"Oh, would you like to swing on a star?" — Song lyric
"Depends on the star, baby." — Sinatra.
The obituary in the previous post mentioned an author, George Kubler,
who captured my attention at a Harvard Square bookstore in the early sixties.
Nostalgia trip —
"The rock might have been the earliest form of a hammer,
but it was improved when someone tied a handle onto the rock
so it would swing harder and faster."
— Wikipedia on The Shape of Time
. . . At the speed of a slow, comfortable screw —
* On the title music —
“The composition, in the words of jazz writer, Donald Clarke, is
‘an object lesson in how to swing at a slow tempo.’ ”
“X marks the spot” — Indiana Jones
An old web page . . .
Searching for updated information on the author yields . . .
Related reading:
m759.net/wordpress/?s=Swing+On
* https://www.colorado.edu/atlas/acme-lab
Related entertainment starring Martin Freeman —
Miller's Girl's reading includes a book
whose cover features an erotic keyhole . . .
Vide Shanna Collins as Laurie in the 2008 TV series "Swingtown" …
and in this journal on All Souls' Day 2021 —
Another, somewhat less erotic, keyhole shows
Shanna Collins in a 2010 film, "In My Sleep" —
" One of many miniature rotund Sicilians in blue work uniforms,
employed by Harvard to sit on steps and smoke cheap cigars,
or lean for hours against the handles of rakes, was opening
the great door. Sunlight washed through the hall as if a dam
had broken, and was met from the other end, where another
maintenance man, rake in hand, opened the facing doors.
They met in the middle and disappeared through some
swinging panels which led to a staircase going down.
Marshall heard one of them say: 'Just anothah weahdo . . .' ”
— Helprin, Mark. Refiner's Fire (pp. 238-239).
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
(The first edition was from New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.)
|
Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's "Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159) What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld…. The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart. |
"Drop me a line" — Request attributed to Emma Stone
A song whose melody was used in
Westworld, Season 4, Episode 1 —
"Singin' in the old bars
Swingin' with the old stars
Livin' for the fame
Kissin' in the blue dark
Playin' pool and wild darts
Video games"
In memory of a video game executive
who reportedly died on June 22, 2022 —
* Adapted from a book title.
“Last we consider the time of their coming,
the season of the year. It was no summer progress.
A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year,
just the worst time of the year to take a journey,
and specially a long journey. The ways deep,
the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off,
in solstitio brumali , the very dead of winter.”
— Lancelot Andrewes, Nativity sermon, 1622
* Title of a poem by T. S. Eliot that paraphrases the above.
Update of Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2022 —
"The sun farthest off . . . ."
Perihelion Day 2022 (File Image)
"As the celestial events for the new year have begun recently,
the Perihelion Day 2022 has finally arrived. It's the moment
when Earth swings closest to the sun once every year and this
closest Earth-Sun distance is called perihelion. This year, the
Perihelion Day will occur on January 4, Tuesday."
"Henry Miller is a master, and an appropriate example."
But not the only master . . .
Meanwhile, back at the New Yorker on November 1 —
"Nonetheless, they clearly shared a devotion to the diary form,
and, like Fredericks, Nin was determined to chronicle her 'reality and truth'
with unflinching honesty. Her diaries documented not only her volatile affairs
with Henry Miller and . . . ."
|
Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's "Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159) What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld…. The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart. |
"As a Chinese jar . . . ."
— Four Quartets
|
Rosalind Krauss "If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World , for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete. Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."
"He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle,
"And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune
The nine engravings of The Club Dumas
An example of the universal— or, according to Krauss,
"This is the garden of Apollo, |
The "Katz" of the August 7 post Art Angles
is a product of Princeton's
Department of Art and Archaeology.
ART —
.jpg)
ARCHAEOLOGY —
"This pattern is a square divided into nine equal parts.
It has been called the 'Holy Field' division and
was used throughout Chinese history for many
different purposes, most of which were connected
with things religious, political, or philosophical."
– The Magic Square: Cities in Ancient China,
by Alfred Schinz, Edition Axel Menges, 1996, p. 71
|
Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's "Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159) What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld…. The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart. |
Punch Line . . .
Wrap Party!
The Washington Post yesterday evening —
|
Kay Starr, ferociously expressive singer By Adam Bernstein November 3 at 8:01 PM Kay Starr, a ferociously expressive singer whose ability to infuse swing, pop and country songs with her own indelible, bluesy stamp made her one of the most admired recording artists of her generation, died Nov. 3 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94. … |
Midrash —
Yesterday afternoon's post "Triple Cross" and …
"Got to keep the loonies on the path."
— Lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon
For those who, like Tom Stoppard, prefer the dark side—
|
NEW ANGLE:
INT. OFFICE BUILDING – NIGHT
NIGHT WATCHMAN
Bateman wheels around and shoots him.
NEW ANGLE:
INT. PIERCE & PIERCE LOBBY – NIGHT
— AMERICAN PSYCHO |
Not quite so dark—
"And then one day you find ten years have got behind you."
— Lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon
This journal ten years ago, on August 25, 2003—
|
… We seek
The poem of pure reality, untouched
At the exactest point at which it is itself,
The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Everything, the spirit's alchemicana
The solid, but the movable, the moment,
— Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening |
"A view of New Haven, say…." —
"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
John Outram, architect
A similar version of this Apollonian image —
Detail:
Related material for the loonies:
|
24 Frames column in the LA Times Critical Mass: 'Thor' swings his hammer and the critics scream May 6, 2011 | 2:55 pm
Bridges are the key theme of this weekend's "Thor," a film that bridges us from the doldrums of spring releases to the flashier, if not better, world of summer blockbusters. It also serves as another step in the bridge from the first "Iron Man" in 2008 to next summer's superhero all-star jam, "The Avengers." And within the film itself, a superhero actioner about the Norse god of thunder and his adventures in his home of Asgard and on Earth, a rainbow bridge connects the well-regarded Asgard sections of the film with the less successful Earth sections, set in Puente Antiguo, N.M. (which means "Old Bridge"). According to Times critic Kenneth Turan, the film also attempts to bridge director Kenneth Branagh's high-minded Shakespearean intentions with Marvel Entertainment's bottom-line-oriented need to crank out entertainment product. — Patrick Kevin Day |
Related material: Kate and Thor in The Turning and A Bridge Too Far.
See "Nine is a Vine" and "Hereafter" in this journal.
As quoted here last October 23—
Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art—
"Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)
What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….
The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.
The follow-up to last year's runaway horror hit, "Paranormal Activity 2," kicked off its first weekend in theaters with a major haul. The creepy tale… pulled in $20.1 million on Friday.
Trailing behind "Paranormal" is last week's box-office busting debut "Jackass 3D. " The prank-fest, which landed about $50 million its first weekend in theaters, slipped to the second-place slot….
…
The Clint Eastwood-helmed ensemble drama "Hereafter" landed in fourth place. Exploring the lives of three people who are dealing with death and the afterlife in several ways, including the story of a psychic played by Matt Damon, the screen legend's latest turn in the director's chair made approximately $4.1 million on Friday.
Related material—
Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art—
"Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)
What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….
The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.
George P. Hansen on Martin Gardner and the paranormal.
Benoît Mandelbrot died on Oct. 14.
— New York Lottery on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2010
Related material on 109: See 1/09, 2009.
Related material on 060: See Hexagram 60 of the I Ching and…
Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art—
"Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)
What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….
The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.
The Story of N
Roberta Smith in the New York Times of July 7, 2006—
Art Review
"… The show has an endgame, end-time mood, as if we are looking at the end of the end of the end of Pop, hyperrealism and appropriation art. The techniques of replication and copying have become so meticulous that they are beside the point. This is truly magic realism: the kind you can't see, that has to be explained. It is also a time when artists cultivate hybridism and multiplicity and disdain stylistic coherence, in keeping with the fashionable interest in collectivity, lack of ego, the fluidity of individual identity. But too often these avoidance tactics eliminate the thread of a personal sensibility or focus.
I would call all these strategies fear of form, which can be parsed as fear of materials, of working with the hands in an overt way and of originality. Most of all originality. Can we just say it? This far from Andy Warhol and Duchamp, the dismissal of originality is perhaps the oldest ploy in the postmodern playbook. To call yourself an artist at all is by definition to announce a faith, however unacknowledged, in some form of originality, first for yourself, second, perhaps, for the rest of us.
Fear of form above all means fear of compression— of an artistic focus that condenses experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and visually comprehensible. With a few exceptions, forms of collage and assemblage dominate this show: the putting together (or simply putting side by side) of existing images and objects prevails. The consistency of this technique in two and three dimensions should have been a red flag for the curators. Collage has driven much art since the late 1970's. Lately, and especially in this exhibition, it often seems to have become so distended and pulled apart that its components have become virtually autonomous and unrelated, which brings us back to square one. This is most obvious in the large installations of graphic works whose individual parts gain impact and meaning from juxtaposition but are in fact considered distinct artworks."
Margaret Atwood on art and the trickster—
"The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie— this line of thought leads Hyde* to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning 'to join,' 'to fit,' and 'to make.' If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart."
* Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, Farrar Straus & Giroux, January 1998
Smith mentions "an artistic focus that condenses experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and visually comprehensible."
Atwood mentions "a seamless whole."
For some related remarks, see "A Study in Art Education" and the central figure pictured above. (There "N" can stand for "number," "nine," or "narrative.")
Margaret Atwood (pdf) on Lewis Hyde’s
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art –
“Trickster,” says Hyde, “feels no anxiety when he deceives…. He… can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation.” (71) As Hyde says, “… almost everything that can be said about psychopaths can also be said about tricksters,” (158), although the reverse is not the case. “Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists.” (159)
What is “the next world”? It might be the Underworld….
The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning to join, to fit, and to make. (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.
See also George P. Hansen on Martin Gardner, Trickster.
“Unsheathe your dagger definitions.“
— James Joyce, Ulysses
The entry of 12:06 PM Thursday, July 23, contained a link to the journal Red Kite Prayer. The “red kite” is the red flag posted near the end of the Tour de France.
Thanks for a definition are due to the journal Flahute. A quotation from that journal:
“There’s only one shot that’s in harmony with the field. The home of your authentic swing. That flag… and all that you are.”
— The Legend of Bagger Vance
See also yesterday’s Log24 post.
on a joke by George Carlin,
a passage by Kierkegaard,
and the death on this date
12 years ago
of actor James Stewart
“Thank you, Mr. Twain. Have your people call my people.” –George Carlin on learning he had won the Mark Twain award. Twain’s people were Protestant, Carlin’s Catholic.
The Protestant Kierkegaard:
“… the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity. It is the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time….
Once here in Copenhagen there were two actors who probably never thought that their performance could have a deeper significance. They stepped forth onto the stage, placed themselves opposite each other, and then began the mimical representation of one or another passionate conflict. When the mimical act was in full swing and the spectators’ eyes followed the story with expectation of what was to follow, they suddenly stopped and remained motionless as though petrified in the mimical expression of the moment. The effect of this can he exceedingly comical, for the moment in an accidental way becomes commensurable with the eternal.”
Catholic tableau
(with Vivien Leigh
representing the Church)
of Salvation by Works —
Protestant tableau
(with James Stewart
as Protestant Pilgrim)
of Salvation by Grace —
Click on either tableau
for a (much) larger image.
“An unscrupulous jeweler will swap diamonds for cheaper ones when jewelry is dropped off to be sized or repaired, he said.
‘It happens all the time,’ Martin said. ‘Nobody’s watching.'”
Observations suggested by an article on author Lewis Hyde– "What is Art For?"– in today's New York Times Magazine:
Margaret Atwood (pdf) on Lewis Hyde's
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art —
"Trickster," says Hyde, "feels no anxiety when he deceives…. He… can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation." (71) As Hyde says, "… almost everything that can be said about psychopaths can also be said about tricksters," (158), although the reverse is not the case. "Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159)
What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld….
The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning to join, to fit, and to make. (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.
The Trickster
and the Paranormal
and
Martin Gardner on
a disappearing cube —
|
"What happened to that… cube?"
Apollinax laughed until his eyes teared. "I'll give you a hint, my dear. Perhaps it slid off into a higher dimension." "Are you pulling my leg?" "I wish I were," he sighed. "The fourth dimension, as you know, is an extension along a fourth coordinate perpendicular to the three coordinates of three-dimensional space. Now consider a cube. It has four main diagonals, each running from one corner through the cube's center to the opposite corner. Because of the cube's symmetry, each diagonal is clearly at right angles to the other three. So why shouldn't a cube, if it feels like it, slide along a fourth coordinate?" — "Mr. Apollinax Visits New York," by Martin Gardner, Scientific American, May 1961, reprinted in The Night is Large |
this illustration in
Beware of Gardner's
"clearly" and other lies.
Seeing the Finite Structure
The following supplies some context for remarks of Halmos on combinatorics.
From Paul Halmos: Celebrating 50 years of Mathematics, by John H. Ewing, Paul Richard Halmos, Frederick W. Gehring, published by Springer, 1991–
Interviews with Halmos, “Paul Halmos by Parts,” by Donald J. Albers–
“Part II: In Touch with God*“– on pp. 27-28:
The Root of All Deep Mathematics
“Albers. In the conclusion of ‘Fifty Years of Linear Algebra,’ you wrote: ‘I am inclined to believe that at the root of all deep mathematics there is a combinatorial insight… I think that in this subject (in every subject?) the really original, really deep insights are always combinatorial, and I think for the new discoveries that we need– the pendulum needs– to swing back, and will swing back in the combinatorial direction.’ I always thought of you as an analyst.
Halmos: People call me an analyst, but I think I’m a born algebraist, and I mean the same thing, analytic versus combinatorial-algebraic. I think the finite case illustrates and guides and simplifies the infinite.
Some people called me full of baloney when I asserted that the deep problems of operator theory could all be solved if we knew the answer to every finite dimensional matrix question. I still have this religion that if you knew the answer to every matrix question, somehow you could answer every operator question. But the ‘somehow’ would require genius. The problem is not, given an operator question, to ask the same question in finite dimensions– that’s silly. The problem is– the genius is– given an infinite question, to think of the right finite question to ask. Once you thought of the finite answer, then you would know the right answer to the infinite question.
Combinatorics, the finite case, is where the genuine, deep insight is. Generalizing, making it infinite, is sometimes intricate and sometimes difficult, and I might even be willing to say that it’s sometimes deep, but it is nowhere near as fundamental as seeing the finite structure.”
Whether the above sketch of the passage from operator theory to harmonic analysis to Walsh functions to finite geometry can ever help find “the right finite question to ask,” I do not know. It at least suggests that finite geometry (and my own work on models in finite geometry) may not be completely irrelevant to mathematics generally regarded as more deep.
* See the Log24 entries following Halmos’s death.
“They took all the trees,
put ’em in a tree museum
and they charged the people
a dollar and a half just to see ’em”
From an article (full version contains spoiler) on Bridge to Terabithia:
“In the book, a girl named Leslie Burke moves in next door to a chore-ridden farm boy, Jess Aarons, and imagines for him a kingdom she names Terabithia. Over a fall and winter, they ride the bus home from school together (sharing a seat in spite of catcalls from schoolmates), dump their backpacks at the edge of the road, and run across an empty field to the edge of a creek bed, where ‘someone long forgotten had hung a rope.’ They use the rope to swing across the gully into Terabithia, a wooded glade that Leslie makes magic….”
Art by Wendell Minor from the cover
of Magic Time, by Doug Marlette
From Bridge to Terabithia:
“I know”– she was getting excited– “it could be a magic country like Narnia, and the only way you can get in is by swinging across on this enchanted rope.” Her eyes were bright. She grabbed the rope. “Come on,” she said.
LOS ANGELES – Roger Cardinal Mahony, leader of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese, the nation’s largest, apologized yesterday for what he called a “terrible sin and crime” as the church confirmed it would pay a record $660 million to people sexually abused by priests.
“Magic Time”—Mary Karr,
“Facing Altars:
Poetry and Prayer“–“There is a body
on the cross
in my church.”
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):
Night Listener
(See previous entry.)
Thanks to Natalie at
KHYI, 95.3 FM, Plano, Texas
(hard country music),
for just now playing
A Fine Line, by Radney Foster:
There’s a curve in the highway, just south of town
where a man has pulled over to figure life out
with only his concience and the lonesome sound
of diesels winding up grade
he’s got a wife and two kids, and they love him so
he’s got a woman down in georgia,
and she’s startin’ to show
he’s damned if he leaves her,
and he’s sure damned if he don’t
and he wonders how life got this way
cuase it’s a fine line in between right and wrong
yea he’s been crossing over that border
way too long
he should’ve seen it coming at him
right from the start
now there aint’ no escape from a broken heart
now the call of the highway is a powerful thing
like the pull of a lover, or a child in a swing
gave his heart to two women
only one wears his ring
they’re both gonna have his babies now
so how do you confess,
what words don’t explain
he never intended to cause this much pain
now he feels like a farmer
who went praying for the rain
got more than he bargained from the clouds
[chorus]
he’ll turn his car around tonight,
go home and try to face the truth
everyone involved’s getting hurt,
now there aint nothing he can do
[chorus]
Update of 11:08 PM ET…
and, Natalie, for playing
“Late Night Grande Hotel“
just now, thanks big time.
Barrington Moore Jr. in 1978 On Moral Outrage:
“People’s organizations, loudspeakers, newspapers, the secret police, and the courts all swing into action and the campaign is launched. A reasonably intelligent person, particularly the educated product of Chinese civilization, which for centuries has stressed the nuances of moral indignation in a setting of intrigue and bureaucratic protocol, will know at once just how to adjust facial expressions and tones of voice in showing the correct degree of indignation for each degree on the official set of priorities that ranks all possible varieties of the execrable behavior of the enemies of the people. A poor peasant or worker cannot be expected to do as well.
Worse still, a peasant or a worker may have trouble understanding why this year’s enemies of the people include some of last year’s heroes, and why it is necessary to have another exhausting campaign so soon if the last one was as successful as everybody said it was. But since socialism is a workers’ and peasants’ state that belongs to the people, there are lots of people to explain such matters to workers and peasants, and indeed to anybody else who cares to listen. Furthermore just about everybody must care to listen. Woe to the person who stubbornly refuses to listen to the right noises or to try to make the right noises under socialism, since a socialist state is very efficient in its allocation of human as well as material resources.”
My children will go
As soon as they grow.
Well, there ain’t nothing
here now to hold them.”
— Robert Zimmerman,
“North Country Blues,” 1963
“Well, if you’re travelin’
in the north country fair,
Where the winds hit heavy
on the borderline,
Remember me to
one who lives there.
She once was
a true love of mine.”
— Robert Zimmerman,
“Girl of the North Country,” 1963
Above: propaganda poster of
the 2005 October revolution.
Where the Rivers Run North,
by Diane Alden.
Final arrangements, continued:
Justice at Heaven’s Gate
“Gate — Early term for a Jazz musician.
Armstrong is the original Swing Jazz player that’s why they call used to call him ‘Gate.’“
— All About Jazz
“Armstrong is also frequently cited as the main source or popularizer of words like scat, gate (a greeting among jazz musicians that became a popular WWII term for a buddy or pal)²
² The term apparently goes back to Louis’s own adolescent nickname, ‘Gatemouth.'”
— Jazz Institute of Chicago
Intelligence Test
From my August 31, 2002, entry quoting Dr. Maria Montessori on conciseness, simplicity, and objectivity:
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Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest.
Another Harvard psychiatrist, Armand Nicholi, is in the news lately with his book The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life.
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Pope |
Nicholi |
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Old |
New |
For the meaning of the Old-Testament logos above, see the remarks of Plato on the immortality of the soul at
For the meaning of the New-Testament logos above, see the remarks of R. P. Langlands at
The Institute for Advanced Study.
For the meaning of life, see
The Gospel According to Jill St. John,
whose birthday is today.
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