Log24

The metaphor for metamorphosis no keys unlock.
— Steven H. Cullinane, "Endgame"

* See Times Square Church in this journal and
   the posts of July 2010.  Related material:

   A Monday night death —

http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=Kristeva

http://m759.net/wordpress/?s="Tel+Quel"

http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=Sollers

Some context for the new novel The Seventh Function —

Click image to search Log24 for Gitterkrieg .

Published on January Seventh, 2016 —

Also published on January Seventh, 2016 —

Primes Are Forever

"If diamonds are a girl's best friend,
prime numbers are a mathematician's….

A Mersenne prime is of the form 2^P-1,
where the variable P is itself a prime—
making the Mersenne an elite sort of prime,
a James Bond among spies."

— Anonymous author at
    Fox News, Feb. 5, 2013

The author notes that the smaller
Mersenne primes include 7.

Related Material

April 7, 2003:

April is Math Awareness Month.

This year's theme is "mathematics and art."

Update of 2:56 PM Feb. 7:

See also Paul Bateman and, in this journal, the date of Bateman's death.

For mathematics rather than narrative, see (for instance)…

.

"George Perle, a composer, author, theorist and teacher who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1986 and was widely considered the poetic voice of atonal composition, died on Friday [Jan. 23, 2009] at his home in Manhattan. He was 93."

— The New York Times this morning

Al Casey, a guitarist whose playful acoustic rhythms and solos were a defining feature of Fats Waller’s band in the 1930’s and 1940’s, died on Sunday [9/11] in Manhattan. He was 89….

Mr. Casey played and recorded with Louis Armstrong in 1944 when both were recognized as leading jazz musicians in the Esquire magazine readers’ poll….

A 90th birthday celebration for Mr. Casey, scheduled for Thursday evening at St. Peter’s Church, 54th Street and Lexington Avenue, will now be his musical memorial service, open to the public.

Don Giovanni, Part II

(See entries of June 8, 2004,
and June  4,  2004.)

Ingmar Bergman long ago
"earned the nickname of
the 'demon director,'
such are the demands that
he makes on his performers."

— Anthony Lane in
The New Yorker,
June 14  & 21, 2004

AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Ingmar Bergman
on the set in
the late 1940's

From the entry of
June 4 last year:

Commentary by Jack Kerouac,
from an entry of May 21, 2004:

"So what do we all do in this life which comes on so much like an empty voidness yet warns us that we will die in pain, decay, old age, horror–?  Hemingway called it a dirty trick.  It might even be an ancient Ordeal laid down on us by an evil Inquisitor in Space, like the ordeal of the sieve and scissors, or even the water ordeal where they dump you in the water with toes tied to thumbs, O God– Only Lucifer could be so mean and I am Lucifer and I'm not that mean, in fact Lucifer goes to Heaven– The warm lips against warm necks in beds all over the world trying to get out of the dirty Ordeal by Death…."

Commentary by The New Yorker:

"… listen to the words of Pablo, the servant of Don Juan, who is summoned from the underworld in 'The Devil's Eye,' Bergman's little-known comedy of 1960. Pablo seduces the wife of a minister, and then, sorrowful and sated, falling to his knees, he addresses her thus:

'First, I'll finish off that half-dug vegetable patch I saw. Then I'll sit and let the rain fall on me. I shall feel wonderfully cool. And I'll breakfast on one of those sour apples down by the gate. After that, I shall go back to Hell.' "

Trance of the Red Queen

In memory of playwright George Axelrod, who died Saturday, June 21, 2003.

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

"In 1987, Mr. Axelrod was saluted at the New York Film Festival. He told the admiring crowd: 'I always wanted to get into the major leagues, and I knew my secret: luck and timing. I had a small and narrow but very, very sharp talent, and inside it, I'm as good as it gets.'

'The Manchurian Candidate,' in 1962, based on Richard Condon's novel about wartime brainwashing and subversive politics, may have been Mr. Axelrod's best achievement. He declared in 1995 that the script 'broke every rule. It's got dream sequences, flashbacks, narration out of nowhere . . . Everything in the world you're told not to do.'

He considered 'The Manchurian Candidate' a comedy…."

"Don't you draw the queen of diamonds,
     boy, she'll beat you if she's able.
You know the queen of hearts
     is always your best bet."

— The Eagles, "Desperado"

Another quotation that seems relevant:

"The hypnosis was performed by
the good and pious nuns…."

For the Diocese of Phoenix 

See entries of June 4 and June 15.

See also two items from Tuesday, June 17, 2003:

A 6/17 Arizona Daily Star article on Phoenix bishop Thomas O'Brien, and the 6/17 cartoon below.

Tony Auth, Philadelphia Inquirer,
June 17, 2003

For background, see Frank Keating in the New York Times, 6/17/03.

My entry of 5 PM EDT Saturday, June 14, 2003, which preceded the death involving Bishop O'Brien, may also be of interest.

Fearful Meditation, Part II —
The Four Last Things

“Where is Evelyn Waugh when you need him?”
— Roger Kimball, “Minimalist Fantasies” 

“Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell —
known collectively in the Catholic world as
the Four Last Things. They would have
formed the basis for a course of
uncomfortable meditations….”
— A Companion to Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited, by David Cliffe

Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell.

Click on pictures for details.

Green and Burning

After posting the 2:42 PM entry at a public library this afternoon, I picked up the following at a “Friends of the Library” used-book sale:

The Green and Burning Tree:
On the Writing and Enjoyment
of Children’s Books, 

by Eleanor Cameron (Little, Brown and Company, Boston and Toronto, 1969).

Cameron, on page 73, gives the source of her title; it is from the Mabinogion:

“And they saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one half of which was in flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in full leaf.”

Cameron finds the meaning of this symbol in Dylan Thomas: His Life and Work, by John Ackerman (Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 6:

“Another important feature of the old Welsh poetry is an awareness of the dual nature of reality, of unity in disunity, of the simultaneity of life and death, of time as an eternal moment rather than as something with a past and future.”

For part of a Nobel Prize lecture on this topic — time as an eternal moment — see Architecture of Eternity, a journal note from December 8, 2002.

That lecture is from an author, Octavio Paz, who wrote in Spanish.  Here are some other words in that language:

Mi verso es de un verde claro,
Y de un carmín encendido.

My verse is a clear green,
And a burning crimson.

These lyrics to the song “Guantanamera” (see Palm Sunday) were on my mind this afternoon when Cameron’s book caught my eye.

Green and crimson are, of course, also the colors of Christmas, or “Christ Mass.”  In view of the fact that Cameron’s book is about children’s literature, this leads, like it or not, to the following meditation.

From a religious site:

Matthew 18:3 – And said, Truly I say to you, Unless you are converted, and become like little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Mark 10:15 – Truly I say to you, Whoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall not enter it at all.

Luke 18:17 – Truly I say to you, Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall by no means enter it.

A meditation from a less religious site:

“What I tell you three times is true.”

Finally, from what I now consider 

• in view of the song lyrics quoted above,
• in view of the fact that it deals with a Cuban movie also titled “Guantanamera,”
• in view of Cameron’s remarks on Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” (p. 129), and
• in view of my April 7 entry on mathematics and art,

to be an extremely religious site, a picture: