Wikipedia on "Dancing in the Moonlight" —
"The song was played as a wake-up call for Daniel M. Tani,
an astronaut on board the STS-120: Discovery mission
headed for the International Space Station,
on the early morning of October 24, 2007."
See also Log24 on October 24, 2007.
“Fact and fiction weave in and out of novels like a shell game.” —R.B. Kitaj
Not just novels.
Fact:
The mark preceding A8 in the above denotes the semidirect product.
 |
Symbol from the box-style I Ching (Cullinane, 1/6/89). This is Hexagram 55, “Abundance [Fullness].” |
The mathematical quote, from last evening’s Symmetry, is from Anne Taormina.
The I Ching remark is not.
Another version of Abbondanza —
Fiction:
Found in Translation and the giorno June 22, 2009, here.
Some background:
Stanley Fish in the Times on April 12, 2010.
See also this journal on that date —
"Fact and fiction weave in and out of novels
like a shell game." –R. B. Kitaj
Not just novels.
"Fact and fiction weave in and out of novels
like a shell game." –R. B. Kitaj
as quoted by Marco Livingstone
Related material: Prime Designer,
Shell Game, and Evil Daemon.
See also remarks by root@matrix.net.
See Sunday's Theater for an update on whether painter R. B. Kitaj was a model for the protagonist of Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater. It seems that, at least in part, he was.
Yesterday's post on Sabbath's Theater, the 1995 novel by Philip Roth, posed the problem of why Roth would make his friend, painter R. B. Kitaj, the model for the novel's obnoxious protagonist. (See Wikipedia's claim, below, that this happened.)
Here is a possible explanation for the Wikipedia claim–
Wikipedia states that painter R.B. Kitaj (see previous references) was the model for the protagonist of the Philip Roth novel Sabbath's Theater.
A Google search shows that the article (no longer online) on Kitaj cited as a source by Wikipedia does indeed make this claim–
In-Your-Face Outsider | Jerusalem Report | Jerusalem Post
By MATT NESVISKY … not least, Philip Roth, who modeled
the protagonist of the 1995 novel "Sabbath's Theater" largely after Kitaj. …
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=2&cid=1192380767901…
The rest of Nesvisky's article may or may not support his claim. It is available by subscribing to HighBeam.
Related material–
The New York Times on Oct. 24, 2007–
R. B. Kitaj, Painter of Moody Human Dramas, Dies at 74Ileana Sonnabend, Art World Figure, Dies at 92Ileana Sonnabend’s eye, shrewdness and lasting alliance with her first husband, Leo Castelli, made her one of the most formidable contemporary art dealers of her time. |
"Sonnabend" means "Saturday" in German.
Some say the Sabbath is Saturday, others say Sunday.
Here is the Log24 entry for the day that
Kitaj and Sonnabend died– a Sunday—
Sunday October 21, 2007Halloween “The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God. And that Mind is a terrible mind, that one may not face directly and remain whole. Some of the forerunners guessed it long ago– first the Hebrews far back in time, others along the way, and they wisely left it alone, left the Arcana alone.”
|
The New York Times on Sonnabend:
… Also talked about was the Sonnabend 1991 show of Jeff Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series of paintings and sculptures that showed the artist engaged in sexual acts with his wife, Ilona Staller.
Mrs. Sonnabend was variously described as “an iron marshmallow” and “a cross between Buddha and Machiavelli.” Short and plump, she was grandmotherly in appearance from a relatively early age due in part to an illness that necessitated a wig.
Her genteel, old Europe manner belied an often imperious yet bohemian and self-deprecating personality. Her soft, fluty voice often left a listener unprepared for the force of her comments, which she could deliver in at least five languages.
Happy Women's History Month.
An earlier entry today (“Hollywood Midrash continued“) on a father and son suggests we might look for an appropriate holy ghost. In that context…
A search for further background on Emmanuel Levinas, a favorite philosopher of the late R. B. Kitaj (previous two entries), led (somewhat indirectly) to the following figures of Descartes:
Compare and contrast:
The harmonic-analysis analogy suggests a review of an earlier entry’s
link today to 4/30– Structure and Logic— as well as
re-examination of Symmetry and a Trinity
(Dec. 4, 2002).
See also —
A Four-Color Theorem,
The Diamond Theorem, and
The Most Violent Poem,
R. B. Kitaj, Painter of Moody Human Dramas, Dies at 74
|
Internet Movie Database on screenwriter Lem Dobbs:
Took his pseudonym from the character Humphrey Bogart played
in 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.'"
October 21 was the day
that R. B. Kitaj died.
For what Kitaj called
"midrashic glosses"
on the numbers and
the lucky sums, see
4/30, 5/12, and
Eight is a Gate.
"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."
"He has come to be fascinated… by the kabbalah, finding in it parallels to the world of art and ideas. Every morning, after a long walk, he winds up at a Westwood café surrounded by pretty UCLA students where he studies the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, before working for an hour on his memoirs."
"There is no teacher
but the enemy."
— Orson Scott Card,
Ender's Game
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