See Hexagram 61 in this journal.

Today's date — "10" or one-zero — suggests a review of base-16
(hexadecimal) notation. In hexadecimal, "10" means 16.

See as well some other Geek Lore.

Continues . 

Some historical background —

Continues .

(Continued)

Are we there yet?

    Click image to enlarge.

Blaine Gibson, Designer of Lifelike Robots
at Disney Parks, Dies at 97

Log24 remarks on Sunday, July 5, the reported date of
Gibson's death:

See also Icon and a fresh New York Times  obituary.

Happy birthday to Jill Abramson.

Tracking Shot

Related material—

See also this journal's September 2009 posts.

This  post was suggested by today's previous post and by today's NY Lottery.
For some background to the ioncinema.com post numbered 4210 above,
see, in conjunction with the page headed "Azazel" linked to here earlier today,
the ioncinema.com post numbered 5601.

From the post numbered 460 in this  journal—

At the still point… from the film "Absolute Power" :

Photo credit – Graham Kuhn

I’ve heard of affairs that are strictly plutonic,
But diamonds are a girl’s best friend!

— Marilyn Monroe, modeling a Freudian slip

From Rough Magic , starring Russell Crowe and Bridget Fonda (1995)—

Bridget brought her rabbits,
There was magic in the air…

— Adapted from "Garden Party"—

Can't please everyone, so you
Got to please yourself.

From The Chronicles of Narnia, Voyage of the Dawn Treader—

"… Sometimes, perhaps, I am a little impatient, waiting for the day
when they can be governed by wisdom instead of this rough magic."

"All in good time, Coriakin," said Aslan.

"Yes, all in very good time, Sir," was the answer.

From Another Manic Monday (Feb. 21)—

We are now at the Year of the Rabbit —

(Click images for sources.)

Today's funeral Mass for Sargent Shriver,
tonight's review in the New York TImes  of a singer
from the Kollege of Musical Knowledge,
and today's New York lottery numbers suggest the following links—

8/15 and 9/10.

Lottery hermeneutics for yesterday's numbers—

PA— Midday 711, Evening 039.

NY— Midday 440, Evening 704.

Simple interpretive methods— numbers as dates and as hexagram numbers— yield 7/11, hexagram 39, and 7/04.

The reader may supply his own interpretations of 7/11 and 7/04; for hexagram 39, see Wilhelm's commentary—

"The hexagram pictures a dangerous abyss lying before us
  and a steep, inaccessible mountain rising behind us."

— and the cover of Cold Mountain—

Adapted from cover of
German edition of Cold Mountain

This suggests revisiting The Edge of Eternity (July 5, 2005).

The hermeneutics of the NY midday 440 is more difficult. A Google search suggests that a Log24 post for Epiphany 2004, "720 in the Book," might yield a clue to the 440 riddle.

By all means, let us 440.

"Experience the magic of Mexico." — Delta vacations ad.

See also Midnight in the Garden (March 15, 2011) 
and New Day Nina (September 22, 2011).

    Click Nina for the above film from Good Friday, 2019.

"Got to keep the loonies on the path."

— Lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon

For those who, like Tom Stoppard, prefer the dark side—

Not quite so dark—

"And then one day you find ten years have got behind you."

— Lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon

This journal ten years ago, on August 25, 2003—

"A view of New Haven, say…." —

"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
John Outram, architect 

A similar version of this Apollonian image —

  Detail:

Related material for the loonies:

"the spirit's alchemicana."

MORAN

MOLLOY

"I lived in the garden. I have spoken of a voice
telling me things. I was getting to know it better
now, to understand what it wanted. It did not
use the words that Moran had been taught
when he was little and that he in his turn had
taught to his little one. So that at first I did not
know what it wanted. But in the end I understood
this language. I understood it, I understood it,
all wrong perhaps. That is not what matters.
It told me to write the report. Does this mean
I am freer now than I was? I do not know.
I shall learn. Then I went back into the house
and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on
the windows. It was not midnight. It was not
raining."

— Molloy , by Samuel Beckett

The above excerpts are in memory of some wordplay
in this journal on March 2, of a sneering joke in the 
Daily Princetonian  on March 11, and of a possible saint
who reportedly died around midnight on the night of
March 13-14. 

See also the morning of March 13.

Note, at the end of the Princetonian  piece, a comment
worthy of Beckett—

"These words. They've been played on."

(Midnight in the Garden, continued)

E is for Ending …

Cullinane = Cullinan + E

And for Everlast.

(The Cullinan link above is to a woman
who apparently is the wife of writer
Alan Cowell. See The Revisiting, Dec. 3rd.)

"Accentuate the Positive."

— Clint Eastwood, soundtrack album for
"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."

The New Yorker 's online Book Bench has an entertaining
approach to Jack's "All work and no play…" in "The Shining."
For some background, see this morning's previous Log24
post, The Thing Itself.

That post gives some background for the
Midnight in the Garden post of September 6th.

Also on September 6th… See Jill.

Click for details.

Related material—

Midnight in the Garden on the Ides of March and New Day Nina.

* For the title, see an historical note on October the 16th.
   For a related novel, see Groundhog Day 2009.

Background— Midnight's post.

This journal on the above "Take a Number" Dairy Queen date—

Riddle

"Midnight in the Garden continued," a post of 12:00 AM July 20, posed the riddle of what the previous day's NY Lottery midday "440" might mean.

A jocular answer was given. Some background for a more serious answer—

Paul Newall, “Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy”—

“Julie recognises the music of the busker outside playing a recorder as that of her husband’s. When she asks him where he heard it, he replies that he makes up all sorts of things. This is an instance of a theory of Kieślowski’s that ‘different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing but for different reasons.’ With regard to music in particular, he held what might be characterised as a Platonic view according to which notes pre-exist and are picked out and assembled by people. That these can accord with one another is a sign of what connects people, or so he believed.”

In honor of Wye Jamison Allanbrook, author of Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, we note that 440 is Concert A.

Allanbrook died on July 15. See this journal on that date—

Angels in the Architecture,
Happy Birthday, and
Brightness at Noon.

Madrid

Junco died on Bastille Day.

Paris

An artist's view —

The above Gracia Lam illustration was suggested
 by her work in a New York Times  piece on the Sabbath
(Sunday, July 18, 2010, on page ST1 of the New York edition).

"Accentuate the Positive." — Clint Eastwood

“Dead time lasts for one hour– from half an hour before midnight to half an hour after midnight. The half-hour before midnight is for doin’ good.”

— Glenna Whitley, “Voodoo Justice,” The New York Times, March 20, 1994

Click for details.

“Poetry is a satisfying of
the desire for resemblance….
If resemblance is described as
a partial similarity between
two dissimilar things,
it complements and reinforces
that which the two dissimilar things
have in common.
It makes it brilliant.”

— Wallace Stevens,
    “Three Academic Pieces” in
    The Necessary Angel (1951)

Two dissimilar things:

1.  A talk to be given at a conference on “Mathematics and Narrative” in Mykonos in July:

Mark Turner,
“The Role of Narrative Imagining in Blended Mathematical Concepts” —

Abstract:
“The Way We Think (Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner; Basic Books, 2002) presents a theory of conceptual integration, or “blending,” as a basic mental operation. See http://blending.stanford.edu. This talk will explore some ways in which narrative imagining plays a role in blended mathematical concepts.”

2.  An application of the “conceptual blending” of  Fauconnier and Turner to some journal entries of 2004:  Cognitive Blending and the Two Cultures.

Midnight Drums for Larry

The Harvard Crimson, March 16:

"Voting by secret ballot in a Faculty meeting at the Loeb Drama Center, 218 faculty members affirmed a motion put on the docket by Professor of Anthropology and of African and African American Studies J. Lorand Matory ’82, stating that 'the Faculty lacks confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers.' "

Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences:

Professor Matory is "a renowned expert on Brazil and on the Yoruba civilization of West Africa, which is world famous for its religious complexity and artistic creativity. He is equally noted for his study of such Latin American religions as Haitian 'Vodu,' Brazilian Candomblé, and Cuban Santería…."

The Harvard Crimson, January 7, 2005:

"I came here with the goal of dancing with Larry Summers, and I did it," Chinwe U. Nwosu ’08 said. "He’s a great dancer."

"Now I can say that 'Bootylicious' is our song," she added.

"Atabaque – a large tom-tom
that is used in Afro-Brazilian
religious celebrations"

— The Sounds of Samba
at Yale

— From Log24.net, Oct. 16, 2004:

Midnight in the Garden
continued

X, continued…

From Midnight, Dec. 28, 2002:

Kylie

Our site music for today is Ravel’s classic, “Bolero.” For bolero purposes, some may prefer Kylie Minogue’s rendition of “Locomotion.”

Related material:

From a synopsis of Cinderella:

“Cinderella is in the Palace garden and is found by the Prince, who is dejected at the lack of success in the quest and throws the slipper away. Happily the Godmother (hidden in the bushes) catches it and replaces it on the bench next to the Prince, just as he remembers he should try it on Cinderella.

Midnight in the Garden

“With a little effort,
anything can be shown
to connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely

cross-referenced.”

— Opening sentence
of Martha Cooley’s
The Archivist

 Example:
Mozart’s K 265,
the page number 265,
and a story by George MacDonald.

Midnight in the Garden of
Good and Evil, continued

Buddies Show Us
the Real Tillman

By MARK PURDY

San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Once the out-of-towners stopped talking, the people from San Jose were allowed to speak. And the honesty erupted.

“Thank you for coming,” said Richard Tillman, the younger brother of Pat Tillman. “But with all respect to those who have been up here before me, Pat’s not with God. He’s not religious. He’s dead. It was amazing to be his little brother. He was the biggest champion I’ve ever seen.”

Commentary:

Maybe God doesn’t like religious people.

See The Four Last Things (6/4/03),

With Honors (6/5/03), and

Directions Out (4/26/04).

Inscape

Picture said to be of
a Japanese Skylark,
Hibari or Alauda japonica.
Photo: 05/2002, Nagano, Japan.

Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil
on Shakespeare’s Birthday

Tony Scherman on an April 7, 1968, recording by Nina Simone:

“…nobody could telescope more emotion into a single, idiosyncratically turned syllable (listen to the way she says the word “Savannah” in her spoken intro to “Sunday in Savannah.” It breaks your heart — and she ain’t even singin’ yet!).”

See also the following entries on midnight in the garden:

Trinity, Oct. 25, 2002

Midnight in the Garden, Oct. 26, 2002

Point of No Return, Dec. 10, 2002

Culture Clash at Midnight, Dec. 11, 2002

Dead Poets Society, Dec. 13, 2002

For the Dark Lady, Dec. 18, 2002

Nightmare Alley, Dec. 21, 2002

For the Green Lady, Dec. 21, 2002

“With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”

— Opening sentence of Martha Cooley’s The Archivist

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness Isaiah 5:20

As she spoke about the Trees of Life and Death, I watched her….  The Archivist

The world has gone mad today And good’s bad today, And black’s white today, And day’s night today Cole Porter

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.

For the Green Lady
of Perelandra,
from the City of Angels

“The oral history of Los Angeles
is written in piano bars.” 
— Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Tonight’s midnight music in the garden of good and evil is a shamelessly romantic classic from a site titled simply Piano Bar.

De Rêve En Rêverie
(Lyrics by Eddy Marnay)

Tu es le pianiste
Et moi je suis ton encore.
Un feu de joie pour deux
Tombe sur nous d’un ciel amoureux.
Toi, toi qui m’as tout appris
Moi, dans l’ombre de ta vie
Je vis,
Je vis de rêve
En rêverie. 

 Washington Square Press paperback, 1981, page 222 

For the Dark Lady

On this midnight in the garden of good and evil, our new site music is “Nica’s Dream.”

From a website on composer Horace Silver:

“Horace Silver apparently composed Nica’s Dream (1956) for Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter-Rothschild, an English aristocrat and a very dear friend of his. She was known to the New York press as the Jazz Baroness and to the black musicians for whom she was something of a patron, simply as Nica. Her apartment in the fashionable Hotel Stanhope on Fifth Avenue became a ‘hospitality suite for some of the greatest jazz players of the day, whom she treated generously.’ (Jack Chambers, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis, University of Toronto Press, 1985, 1:248)

This music is not unrelated to the work of Thomas Pynchon.  From an essay by Charles Hollander:  

“There are some notable parallels between Nica and the woman Stencil knows as V., who started her career with ‘…a young crude Mata Hari act.’ (V.; 386)….  Not that V. is Nica in any roman a clef sense: she is not. But the resonances are powerful at the level of the subtext. Nica is a Rothschild whose life reflects the issues Pynchon wants us to attend in V.: disinheritance, old dynasty vs. new dynasty, secret agents and couriers, plots and counter-plots, ‘The Big One, the century’s master cabal,’ and ‘the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name’ (V.; 226)….” 

See also my journal entry for the December 16-17 midnight, “Just Seventeen.”

Culture Clash at Midnight
in the Garden of Good and Evil

In a future life, if not in this one, Dante might assign these two theologians to Purgatory, where they could teach one another.  Both might benefit if Shepard took Apczynski’s course “The Intellectual Journey” and if Apczynski read Shepard’s new book of short stories, Great Dream of Heaven. 

Background music might consist of Sinatra singing “Three Coins in the Fountain” (for Shepard — See my journal notes of December 10, 2002) alternating with the Dixie Chicks singing “Cowboy, Take Me Away” (for Apczynski, who is perhaps unfamiliar with life on the range).  Today’s site music is this fervent prayer by the Dixie Chicks to a cowboy-theologian like Shepard.

Point of No Return

From Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar for December 10:

• On this day in 1864, General William T. Sherman’s Union army reached Savannah and the 12-day siege began.  Sherman was able to present the city to President Lincoln as a “Christmas present.”

An album recorded in September 1961:

Songs in the above list:

September Song * When the World was Young
I’ll Be Seeing You * I’ll See You Again
Memories of You * There Will Never Be Another You
Somewhere Along the Way * A Million Dreams Ago
It’s a Blue World * I’ll Remember April
These Foolish Things

Not in the list, but in the album:

As Time Goes By

The Savannah Connection:

Augustus Saint-Gaudens
William Tecumseh Sherman,
1892-1903 (installed 1903)
Central Park, New York City

From

The Necessary Angel,

by Wallace Stevens
(New York: Knopf, 1951)
 (New York: Vintage Books, 1966):

“The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety….”

Part of a journal entry for
October 25, 2002:

Point of No Return was Sinatra’s
last album for Capitol.

Note the strategic placement
of the Capitol Records logo
on the album cover.

Midnight in the Garden

From a Nina Simone Lyrics site:

Pack up all my cares and woe,
here I go, singing low,
Bye-bye Blackbird.
Where somebody waits for me,
sugar’s sweet, so is she,
Bye-bye Blackbird.
No one here can love and understand me.
Oh, what hard-luck stories they all hand me.
Make my bed and light the light,
I’ll arrive late tonight,
Blackbird, Bye-bye.

Nina Simone

For more on the eight-point star of Venus,
see “Bright Star,” my note of October 23.

Trinity

The last two days were eventful on the obituary front.  See below for a reasonably holy trinity of lives: 

• Richard Helms as the Father,
• Derek Bell as the Son, and
• Adolph Green as the Holy Spirit. 

See also Bonaventure’s
Itinerarium Mentis in Deum and

the graves list for Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah,
final resting place for Johnny Mercer and plot key
to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

God Is Her Co-Pilot

On the soundtrack album of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,"  Clint Eastwood advised us to "eliminate the negative."  As a sequel to the extremely negative note below, written at midnight on the night of September 13-14, 2002, the following is my best attempt, on this very dark night of the soul, to eliminate the negative.  

Some of us are old enough to recall that the beloved Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, died on September 14, 1982 — exactly 20 years ago —  from injuries she suffered in a car accident the day before.  The following photo recalls happier days of driving the Riviera, in the 1955 film "To Catch a Thief."

This note's title, combined with the photo, suggests that I have a mystical vision of Cary Grant as God.  I can think of worse people to play God.  The best I can do tonight to eliminate the negative is transcribe  the remarks I made in a (paper) journal entry in 1997.  (By the way, I realize that ordinary people are just as important as movie stars, but the latter are more suitable for public discussion.)

In memoriam: Robert Mitchum and James Stewart 

Eternal Triangles (July 3, 1997)

Every civilization tells its own story about the relations between heaven and earth.  Some of the best stories — those of Lao Tsu, the Greek poets, and Buddha — are now almost 26 centuries old.  Some even older stories — those told by the Jews — have enabled our current civilization, led by Charlton Heston as God, to outlast Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.  However, recent claims of Absolute Truth for these stories (The Bible Code) are disturbing.  Perhaps it is time — at least for Robert Mitchum and James Stewart — to meet a kinder, gentler God.

I propose Cary Grant — specifically, as seen in "The Grass is Greener" (1960) with Mitchum and Deborah Kerr, and in "The Philadelphia Story" (1940) with Stewart and Katharine Hepburn.  If we imagine Grant as God, then these films reveal a very old, always entertaining, and sometimes enlightening version of the Trinity:  God and Man as rivals for the Holy Spirit — as played by Deborah, by Kate, and (in heaven) by Grace.  Such a spirit, at work in the real world, may have influenced two of this century's better Bibles:

1. The Oxford Book of English Prose (1925, reprinted through 1958), and

2. "LIFE — The 60th Anniversary Issue" (October 1996)

From (1), for Mitchum's memorial, Deborah might pick "The Basket of Roses" (pp. 1057-1060).  From (2), for Stewart's memorial, Kate might select the page of LIFE's covers for 1941 — and all that page implies.

Finally, Grace, in the Highest society (beyond Bibles) might recall the following telegraphic catechism:

Q. — How old Cary Grant?
A. — Old Cary Grant fine.  How you?

Meditation for Friday the 13th

The 1946 British film below (released as “Stairway to Heaven” in the U.S.) is one of my favorites.  I saw it as a child. Since costar Kim Hunter died this week (on 9/11), and since today is Friday the 13th, the following material seems relevant.

The doctor in “A Matter of Life and Death” addresses a heavenly court on behalf of his patient, R.A.F pilot David Niven:

In the film, David Niven is saved by mistake from a fated death and his doctor must argue to a heavenly court that he be allowed to live.

In a similar situation, I would want Dr. Alan McGlashan, a real-life psychiatrist, on my side.  For an excerpt from one of my favorite books, McGlashan’s The Savage and Beautiful Country,

click here.

As Walker Percy has observed (see my Sept. 7 note, “The Boys from Uruguay”), a characteristic activity of human beings is what Percy called “symbol-mongering.”  In honor of today’s anniversary of the births of two R.A.F. fighter pilots,

Sir Peter Guy Wykeham-Barnes (b. 1915) and author

Roald Dahl (b. 1916),

here is one of the better symbols of the past century:

The circle is of course a universal symbol, and can be made to mean just about whatever one wants it to mean.  In keeping with Clint Eastwood’s advice, in the soundtrack album for “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” to “accentuate the positive,” here are some positive observations on a circle from the poet (and perhaps saint) Dante, who died on the night of September 13-14:

In the sun, Dante and Beatrice find themselves surrounded by a circle of souls famous for their wisdom on earth. They appear as splendid lights and precious jewels who dance and sing as they lovingly welcome two more into their company. Their love for God is kindled even more and grows as they find more individuals to love. Among the blessed souls are St. Thomas Aquinas and one of his intellectual “enemies”, Siger of Brabant, a brilliant philosopher at the University of Paris, some of whose teachings were condemned as heretical. Conflicts and divisions on earth are now forgotten and absorbed into a communal love song and dance “whose sweetness and harmony are unknown on earth and whose joy becomes one with eternity.”

Dante compares their dance and song to God’s bride on earth, the Church, when she answers the morning bells to rise from bed and “woo with matins song her Bridegroom’s love.” Some critics consider this passage the most “spiritually erotic” of all the one hundred cantos of the Comedy. It is the ending of Canto 10, verses 139-148.

— Fr. James J. Collins, “The Spiritual Journey with Dante V,” Priestly People October 1997

The above material on Dante is from the Servants of the Paraclete website.

For more on the Paraclete, see

The Left Hand of God.

See also the illustration in the note below.