On "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" —
"… second unit began shooting the tuk-tuk chase in Morocco.
'It’s scripted as Tangier in the movie, but it was actually shot in Fez'…."
— https://www.lucasfilm.com/news/indiana-jones-duncan-broadfoot/
See as well, from 12 AM ET Sept. 10, "Plan 9 from Death Valley."
For other remarks about Archimedes and Death, see Hidden Structure.
|
"We need the word 'metaphor' for the whole double unit, and to use it sometimes for one of the two components in separation from the other is as injudicious as that other trick by which we use 'the meaning' here sometimes for the work that the whole double unit does and sometimes for the other component–the tenor, as I am calling it–the underlying idea or principal subject which the vehicle or figure means. It is not surprising that the detailed analysis of metaphors, if we attempt it with such slippery terms as these, sometimes feels like extracting cube-roots in the head."
— I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric . |
* Nowak: See the central image in "An Art Director's Top Nine," Log24 yesterday.
** Levinson: See Variety on the "Euphoria" character.
From the end of a story by Vladimir Nabokov in
The New Yorker of May 15, 1948:
"You have the incorrect number. I will
tell you what you are doing: you are
turning the letter O instead of the zero."
"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
had its world premiere at Cannes
on May 18, 2023, and is scheduled to
be released in the United States on
June 30, 2023." — Data from Wikipedia
From this journal on May 18, 2023 —
In memory of Mr. Zell, some notes suggested by his initials . . .
S/Z in Wikipedia and . . .
Related amusements from the above publication date —
August 1, 2017 — "Biff's Pleasure Detailing."
Also on October 3rd . . . The Concrete of Destiny .
May 2003 was "Solomon's Mental Health Month" in this journal.
An essay linked to on the 9th of May in that month —
|
"Taking the Veil," by Jessica Kardon
https://web.archive.org/web/20021102182519/ James Hillman, writing in The Soul's Code, argues for his "acorn theory" of human individual identity, and suggests that "each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived." He insists we are born with a given character, a daimon, the carrier of destiny. This theory is closely linked to the beautiful myth described by Plato in his Republic, when the soul stands before Lachesis and receives his specific soul guardian. Hillman maintains that the daimon will always emerge somehow, even if thwarted or unrecognized. I never had ambitions that reached fruition in the adult world. I have had only two career interests in my life – both formed precognitively. I wanted to be a mermaid or a nun. By the time I learned – shockingly late – that I could not be a mermaid, I had realized I would not be a nun. I concur with Hillman's emphasis on the persistence of early disposition, and I like to imagine that my dreamy, watery, Victorian and self-righteous psyche has held aspects of both of these early interests, throughout my life. I was adopted one month after my birth. I was tended by nuns during the first four weeks of my life. Thereafter, I spent my whole educational life in convent schools. It was the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul that gave me my favorite musical and my early distortions about romantic love and the gender plans of Our Lord. My misconceptions about love and marriage were culled from the Lerner Loewe musical Gigi, a wonderful film based loosely on a Colette novel. I was summoned along with my whole class to the gymnasium to view the movie under the edgy eye of Sister Bernadette. Sister Bernadette was a large, mesomorphic nun famed for the beatings she gave to boys and girls alike, and feared for the mean zest with which she bestowed her favors upon many of us. I was not beaten – but once, believing I was wearing lipstick, she held my head in a sink and scrubbed my lips until they bled, then slapped me. I recall this with a mild, rueful whimsy. We were all manhandled. In memory, Bernadette seems more like an angry and troubled older sibling than a true figure of authority. Anyway, I loved Gigi. It fed directly into my Francophilia. I was convinced that at some future date, I, like Gigi, would be trained as a courtesan. I, too, would cause some hard case, experienced roué to abandon his chill and irony. I saw myself strolling down the Champs Elysee with Louis Jordan in rapt attendance, pushing a baby carriage, wearing a hat the size of a manhole cover, hoisting a parasol above that to assure the longevity of my adorable pallor. The gender plans of Our Lord had recently been revealed to me too. Sister B. had drawn a ladder on the blackboard, a ladder with three rungs. At the top, she explained, were the priests, the nuns, and the monks. These souls had surrendered their lives to God. All would be taken directly to heaven upon their passing from this vale of tears, as we all referred to the world in those lean emotional times. On the middle rung stood the married. If you married and kept the law – which meant leaving every act of marital congress open to the reception of a child, you would be eligible for heaven. If you were foul in marriage, seeking your pleasure, you were going to be damned. On the bottom rung were those selfish souls who had remained single and had imagined their lives their own. This group had never given themselves to Our Lord. They were headed to hell in a sort of preternatural laundry chute. So we little ladies had two viable options: marry and breed without ceasing – or take the veil. Despite my hat and perambulator fantasies, once given the sorry news of the ladder, the veil became the clear romantic favorite. Therefore I began my research. I obtained a catalogue of nunnery. It offered photographs of each order, describing the duties of the specific order, and displaying the garb of that order. I was looking for two things – a great looking veil and gown, and a contemplative order. I had no desire to sully my glorious vision of myself with a life in the outer world. It was apparent to me that the teaching of children was going to involve a whole range of miseries – making them cry, telling them the bad news about the ladder, and so forth. This was not for me. I saw myself kneeling on the floor of my pristine little cell, serene and untouched by human hands. Teaching would be certain to interfere with the proper lighting. Yoked to a bunch of messy children, I could not possibly have the opalescent illumination of heaven falling reliably on my upturned visage. What divided me from my dream of rebirth as a mermaid was the force of what was real: I could not morph. What divided me from my dream of life as a nun was the force of the erotic: I would not abstain. Now, long years later, I am still underwater, and I am still bending the knee. I live in the blue shadows of hidden grottoes, and I am swimming, too, in the gold of my drifting prayers. September 7th, this dream. I am standing in a dimly lit room, gazing at a group of heavy, antique silk burqas that look weirdly like Fortuny gowns. A holy woman approaches me, and tells me that my soul will leave my body, and enter these garments. She turns and points at a young girl standing nearby, a child with close-cropped hair and a solemn look. My heart knows her, but my eyes don't. For a moment I am thinking, exactly as I did in the seventies when holding a joint: "This isn't working." Suddenly, these things: I feel the shape of flame, then I am the shape. I am released into the air, and as pure essence I enter other forms, dissolving in them, gathering my energy back into myself, and flying out again. This was a sensation so exquisite that my dreaming brain woke up and announced to me: "This is a dream about death." I saw that child again as I flew. This time my eyes knew her. I flew to her, but the flame of my soul would not cohere with hers, this child who was, of course, my own self. In the shadows alone, I heard myself whisper: "I'm in the wind. I'm in the water." This lovely dream, which gave me the sublime gift of a little visceral preview of the soul in the death process, also showed me my guardian spirit; divided, but viable. I pass through my life swimming in one self, kneeling in the other. I thought of Rilke's 29th Sonnet to Orpheus and realized this was what I had been dreaming about all my life, moving between them.
by jessica kardon |
See as well yesterday's post "At a Still Point."
. . . Continues.
". . . thematic preoccupations with binaries
(free will and destiny,
fact and fiction,
conscious and unconscious,
desire and fear)
and with the overarching notion
that stories become real
when they profoundly stir
one’s heart and mind.
These elements aren’t dramatized
as much as bluntly articulated . . . ."
— Nick Schager, thedailybeast.com, Dec. 21, 2021
From Twilight Zone , Season 1, Episode 9, "Perchance to Dream " . . .
Other entertainment that is more up to date:
Destiny . . .
"Maybe one night driving over Laurel Canyon
I'd look up in the rearview mirror, and I'd see
somebody or something coming up out of the darkness.
I had to drive the Canyon twice a day. It's a rough road.
One slip and you're over the edge."
— Actor Richard Conte in "Perchance to Dream " (1959)
For more on Laurel Canyon and the number 47
(the length in minutes of the above Loki finale),
see The Beckinsale Letter.
As for "Shadow Play " . . . See last night's The Intimate Monad.
From Number and Time ,
by Marie-Louise von Franz,
Northwestern U. Press paperback,
December 31, 1974 —
Star Wars Chess:
Originally chess seems to have represented an earthly mirror-image of "the stars' battles in Heaven,"22 an outline of those battles from which man's destiny proceeded. 22. See Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge, 1959), III, 540ff., 303ff.; see also IV, pt. 1, 230, 265, 327 ff.
From the recent film The New Mutants —
Anya Taylor-Joy plays in a pool:
"Roll credits."
Ms. Beauman's second husband was Shakespearean actor
Alan Howard, who reportedly died on Valentine's Day 2015.
Beauman herself reportedly died on July 7, 2016.
See, from that date, posts now tagged "The Nothing That Is."
For some remarks related, if only theatrically, to Ms. Beauman's lucrative
novel Destiny and to Mr. Howard, see posts tagged "One Ring."
British author Peter Dickinson, who reportedly died yesterday,
Dec. 16, 2015, at 88, wrote the following (published in the UK
in 1975 and in the US in 1976) —
Inverted image of the above page —
See also, from the date of Dickinson's death, a post on
"A Fight for the Soul…" and a post on the symbol "S."
Of interest too are some remarks related to today's earlier post,
"Hint of Reality" …
"Passion simmers,
Then it boils.
To the victor
Go the spoils."
— The Spoils of Babylon
(theme song, adapted)
Compare and contrast:
"… my song sounded
In the four-towered Caer, forever turning,
And of its Cauldron was my first song sung:
Nine maidens kindle the Cauldron by their breathing.
Of what nature is the Lord of Annwn’s Cauldron?
Enameled iridescence and pearly white its rim.
It will not boil the coward’s portion – not so its destiny."
— The Spoils of Hell
(title adapted)
The title refers to remarks linked to this afternoon :
"An ingenious story line serves to convey
the mysteriousness of destiny, the 'grim pen'
of fate that encloses Hazel Shade."
— John Burt Foster Jr. on page 224 of
Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism
(Princeton University Press, 1993)
Vide a relevant page on Wallace Stevens.
David Brooks's column today quotes Niebuhr. From the same source—
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History—
Chapter 8: The Significance of Irony
Any interpretation of historical patterns and configurations raises the question whether the patterns, which the observer discerns, are "objectively" true or are imposed upon the vast stuff of history by his imagination. History might be likened to the confusion of spots on the cards used by psychiatrists in a Rorschach test. The patient is asked to report what he sees in these spots; and he may claim to find the outlines of an elephant, butterfly or frog. The psychiatrist draws conclusions from these judgments about the state of the patient’s imagination rather than about the actual configuration of spots on the card. Are historical patterns equally subjective?
….
The Biblical view of human nature and destiny moves within the framework of irony with remarkable consistency. Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden because the first pair allowed "the serpent" to insinuate that, if only they would defy the limits which God had set even for his most unique creature, man, they would be like God. All subsequent human actions are infected with a pretentious denial of human limits. But the actions of those who are particularly wise or mighty or righteous fall under special condemnation. The builders of the Tower of Babel are scattered by a confusion of tongues because they sought to build a tower which would reach into the heavens.
Niebuhr's ironic butterfly may be seen in the context of last
Tuesday's post Shining and of last Saturday's noon post True Grid—
The "butterfly" in the above picture is a diagram showing the 12 lines* of the Hesse configuration from True Grid.
It is also a reference to James Hillman's classical image (see Shining) of the psyche, or soul, as a butterfly.
Fanciful, yes, but this is in exact accordance with Hillman's remarks on the soul (as opposed to the spirit— see Tuesday evening's post).
The 12-line butterfly figure may be viewed as related to the discussions of archetypes and universals in Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology and in Charles Williams's The Place of the Lion . It is a figure intended here to suggest philosophy, not entertainment.
Niebuhr and Williams, if not the more secular Hillman, might agree that those who value entertainment above all else may look forward to a future in Hell (or, if they are lucky, Purgatory). Perhaps such a future might include a medley of Bob Lind's "Elusive Butterfly" and Iron Butterfly's "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida."
* Three horizontal, three vertical, two diagonal, and four arc-shaped.
"What exactly was Point Omega?"
This is Robert Wright in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
Wright is discussing not the novel Point Omega by Don DeLillo,
but rather a (related) concept of the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
My own idiosyncratic version of a personal "point omega"—
The circular sculpture in the foreground
is called by the artist "The Omega Point."
This has been described as
"a portal that leads in or out of time and space."
For some other sorts of points, see the drawings
on the wall and Geometry Simplified—
The two points of the trivial affine space are represented by squares,
and the one point of the trivial projective space is represented by
a line segment separating the affine-space squares.
For related darkness at noon, see Derrida on différance
as a version of Plato's khôra—
The above excerpts are from a work on and by Derrida
published in 1997 by Fordham University,
a Jesuit institution— Deconstruction in a Nutshell—
For an alternative to the Villanova view of Derrida,
see Angels in the Architecture.
"The present study is closely connected with a lecture* given by Prof. Ernst Cassirer at the Warburg Library whose subject was 'The Idea of the Beautiful in Plato's Dialogues'…. My investigation traces the historical destiny of the same concept…."
* See Cassirer's Eidos und Eidolon : Das Problem des Schönen und der Kunst in Platons Dialogen, in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg II, 1922/23 (pp. 1–27). Berlin and Leipzig, B.G. Teubner, 1924.
— Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, foreword to the first German edition, Hamburg, March 1924
On a figure from Plato's Meno—
The above figures illustrate Husserl's phrase "eidetic variation"—
a phrase based on Plato's use of eidos, a word
closely related to the word "idea" in Panofsky's title.
For remarks by Cassirer on the theory of groups, a part of
mathematics underlying the above diamond variations, see
his "The Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception."
Sketch of some further remarks—
The Waterfield question in the sketch above
is from his edition of Plato's Theaetetus
(Penguin Classics, 1987).
The "design theory" referred to in the sketch
is that of graphic design, which includes the design
of commercial logos. The Greek word logos
has more to do with mathematics and theology.
"If there is one thread of warning that runs
through this dialogue, from beginning to end,
it is that verbal formulations as such are
shot through with ambiguity."
— Rosemary Desjardins, The Rational Enterprise:
Logos in Plato's Theaetetus, SUNY Press, 1990
Related material—
"Edward T. Hall, a cultural anthropologist
who pioneered the study of nonverbal
communication and interactions between
members of different ethnic groups,
died July 20 at his home in
Santa Fe, N.M. He was 95."
NY Times piece quoted here on
the date of Hall's death:
|
"July 20, 1969, was the moment NASA needed, more than anything else in this world, the Word. But that was something NASA's engineers had no specifications for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA's true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars." Commentary —
The Word according to St. John:
|
"Mr. Hall first became interested in
space and time as forms of cultural
expression while working on
Navajo and Hopi reservations
in the 1930s."
Log24, July 29:
|
"Kaleidoscope turning…
Shifting pattern within |
"We are the key."
— Eye of Cat
Paul Newall, "Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy"—
"Julie recognises the music of the busker outside playing a recorder as that of her husband's. When she asks him where he heard it, he replies that he makes up all sorts of things. This is an instance of a theory of Kieślowski's that 'different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing but for different reasons.' With regard to music in particular, he held what might be characterised as a Platonic view according to which notes pre-exist and are picked out and assembled by people. That these can accord with one another is a sign of what connects people, or so he believed."
The above photo of Juliette Binoche in Blue accompanying the quotations from Zelazny illustrates Kieślowski's concept, with graphic designs instead of musical notes. Some of the same designs are discussed in Abstraction and the Holocaust (Mark Godfrey, Yale University Press, 2007). (See the Log24 entries of June 11, 2009.)
Related material:
"Jeffrey Overstreet, in his book Through a Screen Darkly, comments extensively on Blue. He says these stones 'are like strands of suspended crystalline tears, pieces of sharp-edged grief that Julie has not been able to express.'….
Throughout the film the color blue crops up, highlighting the mood of Julie's grief. A blue light occurs frequently, when Julie is caught by some fleeting memory. Accompanied by strains of an orchestral composition, possibly her husband's, these blue screen shots hold for several seconds while Julie is clearly processing something. The meaning of this blue light is unexplained. For Overstreet, it is the spirit of reunification of broken things."
— Martin Baggs at Mosaic Movie Connect Group on Sunday, March 15, 2009. (Cf. Log24 on that date.)
For such a spirit, compare Binoche's blue mobile in Blue with Binoche's gathered shards in Bee Season.
What NASA needs now is the power of the Word. On Darwin’s tongue, the Word created a revolutionary and now well-nigh universal conception of the nature of human beings, or, rather, human beasts. On Freud’s tongue, the Word means that at this very moment there are probably several million orgasms occurring that would not have occurred had Freud never lived. Even the fact that he is proved to be a quack has not diminished the power of his Word.
July 20, 1969, was the moment NASA needed, more than anything else in this world, the Word. But that was something NASA’s engineers had no specifications for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA’s true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars.
Tom Wolfe is the author of “The Right Stuff,” an account of the Mercury Seven astronauts.
Commentary
"Through the unknown,
remembered gate…."
(Epigraph to the introduction,
Parallelisms of Complete Designs
by Peter J. Cameron,
Merton College, Oxford)
"It's still the same old story…."
— Song lyric
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6:
"An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through."
There is a link to an article on St. Olaf College in Arts & Letters Daily today:
"John Milton, boring? Paradise Lost has a little bit of something for everybody. Hot sex! Hellfire! Some damned good poetry, too…" more»
The "more" link is to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
For related material on Paradise Lost and higher education, see Mathematics and Narrative.
The previous entry linked to an entry of June 2002 that attacked the nominalism of Stanley Fish. Here is another such attack:
| From “Stanley Fish: The Critic as Sophist,” by R.V. Young, in Modern Age, June 22, 2003:
In one of the definitive works of conservatism in the twentieth century, Richard Weaver designates the rise of nominalism as a critical turn in the emergence of the intellectual and cultural disintegration associated with liberalism, which it is the business of a reviving conservatism to contest: “The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.” It is nominalism that provides the intellectual foundation– if a paradox may be hazarded– for the attack by Fish and numerous others (their name is Legion) on the very idea of intellectual foundations:
(4). Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago and London, 1948), 3. R.V. YOUNG is Professor of English at North Carolina State University and author of At War With the Word and Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (2000). |
Simon Blackburn on
Plato and sophists,
realism and nominalism
(previous entry)
From this morning's New York Times:
"In April, Wiccans won an important victory when the Department of Veterans Affairs settled a lawsuit and agreed to add the Wiccan pentacle to a list of approved religious symbols that it will engrave on veterans' headstones….
Many Wiccans practice some form of magic or witchcraft, which they say is a way of affecting one's destiny, but which many outsiders see as evil. The Wiccan pentacle, a five-pointed star inside a circle, is often confused with symbols of Satanism."
The Abridgment of Hope
Part I: Framework
From Log24,
Here’s Your Sign,
Aug. 8, 2002–
“Paz also mentions the Christian concept of eternity as a realm outside time, and discusses what happened to modern thought after it abandoned the concept of eternity.
Naturally, many writers have dealt with the subject of time, but it seems particularly part of the Zeitgeist now, with a new Spielberg film about precognition. My own small experience, from last night until today, may or may not have been precognitive. I suspect it’s the sort of thing that many people often experience, a sort of ‘So that’s what that was about’ feeling. Traditionally, such experience has been expressed in terms of a theological framework.”
Part II: Context
From Ann Copeland,
“Faith and Fiction-Making:
The Catholic Context“–
“Each of us is living out a once-only story which, unlike those mentioned here, has yet to reveal its ending. We live that story largely in the dark. From time to time we may try to plumb its implications, to decipher its latent design, or at least get a glimmer of how parts go together. Occasionally, a backward glance may suddenly reveal implications, an evolving pattern we had not discerned, couldn’t have when we were ‘in’ it. Ah, now I see what I was about, what I was after.”
Part III: Context Sensitivity
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations:
373. Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)
|
Another definition of context-sensitive grammars defines them as formal grammars where all productions are of the form
Such a grammar is also called a monotonic or noncontracting grammar because none of the rules decreases the size of the string that is being rewritten. If the possibility of adding the empty string to a language is added to the strings recognized by the noncontracting grammars (which can never include the empty string) then the languages in these two definitions are identical. |
Part IV: Abridgment
“Know the one about the Demiurge and the Abridgment of Hope?”
— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise, Knopf, 1981, the final page, 439
Also from Stone’s novel, quoted by Ann Copeland in the above essay:
|
You after all? Inside, outside, round and about. Disappearing stranger, trickster. Christ, she thought, so far. Far from where? But why always so far? “Por qué?” she asked. There was a guy yelling. Always so far away. You. Always so hard on the kid here, making me be me right down the line. You old destiny. You of Jacob, you of Isaac, of Esau. Let it be you after all. Whose after all I am. For whom I was nailed. So she said to Campos: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.” (416) |
By Indirections
(Hamlet, II, i)
“Michael Taylor (1971)…. contends that the central conflict in Hamlet is between ‘man as victim of fate and as controller of his own destiny.'”– The Gale Group, Shakespearean Criticism, Vol. 71, at eNotes
Doonesbury today:
“Personality is a synthesis of possibility and necessity.”– Soren Kierkegaard
On Fate (Necessity),
Freedom (Possibility),
and Machine Personality–
Part I: Google as Skynet
George Dyson–
The Godel-to-Google Net [March 8, 2005]
A Cathedral for Turing [October 24, 2005]
Dyson: “The correspondence between Google and biology is not an analogy, it’s a fact of life.”
Part II: The Galois Connection
David Ellerman–
“A Theory of Adjoint Functors– with some Thoughts about their Philosophical Significance” (pdf) [November 15, 2005]
Ellerman: “Such a mechanism seems key to understanding how an organism can perceive and learn from its environment without being under the direct stimulus control of the environment– thus resolving the ancient conundrum of receiving an external determination while exercising self-determination.”
For a less technical version, see Ellerman’s “Adjoints and Emergence: Applications of a New Theory of Adjoint Functors” (pdf).
Ellerman was apparently a friend of, and a co-author with, Gian-Carlo Rota. His “theory of adjoint functors” is related to the standard mathematical concepts known as profunctors, distributors, and bimodules. The applications of his theory, however, seem to be less to mathematics itself than to a kind of philosophical poetry that seems rather closely related to the above metaphors of George Dyson. For a less poetic approach to related purely mathematical concepts, see, for instance, the survey Practical Foundations of Mathematics by Paul Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 1999). For less poetically appealing, but perhaps more perspicuous, extramathematical applications of category theory, see the work of, for instance, Joseph Goguen: Algebraic Semiotics and Information Integration, Databases, and Ontologies.
Front page of The New York Times Book Review, issue dated January 7, 2007:
“Time passes, and what it passes through is people– though people believe that they are passing through time, and even, at certain euphoric moments, directing time. It’s a delusion, but it’s where memoirs come from, or at least the very best ones. They tell how destiny presses on desire and how desire pushes back, sometimes heroically, always poignantly, but never quite victoriously. Life is an upstream, not an uphill, battle, and it results in just one story: how, and alongside whom, one used his paddle.”
— Walter Kirn, “Stone’s Diaries”
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Allan Stone,
art dealer and collector,
died at 74 on Friday,
Dec. 15, 2006.
From his obituary in
yesterday's
New York Times:
The Log24 entry for the date of Stone's death, titled "Putting the X in Xmas," suggests the following picture as a memorial:
Though not bristling
with paint, the picture
is, in a sense, realistic.
It should be noted of the
obituary by Roberta Smith
that
"This is the exact opposite
of what echthroi do in
their X-ing or un-naming."
— Wikipedia on
A Wind in the Door
TIME magazine, issue dated June 12, 2006, item posted Sunday, June 4, 2006:
IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED …
By JULIE RAWE
"Nervous kids and obscure words are not the stuff of big-time TV, but this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee was an improbable nail-biter. One of the 13 finalists got reinstated after judges made a spelling error, a Canadian came in second–who knew foreign kids could compete?–and KATHARINE CLOSE, 13, prevailed in her fifth year. The eighth-grader from Spring Lake, N.J., won with ursprache. It means protolanguage. Now try to use it in conversation."
— Heidegger, Erlauterungen
zu Holderlins Dichtung.
Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1971: 41.
(Skewed Mirrors,
Sept. 14, 2003)
"Evil did not have
the last word."
— Richard John Neuhaus,
April 4, 2005
"This is the exact opposite
of what echthroi do in
their X-ing or un-naming."
— Wikipedia on
A Wind in the Door
|
"Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the PARIS, 1922-1939" — James Joyce, Finnegans Wake |
"There is never any ending
to Paris."
— Ernest Hemingway
From Log24,
April 28, 2005:
(See also Log24,
April 5, 2005.)
Compare this diagram with that of
Samuel Beckett in Quad (1981):
Barry Mazur on a seminal paper of algebraist Saunders Mac Lane:
The paper was rejected “because the editor thought that it was ‘more devoid of content’ than any other he had read. ‘Saunders wrote back and said, “That’s the point,”‘ Mazur said. ‘And in some ways that’s the genius of it. It’s the barest, most Beckett-like vocabulary that incorporates the theory and nothing else.'”
“M. de Villepin positively worships Napoleon, and models himself after his hero. In a 600-page biography, Villepin wrote admiringly about the difference between great men like Napoleon and the ‘common run’ of men. It is worth reading every word carefully.
‘Here we touch on that particular essence of great men, on what distinguishes Napoleon or Alexander, Caesar or de Gaulle, from the common run. It is excess, exaltation, and a taste for risk that forms their genius. It is why they are often better understood in their élan by writers and poets, who are possessed of the same thirst for the absolute, than by those who pray at the altar of facts.’
(New Republic)
And in praise of French nationalism, de Villepin wrote,
‘The Gaullist adventure renewed the élan of [Napoleon’s] Consulate through the restoration of a strong executive and the authority of the State, the same scorn for political parties and for compromise, a common taste for action, and an obsession with the general interest and the grandeur of France.’
Those words come straight from 1800. Napoleon’s ‘genius,’ his ‘thirst for the absolute,’ ‘excess, exaltation, and a taste for risk,’ ‘a strong executive and the authority of the State,’ ‘his ‘scorn for political parties and for compromise,’ and ‘an obsession with the grandeur of France’ — it is all classic national hero worship. But today that kind of thinking is used to promote a new vision of destiny, the European Union.”
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