Log24

Monday, March 2, 2009

Monday March 2, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Straight

From this journal’s Sunday sermon:

“Flowers’s thoughts stray to Brown,
with affectionate pity, as he
drinks port and eats walnuts
for the first time in
Senior Combination Room.”

— G. H. Hardy recounting the plot
of A Fellow of Trinity

A Glossary of Cambridge:

Combination Room
Attached to the High Table end of the largely unheated medieval college halls, this was a warm place for Fellows to gather before and after meals. Now known as the Senior Combination Room to distinguish it from the Junior and Middle combination rooms.

 

From Stanley Fish’s weblog
in The New York Times
(Sunday, March 1, 2009, 10 PM):

 

George Herbert’s “Redemption” —

“‘I resolved to be bold,/And make a suit unto him, to afford/A new small-rented lease and cancel th’old.’

But first he has to find him…. Either he’s just left or he hasn’t been seen, but then, unexpectedly and in the most unlikely circumstances, he turns up:

‘At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth/Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied.’

Before he or his reader can ask ‘what on earth are you doing here?,’ the final line provides an answer with a compact swiftness that is literally breathtaking:

 ‘Who straight, “Your suit is granted,” said, and died.'”

For Senior Combination Room as
a den of thieves and murderers,
see That Hideous Strength.

Related material:

The Painted Word

G. H. Hardy died at 70
on December 1, 1947.
That date is now observed as
“Day Without Art.”

Day Without Art logo: X'd-out frame

Click on image
for further details.

Monday March 2, 2009

Joyce's Nightmare
continues

Today in History – March 2

Today is Monday, March 2, the 61st day of 2009. There are 304 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

On March 2, 1939, Roman Catholic Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope on his 63rd birthday; he took the name Pius XII.

Angels and Demons, Illuminati Diamond, pages 359-360

Log24 on June 9, 2008

From Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics, 1995), page 563:

"He brings out the mandala he found.
'What's it mean?'
[….]

Slothrop gives him the mandala. He hopes it will work like the mantra that Enzian told him once, mba-kayere (I am passed over), mba-kayere… a spell […]. A mezuzah. Safe passage through a bad night…."

 

 

In lieu of Slothrop's mandala, here is another…

Christ and the four elements, 1495
 

 

Christ and the Four Elements

This 1495 image is found in
The Janus Faces of Genius:
The Role of Alchemy
in Newton's Thought,
by B. J. T. Dobbs,
Cambridge University Press,
2002, p. 85

 

 

Related mandalas:Diamond arrangement of the four elements
and

Logo by Steven H. Cullinane for website on finite geometry

 

 

For further details,
click on any of the
three mandalas above.

Angels and Demons cross within a diamond (page 306), and Finite Geometry logo

Happy birthday to
Tom Wolfe, author of
The Painted Word.

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