Log24

Entertainment from NBC on Friday night —

The above question, and Saturday morning's post on a film director
from Melbourne, suggest an image from December's Melbourne Noir —

 (March 8, 2018, was the date of death for Melbourne author Peter Temple.)

Quoted here at 10 PM Pacific Time on Friday night —

"If I should die before I wake,
All my bone and sinew take
Put me in the compost pile
To decompose me for a while . . . ."

— Poem by Lee Hays

Kristen Wiig, Girl Reporter…

.. in The Skeleton Twins—

"I've got news for you."

Co-starring Bill Hader as Her —

See also…

and … in this journal, the author of The Plumed Serpent.

Pandemonium

Yesterday's New York Lottery— Midday 346, Evening 104.

Interpretations:

346 as a page number. See The Storyteller in Chance  (March 22, 2009), with its "spinning wheel" link to a passage by Joan Didion.

104 as a date. See 1/04/11— Didion on "a certain vertiginous occlusion of the imagined and the real" in the post The White Itself.

Black Square,
Black Cross,
Malevich

Related material:

Eid al-Adha,
The Social Aspect of Eid, and
Homage to Malevich

“Inside the church, the grief was real. Sen. Edward Kennedy’s voice caught as he read his lovely eulogy, and when he was done, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg stood up and hugged him. She bravely read from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest‘ (‘Our revels now are ended. We are such stuff as dreams are made on‘). Many of the 315 mourners, family and friends of the Kennedys and Bessettes, swallowed hard through a gospel choir’s rendition of ‘Amazing Grace,’ and afterward, they sang lustily as Uncle Teddy led the old Irish songs at the wake.”

— Newsweek magazine, issue dated August 2, 1999

The Ba gua (Chinese….) are eight diagrams used in Taoist cosmology to represent a range of interrelated concepts. Each consists of three lines, each either ‘broken’ or ‘unbroken,’ representing a yin line or a yang line, respectively. Due to their tripartite structure, they are often referred to as ‘trigrams’ in English. —Wikipedia

Part III:

Above: detail from the cover of…

Week Seven – Imagine…

Friday, August 14, 2009 @ 10:45 a.m.

“Amphitheater – George Kembel –

George Kembel is a co-founder and currently the executive director of the Stanford d.school, also known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University….”

Background:

“Plattner is said to be the 11th richest man in Germany with an estimated fortune of 5 billion USD, according to Forbes….

Plattner is a major owner of the San Jose Sharks hockey team….”

Jumping the Shark San Jose Sharks logo

VS.

Gleaming the Cube Andy Kessler, May 22, 2007

See also recent Log24 entries.
Kessler died of a wasp sting
on Monday, August 10, 2009.

Some philosophical background
for those who prefer Native American
religions to the Abrahamic religions
promoted at Chautauqua:

On the Gleaming Way,
by John Collier.
Chapter One:
 “Native American Time.”

Angel and Beast

Screenwriter Frank Pierson spoke at
Chautauqua Institution this morning.

The gist of his remarks may be found
in an undated graduation speech
at WarnerSisters.com.

His suggested motto for filmmakers:
   "To reach and touch
     the angel in the beast."

The Chautauquan Daily,
Friday, August 7, 2009
by Sara Toth, staff writer —

"Pierson listed his favorite movies as
the Italian and French films that, after
World War II, captivated him and his
friends.
'Those movies were overwhelmingly
fascinating to us, and changed the way
in which we saw movies, and the way we
saw our lives and what we wanted to do
with ourselves,' he said. 'There were so
many that were absolutely marvelous.'
Such movies are not made any
more, Pierson said, and the quality
of the movies now pale in comparison
to those of the 1970s and 1980s.
About once a year, the Coen brothers
release a movie, and Woody Allen
'occasionally' makes a good film,
Pierson said. But the mainstream movies
that are shown in the multiplexes now
are geared toward only one audience:
young men with disposable incomes.
'That's really catering so extensively
to a rather limited audience-- a mentally
retarded and emotionally stunted
audience at that-- that there's not a lot left
over for the rest of us,' Pierson said."

1895: Charles Proteus Steinmetz receives a patent for a “system of distribution by alternating currents.” His engineering work makes it practical to build a widespread power grid for use in lighting and machinery alike.

Thanks to Jillian’s Specials for the following quotation:

“… faith is…. validated by individual experience and inspired by epiphanies.”

— “Where Physics Meets Faith,” by Robert C. Cowen, Oct. 21, 2004

Individual Experience:

See, for instance, the link in last Sunday’s entry to a remarkable group-theoretic map.

Epiphanies:

Part I: For Jillian —

(with a nod to Matthew McConaughey and his films Contact and, more recently, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past).

Part II: For a mountaineer–

(with a nod to Tom Hanks and to Gian-Carlo Rota and the Black Hole of Rome (cf. Psychoshop) as well as to the mountains, both real and imagined, in last Sunday’s link “a remarkable group-theoretic map“).

Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, home of the rat psychology of Skinner and Quine, today offered a lesson in behavioral economics.

From a transcript of Summers’s remarks (for a video, see the previous entry)–

“An abundance of greed and an absence of fear on Wall Street led some to make purchases – not based on the real value of assets, but on the faith that there would be another who would pay more for those assets. At the same time, the government turned a blind eye to these practices and their potential consequences for the economy as a whole. This is how a bubble is born. And in these moments, greed begets greed. The bubble grows.

Eventually, however, this process stops – and reverses. Prices fall. People sell. Instead of an expectation of new buyers, there is an expectation of new sellers. Greed gives way to fear. And this fear begets fear.

This is the paradox at the heart of the financial crisis. In the past few years, we’ve seen too much greed and too little fear; too much spending and not enough saving; too much borrowing and not enough worrying. Today, however, our problem is exactly the opposite.

It is this transition from an excess of greed to an excess of fear that President Roosevelt had in mind when he famously observed that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. It is this transition that has happened in the United States today.”

Related material

Spatial Practice,
Paris-Style:

“Voids, a Retrospective,”
an exhibit of empty rooms
that runs through March 23
at the Centre Pompidou

See also “Art Humor“
 and “Conceptual Art.”

Tom Conoboy on James Purdy’s novel Malcolm:

“Life, Purdy is telling us, is meaningless. Existence is absurd. It consists of events and happenings, all unavoidable, all simultaneously significant and meaningless. They touch you, wound even, ultimately kill, yet somehow existence appears to obtain in a bubble outside of the self. As Thomas M. Lorch describes it, ‘the novel portays humanity revolving about an abyss.'[1] What is real is not real, and what is not real becomes real. Malcolm describes himself as a ‘cypher’ and, in the end, his death affects no-one, least of all him.

Yet, through this, Purdy presents us with the final, and greatest, paradox. In presenting us with nothingness, and in deliberately describing the action in such bland and emotionless language, Purdy actually creates a sense of loss: there is nothing to lose, he is telling us, and yet we feel the loss greatly. What he does is to create a world of genuine nihilism, where nobody communicates, nobody connects, so that we can, in negative, imagine what a world in harmony might be like.”

[1] Thomas M. Lorch, “Purdy’s Malcolm: A Unique Vision of Radical Emptiness.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Summer, 1965), p. 212.

DENNIS OVERBYE

“From the grave, Albert Einstein poured gasoline on the culture wars between science and religion this week.

A letter the physicist wrote in 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, in which he described the Bible as ‘pretty childish’….”

Meanwhile…

Yesterday evening in Springfield (as scheduled):

6:20 PM THE PRESIDENT arrives in Springfield, IL
 
7:00 PM THE PRESIDENT delivers remarks at the 102nd Abraham Lincoln Association Annual Banquet

8:30 PM THE PRESIDENT departs from Springfield, IL

Today’s New York Times:

“Olga Raggio was born in Rome on Feb. 5, 1926, to a Russian mother and an Italian father. She earned a diploma from the Vatican library school in 1947 and a Ph.D. from the University of Rome in 1949.”

“… Raggio, an internationally known scholar and curator who in almost 60 years with the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized some of its best-known exhibitions, scoured the world for treasure and coaxed rarely seen artworks from places as far flung as the Vatican and as close at hand as a New Jersey abbey, died on Jan. 24 in the Bronx. She was 82 and lived in Manhattan.”

Quoted here on the date of Raggio’s death:

“Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is. To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be, utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death.”

— Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324

Related material:

  February 2, 3, and 4 as well as
  February 5 (Raggio’s birthday).

The Beadsman
 

Archbishop Jadot,
former papal envoy
to the United States,
died at 99 on
St. Agnes’s Day,
January 21, 2009.

Stanley Fish in today’s
New York Times —
Barack Obama’s Prose Style:

“… he carries us
from meditative bead
 to meditative bead….”

“The word not only brings the things out of silence; it also produces the silence in which they can disappear again.”

— Max Picard, The World of Silence,
    quoted here on January 15

“Let the word go forth….”

— John Fitzgerald Kennedy, quoted here
    on January 20 — The Eve of St. Agnes

Related material:

Fish contrasts President Obama’s prose style with one that “asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word.”

See also the final word of this journal’s entry on January 21, which was “Keats.”

“Oftentimes people will like a picture I paint because it’s maybe the sun hitting on the side of a window and they can enjoy it purely for itself,” Wyeth once said. “It reminds them of some afternoon. But for me, behind that picture could be a night of moonlight when I’ve been in some house in Maine, a night of some terrible tension, or I had this strange mood. Maybe it was Halloween. It’s all there, hiding behind the realistic side.”

— Andrew Wyeth, who died today

Related material:

“In the pictures of the old masters, Max Picard wrote in The World of Silence, people seem as though they had just come out of the opening in a wall… ”

— Annie Dillard in For the Time Being

“Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas– only I don’t exactly know what they are!…. Let’s have a look at the garden first!”

— A passage from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The “garden” part– but not the “ideas” part– was quoted by Jacques Derrida in Dissemination in the epigraph to Chapter 7, “The Time before First.”

“‘For you… he… we aren’t meaning…’ She was almost stammering, as if she were trying to say several things at once…. Suddenly she gave a little tortured scream. ‘O!’ she cried, ‘O! I can’t keep up! it keeps dividing! There’s too many things to think of!'”

— A passage from Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion, Chapter 12.

“He was thinking faster than he had ever done, and questions rose out of nothing and followed each other– what was to will? Will was determination to choose– what was choice? How could there be choice, unless there was preference, and if there was preference there was no choice, for it was not possible to choose against that preferring nature which was his being; yet being consisted in choice, for only by taking and doing this and not that could being know itself, could it indeed be; to be then consisted in making an inevitable choice, and all that was left was to know the choice, yet even then was the chosen thing the same as the nature that chose, and if not… So swiftly the questions followed each other that he seemed to be standing in flashing coils of subtlety, an infinite ring of vivid intellect and more than intellect, for these questions were not of the mind alone but absorbed into themselves physical passion and twined through all his nature on an unceasing and serpentine journey.”

— A passage from The Place of the Lion, Chapter 10.

“Do you like apples?“

— Good Will Hunting

“Every musician wants to do something of lasting quality, something which will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did it with ‘Stairway.'”

— Jimmy Page on “Stairway to Heaven“

Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column, “Sound, but No Fury,” on the September 26 debate at Oxford, Mississippi–

“Who would have dreamed that when socialism finally came to the U.S.A. it would be brought not by Bolsheviks in blue jeans but Wall Street bankers….?”

Perhaps Ernest Lehman, author of screenplays for “The Prize” and “From the Terrace.” (See recent Log24 entries.)

Paul Krugman’s column in today’s online Times, “Moment of Truth“–

“The consequences of Lehman’s fall were apparent within days, yet key policy players have largely wasted the past four weeks. Now they’ve reached a moment of truth: They’d better do something soon– in fact, they’d better announce a coordinated rescue plan this weekend– or the world economy may well experience its worst slump since the Great Depression.

Let’s talk about where we are right now.”

"I say high, you say low,
you say why,
and I say I don't know.
Oh, no.
You say goodbye
and I say hello."

— Hello Goodbye *

Thanks to NBC Nightly News tonight for a story on the following:

Manhattanhenge is an evening when "the Sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan grid, fully illuminating every single cross-street…."

Full Sun on grid:
Friday, July 11–
8:24 PM EDT

Related material from the late
Tom Disch on St. Sarah's Day:
 

* Walter Everett, in The Beatles as Musicians , has a note on the song "Hello Goodbye"–

"189. The extra-long coda… was referred to as the 'Maori finale' from the start…."

  (Updated Feb. 27, 2013, to replace an incorrect reference in the footnote
   to a book by Stanley Cavell instead of the correct book, by Walter Everett.)

In memory of
Senator Jesse Helms, R-NC:

“I’m a church beside the highway
       where the ditches never drain,
I’m a Baptist like my daddy,
       and Jesus knows my name.”

— Mary Chapin Carpenter

Happy St. Sarah‘s Day
(May 24)

“…something I once heard
Charles M. Schulz say,
‘Don’t worry about the world
coming to an end today.
  It’s already tomorrow
in Australia.'”

— William F. House, 
quoted here on Australia’s
St. Bridget’s Day, 2003

Click on image to view video.

MÉXICO D.F., 10 Abr. 08 / 10:01 am (ACI).- El Arzobispo Emérito de México, Cardenal Ernesto Corripio Ahumada, falleció esta mañana a las 05:30 a.m., en su domicilio….

“Ya la ronda
  llega aquí“

I Have a
Dreamtime
 

Noting today that the time was 11:32 (AM ET),  a portentous number in Finnegans Wake, I decided to practice a bit of chronomancy (use of time for augury).  My weblog's server infomed me when I pressed "enter" that it thought the exact time was 11:32:39.  Consulting (as in Symmetry and Change in the Dreamtime) the I Ching for the meaning of (hexagram) 39, I found the following:

The hexagram pictures a dangerous abyss lying before us and a steep, inaccessible mountain rising behind us…. One must join forces with friends of like mind and put himself under the leadership of a man equal to the situation: then one will succeed in removing the obstacles.

For the abyss and the mountain, see the five log24 entries ending on July 5, 2005, with "The Edge of Eternity." As for "friends of like mind," see the previous entry's references to July 2005.  "The leadership of a man equal to the situation" is more difficult to interpret.  Perhaps it refers, as a politician recently noted, to "a king who took us to the mountain-top and pointed the way to the promised land." Or perhaps to a different king.

Click on image for details.
Note the time: 11:32 (of 13:09).
The moment is that of the syllable
"mount" in the quotation above.

Prizes and Rewards

"… like the victors in the games   
collecting their prizes,
    we receive our reward…."
— Conclusion of
Plato's Republic

From The Harvard Crimson
front page on
Mardi Gras, 2008:

Harvard senior Matthew Di Pasquale
plans a new campus magazine called
"Diamond"–

Click to enlarge.

Related material:

The Crimson Passion:
 Drama at Mardi Gras

colporteur

n. itinerant seller or giver of books,
especially religious literature.

Now you has jazz.

— Cole Porter, lyric for “High Society,”
set in Newport, Rhode Island, 1956