Log24

Angles:

Saxons:

See Saxon in this journal.

The title, that of a novel by Arthur Koestler,
has appeared before in this journal.

The title was quoted in a Log24 note of
May 29, 2002 (G.K. Chesterton's birthday).

The link in Saturday evening's post to a Chesterton
essay suggested a further search that yielded
the following quotation—

Then silence sank. And slowly
      Arose the sea-land lord
Like some vast beast for mystery,
He filled the room and porch and sky,
And from a cobwebbed nail on high
      Unhooked his heavy sword.

— G. K. Chesterton,
   The Ballad of the White Horse

This, together with some Log24 remarks 
from 2004, suggests two images—

Above: A 1955 cover design by Robert Flynn.

The arrow theme also appears in a figure from
John Sealander's Road to Nowhere in the 2004
remarks:

The remarks quoting the Sealander image, from 
March 5, 2004, were on mathematics and narrative.

Related material from a year later:

See an announcement, saved from March 16, 2005,
of a conference on mathematics and narrative that
was held in July 2005. Some context: Koestler's novel.

Peggy Noonan today on the President—

"He told staffers that John Boehner,
one of 11 children of a small-town bar owner,
was a 'country club Republican.' "

Related material from The Atlantic
on the late author John O'Hara (1905-1970)—

As the son of a prominent surgeon, O'Hara held a social position far above that of almost all other Irish Catholics. But in a world in which "'foreigner' meant anyone who wasn't Anglo-Saxon," as one longtime Pottsville resident told us when we recently visited the town, O'Hara could never quite attain the status of his friends, members of the WASP "anthracite aristocracy." This predestined immobility gave O'Hara an acute sensitivity to minute yet telling social distinctions. He was fascinated by the pattern of a necktie, the make of a car, the brand of Scotch, the choice of collar pin, the misuse of a pronoun, the club joined, the college attended, and how these define— in fact, determine— character. "To read him on a fashionable bar or the Gibbsville country club," Edmund Wilson wrote of O'Hara's fictionalized Pottsville, "is to be shown on the screen of a fluoroscope gradations of social prestige of which one had not before been aware."

— "John O'Hara's Protectorate," by Benjamin and Christina Schwarz, The Atlantic , March 2000

Funeral or Wedding?

From the New York Times of

Bastille Day, 2003:

The Countess was associated with the

ville d’Eu in Haute-Normandie.

The patron saint of the ville d’Eu is Lawrence O’Toole, also the patron saint of Dublin, Ireland.

He is known in France as Saint Laurent, and here is a picture of his chapel near the ville d’Eu:

Two pieces of music seem appropriate to memorialize both the dark and the bright sides of life on this Bastille Day.

Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings was played at the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco, and so should be sufficiently royal for the Comtesse de Paris.

For the midi, click here.
(Piano arrangement by Brian Robinson.)

Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” originally sung (in a 1943 film) by Don Ameche, will serve to recall the bright side of life.  It was written after the 1931 Palermo wedding of the Comtesse but may, in a jazz arrangement, be pleasing to St. Norman J.  O’Connor, the jazz priest in my entry of July 5 — the date of death of the Comtesse, who may or may not have also been a saint.

For the midi, click here.

“Now you has jazz.”
— Cole Porter, High Society