Log24

Monday, June 20, 2016

Shema, Salinger

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm

"I've got a brand-new pair of roller skates "

Melanie, 1971

Related material —  Salinger in the Park and
                                 Philosophy in a New Key.

Saturday, January 20, 2024

For Bananafish

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:26 am

"Did you see more glass?"

Wednesday, August 16, 2023

The Underwriting . . . Continues.

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:46 pm

"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection,
and on his own terms, not anyone else's."

— Written by J. D. Salinger ( as quoted earlier here )

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

The Cassirer in the Rye

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:01 am

From the American Mathematical Society today —

Robert Earl Tubbs (1954-2023)
May 15, 2023

"Tubbs, associate professor of mathematics at
the University of Colorado Boulder, died April 11, 2023,
at the age of 69. He received his PhD in 1981 from
Penn State University under the supervision of 
W. Dale Brownawell. His research interests included
number theory, especially transcendental number theory,
the intellectual history of mathematical ideas and mathematics,
and the humanities."

This  journal on the dies natalis  of Tubbs had the third of three
posts tagged "Space and Form."  Those posts dealt with European
cultural history related to Tubbs's interests. The "Space and Form"
posts, along with today's previous Log24 post, suggest a review of
the Nov. 10, 2021 post titled European Culture.  An image from that post —

Those who share Cassirer's enthusiasm for myth may regard the
above Josefine Lyche version of my work as a sort of "secret writing,"
to quote a phrase of Cassirer's I find very distasteful. But there is nothing
secret  about it, although there is some resemblance to written characters.

This  post's title was suggested by a Salinger quote in the European Culture post.

Update on the next day, May  17 —

Further reading in Cassirer's Mythical Thought  indicates that in the
passages above, on Schelling, he may be presenting a parody of
Schelling when he writes "a poem hidden behind a wonderful
secret writing."  Later, on page 10, he asks, sensibly, 

"… is there, perhaps, a means of retaining the question
put forward by Schelling's Philosophie der Mythologie
but of transferring it from the sphere of a philosophy of
the absolute to that of critical philosophy?"

There has reportedly been "an upsurge of interest" in Cassirer —

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Plan 9 from Warren Public Library*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:45 am

Art based on a cover of Salinger's 'Nine Stories'

The above image is from "Nine Stories" in this journal.

* See "Turning Nine."

Saturday, February 18, 2023

Berlinale Revisited

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:25 am

"US actor Stewart, who previously depicted Princess Diana
in Spencer, is president of the international jury at the 73rd
Berlin International Film Festival, where filming will begin for
the project." — Mona Tabbara at screendaily.com, 10 Feb. 2023

From an earlier Berlinale . . .

Monday, July 25, 2022

What’s your story?

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:02 pm

Plan 9 Continues:

Salinger's 'Nine Stories,' paperback with 3x3 array of titles on cover, adapted in a Jan. 2, 2009, Log24 post on Nabokov's 1948 'Signs and Symbols'

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

A New Yorker Child’s Progress

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 6:27 pm

A New Yorker  writer on why he wanted to
learn mathematics at an advanced age —

"The challenge, of course, especially in light of the collapsing horizon, since I was sixty-five when I started. Also, I wanted especially to study calculus because I never had. I didn’t even know what it was—I quit math after feeling that with Algebra II I had pressed my luck as far as I dared. Moreover, I wanted to study calculus because Amie told me that when she was a girl William Maxwell had asked her what she was studying, and when she said calculus he said, 'I loved calculus.' Maxwell would have been about the age I am now. He would have recently retired after forty years as an editor of fiction at The New Yorker , where he had handled such writers as Vladimir Nabokov, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, John Updike, Shirley Hazzard, and J. D. Salinger. When Salinger finished Catcher in the Rye , he drove to the Maxwells’ country house and read it to them on their porch. I grew up in a house on the same country road that Maxwell and his wife, Emily, lived on, and Maxwell was my father’s closest friend."

— Wilkinson, Alec. A Divine Language  (p. 5). Published
July 12, 2022, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

See as well two versions of
a very short story, "Turning Nine."

Wilkinson's title is of course deplorable.
Related material: "Night Hunt" in a
Log24 search for the phrase "Good Question."

Saturday, May 28, 2022

Nine Stories

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:50 pm

Art based on a cover of Salinger's 'Nine Stories'

Related material — Turning Nine and A Mad Day's Work.

Saturday, November 27, 2021

Tag Shopping on Black Friday

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:02 pm

Marcela Nowak today

See as well Polite Number.

Scholium:

"She was a very nice, polite little kid. God, I love it
when a kid’s nice and polite when you tighten their skate
for them or something. Most kids are. They really are.
I asked her if she’d care to have a hot chocolate or something
with me, but she said no, thank you. She said she had to meet
her friend. Kids always have to meet their friend. That kills me."

—  Jerome Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Tuesday, March 9, 2021

Alternate Past: LA/91506

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:36 am

(Title suggested by the beanie label "Alternate Future: NYC/10001")

Salinger's 'Nine Stories,' paperback with 3x3 array of titles on cover, adapted in a Jan. 2, 2009, Log24 post on Nabokov's 1948 'Signs and Symbols'

A version of the Salinger story title "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" —

"… her mouth is red and large, with Disney overtones. But it is her eyes,
a pale green of surprising intensity, that hold me."

Violet Henderson in Vogue , 30 August 2017

See also that date in this  journal.

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Lit for Brats

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:36 am

From a search in this journal for Salinger

“… the wind was noisy the way it is in spooky movies
on the night the old slob with the will gets murdered.”

— From the opening sentence of the first Holden Caulfield
story, published in the Collier’s  of December 22, 1945

See as well the previous post.

Friday, April 6, 2018

Watching the Zero

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

From "The Blacklist" Season 5, Episode 11 —

– Remind me again what it is that we think we're doing here.
– The phone acts as a passive packet sniffer.
It's a trick Tom taught me.
– Packet sniffer? Ugh.
– The FBI uses them.
I'm sure your tech people know all about them.
It can intercept and log traffic that passes over a digital network.
– It is an absolute mystery to me how these gadgets work —
the Dick Tracy phones, these blueteeth connections.
Quite frankly, I miss the rotary phone.
Except for that zero.
Watching that zero crawl back.
Oh, my God.
It was painful.
– We have the code.
– Great.

Read more:  https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/
view_episode_scripts.php?
tv-show=the-blacklist&episode=s05e11

And more:

Philip J. Davis reportedly turned 86 on January 2, 2009.
An image from this journal on that date

Rotary telephone dial

“You have the incorrect number.
I will tell you what you are doing:
you are turning the letter O
instead of the zero.”

— "Symbols and Signs,"
Vladimir Nabokov, 1948

Plan 9

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:18 pm

Salinger's 'Nine Stories,' paperback with 3x3 array of titles on cover, adapted in a Jan. 2, 2009, Log24 post on Nabokov's 1948 'Signs and Symbols'

Sunday, March 12, 2017

Raise High the Ridgepole, Architects*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:40 pm

A post suggested by remarks of J. D. Salinger in 
The New Yorker  of November 19, 1955 —

Wikipedia:  Taiji (philosophy)

Etymology

The word 太極 comes from I Ching : "易有太極,是生兩儀,兩儀生四象,四象生八卦,八卦定吉凶,吉凶生大業。"

Taiji  (太極) is a compound of tai   "great; grand; supreme; extreme; very; too" (a superlative variant of da   "big; large; great; very") and ji   "pole; roof ridge; highest/utmost point; extreme; earth's pole; reach the end; attain; exhaust". In analogy with the figurative meanings of English pole, Chinese ji  極 "ridgepole" can mean "geographical pole; direction" (e.g., siji  四極 "four corners of the earth; world's end"), "magnetic pole" (Beiji  北極 "North Pole" or yinji  陰極 "negative pole; cathode"), or "celestial pole" (baji  八極 "farthest points of the universe; remotest place"). Combining the two words, 太極 means "the source, the beginning of the world".

Common English translations of the cosmological Taiji  are the "Supreme Ultimate" (Le Blanc 1985, Zhang and Ryden 2002) or "Great Ultimate" (Chen 1989, Robinet 2008); but other versions are the "Supreme Pole" (Needham and Ronan 1978), "Great Absolute", or "Supreme Polarity" (Adler 1999).

See also Polarity in this journal.

* A phrase adapted, via Salinger,
from a poem by Sappho

Ἴψοι δὴ τὸ μέλαθρον,
     Υ᾽μήναον
ἀέρρετε τέκτονεσ ἄνδρεσ,
     Υ᾽μήναον
γάμβροσ ἔρχεται ἶσοσ Ά᾽ρευϊ,
     [Υ᾽μήναον]
ανδροσ μεγάλο πόλυ μείζων
     [Υ᾽μήναον]

Saturday, March 11, 2017

Transformer Group*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:45 pm

"Before time began, there was the Cube." — Transformers  (2007)

Plot summary — "An ancient struggle between two Cybertronian races,
the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons, comes to Earth, with
a clue to the ultimate power held by a teenager."

* A post suggested by J. D. Salinger's phrase "a fresh impetus"
  in "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" (1955)

Friday, March 10, 2017

The Transformers

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 pm

"The transformed urban interior is the spatial organisation of
an achiever, one who has crossed the class divide and who uses
space to express his membership of, not aspirations towards, 
an ascendant class in our society: the class of those people who 
earn their living by transformation— as opposed to the mere
reproduction— of symbols, such as writers, designers, and
academics"

The Social Logic of Space ,
     by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson,
     Cambridge University Press, 1984

For another perspective on the achievers, see The Deceivers .

Related material —

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Edwin Schlossberg, 'Still Changes Through Structure' text piece

Exhibit C:

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

The Seventh Stage

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:01 pm

Robin Williams at Bunker Hill Community College

Robin Williams and the Stages of Math

i)   shock & denial
ii)  anger
iii) bargaining
iv) depression
v)  acceptance

And then…

vi)  checking
vii) Joan Rivers

See also

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

A Dark and Stormy Night

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am

This journal on the morning of January 27, 2010,
the day of J. D. Salinger’s death, had a post on
Nietzsche and Heraclitus titled “To Apollo.”

Related material:

“… the wind was noisy the way it is in spooky movies
on the night the old slob with the will gets murdered.”

— From the opening sentence of the first Holden Caulfield
story, published in the Collier’s  of December 22, 1945

See also Peter Matthiessen on Zen,   Salinger and Vedanta,
and Heraclitus in this journal.  Some background—

A quotation from Nietzsche…
(Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden  (KSA).
Herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari.
Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980):

“Nietzsche wrote:

‘Seeing the world as a divine game and beyond good and evil:
in this both the Vedanta and Heraclitus are my predecessors.'”

— KSA vol. 11, page 26, as quoted by André van der Braak
     in a chapter from his 2011 book Nietzsche and Zen

(Darin, dass die Welt ein göttliches Spiel sei
und 
jenseits von Gut und Böse —
habe ich die Vedanta-
Philosophie
und Heraklit zum Vorgänger
.)

For the Class of ’45

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 am

… at The Hotchkiss School

Thursday, November 29, 2012

The Place of the Lion

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:22 pm

For C. S. Lewis, who was born on this date in 1898,
and Natalie Wood, who died on this date in 1981

"He was accustomed to receiving manuscripts from strangers…."
— C. P. Snow on mathematician G. H. Hardy

"Whoever you are— I have always depended on
the kindness of strangers." — A Streetcar Named Desire

From this journal on September 24, 2012

"A single self-transcendence" — Aldous Huxley

From an anonymous author at the website Kill Devil Hill

"This little story… has that climactic moment of 
heightened awareness…. This is a moment where
two individuals become one, empowering them
to transcend the limitations of their own individual
frailty and society. It's an epiphany, an almost
divine spark. It is an experience when one plus one
don't equal two, but something far greater."

Kill Devil Hills also appears in a 1983 film—

"Suppose it were possible to transfer
from one mind to another
the experience of another person."

— Trailer for "Brainstorm" (1983),
the last film of Natalie Wood

Sunday, October 28, 2012

In Like Flynn

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 pm

(Continued from this morning's father-son Flynns
and from two other Flynn father-son pairs. See the
fictional Tron pair on Jan. 5, 2011 and Dec. 2, 2011,
and the "Flynn effect" pair from Sept. 23, 2012.)

From a film

Being Flynn  (2012)
[first lines] 
Jonathan Flynn: America has produced only three classic writers – 
Mark Twain, J. D. Salinger and me. I'm Jonathan Flynn. 
Everything I write is a masterpiece. 

and from this journal

"The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane
and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where
ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground
of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling."

—  The Doors of Perception , by Aldous Huxley

"Greet guests with a touch of glass."

—  The Perception of Doors , by Google —

Monday, October 8, 2012

This Poet You’ve Snatched

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:09 pm

IMAGE- Oct. 7, 2012 post by Margaret Soltan with passages by Salinger on education and DeLillo on hat measurements

Some background from today's New York Times

IMAGE- Oct. 8, 2012, NY Times obituary for Vietnamese imprisoned poet

From DeLillo's novel Mao II  in  the paragraph immediately preceding
the Ritz-hat passage quoted by Soltan—

"He could have told George he was writing about the hostage to bring him back, to return a meaning that had been lost to the world when they locked him in that room. Maybe that was it. When you inflict punishment on someone who is not guilty, when you fill rooms with innocent victims, you begin to empty the world of meaning and erect a separate mental state, the mind consuming what's outside itself, replacing real things with plots and fictions. One fiction taking the world narrowly into itself, the other fiction pushing out toward the social order, trying to unfold into it. He could have told George a writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and beat back our fear. By extending the pitch of consciousness and human possibility. This poet you've snatched. His detention drains the world of one more thimble of meaning."

For related ways of draining the world of meaning, see the politically loaded leftist vocabulary of International Art English

IAE has a distinctive lexicon: aporia , radically , space , proposition , biopolitical , tension , transversal , autonomy . An artist’s work inevitably interrogates, questions, encodes, transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces—though often it doesn’t do these things so much as it serves to, functions to, or seems to (or might seem to) do these things.  [Alix Rule and David Levine, July 30, 2012]

See also this evening's post Issue 16.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Nice Job, Jimmy

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:29 am

"… and now thanks to Philo T. Farnsworth,
we have 'Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.'"

Jimmy Kimmel at last night's Emmy Awards

Related material—

Aldous Huxley in last evening's Log24 post—

"Embraced, the lovers desperately try
to fuse their insulated ecstasies into
a single self-transcendence…."

From an anonymous author at the website Kill Devil Hill

"This little story… has that climactic moment of
heightened awareness….  This is a moment where
two individuals become one, empowering them
to transcend the limitations of their own individual
frailty and society. It's an epiphany, an almost
divine spark. It is an experience when one plus one
don't equal two, but something far greater."

Kill Devil Hills also appears in a 1983 film

"Suppose it were possible to transfer
from one mind to another
the experience of another person."

Trailer for "Brainstorm" (1983),
     the last film of Natalie Wood

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Transparent Things

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:29 pm

… And the New York Lottery, with a wry smile,
signs its Thanksgiving story  J. D. Salinger .

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111124-NYlotteryMidday.jpg

(See 863 and 4034.)

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Frames

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:45 am

"I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids."

— Mary Karr, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer"

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110327-GouldGoldbergs.jpg

 See also "Signs and Symbols."

Art based on a cover of Salinger's 'Nine Stories'

Friday, October 8, 2010

Starting Out in the Evening

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

… and Finishing Up at Noon

This post was suggested by last evening’s post on mathematics and narrative
and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning’s New York Times.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101008-StartingOut.jpg

Above: Frank Langella in
Starting Out in the Evening

Right: Johnny Depp in
The Ninth Gate

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101008-NinthGate.jpg

“One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage.”

— “Is Fiction the Art of Lying?”* by Mario Vargas Llosa, New York Times  essay of October 7, 1984

My own adventures in that realm— as reader, not author— may illustrate Llosa’s remark.

A nearby stack of paperbacks I haven’t touched for some months (in order from bottom to top)—

  1. Pale Rider by Alan Dean Foster
  2. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
  3. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
  4. Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry
  5. Literary Reflections by James A. Michener
  6. The Ninth Configuration by William Peter Blatty
  7. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
  8. Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger
  9. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
  10. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
  11. Being There by Jerzy Kosinski
  12. What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson
  13. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
  14. A Gathering of Spies by John Altman
  15. Selected Poems by Robinson Jeffers
  16. Hook— Tinkerbell’s Challenge by Tristar Pictures
  17. Rising Sun by Michael Crichton
  18. Changewar by Fritz Leiber
  19. The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe
  20. The Hustler by Walter Tevis
  21. The Natural by Bernard Malamud
  22. Truly Tasteless Jokes by Blanche Knott
  23. The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
  24. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

What moral Vargas Llosa might draw from the above stack I do not know.

Generally, I prefer the sorts of books in a different nearby stack. See Sisteen, from May 25. That post the fanciful reader may view as related to number 16 in the above list. The reader may also relate numbers 24 and 22 above (an odd couple) to By Chance, from Thursday, July 22.

* The Web version’s title has a misprint— “living” instead of “lying.”

Friday, February 12, 2010

Capital E

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:30 am

Where Entertainment is God, continued

The following paragraphs are from a review by Piotr Siemion of Infinite Jest, a novel by David Foster Wallace. Illustrations have been added.

"Wallace was somehow able to twist together three yarns…. …there's a J.D Salinger for those who like J.D. Salinger. There's William Burroughs for those hardy souls who like some kick in their prose. And there's a dash of Kurt Vonnegut too. All three voices, though, are amplified in Infinite Jest beyond mere distortion and then projected onto Wallace's peculiar own three-ring circus….

Venn diagram of three sets

… there's entertainment. Make it a capital E.

Hilary Swank in 'Million Dollar Baby'

Illustration by Clint Eastwood
from Log24 post "E is for Everlast"

Infinite Jest revolves, among its many gyrations, around the story of the Entertainment, a film-like creation going by the title of 'Infinite Jest' and created shortly before his suicidal death by the young tennis star's father. The Entertainment's copies are now being disseminated clandestinely all over Wallace's funny America. Problem is, of course, that the film is too good. Anybody who gets to watch it becomes hooked instantly and craves only to watch it again, and again, and again, until the audience drops dead of exhaustion and hunger. Why eat when you're entertained by such a good movie? Wallace's premise brings you back to that apocryphal lab experiment in which rats were treated to a similar choice. When the rat pushed one button, marked FOOD, it would get a food pellet. The other button, marked FUN, would fire up an electrode rigged right into the orgasm center somewhere in the rat's cortex. Needless to add, one rat after another would drop dead from hunger, still twitching luridly and trying to finesse one last push of the button. Same thing in Wallace's story, especially that even those characters who have not seen the Entertainment yet, keep on entertaining themselves by different means."

The title of the Entertainment, "Infinite Jest," might also be applied to a BBC program featuring mathematician Peter J. Cameron. The program's actual title was "To Infinity and Beyond." It was broadcast the night of Feb. 10 (the date of this journal's previous post).

Few, however, are likely to find the Infinity program addictive. For closer approaches to Wallace's ideal Entertainment, see instead Dante (in the context of this journal's Feb. 4 posts on Cameron and the afterlife) and the BBC News.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Unholy Scripture

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:06 pm

From The New York Times

4TH NIGHT FREE

NY Times 1:43 PM Jan. 28, 2010-- News of Salinger's death, with ad-- 'Only in Atlantis: 4th night free'

From this journal —

Sunday, November 5, 2006

Twilight Kingdom

“What he cannot contemplate is the reproach of

    … that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom,

when at length he may meet the eyes….”

On “The Hollow Men”

” … unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom”

Related readings from unholy scripture:
 

  The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040604-Feeling.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

A.  The “long twilight struggle” speech of JFK

B.  “The Platters were singing ‘Each day I pray for evening just to be with you,’ and then it started to happen.  The pump turns on in ecstasy.  I closed my eyes, I held her with my eyes closed and went into her that way, that way you do, shaking all over, hearing the heel of my shoe drumming against the driver’s-side door in a spastic tattoo, thinking that I could do this even if I was dying, even if I was dying, even if I was dying; thinking also that it was information.  The pump turns on in ecstasy, the cards fall where they fall, the world never misses a beat, the queen hides, the queen is found, and it was all information.”

— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis, August 2000 Pocket Books paperback, page 437

C.
  “I will show you, he thought, the war for us to die in, lady.  Sully your kind suffering child’s eyes with it.  Live burials beside slow rivers.  A pile of ears for a pile of arms.  The crisps of North Vietnamese drivers chained to their burned trucks…. Why, he wondered, is she smiling at me?”

— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise,  Knopf hardcover, 1981, page 299

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Metamorphosis and Metaphor

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:31 pm

"Animation tends to be a condensed art form, using metamorphosis and metaphor to collide and expand meaning. In this way it resembles poetry."

— Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts,
   description of an exhibition–

FRAME BY FRAME: ANIMATED AT HARVARD

January 28–Feb 14, 2010

For example–

Animation — The Animated Diamond Theorem,
                      now shown frame by frame for selected frames

Poetry–

Part I —  "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire…."

Part II — Metaphor on the covers of a Salinger book–

Diamond covers for Salinger's 'Nine Stories'

Click image for details.

For other thoughts on
metamorphosis and metaphor,
see Endgame.

Friday, January 29, 2010

More Glass

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Part I:

"…although a work of art 'is formed around something missing,' this 'void is its vanishing point, not its essence.' She shows deftly and delicately that the void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our worlds."

Harvard University Press on Persons and Things (April 30, 2008), by Barbara Johnson

Part II:

"Did you see more glass?"


Louis Kahn, design for nine large glass cubes forming a Holocaust memorial

Part III:

From the date of Barbara Johnson's death:

"Mathematical relationships were
enough to satisfy him, mere formal
relationships which existed at
all times, everywhere, at once."

Broken Symmetries, 1983

X    
  X  
    X

The X's refer to the pattern on the
cover of a paperback edition
  of Nine Stories, by J. D. Salinger.
Salinger died on Wednesday.

"You remember that book he sent me
from Germany? You know–
those German poems.
"

In Germany, Wednesday was
Holocaust Memorial Day, 2010.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Short Story

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:01 pm

Home Delivery

"But wait, there's more!"
Stanley Fish, NY Times today

NY Times 1:43 PM Jan. 28, 2010-- J. D. Salinger has died.

For a larger image, click on The Catcher.

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.  Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around– nobody big, I mean– except me.  And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.  What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff– I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.  That's all I'd do all day.  I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.  I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."

— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 22

Friday, January 2, 2009

Friday January 2, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:48 am
Signs and Symbols

continued…
from the five entries
ending on June 3, 2008
and from yesterday,
New Year's Day

The end of a story by Vladimir Nabokov in The New Yorker of May 15, 1948:

Rotary telephone dial

"You have the incorrect number. I will tell you what you are doing: you are turning the letter O instead of the zero."

They sat down to their unexpected festive midnight tea. The birthday present stood on the table. He sipped noisily; his face was flushed; every now and then he imparted a circular motion to his raised glass so as to make the sugar dissolve more thoroughly. The vein on the side of his bald head where there was a large birthmark stood out conspicuously and, although he had shaved that morning, a silvery bristle showed on his chin. While she poured him another glass of tea, he put on his spectacles and re-examined with pleasure the luminous yellow, green, red little jars. His clumsy moist lips spelled out their eloquent labels: apricot, grape, beech plum, quince. He had got to crab apple, when the telephone rang again.

Art based on a cover of Salinger's 'Nine Stories'

Click for details.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Sunday June 15, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:01 am
“I need a photo-opportunity,
I want a shot at redemption.
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard.”
— Paul Simon

J. D. Salinger, 1951

Nine Stories, by J. D. Salinger

Wednesday, January 1, 2003

Wednesday January 1, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:24 pm

 

ART WARS:

That Old Devil Moon


Kylie Minogue

    From The New York Times, Wed., Jan. 1, 2003:

Richard Horner, 82,
Broadway Producer, Is Dead

Richard Horner, a Broadway theater owner and producer who won a Tony Award for the 1974 revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Moon for the Misbegotten," died on Saturday [December 28, 2002] at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 82.

According to one source, the O'Neill revival opened on December 28, 1973 — the same date on which the life of one of its producers was later to close.

From a CurtainUp review:

The revival at the Morosco was dubbed by its company "The Resurrection Play" since Jason Robards undertook the part just after a near fatal car accident and its legendary director José Quintero had just given up drinking.

According to the Internet Broadway Database, this revival, or resurrection, took place officially not on December 28 — the date of Horner's death — but, appropriately, a day later.

At any rate, O'Neill's title, along with my weblog entry of December 28, 2002,

"On This Date," featuring Kylie Minogue,

suggests the following mini-exhibit of artistic efforts:

 

Curtain Up!

July 2000
issue of GQ
:

Australian pop star Kylie Minogue strikes a pose. The cover is a takeoff on an Athena tennis poster.

 

 

Under the Volcano:

A painting based on Malcolm Lowry's classic novel.

Having played tennis, Dr. Vigil and M. Laruelle talk about the events a year earlier.

The view is of Cuernavaca from the Casino de la Selva hotel.

Painting by
Julian Heaton Cooper.

 

 

 

For further details on Kylie, Mexico, tequila, and
Under the Volcano,
see my entry of November 5, 2002.

For today's site music, click "Old Devil Moon" here.

Addendum of 9:30 pm 1/1/03:

For a politically correct view
of the above GQ cover,
see Charlotte Raven's essay,
"
The Opposite of Sexy,"
from The Guardian, June 13, 2000.

For a more perceptive analysis,
see George Orwell's essay,
"
The Art of Donald McGill,"
from Horizon, September 1941.

An Example of McGill's Art

If there is a devil here,
I suspect it is less likely to be
Kyllie Minogue than Charlotte Raven.

Today's birthdays:

J. D. Salinger (Nine Stories),
E. M. Forster ("Only connect"), and
Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough).

Frazer might appreciate the remarks in
the SparkNotes essay on The Natural,
cited in my note "Homer" of Dec. 30, 2002,
on bird symbolism and vegetative myths.

 


Not amused: Charlotte Raven

 

Raven, take a bough.

 

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