In memory of a Broadway star who reportedly died on Jan. 30 . . .
A Jan. 29 New Yorker story, "Life with Spider," suggests
a look at the author's earlier novel The Variations and,
after a synchronology check, a Log24 flashback —
Thursday, September 7, 2023
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See also Fritz Leiber's rather different Spider Woman in this journal.
The square and diamond in recent posts tagged ImTran
(short for "immanent form, transcendent content")
appear also in some posts tagged "Spider Jerusalem."
Selah.
Film Director Hector Babenco Dies in Brazil
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
JULY 14, 2016, 10:39 A.M. E.D.T.
SAO PAULO — The Argentine-born Brazilian director
nominated for an Oscar for his 1985 film "Kiss of the
Spider Woman" has died. Hector Babenco was 70.
Denise Winther of Babenco's HB Films says the director
died Wednesday night of a heart attack at Sao Paulo's
Sirio-Libanes Hospital.
See also "Only Connect" and "Tombstones in Her Eyes."
Click image for a related post.
“Chaos is order yet undeciphered.”
— The novel The Double , by José Saramago,
on which the film "Enemy" was based
Some background for the 2012 Douglas Glover
"Attack of the Copula Spiders" book
mentioned in Sunday's Synchronicity Check —
Microsoft plans Windows 8 compatibility with mobile devices
"This won't be just another upgrade. Windows 8 is nothing less than the linchpin to Microsoft's strategy for keeping Windows relevant— if not resurgent— as the shift to the post-PC computing era unfolds.
'The stakes are huge,' says Charles King, principal analyst at research firm Pund-IT. 'The company must play outside its comfort zone, but if Microsoft succeeds, the potential opportunities could be significant.'"
— Byron Acohido in USA TODAY this evening
Yesterday's 7:20 AM Google News—
From Cliff Robertson's 1958 TV classic "Days of Wine and Roses"—
From Fritz Leiber's 1959 sci-fi classic "Damnation Morning" —
She drew from her handbag a pale grey gleaming implement
that looked by quick turns to me like a knife, a gun,
a slim sceptre, and a delicate branding iron— especially when
its tip sprouted an eight-limbed star of silver wire.
“The test?” I faltered, staring at the thing.
“Yes, to determine whether you can live in the fourth dimension or only die in it.”
"Of course, the aesthetic program
of cultural modernism
has long been summed up
by the maxim épater la bourgeoisie."
— The New York Times
Sunday Book Review, July 17
Examples:
"This Extreme and Difficult Sense of Spectacular Representation:
Antonin Artaud's Ontology of 'Live'," by Deborah Levitt
of the New School (See the noon post of July 13), as well as…
and, from mathematician Ellen Gethner's home page—
See also Sunday Dinner, A Link for Sunrise, and Inside CBS News.
On a conference at the New School for Social Research on Friday and Saturday, December 3rd and 4th, 2010—
"This conference is part of the early stages in the formation of a lexicon of political concepts. It will be the 5th in a series of conferences started in Tel Aviv University. The project is guided by one formal principle: we pose the Socratic question "what is x?", and by one theatrical principle: the concepts defined should be relevant to political thought…."
[The conference is not unrelated to the New York Times philosophy series "The Stone." Connoisseurs of coincidence— or, as Pynchon would have it, "chums of chance"— may read the conclusion of this series, titled "Stoned," in the light of the death on December 26th (St. Stephen's Day) of Matthew Lipman, creator of the "philosophy for children" movement. Many New York Times readers will, of course, be ignorant of the death by stoning of St. Stephen
Beloit College Nuremberg Chronicle
commemorated on December 26th. They should study Acts of the Apostles— Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.]
Meanwhile, in this journal—
For some background on the Dec. 4th link to "Damnation Morning," see "Why Me?"
For some political background, see "Bright Star"+"Dark Lady" in this journal.
* The title refers to a story by Fritz Leiber.
Mathematics and Narrative
(continued from April 26 and 28):
The Web
See also
Leiber's Big Time, Spider Woman, and The Eight.
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From "Knight to Move," by Fritz Leiber "… You were talking about basic games. Well, the chessboard is clearly a spider’s web with crisscross strands—in Go you even put the pieces on the intersections. The object of the game is to hunt down and immobilize the enemy King, just as a spider paralyzes its victim and sometimes wraps it in its silk. But here’s the clincher: the Knight, the piece most characteristic of chess, has exactly eight crooked moves when it stands in the clear—the number of a spider’s crooked legs, and eyes too! This suggests that all chess-playing planets are Spider-infiltrated from way back. It also suggests that all the chessplayers here for the tournament are Spiders—your shock battalion to take over 61 Cygni 5.” Colonel von Hohenwald sighed. “I was afraid you’d catch on, dear,” he said softly. “Now you’ve signed your abduction warrant at the very least. You may still be able to warn your HQ, but before they can come to your aid, this planet will be in our hands.” He frowned. “But why did you spill this to me, Erica? If you had played dumb—” “I spilled it to you,” she said, “because I wanted you to know that your plot’s been blown––and that my side has already taken countermeasures! We’ve made a crooked Knight’s move too. Has the significance of track games never occurred to you, Colonel? The one-dimensional track, sinuously turning, obviously symbolizes the snake. The pieces are the little bugs and animals the snake has swallowed. As for the dice, well, one of the throws is called Snake Eyes. So be assured that all the k’ta’hra players here are Snakes, ready to counter any Spider grab at 61 Cygni 5.” The Colonel’s mouth almost gaped. |
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From "Knight to Move," by Fritz Leiber "… You were talking about basic games. Well, the chessboard is clearly a spider’s web with crisscross strands—in Go you even put the pieces on the intersections. The object of the game is to hunt down and immobilize the enemy King, just as a spider paralyzes its victim and sometimes wraps it in its silk. But here’s the clincher: the Knight, the piece most characteristic of chess, has exactly eight crooked moves when it stands in the clear—the number of a spider’s crooked legs, and eyes too! This suggests that all chess-playing planets are Spider-infiltrated from way back. It also suggests that all the chessplayers here for the tournament are Spiders—your shock battalion to take over 61 Cygni 5.” Colonel von Hohenwald sighed. “I was afraid you’d catch on, dear,” he said softly. “Now you’ve signed your abduction warrant at the very least. You may still be able to warn your HQ, but before they can come to your aid, this planet will be in our hands.” He frowned. “But why did you spill this to me, Erica? If you had played dumb—” “I spilled it to you,” she said, “because I wanted you to know that your plot’s been blown––and that my side has already taken countermeasures! We’ve made a crooked Knight’s move too. Has the significance of track games never occurred to you, Colonel? The one-dimensional track, sinuously turning, obviously symbolizes the snake. The pieces are the little bugs and animals the snake has swallowed. As for the dice, well, one of the throws is called Snake Eyes. So be assured that all the k’ta’hra players here are Snakes, ready to counter any Spider grab at 61 Cygni 5.” The Colonel’s mouth almost gaped. |
See also . . . .
In memory of a public intellectual who reportedly argued in favor of
"a universal identity system" and died at 94 on May 31 —
Detail from an illustration linked to here on May 31 —
See also . . .
Illustration . . .
Metadata —
The above image of an 18 Sept. post commemorates a Sept. 18 death.
Related material: Kiss of the Spider Woman and Dramarama.
See as well this journal on December 12, 2010 — Sunday Painting —
and an Instagram story this morning by Marcela Nowak:
In memory of an artist who reportedly died
on July 2, 2022, a tune has been added to
an image that was posted here on that date:
On Doctor Strange in Spider-Man: No Way Home —
"This all-powerful wizard really used 'Scooby-Doo' as a verb
meaning 'successfully pull off a series of physical challenges
against monsters who are real.' What in the dad-trying-to-
relate-to-his-distant-son hell? That's like pumping someone up
to kick a game-winning field goal by saying 'Charlie Brown this crap.'"
— Vinnie Mancuso at Collider , November 17, 2021
But seriously . . .
From posts tagged Frankfurter —
"Scooby-Doo this ."
* The "poker" part of the title is above.
For the "comic" part, see the previous post.
Experienced Web users can easily find the "strip" part.
Related drama . . . Mind Spider.
"How old is the 'Big Spider Beck' joke?"
From "Blackboard Jungle" (1955) —
Teacher:
– You see, music is based on mathematics,
and it's just that the next class …
is a little more advanced.
Students:
– We're advanced, teach.
– Two times two is four.
– Are four.
See also Damnation Morning in this journal and . . .
From a post of August 30, 2015 —
“… recall the words of author Norman Mailer
that summarized his Harvard education —
‘At times, bullshit can only be countered
with superior bullshit.’ “
And at times, non-bullshit is required.
BS from The New York Times Friday on the mathematical fields
known as topology and analysis in the 1960s —
“The two fields seemed to be nearly irremediably divided,
because topology twists objects around, and analysis
needs them to be rigid.”
Some less ignorant remarks from 1986:
The above Gauss-Bonnet theorem (ca. 1848) is explained in a talk titled
“Analysis Meets Topology” labeled with the above Emma Stone date —
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker this morning —
" … mysteriously durable manner of mythical depiction,
which runs forward to Egyptian wall paintings and,
for that matter, to modern animation. Therianthropes,
it seems, reflect the symbolic practice of giving to
humans the powers of animals, a shamanistic rite
that seems tied to the origins of religion, and here it is,
for the first time, a startup.
… one of the human figures, we’re told, has
'a tapering profile that possibly merges into the base
of a thick tail and with short, curved limbs splayed out
to the side. In our opinion, this part of the body resembles
the lower half of a lizard or crocodile. …' "
Related art —
Logo by Saul Bass.
Peter Parker : How could you do all of this?
Quentin Beck : You'll see, Peter. People… need to believe.
From Sunday morning, a "green vault" hyperbolic paraboloid —
"A characteristic property of hyperbolic geometry
is that the angles of a triangle add to less
than a straight angle (half circle)." — Wikipedia
A related image —
The title was suggested by a recent New Yorker poem.
Related material: The remarks of Mysterio in "Spider-Man: Far From Home."
Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst
in "Spider-Man 2" (2004) —
Spoilers for another Kirsten Dunst film,
"Midnight Special" (2016) —
"When they all finally reach their destination —
a deserted field in the Florida Panhandle…."
" When asked about the film's similarities to the 2015 Disney movie
Tomorrowland , which also posits a futuristic world that exists in an
alternative dimension, Nichols sighed. 'I was a little bummed, I guess,'
he said of when he first learned about the project. . . . 'Our die was cast.
Sometimes this kind of collective unconscious that we're all dabbling in,
sometimes you're not the first one out of the gate.' "
From another obituary for
the "Spider-Man" screenwriter —
“When I die,” he liked to say, “I’m going to have written
on my tombstone, ‘Finally, a plot!’”
From Gotay and Isenberg, "The Symplectization of Science,"
Gazette des Mathématiciens 54, 59-79 (1992):
"… what is the origin of the unusual name 'symplectic'? ….
Its mathematical usage is due to Hermann Weyl who,
in an effort to avoid a certain semantic confusion, renamed
the then obscure 'line complex group' the 'symplectic group.'
… the adjective 'symplectic' means 'plaited together' or 'woven.'
This is wonderfully apt…."
On "The Emperor's New Clothes" —
|
Andersen’s weavers, as one commentator points out, are merely insisting that “the value of their labor be recognized apart from its material embodiment.” The invisible cloth they weave may never manifest itself in material terms, but the description of its beauty (“as light as spiderwebs” and “exquisite”) turns it into one of the many wondrous objects found in Andersen’s fairy tales. It is that cloth that captivates us, making us do the imaginative work of seeing something beautiful even when it has no material reality. Deeply resonant with meaning and of rare aesthetic beauty—even if they never become real—the cloth and other wondrous objets d’art have attained a certain degree of critical invisibility. — Maria Tatar, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007). Kindle Edition. |
The New Yorker reviewing "Bumblebee" —
"There is one reliable source for superhero sublimity,
and it’s all the more surprising that it’s a franchise with
no sacred inspiration whatsoever but, rather, of purely
and unabashedly mercantile origins: the 'Transformers'
series, based on a set of toys, in which Michael Bay’s
exhilarating filmmaking offers phantasmagorical textures
of an uncanny unconscious resonance."
— Richard Brody on December 29, 2018
"Before time began, there was the Cube."
— Optimus Prime
Some backstory — A Riddle for Davos, Jan. 22, 2014.
See also the Verwandlungslehre link from the previous post
and The Hassenfeld Legacy (for Harlan Kane).
Literary Meditation for the Feast of SS Peter and Paul
Background: McLuhan on analogy.
See a publication offering facsimiles of the original 4×6 cards
of John Shade's "Pale Fire," as Nabokov described them.
Regarding these card proportions, note that 4/6 = 333/500, approximately —
the proportions of the text box in a post from yesterday.
"Continue a search for thirty-three and three" — Katherine Neville.
These rather pointless, but vaguely poetic, analogies were suggested by …
"How frail the wand, but how profound the spell !"
— Clarence R. Wylie, Jr., "Paradox" (1948)
The above fanciful PlayStation symbols suggest an etymology —
See also Kipnis.
Quoted here on May 5, 2018 —
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" Lying at the axis of everything, zero is both real and imaginary. Lovelace was fascinated by zero; as was Gottfried Leibniz, for whom, like mathematics itself, it had a spiritual dimension. It was this that let him to imagine the binary numbers that now lie at the heart of computers: 'the creation of all things out of nothing through God's omnipotence, it might be said that nothing is a better analogy to, or even demonstration of such creation than the origin of numbers as here represented, using only unity and zero or nothing.' He also wrote, 'The imaginary number is a fine and wonderful recourse of the divine spirit, almost an amphibian between being and nonbeing.' "
— A footnote from page 229 of Sydney Padua's |
The page number 229 may also be interpreted, cabalistically,
as the date 2/29, Leap Day.
See Leap Day 2016 among the posts tagged Mind Spider.
"Almost 9 meters tall, Maman is one of the most ambitious
of a series of sculptures by Bourgeois that take as their subject
the spider, a motif that first appeared in several of the artist's
drawings in the 1940s and came to assume a central place in
her work during the 1990s. Intended as a tribute to her mother,
who was a weaver, Bourgeois's spiders are highly contradictory
as emblems of maternity: they suggest both protector and predator—
the silk of a spider is used both to construct cocoons and to bind prey—
and embody both strength and fragility."
Today is said to be the 25th anniversary of the
opening to the public of the World Wide Web.
Related material: Click on the above icon for
posts mentioning "Spider Woman."
In memory of the late mathematician John Nash
and of the late actor Alan Young ...
A Talking Horse —
What the horse says: "First online: 28 August 2013."
See also Overarching, Psychonauts, and Spider Tale in this journal.
The book quoted in the previous post, Attack of the Copula Spiders,
was reportedly published on March 27, 2012.
For the Church of Synchronology —
The above icon may be viewed as a simplified version
of the image described in the April 8 post Space Cross.
"But now, as a kind of reality check,
let’s look at James Joyce’s 'The Dead.' "
— Attack of the Copula Spiders
… And at day five of April 2016 —
(Today is day ten . See the previous post.)
Happy birthday to composer John Kander, who turns 89 today.
NPR MUSIC INTERVIEWS
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* See Noonan Weimar in this journal.
"Dreams can easily and unexpectedly turn into nightmares."
— Oscar speech by J. J. Abrams last night
Related material —
|
"The static boxes were an invention of Grandfather Horn. They generated a tiny cloud of meaningless brain waves. Without such individual thought-screens, there was too much danger of complete loss of individual personality— once Grandfather Horn had 'become' his infant daughter as well as himself for several hours and the unfledged mind had come close to being permanently lost in its own subconscious. The static boxes provided a mental wall behind which a mind could safely grow and function, similar to the wall by which ordinary minds are apparently always enclosed." — "The Mind Spider," by Fritz Leiber |
Johnny Cash* Meets Fritz Leiber**
* "You can run on for a long time…"
** See Spider + Snake in this journal.
"Andersen's weavers, as one commentator points out,
are merely insisting that 'the value of their labor be
recognized apart from its material embodiment.' The
invisible cloth they weave may never manifest itself in
material terms, but the description of its beauty
('as light as spiderwebs' and 'exquisite') turns it into
one of the many wondrous objects found in Andersen's
fairy tales. It is that cloth that captivates us, making us
do the imaginative work of seeing something beautiful
even when it has no material reality."
— The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen ,
edited with an introduction and notes by Maria Tatar
See also Symplectic in this journal.
A passage suggested by the previous post, Box Office:
|
From the 1959 Fritz Leiber story "Damnation Morning" — She looked at me and then nodded. She said carefully, “The person you killed or doomed is still in the room.” An aching impulse twisted me a little. “Maybe I should try to go back––” I began. “Try to go back and unite the selves . . .” “It’s too late now,” she repeated. “But I want to,” I persisted. “There’s something pulling at me, like a chain hooked to my chest.” She smiled unpleasantly. “Of course there is,” she said. “It’s the vampire in you—the same thing that drew me to your room or would draw any Spider or Snake. The blood scent of the person you killed or doomed.” |
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." — Joan Didion
A post from St. Augustine's day, 2015, may serve to
illustrate this.
The post started with a look at a painting by Swiss artist
Wolf Barth, "Spielfeld." The painting portrays two
rectangular arrays, of four and of twelve subsquares,
that sit atop a square array of sixteen subsquares.
To one familiar with Euclid's "bride's chair" proof of the
Pythagorean theorem, "Spielfeld" suggests a right triangle
with squares on its sides of areas 4, 12, and 16.
That image in turn suggests a diagram illustrating the fact
that a triangle suitably inscribed in a half-circle is a right
triangle… in this case, a right triangle with angles of 30, 60,
and 90 degrees… Thus —
In memory of screenwriter John Gregory Dunne (husband
of Joan Didion and author of, among other things, The Studio )
here is a cinematric approach to the above figure.
The half-circle at top suggests the dome of an observatory.
This in turn suggests a scene from the 2014 film "Magic in
the Moonlight."
As she gazes at the silent universe above
through an opening in the dome, the silent
Emma Stone is perhaps thinking,
prompted by her work with Spider-Man …
"Drop me a line."
As he gazes at the crack in the dome,
Stone's costar Colin Firth contrasts the vastness
of the Universe with the smallness of Man, citing …
"the tiny field F2 with two elements."
In conclusion, recall the words of author Norman Mailer
that summarized his Harvard education —
"At times, bullshit can only be countered
with superior bullshit."
(The phrase is from Don DeLillo and Josefine Lyche.)
See “Complex Grid.”
See as well Bill O’Reilly’s remark, “Do not be a coxcomb,”
and an artist‘s self-portrait:
Grid Designer
The following post suggests the Spiders and Snakes of Fritz Leiber’s
Changewar , a mythology inspired by the hallucinations of delirium tremens .
“The growth of consciousness is everything…
the seed of awareness sending its roots
across space and time. But it can grow in so many ways,
spinning its web from mind to mind like the spider
or burrowing into the unconscious darkness like the snake.
The biggest wars are the wars of thought.”
— Fritz Leiber, “The Oldest Soldier” (1960)
Update of 10 PM Saturday, June 14, 2014:
The first link above now leads to Log24 posts tagged
“Consciousness Growth.” This tag is used only to select
specific posts in this journal. It should not be seen as
related to any material of the sort one can find in
a Web search for “growth of consciousness.”
“Chaos is order yet undeciphered.”
— The novel The Double , by José Saramago,
on which the recent film "Enemy" was based
For Louise Bourgeois — a post from the date of Galois's death—
For Toronto — Scene from a film that premiered there on Sept. 8, 2013:
Related material: This journal on that date, Sept. 8, 2013:
"I still haven't found what I'm looking for." — Bono
"In fact Surrealism found what it had been looking for
from the first in the 1920 collages [by Max Ernst],
which introduced an entirely original scheme of
visual structure…."
— Rosalind Krauss quoting André Breton*
in "The Master's Bedroom"
* "Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism"
(1941), in Surrealism and Painting (New York,
Harper & Row, 1972, p. 64).
See also Damnation Morning in this journal.
“…what he was trying to get across was not that he was the Soldier of a Power that was fighting across all of time to change history, but simply that we men were creatures with imaginations and it was our highest duty to try to tell what it was really like to live in other times and places and bodies. Once he said to me, ‘The growth of consciousness is everything… the seed of awareness sending its roots across space and time. But it can grow in so many ways, spinning its web from mind to mind like the spider or burrowing into the unconscious darkness like the snake. The biggest wars are the wars of thought.'”
— Fritz Leiber, “The Oldest Soldier” (1960)
“And that’s the snake.” — Jill Clayburgh in “It’s My Turn” (1980)
Backstory — “For Daedalus,” May 26, 2009.
For a more up-to-date look at Burroway, see a
Chicago Tribune story of March 21, 2014.
For the Princeton Class of 1905 —
Joyce Carol Oates Meets Emily Dickinson.
Oates —
"It is an afternoon in autumn, near dusk.
The western sky is a spider’s web of translucent gold.
I am being brought by carriage—two horses—
muted thunder of their hooves—
along narrow country roads between hilly fields
touched with the sun’s slanted rays,
to the village of Princeton, New Jersey.
The urgent pace of the horses has a dreamlike air,
like the rocking motion of the carriage;
and whoever is driving the horses
his face I cannot see, only his back—
stiff, straight, in a tight-fitting dark coat."
Dickinson —
"Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality."
"… It raced down the gossamer curtain of Its webbing,
a nightmare Spider from beyond time and space,
a Spider from beyond the fevered imaginings of
whatever inmates may live in the deepest depths of hell.
No, Bill thought coldly, not a Spider either, not really,
but this shape isn’t one It picked out of our minds;
it’s just the closest our minds can come to
(the deadlights)
whatever It really is."
— Stephen King, It (Sept. 15, 1986)
Related horror by Fritz Leiber—
"The Mind Spider" and "Damnation Morning."
Related fiction by Mark Helprin—
As a perceptive reviewer has noted, Helprin's title is
almost a verse from the song "Danny Boy."
See, too, the Danny Boy of The Shining ,
who returns tomorrow in a sequel, Doctor Sleep .
The eight parts of the semaphore circle
in the previous post suggest some context
for Fritz Leiber's eight-limb "spider" symbol:
See Mary Karr, Time on the Cross, and chuahaidong.org.
University Diaries today has a meditation on
nothingness and the University of North Carolina.
She includes a picture by John Picacio that was done as a
cover illustration for the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz .
Related material:
A June 10 obituary for Msgr. Tim O'Connor, former rector
of Sacred Heart Cathedral in Raleigh, NC.
"To those who knew him, O’Connor’s aesthetic sense
was a defining quality. As rector at Sacred Heart Cathedral—
the seat of the bishop of Raleigh— he led a $500,000
renovation project in the late ’90s that refurbished the floors
and pews and installed art, such as painting the ceiling blue
with 14-karat gold leaf stars."
— Julian Spector — jspector@newsobserver.com
Some context:
Sermon in this journal last Sunday, June 9, which
was the reported date of Msgr. O'Connor's death.
Mary Chapin Carpenter in this journal on July 6, 2008:
Related art:
Ceiling of Raleigh's Sacred Heart Cathedral—
Some context for this art:
From "Spider Robinson: The SF Writer as Empath"
by Ben Bova —
When Analog magazine was housed over at Graybar Building
on Lexington Avenue, our offices were far from plush. In fact,
they were grimy. Years worth of Manhattan soot clung to the
walls. The windows were opaque with grime. (What has this
to do with Spider Robinson? Patience, friend.)
Many times young science fiction fans would come to Manhattan
and phone me from Grand Central Station, which connected
underground with the good old Graybar. "I've just come to New
York and I read every issue of Analog and I'd like to come up and
see what a science fiction magazine office looks like," they would
invariably say.
I'd tell them to come on up, but not to expect too much. My advice
was always ignored. The poor kid would come in and gape at the
piles of manuscripts, the battered old metal desks, and mountains
of magazines and stacks of artwork, the ramshackle filing cabinets
and bookshelves. His eyes would fill with tears. His mouth would
sag open.
He had, of course, expected whirring computers, telephones with
TV attachments, smoothly efficient robots humming away,
ultramodern furniture, and a general appearance reminiscent of a
NASA clean room. (Our present offices, in the spanking new Condé
Nast Building on Madison Avenue, are a little closer to that dream.)
The kid would shamble away, heartsick, the beautiful rainbow-hued
bubble of his imagination burst by the sharp prick of reality.
"Funny how annoying a little prick can be." — Garry Shandling as Senator Stern
The above images are from a prequel (March 29, 2013)
to 'Nauts (March 26, 2006.)
See also Spider Mother, Gamer Post, and Spider Tale.
From February 24, 2005:
The above three-part image may be viewed as a tribute to
Jerusalem Day (today), to Saul Bass, or to Spider Jerusalem.
(See related posts and Damnation Morning.)
See Snakes on a Projective Plane by Andrew Spann (Sept. 26, 2006):
Click image for some related posts.
"…what he was trying to get across was not that he was the Soldier of a Power that was fighting across all of time to change history, but simply that we men were creatures with imaginations and it was our highest duty to try to tell what it was really like to live in other times and places and bodies. Once he said to me, 'The growth of consciousness is everything… the seed of awareness sending its roots across space and time. But it can grow in so many ways, spinning its web from mind to mind like the spider or burrowing into the unconscious darkness like the snake. The biggest wars are the wars of thought.' "
— Fritz Leiber, Changewar , page 22
Surreal requiem for the late Jonathan Winters:
"They 'burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars,'
as Jack Kerouac once wrote. It was such a powerful
image that Wal-Mart sells it as a jigsaw puzzle."
— "When the Village Was the Vanguard,"
by Henry Allen, in today's Wall Street Journal
See also Damnation Morning and the picture in
yesterday evening's remarks on art:
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis in Looper :
Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys :
See also Big Time in this journal.
"Now the serpent was more subtle
than any beast of the field…."
— Genesis 3:1
"“The serpent’s eyes shine
As he wraps around the vine….”
– Don Henley
"Nine is a vine."
— Folk rhyme
Click images for some background.
From a transcript of the Charlize Theron film
"The Astronaut's Wife"—
Schoolchildren —
"Down came the rain,
and washed the spider out,
out came the sun,
and dried up all the rain,
and the itsy-bitsy spider
climbed up the spout again."
See also The Patterning Windows.
(Continued from yesterday evening)
On Max Bialystock's Spider-Man Godspell Seminar—
"… for surrealism to be entertaining
onstage, it must be shaped into
some kind of satisfying form."
— Charles Isherwood
in today's New York Times
(RSS: Wed, 16 May 2012 00:37:17 GMT)
From Fritz Leiber's 1959 story "Damnation Morning" —
She drew from her handbag a pale grey gleaming
implement that looked by quick turns to me
like a knife, a gun, a slim sceptre, and a delicate
branding iron— especially when its tip sprouted
an eight-limbed star of silver wire.
“The test?” I faltered, staring at the thing.
“Yes, to determine whether you can live
in the fourth dimension or only die in it.”
Tony Award Nominations
"The losers? 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,'
the $75 million blockbuster that received just
two nominations. 'Seminar' and 'Godspell,'
which have some strong fans but were
shut out of the nominations."
— Patrick Healy in this morning's New York Times
A thought for Max Bialystock—
The Spider-Man Godspell Seminar!
Jeff Goldblum in "Seminar"
Update of 12:25 PM —
The reviews are in!
"A version of this article appeared in print on May 1, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition…."
Taymor, it must be said, is a beautiful woman. Her face at fifty-eight has sharp, expressive features— she actually frowns when she's unhappy, and her eyes seem to light up when she laughs— and she still has the long black hair she had when she was a young actress, "a very pretty eighteen-year-old," as she puts it, who "didn't want to play Cinderella or Snow White. I wanted to be the Wicked Witch of the West."
— Richard Dorment, article dated November 14, 2011
"A New York Jew imitates D. H. Lawrence at his peril."
See also The Ninth Gate and Spider Women.
* For the title, do a search in this journal.
NY Lottery this evening: 3-digit 444, 4-digit 0519.
444:
"… of our history … and of our destructive paths.
We are beginning to sense the need to restore
the sacred feminine." She paused. "You
mentioned you are writing a manuscript about
the symbols of the sacred feminine, are you not?"
"I …"
Related material— "Eightfold Geometry" + Spider in this journal.
For this afternoon's NY numbers— 511 and 9891— see
511 in the "Going Up" post of July 12, 2007, as well as
Ben Brantley's recent suggestion of Paris Hilton as a
matinee attraction and her 9891 photo on the Web.
The LA Times on last weekend's film "Thor"—
"… the film… attempts to bridge director Kenneth Branagh's high-minded Shakespearean intentions with Marvel Entertainment's bottom-line-oriented need to crank out entertainment product."
Those averse to Nordic religion may contemplate a different approach to entertainment (such as Taymor's recent approach to Spider-Man).
A high-minded— if not Shakespearean— non-Nordic approach to groups acting—
"What was wrong? I had taken almost four semesters of algebra in college. I had read every page of Herstein, tried every exercise. Somehow, a message had been lost on me. Groups act . The elements of a group do not have to just sit there, abstract and implacable; they can do things, they can 'produce changes.' In particular, groups arise naturally as the symmetries of a set with structure. And if a group is given abstractly, such as the fundamental group of a simplical complex or a presentation in terms of generators and relators, then it might be a good idea to find something for the group to act on, such as the universal covering space or a graph."
— Thomas W. Tucker, review of Lyndon's Groups and Geometry in The American Mathematical Monthly , Vol. 94, No. 4 (April 1987), pp. 392-394
"Groups act "… For some examples, see
Related entertainment—
High-minded— Many Dimensions—
Not so high-minded— The Cosmic Cube—
One way of blending high and low—
The high-minded Charles Williams tells a story
in his novel Many Dimensions about a cosmically
significant cube inscribed with the Tetragrammaton—
the name, in Hebrew, of God.
The following figure can be interpreted as
the Hebrew letter Aleph inscribed in a 3×3 square—
The above illustration is from undated software by Ed Pegg Jr.
For mathematical background, see a 1985 note, "Visualizing GL(2,p)."
For entertainment purposes, that note can be generalized from square to cube
(as Pegg does with his "GL(3,3)" software button).
For the Nordic-averse, some background on the Hebrew connection—
Background— Why Me? and the Fritz Leiber story "Damnation Morning."
The story, about the afterlife of a dead drunk, contains an intriguing dark lady.
Related material — Search for the Spider Woman.
See also Julie Taymor in an interview published last Dec. 12 —
“I’ve got two Broadway shows, a feature film, and Mozart,’’ she said.
“It’s a very interesting place to be and to be able to move back and forth,
but at a certain point you have to be able to step outside and see,’’
and here she dropped her voice to a tranquil whisper, “it’s just theater.
It’s all theater. It’s all theater. The whole thing is theater.’’
— and search for Taymor + Spider in this journal.
Happy Shakespeare's Birthday.
Today's noon post included a search result from a website titled "Enchanted Mind."
Related thoughts:
Today's New York Times on Julie Taymor's "Spider-Man"—
"Gone, when the show resumes performances on May 12 after a three-week overhaul, will be the Geek Chorus of narrators…."
A theatrical alternative—
National Catholic Reporter in 1995 on "Mighty Aphrodite"—
"Woody's neuroticism may be wearing thin, but he has invented a comic Greek chorus to comment on his problems…."
For a less comic Greek chorus, see The Quiet Customer (August 10, 2010).
"Hello, are you my 3 o'clock?"
See also Spider Girl (August 2, 2009).
yesterday on Julie Taymor and "Spider-Man"—
"This isn't a time for schadenfreude. Jobs are on the line, careers hang in the balance and the Fed isn't going to ride to the rescue of megamusicals as it did for Wall Street banks. But you'll forgive me for being a pessimist about the chances of an 11th hour redemption. The only way I can see this train wreck turning into an artistic success is if the investors were somehow able to resurrect Orson Welles to adapt the whole unfortunate episode into a 'Citizen Kane' sequel, the tale of an avant-garde idealist who loses her way after being enabled by heedless businessmen determined to duplicate the multibillion-dollar bonanza of 'The Lion King.'"
See also this morning's post and…
— Errol Morris in The New York Times , March 9th
In today's Wall Street Journal , Peter Woit reviews a new book on dark matter and dark energy.
For a more literary approach, see "dark materials" in this journal.
Before thir eyes in sudden view appear The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark Illimitable Ocean without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth, And time and place are lost; where eldest Night And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise Of endless warrs and by confusion stand. For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce Strive here for Maistrie, and to Battel bring amidst the noise Thir embryon Atoms.... ... Into this wilde Abyss, The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave, Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight, Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain His dark materials to create more Worlds, Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while, Pondering his Voyage.... -- John Milton, Paradise Lost , Book II
Related material:
1. The “spider” symbol of Fritz Leiber’s short story “Damnation Morning”—
2. Angels and demons here and in the Catholic Church.
3. The following diagram by one “John Opsopaus”—
"The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
Some background—
An image from yesterday's search
God, TIme, Hopkins
"We got tom-toms over here bigger than a monster
Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla"
— "Massive Attack"
"I'm just checking your math on that. Yes, I got the same thing."
"Live… Uh, check that… From New York, it's Saturday Night! "
From this morning's New York Times…
"On November 12th and 13th, 2010,
a meeting of Roman Catholic bishops
convened to respond to the growing demand
for exorcism rites."
— Trailer for the film "The Rite," which opens today
Meanwhile, in this journal on November 12th and 13th, 2010… Award Show Story.
Related material — God, Time, Hopkins and a Faustian link from November 12th.
Update of 9:57 AM 1/28— The Faustian link suggests readings from
James G. Hart's The Person and the Common Life (Kluwer Academic, 1992).
See pages 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and note especially the spider metaphor on page 5 —
Julie Taymor in an interview published Dec. 12 —
“I’ve got two Broadway shows, a feature film, and Mozart,’’ she said.
“It’s a very interesting place to be and to be able to move back and forth,
but at a certain point you have to be able to step outside and see,’’
and here she dropped her voice to a tranquil whisper, “it’s just theater.
It’s all theater. It’s all theater. The whole thing is theater.’’
Google News this afternoon (Blake Edwards obituary) —
Julie Taymor in an interview published Dec. 12 —
“I’ve got two Broadway shows, a feature film, and Mozart,’’ she said. “It’s a very interesting place to be and to be able to move back and forth, but at a certain point you have to be able to step outside and see,’’ and here she dropped her voice to a tranquil whisper, “it’s just theater. It’s all theater. It’s all theater. The whole thing is theater.’’
Non-theater —
"The interplay between Euclidean and Galois geometry" and
related remarks on interplay — Keats's Laws of Aesthetics.
Part theater, part non-theater —
Yesterday's New York Lottery— Midday 042, Evening 919.
Here 042 may be seen as referring to New York's 42nd Street…
Below, West 42nd St., facing north, from yesterday's New York Times—
Related material —
in the post Black SwanThat story is part of the Change War saga by Fritz Leiber, notably represented by Leiber's 1957 novel The Big Time.
See also Comic Book Resources on the new comic-book series Spider-Man: Big Time—
CBR: “Big Time” is this title of this new era of “Amazing Spider-Man.” Why choose that title? What exactly is it referring to?
DAN SLOTT: “Big Time” refers to more than “Amazing Spider-Man,” it also refers to other Spider-Projects: “Astonishing Spider-Man/Iron Man,” the new Norman Osborn mini, and the all-new “Spider-Girl!” With “Amazing,” “Big Time” takes on a lot of meanings. In this book, everything is bigger: bigger stakes for Peter Parker, bigger threats for Spider-Man, and a much bigger comic. We are expanding to 30 pages of material, twice a month!
As for yesterday's evening NY lottery number 919, see 9/19.
"It's my absolute ambition that you are touched to the core of your being with the content…."
— Julie Taymor on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (Playbill video, undated)
Another ambitious comic-book promotion —
"What Logicomix does that few works in any medium do is to make intellectual passion palpable. That is its greatest strength. And it’s here that its form becomes its substance."
— Judith Roitman, review (pdf, 3.7 MB) of Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth , in …
The December 2010 AMS Notices cover has excerpts from Logicomix.
Related material:
"In the classical grammarians’ sense of the power of form over 'content' and style over 'substance,' he originated the phrase, 'the medium is the message.'"
— Joseph P. Duggan on Marshall McLuhan at The University Bookman
See also, in this journal, The Medium is the Message, Wechsler, and Blockheads .
Hollywood Reporter Exclusive
Martin Sheen Caught in
Spider-Man's Web
Sally Field is in early talks
to play Aunt May.
Related material:
Birthdays in this journal,
Galois Field of Dreams,
and Class of 64.
From this date last year—
Saturday, October 31, 2009Happy Harvard Halloween
Related material: This journal on the birthday of Kate Jackson ("Satan’s School for Girls") this year and in 2005. For more literary depth, see Spider Girl references on March 1, 2005 and August 2, 2009, as well as Raiders of the Lost Well (Feb. 18, 2009). Related religious symbolism: Follow the Harvard links of October 28 ("serious" and then "de facto university motto. [1]"). |
"By these Festival-rites, from the Age that is past,
To the Age that is waiting before…"
For Julie Taymor on Fashion's Night Out…
This morning's post had a link to a video meditation from the director of
the 1985 film "Kiss of the Spider Woman"—
This film clip is echoed by lyrics, broadcast this morning, from Taymor's new Spider-Man musical—
You can fly too high and get too close to the sun.
See how the boy falls from the sky.
This morning's post and the "At Play" film it linked to featured class conflict and Brazilian natives.
For a more down-to-earth approach to these topics, see Fox Broadcasting's new series "Running Wilde."
From Telegraph.co.uk (published: 5:56 PM BST 10 Aug 2010), a note on British-born Canadian journalist Bruce Garvey, who died at 70 on August 1—
In 1970, while reporting on the Apollo 13 mission at Nasa Mission Control for the Toronto Star, he was one of only two journalists— alongside Richard Killian of the Daily Express— to hear the famous message: "Houston we've had a problem."
See also Log24 posts of 10 AM and noon today.
The latter post poses the problem "You're dead. Now what?"
Again, as in this morning's post, applying Jungian synchronicity—
A check of this journal on the date of Garvey's death yields a link to 4/28's "Eightfold Geometry."
That post deals with a piece of rather esoteric mathematical folklore. Those who prefer easier problems may follow the ongoing struggles of Julie Taymor with "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark."
The problems of death, geometry, and Taymor meet in "Spider Woman" (April 29) and "Memorial for Galois" (May 31).
Continued from May 8
(Feast of Saint Robert Heinlein)
“Wells and trees were dedicated to saints. But the offerings at many wells and trees were to something other than the saint; had it not been so they would not have been, as we find they often were, forbidden. Within this double and intertwined life existed those other capacities, of which we know more now, but of which we still know little– clairvoyance, clairaudience, foresight, telepathy.”
— Charles Williams, Witchcraft, Faber and Faber, London, 1941
Why "Saint" Robert? See his accurate depiction of evil– the Eater of Souls in Glory Road.
For more on Williams's "other capacities," see Heinlein's story "Lost Legacy."
A related story– Fritz Leiber's "The Mind Spider." An excerpt:
The conference—it was much more a hyper-intimate
gabfest—proceeded.
"My static box bugged out for a few ticks this morning,"
Evelyn remarked in the course of talking over the
trivia of the past twenty-four hours.
The static boxes were an invention of Grandfather
Horn. They generated a tiny cloud of meaningless brain
waves. Without such individual thought-screens, there was
too much danger of complete loss of individual personality
—once Grandfather Horn had "become" his infant daughter
as well as himself for several hours and the unfledged
mind had come close to being permanently lost in its own
subconscious. The static boxes provided a mental wall be-
– hind which a mind could safely grow and function, similar
to the wall by which ordinary minds are apparently
always enclosed.
In spite of the boxes, the Horns shared thoughts and
emotions to an amazing degree. Their mental togetherness
was as real and as mysterious—and as incredible—as
thought itself . . . and thought is the original angel-cloud
dancing on the head of a pin. Their present conference
was as warm and intimate and tart as any actual family
gathering in one actual room around one actual table.
Five minds, joined together in the vast mental darkness
that shrouds all minds. Five minds hugged together for
comfort and safety in the infinite mental loneliness that
pervades the cosmos.
Evelyn continued, "Your boxes were all working, of
course, so I couldn't get your thoughts—just the blurs of
your boxes like little old dark grey stars. But this time
if gave me a funny uncomfortable feeling, like a spider
Crawling down my—Grayl! Don't feel so wildly! What
Is it?”
Then… just as Grayl started to think her answer…
something crept from the vast mental darkness and infinite
cosmic loneliness surrounding the five minds of the
Horns.
Grayl was the first to notice. Her panicky thought had
ttie curling too-keen edge of hysteria. "There are six of
us now! There should only be five, but there are six.
Count! Count, I tell you! Six!"
To Mort it seemed that a gigantic spider was racing
across the web of their thoughts….
See also this journal on May 30– "720 in the Book"– and on May 31– "Memorial for Galois."
("Obnoxious nerds"— a phrase Martin Gardner recently applied to Galois— will note that 720
… and for Louise Bourgeois
"The épateurs were as boring as the bourgeois,
two halves of one dreariness."
— D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent
Thanks to David Lavery for the following–
See also references in Log24 to "Hitler Plans Burning Man," as well as…
"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web…."
— Alan Watts in Wikipedia article on Indra's Net.
and
"the Burning Man Evolution of
Spider Robinson's Cross-Time Saloon."
The paranoid schizophrenics among us might also enjoy what they may, if they like, view as a coded reference to today's date, 3/13–
Page 313 in Robert Stone's classic novel
A Flag for Sunrise (Knopf hardcover, 1981).
More Than Matter
| Wheel in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913
(f) Poetry The burden or refrain of a song. ⇒ “This meaning has a low degree of authority, but is supposed from the context in the few cases where the word is found.” Nares. You must sing a-down a-down, An you call him a-down-a. O, how the wheel becomes it! Shak. |
“In one or other of G. F. H. Shadbold’s two published notebooks, Beyond Narcissus and Reticences of Thersites, a short entry appears as to the likelihood of Ophelia’s enigmatic cry: ‘Oh, how the wheel becomes it!’ referring to the chorus or burden ‘a-down, a-down’ in the ballad quoted by her a moment before, the aptness she sees in the refrain.”
— First words of Anthony Powell’s novel “O, How the Wheel Becomes It!” (See Library Thing.)
Related material:
Photo uploaded on January 14, 2009
with caption “This nothing’s more than matter”
and the following nothings from this journal
on the same date– Jan. 14, 2009—
New York Times, January 12, 2010, 12:26 PM–
"Spider-Man" Musical Will Refund Tickets
"With… direction by Julie Taymor ['Frida'], 'Spider-Man' has been marred by delays….
The musical’s troubles have unfolded at the same time that the next “Spider-Man” movie has been descending into disarray…."
Related material:
"No Great Magic," by Fritz Leiber–
"The white cosmetic came away, showing sallow skin and on it a faint tattoo in the form of an 'S' styled like a yin-yang symbol left a little open.
'Snake!' he hissed. 'Destroyer! The arch-enemy, the eternal opponent!'"
“Ay que bonito es volar
A las dos de la mañana….”
— “La Bruja“
From a Spider:
Criss Angel Celebrates His Birthday,
Long Story, and
From the Web:
From a Spider Web:
Damnation Morning
(the complete story),
Hitler Plans Burning Man
("What the hell is next?"),
NEXT,
and Vegas Angel.
There must be…
50 ways to leave Las Vegas.
The Interpreter’s House
| From Sunday morning’s October Endgame: A Korean Christian site–
See Mizian Translation Service for |
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Second Part, “The Interpreter’s House“–
“When the Interpreter had shown them this, He has them into the very best room in the house; a very brave room it was. So He bid them look round about, and see if they could find anything profitable there. Then they looked round and round; for there was nothing there to be seen but a very great spider on the wall: and that they overlooked.
MERCY. Then said Mercy, Sir, I see nothing; but Christiana held her peace.
INTER. But, said the Interpreter, look again, and she therefore looked again, and said, Here is not anything but an ugly spider, who hangs by her hands upon the wall. Then said He, Is there but one spider in all this spacious room? Then the water stood in Christiana’s eyes, for she was a woman quick of apprehension; and she said, Yea, Lord, there is here more than one. Yea, and spiders whose venom is far more destructive than that which is in her. The Interpreter then looked pleasantly upon her, and said, Thou hast said the truth. This made Mercy blush, and the boys to cover their faces, for they all began now to understand the riddle.74
Then said the Interpreter again, “The spider taketh hold with their hands (as you see), and is in kings’ palaces’ (Prov. 30:28). And wherefore is this recorded, but to show you, that how full of the venom of sin soever you be, yet you may, by the hand of faith, lay hold of, and dwell in the best room that belongs to the King’s house above!75
CHRIST. I thought, said Christiana, of something of this; but I could not imagine it all. I thought that we were like spiders, and that we looked like ugly creatures, in what fine room soever we were; but that by this spider, this venomous and ill-favoured creature, we were to learn how to act faith, that came not into my mind. And yet she has taken hold with her hands, as I see, and dwells in the best room in the house. God has made nothing in vain.”
Related material:
The spider metaphor in
Under the Volcano
(April 10, 2004) and
an AP obituary
from yesterday.
Related material: This journal on the birthday of Kate Jackson ("Satan’s School for Girls") this year and in 2005.
For more literary depth, see Spider Girl references on March 1, 2005 and August 2, 2009, as well as Raiders of the Lost Well (Feb. 18, 2009). Related religious symbolism: Follow the Harvard links of October 28 ("serious" and then "de facto university motto. [1]").
The Tale of the British Virgins
Related material:
Yesterday’s Dr. No entry
and a story by
Christine Dell’Amore
Spider Girl
"The 'magico-religious' tarantella
is a solo dance performed
supposedly to cure…
the delirium and contortions
attributed to the bite of a spider
at harvest (summer) time."
Moral:
Life's a dance
(and Jersey girls
are tough).
who was raised in Tenafly, New Jersey–Bull on Sacred Cows:
"Poor late nineteenth-century, poor early twentieth-century! Oh, brave new world that had such people in it: people like Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel. Seven people who did more than all the machine-guns and canons of the Somme Valley or the Panzer divisions of Hitler to end the old world and to create– if not the answers– at least the questions that started off the new, each one of them killing one of the sacred cows on which Western consciousness had fed for so long…."— Apostolos Doxiadis, "Writing Incompleteness-– the Play" (pdf).
See also Mathematics and Narrative.
Annals of Prose Style
|
“Preserving a strict unity of time and place, this stark tale of a young woman’s decline into insanity is set in a summer home on a holiday island. It is the first part of the trilogy that comprises Winter Light and The Silence, films which are generally seen as addressing Bergman’s increasing disillusionment with the emotional coldness of his inherited Lutheran religion. In particular here, Bergman focuses on the absence of familial love which might perhaps have pulled Karin (Andersson) back from the brink; while Karin’s mental disintegration manifests itself in the belief that God is a spider. As she slips inexorably into madness, she is observed with terrifying objectivity by her emotionally paralyzed father (Björnstrand) and seemingly helpless husband (von Sydow).”
Related material:
1. The “spider” symbol of Fritz Leiber’s short story “Damnation Morning”–
2. Hollywood’s “Angels & Demons” (to open May 15), and
3. The following diagram by one “John Opsopaus”–
Annals of Prose Style
|
“Preserving a strict unity of time and place, this stark tale of a young woman’s decline into insanity is set in a summer home on a holiday island. It is the first part of the trilogy
that comprises Winter Light and The Silence, films which are generally seen as addressing Bergman’s increasing disillusionment with the emotional coldness of his inherited Lutheran religion. In particular here, Bergman focuses on the absence of familial love which might perhaps have pulled Karin (Andersson) back from the brink; while Karin’s mental disintegration manifests itself in the belief that God is a spider. As she slips inexorably into madness, she is observed with terrifying objectivity by her emotionally paralyzed father (Björnstrand) and seemingly helpless husband (von Sydow).”
— Nigel Floyd, Time Out, quoted at Bergmanorama
Related material:
1. The “spider” symbol of Fritz Leiber’s short story “Damnation Morning“–
2. The Illuminati Diamond of Hollywood’s “Angels & Demons” (to open May 15), and
3. The following diagram by one “John Opsopaus“–
Eight is a Gate
From the most highly
rated negative review:
“I never did figure out
what ‘The Eight’ was.”
Various approaches
to this concept
(click images for details):
Katherine Neville, author of perhaps the greatest bad novel of the twentieth century, The Eight, has now graced a new century with her sequel, titled The Fire. An excerpt:
“Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior century, by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a pioneering mountain lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rock and massive tree trunks chinked together, it was a huge log cabin that was shaped like an octagon– patterned after a hogan or sweat lodge– with many-paned windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a vast, architectural compass rose.
……..
From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau, I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks, licked by the rosy morning light. On a clear day like this, I could see all the way to Mount Hesperus– which the Diné call Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain. One of the four sacred mountains created by First Man and First Woman.Together with Sisnaajinii, white mountain (Mt. Blanca) in the east; Tsoodzil, blue mountain (Mt. Taylor) in the south, and Dook’o’osliid, yellow mountain (San Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked out the four corners of Dinétah– ‘Home of the Diné,’ as the Navajo call themselves.
And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was standing on: Four Corners, the only place in the U.S. where four states– Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona– come together at right angles to form a cross.”
|
The Eight
Lest the reader of the previous entry mistakenly take Katherine Neville’s book The Eight more seriously than Fritz Leiber’s greatly superior writings on eightness, here are two classic interpretations of Leiber’s “spider” or “double cross” symbol:
|
The eight-rayed star may be taken
as representing what is known
in philosophy as a “universal.”
See also
|
Along Came
a Spider
A phrase from 1959
"Look, Buster, |
… Todo lo sé
por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema
de la Muerte.
The link to
"Buffalo Soldier"
in this entry
is in memory of
Vittorio Foa, who
died Monday
at his home
outside Rome.
|
M. V. Ramana on a famous quotation–
"Oppenheimer had learned Sanskrit at Berkeley so as to read the Gita in the original; he always kept a worn pink copy on the bookshelf closest to his desk. It is therefore likely that he may have actually thought of the original, Sanskrit, verse rather than the English translation. The closest that fits this meaning is in the 32nd verse from the 11th chapter of the Gita.
This literally means: I am kAla, the great destroyer of Worlds. What is intriguing about this verse, then, is the interpretation of kAla by Jungk and others to mean death. While death is technically one of the meanings of kAla, a more common one is time." "KAla" (in the Harvard-Kyoto transliteration scheme) is more familiar to the West in the related form of Kali, a goddess sometimes depicted as a dancing girl; Kali is related to kAla, time, according to one website, as "the force which governs and stops time." See also the novel The Fermata, by Nicholson Baker. The fact that Oppenheimer thought of Chapter 11, verse 32, of the Gita may, as a mnemonic device, be associated with the use of the number 1132 in Finnegans Wake.
|
The custom-made asterisk
above may be regarded
as a version of
the "Spider" symbol
of Fritz Leiber.
… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.
Related material:
The previous five entries
and the entries of
this date three years ago.
Time of this entry:
New York Times today–
"Plot Would Thicken, if the
Writers Remembered It"
"We've lost the plot!"
— Slipstream
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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.
On Anthony Hopkins’s new film:
“At one point during ‘Slipstream,’ Hopkins’s character stumbles upon a Dolly Parton impersonator while Parton’s wonderful song, ‘Coat of Many Colors,’ plays on the soundtrack. I told Hopkins that I thought he used the tune– which is about a multi-hued coat that little Dolly’s grandmother made for her out of random pieces of cloth when the future superstar’s family was dirt poor– as a sort of commentary on the patchwork structure of ‘Slipstream’ itself. Hopkins smiled broadly and his eyes lit up. Yes, he said, that’s exactly what he was doing. He said he even tried to get Parton to appear in the movie, but she was booked and couldn’t do it.”
— Paul Tatara, Oct. 22, 2007
“Our existence is beyond understanding. Nobody has an answer. I sense that life is such a mystery. To me, God is time.”
It’s been going on for a billion years and it will last another billion or so. Up and down the timeline, the two sides– ‘Spiders’ and ‘Snakes’– battle endlessly to change the future and the past. Our lives, our memories, are their battleground. And in the midst of the war is the Place, outside space and time, where Greta Forzane and the other Entertainers provide solace and r-&-r for tired time warriors.”
— Publisher’s description of Fritz Leiber’s Big Time.
“My God, this place must be
a million years old!”
“Dolly’s Little Diner–
Home from Home”
Meanwhile…
Country Star
Porter Wagoner, 80, Dies
Wallace Stevens,
“Country Words”–
“What is it that my feeling seeks?
I know from all the things it touched
And left beside and left behind.
It wants the diamond pivot bright.”
Epiphany: A link in the Log24 entries for Epiphany 2007 leads to Damnation Morning, which in turn leads to Why Me?, a discussion of the mythology of Spiders vs. Snakes devised by Fritz Leiber. Spiders represent the conscious mind, snakes the unconscious.
On Hexagram 18: "The Chinese character ku represents a bowl in whose contents worms are breeding. This means decay." —Wilhelm's commentary
This brings us back to the previous entry with its mention of the date of Rudolf Arnheim's death: Saturday, June 9. In Log24 on that date there was a link, in honor of Aaron Sorkin's birthday, to a short story by Leonard Michaels. That link was suggested, in part, by a review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review (available online earlier, on Friday). Here is a quote from that review related to the Hexagram 18 worm bowl:
"… what grabbed attention for his early collections was Michaels's gruesome, swaggering depiction of the sexual rampage that was the swinging '60s in New York– 'the worm bucket,' as Michaels described an orgy."
Related material for meditation on this, the anniversary (according to Encyclopaedia Britannica) of the birth of author Jerzy Kosinski— his novel The Hermit of 69th Street.
Kosinski was not unfamiliar with Michaels's worm bucket. For related information, see Hermit (or at least a review).
In Leiber's stories the symbol of the Snakes is similar to the famed Yin-Yang symbol, also known as the T'ai-chi tu. For an analysis of this symbol by Arnheim, see the previous entry. See also "Sunday in the Park with Death" (Log24, Oct. 26, 2003):
"Some postmodern theorists like to talk about the relationship between 'intertextuality' and 'hypertextuality'; intertextuality makes each text a 'mosaic of quotations' [Kristeva, Desire in Language, Columbia U. Pr., 1980, 66] and part of a larger mosaic of texts, just as each hypertext can be a web of links and part of the whole World-Wide Web." —Wikipedia
Day Without Logic,
Introduction to Logic,
The Geometry of Logic,
Structure and Logic,
Spider-Man and Fan:
"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
— A Wrinkle in Time
This time slot, 7:00 AM EST,
Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2007,
was reserved earlier.
It now (mid-day Jan. 3)
seems an appropriate place
for the following
illustration —
Happy Six
Click on picture
for details.
See also Saturday’s entry
and Sunday’s Pennsylvania
mid-day lottery:
666.
Related material:
(Monday, March 28, 2005),
the Log24 entries
for the following Friday
(April 1, 2005), and
the Pennsylvania lottery
evening number for that
Friday, April Fools’ Day:
666.
Today’s birthday:
the late Joan Aiken,
author of
The Shadow Guests.
(See Devil’s Night, 2005.)
The following symbol
has been associated
with the date
December 1:
Click on the symbol
for details.
That date is connected
to today’s date since
Dec. 1 is the feast—
i.e., the deathday– of
a saint of mathematics:
G. H. Hardy, author of
the classic
A Mathematician’s Apology
(online, pdf, 52 pp. ),
while today is the birthday
of three less saintly
mathematical figures:
Sir William Rowan Hamilton,
For these birthdays, here is
a more cheerful version of
the above symbol:
For the significance of
this version, see
Chinese Jar Revisited
(Log24, June 27, 2006),
a memorial to mathematician
Irving Kaplansky
(student of Mac Lane).
This version may be regarded
as a box containing the
cross of St. Andrew.
If we add a Greek cross
(equal-armed) to the box,
we obtain the “spider,”
or “double cross,” figure
of my favorite mythology:
Fritz Leiber’s Changewar.
From Dogma Part II: Amores Perros:
"Do Catholics believe that when you die your soul goes up in the sky? To heaven, if they go to heaven?"
— Hope of Heaven, by John O'Hara (1938), Carroll & Graf paperback, 1985, page 162
"My blue dream of being in a basket like a kite held by a rope against the wind…. It's fun to stretch and see the blue heavens spreading once more, spreading azure thighs for adventure."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (1941), Collier paperback, 1986, page 162
The following work of art
illustrates the above remarks.
Strange Attractor
(See also the star as a
“spider” symbol in the
stories of Fritz Leiber.)
For Heinrich Harrer,
who died today…
Wikipedia on the north face of the Eiger:
“A portion of the upper face is called ‘The White Spider,’ as snow-filled cracks radiating from an ice-field resemble the legs of a spider. Harrer used the name for the title of his book about his successful climb, Die Weisse Spinne (translated… as The White Spider).”
“Connoisseur of Chaos,”
by Wallace Stevens,
from Parts of a World (1942):
III
After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops’ books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so . And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.
V
The pensive man . . . He sees that eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.
Related material:
Upper part of above picture–
From today’s New York Times,
Seeing Mountains in
Starry Clouds of Creation.
Lower part of above picture–
Pilgrimage to Spider Rock:
Vine Deloria Jr.,
Evolution, Creationism,
and Other Modern Myths:
“The continuing struggle between evolutionists and creationists, a hot political topic for the past four decades, took a new turn in the summer of 1999 when the Kansas Board of Education voted to omit the mention of evolution in its newly approved curriculum, setting off outraged cries of foul by the scientific establishment. Don Quixotes on both sides mounted their chargers and went searching for windmills.”
A figure from
last night’s entry,
Spider Woman:
From Sunday, the day
of Vine Deloria’s death,
a picture that might be
called Changing Woman:
Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat
in Time and Eternity
(Log 24, Feb. 1, 2003)
and
a review
of Fritz Leiber’s
The Big Time,
“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
of the sigil
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.”
— Fritz Leiber, “Damnation Morning“
For Vine Deloria Jr., who died at 72 on Sunday, Nov. 13, 2005:
Things forgotten are shadows.
The shadows will be as real
as wind and rain and song and light,
there in the old place.
Spider Woman atop your rock,
I would greet you,
but I am going the other way.
Only a fool would pursue a Navajo
into the Canyon of Death.
Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure…
— Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat
Adapted from Matisse
“The Jazz Age spirit flared
in the Age of Aquarius.”
— Maureen Dowd, essay
for Devil’s Night, 2005:
What’s a Modern Girl to Do?
“I hope she’ll be a fool —
that’s the best thing a girl can be
in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
— Daisy Buchanan in Chapter I
of The Great Gatsby
“Thanks for the tip,
American Dream.”
— Spider-Girl, in
Vol. 1, No. 30, March 2001
(Excerpts from
Random Thoughts
for St. Patrick’s Eve)
Related material:
and Crankbuster.
For those who enjoy adolescent humor…
Crankbuster —
He’s the man; the man
with the Midas touch,
a spider’s touch,
beckons you to enter
his web of sin,
but don’t go in.
Harvard's Barry Mazur on
one mathematical style:
"It’s the barest, most Beckett-like vocabulary
that incorporates the theory and nothing else."
Samuel Beckett, Quad (1981):
A Jungian on this six-line logo:
"They are the same six lines
that exist in the I Ching….
Now observe the square more closely:
four of the lines are of equal length,
the other two are longer….
For this reason symmetry
cannot be statically produced
and a dance results."
— Marie-Louise von Franz,
Number and Time (1970),
Northwestern U. Press
paperback, 1979, p. 108
A related logo from
Columbia University's
Department of Art History
and Archaeology:
Also from that department:
Meyer Schapiro Professor
of Modern Art and Theory:
"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."
"In the garden of Adding
live Even and Odd…"
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in
City of God, by E. L. Doctorow
THE GREEK CROSS
Here, for reference, is a Greek cross
within a nine-square grid:
Related religious meditation for
Doctorow's "Garden of Adding"…
Types of Greek cross
illustrated in Wikipedia
under "cross":
THE BAPTISMAL CROSS
Related material:
Fritz Leiber's "spider"
or "double cross" logo.
See Why Me? and
A Shot at Redemption.
Happy Orthodox Easter.
Related material:
From 6/13 2004 —
An 8-rayed star:
Another 8-rayed star:
St. Peter’s Square in Rome
From 6/13 2003 —
A link to a 2001 First Things essay,
The underwriting of Hebraic–Hellenic literacy, of the normative analogue between divine and mortal acts of creation, was, in the fullest sense, theological. As was the wager (pronounced lost in deconstruction and postmodernism) on ultimate possibilities of accord between sign and sense, between word and meaning, between form and phenomenality. The links are direct between the tautology out of the Burning Bush, that ‘I am’ which accords to language the privilege of phrasing the identity of God, on the one hand, and the presumptions of concordance, of equivalence, of translatability, which, though imperfect, empower our dictionaries, our syntax, our rhetoric, on the other. That ‘I am’ has, as it were, at an overwhelming distance, informed all predication. It has spanned the arc between noun and verb, a leap primary to creation and the exercise of creative consciousness in metaphor. Where that fire in the branches has gone out or has been exposed as an optical illusion, the textuality of the world, the agency of the Logos in logic—be it Mosaic, Heraclitean, or Johannine—becomes ‘a dead letter.’
That passage bears rereading.”
— Richard John Neuhaus quoting
George Steiner’s Grammars of Creation
(Yale University Press, April 1, 2001)
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