(Suggested by the previous post)
* For the church, see Kermode + Garber.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
MBTI at the Church of St. Frank*
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Thursday, May 2, 2013
Character
For the Church of St. Frank:
The phrase “Church of St. Frank” was coined in 1995 by
a Harvard professor sneering at literary critic Frank Kermode.
(See a related Log24 note from 1995.)
Now that Frank Kermode is gone, perhaps the phrase suits Frank Langella.
Above: Langella at Cannes with fellow actors from
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps . He also starred in
the film version of Starting Out in the Evening (quoted above).
Some related reflections on character:
Diamond Speech (this journal, July 3, 2012) and
Robert Diamond’s Next Life in today’s online New York Times .
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Sunday, April 19, 2009
Sunday April 19, 2009
The Crimson Passion
continues…
continues…
(Background:
Truth and Style)
“We are here in the
Church of St. Frank,
where moral judgments
permit the true believer
to avoid any semblance
of thought.”
— Marjorie Garber on
Frank Kermode
Today’s sermon is a
link to a London publication
where one can purchase
Kermode’s excellent review
of the following:
Those who prefer
Garber’s Harvard sneer
may consult
The Crimson Passion
and the following
resurrection figure:
The Harvard Jesus
Crimson/Nancy K. Dutton
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Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Wednesday September 19, 2007
Einstein, God, and
the Consolation of Form
the Consolation of Form
“The kind of thing that would make Einstein gag”
“– …He did some equations that would make God cry for the sheer beauty of them. Take a look at this…. The sonofabitch set out equations that fit the data. Nobody believes they mean anything. Shit, when I back off, neither do I. But now and then, just once in a while…
— He joined physical and mental events. In a unified mathematical field.
— Yeah, that’s what I think he did. But the bastards in this department… bunch of goddamned positivists. Proof doesn’t mean a damned thing to them. Logical rigor, beauty, that damned perfection of something that works straight out, upside down, or sideways– they don’t give a damn.”
— “Nothing Succeeds,” in The Southern Reporter: Stories of John William Corrington, LSU Press, 1981
“The search for images of order and the loss of them constitute the meaning of The Southern Reporter.”
— Louisiana State University Press
“By equating reality with the metaphysical abstraction ‘contingency’ and explaining his paradigm by reference to simple images of order, Kermode [but see note below] defines the realist novel not as one which attempts to get to grips with society or human nature, but one which, in providing the consolation of form,* makes the occasional concession to contingency….”
“We are here in the
Church of St. Frank.“
Church of St. Frank.“
— Marjorie Garber,
Harvard University
* “The consolations of form” is a phrase Kermode quoted from Iris Murdoch. Webster does not mention Murdoch. Others have quoted Murdoch’s memorable phrase, which comes from her essay “Against Dryness: A Polemical Sketch,” Encounter, No. 88, January 1961, pp. 16-20. The essay was reprinted in a Penguin paperback collection of Murdoch’s work, Existentialists and Mystics. It was also reprinted in The Novel Today, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (Manchester, Manchester U. Press, 1977); in Revisions, ed. S. Hauerwas and A. MacIntyre (Notre Dame, U. of Notre Dame Press, 1981); and in Iris Murdoch, ed. H. Bloom (New York, Chelsea House, 1986).
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Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Tuesday July 24, 2007
The Church of St. Frank
See yesterday’s entries for
some relevant quotations
from Wallace Stevens.
Further quotations for what
Marjorie Garber, replying to
a book review by
Frank Kermode, has called
“the Church of St. Frank“–
Frank Kermode on
Harold Bloom:
“He has… a great, almost
selfish passion for poetry,
and he interprets difficult
texts as if there were no
more important activity
in the world, which may
be right.”
Page 348 of Wallace Stevens:
The Poems of Our Climate,
by Harold Bloom
(1977, Cornell U. Press):
“The fiction of the leaves is now Stevens’ fiction…. Spring, summer, and autumn adorn the rock of reality even as a woman is adorned, the principle being the Platonic one of copying the sun as source of all images….
… They are more than leaves
that cover the barren rock….
They bear their fruit
so that the year is known….
If they are more than leaves, then they are no longer language, and the leaves have ceased to be tropes or poems and have become magic or mysticism, a Will-to-Power over nature rather than over the anteriority of poetic imagery.”
For more on magic, mysticism, and the Platonic “source of all images,” see Scott McLaren on “Hermeticism and the Metaphysics of Goodness in the Novels of Charles Williams.” McLaren quotes Evelyn Underhill on magic vs. mysticism:
The fundamental difference between the two is this: magic wants to get, mysticism wants to give […] In mysticism the will is united with the emotions in an impassioned desire to transcend the sense-world in order that the self may be joined by love to the one eternal and ultimate Object of love […] In magic, the will unites with the intellect in an impassioned desire for supersensible knowledge. This is the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness […] (Underhill 84; see also 178ff.)
— Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. New York: Dutton, 1911.
For more on what Bloom calls the “Will-to-Power over nature,” see Faust in Copenhagen and the recent (20th- and 21st-century) history of Harvard University. These matters are also discussed in “Log24 – Juneteenth through Midsummer Night.”
For more on what Underhill calls “the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness,” see the review, in the August 2007 Notices of the American Mathematical Society, of a book by Douglas Hofstadter– a writer on the nature of consciousness— by magician Martin Gardner.
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Friday, August 2, 2002
Friday August 2, 2002
Double Day… August 2, 2002
“Time cannot exist without a soul (to count it).” — Aristotle
The above quotation appears in my journal note of August 2, 1995, as an epigraph on the reproduced title page of The Sense of an Ending, by Frank Kermode (Oxford University Press, 1967).
August 2, 1995, was the fortieth anniversary of Wallace Stevens’s death. On the same date in 1932 — seventy years ago today — actor Peter O’Toole was born. O’Toole’s name appears, in a suitably regal fashion, in my journal note of August 2, 1995, next to the heraldic crest of Oxford University, which states that “Dominus illuminatio mea.” Both the crest and the name appear below the reproduced title page of Kermode’s book — forming, as it were, a foundation for what Harvard professor Marjorie Garber scornfully called “the Church of St. Frank” (letters to the editor, New York Times Book Review, July 30, 1995).
Meditations for today, August 2, 2002:
From page 60 of Why I Am a Catholic, by Gary Wills (Houghton Mifflin, 2002):
“Was Jesus teasing Peter when he called him ‘Rocky,’ naming him ab opposito, as when one calls a not-so-bright person Einstein?”
From page 87 of The Third Word War, by Ian Lee (A&W Publishers, Inc., New York, 1978):
“Two birds… One stone (EIN STEIN).”
From “Seventy Years Later,” Section I of “The Rock,” a poem by Wallace Stevens:
A theorem proposed between the two —
Two figures in a nature of the sun….
From page 117 of The Sense of an Ending:
“A great many different kinds of writing are called avant-garde…. The work of William Burroughs, for instance, is avant-garde. His is the literature of withdrawal, and his interpreters speak of his hatred for life, his junk nihilism, his treatment of the body as a corpse full of cravings. The language of his books is the language of an ending world, its aim… ‘self-abolition.'”
From “Today in History,” by The Associated Press:
“Five years ago: ‘Naked Lunch’ author William S. Burroughs, the godfather of the ‘Beat generation,’ died in Kansas City, Mo., at age 83.”
Part of the above statement is the usual sort of AP disinformation, due not to any sinister intent but to stupidity and carelessness. Burroughs actually died in Lawrence, Kansas. For the location of Lawrence, click on the link below. Location matters.
From page 118 of The Sense of an Ending:
“Somewhere, then, the avant-garde language must always rejoin the vernacular.”
From the Billie Holiday songbook:
“Good mornin’, heartache.”
From page 63 of The New Yorker issue dated August 5, 2002:
“Birthday, death-day — what day is not both?” — John Updike
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