Log24

If you liked this one, see more in Blanche Knott's Truly Tasteless Jokes.

"Birthday, death-day — what day is not both?" — Updike

The actor who played "Illya Kuryakin" reportedly died yesterday —

" David Keith McCallum Jr. was born on Sept. 19, 1933, into
a musical family in Glasgow. His father was the first violinist
for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London; his mother,
Dorothy Dorman, was a cellist. He would later tell interviewers
that his Scotch Presbyterian upbringing had left him emotionally
circumscribed.

'We Scots, we tend to be awfully tight inside,' he told TV Guide
in 1965. 'It has hurt me as an actor to be so — so naturally restricted.' "

— Leslie Kaufman in The New York Times

This  journal on McCallum's 90th birthday — Sept. 19, 2023 —

"You take the high road and . . . ."

The above YouTube posting date is July 5, 2021.

An image from this  journal on July 5, 2021 —

This  journal on the above color-field date . . .

* I prefer the art-history term "color field"
to the pandering term "psychedelic."

For an aspiring art director . . .

Since the event is online, your boozin' can be merely simulated .
This might be your best course of action.  Looking for a cock tale ?

Related, but only poetically —

The Pure Mathematics of Power Sets.

"Jurassic World: Maisie Lockwood Adventures 2: The Yosemite Six ​​​​
will be released on September 27, 2022."

Thanks for the warning.

Of greater interest to some: The Number  Six.

A phrase from the above scene: "the metaphysics of identity."

I prefer a May 1986 looking-glass from pure mathermatics.

On the director of the six-episode Disney series Obi-Wan Kenobi —

"She received her undergraduate degree, major of cultural theory
and minor in art history, from McGill University in Montreal …. "

— Wikipedia article:  Deborah Chow

"When you come to a fork in the road . . ."

— Yogi Berra

Related cultural remarks — Magic for Liars.

Two Web items, each dated August 12, 2017 —

Meanwhile, at Yale . . .

See the title phrase, by Delmore Schwartz, in this journal.

See also . . .

. . . and Concinnitas  in this journal … as well as — related to a formula
from the Concinnitas  project — "Thirteen??" by David Mumford.

"Neil Gordon, whose cerebral novels about radical politics,
most famously 'The Company You Keep,' challenged readers
with biblical parables and ethical dilemmas, died on May 19
in Manhattan. He was 59.  . . . .

. . . he earned . . . . a doctorate from Yale, where his dissertation
was titled** 'Stranger Than Fiction: The Occult Short Stories of
Hawthorne and Balzac.'"

— Sam Roberts in The New York Times

*    For the title (suggested by the date May 19), see posts tagged Y for Yale.

**  Actually (and more sensibly) titled "Stranger than Fiction:
    The Status of Truth in the Occult Short Stories of Hawthorne and Balzac."

"The transformed urban interior is the spatial organisation of
an achiever, one who has crossed the class divide and who uses
space to express his membership of, not aspirations towards, 
an ascendant class in our society: the class of those people who 
earn their living by transformation— as opposed to the mere
reproduction— of symbols, such as writers, designers, and
academics"

— The Social Logic of Space ,
     by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson,
     Cambridge University Press, 1984

For another perspective on the achievers, see The Deceivers .

Related material —

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Exhibit C:

See as well the previous post.

Yale University Press, 2001:

Tinguely, "Martin Heidegger,
Philosopher," sculpture, 1988

See also Talman in this journal.

A detail from this morning's 6 AM post —

See also Bloomsday 2007, "Obituaries in the News."

This morning's 6 AM post linked to a more recent obituary in the news —

"… while Jules and Judy were still living in Brooklyn Heights … 
Jules collaborated with his former roommate, Norton Juster,
by illustrating what was to become the children’s classic
The Phantom Tollbooth . Neither author or illustrator had
a clue as to how to get this unlikely work published, and it
was Judy’s idea to take it to a mutual friend . . . ."

From an essay by Mark Edmundson,
University Professor at the University of Virginia,
who was granted a Ph.D. by Yale in 1985 —

An example of vincible ignorance:

Edmundson's remarks above, in light of …

A Cornell professor discusses a poem by Wallace Stevens:

"Professor Eucalyptus in 'Ordinary Evening' XIV, for example, 'seeks/ God in the object itself,' but this quest culminates in his own choosing of 'the commodious adjective/ For what he sees… the description that makes it divinity, still speech… not grim/ Reality but reality grimly seen/ And spoken in paradisal parlance new'…."

 

These objects may be
regarded as supplying
a parlance that is, if not
paradisal, at least
intelligible– if only in
the context of my own
personal experience:

Journal entry dated 5/14:

In the Details

Wallace Stevens,
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven:

XXII

Professor Eucalyptus said, "The search
For reality is as momentous as
The search for God."  It is the philosopher's search
For an interior made exterior
And the poet's search for the same exterior made
Interior….

   … Likewise to say of the evening star,
The most ancient light in the most ancient sky,
That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines
From the sleepy bosom of the real, re-creates,
Searches a possible for its possibleness.

Julie Taymor, "Skewed Mirrors" interview:

"… they were performing for God. Now God can mean whatever you want it to mean. But for me, I understood it so totally. The detail….

They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. It was…it was the most important thing that I ever experienced."

"Skewed Mirrors"
illustrated:

Click on the above to enlarge.