Monday, April 21, 2025
Friday, October 20, 2023
Scriptural Exegesis
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Thursday, October 12, 2017
Ideograms
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Saturday, September 19, 2015
A Certain Term
"I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night…."
— Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
Related imagery —
Detail:
Closer detail:
Exegesis:
A Certain Term: Not English, Not Chinese —
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Monday, December 12, 2011
X o’ Jesus
Religion for stoners,♦ in memory of Horselover Fat
Amazon.com gives the publication date of a condensed
version* of Philip K. Dick's Exegesis as Nov. 7, 2011.
The publisher gives the publication date as Nov. 8, 2011.
Here, in memory of the author, Philip K. Dick (who sometimes
called himself, in a two-part pun, "Horselover Fat"), is related
material from the above two dates in this journal—
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Tuesday, November 8, 2011 m759 @ 12:00 PM …. Update of 9:15 PM Nov. 8, 2011— From a search for the word "Stoned" in this journal—
See also Monday's post "The X Box" with its illustration
Monday, November 7, 2011
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs, quoted in
For some background on this enigmatic equation,
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Merry Xmas.
♦ See also last night's post and the last words of Steve Jobs.
* Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the publisher, has, deliberately or not, sown confusion
about whether this is only the first of two volumes.
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Monday, July 25, 2011
The Game
Virginia Heffernan in Sunday's online New York Times—
"… In the past, information on paper was something to read. Bricks and mortar were a place to be. But, since the first appearance of the Web in 1990, we have come to accept that information in pixels is something to read— and also a place to be . That familiar and yet still jaw-dropping metaphor takes energy to maintain. The odd shared sense that there’s three-dimensionality and immersion and real-world consequences on the Web as in no book or board game— that’s the Web’s sine qua non. Hence, cyberspace . And 'being on' the Internet….
… The dominant social networks are fantasy games built around rigged avatars, outright fictions and a silent— and often unconscious— agreement among players that the game and its somewhat creaky conceits influence the real world…."
— "The Confidence Game at Google+"
"It's just another manic Monday
I wish it was Sunday
'Cause that's my funday"
— The Bangles
"Accentuate the Positive"
— Clint Eastwood, soundtrack album
for "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"
This journal on All Saints' Day, Sunday, November 1, 2009—
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Suggested by the New York State lottery numbers on All Hallows’ Eve [2009]— 430 (mid-day) and 168 (evening)… From 430 as a date, 4/30— Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo , by Joseph Dewey, University of South Carolina Press, 2006, page 123: “It is as if DeLillo himself had moved to an endgame….” For such an endgame, see yesterday’s link to a Mira Sorvino drama. The number 168 suggested by the Halloween lottery deals with the properties of space itself and requires a more detailed exegesis… For the full picture, consider the Log24 entries of Feb. 16-28 this year, esp. the entries of Feb. 27 and the phrase they suggest— Flores, flores para los muertos. |
See also Pearly Gates of Cyberspace in this journal.
For flores para los muertos , see today's Times .
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Sunday, November 1, 2009
October Endgame
Suggested by the New York State lottery numbers on All Hallows' Eve–
430 (mid-day) and 168 (evening)…
From 430 as a date, 4/30— Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo, by Joseph Dewey, University of South Carolina Press, 2006, page 123:
"It is as if DeLillo himself had moved to an endgame…."
For such an endgame, see yesterday's link to a Mira Sorvino drama. The number 168 suggested by the Halloween lottery deals with the properties of space itself and requires a more detailed exegesis… For the full picture, consider the Log24 entries of Feb. 16-28 this year, esp. the entries of Feb. 27 and the phrase they suggest–
Flores, Flores para los muertos.
Consider also Xinhua today, with its discussion of rocket science and seal-cutting:
Click image for context.
For space technology, see the above link to Feb. 16-28 this year as well as the following (click on image for details)–
As for seal-cutting, see the following seal from a Korean Christian site:
See Mizian Translation Service for some background on the seal's designer.
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Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Wednesday August 12, 2009
Exegesis
Text:
| The Shining, 1977, page 162: “A new headline, this one “The item on the next page |
Exegesis:
| April 10— Good Friday– See The Paradise of Childhood. Four months later– Aug. 10— “When he thought of the old man |
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Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Wednesday January 21, 2009
Scripture
“… while some are elected,
others not elect are
passed by….”
— A commentary on the
Calvinist doctrine of preterition
| Gravity’s Rainbow, Penguin Classics, 1995, page 742:
“… knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea…. Now there’s only a long cat’s-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain tonight, bright gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of 742″ |
“God is the original
conspiracy theory.”
“We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”
— President Obama yesterday
It is not entirely clear what these “childish things” are. Perhaps the young nation’s “childish things” that the new President refers to are part of what Robert Stone memorably called “our secret culture.” Stone was referring to Puritanism, which some advocates of the new religion of Scientism might call “childish.” I do not. Lunatic, perhaps, but not childish.
Related meditations:
A year ago yesterday, on Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008, the mid-day lottery for New York State was 605.
A midrash in the Judeo-Christian tradition of paranoia a year ago today suggested that 605 might be a veiled reference to “God, the Devil, and a Bridge,” a weblog entry on mathematician André Weil.
Continuing in this vein a year later, we are confronted with the mid-day New York lottery for yesterday:
742.
Taking a hint from another
entry on Weil, this may be
regarded as a reference to
The Oxford Book of
English Verse (1919 edition):
Selection 742 in that book
comports well with this
jounal’s recent meditations
on death and Brooklyn:
| “Let me glide noiselessly forth; | |
| With the key of softness unlock the locks….” — Walt Whitman |
Applying this method of
exegesis to last year’s
lottery, we have
| “And all that did then attend and follow, |
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| Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo, |
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| With envy of my sweet pipings.” |
“In time, his carefree lifestyle began to upset the early Christians, who saw his earthy temptations as a manifestation of the Devil. Who would’ve thought that the horny old goat would become the blueprint for popular conceptions of Satan– cloven hooves, horns and all?”
— Pan: God of Shepherds, Flocks, and Fornication
Hymn 605 thus supplies a reference to the devil mentioned by Weil in the entry of 6/05.
It, together with Hymn 742 of a year later, may be regarded as a divine response to a weblog entry yesterday from the Greater Wasilla Area on listening to the inauguration:
“… thus far, I have not heard any priests of Apollo, nor of any other God, issuing any auguries.”
Neither have I, but hearing is only one of the senses.
“Heard melodies are sweet,
but those unheard
Are sweeter.”— John Keats
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Monday, June 9, 2008
Monday June 9, 2008
Interpret This
"With respect, you only interpret."
"Countries have gone to war
after misinterpreting one another."
"Once upon a time (say, for Dante),
it must have been a revolutionary
and creative move to design works
of art so that they might be
experienced on several levels."
it must have been a revolutionary
and creative move to design works
of art so that they might be
experienced on several levels."
— Susan Sontag,
"Against Interpretation"
Edward Rothstein in today's New York Times review of San Francisco's new Contemporary Jewish Museum:
"An introductory wall panel tells us that in the Jewish mystical tradition the four letters [in Hebrew] of pardes each stand for a level of biblical interpretation: very roughly, the literal, the allusive, the allegorical and the hidden. Pardes, we are told, became the museum’s symbol because it reflected the museum’s intention to cultivate different levels of interpretation: 'to create an environment for exploring multiple perspectives, encouraging open-mindedness' and 'acknowledging diverse backgrounds.' Pardes is treated as a form of mystical multiculturalism.
But even the most elaborate interpretations of a text or tradition require more rigor and must begin with the literal. What is being said? What does it mean? Where does it come from and where else is it used? Yet those are the types of questions– fundamental ones– that are not being asked or examined […].
How can multiple perspectives and open-mindedness and diverse backgrounds be celebrated without a grounding in knowledge, without history, detail, object and belief?"
"It's the system that matters.
How the data arrange
themselves inside it."
How the data arrange
themselves inside it."
"Examples are the stained-
glass windows of knowledge."
Click on image to enlarge.
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Friday, January 19, 2007
Friday January 19, 2007
Triple Kiss
| I bent to kiss the lovely Maid, | |
| And found a threefold kiss return’d. |
— “The Crystal Cabinet“
The above illustration of a classic Blake verse is for Anthony Daniels, a critic of Ezra Pound. The illustration may appeal to Daniels, since it is, like the persona presented by Daniels himself, petit-bourgeois and vulgar.
It was inspired by today’s two previous entries and by Daniels’s remarks, in this month’s New Criterion magazine, on Ezra Pound:
“Of his poetry I shall say nothing: not being fluent in Greek, Chinese, Italian, Farsi, and so forth, I do not feel much qualified to comment on it…. I shall merely confess to a petit-bourgeois partiality for comprehensibility and to what Pound himself called, in the nearest he ever came to a mea culpa with regard to his own ferocious anti-Semitism at a time of genocide, ‘a vulgar suburban prejudice’ against those who suppose that their thoughts are so profound that they justify a lifetime of exegesis if ever their meaning is to be even so much as glimpsed through a glass darkly.”
Daniels, here posing as a vulgar suburban petit-bourgeois, is unwilling to examine Pound’s poetry even “through a glass darkly.” This echoes the petit-bourgeois, but not vulgar, “confession” of today’s previous entry:
“I didn’t expect much–didn’t look out the window
At school more diligent than able–docile stable”
— “A Life,” by Zbigniew Herbert
Pound, editor of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”– published in the first issue of the original Criterion magazine in 1922– might refer Daniels to the ghost of Guy Davenport:
“‘The architectonics of a narrative,’ Davenport says, ‘are emphasized and given a role to play in dramatic effect when novelists become Cubists; that is, when they see the possibilities of making a hieroglyph, a coherent symbol, an ideogram of the total work. A symbol comes into being when an artist sees that it is the only way to get all the meaning in.’….
In his study of The Cantos, Davenport defines the Poundian ideogram as ‘a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols, rather than a grammar of logical sequence…. An idea unifies, dominates, and controls the particulars that make the ideogram’…. He insists on the intelligibility of this method: ‘The components of an ideogram cohere as particles in a magnetic field, independent of each other but not of the pattern in which they figure.'”
— Andre Furlani, “‘When Novelists Become Cubists’: The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport“
Related material:
A remark
on form and pattern
by T. S. Eliot
(friend of Pound
and founder of
the original
Criterion magazine)
A remark
on form and pattern
by T. S. Eliot
(friend of Pound
and founder of
the original
Criterion magazine)
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Saturday, November 9, 2002
Saturday November 9, 2002
Birthdate of Hermann Weyl
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Result of a Google search.
Category: Science > Math > Algebra > Group Theory
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Weyl, H.: Symmetry. |
Sponsored Link
Symmetry Puzzle
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Quotation from Weyl's Symmetry:
"Symmetry is a vast subject, significant in art and nature. Mathematics lies at its root, and it would be hard to find a better one on which to demonstrate the working of the mathematical intellect."
In honor of Princeton University, of Sylvia Nasar (see entries of Nov, 6), of the Presbyterian Church (see entry of Nov. 8), and of Professor Weyl (whose work partly inspired the website Diamond Theory), this site's background music is now Pink Floyd's
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"Shine On, You Crazy Diamond."
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Updates of Friday, November 15, 2002:
In order to clarify the meaning of "Shine" and "Crazy" in the above, consult the following —
- "Shine" … The Shining, by Stephen King
- "Crazy" … The Hollow Man, by Dan Simmons
To accompany this detailed exegesis of Pink Floyd, click here for a reading by Marlon Brando.
For a related educational experience, see pages 126-127 of The Book of Sequels, by Henry Beard, Christopher Cerf, Sarah Durkee, and Sean Kelly (Random House paperback, 1990).
Speaking of sequels, be on the lookout for Annie Dillard's sequel to Teaching a Stone to Talk, titled Teaching a Brick to Sing.