Log24

From University Diaries  yesterday—

"A writer for The Atlantic  applauds Santorum's attack on universities
as secular, amoral indoctrination machines.

What can UD  say to this?…."

Below is a screenshot of the new home page for
Columbia University Department of Mathematics.

The impressive building in the photo is not  the math department.

(Click to enlarge.)

The building is actually Columbia's Butler Library.

"Along the front and sides of the library are inscribed the names of
Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Desmosthenes,
Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Tacitus, Saint Augustine, Aquinas, Dante,
Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, and Goethe." —Wikipedia

The inscribed names outline a defense of liberal education
perhaps more robust than the Feb. 26 effort of Andrew Delbanco,
which University Diaries  calls "tepid." (See the previous Log24 post.)

Related material: Object Lesson.

See also For the Pope in Scotland.

Thanks to Critical Mass for a July 24, 2009, discussion of the word "glory."

Related material: The glorious illustrations by Arnold Roth in the City Journal  of November 13, 2009.

The author of the above title is featured in
a New York Times  obituary today. Another 
book by the same author, On Glory Roads,
appears in some related readings here .

See Glory Road in this journal.

See also Road to Hell.

In a New Yorker  "Cultural Comment" column today,
Richard Brody describes a 2004 novel that he says …

"… dramatizes the American character as
vast, manifold, and inchoate;
it can use its prodigious and uninhibited energy
for good or for evil, and it shifts
under the sudden force of unforeseeable events.
The shifts and pivots of the American nation
at large are also those of each individual American.
The grand political stage and the intimate life
are inseparable; identity itself is inextricable
from the currents of history. The novel’s
mighty psychological weight rests upon
a terrifyingly delicate balance of circumstances
that depend on whims of chance." 

I prefer the shifts and pivots in earlier fictions; for example,
those of Robert A. Heinlein, who died in 1988.

Some backstory :  Glory Road  in this journal.

Under the Volcano:
A Bottle, a Door, a Box

See also Glory Season (Nov. 12, 2005) and Unique Figure (April 12, 2011).

Update of 11:22 AM —

Today in History —

"On December 21, 1937, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'
premiered to a record-breaking audience at the Carthay Circle
Theatre in Los Angeles."

Related material:  The Red Book.

From James Joyce's  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man —

See also “Six Cuban Families Celebrate Kids’ Law Degrees.”
Feliz Cumpleaños  to Al Pacino.

* “The Lighthouse,” in Spanish.  See Under the Volcano .

See "Glory Road" + "Black Box."

Tablet  magazine, November 9th, 2012,
on Spielberg's Lincoln :

"… the movie’s lone Rocky moment
of ecstatic self-congratulation
is reserved for the amendment’s climactic
passage with the victorious congressmen
spontaneously bursting into
'The Battle Hymn of the Republic.' "

"Mine eyes have seen the glory…"

Both images above refer to this morning's post
 Professor Lavery's Sunday School.

For other porn from Tablet  magazine, see
Minimalist Whirl.

For other porn from Lincoln's seat of government, see
Physical Poetry and All In .

For further blasphemy, see The Apotheosis of Washington:

A followup to this morning's post Stolen Glory— 

Columbia's Butler Library "plays a role in
Paul Auster's 2009 novel Invisible ,
where the novel's main protagonist, Adam Walker,
takes a job as a 'page' in the library's stacks." —Wikipedia

Part I (from Feb. 24)—

Part II— (Click to enlarge)

For the page's source, see Butler Library.

"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—

three-point landing n

— 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    

To the leftist philosophers of Villanova

From "Make a Différance"
(Women's History Month, 2005)—

Frida Saal's 

Lacan Derrida:

"I was visited by a minotaur."
— Harvard student, Fall 2009.

(For the visit, see yesterday's posts
Glory Road continued… And continued….)

Song of the Minotaur– Part I, Part II, Part III

Glory Road postgraduate curriculum–

"Learning has always been a major part of Catholic tradition."

Related material:

The Labyrinth of Solitude
entry in this journal,
The Harvard Crimson on the
Harvard FML Video Contest,
and the winning video—

Another view of Harvard–

"Let Noon Be Fair."
— Novel title, Willard Motley.

See also Soul at Harvard.

From the weblog of David Lavery, literature, film, and television scholar/critic, now teaching at Middle Tennessee State University–

Lavery’s quote of the day (6/27/09)-

“Art is based on second love, not first love. In it we make a return to something which we had willfully alienated. The child is occupied mostly with things, but it is because he is still unfurnished with systematic ideas, not because he is a ripe citizen by nature and comes already trailing clouds of glory. Images are clouds of glory for the man who has discovered that ideas are a sort of darkness.”

–John Crowe Ransom

Posted by Lavery on Friday, June 26, 2009, at 9:00 PM

Related material:
Log24 entries of 11/18/05

Also in today’s online Times:

“Mstislav Rostropovich, a cellist and conductor who was renowned not only as one of the great instrumentalists of the 20th century, but also as an outspoken champion of artistic freedom in Russia during the final decades of the Cold War, died in Moscow today. He was 80 and lived in Paris, with homes in Moscow, St. Petersburg, London and Lausanne, Switzerland….

Mr. Rostropovich… was widely known by his diminutive, Slava (which means glory in Russian)….”

Related material:

I. “Established on 8 November 1943, the Order of Glory (Orden Slavy – Орден Славы) was an Order (decoration) of the Soviet Union…. The Order of Glory… was modelled closely upon the Tsarist Cross of St. George….” —Wikipedia

II. Also on the 8th of November, in 2006 and 2002: Grave Matters and Religious Symbolism at Princeton.

III. “Mr. Rostropovich will be buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery, where on Wednesday his friend, Boris Yeltsin, post-Soviet Russia’s first president, was laid to rest.” —New York Times

IV. “A graveyard smash.” –Bobby (Boris) Pickett, who died Wednesday.

The Lincoln Brigade



Marches On.

As yesterday’s Lincoln’s Birthday entry indicated, my own sympathies are not with the “created equal” crowd.  Still, the Catholic Fascism of Franco admirer Andrew Cusack seems somewhat over-the-top.  A more thoughtful approach to these matters may be found in a recommendation by Ross Douthat at The American Scene:

Read Eve Tushnet on the virtues of The Man in the High Castle.

Related material: Log24 on Nov. 14, Nov. 15, and Nov. 16, 2003.

Another item of interest from Eve:

“Transubstantiation [is equivalent but not equal to] art (deceptive accident hides truthful substance), as vs. Plato’s condemnation of the physical & the fictive? (Geo. Steiner)”

Related material:

“In Grammars of Creation, more than in his 1989 book Real Presences, Steiner acknowledges that his argument rests on inescapably Christian foundations. In fact, he has in the past sometimes written in a strongly anti–Christian vein, while the present book reflects the influence of, among others, Miri Rubin, whose Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture is credited in a footnote. Steiner asserts that, after the Platonisms and Gnosticisms of late antiquity, it is the doctrines of incarnation and transubstantiation that mark ‘the disciplining of Western syntax and conceptualization’ in philosophy and art. ‘Every heading met with in a study of “creation,” every nuance of analytic and figural discourse,’ he says, derives from incarnation and transubstantiation, ‘concepts utterly alien to either Judaic or Hellenic perspectives– though they did, in a sense, arise from the collisions and commerce between both.’….

The incarnation of God in the Son, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into his body and blood, are ‘a mysterium, an articulated, subtly innervated attempt to reason the irrational at the very highest levels of intellectual pressure.’ ‘Uniquely, perhaps, the hammering out of the teaching of the eucharist compels Western thought to relate the depth of the unconscious and of pre-history with speculative abstractions at the boundaries of logic and of linguistic philosophy.’ Later, the ‘perhaps’ in that claim seems to have disappeared:

At every significant point, Western philosophies of art and Western poetics draw their secular idiom from the substratum of Christological debate. Like no other event in our mental history, the postulate of God’s kenosis through Jesus and of the never-ending availability of the Savior in the wafer and wine of the eucharist, conditions not only the development of Western art and rhetoric itself, but at a much deeper level, that of our understanding and reception of the truth of art– a truth antithetical to the condemnation of the fictive in Plato.

This truth reaches its unrepeated perfection in Dante, says Steiner. In Dante, ‘It rounds in glory the investigation of creativity and creation, of divine authorship and human poesis, of the concentric spheres of the aesthetic, the philosophical, and the theological. Now truth and fiction are made one, now imagination is prayer, and Plato’s exile of the poets refuted.’ In the fashionable critical theories of our day, we witness ‘endeavors of the aesthetic to flee from incarnation.’ ‘It is the old heresies which revive in the models of absence, of negation or erasure, of the deferral of meaning in late–twentieth–century deconstruction. The counter-semantics of the deconstructionist, his refusal to ascribe a stable significance to the sign, are moves familiar to [an earlier] negative theology.’ Heidegger’s poetics of ‘pure immanence’ are but one more attempt ‘to liberate our experience of sense and of form from the grip of the theophanic.’ But, Steiner suggests, attempted flights from the reality of Corpus Christi will not carry the day. ‘Two millennia are only a brief moment.’

Wikipedia on the tesseract:

Robert A. Heinlein in Glory Road:

Johnny Cash: “And behold, a white horse.”

On The Last Battle, a book in the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis:

Lewis said in “The Weight of Glory”—
 

On enchantments that need to be broken:

See the description of the Eater of Souls in Glory Road and of Scientism in

• Mathematics and Narrative,

• The Rhetoric of Scientism,

• and the C. S. Lewis classic,
  That Hideous Strength.

State of Grace
On this date in 1929,
Grace Kelly was born.

The Day Justice Died

But all things then were oracle and secret.
Remember the night when,
    lost, returning, we turned back
Confused, and our headlights
    singled out the fox?
Our thoughts went with it then,
    turning and turning back
   With the same terror,
                into the deep thicket
   Beside the highway,
                at home in the dark thicket.

I say the wood within is the dark wood….

— Donald Justice, “Sadness”

In memory of Justice,
Dante excerpts:

Canto I

Midway in the journey of our life
 I found myself in a dark wood,
 for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell what that
 wood was, wild, rugged, harsh;
 the very thought of it renews the fear!

Canto III

— Translation by Charles S. Singleton,
selection by Paul J. Viscuso

Justice moved my high maker…

From the day Justice died,
Friday, August 6, 2004,
The Feast of the Metamorphosis:

From Robert A. Heinlein‘s
classic novel, Glory Road:

Today’s birthday:

Esther Dyson

Ishtar Wannabe

Reuters, Los Angeles,
June 17, 2004 09:09 PM ET—

Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone has adopted the Hebrew name Esther.

I personally feel that a more deserving candidate for such a flattering name change would be Piper Laurie (nee Rosetta Jacobs).

See an entry of  Dec. 30, 2002, on Miss Laurie:

Dead Poets Society

On Friday, December 5, 2003, I picked up a copy of An Introduction to Poetry, by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, 8th ed., at a used book sale for 50 cents.

The previous entry concerns a poem by Buson I found in that book, and contains a link on Kennedy’s name to a work suitable for this holiday season.

As additional thanks for the poem, here are links to a two-part interview with Gioia:

Paradigms Lost: Part One, and

Paradigms Lost: Part Two.

“A poem need not shout to be heard.”
— Dana Gioia

Three Days Late
and a Dollar Short

This is a book that attempts to recreate the myth of Saint Peter.

See the New York Times review of this book from today, July 2, 2003, three days late.  The Feast of St. Peter was on June 29.

The price, $24, also falls short of the theological glory reflected in the number 25, the common denominator of Christmas (12/25) and AntiChristmas (6/25), as well as the number of the heart of the Catholic church, the Bingo card. 

For all these issues, see my entries and links in memory of St. Peter, from June 29. 

The real “book against God,” a novel by Robert Stone, is cited there.  The legend of St. Peter is best described by Stone, not Wood.

Of Time and the River

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

Thomas Wolfe

“entered the university at Chapel Hill at fifteen ‘an awkward, unhappy misfit.’ By the time he graduated, he was editor of the college newspaper….”

Jeff MacNelly, who died on this date in the Year of Our Lord 2000,

“in 1977 started drawing the comic strip ‘Shoe‘…. The strip was named in honor of the legendary Jim Shumaker, for whom MacNelly worked at the Chapel Hill Weekly.” 

From my Monday, June 2, 2003 entry:

Two quotations from “The Diamond Project“:

“We all know that something is eternal,” the Stage Manager says. “And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even stars—everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.”
— John Lahr, review of “Our Town“ 

“Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.  Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.”
— Song of Solomon

Here are some other thoughts from the same date, but a different time, fictional time, Faulkner time:

June Second, 1910

Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after a while the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibers waving slow as the motion of sleep. They dont touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones. And maybe when He says Rise the eyes will come floating up too, out of the deep quiet and the sleep, to look on glory.

— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

The concluding link from my June 2, 2003, entry furnishes a clue to the timelessness of Quentin Compson‘s thoughts above:

Glory… Song of Songs 8. 7-8

From the King James Bible‘s rendition of the Song of Songs:

8:7  Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.
8:8  We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?

For Quentin Compson’s thoughts on his little sister Caddy, consult the online hypertext edition of

Operation Playmate:

11:01 AM

On this date in 1938, Louis Armstrong and his orchestra recorded “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

On this date in 1961, Saint Gary Cooper died.

From my Jan. 2, 2003, entry:

Faces of the Twentieth Century:
The Harvest Continues

“I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens
    to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips
    yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer,
    of rounder replies?”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins,
   “Hurrahing in Harvest”

“Cowboy, take me away.
Fly this girl as high as you can
into the wild blue.”

— The Dixie Chicks

From my March 31, 2003, entry:

“During the Gulf War, Playboy magazine’s celebrated Centerfolds reached out to U.S. military men and women… with their ‘Operation Playmate’ project….

Now, in light of the war in Iraq, ‘Operation Playmate’ has returned.”

Entertainment Weekly, May 2, 2003:

Perhaps, in heaven, Dixie Chick Natalie “Mattress Dancing” Maines will provide terpsichorean instruction. 

Etymology: Latin Terpsichor,
from Greek Terpsikhor,
from feminine of terpsikhoros,
dance-loving : terpein, to delight
+ khoros, dance.

See, too, my entry for Beltane (May 1), the day that death claimed the 13th Episcopal bishop of New York City.

All of these events are not without interest, but it is not easy to fit them into one coherent story, as Robert Penn Warren once requested:

“The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.”

It is perhaps relevant that, as T. S. Eliot well knew, there can be no dance except in time, and that the time of my May 1 entry is 5:13, today’s date in another guise.  To paraphrase an Eliot line, 

“Hurry up please, it’s 5/13.”

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

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).

Faces of the Twentieth Century:
The Harvest Continues

“I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?”

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Hurrahing in Harvest”

“Cowboy, take me away.
Fly this girl as high as you can
into the wild blue.”

— The Dixie Chicks

See
“Culture Clash at Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil“
in my notes of December 11, 2002.

Three in One

This evening’s earlier entry, “Homer,” is meant in part as a tribute to three goddess-figures from the world of film.  But there is one actress who combines the intelligence of Judy Davis with the glamour of Nicole Kidman and the goodness of Kate Winslet– Perhaps the only actress who could have made me cry Stella! as if I were Brando…. Piper Laurie.

Bright Star

From the website of Karey Lea Perkins:

“The truth is that man’s capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is…intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness…”

— Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1975

Today’s New York Times story on Richard Helms, together with my reminiscences in the entry that follows it below, suggest the following possibility for symbol-mongering:

This comparison is suggested by the Spanish word “Lucero” (the name, which means “Bright Star,” of the girl in Cuernavaca mentioned two entries down) and by the following passage from Robert A. Heinlein‘s classic novel, Glory Road:

The C.I.A. star above is from that organization’s own site.  The star of Venus (alias Aster, alias Ishtar) is from Symbols.com, an excellent site that has the following variations on the Bright Star theme:

See also my notes The Still Point and the Wheel and Midsummer Eve’s Dream.  Both notes quote Robinson Jeffers:

“For the essence and the end
Of his labor is beauty…
one beauty, the rhythm of that Wheel,
and who can behold it is happy
and will praise it to the people.”

— Robinson Jeffers, “Point Pinos and Point Lobos,”
quoted at the end of The Cosmic Code,
by Heinz Pagels, Simon & Schuster, 1982

Place the eightfold star in a circle, and you have the Buddhist Wheel of Life: