Log24

See Leiber in this journal.

From a 1962 young-adult novel —

"There's something phoney in the whole setup, Meg thought.
There is definitely something rotten in the state of Camazotz."

Song adapted from a 1960 musical —

"In short, there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happy-ever-aftering
Than here in Camazotz!"

See Source + Michener and The Source (Dec. 29, 2014).

A Sermon from Christchurch
in The New York Times

Related material:

Zen and the Art
and
For the Burning Man

The New York Times  today reported a death on October 18th,
the Feast of St. Luke.

See also Luke in this  journal. Some will prefer Cool Hand  Luke to
the alleged gospel author.

"Sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand."

"On September 2, 2020, at the age of 59, 
David Graeber died of necrotizing pancreatitis
while on vacation in Venice. The news hit me
like a blow. How many books have we lost,
I thought, that will never get written now?
How many insights, how much wisdom,
will remain forever unexpressed? The appearance of
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity 
is thus bittersweet, at once a final, unexpected gift
and a reminder of what might have been."
— William Deresiewicz

This is from The Atlantic  on St. Luke's Day, 2021.
Note the article's illustration, and related material from
this  journal on the date of the death described above:

Or: "Use the Source, Luke"

A book first published by Doubleday in 1979:

From Fritz Leiber's 1959 sci-fi classic "Damnation Morning" —

She drew from her handbag a pale grey
gleaming implement that looked by quick turns
to me like a knife, a gun, a slim sceptre, and a
delicate branding iron— especially when its tip
sprouted an eight-limbed star of silver wire.

“The test?” I faltered, staring at the thing.

“Yes, to determine whether you can live in the
fourth dimension or only die in it.”

See also Philanthropic Numerology (St. Luke's Day, 2012).

Continues.

Amy Adams as…

The $146 Million Domestic

From the day Askew died—

The "large and startling" phrase is from Flannery O'Connor—

For a large and startling figure played by Askew, see a scene from "Big Love."

For Women's History Month—

The Beam of Pink Light

From a post linked to on Lyxe's upload date, Feb. 6, 2012—

“… with primitives the beginnings of art, science, and religion
coalesce in the undifferentiated chaos of the magical mentality….”

— Carl G. Jung, “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,”
     Collected Works, Vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature,
     Princeton University Press, 1966, excerpted in
    Twentieth Century Theories of Art, edited by James M. Thompson.

See also the NY Lottery for St. Luke's Day, 2011, publication date
of the new edition of Philip K. Dick's VALIS  quoted above.

"There is work to be done
  in the dark before dawn."

— Song lyric

Log24 posts suggested by the New York Lottery
yesterday (the Feast of Saint Luke) —

684,  2047,  710,  7900.

On Kirk Varnedoe

"At 42– a professor with no museum experience– he was named curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. It was, and is, the most influential job in the fluid, insular, fiercely contentious world of modern art. Just two decades past his last Amherst game, the lineman from Savannah was sitting in the chair where the most critical decisions in his profession are made– 'the conscientious, continuous, resolute distinction of quality from mediocrity,' according to his Olympian predecessor Alfred Barr. The Modern and its chief curator serve the American art establishment as a kind of aesthetic Supreme Court, and most of their rulings are beyond appeal."

— Hal Crowther

On Quality

The Randomness

In yesterday’s New York Times, science writer George Johnson quoted a Buddhist:

“Though he professes to accept evolutionary theory, he recoils at one of its most basic tenets: that the mutations that provide the raw material for natural selection occur at random. Look deeply enough, he suggests, and the randomness will turn out to be complexity in disguise– ‘hidden causality,’ the Buddha’s smile. There you have it, Eastern religion’s version of intelligent design.”

— “The Universe in a Single Atom”: Reason and Faith

Gamblers, religious zealots, and the insane may interpret the above as utterances of Lady Luck, God, or The Conspiracy.

A Buddhist interpretation for the New York Times:

A Christian interpretation for the home state of Grace Kelly:

Readings for the Oct. 18
Feast of St. Luke

A fellow Xangan is undergoing a spiritual crisis. Well-meaning friends are urging upon her all sorts of advice. The following is my best effort at religious counsel, meant more for the friends than for the woman in crisis.

Part I… Wallace Stevens 

From Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:

Ox Emblematic of St. Luke. It is one of the four figures which made up Ezekiel’s cherub (i. 10). The ox is the emblem of the priesthood….

   The dumb ox. St. Thomas Aquinas; so named by his fellow students at Cologne, on account of his dulness and taciturnity. (1224-1274.)
   Albertus said, “We call him the dumb ox, but he will give one day such a bellow as shall be heard from one end of the world to the other.” (Alban Butler.)

From Wallace Stevens, “The Latest Freed Man“:

It was how the sun came shining into his room:
To be without a description of to be,
For a moment on rising, at the edge of the bed, to be,
To have the ant of the self changed to an ox
With its organic boomings, to be changed
From a doctor into an ox, before standing up,
To know that the change and that the ox-like struggle
Come from the strength that is the strength of the sun,
Whether it comes directly or from the sun.
It was how he was free. It was how his freedom came.
It was being without description, being an ox.

Part II… The Rosy Cross

Readings:

• Brautigan, Richard, The Hawkline Monster, Simon and Schuster, 1974…
  Just for the pleasure of reading it… A compelling work of fiction on spiritual matters that includes a conversion to Rosicrucianism in its concluding chapter.
• Browning, Vivienne (Betty Coley, ed).
  My Browning Family Album. With a Foreword by Ben Travers, and a Poem by Jack Lindsay Springwood, London, 1979…
  The Rosicrucian tradition in Australia (highly relevant background reading for the 1994 film “Sirens”). Includes a mention of Aleister Crowley, dark mage, who also figures (prominently) in….
• Wilson, Robert Anton, Masks of the Illuminati, Pocket Books, April 1981…
  James Joyce and Albert Einstein join in a metaphysical investigation.

  “He recited from the anonymous Muses Threnody of 1648:

  For we be brethren of the Rosy Cross
  We have the Mason Word and second sight
  Things for to come we can see aright.”

Part III… Stevens Again

A major critical work on Wallace Stevens that is not unrelated to the above three works on the Rosicrucian tradition:

Leonora Woodman, Stanza My Stone: Wallace Stevens and the Hermetic Tradition, West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1983

From the Department of English, Purdue University:

Leonora Woodman came to Purdue in 1976. In 1979, she became Director of Composition, a position she held until 1986…. At the time of her death in 1991, she was in the midst of an important work on modernist poetry, Literary Modernism and the Fourth Dimension: The Visionary Poetics of D.H. Lawrence, H.D., and Hart Crane.

For more on Gnostic Christianity, see

• Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979), and
• Harold Bloom, Omens of Millenium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (Riverhead Books, 1996).