Log24

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Master Class

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

(Continued)

From yesterday’s post “Structure“—

IMAGE- 'Where do you believe you're going?'- The Club Dumas

A meditation on today’s New York Times  obituaries:

Gone to China.”

Structure vs. Character

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

"… Reality is not a given whole. An understanding of this,
a respect for the contingent, is essential to imagination
as opposed to fantasy. Our sense of form, which is an
aspect of our desire for consolation, can be a danger to
our sense of reality as a rich receding background.
Against the consolations of form, the clean crystalline
work, the simplified fantasy-myth, we must pit the
destructive power of the now so unfashionable naturalistic
idea of character.

Real people are destructive of myth, contingency is
destructive of fantasy and opens the way for imagination.
Think of the Russians, those great masters of the contingent.
Too much contingency of course may turn art into journalism.
But since reality is incomplete, art must not be too much
afraid of incompleteness. Literature must always represent a
battle between real people and images; and what it requires
now is a much stronger and more complex conception of the
former."

— Iris Murdoch, January 1961, "Against Dryness"

See also the recent posts Structure and Character.

Friday, May 3, 2013

Structure

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:00 pm

For the Church of St. Frank:

See Strange Correspondences and Eightfold Geometry.

Correspondences , by Steven H. Cullinane, August 6, 2011

The rest is the madness of art.”

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Character

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:00 pm

For the Church of St. Frank:

The phrase “Church of St. Frank” was coined in 1995 by
a Harvard professor sneering at literary critic Frank Kermode.
(See a related Log24 note from 1995.)

Now that Frank Kermode is gone, perhaps the phrase suits Frank Langella.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/11720-WallStreetAtCannesSm.jpg

Above: Langella at Cannes with fellow actors from
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps . He also starred in
the film version of Starting Out in the Evening  (quoted above).

Some related reflections on character:

Diamond Speech (this journal, July 3, 2012) and
Robert Diamond’s Next Life in today’s online New York Times .

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