Log24

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Lit for Brats

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:36 am

From a search in this journal for Salinger

“… the wind was noisy the way it is in spooky movies
on the night the old slob with the will gets murdered.”

— From the opening sentence of the first Holden Caulfield
story, published in the Collier’s  of December 22, 1945

See as well the previous post.

Game

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:18 am

Rules for a game codesigned by Ellie Black, the cartoonist
of yesterday's post Cutting-Edge Prize

Sunday, November 10, 2019

Housman and Ecclesiastes

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:00 am

From A.E. Housman's 1892 lecture in the previous post

"In the day when the strong men shall bow themselves,
  and desire shall fail…."

Today's readers may be less familiar than was Housman's 1892
audience with the source of those phrases

Monday, June 27, 2016

View from a Member

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:35 pm

See also an adapted AA saying in this evening's previous post
and Mary Karr in  a "Damnation Morning" post.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Bodies for Crosses

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:59 pm

The saying of poet Mary Karr that
"there is a body  on the cross in my church,"
together with the crosses of the previous post
suggests a synchronicity check of the
date  discussed in that post —

“Be serious, because
The stone may have contempt
For too-familiar hands”

— Adrienne Rich in “The Diamond Cutters” (1955)

Blackboard Jungle , 1955 —

IMAGE- Richard Kiley in 'Blackboard Jungle,' with grids and broken records

Space crosses, simple and not-so-simple

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Surrealistic Alarm Clock*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:00 am

"But it rings and I rise …."

* See related Log24 posts.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

Box Office

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:01 pm

This suggests the recent link (in the Sept. 22 post Geometry for Jews)
to the post Red October (Oct. 2, 2012).  That post mentioned the first
version of Hotel Transylvania.

See also Mary Karr's look at American culture in today's NY Times
Sunday Book Review .

Monday, June 30, 2014

Toward Evening

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:29 am

(Friday’s Latin Club  posts, continued)

The poet Allen Grossman reportedly died in
the morning on Friday, June 27, 2014.

IMAGE- 'Descartes' Loneliness,' by Allen Grossman, from a book published in December, 2007

Log24 post of Aug. 31, 2010, 'Page Mark'

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Dark Ladies

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm

From the cover of Anne Sexton's Transformations

"Her metaphoric strength has never been greater —
really funny, among other things, a dark, dark laughter."
— C. K. Williams

Another dark lady:

See also Karr in this  journal on the date of the above article— 
May 24, 2012, the feast of the  dark lady

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Brightness at Noon (continued)

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

The eight parts of the semaphore circle
in the previous post suggest some context
for Fritz Leiber's eight-limb "spider" symbol:

  IMAGE- 'Eight-limbed asterisk' of Fritz Leiber (square version)

See Mary Karr,  Time on the Cross, and chuahaidong.org.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Labyrinth 23

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

The title refers to a search (see below)
suggested by three things—

  1. David Foster Wallace biographer D. T. Max
    "There's a note in one of my files where he says something like,
    'Infinite Jest  was just a means to Mary Karr's end, as it were.' "

  2. "There is a body  on  the cross in my church ." —Mary Karr

  3. A body.

The search Labyrinth 23.

(Within the search results, note particularly the post "The Infinity Point.")

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Dark, Dark, Dark

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Damnation Morning

From her left arm hung a black handbag that closed with a drawstring and from which protruded the tip of a silvery object about which I found myself apprehensively curious.

Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.

The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark lines and about as big as a silver dollar. An X superimposed on a plus sign. It looked permanent.


IMAGE- 'Eight-limbed asterisk' of Fritz Leiber (square version)

Except for the bangs she wore her hair pinned up. Her ears were flat, thin-edged, and nicely shaped, with the long lobes that in Chinese art mark the philosopher. Small square silver flats with rounded corners ornamented them.

Her face might have been painted by Toulouse-Lautrec or Degas. The skin was webbed with very fine lines; the eyes were darkly shadowed and there was a touch of green on the lids (Egyptian?—I asked myself); her mouth was wide, tolerant, but realistic. Yes, beyond all else, she seemed realistic.

Mary Karr

You’re not afraid to show yourself at your lowest ebb. In Lit, you stop breast-feeding because you’ve started drinking again. You describe yourself hiding in a closet with a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of Listerine, and a spit bowl.

It’s not a proud moment. The temptation in Lit was to either make myself seedy or show some glamour. But there wasn’t any. It was just dark, dark, dark for days. Ugly.

Were you surprised by how deeply people related to this dark stuff?

If I’m doing my job then I’m able to make the strange seem familiar. Bad memoirs try to make the strange stranger, to provide something for people to gawk at. I try to create an experience where no matter how bizarre something is, it seems normal. I don’t want readers to balk, I want them to be in the experience. My goal isn’t for people to go, “Oh, poor little Mary Karr,” but rather to have the reader go, “I can be an asshole too,” or just to have enthusiasm for the possibility for change.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Frames

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:45 am

"I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids."

— Mary Karr, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer"

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110327-GouldGoldbergs.jpg

 See also "Signs and Symbols."

Art based on a cover of Salinger's 'Nine Stories'

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Twenty-Four

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 pm

"Poetry never left me stranded, and as an atheist most of my life, I presumed its mojo was a highbrow, intellectual version of what religion did for those more gullible believers in my midst— dumb bunnies to a one, the faithful seemed to me, till I became one.

In the Texas oil town where I grew up, fierceness won fights, but I was thin-skinned— an unfashionably bookish kid whose brain wattage was sapped by a consuming inner life others didn’t seem to bear the burden of. I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids."

— "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer," by Mary Karr

"The original movie had been slowed to a running time of twenty-four hours.
What he was watching seemed pure film, pure time.
The broad horror of the old gothic movie was subsumed in time."

Point Omega , by Don DeLillo

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Sunday July 12, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:17 am

In honor of
 William York Tindall
 (yesterday's entry):

A Literary Symbol

for Boyne Day

Mary Karr was "an unfashionably bookish kid whose brain wattage was sapped by a consuming inner life others didn't seem to bear the burden of. I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids."

Geneva drive from Wikipedia

Click for animation.

Karr is Catholic.
Geneva is not.

Related material:
Calvinist Epiphany
for St. Peter's Day

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Saturday March 21, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:30 pm
Interpreter's Booth

Tonight's online New York Times:

NY Times  online March 21, 2009: Pope in Angola tells clergy to work against belief in witchcraft

Click to enlarge.


Mary Karr,
"Facing Altars:
    Poetry and Prayer"–

"There is a body
on the cross
  in my church."


Sean Penn gives Nicole Kidman his card in 'The Interpreter'

Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman
in "The Interpreter."

Click to enlarge.

"My card."

"Is Heart of Darkness the story of Kurtz or the story of Marlow’s experience of Kurtz?  Was Marlow invented as a rhetorical device for heightening the meaning of Kurtz’s moral collapse, or was Kurtz invented in order to provide Marlow with the centre of his experience in the Congo?  Again a seamless web, and we tell ourselves that the old-fashioned question 'Who is the protagonist?' is a meaningless one."


Wayne C. Booth, p. 346 in
The Rhetoric of Fiction
(1961),
as quoted by Paul Wake in
"The Storyteller in Chance"

Friday, January 9, 2009

Friday January 9, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:01 pm
Stories
for Mary Karr

"In reality, my prose books
probably sit between
I Was a Teenage Sex Slave
and some other contemporary
memoir written in five minutes…."

Mary Karr in the NY Times
of July 6, 2007

Story of M, Story of N, Story of O

See also
Ballet Blanc
and the true story
0, 1, 2, 3, ….

"In a dream scenario, my memoirs…
would find another shelf.
They’d sit between St. Augustine
  and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory…."

— Mary Karr, loc. cit.

Recall the
mnemonic rhyme
"Nine is a Vine."

Monday, July 28, 2008

Monday July 28, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Continued

“There is a body on
the cross in my church.”
— Mary Karr, quoted 
here on July 10, 2007

From Jan. 20, 2004,
opening day of the first
Tennessee lottery–

Song of the Father

“Gonna buy me a shotgun,
long as I am tall,
Buy me a shotgun,
long as I am tall,
Gonna shoot po’ Thelma,
just to see her jump and fall.”

— Jimmie Rodgers, known as
the father of country music.”

Monday, July 16, 2007

Monday July 16, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:06 am
Confirmation

“They took all the trees,
put ’em in a tree museum
and they charged the people
a dollar and a half just to see ’em”

Joni Mitchell

From an article (full version contains spoiler) on Bridge to Terabithia:

“In the book, a girl named Leslie Burke moves in next door to a chore-ridden farm boy, Jess Aarons, and imagines for him a kingdom she names Terabithia. Over a fall and winter, they ride the bus home from school together (sharing a seat in spite of catcalls from schoolmates), dump their backpacks at the edge of the road, and run across an empty field to the edge of a creek bed, where ‘someone long forgotten had hung a rope.’ They use the rope to swing across the gully into Terabithia, a wooded glade that Leslie makes magic….”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070716-MagicTime.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Art by Wendell Minor from the cover
of Magic Time, by Doug Marlette

From Bridge to Terabithia:

“I know”– she was getting excited– “it could be a magic country like Narnia, and the only way you can get in is by swinging across on this enchanted rope.” Her eyes were bright. She grabbed the rope. “Come on,” she said.

LOS ANGELES – Roger Cardinal Mahony, leader of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese, the nation’s largest, apologized yesterday for what he called a “terrible sin and crime” as the church confirmed it would pay a record $660 million to people sexually abused by priests.

Log24 7/11,
“Magic Time”

Mary Karr,
Facing Altars:
  Poetry and Prayer“–

“There is a body
on the cross  
 in my church.”

“Don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know
what you’ve got
till it’s gone”

Joni Mitchell

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Wednesday July 11, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:45 am
… And One More  
 for the Road

In memory of Doug Marlette,
cartoonist and author
of Magic Time.

Marlette died in a highway
accident yesterday at about
10 AM CT.  He was
"on his way to Oxford
[Mississippi]… to help a
troupe of high school students
put on a play based on
his nationally syndicated
comic strip, Kudzu."

Chris Joyner,
Clarion-Ledger,
Jackson, Mississippi


  Log24 yesterday,
7:59 AM ET:

Mary Karr,
"Facing Altars:
    Poetry and Prayer"–

"There is a body
on the cross  
 in my church."

Church, by Doug Marlette

Kudzu, by Doug Marlette

"I started kneeling to pray morning and night– spitefully at first, in a bitter pout. The truth is, I still fancied the idea that glugging down Jack Daniels would stay my turmoil, but doing so had resulted in my car hurtling into stuff." Mary Karr

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Tuesday July 10, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
Fewer frames
for Mary Karr

3x3 grid

Mary Karr was “an unfashionably bookish kid whose brain wattage was sapped by a consuming inner life others didn’t seem to bear the burden of. I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids.”

Tuesday July 10, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 am
Pulp Fiction

“There is a body on the cross in my church. (Which made me think at first that the people worshipped the suffering, till my teenage son told me one day at Mass: ‘What else would get everybody’s attention but something really grisly? It’s like Pulp Fiction.’ In other words, we wouldn’t have it any other way.)” —Mary Karr

Corpus Hypercubus,
by Dali.

Pulp fiction:

“Does the word ‘tesseract’
mean anything to you?”
— Robert A. Heinlein

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