Log24

Friday, December 26, 2014

Hereafter

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 am

See also Catholic Damon in this journal.

Friday, October 22, 2010

Hereafter

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

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101022-AlphenSm.jpg

More.

Click here for soundtrack.

Sunday, July 7, 2024

The Penthouse Area

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:19 pm

Related material for the National Comedy Center, from other posts
tagged Hereafter —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101022-AlphenSm.jpg

Saturday, July 6, 2024

A Date with Jaime

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:35 pm

A fan tribute in Jaime King's Instagram this evening suggests
a look at the date October 22, 2010 as well as the old joke
"What am I here after?"

Sunday, January 8, 2023

Oil City Snow

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:38 pm

From AP News in The Derrick , Oil City, PA, today —

"Banks lived part of the year in Florida, and for a time
had a home in Jamaica, but he was essentially a man
of the North, with an old Puritan’s sense of consequences.
Snow fell often in his fiction . . . ." — Hillel Italie

Update of 3:33 PM ET —

From a link target in this  journal on April 4, 2004

"Puzzle begun  I write in the day's space . . . ."

Saturday, September 10, 2022

Solomon’s Mental Health Month

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:21 pm

May 2003 was "Solomon's Mental Health Month" in this journal.

An essay linked to on the 9th of May in that month —

"Taking the Veil," by Jessica Kardon

https://web.archive.org/web/20021102182519/
http://www.thespleen.com/otherorgans/otherorgans/
index.php?artID=724

James Hillman, writing in The Soul's Code, argues for his "acorn theory" of human individual identity, and suggests that "each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived." He insists we are born with a given character, a daimon, the carrier of destiny. This theory is closely linked to the beautiful myth described by Plato in his Republic, when the soul stands before Lachesis and receives his specific soul guardian. Hillman maintains that the daimon will always emerge somehow, even if thwarted or unrecognized.

I never had ambitions that reached fruition in the adult world. I have had only two career interests in my life – both formed precognitively. I wanted to be a mermaid or a nun. By the time I learned – shockingly late – that I could not be a mermaid, I had realized I would not be a nun. I concur with Hillman's emphasis on the persistence of early disposition, and I like to imagine that my dreamy, watery, Victorian and self-righteous psyche has held aspects of both of these early interests, throughout my life.

I was adopted one month after my birth. I was tended by nuns during the first four weeks of my life. Thereafter, I spent my whole educational life in convent schools. It was the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul that gave me my favorite musical and my early distortions about romantic love and the gender plans of Our Lord. My misconceptions about love and marriage were culled from the Lerner Loewe musical Gigi, a wonderful film based loosely on a Colette novel. I was summoned along with my whole class to the gymnasium to view the movie under the edgy eye of Sister Bernadette.

Sister Bernadette was a large, mesomorphic nun famed for the beatings she gave to boys and girls alike, and feared for the mean zest with which she bestowed her favors upon many of us. I was not beaten – but once, believing I was wearing lipstick, she held my head in a sink and scrubbed my lips until they bled, then slapped me. I recall this with a mild, rueful whimsy. We were all manhandled. In memory, Bernadette seems more like an angry and troubled older sibling than a true figure of authority.

Anyway, 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. I saw myself strolling down the Champs Elysee with Louis Jordan in rapt attendance, pushing a baby carriage, wearing a hat the size of a manhole cover, hoisting a parasol above that to assure the longevity of my adorable pallor.

The gender plans of Our Lord had recently been revealed to me too. Sister B. had drawn a ladder on the blackboard, a ladder with three rungs. At the top, she explained, were the priests, the nuns, and the monks. These souls had surrendered their lives to God. All would be taken directly to heaven upon their passing from this vale of tears, as we all referred to the world in those lean emotional times. On the middle rung stood the married. If you married and kept the law – which meant leaving every act of marital congress open to the reception of a child, you would be eligible for heaven. If you were foul in marriage, seeking your pleasure, you were going to be damned. On the bottom rung were those selfish souls who had remained single and had imagined their lives their own. This group had never given themselves to Our Lord. They were headed to hell in a sort of preternatural laundry chute.

So we little ladies had two viable options: marry and breed without ceasing – or take the veil.

Despite my hat and perambulator fantasies, once given the sorry news of the ladder, the veil became the clear romantic favorite. Therefore I began my research. I obtained a catalogue of nunnery. It offered photographs of each order, describing the duties of the specific order, and displaying the garb of that order. I was looking for two things – a great looking veil and gown, and a contemplative order. I had no desire to sully my glorious vision of myself with a life in the outer world. It was apparent to me that the teaching of children was going to involve a whole range of miseries – making them cry, telling them the bad news about the ladder, and so forth. This was not for me. I saw myself kneeling on the floor of my pristine little cell, serene and untouched by human hands. Teaching would be certain to interfere with the proper lighting. Yoked to a bunch of messy children, I could not possibly have the opalescent illumination of heaven falling reliably on my upturned visage.

What divided me from my dream of rebirth as a mermaid was the force of what was real: I could not morph. What divided me from my dream of life as a nun was the force of the erotic: I would not abstain.

Now, long years later, I am still underwater, and I am still bending the knee. I live in the blue shadows of hidden grottoes, and I am swimming, too, in the gold of my drifting prayers.

September 7th, this dream. I am standing in a dimly lit room, gazing at a group of heavy, antique silk burqas that look weirdly like Fortuny gowns. A holy woman approaches me, and tells me that my soul will leave my body, and enter these garments. She turns and points at a young girl standing nearby, a child with close-cropped hair and a solemn look. My heart knows her, but my eyes don't.

For a moment I am thinking, exactly as I did in the seventies when holding a joint: "This isn't working." Suddenly, these things: I feel the shape of flame, then I am the shape. I am released into the air, and as pure essence I enter other forms, dissolving in them, gathering my energy back into myself, and flying out again. This was a sensation so exquisite that my dreaming brain woke up and announced to me: "This is a dream about death."

I saw that child again as I flew. This time my eyes knew her. I flew to her, but the flame of my soul would not cohere with hers, this child who was, of course, my own self.

In the shadows alone, I heard myself whisper: "I'm in the wind. I'm in the water."

This lovely dream, which gave me the sublime gift of a little visceral preview of the soul in the death process, also showed me my guardian spirit; divided, but viable.

I pass through my life swimming in one self, kneeling in the other. I thought of Rilke's 29th Sonnet to Orpheus and realized this was what I had been dreaming about all my life, moving between them.

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.

– Stephen Mitchell, translating Rainer Marie Rilke.

by jessica kardon
iowa city, iowa
2002-09-23

See as well yesterday's post "At a Still Point."

Saturday, September 25, 2021

Panels

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:04 am

A space fan in Tomorrowland  knocks on one door-panel of a 3×3 array —

Related image from Hereafter —

Matt Damon with his  3×3 door-panel array.

IMAGE- Matt Damon and the perception of doors in 'Hereafter'

Sunday, June 13, 2021

Verba Volant, Scripta Manent

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:50 am

For  Kristen  Breitweiser

"Daisy, when she comes to tea at Nick's house,
refers to the flowers brought by Gatsby as being
appropriate for a funeral and asks 'Where's the corpse?' 
Gatsby enters immediately thereafter. This foreshadows
what will happen to Gatsby. The dialogue is not in the novel…."

— Discussion of the 2000 TV movie version in
Learning Guide to The Great Gatsby 

Correction to the midrash: 

Sorvino actually says, when there is a knock at the door,

"That must be the corpse."

Jersey girls are tough.

Tuesday, May 25, 2021

Jersey Hymn

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:44 am

An upload from Good Friday, 2019

"Daisy, when she comes to tea at Nick's house,
refers to the flowers brought by Gatsby as being
appropriate for a funeral and asks 'Where's the corpse?' 
Gatsby enters immediately thereafter. This foreshadows
what will happen to Gatsby. The dialogue is not in the novel…."

— Discussion of the 2000 TV movie version in
Learning Guide to The Great Gatsby 

Correction to the midrash: 

Sorvino actually says, when there is a knock at the door,

"That must be the corpse."

Jersey girls are tough.

Friday, January 1, 2021

Geometry for Child Buyers

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:42 pm

Yesterday’s flashback to the “Square Ice” post of
St. Francis’s Day, 2016 —

'Square Ice' figure

This suggests a review of the July 16, 2013, post “Child Buyers.”

Related images from “Tomorrowland” (2015)

An ignorant, but hopeful, space fan —

The space fan knocks on one door-panel of a 3×3 array

Related image from “Hereafter” (2010)

Matt Damon with his  3×3 door-panel array.

IMAGE- Matt Damon and the perception of doors in 'Hereafter'

Monday, October 8, 2018

Oktoberfest

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:38 am

IMAGE-- Matt Damon stands where a door opens in 'Hereafter'

Note that some have to stop and some don't.

This  journal on the above date, 5 July 2008 —

"Review by Charles Isherwood in today’s New York Times :

A god deserves a great entrance. And Dionysus, the god of wine
and party boy of Mount Olympus, whose celebratory rituals got
the whole drama thing rolling in the first place, surely merits a
spectacular one….”

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Dead Reckoning

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:28 pm

Continued from yesterday evening

IMAGE- Bogart in 'Casablanca' with chessboard

Today's mathematical birthday — 

Claude Chevalley, 11 Feb. 1909 – 28 June 1984.

From MacTutor —

Chevalley's daughter, Catherine Chevalley, wrote about
her father in "Claude Chevalley described by his daughter"
(1988):—

For him it was important to see questions as a whole, to see the necessity of a proof, its global implications. As to rigour, all the members of Bourbaki cared about it: the Bourbaki movement was started essentially because rigour was lacking among French mathematicians, by comparison with the Germans, that is the Hilbertians. Rigour consisted in getting rid of an accretion of superfluous details. Conversely, lack of rigour gave my father an impression of a proof where one was walking in mud, where one had to pick up some sort of filth in order to get ahead. Once that filth was taken away, one could get at the mathematical object, a sort of crystallized body whose essence is its structure. When that structure had been constructed, he would say it was an object which interested him, something to look at, to admire, perhaps to turn around, but certainly not to transform. For him, rigour in mathematics consisted in making a new object which could thereafter remain unchanged.

The way my father worked, it seems that this was what counted most, this production of an object which then became inert— dead, really. It was no longer to be altered or transformed. Not that there was any negative connotation to this. But I must add that my father was probably the only member of Bourbaki who thought of mathematics as a way to put objects to death for aesthetic reasons.

Recent scholarly news suggests a search for Chapel Hill
in this journal. That search leads to Transformative Hermeneutics.
Those who, like Professor Eucalyptus of Wallace Stevens's
New Haven, seek God "in the object itself" may contemplate
yesterday's afternoon post on Eightfold Design in light of the
Transformative post and of yesterday's New Haven remarks and
Chapel Hill events.

Monday, January 5, 2015

Requiem for a Jew

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:30 pm

"Bercovitch’s first published article, in 1964, was on
'Dramatic Irony in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground ';
his second and his third, in 1965, on 'Romance and Anti-Romance
in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ' and 'Three Perspectives on
Reality in Paradise Lost .' Only thereafter does his publication record
begin to reflect his interest in the vagaries of early American culture,
when he published in 1966 his essay, 'New England Epic:
Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana .'"

— "Scholar and Exegete: A Tribute to Sacvan Bercovitch,
Honored Scholar of Early American Literature," by
Christopher Looby

Bercovitch reportedly died at 81 on Dec. 9, 2014.
See his New York Times  obituary from this evening
as well as a passage from Nicholas of Cusa quoted
here, also on Dec. 9, 2014 —

Bercovitch was a professor at Harvard (an institution
apparently unable to state accurately the date of
his death). The translator of of the above Nicholas of
Cusa passage may, I surmise, have been my section
man in a freshman philosophy course at Harvard
in the academic year 1960-1961.

"The way which directs a pilgrim to a city
is not the name of that city." 
— Nicholas of Cusa

Monday, February 3, 2014

Occupy Wall

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 am

Moss on the Wall  (Continued)

Tom Cruise at the Vatican in Mission: Impossible III  (2006) —

Starring Tom Cruise as Ezekiel Moss, "a mysterious drifter
with the divine ability to channel and physically inhabit
the spirits of the dead."

— The quote is from "Philip Seymour Hoffman
Project 'Ezekiel Moss' Will Not Be Sold In Berlin
*"
at Deadline.com.

See also Hereafter + Damon in this journal, as well as
the upload date for the above clip: Oct. 6, 2011.

* Here "Berlin" refers to the upcoming
    European Film Market, Feb. 6-14

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Learning Guide

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:08 pm

The late Adam Smith:

"Assume a can opener."

Wikipedia:

"The festival opened with The Great Gatsby
directed by Baz Luhrmann."

Midrash on an earlier film version (Mira Sorvino's, 2000):

"Daisy, when she comes to tea at Nick's house,
refers to the flowers brought by Gatsby as being
appropriate for a funeral and asks 'Where's the corpse?' 
Gatsby enters immediately thereafter. This foreshadows
what will happen to Gatsby. The dialogue is not in the novel…."

Learning Guide to The Great Gatsby

Correction to the midrash: 

Sorvino actually says, when there is a knock at the door,

"That must be the corpse."

Jersey girls are tough.

Update of Candlemas, 2014, in memory of Philip Seymour Hoffman—

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Narratives…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:00 am

from yesterday— Bling Ring and Church Logic.

Related narratives— Get Quotes (source of image below)

as well as Helprin's Doors and Trickster.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Sequels

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:23 am

Hereafter

(Click to enlarge.)

IMAGE- NY Times online front page March 11, 2012, with images related to the film 'Hereafter' and to Goldman Sachs

 

Margin Call

(Click for story.)

IMAGE- Leaving Goldman Sachs (NY Times online front page)

"Greg Smith is resigning today as a Goldman Sachs executive director
and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business
in Europe, the Middle East and Africa." —NY Times  today

Boo.

Monday, May 2, 2011

The Vine*

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am

See "Nine is a Vine" and "Hereafter" in this journal.

IMAGE- Matt Damon and the perception of doors in 'Hereafter'

As quoted here last October 23

Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

"Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)

What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….

The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation  and art  all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254)  If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist.  Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.

* April 7, 2005

Friday, April 8, 2011

Hello Note

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:33 am

(Continued from yesterday's Brightness at Noon, Afternoon Delight, and Goodbye Note.)

"The Catholic Church, through the Holy Office, has declared it is not lawful 'to take part in spiritualistic communications or manifestations of any kind, whether through a so-called medium or without one, whether hypnotism is used or not, even with the best of intentions among the participants, whether for the purpose of interrogating the souls of the departed or spiritual beings, whether by listening to their responses or even in idle curiosity, even with the tacit or express protestation of not having anything to do with the evil spirits' (Denzinger 3642*).

Behind the church's attitude toward Spiritualism is the concern that a Catholic would expose himself to the risk of actually dealing with the evil spirit. The assumption is that if fraud or deception are excluded, and manifestations occur that are beyond natural explanation, the active agent in these cases is neither God nor any one of the good spirits (whether angelic or human) but demonic forces that are sure to mislead the Catholic and endanger the integrity of his faith."

Modern Catholic Dictionary

* 3642 2182 Qu.: An liceat per Medium, ut vocant, vel sine Medio, adhibito vel non hypnotismo, locutionibus aut manifestationibus spiritisticis quibuscumque adsistere, etiam speciem honestatis vel pietatis praeseferentibus, sive interrogando animas aut spiritus, sive audiendo responsa, sive tantum aspiciendo, etiam cum protestatione tacita vel expressa, nullam cum malignis spiritibus partem se habere velle. Resp.: (cfirm. a S. P'ce, 26 avril): Negative in omnibus.

See also The Ecclesiastical Review , Volume 57,
by Catholic University of America, page 186.
This volume, from Harvard University, was digitized on June 19, 2008.

IMAGE-- Matt Damon stands where a door opens in 'Hereafter'

Katherine Neville, The Eight

"Continue a search for thirty-three and three.
Veiled forever is the secret door."

See Combinational* Delight.

See also The Maker's Gift.

* Corrected Dec. 14, 2014, from "Combinatorial."

Monday, March 14, 2011

A Dante for Our Times

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 pm

(Continued from this date two years ago)

"Hell is other people." —Sartre
"With a laugh track." —Cullinane

A sequel to Good Will Hunting and Hereafter

The Emory Board

Friday, October 29, 2010

Word Study

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:02 am

Commentary on Revelation 6:8—

And I looked, and behold a pale horse:
and his name that sat on him was Death,
and Hell followed with him.

Vincent's Word Studies

Pale (χλωρὸς)

Only in Revelation, except Mark 6:39. Properly, greenish-yellow, like young grass or unripe wheat. Homer applies it to honey, and Sophocles to the sand. Generally, pale, pallid. Used of a mist, of sea-water, of a pale or bilious complexion. Thucydides uses it of the appearance of persons stricken with the plague (ii., 49). In Homer it is used of the paleness of the face from fear, and so as directly descriptive of fear ("Iliad," x., 376; xv., 4). Of olive wood ("Odyssey," ix., 320, 379) of which the bark is gray. Gladstone says that in Homer it indicates rather the absence than the presence of definite color. In the New Testament, always rendered green, except here. See Mark 6:39; Revelation 8:7; Revelation 9:4.

Hell

Properly, Hades. The realm of the dead personified. See on Matthew 16:18.

Related material:

Death toll climbs to 394 in Indonesian tsunami

See also, in this journal, Pale Rider  and Hereafter.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Paranormal Jackass

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:28 pm

From MTV.com this afternoon

The follow-up to last year's runaway horror hit, "Paranormal Activity 2," kicked off its first weekend in theaters with a major haul. The creepy tale… pulled in $20.1 million on Friday.

Trailing behind "Paranormal" is last week's box-office busting debut "Jackass 3D. " The prank-fest, which landed about $50 million its first weekend in theaters, slipped to the second-place slot….

The Clint Eastwood-helmed ensemble drama "Hereafter" landed in fourth place. Exploring the lives of three people who are dealing with death and the afterlife in several ways, including the story of a psychic played by Matt Damon, the screen legend's latest turn in the director's chair made approximately $4.1 million on Friday.

Related material—

IMAGE-- Matt Damon stands where a door opens in 'Hereafter'

Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

"Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)

What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….

The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation  and art  all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254)  If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist.  Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.

The Paranormal Trickster Blog

George P. Hansen on Martin Gardner and the paranormal.

Friday, October 22, 2010

But Seriously…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:19 pm

Happy Birthday, Jean Simmons …  Jan. 31, 2008

Elmer Gantry … Hollywood's view of the Foursquare Church

Resurrection … An August 2003 post inspired by KHYI, then broadcasting from Plano, Texas

For what it's worth, some free advice for Matt Damon…

GET QUOTES

IMAGE- NY Times market news and ad for 'Hereafter,' Oct. 22, 2010

Moreover

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:02 pm

Google News this afternoon—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101022-AstronautFoursquare.jpg

Related material:

  1. Celebration of Mind (Oct. 20)
  2. Problem Picture (Oct. 21)
  3. Hereafter (Oct. 22)
  4. The Gypsy in The French Mathematician

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101022-GaloisSpace.gif

Saturday, October 16, 2010

The Mandelbrot Numbers

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:36 am
 

Benoît Mandelbrot died on Oct. 14.
 

NY Lottery Thursday, Oct. 14, 2010-- Midday 109, Evening 060

— New York Lottery on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2010

Related material on 109: See 1/09, 2009.
Related material on 060: See Hexagram 60 of the I Ching  and…

IMAGE-- Matt Damon stands where a door opens in 'Hereafter'

Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

"Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)

What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….

The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation  and art  all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254)  If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist.  Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.

Sunday, June 6, 2004

Sunday June 6, 2004

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:28 pm
Parallelisms

“I confess I do not believe in time.
I like to fold my magic carpet,
after use, in such a way
as to superimpose
one part of the pattern
upon another.”

(Nabokov, Speak, Memory)

From a review of On the Composition of Images, Signs & Ideas, by Giordano Bruno:

Proteus in the House of Mnemosyne (which is the fifth chapter of the Third Book) relies entirely on familiarity with Vergil’s Aeneid (even when the text shifts from verse to prose). The statement, “Proteus is, absolutely, that one and the same subject matter which is transformable into all images and resemblances, by means of which we can immediately and continually constitute order, resume and explain everything,” reads less clear than the immediate analogy, “Just as from one and the same wax we awaken all shapes and images of sensate things, which become thereafter the signs of all things that are intelligible.”

From an interview with Vladimir Nabokov published in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol. VIII, no. 2, Spring 1967:

When I was your student, you never mentioned the  Homeric parallels in discussing Joyce’s Ulysses  But you did supply “special information” in introducing many of the masterpieces: a map of Dublin for Ulysses….  Would you be able to suggest some equivalent for your own readers?

Joyce himself very soon realized with dismay that the harping on those essentially easy and vulgar “Homeric parallelisms” would only distract one’s attention from the real beauty of his book. He soon dropped these pretentious chapter titles which already were “explaining” the book to non-readers.  In my lectures I tried to give factual data only. A map of three country estates with a winding river and a figure of the butterfly Parnassius mnemosyne for a cartographic cherub will be the endpaper in my revised edition of Speak, Memory.

For more on Joyce and Proteus,
see the May 27 entry
Ineluctable.

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
 

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