Log24

Saving an Appearance

(Click images for background.)

See also Isaiah—

For a founder of Symphony Space—

"To assuage this space…"

Now online— Lavery's "God, Death, and Pizza"

This suggests a look at Ivan Illich, at Mother Jerome, at a note from the date of death of the former, and at an image from the date of death of the latter.

Note from December 2, 2002— Pilate's Question

Image from June 27, 2006—

See also the Eve of Devil's Night, 2015 —

Related material from an academic's weblog —

Happy birthday to a star of Tarantino's Yuletide offering.

(Continued from Dec. 13, 2014.)

David Lavery's enthusiasm today for the Marvel Comics
"Infinity Stones" suggests a review of The Foundation Stone
mentioned in the post Narrative Metaphysics of 12/13/2014.

See as well "Many Dimensions" in this journal.

Thanks to David Lavery for the following:

http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/articles/issue-18/mariani-essays

This post was suggested by today's 
Easter message from academic David Lavery —

For a reply, see …

"Horus Manure: Debunking the Jesus/Horus Connection," 
a post from the weblog  Jon Sorensen: Blogging on
Catholic Apologetics , dated October 25, 2012.

The phrase "blood libel" also comes to mind.

* "Documenting Victims" was the title of a post in this  journal
   from the same date as Sorensen's post— Oct. 25, 2012. 

(Continued)

For Brad Leithauser, some of whose remarks
on "Reading Poems Backward" were quoted
here on July 13—

A brief review of the life of artist Marc Simont,
who died on that day.

(Click for a larger and clearer image.)

Tell it slant .

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:

Éxito

Or: The Death of Ivan Illich

See For David Lavery and the prequel Art Isn't Easy. 

"Time for you to see the field."

From a scholar quoted in this morning's post —

"Both Vico and Joyce, each in his own way, practice what Vico calls a nuov'arte critica , a 'new critical art'…"

From Hugh Grant's birthday, 2003 (found in a search for whiteness  in this morning's post) —

The cover of yesterday's Sunday New York Times Book Review
features stylized letters by artist Leonardo Sonnoli that include black
circles and triangles —

The stylized Sonnoli letters spell out "WORDS ABOUT WORDS ABOUT WORDS."
This phrase is used to introduce essays on criticism by "six accomplished critics."

A less accomplished critic might note that in the picture above, Tara is modeling
a new fashion by Sonnoli — namely, the word OOV.  A search for this word yields…

"OOV in text processing stands for 'out-of-vocabulary,' i.e., a word
 that is not known in the computer's online dictionary."

It should be.

Addendum (from a link in the same search for whiteness ) in memory of a great beauty who died on Sunday —
     

"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
 how deep the darkness is around us."
  — Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
      Random House, 1973, page 118

Continued from Christmas 2009 and from last Sunday—

The serious reflection is composed
Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace."

– Wallace Stevens

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

“The action is in the plot, inaccessible to introspection, and only the characters know what’s going on.”

— James Hillman, quoted at David Lavery’s weblog.

See also

• Into the Dark,
• Easter 2009 (with Lavery and the Monster from the Id), and
• Church of the Forbidden Planet.

Click on image
 for further details.

Split

The first idea was not our own. Adam
in Eden was the father of Descartes.

— Wallace Stevens,
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

A very interesting web site at
Middle Tennessee State University
relates the Stevens quote
to two others:

“The sundering we sense, between nature and culture, lies not like a canyon outside us but splits our being at its most intimate depths the way mind breaks off from body. It is still another version of that bitter bifurcation long ago decreed: our expulsion from Eden. It differs from the apparently similar Cartesian crease across things in the fact that the two halves of us once were one; that we did not always stand askance like molasses and madness–logically at odds–but grew apart over the years like those husbands and wives who draw themselves into different corners of contemplation.”

— William Gass,
“The Polemical Philosopher”

“The experiment [to make rationality primary] reached the reductio ad absurdum following the attempt by Descartes to solve problems of human knowledge by giving ontological status to the dichotomy of thinking substance and extended substance, that is subject and object. Not only were God and man, sacred and secular, being and becoming, play and seriousness severed, but now also the subject which wished to unite these fragmented dichotomies was itself severed from that which it would attempt to reconcile.”

— David Miller, God and Games

“Which is it then? For Gass, the Cartesian schism is a post- lapsarian divorce-in progress, only apparently similar to the expulsion from paradise. For Stevens the fault is primordial and Descartes only its latter-day avatar. For Miller, Descartes is the historical culprit, the patriarch of the split.”

— The Evil Genius Notebook,
by David Lavery

Mark Hopkins Award

From Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar:

• “Mark Hopkins, U.S. educator, was born on this day in 1802.  He taught at Williams College….  President Garfield, one of his students, said that all that was needed for a college was Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.”

I have never encountered a mentor figure capable of holding down his end of a log in the manner of Mark Hopkins.  The closest I have come to such an encounter is with a book, The Practical Cogitator, by Charles P. Curtis and Ferris Greenslet.

This year’s Mark Hopkins award for the closest approach to the log-sitting ideal goes to David Lavery, whose online commonplace book appears in the column at left.  Lavery, too, appreciates the work of Curtis and Greenslet, as his site indicates.

See also a quote from Lavery in today’s New York Times.