For Vegas Kool-Aid
From the Instagram history of Marcela Nowak —
… And other Vegas-related material —
"Can you make it any more complicated?"
For the Adelson* Sphere —
Sunday, October 15, 2023
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Purple Requiem
See as well "The Stars My Destination" in this journal.
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Tuesday, November 22, 2011
The Purple Square of Oxford
Pebbles found on the cyberspace beach this morning
From Oxford University Press—
From a less scholarly work at Scribd.com —
"The clocks were striking thirteen."
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Saturday, May 7, 2011
Midnight Purple
From an obituary in tonight's online New York Times —
Margalit Fox on Lanny Friedlander, founder of Reason magazine, who died at 63 on March 19*—
"As Mr. Friedlander conceived it, Reason was neither strictly right-wing libertarian nor strictly left— in modern parlance, neither red nor blue but a purple amalgam of the two. It was genuinely purple at first, as it was run off on a ditto machine."
Related material: Tonight's previous post and, from November 5, 2008—
* The date of Knecht Moves and Supermoon.
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Saturday, March 23, 2024
Phenomenology and Multispeech
The Phenomenology Part —
Art adapted from a student* artwork in a public gallery display
this month in my hometown library that I saw on March 20 —
The Multispeech Part —
From a New York Times obituary yesterday, March 22 —
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/books/lyn-hejinian-dead.html —
"With its use of ambiguous language and disjunctive sentences,
the book forsook the traditional language of autobiography,
beginning with a haunting evocation of Ms. Hejinian’s earliest memory,
her father returning from World War II:
A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned
home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at
the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left,
was purple — though moments are no longer so colored."
I do not endorse the dead poet's philosophy, but the language is striking.
* The artist is much too young to be identified by name on the Internet,
but may (or may not) become much better known in later life.
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Saturday, January 13, 2024
Xmas Pattern
Found on the Web today —
Earlier . . .
Thursday, August 10, 2023
|
Related entertainment starring Martin Freeman —
Related Art —
See as well The Diamond Theorem in Basque Country
for material from the University of the Basque Country,
an offshoot of the University of Bilbao (in Basque, "Bilbo").
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Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Beginning My 81st Year . . . Exploring Color Space
From the 12 AM Aug. 23, 2023, film at TCM …
See also Chaplin-related remarks in the previous post.
A related scene from April 1, 2023 . . .
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Saturday, August 12, 2023
Manic Pixie Song*
* For the title and the color, see last night's "Drunkard's Dream" post.
Happy birthday, Cara Delevingne.
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For Jodie Foster and the Late Robbie Robertson —
“A Drunkard’s Dream If Ever I Did See One”
"Another day, another couch." — Marcela Nowak
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“A Drunkard’s Dream If Ever I Did See One”
“A Drunkard’s Dream If Ever I Did See One”
Thursday, August 10, 2023
Friday, August 4, 2023
The Roc’s Egg
|
"Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler." |
|
Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road — “What did I want? I wanted a Roc’s egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist, and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur – I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles. I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, 'The game’s afoot!' I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and Lost Dauphin. I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and to eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be the way they had promised me it was going to be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is. I had had one chance – for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be – and I had known it and I had let it slip away. Maybe one chance is all you ever get.” |
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Saturday, April 1, 2023
The Color Out of Nevermore
A detail from the final Log24 post of March 2023 —
"Wednesday, some red doors
should not be painted black."
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Saturday, January 7, 2023
Monday, May 25, 2020
D8ing Continues.
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Saturday, August 10, 2019
Thursday, August 8, 2019
Release Date
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Thursday, February 21, 2019
Tuesday, November 27, 2018
Sunday, October 28, 2018
Commonwealth Tales, or “Lost in Physics”
From Ulysses , by James Joyce —
|
John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth: —Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle with Plato. —Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his commonwealth? |
Compare and contrast:
Fans of Plato might enjoy tales of Narnia, but fans of
James Joyce and Edgar Allan Poe might prefer
a tale by Michael Chabon from April 2001 about a
"doleful little corner of western Pennsylvania."
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Tuesday, August 28, 2018
For St. Augustine’s Day
Whether the word "condescension" functions as purple Kool-Aid
here or in the previous post, the reader may decide.
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Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Purported Endgame
A search for "IMA" yields, at ima.org.au . . .
"Since 1975, the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) has been Queensland’s
leading independent forum for art and its discourses." … And …
"Clog, therefore, purple Jack and crimson Jill."
— Wallace Stevens
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Wednesday, August 8, 2018
Annals of Phenomenology
The Return of Purple Man
Or: This Just In
Detail from a post of yesterday morning taken from
the laptop of private investigator Jessica Jones —
The above image, together with yesterday's date, suggested, rather
fancifully, yesterday morning's later post on just intonation, "Seventh."
The nemesis of Jessica Jones, the Purple Man —
A New York Times piece today* is related to both just intonation and
the color purple —
* Published at 1:50 PM ET —
itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-08-08T17:50:30.000Z"
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Thursday, January 18, 2018
A Phrase That Might Have Been
The online New York Times reports this afternoon
the death of a production designer on January 9th —
"In addition to the two Oscars Mr. Marsh won
(which he shared with others), he was nominated
for two more: for 'Scrooge' (1970), with Albert Finney and
Alex [sic ] Guinness, and 'Mary, Queen of Scots' (1971),
with Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson."
"… The Little Broomstick by Mary Stewart,
illustrated by Shirley Hughes, published Brockhampton 1971.
The story is about Mary, staying at Great-Aunt Charlotte's house,
bored until she meets the black cat Tib and finds the purple flower
fly-by-night that makes the little broomstick fly. In chapter 10
'gay go up and gay go down' Mary hides in Endor College,
the witch school, after hours and finds Tib transformed into a frog
(Madame Mumblechook had taken him from her as her entry fee).
She recites the Master Spell to release him. ' It was a simple,
gay little rhyme, and it ended on a phrase that might have been
(but wasn't) "the dancing ring of days".' "
"Bah, humbug!" — A Christmas Carol
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Thursday, January 11, 2018
Grab-Bag
In a new film, "The Commuter," Liam Neeson fights
a conspiracy …
"so vast and preposterous that it becomes
nothing more than a grab-bag of plot twists."
— A. O. Scott in The New York Times , 5 AM Jan. 11
Update of 6:29 AM —
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Sunday, August 20, 2017
Hillbilly Hell
"Clog, therefore, purple Jack and crimson Jill." — Wallace Stevens
|
"A 1991 PBS documentary called Dancing Outlaw introduced the world to the life and times of gas-huffing, vengeance-seeking, tap-dancin’ Jesco White. White Lightnin’ , which premiered recently at Sundance, is British director Dominic Murphy’s reportedly more surreal take on this fabled Appalachian anti-hero. While not locked in reform school, work camps, or the psych ward, the young Jesco White learned his special breed of clog dancing from his father, who was eventually killed in a random act of hillbilly violence. In White Lightnin' Jesco picks up his daddy’s tap shoes and hits the road, where he comes to grips with the art, addiction, and madness that have plagued his violent life story. And somewhere along the way he meets his wife, played by none other than Carrie Fisher. While David D’Arcy speaks almost fondly of White Lightnin' s redneck-exploitation (he was probably stretching for other ways to describe this “hillbilly slasher saga”), Dennis Harvey was less enchanted by the film’s 'pretentious glimpse of hillbilly hell.' Most early reviews are apprehensive about the film’s distribution chances unless its grotesque lyricism finds a niche market. But I can't imagine this, being the first film written by the co-founders of Vice Magazine , not generating more distribution steam in the near future. If anyone knows how to generate buzz it is those guys." — MLeary review, January 28, 2009, 12:58 AM |
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Wednesday, June 15, 2016
Venn’s Lotus …
A search for "Purple" in this journal suggests a review of Transition,
a Log24 post of November 21, 2011. A related image —
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Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Saturday, April 23, 2016
What Mad Pursuit
Quine, Pursuit of Truth , Harvard
University Press, 1990, epigraphs:
For another quote from Sherwin-Williams,
see the April 21 post Purple Requiem.
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Friday, April 22, 2016
Vanity Fair Continues
Detail of illustration by Frederick Alfred Rhead of Vanity Fair,
page 96 in the John Bunyan classic Pilgrim's Progress
(New York, The Century Co., 1912)
Yesterday's posts Legend and Purple Requiem suggest a review
of John Bunyan. A search for "Vanity Fair" + "Temple of Art" yields…
The above Vanity Fair article was linked to here previously.
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Friday, April 10, 2015
Immaculate Inception
See also Midnight Purple
and today's previous post.
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Friday, November 28, 2014
Off the Map
Alexander Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles , 18.5.9.5. e, p. 1181 :
Pour mettre la joie à son comble, j’ajoute que le dénommé Saavedra
semble avoir disparu de la circulation sans plus laisser aucune trace….
Du coup, l’histoire prend des allures de sombre intrigue policière.
Man of La Mancha :
"Who knows where madness lies?"
An author quoted here at 10 PM ET Monday, Nov. 24, 2014 :
And then there is author Dan McGirt :
|
It sounded fun, so I signed up — and soon learned writing a story set in someone else’s fictional world presents certain … challenges. It was an enjoyable experience, yet very different than being able to write and run with whatever crazy idea pops into my head. Trying to capture the feel of a game that is more based on action and blowing stuff up than on deep character moments (not that I would know much about that … ) was also a challenge. I experimented with things like using comic book sound effects, lean descriptions (do I really need to describe a fireball spell in detail?) and other tricks to keep things moving. I also got to add to Magicka lore. Often the answer to my questions about some bit of in-world history or “fact” was “Make something up.” So I did! (Often getting a response of … “Odin’s onions, no! You can’t do that!”) So I was thrilled and excited to contribute in a small way to the development of Midgård. The result is Magicka: The Ninth Element , in which four young Wizards are sent on a quest to pursue the mysterious Purple Wizard who has stolen a powerful artifact from the Order of Magick. Which powerful artifact? No one is quite sure (for reasons explained in the story). What does it do? Again, unclear. But it can’t be good. Thus our heroes Davlo, Grimnir, Fafnir and Tuonetar set out on their quest — and promptly go off the map. (I’m not even kidding. The Midgård map in the front of the book will of little use to you. But it’s pretty!) Will they survive the dangers of the Unmapped Lands? Will they catch the Purple Wizard in time? Will they save the world? Read the book to find out! |
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Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Christmas Ornaments
Continued from December 25—
A link from Sunday afternoon to Nov. 26, 2012,
suggests a review of one of the above structures.
The Dreaming Jewels cover at left is taken from a review
by Jo Walton at Tor.com—
"This is a book that it’s clearly been difficult
for publishers to market. The covers have been
generally pretty awful, and also very different.
I own a 1975 Corgi SF Collectors Library
paperback that I bought new for 40p in the later
seventies. It’s purple, and it has a slightly grainy
cover, and it matches my editions of The Menace
From Earth and A Canticle for Leibowitz .
(Dear old Corgi SF Collectors Editions with their
very seventies fonts! How I imprinted on them at
an early age!) I mention this, however, because
the (uncredited) illustration actually represents and
illustrates the book much better than any of the other
cover pictures I’ve seen. It shows a hexagon with an
attempt at facets, a man, a woman, hands, a snake,
and stars, all in shades of green. It isn’t attractive,
but it wouldn’t put off people who’d enjoy what’s inside
either."
The "hexagon with an attempt at facets" is actually
an icosahedron, as the above diagram shows.
(The geometric part of the diagram is from a Euclid webpage.)
For Plato's dream about these jewels, see his Timaeus.
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Monday, November 21, 2011
Transition
A search for images related to Joseph T. Clark, Society of Jesus,
(author* of a quote in today's noon entry) yields—
"Heaven, I'm in heaven" — First words of "Purple Rose of Cairo"
* Very likely the same Joseph T. Clark, S. J. (1911-1989) who taught at Canisius College.
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Sunday, September 18, 2011
What Rough Beast
Lurching Toward Decision
"Suskind… nails, I think, Obama's intellectual blind spot. Indeed, Obama himself nails it, telling Suskind that he was too inclined to search for 'the perfect technical answer' to the myriad of complex issues coming at him."
— Frank Rich on Ron Suskind's new book about the White House, Confidence Men
Very distantly related material—
From "Confidence Game," an Oct. 12, 2008, post in this journal, a quasi-European perspective—
|
Kaleidoscope turning… – Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat |
See also …
Gravity’s Rainbow , Penguin Classics, 1995, page 742:
"… knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea….
Now there’s only a long cat’s-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain tonight, bright gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of
742"
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Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Wednesday January 21, 2009
Scripture
“… while some are elected,
others not elect are
passed by….”
— A commentary on the
Calvinist doctrine of preterition
| Gravity’s Rainbow, Penguin Classics, 1995, page 742:
“… knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea…. Now there’s only a long cat’s-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain tonight, bright gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of 742″ |
“God is the original
conspiracy theory.”
“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”
— President Obama yesterday
It is not entirely clear what these “childish things” are. Perhaps the young nation’s “childish things” that the new President refers to are part of what Robert Stone memorably called “our secret culture.” Stone was referring to Puritanism, which some advocates of the new religion of Scientism might call “childish.” I do not. Lunatic, perhaps, but not childish.
Related meditations:
A year ago yesterday, on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008, the mid-day lottery for New York State was 605.
A midrash in the Judeo-Christian tradition of paranoia a year ago today suggested that 605 might be a veiled reference to “God, the Devil, and a Bridge,” a weblog entry on mathematician André Weil.
Continuing in this vein a year later, we are confronted with the mid-day New York lottery for yesterday:
742.
Taking a hint from another
entry on Weil, this may be
regarded as a reference to
The Oxford Book of
English Verse (1919 edition):
Selection 742 in that book
comports well with this
jounal’s recent meditations
on death and Brooklyn:
| “Let me glide noiselessly forth; | |
| With the key of softness unlock the locks….” — Walt Whitman |
Applying this method of
exegesis to last year’s
lottery, we have
| “And all that did then attend and follow, |
|
| Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo, |
|
| With envy of my sweet pipings.” |
“In time, his carefree lifestyle began to upset the early Christians, who saw his earthy temptations as a manifestation of the Devil. Who would’ve thought that the horny old goat would become the blueprint for popular conceptions of Satan– cloven hooves, horns and all?”
— Pan: God of Shepherds, Flocks, and Fornication
Hymn 605 thus supplies a reference to the devil mentioned by Weil in the entry of 6/05.
It, together with Hymn 742 of a year later, may be regarded as a divine response to a weblog entry yesterday from the Greater Wasilla Area on listening to the inauguration:
“… thus far, I have not heard any priests of Apollo, nor of any other God, issuing any auguries.”
Neither have I, but hearing is only one of the senses.
“Heard melodies are sweet,
but those unheard
Are sweeter.”— John Keats
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Sunday, May 25, 2008
Sunday May 25, 2008
Wechsler Cubes
"Confusion is nothing new."
— Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
— Song lyric, Cyndi Lauper
Part I:
Magister Ludi
Magister Ludi
Hermann Hesse's 1943 The Glass Bead Game (Picador paperback, Dec. 6, 2002, pp. 139-140)–
"For the present, the Master showed him a bulky memorandum, a proposal he had received from an organist– one of the innumerable proposals which the directorate of the Game regularly had to examine. Usually these were suggestions for the admission of new material to the Archives. One man, for example, had made a meticulous study of the history of the madrigal and discovered in the development of the style a curved that he had expressed both musically and mathematically, so that it could be included in the vocabulary of the Game. Another had examined the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar's Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns. Or again some fanatic had once more unearthed some new cabala hidden in the musical notation of the fifteenth century. Then there were the tempestuous letters from abstruse experimenters who could arrive at the most astounding conclusions from, say, a comparison of the horoscopes of Goethe and Spinoza; such letters often included pretty and seemingly enlightening geometric drawings in several colors."
Part II:
A Bulky Memorandum
A Bulky Memorandum
From Siri Hustvedt, author of Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)– What I Loved: A Novel (Picador paperback, March 1, 2004, page 168)–
A description of the work of Bill Wechsler, a fictional artist:
"Bill worked long hours on a series of autonomous pieces about numbers. Like O's Journey, the works took place inside glass cubes, but these were twice as large– about two feet square. He drew his inspiration from sources as varied as the Cabbala, physics, baseball box scores, and stock market reports. He painted, cut, sculpted, distorted, and broke the numerical signs in each work until they became unrecognizable. He included figures, objects, books, windows, and always the written word for the number. It was rambunctious art, thick with allusion– to voids, blanks, holes, to monotheism and the individual, the the dialectic and yin-yang, to the Trinity, the three fates, and three wishes, to the golden rectangle, to seven heavens, the seven lower orders of the sephiroth, the nine Muses, the nine circles of Hell, the nine worlds of Norse mythology, but also to popular references like A Better Marriage in Five Easy Lessons and Thinner Thighs in Seven Days. Twelve-step programs were referred to in both cube one and cube two. A miniature copy of a book called The Six Mistakes Parents Make Most Often lay at the bottom of cube six. Puns appeared, usually well disguised– one, won; two, too, and Tuesday; four, for, forth; ate, eight. Bill was partial to rhymes as well, both in images and words. In cube nine, the geometric figure for a line had been painted on one glass wall. In cube three, a tiny man wearing the black-and-white prison garb of cartoons and dragging a leg iron has
— End of page 168 —
opened the door to his cell. The hidden rhyme is "free." Looking closely through the walls of the cube, one can see the parallel rhyme in another language: the German word drei is scratched into one glass wall. Lying at the bottom of the same box is a tiny black-and-white photograph cut from a book that shows the entrance to Auschwitz: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. With every number, the arbitrary dance of associations worked togethere to create a tiny mental landscape that ranged in tone from wish-fulfillment dream to nightmare. Although dense, the effect of the cubes wasn't visually disorienting. Each object, painting, drawing, bit of text, or sculpted figure found its rightful place under the glass according to the necessary, if mad, logic of numerical, pictorial, and verbal connection– and the colors of each were startling. Every number had been given a thematic hue. Bill had been interested in Goethe's color wheel and in Alfred Jensen's use of it in his thick, hallucinatory paintings of numbers. He had assigned each number a color. Like Goethe, he included black and white, although he didn't bother with the poet's meanings. Zero and one were white. Two was blue. Three was red, four was yellow, and he mixed colors: pale blue for five, purples in six, oranges in seven, greens in eight, and blacks and grays in nine. Although other colors and omnipresent newsprint always intruded on the basic scheme, the myriad shades of a single color dominated each cube.
The number pieces were the work of a man at the top of his form. An organic extension of everything Bill had done before, these knots of symbols had an explosive effect. The longer I looked at them, the more the miniature constructions seemed on the brink of bursting from internal pressure. They were tightly orchestrated semantic bombs through which Bill laid bare the arbitrary roots of meaning itself– that peculiar social contract generated by little squiggles, dashes, lines, and loops on a page."
Part III:
Wechsler Cubes
(named not for
Bill Wechsler, the
fictional artist above,
but for the non-fictional
David Wechsler) –
(named not for
Bill Wechsler, the
fictional artist above,
but for the non-fictional
David Wechsler) –
|
From 2002:
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest. |
Part IV:
A Magic Gallery
A Magic Gallery
|
ZZ
Figures from the
Poem by Eugen Jost:
Mit Zeichen und Zahlen
Numbers and Names,
With numbers and names English translation A related poem:
Alphabets
From time to time
But if a savage
— Hermann Hesse (1943), |
Comments Off on Sunday May 25, 2008
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Wednesday April 11, 2007
It’s Not Easy
Being Green
Don Imus, 1974 album
Being Green
Don Imus, 1974 album
Rutgers women’s basketball
coach C. Vivian Stringer:
“It’s about us as people– black, white, purple or green. And as much as I speak about that, it’s not even black and white– the color is green.”
Imus flap about
black, white, and green
David Lieberman, Laura Petrecca and Gary Strauss in USA Today:
“So amid all the uproar over Imus’ remarks and the national discussion over race relations that they ignited, why wasn’t he fired?
Stringer and others think that has less to do with relations between blacks and whites than it does with another color.
‘The color is green– if we can tolerate as a society what’s just taken place,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how anyone could have heard this and not been offended.’
As one of the country’s most popular radio talk show hosts, Imus is the centerpiece of a multimillion-dollar business that would collapse without him.
To get a sense of its size: Advertisers spent $11.3 million last year on his show at just one station, New York’s WFAN, according to Nielsen. That accounted for nearly 24% of all the station’s ad sales.
Sponsors paid MSNBC an additional $8.4 million last year for spots on Imus’ show, according to TNS Media Intelligence.”
Mike Lupica in the
New York Daily News,
April 11, 2007:
“Essence Carson talked about what Imus had said about her and her teammates, and about everything that has happened since.
‘It has stolen a moment of pure grace from us,’ she said.
The moment of pure grace was Essence Carson….”
From ESSENCE.com:
“Essence Communications Inc. (ECI) was founded in 1968. In October 2000, ECI signed an agreement with Time Inc., a subsidiary of Time Warner Inc., to form a joint venture known as Essence Communications Partners. ESSENCE was the majority owner of the venture. In March 2005, Time Inc. acquired the portion it did not already own. The company’s name changed back to Essence Communications Inc. The ECI corporate headquarters are in New York City, with offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Detroit.
ESSENCE magazine
During the past 36 years, the company has grown into a vital business of diverse media properties and communications systems that include ESSENCE, its flagship magazine launched in 1970. Its success is linked to its unique relationship with the readers of ESSENCE magazine and the strong alliances it has forged with America’s leading corporations and financial institutions.”
Comments Off on Wednesday April 11, 2007
Wednesday, July 5, 2006
Wednesday July 5, 2006
Solemn Dance
Virgil on the Elysian Fields:
Some wrestle on the sands, and some in play And games heroic pass the hours away. Those raise the song divine, and these advance In measur'd steps to form the solemn dance.
(See also the previous two entries.)
"The cover of this issue of the Bulletin is the frontispiece to a volume of Samuel de Fermat’s 1670 edition of Bachet’s Latin translation of Diophantus’s Arithmetica. This edition includes the marginalia of the editor’s father, Pierre de Fermat. Among these notes one finds the elder Fermat’s extraordinary comment [c. 1637] in connection with the Pythagorean equation
— Barry Mazur, Gade University Professor at Harvard
Mazur's concluding remarks are as follows:
"But however you classify the branch of mathematics it is concerned with, Diophantus’s Arithmetica can claim the title of founding document, and inspiring muse, to modern number theory. This brings us back to the goddess with her lyre in the frontispiece, which is the cover of this issue. As is only fitting, given the passion of the subject, this goddess is surely Erato, muse of erotic poetry."
Mazur has admitted, at his website, that this conclusion was an error:
"I erroneously identified the figure on the cover as Erato, muse of erotic poetry, but it seems, rather, to be Orpheus."
"Seems"?
The inscription on the frontispiece, "Obloquitur numeris septem discrimina vocum," is from a description of the Elysian Fields in Virgil's Aeneid, Book VI:
His demum exactis, perfecto munere divae, Devenere locos laetos, & amoena vireta Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas. Largior hic campos aether & lumine vestit Purpureo; solemque suum, sua sidera norunt. Pars in gramineis exercent membra palaestris, Contendunt ludo, & fulva luctanter arena: Pars pedibus plaudunt choreas, & carmina dicunt. Necnon Threicius longa cum veste sacerdos Obloquitur numeris septem discrimina vocum: Jamque eadem digitis, jam pectine pulsat eburno.
PITT: These rites compleat, they reach the flow'ry plains, The verdant groves, where endless pleasure reigns. Here glowing AEther shoots a purple ray, And o'er the region pours a double day. From sky to sky th'unwearied splendour runs, And nobler planets roll round brighter suns. Some wrestle on the sands, and some in play And games heroic pass the hours away. Those raise the song divine, and these advance In measur'd steps to form the solemn dance. There Orpheus graceful in his long attire, In seven divisions strikes the sounding lyre; Across the chords the quivering quill he flings, Or with his flying fingers sweeps the strings. DRYDEN: These holy rites perform'd, they took their way, Where long extended plains of pleasure lay. The verdant fields with those of heav'n may vie; With AEther veiled, and a purple sky: The blissful seats of happy souls below; Stars of their own, and their own suns they know. Their airy limbs in sports they exercise, And on the green contend the wrestlers prize. Some in heroic verse divinely sing, Others in artful measures lead the ring. The Thracian bard surrounded by the rest, There stands conspicuous in his flowing vest. His flying fingers, and harmonious quill, Strike seven distinguish'd notes, and seven at once they fill.
It is perhaps not irrelevant that the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's next role would have been that of Orfeo in Gluck's "Orfeo ed Euridice." See today's earlier entries.
The poets among us may like to think of Mazur's own role as that of the lyre:
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Sunday, October 9, 2005
Sunday October 9, 2005
Today's Sermon:
Magical Thinking
Magical Thinking
On this date– "In 1936,
the first generator at Boulder
(later Hoover) Dam began
transmitting electricity to Los Angeles."
— Today in History, Associated Press
the first generator at Boulder
(later Hoover) Dam began
transmitting electricity to Los Angeles."
— Today in History, Associated Press
"Brightness doubled
generates radiance."
— Hexagram 30
generates radiance."
— Hexagram 30
"I know what nothing means."
— Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays
"Nothing is random."
— Mark Helprin in Winter's Tale
"… She thought about nothing. Her mind was a blank tape, imprinted daily with snatches of things overheard, fragments of dealers' patter, the beginnings of jokes and odd lines of song lyrics. When she finally lay down nights in the purple room she would play back the day's tape, a girl singing into a microphone and a fat man dropping a glass, cards fanned on a table and a dealer's rake in closeup and a woman in slacks crying and the opaque blue eyes of the guard at some baccarat table. A child in the harsh light of a crosswalk on the Strip. A sign on Fremont Street. A light blinking. In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen, the only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin.
By the end of a week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other. She had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for even one micro-second she would have what she had come to get. As if she had fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity. She could feel smoke against her skin. She could feel voice waves. She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which. 'Maria,' she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody.
She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water. When the pressure got great enough she drove out there. All that day she felt the power surging through her own body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam's face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself. With a guide and a handful of children Maria walked through the chambers, stared at the turbines in the vast glittering gallery, at the deep still water with the hidden intakes sucking all the while, even as she watched, clung to the railings, leaned out, stood finally on a platform over the pipe that carried the river beneath the dam. The platform quivered. Her ears roared. She wanted to stay in the dam, lie on the great pipe itself, but reticence saved her from asking.
'Just how long have you been here now,' Freddy Chaikin asked when she ran into him in Caesar's. 'You planning on making a year of it? Or what?'"
Related material
The front page of today's
New York Times Book Review
and Log24, July 15, 2004:
|
A quotation that somehow
seems relevant:
O the mind, mind has mountains, |
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Monday, October 18, 2004
Monday October 18, 2004
Counting Crows
on the Feast of St. Luke
"In the fullness of time,
educated people will believe
there is no soul
independent of the body,
and hence no life after death."
— Francis Crick, who was awarded
a Nobel Prize on this date in 1962
"She went to the men on the ground and looked at them and then she found Inman apart from them. She sat and held him in her lap. He tried to talk, but she hushed him. He drifted in and out and dreamed a bright dream of a home. It had a coldwater spring rising out of a rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream, the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all the seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plants blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October, corn crops tasseling, a stuffed chair pulled up to the glowing parlor hearth, pumpkins shining in the fields, laurels blooming on the hillsides, ditch banks full of orange jewelweed, white blossoms on dogwood, purple on redbud. Everything coming around at once. And there were white oaks, and a great number of crows, or at least the spirits of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs. There was something he wanted to say."
— Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
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Sunday, December 8, 2002
Sunday December 8, 2002
From a Spanish-English dictionary:
lucero m. morning or evening star:
any bright star….
2. hole in a window panel for the
admission of light….
Sal a tu ventana,
que mi canto es para ti….
Lucero, lucero, lucero, lucero
See In Mexico City, a Quiet Revelation,
in the New York Times of December 5.
The photo, from a different website, is
of a room by the architect Luis Barragán.
From the Nobel Prize lecture of Octavio Paz
on December 8, 1990 — twelve years ago today:
"Like every child I built emotional bridges in the imagination to link me to the world and to other people. I lived in a town on the outskirts of Mexico City, in an old dilapidated house that had a jungle-like garden and a great room full of books. First games and first lessons. The garden soon became the centre of my world; the library, an enchanted cave. I used to read and play with my cousins and schoolmates. There was a fig tree, temple of vegetation, four pine trees, three ash trees, a nightshade, a pomegranate tree, wild grass and prickly plants that produced purple grazes. Adobe walls. Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours' patio. Books with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through, supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors and princesses, beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sindbad and with Robinson, we fought with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid. How I would have liked to stay forever on the Isle of Calypso! In summer the green branches of the fig tree would sway like the sails of a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept by the wind, I could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon as they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within reach; time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present."
Today's site music is courtesy of the Sinatra MIDI Files.
Saturday, September 14, 2002
Saturday September 14, 2002
September 14:
Triumph of the Cross
and Death of
Princess Grace of Monaco
September 13 was the feast day of St. John Chrysostom.
From the Catholic Encyclopedia:
“St. John Chrysostom more than once in his writings makes allusion to the adoration of the cross; one citation will suffice: ‘Kings removing their diadems take up the cross, the symbol of their Saviour’s death; on the purple, the cross; in their prayers, the cross; on their armour, the cross; on the holy table, the cross; throughout the universe, the cross. The cross shines brighter than the sun.'”
Today, September 14, is the feast day of the Triumph of
“The primitive form of the cross seems to have been that of the so-called ‘gamma’ cross (crux gammata), better known to Orientalists and students of prehistoric archæology by its Sanskrit name, swastika.”
— The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume IV
Copyright © 1908
by Robert Appleton Company
Online Edition Copyright © 1999
by Kevin Knight
Nihil Obstat.
Remy Lafort, Censor
Imprimatur.
+John M. Farley,
Archbishop of New York
Later writers might choose to omit the above sentence, published in 1908, but, as Pilate said, “Quod scripsi, scripsi.” For modern times, this quotation is perhaps best translated into German, the language of modern Pilates:
Was ich geschrieben habe,
habe ich geschrieben.
It might well be accompanied by another translation from the same website, which renders the “Ora et labora” of St. Benedict as
Bete und arbeite!
and, indeed, by a classic quotation from twentieth-century German Christian thought:
ARBEIT MACHT FREI.
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