Log24

Project for the
New Century

“A bully can be stopped, and so can a mob. It takes one person with the courage and a resolute voice.”

— Tim Robbins, speech to National Press Club, April 15, 2003

Resoluteness is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for such a voice.  Also needed is eloquence.  Here is such a voice:

William Rivers Pitt.

Postscript:

I wrote the above at 3:38 PM today, thinking I had finally found someone to admire whom my left-leaning friends might also admire.

Perhaps resoluteness and eloquence suffice to stop a mob; they are not, however, sufficient to impress professional journalists, who, to be much impressed, require a third quality– truthfulness.

Since today’s major Washington and New York papers indicate that a presidential scandal of Water- or Monica-gate proportions may be in the offing, some minimal fact-checking seems in order.  Hence, at 3:40 PM today, I did a Google search on names Pitt discusses:

“karl rove”  
“robert mosbacher”  
 novak. 

That search indicates that unfortunately, mob-stopper Pitt seems, like many leftists, to be a liar.

Here is an excerpt from Pitt on Karl Rove dated Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2003:

The Most Insidious of Traitors

“Karl Rove, senior political advisor to George W. Bush, is a very powerful man. That is not to say he has never been in trouble. Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush Sr. campaign for trashing Robert Mosbacher, Jr., who was the chief fundraiser for the campaign and an avowed Bush loyalist. Rove accomplished this trashing of Mosbacher by planting a negative story with columnist Bob Novak. The campaign figured out that Karl had done the dirty deed, and he was given his walking papers.

Demonstrably, Rove is back in the saddle again. The January 2003 edition of Esquire magazine carried an article by Ron Suskind…. “

Here is an excerpt from columnist Robert Novak dated December 5, 2002:

Low Political Intrigue

“The article in Esquire’s January edition by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind is actually about Karl Rove, Bush’s powerful political adviser…. 

Unfortunately, I did not escape Suskind’s article, which includes these sentences: ‘Sources close to the former president say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fund-raising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he was summarily ousted.’  I was called by no fact-checker, who would have learned of multiple errors.

Suskind has confused former Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher Sr., Bush’s 1992 chief fund-raiser, with his son Rob, who headed the Bush campaign in Texas (Victory ’92). Criticism of the younger Mosbacher, a frequent unsuccessful candidate in Texas, was not ‘planted’ with me by Rove but was passed to me by a Bush aide whom I interviewed. Rove was indeed fired by Mosbacher from Victory ’92 but continued as a national Bush-for-president operative.

Three mistakes in two sentences lend credence to claims by White House aides that they were misrepresented in Suskind’s July article…”

I say Pitt seems to be lying because in today’s editorial he never even mentions Novak’s column of December 5, 2002, which is, as noted above, readily available. 

It is, of course, possible that Pitt and Suskind are right and Novak is wrong.  It is also possible that Orwell was wrong, that Stalin was a great man, and that Communism is the wave of the future.

Magic Hawaii

Today, the birthday of singer Jerry Lee Lewis, is also the feast of St. Michael and All Angels.

In honor of Lewis:

Killer Radio, an entry of July 31, 2003, that contains the following…

“When the light came she was sitting on the bed beside an open suitcase, toying with her diamond rings.  She saw the light first in the depths of the largest stone.”

— Paul Preuss, Broken Symmetries,
    scene at Diamond Head, Oahu,
    Hawaii

In honor of the angels:

Mathematics as an Adequate Language,
by Israel Gelfand, Sept. 2, 2003, which contains the following…

“Many people consider mathematics to be a boring and formal science.  However, any really good work in mathematics always has in it: beauty, simplicity, exactness, and crazy ideas.  This is a strange combination.  I understood earlier that this combination is essential on the example of classical music and poetry.  But it is also typical in mathematics.  It is not by chance that many mathematicians enjoy serious music.

This combination of beauty, simplicity, exactness, and crazy ideas is, I think, common to both mathematics and music.”

These qualities seem also to be sought by practitioners of religion and physics… for example, by the spiritually-minded physicist in Preuss’s Broken Symmetries.  Skeptics might prefer, to the word “religion,” the word (pronounced with a sneer) “magic.”

What do we find if, following in the footsteps of Gelfand and Preuss, we do a Google search on the following words…

“beauty simplicity exactness
 crazy magic Hawaii“?

The search yields two results:

1. The Pupil: Poems by W. S. Merwin.
   The above link is to a poem, “Prophecy,” that seems suitable for these, the High Holy Days at the end of one year and the beginning of another.

   

   For a follow-up to the poem, see
   The Shining of Lucero.

2. “Striking Through the Mask, or
    The Allegorical Meanings
    in Moby Dick.”

These two selections, both on the theme of light and darkness, offer a language that is perhaps more adequate than mathematics for dealing with the nature of the High Holy Days.  For a more lighthearted approach to these concerns, also with a Hawaiian theme, see

The Aloha Mass.

Time is a Weapon

“Time is a weapon, it’s cold and it’s cruel.”

— Max D. Barnes song lyric,
sung by Ray Price
(See Aug. 1, 2003, entry.)

3:57

was the time of yesterday afternoon’s entry,

Aloha.

“Only through time time is conquered.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

A Mass for
Rosh Hashanah

In memory of playwright Herb Gardner, who died on Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2003, in honor of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sunset today, and in celebration of T. S. Eliot’s birthday, which is today, here is an illustrated Mass from the Catholic News Service dated Sept. 24 (Saint Herb’s Day):

See also the two previous entries,
and “Max’s Hawaiian Ecstasies” in
Gardner’s play “The Goodbye People.”

For a musical accompaniment to this
requiem for Gardner,
 the “Aloha Mass,”
click here.

Among
those
at the
Mass:

The Mass, at Max’s Hawaiian Ecstasies
in Paradise, will conclude with
“Simply Irresistible,” sung by
Saint Robert Palmer and performed by…

Irresistible Grace.

The role of the congregation will, as usual,
be performed by George Plimpton.
Payment for our sins will be made by
Johnny Cash.

In Memory of Playwright
 Herb Gardner

eBay item 3243620848:

“Up for auction is a Hawaiian hula girl music box. It plays ‘Tiny Bubbles’ and spins around. It is approx. 12″ tall and the top part of the body is made of hard plastic. It is in great condition.”

Aloha.

Bel Canto

The conclusion of tonight’s season-
opening episode of “The West Wing”
was a picture of President Bartlet  
 receiving the Host at Mass.

Related material:

The Source:

Tips On Popular Singing
by Frank Sinatra
in collaboration with
his vocal teacher John Quinlan

What prompted me to find this
booklet on the Web
(at about 8:45 PM tonight) was

40,000 Years of Music
by Jacques Chailley
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964),
page 162,
on the bel canto style of singing.

I picked up this book this afternoon
at a sale for $1.

See also Sinatra’s remarks on bel canto
(various places on the Web).

For the religious significance of
the page number 162, see my
entry of 9/11 2003,

Particularity.

Added at 3:20 AM Sept. 25…

In Related News:

Source: Google News, about 3:15 AM 9/25/03

Intelligence Test

Today’s British Intelligence Award
goes to Reuters news agency:

Today’s British Stupidity Award goes,
of course, to Jonathan Powell.

Today in History

Happy birthday, Ronna.

Contrapuntal Structure

Click here for a web page based on my Sept. 16 entry The Form, the Pattern.

The Mysteries of 26

My entry of May 26, 2003 —

Many Dimensions — Why 26? —

dealt with the question of whether this number, said to be of significance (as a number of dimensions) in theoretical physics, has any purely mathematical properties of interest.

That entry contained the above figure, a so-called Levi graph illustrating point/line incidence in the finite projective plane with 13 points and 13 lines, PG(2,3).

It turns out that in a paper of April 7, 2000, John H. Conway and Christopher S. Simons discussed a close connection between this plane and the Monster group.  See

26 Implies the Bimonster 

(Journal of Algebra. Vol. 235, no. 2.
MR 2001k:20028).

Conway had written about such a connection as early as 1985.

I apologize for not knowing about this sooner, and so misleading any mathematical readers about the number 26, which it seems does have considerable purely mathematical significance.

Happy Ending

From yesterday morning:

From Jesus College, Oxford —
Not the Jesus I had in mind, but it will do:

“… Filled with despair, Orpheus dragged himself back to earth with only his music left to him…. In death Orpheus once more entered the Underworld, still playing the lyre. He and Eurydice were permanently reunited. Many scholars see Orpheus as another pagan prototype of Christ.”

Amen.

Time’s Breakdown

“… even if we can break down time into component Walsh functions, what would it achieve?”

— The Professor, in “Passing in Silence,”
    by Oliver Humpage

“Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave.”

— Gösta Kraken, Perception Perceived: an Unfinished Memoir (p. 9 in Fremder, a novel by Russell Hoban)

“The Underground’s ‘flicker’ is a mechanical reconciliation of light and darkness, the two alternately exhibited very rapidly.”

— Hugh Kenner on T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” in Four Quartets

From last year’s entries:

ART WARS September 12, 2002

For some further reflections on flickering time,
see an essay by Nicholson Baker on

the Geneva mechanism
in movie projectors.

“At three o’clock in the morning
Eurydice is bound to come into it.”
—Russell Hoban,
The Medusa Frequency

For June Carter Cash as Eurydice,
see The Circle is Unbroken.

Let us pray that Jesus College
will help this production,
with Johnny Cash as Orpheus,
to have a happy ending.

Time

Words move, music moves
Only in time….

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

— Wallace Stevens, “The Pure Good of Theory”

Only through time time is conquered.

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Two More Skewed Mirrors

Background: Previous three entries and
The Crucifixion of John O’Hara.

1. From The New Yorker,
   issue dated Sept. 22, 2003…

   John Updike on John O’Hara —

   And yet the ultimate units of society, the human individuals lost within the crushing agglomeration of hostility, rivalry, snobbery, exclusion, and defeat that O’Hara felt in his bones, have aspirations and hopes and passions, and can be regarded with tenderness by a writer whose bleak and swift style seems at first not to care. A small story from “Files on Parade” (1939) titled “By Way of Yonkers” sticks in my mind as especially moving. Its two principals, the young woman unnamed and the man named only in the last sentence, exist on the lower levels of Depression survival. She, with her gunmetal stockings and Cossack hat and “neat, short nose with jigsaw nostrils,” seems to be a hooker. She arrives at the man’s shabby apartment so late that he tells her she must have come by way of Yonkers, and when he asks “How’d you do?” of the engagement that delayed her she not quite evades the question:

   “Oh—” she said it very high. Then: “All right. Financially. But do we have to talk about it? You and me?”

   She talks instead about her fading appetite for liquor, and the expense of dental care. He, lying inert and fully dressed on his bed, talks of being broke, of not wanting to take money from her, of how he can’t seem “to make a connection in this town.” The town is New York, and he is a minor gangster thrown out of work by the repeal of Prohibition. But he has met a man who offered him a connection in Milwaukee, and he is going to go there for a long time. The concluding words are unspectacular and unexpectedly sweeping:

   [She asks,] “Any chance you being back in town soon?”
   “Well, not right away, honey. First I have to build up my connection again.”
   “Well, I don’t have to tell you, I’m glad for you. It’s about time you got a good break.” She resumed rubbing his ankle. He put his hand on the top of her head.
   “Yeah? You’re as good a break as I ever got.”
   “Ah, Christ, Bill,” she said, and fell face down in tears.

   One is moved not only by their plight of presumably eternal separation but by the dignity that O’Hara, in a literary time of programmatic pro-proletarian advocacy (Odets and Steinbeck and Mike Gold), instinctively brings to his two specimens of lowlife. He does not view them politically, from above; he is there in the room with them, and one is moved by the unspoken presence of an author so knowing, so unjudgmental, so nearly an outcast himself.

2. Johnny Cash singing “Hurt” —
   
   The video can be seen here.

Ah, Christ, Johnny.

The Graces of Paranoia

The New Yorker on Mel Gibson’s filmed passion play:

How did he know that God wanted him to make “The Passion“?

Gibson in “Signs“

“There are signals,” he said.  “You get signals.  Signs.  ‘Signal graces,’ they’re called.  It’s like traffic lights.  It’s as clear as a traffic light.  Bing!  I mean, it just grabs you and you know you have to listen to that and you have to follow it….” 

— “The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession,” by Peter J. Boyer, The New Yorker, September 15, 2003, p. 70

On the later plays of August Strindberg:

In some plays, when the central character notices things in the everyday world that start to take on unearthly significance (the masts of a half-sunken ship begin to resemble the three crosses on Calvary; someone takes sick just when one wishes the person dead), it usually indicates that the character is starting to experience a life-changing paranoid-schizophrenic episode, not unlike the one Strindberg himself experienced in his so-called “inferno” crisis in the 1890s.

— Cary M. Mazer, “A Strindberg Christmas“

For the Grace that I prefer to Gibson’s looney ravings, see my entries for this date last year.

For the Man in Black

Lyrics:  Arizona Star

“Shinin’ like a diamond
 she had tombstones in her eyes.”

A picture: Salma Hayek and Julie Taymor

A book:  Dark Ladies, by Fritz Leiber

This offers a gentler form of the alcoholic experience than Malcolm Lowry’s classic Under the Volcano:

“I’ve had hallucinations from alcohol, too…. But only during withdrawal oddly, the first three days.  In closets and dark corners and under tables — never in very bright light — I’d see these black and sometimes red wires, about the thickness of telephone cords, vibrating, whipping around.  Made me think of giant spiders’ legs and such.  I’d know they were hallucinations — they were manageable, thank God.  Bright light would always wipe them out.”

— Fritz Leiber, “Our Lady of Darkness,” in Dark Ladies

Related entries:

The Feast of Kali, the Dark Lady, and

Architecture of Eternity,
my own “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.”

For a more serious Dark Lady portrait, see the site of artist John de la Vega.

Now for the grand finale…

Edward Teller Is Dead at 95;
Fierce Architect of H-Bomb

Two links…

Patrick’s Rune
             at Shane Ross’s Caltech site

Patrick’s Rune
             at S. H. Cullinane’s Harvard site

…and a quote from Ross’s home page:

The truth shall make you free.

— The Caltech motto and John 8:32

“Dr. Jose Barchilon, a psychoanalyst and educator who studied the unconscious roots of creativity and mental illness, died on

August 6

at his home in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was 90.

In addition to training and teaching in New York and Denver, Dr. Barchilon wrote extensively, including early studies of psychosomatic illness and psychoanalytic studies of novels by Jane Austen, Albert Camus, Mark Twain and others.

He also trained a generation of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts….”

— The New York Times, Sept. 9, 2003

“Words are Events”

— Walter J. Ong, S. J.

Gisele Marie Louise Marguerite La Fleche,

better known as Gisele MacKenzie, star of “Your Hit Parade,” died on

Friday, September 5, 2003.

From my entry of Saturday, Sept. 6, 2003:

‘That person who is to be known,
he in whom these parts rest,
like spokes in the nave of a wheel,
you know him,
lest death should hurt you.’

— Prasna Upanishad

La Fleche

Cover illustration for
The Spirit of Zen

The Spirit is Willing…