In memory of Ruth Haring, a former president of the United States
Chess Federation who reportedly died at 63 on Thursday,
November 29, 2018 —
A search for Ruthless in this journal yields the tag Mythologem Day.
Monday, December 3, 2018
Ruthless
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Friday, September 29, 2023
For Cosmopolitans
Vide …
-
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/american-jewry/14774/
ruthless-cosmopolitans/
- http://m759.net/wordpress/?tag=silver-screen
See as well the "Flowessence" art of Marcela Nowak and
the subject of today's Google Doodle . . .
"Csíkszentmihályi is the author of the bestseller
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,
as well as a distinguished professor of psychology
and management at Claremont Graduate University
and co-director of the Quality of Life Research Center."
— upi.com/Science_News
SEPT. 29, 2023 / 7:21 AM / UPDATED AT 12:07 PM —
"Google Doodle marks happiness psychologist
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's birthday, " by Karen Butler
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Wednesday, March 10, 2021
Wednesday, March 3, 2021
Ink
From this journal on Nov. 9-12, 2004:
|
Fade to Black “…that ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent.” — Trevanian, Shibumi “‘Haven’t there been splendidly elegant colors in Japan since ancient times?’ ‘Even black has various subtle shades,’ Sosuke nodded.” — Yasunari Kawabata, The Old Capital  Ad Reinhardt An Ad Reinhardt painting described in the entry of
Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1960-66. The viewer may need to tilt the screen to see that “The grid is a staircase to the Universal…. We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who, despite his repeated insistence that ‘Art is art,’ ended up by painting a series of… nine-square grids in which the motif that inescapably emerges is a Greek cross.  Greek Cross There is no painter in the West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape and the Pandora’s box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it.” — “Grids,” by Rosalind Krauss, |
Related material from The New York Times today —
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Monday, February 8, 2021
Folklore
Wendy Derleth
|
https://moviedatabase.fandom.com/ wiki/Wendy_Derleth —
Wendy Derleth is a fictional teacher and a supporting character featured in the Wishmaster film series. Played by actress Jenny O'Hara, she appeared in the first installment of the series, Wishmaster in 1997. Biography Wendy Derleth was a professor of folklore at a university in California. Occasionally, she was called upon to lend her expertise to projects going on with the drama department, but admitted that such a thing was not really in her wheelhouse. In 1997, a woman named Alexandra Amberson came to Professor Derleth for advice under the recommendation of art collector Raymond Beaumont. Derleth had history with Beaumont and saw Amberson's apparent disinterest in the man as a sign of good judgment. Alex had been suffering from recent nightmares and prophetic visions relating to the presence of a Djinn. Without revealing too much, she picked Derleth's brain about the true nature of such creatures. Wendy was quite knowledgeable about Djinn and was quick to point out that these creatures were not cute and funny as one would expect from the likes of Barbara Eden or Robin Williams. They were dangerous and ruthless monsters born from the shadows cast by the first light of creation. |
Related material —
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Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Focus
http://m759.net/wordpress/?tag=ruthless-focus
Related material —
Some backstory —
Freeman Dyson on ruthlessness and …
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Sunday, April 19, 2015
Sermon for the Cruelest Month
Some Harvard thoughts suggested by the recent
Jonathan Crombie project "Waiting for Ishtar" and
by a search in this journal for "Megan Follows" —
Remarks by Freeman Dyson in today's New York Times
Sunday Book Review (page BR8)…
"Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine?
The child Emily in 'A High Wind in Jamaica,'
by Richard Hughes. She murders a friendly
sea captain and lays the blame on members
of the crew, who are hanged for the crime.
To have survived for millions of years in the
lawless world of human evolution, parents
must love children even when children do evil,
and children must be ruthless and lovable.
Emily is ruthless and lovable."
A remark by young Emily in the film of "High Wind"—
"Church of England."
For another version of "lovable," see The Eve of St. Agnes, 2003.
For another version of "ruthless," see the depiction, by Zachary Scott,
of a Harvard student in the 1948 film titled "Ruthless."
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Monday, January 19, 2015
Product 19:
Revisionism
From Wikipedia as of today:
"In fiction, revisionism is the retelling of a story
or type of story with substantial alterations in
character or environment, to 'revise' the view
shown in the original work. Unlike most usages
of the term revisionism, this is not generally
considered pejorative.
The film Dances with Wolves is a revisionist
Western because it portrays the Native Americans
sympathetically instead of as the savages of
traditional Westerns, which have been criticized
as racist. Similarly, the novel Wicked by
Gregory Maguire is a revisionist account of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , which portrays the
Wicked Witch of the West fighting for what she
believes is right, and the Wizard as a ruthless
dictator of Oz."
See also another Wikipedia article's Revision History.
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Monday, February 24, 2014
Second City
See Stadium Devildare, Church Notes, and Ruth Margraff*.
Ruthless : A Brief Drama —
"There is no ____ , there is only Zuul."
— Adapted from Ghostbusters
* In a webpage dated July 25, 2007.
See also this journal on that date.
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Monday, December 30, 2013
A Wilderness of Mirrors
A link to a Nov. 22 post on Arcade Fire was added today
to yesterday's "Dating an OS" post.
That Nov. 22 post suggests a review related to a new film —
"If the spy wars of the later 20th century were fought
in 'a wilderness of mirrors,' beset by paradox and
moral uncertainty— evil done in the name of good—
then John le Carré, or, rather, the narrative voice that
went by the name John le Carré, was the perfect
choice to polish those mirrors. It was the voice of the
urbane, upper-class Englishman: courteous, opaque
and chilly, with a ruthless, penetrative intellect and
razor wit for the delivery of its insights."
— Alan Furst in The New York Times Sunday
Book Review on October 12, 2008
For other material on mirrors, see all posts tagged Arcade Fire.
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Wednesday, May 1, 2013
For Law Day
Harvard Gazette , March 4th, 2013:
"Winfrey will speak on May 30 during Commencement day’s
Afternoon Exercises, which serve as the annual meeting of
the Harvard Alumni Association. The exercises will take place
in the Tercentenary Theatre of Harvard Yard,
between Memorial Church and Widener Library."
On the 1977 Octavia Butler novel Mind of My Mind :
"The first chapter in a history that Butler has already taken up
at a much later stage in Patternmaster (1976).
Mind of My Mind begins with Doro, a ruthless mutant
as old as the pyramids who has spent the last 4,000 years
trying to breed a race in his own image. The culminating
experiment is his daughter Mary. But, to Doro's astonishment,
Mary's first instinct on attaining her full powers is to begin
building a mental community— a Pattern— out of the
wretched thousands of Doro's half-telepathic failures
and partial successes. Despite some ragged moments,
Butler is clearly on to a promising vein— something like
Zenna Henderson's 'People' stories without their
saccharine silliness. There's a lot of intrinsic energy in the
Pattern idea, and one wants to see where this erratic, gifted
storyteller will pick it up next."
— Kirkus Reviews , Vol. XLV, No. 8 (1977), p. 453.
See this journal on Butler's dies natalis , the feast of St. Matthias, 2006.
Those who prefer Eastern approaches to religion may consult
Robert Thurman and his daughter Uma.
"Oprah, Uma. Uma, Oprah." — David Letterman
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Monday, July 16, 2012
Merit vs. Meritocracy
The New York Times online opinion today—
"Merit has been traditionally equated with intelligence, industriousness, educational attainment, creativity and competency. In a meritocracy, formal qualifications provide opportunity, position is no longer ascribed by birth, and rewards flow to those who excel.
The rise of meritocratic competition as the preeminent means of social stratification in America has been hailed as a welcome advance because it replaced a society dominated by an upper class dependent on inherited wealth and status. The transition to meritocracy has, however, had unintended consequences. In the business sector, particularly, other less benign qualities emerge as essential to meritocratic success: aggressiveness, ruthlessness, dominance-seeking, victimizing behavior, acquisitiveness and the disciplined pursuit of self-interest."
— Journalism professor Thomas B. Edsall discussing remarks last December by Mitt Romney
Note the subtle shift here from "merit" to "meritocracy." Romney used the former word, not the latter.
Note also this sentence, aimed particularly at meritocratic New York Times readers—
"In a meritocracy, formal qualifications provide opportunity… and rewards flow to those who excel."
Edsall lies. In a meritocracy, rewards flow to those who rubber-stamp "formal qualifications." See particularly Walter Kirn on meritocracy.
Edsall is pandering to Times readers. Romney was pandering to a different group—
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Saturday, March 14, 2009
Saturday March 14, 2009
A Dante
for Our Times
for Our Times
“This could be Heaven
or this could be Hell.”
— “Hotel California”
Heaven —
or —
Hell —
Apparently from the back cover of The Ninth Wave:
“Fear + hate = power was Mike Freesmith’s formula for success. He first tested it in high school when he seduced his English teacher and drove a harmless drunk to suicide. He used it on the woman who paid his way through college. He used it to put his candidate in the governor’s chair, and to make himself the most ruthless, powerful kingmaker in American politics.”
Don’t forget greed. See yesterday’s Friday the 13th entries.
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Thursday, February 12, 2009
Thursday February 12, 2009
Headliners
Today, many observe
the 200th anniversary
of the birth of two
noted philosophers
of death:
Charles Darwin and
Abraham Lincoln.
A fitting headline:
FAUST VIVIFIES DEATH
(Harvard Crimson ,
February 7, 2008)
Happy birthday,
Cotton Mather.
Robert Stone,
A Flag for Sunrise :
"Our secret culture is as frivolous as a willow on a tombstone. It's a wonderful thing– or it was. It was strong and dreadful, it was majestic and ruthless. It was a stranger to pity. And it's not for sale, ladies and gentlemen."
Comments Off on Thursday February 12, 2009
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Sunday February 17, 2008
Big Time
New York Times today–
"Plot Would Thicken, if the
Writers Remembered It"
"We've lost the plot!"
— Slipstream
|
Excerpt from Fritz Leiber's Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it's cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I'd hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, "Look, Buster, do you want to live?"…. Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.
Bordered version The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent…. … "Here is how it stacks up: You've bought your way with something other than money into an organization of which I am an agent…." "It's a very big organization," she went on, as if warning me. "Call it an empire or a power if you like. So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist. It has agents everywhere, literally. Space and time are no barriers to it. Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future, but also the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees." "I. G. Farben?" I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor. She didn't rebuke my flippancy, but said, "And it isn't the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name." "Which is?" I asked. "The Spiders," she said. That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly. I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me– something like that. She watched me. "You might call it the Double Cross," she suggested, "if that seems better." |
Related material:
the previous entry.
Comments Off on Sunday February 17, 2008
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Saturday December 17, 2005
Fade to Black
"…that ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent."
— Trevanian,
Shibumi
"'Haven't there been splendidly elegant colors in Japan since ancient times?'
'Even black has various subtle shades,' Sosuke nodded."
— Yasunari Kawabata,
The Old Capital
"The Zen disciple sits for long hours silent and motionless, with his eyes closed. Presently he enters a state of impassivity, free from all ideas and all thoughts. He departs from the self and enters the realm of nothingness. This is not the nothingness or the emptiness of the West. It is rather the reverse, a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless."
— Yasunari Kawabata,
Nobel lecture, 1968
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Sunday, November 20, 2005
Sunday November 20, 2005
“There is a pleasantly discursive treatment of Pontius Pilate’s unanswered question ‘What is truth?'”
— H. S. M. Coxeter, 1987, introduction to Richard J. Trudeau’s remarks on the “Story Theory” of truth as opposed to the “Diamond Theory” of truth in The Non-Euclidean Revolution
“A new epistemology is emerging to replace the Diamond Theory of truth. I will call it the ‘Story Theory’ of truth: There are no diamonds. People make up stories about what they experience. Stories that catch on are called ‘true.’ The Story Theory of truth is itself a story that is catching on. It is being told and retold, with increasing frequency, by thinkers of many stripes*….”
— Richard J. Trudeau in
The Non-Euclidean Revolution
“‘Deniers’ of truth… insist that each of us is trapped in his own point of view; we make up stories about the world and, in an exercise of power, try to impose them on others.”
— Jim Holt in The New Yorker.
(Click on the box below.)
Exercise of Power:
Show that a white horse–
a figure not unlike the
symbol of the mathematics
publisher Springer–
is traced, within a naturally
arranged rectangular array of
polynomials, by the powers of x
modulo a polynomial
irreducible over a Galois field.
This horse, or chess knight–
“Springer,” in German–
plays a role in “Diamond Theory”
(a phrase used in finite geometry
in 1976, some years before its use
by Trudeau in the above book).
Related material
On this date:
In 1490, The White Knight
(Tirant lo Blanc 
)–
a major influence on Cervantes–
was published, and in 1910
the Mexican Revolution began.
Illustration:
Zapata by Diego Rivera,
Museum of Modern Art,
New York
“First published in the Catalan language in Valencia in 1490…. Reviewing the first modern Spanish translation in 1969 (Franco had ruthlessly suppressed the Catalan language and literature), Mario Vargas Llosa hailed the epic’s author as ‘the first of that lineage of God-supplanters– Fielding, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Joyce, Faulkner– who try to create in their novels an all-encompassing reality.'”
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Sunday, June 19, 2005
Sunday June 19, 2005
ART WARS:
Darkness Visible
Darkness Visible
“No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe”
— John Milton, Paradise Lost,
Book I, lines 63-64
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe”
— John Milton, Paradise Lost,
Book I, lines 63-64
A famed vulgarizer, Martin Gardner,
summarizes the art of Ad Reinhardt
(Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt,
Dec. 24, 1913 – Aug. 30, 1967):
summarizes the art of Ad Reinhardt
(Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt,
Dec. 24, 1913 – Aug. 30, 1967):
“Ed Rinehart [sic] made a fortune painting canvases that were just one solid color. He had his black period in which the canvas was totally black. And then he had a blue period in which he was painting the canvas blue. He was exhibited in top shows in New York, and his pictures wound up in museums. I did a column in Scientific American on minimal art, and I reproduced one of Ed Rinehart’s black paintings. Of course, it was just a solid square of pure black. The publisher insisted on getting permission from the gallery to reproduce it.”
|
Fade to Black “…that ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent.” — Trevanian, Shibumi
“‘Haven’t there been splendidly elegant colors in Japan since ancient times?’ ‘Even black has various subtle shades,’ Sosuke nodded.” — Yasunari Kawabata, The Old Capital
An Ad Reinhardt painting
Ad Reinhardt, The viewer may need to tilt “The grid is a staircase to the Universal…. We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who, despite his repeated insistence that ‘Art is art,’ ended up by painting a series of… nine-square grids in which the motif that inescapably emerges is a Greek cross. Greek Cross There is no painter in the West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape and the Pandora’s box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it.” — Rosalind Krauss,
|
In memory of
St. William Golding
(Sept. 19, 1911 – June 19, 1993)
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Friday, November 12, 2004
Friday November 12, 2004
The above link is in memory of
Iris Chang,
who ended her life at 36
on Nov. 9, 2004.
A central concept of Zen
is satori, or “awakening.”
For a rude awakening, see
Satori at Pearl Harbor.
|
Fade to Black See, too, my entries of “…that ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent.” — Trevanian, Shibumi
” ‘Haven’t there been splendidly elegant colors in Japan since ancient times?’ ‘Even black has various subtle shades,’ Sosuke nodded.’ “ — Yasunari Kawabata, The Old Capital An Ad Reinhardt painting
Ad Reinhardt,
|
Friday, September 17, 2004
Friday September 17, 2004
God is in…
The Details
From an entry for Aug. 19, 2003 on
conciseness, simplicity, and objectivity:
Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest. Another Harvard psychiatrist, Armand Nicholi, is in the news lately with his book The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life.
For the meaning of the Old-Testament logos above, see the remarks of Plato on the immortality of the soul at For the meaning of the New-Testament logos above, see the remarks of R. P. Langlands at |
On Harvard and psychiatry: see
The Crimson Passion:
A Drama at Mardi Gras
(February 24, 2004)
This is a reductio ad absurdum of the Harvard philosophy so eloquently described by Alston Chase in his study of Harvard and the making of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski's time at Harvard overlapped slightly with mine, so I may have seen him in Cambridge at some point. Chase writes that at Harvard, the Unabomber "absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) 'there is no logical justification for morality.'" I was less impressed by Harvard positivism, although I did benefit from a course in symbolic logic from Quine. At that time– the early 60's– little remained at Harvard of what Robert Stone has called "our secret culture," that of the founding Puritans– exemplified by Cotton and Increase Mather.
From Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise:
"Our secret culture is as frivolous as a willow on a tombstone. It's a wonderful thing– or it was. It was strong and dreadful, it was majestic and ruthless. It was a stranger to pity. And it's not for sale, ladies and gentlemen."
Some traces of that culture:
|
A web page
|
A contemporary
Click on pictures for details. |
A more appealing view of faith was offered by PBS on Wednesday night, the beginning of this year's High Holy Days:
|
Armand Nicholi: But how can you believe something that you don't think is true, I mean, certainly, an intelligent person can't embrace something that they don't think is true — that there's something about us that would object to that.
Jeremy Fraiberg: Well, the answer is, they probably do believe it's true. Armand Nicholi: But how do they get there? See, that's why both Freud and Lewis was very interested in that one basic question. Is there an intelligence beyond the universe? And how do we answer that question? And how do we arrive at the answer of that question? Michael Shermer: Well, in a way this is an empirical question, right? Either there is or there isn't. Armand Nicholi: Exactly. Michael Shermer: And either we can figure it out or we can't, and therefore, you just take the leap of faith or you don't. Armand Nicholi: Yeah, now how can we figure it out? Winifred Gallagher: I think something that was perhaps not as common in their day as is common now — this idea that we're acting as if belief and unbelief were two really radically black and white different things, and I think for most people, there's a very — it's a very fuzzy line, so that — Margaret Klenck: It's always a struggle. Winifred Gallagher: Rather than — I think there's some days I believe, and some days I don't believe so much, or maybe some days I don't believe at all. Doug Holladay: Some hours. Winifred Gallagher: It's a, it's a process. And I think for me the big developmental step in my spiritual life was that — in some way that I can't understand or explain that God is right here right now all the time, everywhere. Armand Nicholi: How do you experience that? Winifred Gallagher: I experience it through a glass darkly, I experience it in little bursts. I think my understanding of it is that it's, it's always true, and sometimes I can see it and sometimes I can't. Or sometimes I remember that it's true, and then everything is in Technicolor. And then most of the time it's not, and I have to go on faith until the next time I can perhaps see it again. I think of a divine reality, an ultimate reality, uh, would be my definition of God. |
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|
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Gallagher seemed to be the only participant in the PBS discussion that came close to the Montessori ideals of conciseness, simplicity, and objectivity. Dr. Montessori intended these as ideals for teachers, but they seem also to be excellent religious values. Just as the willow-tombstone seems suited to Geoffrey Hill's style, the Pythagorean sangaku pictured above seems appropriate to the admirable Gallagher.
Sunday, June 6, 2004
Sunday June 6, 2004
The X Factor
On OSS veteran Charles Hostler,
an unsung D-Day hero, now sung:
an unsung D-Day hero, now sung:
“He was trained by the British MI6
intelligence agency for an operation
known as X2 – or ‘double cross.’ “
|
From Fritz Leiber’s
“Damnation Morning,” 1959:
Bordered version The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent…. … “Here is how it stacks up: You’ve bought your way with something other than money into an organization of which I am an agent….” “It’s a very big organization,” she went on, as if warning me. “Call it an empire or a power if you like. So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist. It has agents everywhere, literally. Space and time are no barriers to it. Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future, but also the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees.” “I. G. Farben?” I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor. She didn’t rebuke my flippancy, but said, “And it isn’t the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name.” “Which is?” I asked. “The Spiders,” she said. That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly. I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at She watched me. “You might call it the Double Cross,” she suggested, “if that seems better.” |
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Saturday, May 22, 2004
Saturday May 22, 2004
Star Wars
In memory of Melvin J. Lasky, editor, 1958-1990, of the CIA-funded journal Encounter:
“Once called as lively, and as bitchy, as a literary cocktail party, Encounter published articles of unrivalled authority on politics, history and literature.”
Lasky died on Wednesday, May 19, 2004. From a journal entry of my own on that date:
This newly-digitized diagram is from a
paper journal note of October 21, 1999.
Note that the diagram’s overall form is that of an eight-point star. Here is an excerpt from a Fritz Leiber story dealing with such a star, the symbol of a fictional organization:
|
Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, “Look, Buster, do you want to live?” Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question. The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent. … “Here is how it stacks up: You’ve bought your way with something other than money into an organization of which I am an agent….” “It’s a very big organization,” she went on, as if warning me. “Call it an empire or a power if you like. So far as you are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist. It has agents everywhere, literally. Space and time are no barriers to it. Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future, but also the past. It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and is merciless to its employees.” “I. G. Farben?” I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at humor. She didn’t rebuke my flippancy, but said, “And it isn’t the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name.” “Which is?” I asked. “The Spiders,” she said. That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly. I expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and leap at me—something like that. She watched me. “You might call it the Double Cross,” she suggested, “if that seems better.” — Fritz Leiber, |
From last year’s entry,
Indiana Jones and the Hidden Coffer,
of 6/14:
|
From Borges’s “The Aleph“:
From The Hunchback of Notre Dame:
Lena Olin and Harrison Ford |
Finally, from an excellent site
on the Knights Templar,
a quotation from Umberto Eco:
|
When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches move us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime. — “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage” (1984) from Travels in Hyperreality |
Comments Off on Saturday May 22, 2004
Monday, November 17, 2003
Monday November 17, 2003
Total Recall:
in which Philip K. Dick
meets Joan Didion yet again
From Joan Didion’s new work on California history, Where I Was From:
“There was never just the golden dream of riches and bountiful nature, but always a scene of exploitation and false promises, indifference and ruthlessness, a kind of hollow core.”
 |
 |
Hollow no more.
Friday, August 1, 2003
Friday August 1, 2003
For All Time
“… and the Wichita lineman is still on the line…”
(Reflection on a member of the Radcliffe Class of 1964 who lived near Wichita and now has her own home page… While listening to a song on my “home on The Range – KHYI 95.3FM, Plano, Texas.”)
Readings for a seminar we never really finished:
“…that ineffable constellation of talents that makes the player of rank: a gift for conceiving abstract schematic possibilities; a sense of mathematical poetry in the light of which the infinite chaos of probability and permutation is crystallized under the pressure of intense concentration into geometric blossoms; the ruthless focus of force on the subtlest weakness of an opponent.”
— Trevanian, Shibumi
” ‘Haven’t there been splendidly elegant colors in Japan since ancient times?’
‘Even black has various subtle shades,’ Sosuke nodded.’ “
— Yasunari Kawabata, The Old Capital
Wednesday, March 19, 2003
Wednesday March 19, 2003
A Look at the Rat
In memory of Herbert Aptheker, theoretician of the American Communist Party, who died on St. Patrick’s Day, 2003 —
From The New Yorker, issue dated March 24, 2003, Louis Menand on Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station:
“Wilson did know what was going on in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-thirties, as his pages on Stalin in To the Finland Station make clear. The problem wasn’t with Stalin; the problem was with Lenin, the book’s ideal type of the intellectual as man of action. Wilson admitted that he had relied on publications controlled by the Party for his portrait of Lenin. (Critical accounts were available; for example, the English translation of the émigré Mark Landau-Aldanov’s Lenin was published, by Dutton, in 1922.) Lenin could create an impression of selfless humanitarianism; he was also a savage and ruthless politician—a ‘pail of milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom,’ as Vladimir Nabokov put it to Wilson in 1940, after reading To the Finland Station. In the introduction to the 1972 edition, Wilson provided a look at the rat. He did not go on to explain in that introduction that the most notorious features of Stalin’s regime—the use of terror, the show trials, and the concentration camps—had all been inaugurated by Lenin. To the Finland Station begins with Napoleon’s betrayal of the principles of the French Revolution; it should have ended with Lenin’s betrayal of European socialism.”
From Herbert Aptheker, “More Comments on Howard Fast“:
“We observe that in the list of teachers whom Howard Fast names as most influential in his own life there occur the names of fourteen individuals from Jefferson to Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair to Marx, Douglass to Engels, but there is no room for Lenin.
He is, I think, an important teacher, too; indeed, in my view, Lenin is the greatest figure in the whole galaxy of world revolutionary leaders. He is, certainly, the greatest analyzer of and fighter against imperialism.”
For more on Howard Fast, see my entry
“Death Knell” of March 13, 2003.
For a look at the pail of milk, see
the New Yorker cover in Geometry for Jews.
For a more cheerful look at geometry
on this St. Joseph’s Day, see
Harry J. Smith’s
“There is such a thing as a tesseract.”
— A Wrinkle in Time
Comments Off on Wednesday March 19, 2003
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
Tuesday March 18, 2003
|
Purim “Comedy gold!” |
BBC News, Tuesday, 21 March,
 Celebrants dressed as Baruch Goldstein |
Song of God
The Jewish holiday Purim began at sundown
on St. Patrick’s Day.
“It’s Springtime for Esther and Israel!”
It is said that God is in the details. The details:
Purim is the holiday celebrating Esther. For more on that name, see Three in One.
From The New Yorker, issue dated March 24, 2003:
“Lenin could create an impression of selfless humanitarianism; he was also a savage and ruthless politician — a ‘pail of milk of human kindness with a dead rat‡ at the bottom,’ as Vladimir Nabokov put it….”
Sounds familiar, somehow.
_____________________________
See also the entry Homer that precedes it… in honor of
Saint Bernard Malamud, whose feast day is today.
† Added March 20:
See also this year’s graveside Purim party.
‡ Added March 20:
For more on the dead rat, see the entry of March 19.
See also a relevant quotation from James Cagney.
Comments Off on Tuesday March 18, 2003