Log24

From today's New York Times  obituary of a pioneering filmmaker —

"In 1948, he enrolled at the University of Toronto 
to study political science and economics.
The avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren taught
a workshop at the university one semester and
he became her lighting assistant. She encouraged
him to abandon economics and make movies instead."

Deren previously appeared here on Sunday, March 31, 2019:

For some wide-screen non-illusion, see . . .

Related material —

The above passage was suggested by an IMDb release date —

— and by a Log24 post, Lux, of the same date:  19 August, 2014.

See also photos by a big brother of Lux Feininger in this journal
on Wednesday, August 30, 2017.

This post was suggested by an obituary of a Polish painter from this
morning's online New York Times  that mentions Stanislaw Zamecznik. 

Zamecznik's granddaughter Marianne Zamecznik discusses
him in a note on an exhibition in Sweden that took place on
Nov. 19, 2012 —

"Since 2009 I have been working with the legacy left behind
by my grandfather, Stanislaw Zamecznik, a Polish exhibition
architect, whom I never met, but that was always present,
that dear ghost, both through my father and grandmother`s
accounts, and by his somewhat mysterious standing in the
Polish avant-garde history."

See also Marianne Zamecznik in this journal and two posts 
from the above exhibition date, Nov. 19, 2012.

Headline on an avant-garde-theater piece in
The New York Times  that was the subject of
a Log24 post on December 15  (Julie Taymor's birthday):

"To Thine Own Algorithm Be True"

Today is the feast of St. Peter Canisius.

Click on Canisius for material related to the Times
story, and on the feast for a more traditional tale.

The New York Times  this evening has a story
on "A Piece of Work," an avant-garde production
at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) that is to open
Wednesday.

A background check on Annie Dorsen, the production's 
author-director, yields the following remarks on a video
promoting a show titled "Magical"—

"This video is sent us by the company for promotion
of their show in Bergen the 15. and 16. of April 2011.
Excerpt from the program:

Do magic and feminism go together? Anne Juren, the
French choreographer living in Vienna, and Annie
Dorsen, the New York based director, attempt to prove
that it can: it’s alchemical, it’s political and it works."

Related material:  This journal eight years ago today, and
the Log24 posts from the dates, April 15-16, 2011, of the
"Magical" production in Bergen, Norway.

Happy birthday, Julie Taymor.

Related story—

Coppola photographed the new Obelisk of Buenos Aires in 1936.

"Where the Obelisco stands, a church dedicated to St. Nicholas
of Bari [or of Myra] was previously demolished."

Related images—

Wikipedia image

 "And if you should survive to a hundred and five,
   look at all you'll derive …" —Sinatra

Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times Theater Critic, yesterday on Julie Taymor and "Spider-Man"—

"This isn't a time for schadenfreude. Jobs are on the line, careers hang in the balance and the Fed isn't going to ride to the rescue of megamusicals as it did for Wall Street banks. But you'll forgive me for being a pessimist about the chances of an 11th hour redemption. The only way I can see this train wreck turning into an artistic success is if the investors were somehow able to resurrect Orson Welles to adapt the whole unfortunate episode into a 'Citizen Kane' sequel, the tale of an avant-garde idealist who loses her way after being enabled by heedless businessmen determined to duplicate the multibillion-dollar bonanza of 'The Lion King.'"

See also this morning's post and…

 — Errol Morris in The New York Times , March 9th

This morning’s New York Times reports the deaths of Nuremberg interrogator Richard W. Sonnenfeldt and of avant-garde novelist and Beckett scholar Raymond Federman.

Symbols from this journal on the dates of their deaths:

For connotations of the symbol appropriate to the name Sonnenfeldt, see the link to A Sunrise for Sunrise in the entry of Saturday, Oct. 10.

A quotation that appeared here on Wednesday, Oct. 7, seems relevant to Federman:

But I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear. You are a poorjoist, unctuous to polise nopebobbies….

— James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Obituaries in the News

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:13 a.m. ET

Norman Hackerman

“AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Norman Hackerman, a chemist … died Saturday [June 16] …. He was 95. … He taught chemistry … before joining the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon during World War II.”

The date of Hackerman’s death is celebrated in Ireland as Bloomsday— the day on which, in 1904, the events of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses came to pass.

From Log24 on Bloomsday 2007:

Scene from  
“Behind the Lid” —

Photo by Richard Termine

Click on the picture for details.

“History, Stephen said,
is a nightmare
from which I am
trying to awake.”

— Ulysses

In a recent Edge article, “The Vagaries of Religious Experience,” a Harvard psychologist, Daniel Gilbert,  quotes Einstein on his own religious vagaries:

“(I had) a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy* of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies. It was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment– an attitude which has never again left me.” (Autobiographical Notes, 1949)

Gilbert adds,

“Einstein’s orgy* of freethinking forever changed our understanding of space and time, and the phrase ‘Religion for Dummies’ became, in the view of many scientists, a redundancy.”

Here is another Einstein quotation, from the paragraph in Autobiographical Notes following the paragraph quoted by Gilbert:

“It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the ‘merely-personal,’ from an existence which is dominated by wishes, hopes and primitive feelings.  Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.  The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation…. The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it.”

Einstein describes “the road to the religious paradise” as “comfortable and alluring.”  He might therefore have profited by the book saluted in the previous entry… a book that might be described, to adapt Gilbert’s charming phrase, as “Religion for Dummies like Einstein.”

For an approach to the contemptible religion of Scientism that is more subtle than Gilbert’s, see “Einstein’s Third Paradise,” by Gerald Holton, another Harvard savant.

* In the original, the words “orgy of” appear in square brackets to indicate an interpolation by the editor, Paul A. Schilpp, a Methodist minister (pdf).  Einstein’s own words were “eine geradezu fanatische Freigeisterei.”  Gilbert’s omission of the brackets indicates both the moral slovenliness typical of those embracing Scientism and the current low standards of scholarship at Harvard.  (Related material: The Crimson Passion.)

Cut to Condon

From today’s New York Times:

California Postpones
Exit Exam

By GREG WINTER

aced with failure rates that could bar tens of thousands of students from graduating, the California State Board of Education voted yesterday to postpone the consequences of its high school exit exam for two years….

The reprieve in California is the latest example of the reticence some states have shown when it comes time to impose the significant consequences of the testing movement they have pushed so avidly in recent years. More than two dozen states now have some form of make-or-break exams.

Break.  Cut to Condon.

Recommended reading and viewing:

Winter Kills, a novel by Richard Condon.

“Winter Kills,” a film based on the novel.

From a review of the film:

“Winter Kills‘s storytelling style is the narrative equivalent of throwing a bag over the audience’s head and pushing it down some dark stairs.”

Exactly the style needed for the California State Board of Education.

Double Day… August 2, 2002

“Time cannot exist without a soul (to count it).” — Aristotle

The above quotation appears in my journal note of August 2, 1995, as an  epigraph on the reproduced title page of The Sense of an Ending, by Frank Kermode (Oxford University Press, 1967).

August 2, 1995, was the fortieth anniversary of Wallace Stevens’s death. On the same date in 1932 — seventy years ago today — actor Peter O’Toole was born.  O’Toole’s name appears, in a suitably regal fashion, in my journal note of August 2, 1995, next to the heraldic crest of Oxford University, which states that “Dominus illuminatio mea.”  Both the crest and the name appear below the reproduced title page of Kermode’s book — forming, as it were, a foundation for what  Harvard professor Marjorie Garber scornfully called “the Church of St. Frank” (letters to the editor, New York Times Book Review, July 30, 1995).

Meditations for today, August 2, 2002:

From page 60 of Why I Am a Catholic, by Gary Wills (Houghton Mifflin, 2002):

“Was Jesus teasing Peter when he called him ‘Rocky,’ naming him ab opposito, as when one calls a not-so-bright person Einstein?”

From page 87 of The Third Word War, by Ian Lee (A&W Publishers, Inc., New York, 1978):

“Two birds… One stone (EIN STEIN).”

From “Seventy Years Later,” Section I of “The Rock,” a poem by Wallace Stevens:

A theorem proposed between the two —

Two figures in a nature of the sun….

From page 117 of The Sense of an Ending:

“A great many different kinds of writing are called avant-garde…. The work of William Burroughs, for instance, is avant-garde.  His is the literature of withdrawal, and his interpreters speak of his hatred for life, his junk nihilism, his treatment of the body as a corpse full of cravings.  The language of his books is the language of an ending world, its aim… ‘self-abolition.'”

From “Today in History,” by The Associated Press:

“Five years ago:  ‘Naked Lunch’ author William S. Burroughs, the godfather of the ‘Beat generation,’ died in Kansas City, Mo., at age 83.”

Part of the above statement is the usual sort of AP disinformation, due not to any sinister intent but to stupidity and carelessness.  Burroughs actually died in Lawrence, Kansas. For the location of Lawrence, click on the link below.  Location matters.

http://www.mapquest.com/

From page 118 of The Sense of an Ending:

“Somewhere, then, the avant-garde language must always rejoin the vernacular.”

From the Billie Holiday songbook:

“Good mornin’, heartache.”

From page 63 of The New Yorker issue dated August 5, 2002:

“Birthday, death-day — what day is not both?” — John Updike