Log24

"Does the name 'Coulter' mean anything to you?"

See as well this  journal on 07/19/2021, the Lotus-page date above. 

— Um, there's supposed to be a Smithsonian event in there.

— Nothing on the schedule. Maybe it got moved to another room.

— I-I'm supposed to give a speech.

— I doubt it. But don't let that stop you. I'm a real good listener.

Read more at: https://tvshowtranscripts.ourboard.org/
viewtopic.php?f=1054&t=46169

From a post this morning  by Peter J. Cameron
in memory of John Horton Conway —

On film director Stanley Kubrick:

On physics writer Peter Woit:

Illustration from a post of
Schicksalstag  2009

The title is a tribute to the late Florence King, who
reportedly died last Wednesday, January 6, 2016.

It is the title of one of her novels.

Related material from the date of King's death —

An excerpt from King's obituary —

For the late Paul Halmos —

Keith Devlin's column is a monthly feature of the Mathematical
Association of America (MAA). This month's column apparently
first appeared online on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2015. The column
itself, however, is, as of today, dated 12:00 AM Feb. 1, 2015.

It is doubtful whether the professor honored in the column
would approve of this temporal subterfuge.

AP Today in History 
Thought for the Day:

“I respect faith, but doubt is what
gives you an education.”
— Wilson Mizner, 
     American playwright (1876-1933)*

From this journal on the (wide) release date
of "X-Men: First Class" —

A minimalist 3×3 matrix favicon—

This may, if one likes, be viewed as the "nothing"
present at the Creation.  See Jim Holt on physics.

* A source —

A search for background on the academic
author cited in the previous post yields…

"The debate is, in the words of one professor,
'a struggle for the intellectual soul of Stanford.'"

Some may doubt there is such a thing.
See Marissa Mayer in this journal…

and in Vogue  (a story dated August 16, 2013)—

​

On Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators :

“Yet as the book’s five hundred–plus pages unwind, Isaacson interrupts himself to present small bromides about what it means to innovate and what we might learn from these innovators, our presumed betters. “Innovation requires articulation,” he tells us, after explaining how the main strength of Grace Hopper, a trailblazing computer scientist for the US Navy, was her ability to speak in the languages of mathematicians, engineers, programmers, and soldiers alike. ‘One useful leadership talent is knowing when to push ahead against doubters and when to heed them,’ he offers later.

The book is peppered with these kinds of passages, which often intrude on the narrative, depriving us of moments of real emotional power.”

— Jacob Silverman in Bookforum , Sept/Oct/Nov 2014

From Isaacson’s book:

Related material:

In memory of T. S. Eliot…

… and in memory of Stanley Chase, producer of Colossus: The Forbin Project
and of Threepenny Opera :

Ninefold square from Colossus
(“There is another system”) —

Fourfold square introducing Brecht
in  Dreigroschen Trifft Vierfarben —

From a New York Times  obituary by Bruce Weber tonight—

Charles Marowitz, Director and Playwright, Dies at 82

“There are two kinds of bafflement in the theater: the kind that fascinates as it perplexes, and the kind that just perplexes,” he wrote in The Times in 1969 in an essay about Mr. Shepard’s play “La Turista,” which had recently opened in London. “If a play doesn’t make quick sense, but enters into some kind of dialogue with our subconscious, we tend to admit it to that lounge where we entertain interesting-albeit-unfamiliar strangers.

“If it only baffles, there are several courses open to us: we can assume it is ‘above our heads’ or directed ‘to some other kind of person,’ or regretfully conclude that it confuses us because it is itself confused. However, the fear of being proved wrong is so great today that almost every new work which isn’t patently drivel gets the benefit of the doubt.”

 Another play by Sam Shepard mentioned in the obituary suggests a review of…

• “From the Witch Ball,” a post from May 2,
  the reported date of Marowitz’s death
• “Two Satanic Majesties Request All-Devouring Fame,”
  a NY Times  review from October 9, 2006
• This  journal on that date— October 9, 2006—
  “Art Wars: To Apollo.”

​

Amy Adams in this journal on April 26, 2013 —

"Do the words 'mullet toss' mean anything to you?"

"Why history?
Well, the essence of history  is story ,
and a good story is an end in itself."

— Barry Mazur, "History of Mathematics  as a tool,"
    February 17, 2013

See also today's previous post.

Raiders of the Lost Tesseract  continues…

SOCRATES: Is he not better off in knowing his ignorance?
MENO: I think that he is.
SOCRATES: If we have made him doubt, and given him the 'torpedo's shock,' have we done him any harm?
MENO: I think not.

Torpedo… LOS!

A Google search for images matching
Amy Adams's door in the 2005 film
"Standing Still" yields a surprising result.

Related material: Adams in "Doubt" (2008).

See also A Touch of Glass.

Once in love with Amy…

Later…

Mormon Mitt Romney at the Baptist school Liberty University today:

"The task set before you four years ago
  is now completed in full."

I do not know what that task was. In this journal four years ago,
the task was lottery hermeneutics… a subject I doubt is taught
at Liberty University.

The New York lottery numbers from Sunday, May 11, 2008,
in a May 12 post four years ago could be interpreted as
pointing to the date 3/13— 

Say, 3/13, 2006— a date on which this journal quoted some
remarks on the biblical phrase "the fullness of time."

Those remarks were neither Baptist nor
Mormon, but rather Presbyterian.

From today's New York Times —

"We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones[*] among us. And for all of us."

— Eric Weiner , the author, most recently, of Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine .

[* A term for the religiously unaffiliated. See also the 3 PM hour of prayer.]

For highly interactive flirtations, I prefer Rebecca Larue.  ("Skyrockets in flight…")

From Mitchell Stephens, author of a website mentioned here yesterday:

“This paper is designed to be a conversation….

The ideas are organized loosely around a single theme: the Roman leader Pompey’s forced entry into the most sacred place of the Jewish temple. At issue are the origins and prevalence of doubt, even at the heart of religion….

The paper will be initially presented, with comments and additions, to the working group on ‘Secularism, Religious Authority, and the Mediation of Knowledge’ of the Center for Religion and Media at New York University on December 8, 2006.”

From the paper itself:

“All Pompey’s intrusion into the Holy of Holies will leave behind is one sentence in Tacitus; still, it is not hard to imagine it as a media show. As he enters this hidden room in the Temple of those weird, unGreek, Asian, tribal Jews, this cosmopolitan, sophisticated Roman is not just the insensitive anthropologist. He wants, to continue our imagining, to display the lack of contents of the Holy of Holies in a museum, to take them, like the treasures of Tutankhamen’s tomb, on tour. This all-powerful Roman wields klieg lights; he brings the press. He exposes. His expedition is something of an exposé. The whole scene feels as if it might have been filmed: like Dorothy’s peek behind the curtain at the diminutive Wizard of Oz. It feels as if it might have been televised: like Geraldo Rivera’s opening of Al Capone’s ‘secret vault.’ Pompey has in common with all journalists a desire to shove a microphone in God’s face. He wants to rant about what he has learned on his blog.

In his desecration of the Holy of Holies, Pompey has with him, in other words, what Jacques Derrida, in his essay ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ calls the ‘powers of abstraction’: ‘deracination, delocalization, disincarnation, formalization, universalizing schematization, objectification, telecommunication etc.'”

Related material:

My comment on a discussion of elliptic curves and modular forms at Secret Blogging Seminar, about 10 PM tonight:

Update of about 10:45 PM tonight:

A reply by the author of the discussion, Scott Carnahan:

I don’t think anyone doubted that there is a connection between elliptic curves and modular forms on the level I described above. However, the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture refers to a more advanced idea about a deeper connection.

Carnahan then gives a one-paragraph summary, definitely not popularized, of the deeper connection.

Line 678 of The Bacchae —

From a Brandeis class’s translation (2006):

Messenger:

[677] Our feeding herds of cattle were just climbing
[678] above the treeline when the sun
[679] sent forth its rays to warm the earth.

Related review by Charles Isherwood in today’s New York Times:

“A god deserves a great entrance. And Dionysus, the god of wine and party boy of Mount Olympus, whose celebratory rituals got the whole drama thing rolling in the first place, surely merits a spectacular one….”

Line 506 of The Bacchae —

From a 1988 translation (pdf) by Matthew A. Neuburg—

Dionysus:

[506] You don’t know what you’re saying, what you’re doing, who you are.

Translator’s note:

506 The state of this line in the MSS has driven editors to despair; in particular, the first of the things Pentheus is said not to know is, in Greek, “what you are living,” which seems doubtful Greek. Many emendations have been proposed; I accept here DODDS’s emendation, but I have a feeling we’re missing something.

Today in History
(via The Associated Press)

Joan Didion, The White Album:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live….

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

An Alternate History

(based on entries of
the past three days):

“A FAMOUS HISTORIAN:

England, 932 A.D. —
A kingdom divided….”

— Introduction to “Spamalot”

The Great Bartender
by Peter Viereck (1948)

Being absurd as well as beautiful,
Magic– like art– is hoax redeemed by awe.
(Not priest but clown,
     the shuddering sorcerer
Is more astounded than
     his rapt applauders:
“Then all those props and Easters
     of my stage
Came true?  But I was joking all the time!”)
Art, being bartender, is never drunk;
And magic that believes itself, must die.
My star was rocket of my unbelief,
Launched heavenward as
     all doubt’s longings are;
     It burst when, drunk with self-belief,
I tried to be its priest and shouted upward:
“Answers at last!  If you’ll but hint
     the answers
For which earth aches, that famous
     Whence and Whither;
Assuage our howling Why? with final fact.”

— As quoted in The Practical Cogitator,
   or The Thinker’s Anthology,
   Selected and Edited by
   Charles P. Curtis, Jr., and
   Ferris Greenslet,
   Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged,
   With a new Introduction by
   John H. Finley, Jr.,
   Houghton Mifflin Company,
   Boston, 1962

The dates of Viereck’s birth and death are according to this morning’s New York Times.

Into the Dark

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant
….
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of
    darkness on darkness….

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“I’m well past eighty now and fairly certain I won’t see ninety but I’d like more of a choice than Hell or Paradise when I leave. Now that we know the Bible was created by a vote of Emperor Constantine’s clergy, wouldn’t we all be better off if other options were offered? Or is the fear of what happens after death the glue that holds Religion together? I hope not because I believe better of God.

As a Deist, I have no fear or doubts of the way that life ends. I can bravely face the reality of ceasing to exist because the God of my heart comforts me by promising to provide a dark, starless night of nothingness when my visit is over.”

— Paul Winchell (pdf) (See previous entry.)

Paul Winchell was born at the winter solstice — the longest night — December 21, 1922.

For another view of the longest night, see the five Log24 entries ending on the day after the longest night of 2003.   Summary of those entries:

“My God, it’s full of stars!”

From Andrew Cusack’s weblog:

April 21, 2005

‘For Christ and Liberty’

Though [it is] a purely Protestant institution (literally), I am rather fond of Patrick Henry College. Indeed, it takes some courage in this day and age to only admit students willing to sign a ten-point profession of Protestant Reformed faith. They also happen to have an old-fashioned ball featuring ‘English country dancing, delicacies such as cream puffs and truffles and leisurely strolls about the scenic grounds of the historic Selma Plantation’.

Anyhow, the college, whose motto is ‘For Christ and Liberty’, was visited [by] Anthony Esolen, a contributing editor to Touchstone magazine, who makes these comments:

Many of the points Esolen commends are things I hope will be found in the colleges of my university when I get around to starting it. I particularly admire that Patrick Henry College’s young men and women are just that, according to Esolen. This is all too often hard to achieve in modern American higher education, where students are quite often just elderly adolescents. (Though I suspect this has more to do with parents and family than education).

The absurdist drinking age that the Federal government underhandedly coerced each state into passing hinders maturity as well. Indeed, when I start the first college or colleges of the university I’m planning, each will have a private college bar which will serve anyone over the age of 16 or so. (Probably at the barman or barmaid’s discretion). Civil disobedience is the only solution.

Though the graduates Patrick Henry College provides will be Protestant (at least at the time of their graduation), I have no doubt that they will act as leaven to raise up the social and political life of our United States. I’m not particularly fond that they proudly advertise their commendation as “One of America’s Top Ten Conservative Colleges”. I’m not of the view that colleges ought to be ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ per se. They ought to be seen more as communities of inquisitive, curious, intelligent people united in the quest for truth. Labels like ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ are far too narrow and allow the simple-minded to pidgeon-hole things which are too complex for such monikers.

But anyhow, cheers for Patrick Henry College.

White Christmas

Starring W. V. Quine as
the Ghost of Christmas Past

“Birthday, death-day —
   what day is not both?”
   — John Updike

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live….

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

— Joan Didion, The White Album

0! = 1

— Quine’s Shema

Kierkegaard on death:

“I have thought too much about death not to know that he cannot speak earnestly about death who does not know how to employ (for awakening, please note) the subtlety and all the profound waggery which lies in death.  Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is.  To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be, utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death.”

— Works of Love,
   Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324

For more on “the thought of the eternal,”  see the discussion of the number 373 in Directions Out and Outside the World, both of 4/26/04.

“… as an inscription over the graveyard gate one could place ‘No compulsion here’ or ‘With us there is no compulsion.’ “

— Works of Love,
   Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 324

“In the summer of 1943 I was eight, and my father and mother and small brother and I were in Peterson Field in Colorado Springs.  A hot wind blew through that summer…. There was not much to do…. There was an Officers’ Club, but no swimming pool; all the Officers’ Club had of interest was artificial blue rain behind the bar.  The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not spend the summer watching it, and so we went, my brother and I, to the movies.

We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened Quonset hut which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice.  Heard him tell a girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, ‘at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.’  As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.  Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

… When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it.  And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free. could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.”

— Joan Didion,
   “John Wayne: A Love Song,” 1965

“He is home now. He is free.”

— Ron Reagan, Friday, June 11, 2004

“Beware, therefore, of the dead!  Beware of his kindness; beware of his definiteness, beware of his strength; beware of his pride!  But if you love him, then remember him lovingly, and learn from him, precisely as one who is dead, learn the kindness in thought, the definiteness in expression, the strength in unchangeableness, the pride in life which you would not be able to learn as well from any human being, even the most highly gifted.”

— Works of Love,
   Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 328

The Script

Hollywood Writers, Producers
 Fail to Reach Agreement

Some scripts just write themselves.

Falluja Plan in Doubt
as U.S. Deals With
Furor Over Abuse

The Siege, 1998

Our Man in Baghdad
by Jon Lee Anderson
The New Yorker,
issue of 2004-05-03,
posted 2004-04-26:

“My host was a Shiite cleric, Ayad Jamaluddin…. He lives on the river, in an imposing house supplied by the Coalition Provisional Authority, to which he has close ties….

Ayad Jamaluddin dismissed the idea of the Iraqis policing themselves any time in the near future. He believed that Iraq needed shock treatment, and that it would be best administered by the Americans.

The New Yorker,
online images

‘Iraqis are sick, you know, and what they need is a psychiatrist,’ he said. ‘For thirty-five years, Saddam Hussein didn’t allow Iraqis to think. The Iraqi people are missing something: they are missing a soul. They need a dictator—that is their problem. The Shia want their dictator; the Sunnis want theirs. Unfortunately for us, the Iraqi people’s only model of a leader is Saddam Hussein.’

I remarked that his hopes for a sweeping transformation of a national psyche had few historical precedents, at least under modern American stewardship. The postwar transformations of Germany and Japan were possible only because there was a wholesale capitulation by the regimes in both countries after devastating military assaults. In Japan’s case, this had come about after the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast offering Japan’s unconditional surrender, and the admission that he was not a divine being. Jamaluddin smiled: ‘Then maybe what we need is another Hiroshima for Iraq. Maybe Fallujah will be our Hiroshima. Inshallah.’ ”

See, too, The New Yorker‘s press release for

 May 1, 2004 — Law Day —

on the legal career of presidential candidate John Kerry:

“Kerry says his background as a prosecutor made criminal-defense work unappealing. ‘I took a court appointment once in a criminal case,’ Kerry says, ‘and I realized I just didn’t want the guy out on the street. I knew he was guilty. It takes a certain kind of makeup as a lawyer to dedicate yourself to having someone like that out on the street. I know our system says someone has to represent everyone, but I just couldn’t do it. I went to the court and asked them to take me off the case.’ “

Recall the conclusion of Devil’s Advocate:

“Vanity is definitely my favorite sin.”

Triple Crown

“The tug of an art that unapologetically sees itself as on a par with science and religion is not to be underestimated…. Philosophical ambition and formal modesty still constitute Minimalism’s bottom line.”

— Michael Kimmelman, April 2, 2004 

________________

From Hans Reichenbach‘s

The Rise of Scientific Philosophy:

Ch. 18 – The Old and the New Philosophy

“The speculative philosophers allotted to art a dignified position by putting art on a par with science and morality: truth, beauty and the good were for them the triple crown of human searching and longing.”

Ch. 15 – Interlude: Hamlet’s Soliloquy

“I have good evidence.  The ghost was very conclusive in his arguments.  But he is only a ghost.  Does he exist?  I could not very well ask him.  Maybe I dreamed him.  But there is other evidence….

It is really a good idea: that show I shall put on.  It will be a crucial experiment.  If they murdered him they will be unable to hide their emotions.  That is good psychology.  If the test is positive I shall know the whole story for certain.  See what I mean?  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, my dear logician.
    I shall know it for certain?  I see your ironical smile.  There is no certainty….
   There I am, the eternal Hamlet.  What does it help me to ask the logician….?  His advice confirms my doubt rather than giving me the courage I need for my action.  One has to have more courage than Hamlet to be always guided by logic.”

________________

On this Holy Thursday, the day of Christ’s Last Supper, let us reflect on Quine’s very pertinent question in Quiddities (under “Communication”):

“What transubstantiation?”

“It is easiest to tell what transubstantiation is by saying this: little children should be taught about it as early as possible. Not of course using the word…because it is not a little child’s word. But the thing can be taught… by whispering…”Look! Look what the priest is doing…He’s saying Jesus’ words that change the bread into Jesus’ body. Now he’s lifting it up. Look!”

From “On Transubstantiation” by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, Collected Philosophical Papers, V.III: Ethics, Religion, and Politics, 1981, Univ. of Minnesota Press, as quoted in the weblog of William Luse, Sept, 28, 2003

A perhaps more credible instance of transubstantiation may be found in this account of Anscombe on the Feast of Corpus Christi:

“In her first year at Oxford, she converted to Catholicism. In 1938, after mass at Blackfriars on the Feast of Corpus Christi, she met Peter Geach, a young man three years her senior who was also a recent convert to Catholicism. Like her, Geach was destined to achieve eminence in philosophy, but philosophy played no role in bringing about the romance that blossomed. Smitten by Miss Anscombe’s beauty and voice, Geach immediately inquired of mutual friends whether she was ‘reliably Catholic.’ Upon learning that she was, he pursued her and, swiftly, their hearts were entangled.”

— John M. Dolan, Living the Truth

Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and
    lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through
    the features of men’s faces.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Concluding reflections for Holy Thursday:

Truth, Beauty, and The Good

Art is magic delivered from
the lie of being truth.
 — Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia,
London, New Left Books, 1974, p. 222
(First published in German in 1951.)

The director, Carol Reed, makes…
 impeccable use of the beauty of black….
— V. B. Daniel on The Third Man 

I see your ironical smile.
— Hans Reichenbach (see above)

Adorno, The Third Man, and Reichenbach
are illustrated below (l. to r.) above the names of cities with which they are associated. 

In keeping with our transubstantiation theme, these three cities may be regarded as illustrating the remarks of Jimmy Buffett

on culinary theology.

President Queeg

“Over the weekend, Richard A. Clarke, Bush’s former counterterrorism coordinator, said Bush focused too little attention on al Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and too much on Iraq afterward.

Clarke detailed his allegations in a book released yesterday. In it, he echoes criticism of Bush’s judgment and fixation on Iraq that were leveled by former Treasury secretary Paul H. O’Neill in his book, which was published in January.”

— Jim VandeHei, Washington Post,
    March 23, 2004

“Pity poor George Bush. For some reason, he has been beset by delusional aides who, once they leave the White House, write books containing lies and exaggerations and — this is the lowest blow of all — do not take into account the president’s genius and all-around wisdom.”

— “Bush, Clarke and A Shred of Doubt,”
    Richard Cohen, Washington Post,
    March 23, 2004

“He was no different than any officer in the wardroom — they were all disloyal. I tried to run the ship properly, by the book, but they fought me at every turn.

… Naturally, I can only cover these things from memory…  If I’ve left anything out, why, just ask me specific questions and I’ll be glad to answer them… one-by-one…”

— The Caine Mutiny

(With apologies to Paul Krugman… See Krugman’s column on President Queeg from March 14 last year — abstract or full text.)

Rough Beast

The title is a reference to the horse in yesterday’s entry of 6:13 PM.

The time of that entry, 6:13, is a deliberate reference* to the date of a June 13, 2003, entry, for the birthday of W. B. Yeats.

That entry contains the following —

Behold a Pale Horse:
A link in memory of Gregory Peck,

which leads to…

“It was not a mere soldier’s courage, like gripping a weapon and charging the foe: it was like charging Death itself on his pale horse.

Even at his best, his island parrot, the better loved of the two, spoke no word he was not taught to speak by his master. How then has it come about that this man of his, who is a kind of parrot and not much loved, writes as well as or better than his master? For he wields an able pen, this man of his, no doubt of that. Like charging Death himself on his pale horse. His own skill, learned in the counting house, was in making tallies and accounts, not in turning phrases. Death himself on his pale horse: those are words he would not think of. Only when he yields himself up to this man of his do such words come.”

— J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize Lecture
   of Dec. 10, 2003

* As is the time of this entry.

Intelligence Test

Today’s British Intelligence Award
goes to Reuters news agency:

Today’s British Stupidity Award goes,
of course, to Jonathan Powell.

Monolith

“Music can name the unnameable
and communicate the unknowable.”

— Quotation attributed to Leonard Bernstein

“Finally we get to Kubrick’s ultimate trick….  His secret is in plain sight…. The film is the monolith. In a secret that seems to never have been seen by anyone: the monolith in the film has the same exact dimensions as the movie screen on which 2001 was projected.”

—  Alchemical Kubrick 2001, by Jay Weidner 

My entry of Saturday, August 30,
included the following illustration:

My entry of Monday, September 1,
concluded with the black monolith.

“There is little doubt that the black monolith
in 2001 is the Philosopher’s Stone.”

—  Alchemical Kubrick 2001, by Jay Weidner 

 The philosopher Donald Davidson
died on Saturday, August 30.

The New York Times says that as an undergraduate, Davidson “persuaded Harvard to let him put on ‘The Birds’ by Aristophanes and played the lead, Peisthetairos, which meant memorizing 700 lines of Greek. His friend and classmate Leonard Bernstein, with whom he played four-handed piano, wrote an original score for the production.”

Perhaps they are still making music together.

A Queer Religion

August 4 headline:

Gay bishop on way to win

This suggests the following theological meditation by a gay Christian:

Amen to the conclusion, at least.

The author of this meditation, “Pharsea,” is a “traditional Catholic” and advocate of the Latin Mass — just like Mel Gibson.  One wonders how Gibson might react to Pharsea’s theology.

As for me… I always thought there was something queer about that religion.

Catholic Tastes

In memory of New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg, who died Saturday, July 26, 2003:

Nous Voici Dans La Ville – A Christmas song from 15th century France (midi by John Philip Dimick).

In memory of my own youth:

Formaggio Address Paseo del Conquistador # 144 Food Type Italian Dress Casual Tel 777-313-0584 Comment Chef Lorenzo Villagra is formally trained in Italian Cuisine. Great food and views of the valley of Cuernavaca.

In memory of love:

Volverán del amor en tus oídos

Las palabras ardientes a sonor;

Tu corazón de su profundo sueño

Tal vez despertará;

Pero mudo y absorto y de rodillas,

Como se adora a Dios ante su altar,

Como yo te he querido…desengáñate,

¡Así no te querrán!

— from “Rima LIII“
    by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
   (1836-1870)

Translation by Young Allison, 1924:

Burning words of love will come
Again full oft within thine ears to sound;
Perchance thy heart will even be aroused
From its sleep profound;

But mute and prostrate and absorbed,
As God is worshipped in His holy fane,
As I have loved thee…undeceive thyself:
Thou wilt not be thus loved again!

The Robert Lowell version of
the complete poem by Bécquer:

Will Not Come Back
(Volverán)

Dark swallows will doubtless come back killing
the injudicious nightflies with a clack of the beak:
but these that stopped full flight to see your beauty
and my good fortune… as if they knew our names–
they’ll not come back. The thick lemony honeysuckle,
climbing from the earthroot to your window,
will open more beautiful blossoms to the evening;
but these… like dewdrops, trembling, shining, falling,
the tears of day–they’ll not come back…
Some other love will sound his fireword for you
and wake your heart, perhaps, from its cool sleep;
but silent, absorbed, and on his knees,
as men adore God at the altar, as I love you–
don’t blind yourself, you’ll not be loved like that.

See, too, my entry for the feast day of
Saint Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer,
which happens to be December 22.

For Hemingway’s Birthday:
The Hong Kong
Candidate

“Blair, on his first trip to China in five years, expressed his belief that the strengthened relationship between Britain and China would, beyond any doubt, continue to develop…”
— People’s Daily, Beijing, July 21, 2003

“Now he’s poppin’ the piano just to raise the price of a ticket to the land of the free….”
— “Hong Kong Blues,”  sung by Hoagy Carmichael in “To Have and Have Not,” a film based on a Hemingway novel.

“The U.S. government repatriated on Monday 15 migrants from a Cuban government vessel that was taken illegally from Cuba…. The island’s communist government said the ship was hijacked and demanded the return of the occupants and the boat.”
— Reuters, Miami, July 21, 2003, 1:08 PM ET

As a review at Amazon.com notes,

“The movie concerns a brave fishing-boat captain in World War II-era Martinique who aids the French Resistance, battles the Nazis, and gets the girl in the end. The novel concerns a broke fishing-boat captain who agrees to carry contraband between Cuba and Florida in order to feed his wife and daughters. Of the two, the novel is by far the darker, more complex work.”

Mental Health Month, Day 26:

Many Dimensions

John Baez on why bosonic string theory is said to require 26 dimensions —

“By now, if you’re a rigorous sort of pure mathematician, you must be suffering from grave doubts about the sanity of this whole procedure.”

Doubts?  Let us just say I prefer

G-string theory:

“The G-string is unique in that it combines the properties of all known string theories. It has 26-dimensional modes propagating to the left, 10-dimensional modes propagating to the right, and 2-dimensional modes just sitting around wondering what the hell is going on.”

ART WARS:

The following flashback to March 2002 seems a suitable entry for May, which is Mental Health Month.

From On Certainty, by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1969):

#508: What can I rely on?
#509: I really want to say that a language game is only possible if one trusts something. (I did not say “can trust something”).
— Quoted by Hilary Putnam in Renewing Philosophy, Chapter 8 (Harvard University Press, 1992)

An Arab on Deconstruction

From “Deconstructing Postmodernism,” by Ziauddin Sardar, at the website “The Free Arab Voice”:

Doubt, the perpetual and perennial condition of postmodernism, is best described by the motto of the cult television series The X-files: ‘Trust no One’….

Deconstruction – the methodology of discursive analysis – is the norm of postmodernism. Everything has to be deconstructed. But once deconstruction has reached its natural conclusion, we are left with a grand void: there is nothing, but nothing, that can remotely provide us with meaning, with a sense of direction, with a scale to distinguish good from evil.

Those who, having reviewed a thousand years of lies by Jews, Arabs, and Christians, are sick of language games, and who are also offended by the recent skillful deconstruction of the World Trade Center, may find some religious solace in the philosophy of Zen.

Though truth may be very hard to find in the pages of most books, the page numbers are generally reliable. This leads to the following Zen meditations.

From a review of the film “The Terminator”:

Some like to see Sarah as a sort of Mother of God, and her son as the saviour in a holy context. John Connor, J.C. , but these initials are also those of the director, so make up your own mind.
— http://www.geocities.com/
   hackettweb2/terminator.html

From a journal note on religion, science, and the meaning of life written in 1998 on the day after Sinatra died and the Pennsylvania lottery number came up “256”:

“What is 256 about?”
— S. H. Cullinane

From Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun (Ballantine paperback, 1993) —
John Connor (aka J. C.) offers the following metaphysical comment on the page number that appears above his words (256):

“It seems to be.”
“Is your investigation finished?”
“For all practical purposes, yes,” Connor said.

Connor is correct. The number 256 does indeed seem to be, and indeed it seemed to be again only yesterday evening, when the Pennsylvania lottery again made a metaphysical statement.

Our Zen meditation on the trustworthiness of page numbers concludes with another passage from Rising Sun, this time on page 373:

Connor sighed.
“The clock isn’t moving.”

Here J. C. offers another trenchant comment on his current page number.

The metaphysical significance of 373, “the eternal in the temporal,” is also discussed in the Buddhist classic A Flag for Sunrise, by Robert Stone (Knopf hardcover, 1981)… on, of course, page 373.

State of the Communion

Relevant readings:

• Definition of the communion of saints in the Catholic Encylopedia —
  

  “In that communion there is no loss of individuality, yet such an interdependence that the saints are ‘members one of another’ (Rom., xii, 5)….”

• Ephesians 4:16 —

“…the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth….”

• A Game Designer’s Holy Grail —
  

  “Herman Melville described the exact process beautifully in his novel, Mardi:

  ‘In me, many worthies recline, and converse. I list to St. Paul who argues the doubts of Montaigne…'”

• Invitation to the HipBone Games —
  

  “…man is seen as he is sub specie aeternitatis, an ‘immortal diamond.'”



• Your Hip Bone Connected —
  

  “Now hear the word of the Lord” 

To Sir Anthony Hopkins
on His Birthday

From “The Wardrobe Wars,” by Paul Willis:

“I was back at Wheaton for a conference just a couple of years ago. During a period of announcements, a curator from the Wade Collection invited the conference participants to visit the collection and see the many books and papers that had belonged to Lewis and his associates. At the end of her announcement, she told us, ‘We also have the wardrobe that served as the original for the one in the Narnia Chronicles.’

There it was, that definite article again. In a remarkable display of maturity I put up my hand and said, ‘Excuse me, but the wardrobe is at Westmont College in Santa Barbara.’

The woman gave me a long, hard look of the ‘we are not amused’ variety. That was all. I wasn’t able to find her after the session was over to clear things up.

Not that we could have, really. Of course, if pressed, I suspect we would both admit the wardrobe we are really concerned with exists only within the covers of a book, and that not even this wardrobe is so important as the story of which it is a part, and that the story is not so important as the sense of infinite longing that it stirs within our souls, and that this longing is not so important as the One—more real than Aslan himself—to whom it directs us. But that would be asking too much of either the curator or myself. To worship at our respective wardrobes, whether they be in Jerusalem or Samaria, is indeed to live in the shadowlands. And that is where we like it.

Lewis himself would doubtless say that the physical wardrobes in our possession are but copies of a faint copy. He might even claim, to our horror, that no single wardrobe inspired the one found in his book. Then he might add under his breath, like the professor in The Last Battle who has passed on to the next life, ‘It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!'”

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.

Trifecta

Born today: Arthur Koestler,
former Communist and writer on parapsychology

From To Ride Pegasus, by Anne McCaffrey, 1973: 

“Mary-Molly luv, it’s going to be accomplished in steps, this establishment of the Talented in the scheme of things. Not society, mind you, for we’re the original nonconformists…. and Society will never permit us to integrate.  That’s okay!”  He consigned Society to insignificance with a flick of his fingers.  “The Talented form their own society and that’s as it should be: birds of a feather.  No, not birds.  Winged horses!  Ha!  Yes, indeed. Pegasus… the poetic winged horse of flights of fancy.  A bloody good symbol for us.  You’d see a lot from the back of a winged horse…”

“Yes, an airplane has blind spots.  Where would you put a saddle?”  Molly had her practical side.

He laughed and hugged her.  Henry’s frequent demonstrations of affection were a source of great delight to Molly, whose own strength was in tactile contacts. 

“Don’t know.  Lord, how would you bridle a winged horse?”

“With the heart?”

“Indubitably!”  The notion pleased him.  “Yes, with the heart and the head because Pegasus is too strong a steed to control or subdue by any ordinary method.” 

Born today:  Darryl F. Zanuck,
producer of “Viva Zapata!”

Director Eliza Kazan consults with scriptwriter John Steinbeck about the production of “Viva Zapata!” in Cuernavaca, Mexico:

When John woke, I asked him, “Isn’t the Syndicate of Film Technicians and Workers here Communist-dominated?”

Elia Kazan on Darryl Zanuck’s insistence that Zapata’s white horse be emphasized:

Darryl made only one suggestion that he was insistent on. He’d stolen it, no doubt, from an old Warner western, but he offered it as if it were pristine stuff. “Zapata must have a white horse,” he said, “and after they shoot him, we should show the horse running free in the mountains — get the idea? A great fade-out.” We got the idea, all right. Darryl was innocent about the symbol in his suggestion, but so enthusiastic about the emotion of it that he practically foamed at the mouth. John’s face was without expression. Actually, while I thought it was corny, the idea worked out well in the end. 

Born today: comedian Bob Newhart