your best. Losers
always whine about
their best. Winners
go home and …."
"The
Wu Li
Masters know
that physicists are
doing more than
'discovering the endless
diversity of nature.' They
are dancing with Kali,
the Divine Mother of
Hindu mythology."
— Gary Zukav,
Harvard
'64
|
"Three times the concentred self takes hold, three times The thrice concentred self, having possessed The object, grips it in savage scrutiny, Once to make captive, once to subjugate Or yield to subjugation, once to proclaim The meaning of the capture, this hard prize, Fully made, fully apparent, fully found."
— "Credences of Summer," VII, |
For a religious
interpretation
of 265, see
Sept. 30, 2004.
For a religious
interpretation
of 153, see
Fish Story.
A quotation from
the Eater of Souls:
"That's how it is, Easy," my Coach went on, his voice more in sorrow than in anger. "Yardage is all very well but you don't make a nickel unless you cross that old goal line with the egg tucked underneath your arm." He pointed at the football on his desk. "There it is. I had it gilded and lettered clear back at the beginning of the season, you looked so good and I had so much confidence in you– it was meant to be yours at the end of the season, at a victory banquet."
— Glory Road,
by Robert A. Heinlein
November 2004–
Controversial "Desperate Housewives"… ranks No. 5 among all prime-time shows for ages 12-17. ("Monday Night Football" is No. 18.) This may explain in part why its current advertisers include products like Fisher-Price toys, the DVD of "Elf" and the forthcoming Tim Allen holiday vehicle, "Christmas With the Kranks." Those who cherish the First Amendment can only hope that the Traditional Values Coalition, OneMillionMoms.com, OneMillionDads.com and all the rest send every e-mail they can to the F.C.C. demanding punitive action against the stations that broadcast "Desperate Housewives." A "moral values" crusade that stands between a TV show this popular and its audience will quickly learn the limits of its power in a country where entertainment is god. — "The Great Indecency Hoax," a New York Times column by Frank Rich quoted in Log24 on Nov. 26, 2004 |
The entertainment continues. A rabbi's obituary in today's New York Times (see previous entry) served as ad-bait for "Joshua," a Fox Searchlight film opening July 6.
A search for a less sacrilegious memorial to the rabbi yields the following:
The "Project MUSE" link above
works only at
subscribing libraries.
It seems that here, too,
the rabbi is being
used as bait.
For a perhaps preferable
reference to bait, in the
context of St. Peter as
a "fisher of men," see
the Christian "mandorla"
or "vesica piscis,"
a figure hidden within
the geometry of Rome's
St. Peter's Square–
which, despite its name,
is an oval:
For the geometric
construction of the
Roman oval, see
"ovato tondo" in
Rudolf Arnheim's
The Power of the Center.
For a less theoretical account
of the religious significance
of the mandorla, see
the 2001 film
The Center of the World.
Pictures at 11
From today's Maureen Dowd column:
"Trapped in their blue bell jar,
drowning in unfulfilled dreams,
Democrats are the
'Desperate Housewives' of politics."
 Sam Dean for The New York Times
Law and Religion The Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University is part of a movement around the nation that brings a religious perspective to the law. |
Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird: "She's… broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with." |
"Every performance was a gem,
including 'Mockingbird'…
sung by Toby Keith with his
17-year-old daughter Krystal."
Midnight in the Garden of
Good and Evil, continued
By MARK PURDY
San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. – Once the out-of-towners stopped talking, the people from San Jose were allowed to speak. And the honesty erupted.
“Thank you for coming,” said Richard Tillman, the younger brother of Pat Tillman. “But with all respect to those who have been up here before me, Pat’s not with God. He’s not religious. He’s dead. It was amazing to be his little brother. He was the biggest champion I’ve ever seen.”
Commentary:
Maybe God doesn’t like religious people.
See The Four Last Things (6/4/03),
With Honors (6/5/03), and
Directions Out (4/26/04).
| Number 61 |  |
For Joan Didion on her birthday
From “On Keeping a Notebook” (1966)
in Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write- on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hatcheck counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, “That’s my old football number”)….
I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hat-check counter in Pavillon; in fact I suspect that the line “That’s my old football number” touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probably “The Eighty-Yard Run.”
From a 1994 interview with Tommy Lee Jones by Bryant Gumbel:
Gumbel: While majoring in English, Jones was also an offensive guard on the Harvard football team. Number 61 in your program, his last game, against Yale, proved to be one of the most famous games every played. Harvard scored 16 points in the last 42 seconds to gain a 29-all tie. (Photo of Jones in football uniform, footage of 1968 football game.)
Mr. J: It couldn’t have been a more spectacular way to leave the game that had been so important to me all my life. The grass had never looked that green, nor the sky that blue.
Gumbel: That lucky game was for Jones a precursor of good fortune to come. It seems Harvard´s team doctor, Thomas Quigley, had caught some of Tommy Lee’s off the field plays and come away impressed. (Photo of Jones at rehearsal)
Mr. J: And when I was about to graduate, he asked if I had thought about going to New York, and I said I didn’t know. He said, “Well, if you do, take this letter and give it to my daughter, she’s doing a play.”
Ms. Jane Alexander (Actress): And I opened it. It was from my father, and it said: “This young man excels at Harvard. He is a good football player, but he wants to be an actor. Take care of him.” So I introduced him to a few agents, and right away he got a job.
Mr. J: And I had one line…. The line was five words long.
Gumbel: Were this a fairy tale, it would be….
Joan Didion: “That’s my old football number.”
Miss Sauvé
for the Sunday following Corpus Christi Day, 2002:
The part of her fiction that most fascinates me, then and now, is what many critics referred to as “the grotesque,” but what she herself called “the reasonable use of the unreasonable.” [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, eds. (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1969)]
A modest example comes to mind. In a short story …. the setting sun appears like a great red ball, but she sees it as “an elevated Host drenched in blood” leaving a “line like a red clay road in the sky.” [Flannery O’Connor, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” from A Good Man is Hard to Find (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971)]
In a letter to a friend of hers, O’Connor would later write, “…like the child, I believe the Host is actually the body and blood of Christ, not just a symbol. If the story grows for you it is because of the mystery of the Eucharist in it.” In that same correspondence, O’Connor relates this awkward experience:
I was once, five or six years ago, taken by [Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick] to have dinner with Mary McCarthy…. She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went and eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say…. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [McCarthy] said that when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable. [Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor (Vintage: New York, 1979) 124-125]
….There is, of course, something entirely preposterous and, well, unreasonable, almost grotesque, about the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. We claim, with a perfectly straight face, to eat the body and drink the blood of the Eternal Word of God, the second person of the Most Holy Trinity who, according to some, shouldn’t even have a body to begin with. But therein lies precisely the most outlandish feature of the Eucharist: namely, that it embodies the essential scandal of the Incarnation itself.
— Friar Francisco Nahoe, OFM Conv.
From James Joyce
A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man
Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?
— Here he is! Here he is!
From The Gazette, Montreal,
of Sunday, August 20, 1995, page C4:
“Summer of ’69,” a memoir by Judy Lapalme on the death by accidental drowning of her 15-year-old younger brother:
“I had never tasted pizza until Jeff died. Our family, of staunch Irish Catholic stock with more offspring than money, couldn’t cope with the luxury or the spice.
The Hallidays, neighbors from across the street, sent it over to us the day after the funeral, from Miss Sauvé’s Pizzeria, on Sauvé St., just east of Lajeunesse St. in Ahuntsic. An all-dressed pizza with the hard hat in the centre….
I was 17 that summer and had just completed Grade 12 at Holy Names High School in Rosemont….
…. Jeff was almost 16, a handsome football star, a rebellious, headstrong, sturdy young man who was forever locking horns with my father…. On Friday, Aug. 1, Jeff went out on the boat… and never came back….
The day after the funeral, a white Volkswagen from Miss Sauvé’s Pizzeria delivered a jumbo, all-dressed pizza to us. The Hallidays’ daughter, Diane, had been smitten with Jeff and wanted to do something special.
My father assured us that we wouldn’t like it, too spicy and probably too garlicky. There could not be a worse indictment of a person to my father than to declare them reeking of garlic.
The rest of us tore into the cardboard and began tasting this exotic offering — melted strands of creamy, rubbery, burn-your-palate mozzarrella that wasn’t Velveeta, crisp, dry, and earthy mushrooms, spicy and salty pepperoni sliding off the crust with each bite, green peppers…. Bread crust both crisp and soggy with tomato sauce laden with garlic and oregano.
It was an all-dressed pizza, tasted for the first time, the day after we buried Jeff….
The fall of 1969, I went to McGill…. I never had another pizza from Miss Sauvé’s. It’s gone now — like so many things.”
Ten thousand places
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889
She died on August 3, 1964 at the age of 39.
In almost all of her works the characters were led to a place where they had to deal with God’s presence in the world.
She once said “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.”
Flannery OConnor – Southern Prophet:
… When a woman wrote to Flannery O’Connor saying that one of her stories “left a bad taste in my mouth,” Flannery wrote back: “You weren’t supposed to eat it.”
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