Log24

"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow

“For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.” — Gravity’s Rainbow

“I don’t write exclusively on Jewish themes or about Jewish characters.
My collection of short stories, Strange Attractors , contained nine pieces,
five of which were, to some degree, Jewish, and this ratio has provided me
with a precise mathematical answer (for me, still the best kind of answer)
to the question of whether I am a Jewish writer. I am five-ninths a Jewish writer.”

— Rebecca Goldstein, “Against Logic”

Related material:  The cross of five ninths, from Epiphany 2006.

This morning's previous post, on sacred space,
linked to "Positively White Cube Revisited,"
an article by one Simon Sheikh.

Sheikh writes well, but he seems to be a disciple
of the damned Marxist lunatic Louis Althusser.

As Pynchon put it in Gravity's Rainbow ,
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."

In this case, a video starring Sheikh on the exhibition "All That Fits"
suggests, by its filming date (May 27, 2011),  a Maltese  cross.

"The stuff that dreams are made of." — Bogart

(See also Oct. 25, 2012.)

Related material:
See a search for the author of
Venus on the Half-Shell .

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow

Phoebe Halliwell of "Charmed"

Review of a new film — "She’s Out of My League has moments of humor and insight, but it’s bogged down by excessive vulgarity and cartoonishness."

Sometimes that's what it takes —

Click to enlarge.

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Gravity's Rainbow   

The above text on Joyce’s theory of epiphanies:

“It emphasizes the radiance, the effulgence, of the thing itself revealed in a special moment, an unmoving moment, of time. The moment, as in the macrocosmic lyric of Finnegans Wake, may involve all other moments, but it still remains essentially static, and though it may have all time for its subject matter it is essentially timeless.”

— Page 17 of Stephen Hero, by James Joyce, Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum, and Herbert Cahoon, Edition: 16, New Directions Publishing, 1963

Related epiphanies —

Detail from
the above text:

Cover of
a paperback novel
well worth reading:

Related material:

“Joyce knew no Greek.”
— Statement by the prototype
of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses,
Oliver St. John Gogarty,
quoted in the above
New Directions Stephen Hero

“Chrysostomos.”
— Statement in Ulysses
by the prototype
of Stephen Dedalus,
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce

See also the link to
Mardi Gras, 2008,
in yesterday’s entry,
with its text from
the opening of Ulysses:

“He faced about and
blessed gravely thrice
the tower,
the surrounding country
 and the awaking mountains.”

Some context:

(Click on images for details.)

and

“In the process of absorbing
the rules of the institutions
we inhabit, we become
who we are.”

— David Brooks, Jewish columnist,
in today’s New York Times

The Prisoner,
Episode One, 1967:
“I… I meant a larger map.”

The New York Times,
Thursday, September 13, 2007–

Burt Hasen, a New York painter who drew inspiration from his experience working with maps as a military technician during World War II, died on Friday [September 7, 2007] in Manhattan. He was 85 and lived in Lower Manhattan….

During the war he served in the Air Force in the Pacific, where his duties involved close study of aerial maps, an activity that lastingly influenced his work. His densely worked canvases often had an overhead perspective….Toward the end of his life, many of his seemingly abstract paintings were based directly, and in detail, on maps….

In 2006 Mr. Hasen, his wife and the other tenants of a five-story building at 7 Dutch Street near the South Street Seaport made news when they organized against their landlord’s attempt to evict them from the rent-regulated lofts they had occupied for more than 30 years. They subsequently had their leases renewed.

“For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross.”
— Gravity’s Rainbow

Rosalind Krauss
in "Grids," 1979:

"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,
checking strange
correspondences
between them."
— The Club Dumas,1993

"And it's whispered that soon
if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us
to reason."
— Robert Plant,1971

The nine engravings of
The Club Dumas
(filmed as "The Ninth Gate")
are perhaps more an example
of the concrete than of the
universal.

An example of the universal*–
or, according to Krauss, a
"staircase" to the universal–
is the ninefold square:

"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
— John Outram, architect    

For more on the field
of reason, see
Log24, Oct. 9, 2006.

A reasonable set of
"strange correspondences"
in the garden of Apollo
has been provided by Ezra Brown
in a mathematical essay (pdf).

Unreason is, of course,
more popular.

* The ninefold square is perhaps a "concrete universal" in the sense of Hegel:

"Two determinations found in all philosophy are the concretion of the Idea and the presence of the spirit in the same; my content must at the same time be something concrete, present. This concrete was termed Reason, and for it the more noble of those men contended with the greatest enthusiasm and warmth. Thought was raised like a standard among the nations, liberty of conviction and of conscience in me. They said to mankind, 'In this sign thou shalt conquer,' for they had before their eyes what had been done in the name of the cross alone, what had been made a matter of faith and law and religion– they saw how the sign of the cross had been degraded."

— Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, "Idea of a Concrete Universal Unity"

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon   
 

Today’s birthday: Anne Rice.

Vampire Quality

To Jacques Levy, cont. 

and

to Richard Avedon, cont.

 Levy directed “Red Cross,”
a Sam Shepard play that is
said to be about
“the vampire quality
of language.”
_____________________

From Under the Volcano,
Chapter II:

Hotel Bella Vista
Gran Baile Noviembre 1938
a Beneficio de la Cruz Roja.
Los Mejores Artistas del radio en accion.
No falte Vd.

Jesse McKinley in today’s New York Times:

“In a surprise entry to the fall season, Sam Shepard – actor, playwright and sexagenarian heartthrob – has written a new, sharp-elbowed farce….

The play, ‘The God of Hell,’ was written over the summer by Mr. Shepard, 60, who wanted to stage it before the Nov. 2 election….

In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Shepard said that the play was ‘a takeoff on Republican fascism, in a way,’ and that he thought it would be more pertinent if seen during the presidential campaign.”

See The Script:
“Vanity is definitely my favorite sin.”

Out for Blood
____________________

Dedication added on
Oct. 4, 2004, 2:10 PM:
To Jacques Levy,
who died on Sept. 30, 2004.
Levy directed “Red Cross,”
a Sam Shepard play that is
said to be about
“the vampire quality
of language.”
_____________________

Kerry “shouldn’t be looking to score
technical points like this is
Harvard-Yale debate society.”

— Chris Lehane, quoted in
today’s Washington Post

From today’s Harvard Crimson:

Ben and Jerry:

“I know I’m in the minority,
but I like Bush.”

— Jerry Bruckheimer,
quoted in the
New York Daily News
of April 11, 2004

Key

Today is Joan Didion’s birthday.  It is also the date that the first Phi Beta Kappa chapter was formed, at the College of William and Mary.

A reading for today, from a web page called Respect:

“In her book Slouching Toward Bethlehem Didion writes about being a student in college. She says she expected to be voted into Phi Beta Kappa but discovered she didn’t have the grades for it. She says: ‘I had somehow thought myself [as being] exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others.’ But, Didion continues:

Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked tragic stature, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man. I lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix in hand.

What Joan Didion discovered in the wake of this incident was that self-respect, although it was of importance, had to come from something inside her, rather than from the approval of others. She says she learned that self-respect has to do with ‘a separate peace, a private reconciliation,’ and at the heart of it is a willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life, whatever its rewards or lack of them. Didion says:

… people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things…. People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues.

— Comments by David Sammons

For more of Didion’s essay, click here.