Log24

These locusts by day, these crickets by night 
Are the instruments on which to play 
Of an old and disused ambit of the soul 
Or of a new aspect, bright in discovery— 

A disused ambit of the spirit’s way,
The sort of thing that August crooners sing,
By a pure fountain, that was a ghost, and is, 
Under the sun-slides of a sloping mountain; 

Or else a new aspect, say the spirit's sex,
Its attitudes, its answers to attitudes 
And the sex of its voices, as the voice of one 
Meets nakedly another’s naked voice. 

From a 2003 "Plato's Caveman" post . . .

* Cf. San Joaquin Flashback .

The previous post, "Colorful Tales," on the Nov. 28, 2016, death
of one Angus Fletcher, together with the remarks indexed above,
suggest a review from …

The archives of The New York Times  —

"THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE
Literature as a Way of Life
By Harold Bloom
357 pp. Yale University Press. $32.50.

Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of the Book Review.

A version of this review appeared in print
on May 22, 2011, on Page BR1 of the 
Sunday Book Review with the headline:
'An Uncommon Reader.'"

"By this time, Bloom had burrowed into a cave,
its lamplit forms and shapes merging into
an occult mythos scarcely intelligible
even to other scholars. 'Bloom had an idea,' 
Christopher Ricks said; 'now the idea has him.' 
Cynthia Ozick, meanwhile, called him an 'idol-maker.' 
In contrast to Cleanth Brooks . . . ."

An illustration from "The Echo in Plato's Cave" linked to
in the previous post —

Judy Davis in the Marabar Caves
 

Cynthia Ozick on Bloom —

See also Dharwadker in the previous post and on the Higgs boson.

The previous post suggests a review of posts tagged Wheeler in this journal.

See also a post from the date of Wheeler's death, The Echo in Plato's Cave.

In memory of CBS TV programmer Michael Dann,
who reportedly died at 94 on Friday, May 27 —

Don't Forget Hoss

Judy Carne and Hoss in NBC's "Bonanza,"  a nemesis
of CBS Sunday programming.

In other entertainment news …

Cartoonist Frank Modell reportedly died at 98, 
also on Friday, May 27.

In his  memory, part of a Weird Tale from 1948 that is
illustrated (sort of) by a more recent Modell drawing —

Wild Devising

"No one ever found out who the dead man was.
He had no luggage and no identification;
he had been hitchhiking, and he had
over ninety dollars in his pocket.
He might have been anybody—
someone from show business, or a writer perhaps,
on a haywire vacation of his own wild devising.
I suppose that doesn't matter either.
What does matter is that he died while
Grace was in a very close communion
with what he was doing, and her mind was
wide open for his fantasy. …. "

— Theodore Stugeon, "The Perfect Host,"
Weird Tales , November 1948, page 15

Some context:  This morning's post
"Entertainment in Plato's Cave," and
a few titles from my Kindle library —

"Plato's allegory of the cave describes prisoners,
inhabiting the cave since childhood, immobile,
facing an interior wall. A large fire burns behind
the prisoners, and as people pass this fire their
shadows are cast upon the cave's wall, and
these shadows of the activity being played out
behind the prisoner become the only version of
reality that the prisoner knows."

— From the Occupy Space gallery in Ireland

See also the number 6 in yesterday's posts,
Perfect Number and Perfect Universe.

Continued from yesterday's Occupy Space and The Master,
and last night's Midnight in Manhattan—

Princeton Caveman Valentine

University Diaries  today—

"Educated people— with some exceptions, like Nader— like to explore the senses, and indeed many of your humanities courses (like the one UD ‘s teaching right now about beauty, in which we just read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” with its famous concluding lines: In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art ) feature artworks and ideas that celebrate sensuality."

This suggests a review lecture on the unorthodox concept of lottery hermeneutics .

Today's New York Lottery—

A quote suggested by the UD  post—

"Sainte-Beuve's Volupté  (1834) introduced the idea of idler as hero (and seeking pleasurable new sensations as the highest good), so Baudelaire indulged himself in sex and drugs."

— Article on Baudelaire by Joshua Glenn in the journal Hermenaut

Some reflections suggested by Hermenaut  and by the NY evening numbers, 674 and 1834—

(Click images to enlarge.)

Cool Mystery:

Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."

As for the midday numbers—

For 412, see 4/12, and for 1030, see 10/30, Devil's Night (2005).

For further background, consult Monday's Realism in Plato's Cave.

In memory of the late combinatorialist-philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota…

Excerpts from the introduction to Allan Casebier's

Film and Phenomenology: Towards a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation
(Cambridge Studies in Film, Cambridge University Press, 1991) —

Pages 1-2,  pages 3-4,  pages 5-6.

Cover illustration: Knight, Death, and the Devil, by Albrecht Dürer