Log24

Friday, January 10, 2020

The Lotos Rose

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:01 am

See the title in this journal.

Thursday, January 9, 2020

Universal History (Adapted)

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:05 pm

"One of the more fortuitous encounters of late-20th-century popular culture —
almost up there with Lennon meets McCartney and Taylor meets Burton —
took place on Labor Day 1965, at Jane Fonda’s Malibu beach house. The
actress was hosting a daylong bash at which her father, Henry’s,
generation mingled uneasily with her Hollywood hippie friends. The Byrds
played in the backyard. A young comedian-turned-film director named Mike
Nichols was approached by an improv comic-turned-itinerant writer named
Buck Henry, who asked how he was doing. Nichols dourly looked around
at all the proto-Summer of Love vibes and said, 'Here, under the shadow
of the great tree, I have found peace.'

Henry immediately recognized a sardonic East Coast kindred spirit trapped
in Lotusland . . . ."

—  Ty Burr,  Boston Globe  staff, January 9, 2020, 10:34 AM

Adapt or Die

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:53 am

For Hollywood

Maybe.

For Emily Yahr (see second item above) —

Buck Henry reportedly died yesterday, January 8, 2020.
This journal on that date a year earlier —

Saturday, August 3, 2013

The Lotos Rose

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:09 am

See the title in this journal.

Related material:

Philosophers on the Beach
George Santayana in Acapulco, Colin McGinn in Miami.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Tuesday July 21, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am

Today's Readings:

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Thursday July 16, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:00 pm
Mother of Beauty
continued from
April 7, 2004
In memory of Julius Shulman,
architectural photographer,
who died last night:

“And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light…”

Four Quartets, quoted here
November 22, 2004

Photo by Gerry Gantt, and the Jewel in Venn's Lotus

“… as in the hearth and heart of light.” Delmore Schwartz   

(See previous entry.)

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Tuesday March 29, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:01 pm
 

continued

The stranglehold of the Wiener Kreis on Harvard philosophy may at last be breaking:

"… imagination and belief are related….  belief presupposes imagination…."

"To negate the actual is to move imaginatively into the realm of modality.  Logic is all about the entertaining of possibilities."

"… imagination is central to an account of linguistic understanding. To understand a sentence is to imaginatively grasp the possibility it represents."

— Colin McGinn, excerpt (pdf) from Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning, published by Harvard University Press on November 22, 2004

From November 22, 2004:

Photo by Gerry Gantt

From Four Quartets:

And the pool was filled
with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light…

Monday, November 22, 2004

Monday November 22, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:12 pm
 
Flores, Flores Para Los Muertos

See entry of
All Hallows' Eve:

"A memorial Mass will be held on Monday,
November 22, 2004, at the Church of
St. Ignatius Loyola, 980 Park Avenue…."

Photo by Gerry Gantt

From Four Quartets:

And the pool was filled
with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light…

Related reading:

From a review at Amazon.com
of All Hallows' Eve, by Charles Williams:

"How many other books do you know in which one of the two main characters is dead, in which the dead and living can communicate almost as easily as we do every day, in which magic is serious and scary? Mainstream books, that is, not Goosebumps, with an introduction by T.S. Eliot, with the whole thing to be understood as at least feasible if not truth. This is unusual. And yet, and yet, the whole thing works."

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Wednesday September 29, 2004

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

Romantic Interaction,
continued

(See parts 1, 2, 3, 4)

From Karl Iagnemma:

From Log24.net, March 3, 2004:

"No se puede vivir sin amar."

— Malcolm Lowry,
Under the Volcano

Photo by Gerry Gantt

From Four Quartets:

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light….

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Tuesday September 28, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:33 pm

3:33:33 PM

Romantic Interaction, continued…

The Rhyme of Time

From American Dante Bibliography for 1983:

Freccero, John. "Paradiso X: The Dance of the Stars" (1968). Reprinted in Dante in America … (q.v.), pp. 345-371. [1983]

Freccero, John. "The Significance of terza rima." In Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento … (q.v.), pp. 3-17. [1983]

Interprets the meaning of terza rima in terms of a temporal pattern of past, present, and future, with which the formal structure and the thematics of the whole poem coordinate homologically: "both the verse pattern and the theme proceed by a forward motion which is at the same time recapitulary." Following the same pattern in the three conceptual orders of the formal, thematical, and logical, the autobiographical narrative too is seen "as forward motion that moves towards its own beginning, or as a form of advance and recovery, leading toward a final recapitulation." And the same pattern is found especially to obtain theologically and biblically (i.e., historically). By way of recapitulation, the author concludes with a passage from Augustine's Confessions on the nature of time, which "conforms exactly to the movement of terza rima." Comes with six diagrams illustrating the various patterns elaborated in the text.

From Rachel Jacoff's review of Pinsky's translation of Dante's Inferno:

"John Freccero's Introduction to the translation distills a compelling reading of the Inferno into a few powerful and immediately intelligible pages that make it clear why Freccero is not only a great Dante scholar, but a legendary teacher of the poem as well."

From The Undivine Comedy, Ch. 2, by Teodolinda Barolini (Princeton University Press, 1992):

"… we exist in time which, according to Aristotle, "is a kind of middle-point, uniting in itself both a beginning and an end, a beginning of future time and an end of past time."* It is further to say that we exist in history, a middleness that, according to Kermode, men try to mitigate by making "fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems." Time and history are the media Dante invokes to begin a text whose narrative journey will strive to imitate– not escape– the journey it undertakes to represent, "il cammin di nostra vita."

* Aristotle is actually referring to the moment, which he considers indistinguishable from time: "Now since time cannot exist and is unthinkable apart from the moment, and the moment is a kind of middle-point, uniting as it does in itself both a beginning and an end, a beginning of future time and an end of past time, it follows that there must always be time: for the extremity of the last period of time that we take must be found in some moment, since time contains no point of contact for us except in the moment. Therefore, since the moment is both a beginning and an end there must always be time on both sides of it" (Physics 8.1.251b18-26; in the translation of R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon [New York: Random House, 1941]).  

From Four Quartets:

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

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