Natasha’s Dance
“It’s a dance,
for goodness’ sake.”
— Scott Houston
For the lyrics, see Sinatra.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Monday March 30, 2009
The Rest of the Picture
Lenin at Smolny, c. 1925,
by Isaak Israilevich Brodsky —
Lenin at Smolny, c. 1925,
by Isaak Israilevich Brodsky —
A copy of this picture, with
left and right reversed, appears
on the front and back covers
of the Feb. 2006 MIT Press
book The Parallax View,
by Slavoj Zizek.
(See previous entry.)
Comments Off on Monday March 30, 2009
Monday March 30, 2009
Happy Birthday,
Warren Beatty
Viewpoint A:
Blue —
Viewpoint B:
Red —
Warren Beatty
Viewpoint A:
Blue —
Viewpoint B:
Red —
| MIT Press: The Parallax View Slavoj Zizek Published on February 17, 2006  The Parallax View is Slavoj Zizek’s most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Zizek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Zizek is interested in the “parallax gap” separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an “impossible short circuit” of levels that can never meet. From this consideration of parallax, Zizek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism. |
Table of Contents and Sample Chapters“If you liked Badiou,
you’ll love ‘Zizek!’.”
Comments Off on Monday March 30, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Sunday March 29, 2009
Getting All
the Meaning In
Webpage heading for the
2009 meeting of the
American Comparative
Literature Association:
The mysterious symbols on
the above map suggest the
following reflections:
From A Cure of the Mind: The Poetics of Wallace Stevens, by Theodore Sampson, published by Black Rose Books Ltd., 2000–
Page x:
"… if what he calls 'the spirit's alchemicana' (CP [Collected Poems] 471) addresses itself to the irrational element in poetry, to what extent is such an element dominant in his theory and practice of poetry, and therefore in what way is Stevens' intricate verbal music dependent on his irrational use of language– a 'pure rhetoric of a language without words?' (CP 374)?"
Related material:
| From "'When Novelists Become Cubists:' The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport," by Andre Furlani:
Laurence Zachar argues that Davenport's writing is situated "aux frontieres intergeneriques" where manifold modes are brought into concord: "L'etonnant chez Davenport est la facon don't ce materiau qui parait l'incarnation meme du chaos– hermetique, enigmatique, obscur, avec son tropplein de references– se revele en fait etre construit, ordonne, structure. Plus l'on s'y plonge, et plus l'on distingue de cohesion dans le texte." 'What astonishes in Davenport is the way in which material that seems the very incarnation of chaos– hermetic, enigmatic, obscure, with its proliferation of allusions– in fact reveals itself to be constructed, organized, structured. The more one immerses oneself in them the more one discerns the texts' cohesion.' (62). Davenport also works along the intergeneric border between text and graphic, for he illustrates many of his texts. (1) "The prime use of words is for imagery: my writing is drawing," he states in an interview (Hoeppfner 123). Visual imagery is not subordinated to writing in Davenport, who draws on the assemblage practice of superimposing image and writing. "I trust the image; my business is to get it onto the page," he writes in the essay "Ernst Machs Max Ernst." "A page, which I think of as a picture, is essentially a texture of images. […] The text of a story is therefore a continuous graph, kin to the imagist poem, to a collage (Ernst, Willi Baumeister, El Lissitzky), a page of Pound, a Brakhage film" (Geography 374-75). Note: (1.) Davenport is an illustrator of books (such as Hugh Kenner's The Stoic Comedians and The Counterfeiters) and journals (such as The Kenyon Review, Parnassus, and Paideuma). His art is the subject of Erik Anderson Reece's monograph, A Balance of Quinces, which reveals the inseparable relationship between Davenport's literary and pictorial work. References: Davenport, Guy. The Geography of the Imagination. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. Rpt. New York: Pantheon, 1992. Hoepffner, Bernard. "Pleasant Hill: An Interview with Guy Davenport." Conjunctions 24 (1995): 118-24. Reece, Erik Anderson. A Balance of Quinces: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport. New York: New Directions, 1996. Zachar, Laurence. "Guy Davenport: Une Mosaique du genres." Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Americaines 21 (1994): 51-63. |
"… when novelists become Cubists; that is, when they see the possibilities of making a hieroglyph, a coherent symbol, an ideogram of the total work. A symbol comes into being when an artist sees that it is the only way to get all the meaning in."
— Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination
Comments Off on Sunday March 29, 2009
Sunday March 29, 2009
Auerbach, Purdy;
Purdy, Auerbach
Purdy, Auerbach
The 4-day annual meeting
of the American Comparative
Literature Association
concludes today.
This year the the meeting
is held at Harvard University.
(Program– pdf, 256 pp.)
“But the spirit of rhetoric– a spirit which classified subjects in genera and invested every subject with a specific form of style as one garment becoming it in virtue of its nature [i.e. lower classes with the farcical low-style, upper classes with the tragic, the historic and the sublime elevated-style]– could not extend its dominion to them [the Bible writers] for the simple reason that their subject would not fit into any of the known genres.”
— Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton edition of 1953, p. 45, as quoted at Wikipedia)
| The Washington Post on its literary columnist Michael Dirda:
“… he holds a PhD in comparative literature from Cornell….” Dirda on author James Purdy (April 5, 2000): QUESTION: “What do you make of Purdy and his place in 20th century American fiction?” |
Steven H. Cullinane on Purdy,
“Radical Emptiness,”
Friday, March 13th, 2009 —
“Radical Emptiness,”
Friday, March 13th, 2009 —
“See you in the
funny papers, Purdy.”
Comments Off on Sunday March 29, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Saturday March 28, 2009
The Rest
of the Story
Today's previous entry discussed the hermeneutics of the midday NY and PA lottery numbers.
| Lotteries on Reba's birthday, 2009 |
Pennsylvania (No revelation) |
New York (Revelation) |
| Mid-day (No belief) |
No belief, no revelation 726 |
Revelation without belief 378 |
| Evening (Belief) |
Belief without revelation 006 |
Belief and revelation 091 |
Interpretations of the evening numbers–
The PA evening number, 006, may be viewed as a followup to the PA midday 726 (or 7/26, the birthday of Kate Beckinsale and Carl Jung). Here 006 is the prestigious "00" number assigned to Beckinsale.
Will: Do you like apples?
Clark: Yeah.
Will: Well, I got her number.
How do you like them apples?
Clark: Yeah.
Will: Well, I got her number.
How do you like them apples?
The NY evening number, 091, may be viewed as a followup to the NY midday 378 (the number of pages in The Innermost Kernel by Suzanne Gieser, published by Springer, 2005)–
Page 91: The entire page is devoted to the title of the book's Part 3– "The Copenhagen School and Psychology"–
The next page begins: "With the crisis of physics, interest in epistemological and psychological questions grew among many theoretical physicists. This interest was particularly marked in the circle around Niels Bohr."
A particularly
marked circle
from March 15:
marked circle
from March 15:
The circle above is
marked with a version of
the classic Chinese symbol
adopted as a personal emblem
by Danish physicist Niels Bohr,
leader of the Copenhagen School.
"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."
-- Wallace Stevens,
"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
Canto IV of "It Must Change"
The square above is marked
with a graphic design
related to the four-diamond
figure of Jung's Aion.
Comments Off on Saturday March 28, 2009
Saturday March 28, 2009
The Dance
of Chance
of Chance
Today’s midday
lotteries:
NY 378
PA 726
Interpretation:
The 378 pages of
a book on Pauli and Jung,
“The Innermost Kernel“
The date, 7/26, of
birth for Jung and for
Kate Beckinsale,
star of
“Serendipity“
See also today’s previous entry
and “Bright Star and Dark Lady”
from 7/26, 2003.
Comments Off on Saturday March 28, 2009
Saturday March 28, 2009
In memory of
film producer
Steven Bach:
film producer
Steven Bach:
“Time: the moving
image of eternity.”
— Plato
Happy birthday,
Reba McEntire
Comments Off on Saturday March 28, 2009
Saturday March 28, 2009
xxx
| Denmark Abonti |
uid=48323914 (Rohatsu Venus) |
3/28/2009 7:49 AM |
Comments Off on Saturday March 28, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Tuesday March 24, 2009
The Child Trap
See E! Online, March 18 — Lindsay Lohan Remembers Parent Trap Mum
See also
For those who like such things, an excellent Marxist analysis of Watchmen from another fan:
Whitson, Roger. “Panelling Parallax: The Fearful Symmetry of Alan Moore and William Blake.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies Vol. 3 No. 2 (2007). Dept. of English, University of Florida.
Whitson’s subject, Alan Moore, is the author of the Watchmen graphic novel. Moore’s style seems less suited to the Forth family pictured above than to Lindsay Lohan fans– who may also enjoy another graphic novel by Moore, Lost Girls.
More Lohan material related to her role in “Georgia Rule“–
Damnation Morning Continued (March 16).
Further background:
“The film realizes that if people actually fought crime, they’d most likely be crazy. Take The Comedian for an example. He fights crime, sure. He’s also a raging alcoholic.” –“‘Watchmen’ a flawed masterpiece,” by Ryan Michaels
See also the following expanded version of a link from Sunday morning, March 22:
Comments Off on Tuesday March 24, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Sunday March 22, 2009
Funeral Services Held
for Natasha Richardson
for Natasha Richardson
“Family and friends of Natasha Richardson said their final farewells to the late actress Sunday afternoon during a small, private funeral held near her Millbrook home in upstate New York….
Richardson died on Wednesday [March 18, 2009] at the age of 45 from a head injury she suffered [on Monday, March 16, 2009] while skiing in Canada.
The funeral began after the family arrived in a police-escorted motorcade at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Lithgow, where Neeson and her sons are members….”
For what it’s worth…
Background image
for the E! story:
Related images —
Midsummer Night
in the Garden of
Good and Evil.
See also:
“God as Trauma,”
by a former vicar
of the Lithgow church,
and Drunkard’s Walk.
Comments Off on Sunday March 22, 2009
Sunday March 22, 2009
The Storyteller
in Chance
(continued from
last night)
“… we tell ourselves that
the old-fashioned question
‘Who is the protagonist?’
is a meaningless one.”
the old-fashioned question
‘Who is the protagonist?’
is a meaningless one.”
— — Wayne C. Booth, p. 346 in
The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961),
as quoted by Paul Wake in
“The Storyteller in Chance“
The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961),
as quoted by Paul Wake in
“The Storyteller in Chance“
“I argue that Sophocles did not intend to present either Antigone or Creon as the hero/heroine for his tragic play, as Hegel, Kierkegaard, and others stipulate. Rather, Sophocles presents the Chorus and the Watchman as the true heroic figures.”
–“A Burkean Reading of the Antigone: Comical and Choral Transcendence,” by Rebecca McCarthy, Kaplan University
Comments Off on Sunday March 22, 2009
Sunday March 22, 2009
The Craft
“Pope tells clergy in Angola
to work against
belief in witchcraft”
— Headline in tonight’s
online New York Times
“Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them.”
— C. S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory
Related material:
Fantasy and Fugue
and the same words
as rendered by
Bach and Schweitzer
See also
Yesterday’s entries
and
Midsummer Night
in the Garden
of Good and Evil.
Comments Off on Sunday March 22, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Saturday March 21, 2009
Interpreter's Booth
Tonight's online New York Times:
Tonight's online New York Times:
Click to enlarge.
Mary Karr,
"Facing Altars:
Poetry and Prayer"–
"There is a body
on the cross
in my church."
Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman
in "The Interpreter."
Click to enlarge.
"My card."
|
"Is Heart of Darkness the story of Kurtz or the story of Marlow’s experience of Kurtz? Was Marlow invented as a rhetorical device for heightening the meaning of Kurtz’s moral collapse, or was Kurtz invented in order to provide Marlow with the centre of his experience in the Congo? Again a seamless web, and we tell ourselves that the old-fashioned question 'Who is the protagonist?' is a meaningless one."
|
— Wayne C. Booth, p. 346 in
The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961),
as quoted by Paul Wake in
"The Storyteller in Chance"
The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961),
as quoted by Paul Wake in
"The Storyteller in Chance"
Comments Off on Saturday March 21, 2009
Saturday March 21, 2009
Counters in Rows
"Music, mathematics, and chess are in vital respects dynamic acts of location. Symbolic counters are arranged in significant rows. Solutions, be they of a discord, of an algebraic equation, or of a positional impasse, are achieved by a regrouping, by a sequential reordering of individual units and unit-clusters (notes, integers, rooks or pawns)."
— George Steiner
(See March 10, "Language Game.")
Comments Off on Saturday March 21, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
Friday March 20, 2009
Happy Birthday,
Holly Hunter
Holly Hunter
Epigraph to The Glass Bead Game:
Non entia enim licet quodammodo levibusque hominibus facilius atque incuriosius verbis reddere quam entia, veruntamen pio diligentique rerum scriptori plane aliter res se habet: nihil tantum repugnat ne verbis illustretur, at nihil adeo necesse est ante hominum oculos proponere ut certas quasdam res, quas esse neque demonstrari neque probari potest, quae contra eo ipso, quod pii diligentesque viri illas quasi ut entia tractant, enti nascendique facultati paululum appropinquant.
— ALBERTUS SECUNDUS
tract. de cristall. spirit.
ed. Clangor et Collof. lib. I, cap. 28.
In Joseph Knecht’s holograph translation:.
For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.
Comments Off on Friday March 20, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Thursday March 19, 2009
Two-Face
[Note: Janus is Roman, not Greek, and
the photo is from one “Fubar Obfusco”]
Click on image for details. From January 8:
[Note: Janus is Roman, not Greek, and
the photo is from one “Fubar Obfusco”]
Click on image for details. From January 8:
Religion and Narrative, continued:
|
Context:
Notes on Mathematics and Narrative
(entries in chronological order,
March 13 through 19)
Comments Off on Thursday March 19, 2009
Thursday March 19, 2009
An image from
Quintessence:
A Glass Bead Game
by Charles Cameron —
Quintessence:
A Glass Bead Game
by Charles Cameron —
Christ and the Four Elements
This 1495 image is found in
The Janus Faces of Genius:
The Role of Alchemy
in Newton's Thought,
by B. J. T. Dobbs,
Cambridge U. Press,
2002, p. 85
From
Kernel of Eternity:
From
Sacerdotal Jargon
at Harvard:
From "The Fifth Element"
(1997, Milla Jovovich
and Bruce Willis) —
The crossing of the beams:
Happy birthday, Bruce Willis.
Comments Off on Thursday March 19, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Wednesday March 18, 2009
From a place where
entertainment is God:
entertainment is God:
Click to enlarge.
From another place:
Click logo for a story.
“… a kind of cross.”
— Gravity’s Rainbow
Comments Off on Wednesday March 18, 2009
Wednesday March 18, 2009
Gallic Clarity
Yesterday’s entry Deep Structures discussed the “semiotic square,” a device that exemplifies the saying “If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, then baffle ’em with bullshit.”
A search today for what the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson might have meant by saying that the square “is capable of generating at least ten conceivable positions out of a rudimentary binary opposition” leads to two documents of interest.
1. “Theory Pictures as Trails: Diagrams and the Navigation of Theoretical Narratives” (pdf), by J.R. Osborn, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego (Cognitive Science Online, Vol.3.2, pp.15-44, 2005)
2. “The Semiotic Square” (html), by Louis Hébert (2006), professor, Université du Québec à Rimouski, in Signo (http://www.signosemio.com).
Shown below is Osborn’s picture of the semiotic square:
Osborn’s discussion of the square, though more clear than, say, that of Rosalind Krauss (who reverses the bottom two parts of the square– see Deep Structures), fails. His Appendix A is miserably obscure.
On the brighter side, we have, as a sign that Gallic clarity still exists, the work of Hébert.
Here is how he approaches Jameson’s oft-quoted, but seemingly confused, remark about “ten conceivable positions”–
“The Semiotic Square,”
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|
5. (=1+2) COMPLEX TERM
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7. (=1+3) POSITIVE DEIXIS |
8. (=2+4) NEGATIVE DEIXIS
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6. (=3+4) NEUTRAL TERM
|
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LEGEND:
The + sign links the terms that are combined to make up a metaterm (a compound term); for example, 5 is the result of combining 1 and 2.
2.1 CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS
The semiotic square entails primarily the following elements (we are steering clear of the constituent relationships of the square: contrariety, contradiction, and complementarity or implication):
1. terms
2. metaterms (compound terms)
3. object(s) (classified on the square)
4. observing subject(s) (who do the classifying)
5. time (of the observation)
2.1.1 TERMS
The semiotic square is composed of four terms:
Position 1 (term A)
Position 2 (term B)
Position 3 (term not-B)
Position 4 (term not-A)
The first two terms form the opposition (the contrary relationship) that is the basis of the square, and the other two are obtained by negating each term of the opposition.
2.1.2 METATERMS
The semiotic square includes six metaterms. The metaterms are terms created from the four simple terms. Some of the metaterms have been named. (The complex term and the neutral term, despite their names, are indeed metaterms).
Position 5 (term 1 + term 2): complex term
Position 6 (term 3 + term 4): neutral term
Position 7 (term 1 + term 3): positive deixis
Position 8 (term 2 + term 4): negative deixis
Position 9 = term 1 + term 4: unnamed
Position 10 = term 2 + term 3: unnamed
These ten “positions” are apparently meant to explain Jameson’s remark.
Hébert’s treatment has considerably greater entertainment value than Osborn’s. Besides “the living dead” and angels, Hébert’s examples and exercises include vampires, transvestites, the Passion of Christ, and the following very relevant quotation:
“Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” (Matthew 5:37)
Comments Off on Wednesday March 18, 2009
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Tuesday March 17, 2009
Deep Structures
The Square of Oppositon
at Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy
The Square of Opposition
in its original form
"The diagram above is from a ninth century manuscript of Apuleius' commentary on Aristotle's Perihermaneias, probably one of the oldest surviving pictures of the square."
— Edward Buckner at The Logic Museum
From the webpage "Semiotics for Beginners: Paradigmatic Analysis," by Daniel Chandler:
The Semiotic Square
"The structuralist semiotician Algirdas Greimas introduced the semiotic square (which he adapted from the 'logical square' of scholastic philosophy) as a means of analysing paired concepts more fully (Greimas 1987,* xiv, 49). The semiotic square is intended to map the logical conjunctions and disjunctions relating key semantic features in a text. Fredric Jameson notes that 'the entire mechanism… is capable of generating at least ten conceivable positions out of a rudimentary binary opposition' (in Greimas 1987,* xiv). Whilst this suggests that the possibilities for signification in a semiotic system are richer than the either/or of binary logic, but that [sic] they are nevertheless subject to 'semiotic constraints' – 'deep structures' providing basic axes of signification."
* Greimas, Algirdas (1987): On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (trans. Paul J Perron & Frank H Collins). London: Frances Pinter
Another version of the semiotic square:
Krauss says that her figure "is, of course, a Klein Group."
Here is a more explicit figure representing the Klein group:
There is also the logical
diamond of opposition —
A semiotic (as opposed to logical)
diamond has been used to illustrate
remarks by Fredric Jameson,
a Marxist literary theorist:
|
"Introduction to Algirdas Greimas, Module on the Semiotic Square," by Dino Felluga at Purdue University–
The semiotic square has proven to be an influential concept not only in narrative theory but in the ideological criticism of Fredric Jameson, who uses the square as "a virtual map of conceptual closure, or better still, of the closure of ideology itself" ("Foreword"* xv). (For more on Jameson, see the [Purdue University] Jameson module on ideology.) Greimas' schema is useful since it illustrates the full complexity of any given semantic term (seme). Greimas points out that any given seme entails its opposite or "contrary." "Life" (s1) for example is understood in relation to its contrary, "death" (s2). Rather than rest at this simple binary opposition (S), however, Greimas points out that the opposition, "life" and "death," suggests what Greimas terms a contradictory pair (-S), i.e., "not-life" (-s1) and "not-death" (-s2). We would therefore be left with the following semiotic square (Fig. 1): 
As Jameson explains in the Foreword to Greimas' On Meaning, "-s1 and -s2"—which in this example are taken up by "not-death" and "not-life"—"are the simple negatives of the two dominant terms, but include far more than either: thus 'nonwhite' includes more than 'black,' 'nonmale' more than 'female'" (xiv); in our example, not-life would include more than merely death and not-death more than life.
* Jameson, Fredric. "Foreword." On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. By Algirdas Greimas. Trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1976.
|
"The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God."
— The Gameplayers of Zan, by M.A. Foster
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon,
Gravity's Rainbow
Crosses used by semioticians
to baffle their opponents
are illustrated above.
Some other kinds of crosses,
and another kind of opponent:
|
Monday, July 11, 2005
Logos
for St. Benedict's Day Click on either of the logos below for religious meditations– on the left, a Jewish meditation from the Conference of Catholic Bishops; on the right, an Aryan meditation from Stormfront.org.
Both logos represent different embodiments of the "story theory" of truth, as opposed to the "diamond theory" of truth. Both logos claim, in their own ways, to represent the eternal Logos of the Christian religion. I personally prefer the "diamond theory" of truth, represented by the logo below.
See also the previous entry Sunday, July 10, 2005
Mathematics
and Narrative Click on the title for a narrative about
Nikolaos K. Artemiadis,
"First of all, I'd like to
— Remark attributed to Plato
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Comments Off on Tuesday March 17, 2009
Monday, March 16, 2009
Monday March 16, 2009
Damnation Morning
continued
continued
Annals of Prose Style
|
“Preserving a strict unity of time and place, this stark tale of a young woman’s decline into insanity is set in a summer home on a holiday island. It is the first part of the trilogy
that comprises Winter Light and The Silence, films which are generally seen as addressing Bergman’s increasing disillusionment with the emotional coldness of his inherited Lutheran religion. In particular here, Bergman focuses on the absence of familial love which might perhaps have pulled Karin (Andersson) back from the brink; while Karin’s mental disintegration manifests itself in the belief that God is a spider. As she slips inexorably into madness, she is observed with terrifying objectivity by her emotionally paralyzed father (Björnstrand) and seemingly helpless husband (von Sydow).”
— Nigel Floyd, Time Out, quoted at Bergmanorama
Related material:
1. The “spider” symbol of Fritz Leiber’s short story “Damnation Morning“–
2. The Illuminati Diamond of Hollywood’s “Angels & Demons” (to open May 15), and
3. The following diagram by one “John Opsopaus“–
Comments Off on Monday March 16, 2009
Monday March 16, 2009
Damnation Morning
continued
continued
Annals of Prose Style
|
“Preserving a strict unity of time and place, this stark tale of a young woman’s decline into insanity is set in a summer home on a holiday island. It is the first part of the trilogy that comprises Winter Light and The Silence, films which are generally seen as addressing Bergman’s increasing disillusionment with the emotional coldness of his inherited Lutheran religion. In particular here, Bergman focuses on the absence of familial love which might perhaps have pulled Karin (Andersson) back from the brink; while Karin’s mental disintegration manifests itself in the belief that God is a spider. As she slips inexorably into madness, she is observed with terrifying objectivity by her emotionally paralyzed father (Björnstrand) and seemingly helpless husband (von Sydow).”
— Nigel Floyd, Time Out, quoted at Bergmanorama
Related material:
1. The “spider” symbol of Fritz Leiber’s short story “Damnation Morning”–
2. Hollywood’s “Angels & Demons” (to open May 15), and
3. The following diagram by one “John Opsopaus”–
Comments Off on Monday March 16, 2009
Monday March 16, 2009
Plato’s Ghost
“Plato’s Ghost evokes Yeats’s lament that any claim to worldly perfection inevitably is proven wrong by the philosopher’s ghost….”
— Princeton University Press on Plato’s Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics (by Jeremy Gray, September 2008)
“She’s a brick house…”
— Plato’s Ghost according to
Log24, April 2007
“First of all, I’d like
to thank the Academy.”
— Remark attributed to Plato
(Cf. the “I tell you a mystery”
link of March 11 in
“Politics, Religion, Scarlett.”)
Comments Off on Monday March 16, 2009
Monday March 16, 2009
(Cf. Sinatra’s birthday, 2004)
One for his baby:
Ron Silver as
Alan Dershowitz in
“Reversal of Fortune”
suggests the epigraph of
The Particulars of Rapture:
Reflections on Exodus —
two stanzas from attorney
Wallace Stevens
quoted here yesterday afternoon.
One more for the road:
A link that appeared in a
different form in Saturday’s
“Flowers for Barry“–
Speed the Plow.
This leads to
A Hanukkah Tale
containing the following:
This is, in turn, related to
Harvard’s Barry Mazur‘s recent
essay on time in mathematics
and literature (pdf).
Comments Off on Monday March 16, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Sunday March 15, 2009
The Origin of Change
A note on the figure
from this morning's sermon:
"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On one another, as a man depends On a woman, day on night, the imagined On the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace And forth the particulars of rapture come." -- Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," Canto IV of "It Must Change"
Comments Off on Sunday March 15, 2009
Sunday March 15, 2009
Angels, Demons,
"Symbology"
"On Monday morning, 9 March, after visiting the Mayor of Rome and the Municipal Council on the Capitoline Hill, the Holy Father spoke to the Romans who gathered in the square outside the Senatorial Palace…
'… a verse by Ovid, the great Latin poet, springs to mind. In one of his elegies he encouraged the Romans of his time with these words:
"Perfer et obdura: multo graviora tulisti."
"Hold out and persist:
you have got through
far more difficult situations."
(Tristia, Liber V, Elegia XI, verse 7).'"
This journal
on 9 March:
on 9 March:
Note the color-interchange
symmetry of each symbol
under 180-degree rotation.
Related material:
The Illuminati Diamond:
Dan Brown's novel Angels & Demons introduced in the year 2000 the fictional academic discipline of "symbology" and a fictional Harvard professor of that discipline, Robert Langdon (named after ambigram* artist John Langdon).
Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon
Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon
A possible source for Brown's term "symbology" is a 1995 web page, "The Rotation of the Elements," by one "John Opsopaus." (Cf. Art History Club.)
"The four qualities are the key to understanding the rotation of the elements and many other applications of the symbology of the four elements." –John Opsopaus
* "…ambigrams were common in symbology…." —Angels & Demons
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Saturday, March 14, 2009
Saturday March 14, 2009
Flowers for Barry
|
On Time
(in Mathematics and Literature) “… I want to spend these twenty minutes savoring, and working up, the real complexity of the metaphorical relationship of time and distance– to defamiliarize it for us. And then I will give a few examples of how imaginative literature makes use of the inherent strangeness in this relationship: Time ↔ Distance.
And finally I will offer my opinion (which I think must be everyone’s opinion) about why we derive significant– but not total– comfort from this equation.” — Barry Mazur, March 8, 2009, draft (pdf) of talk for conference on comparative literature* |
Another version of
Mazur’s metaphor
Time ↔ Distance:
— Steven H. Cullinane,
October 8, 2003
For some context in
comparative literature,
see Time Fold
(Oct. 10, 2003)
and A Hanukkah Tale
(Dec. 22, 2008).
Related material:
Rat Psychology
yesterday.
* American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) annual meeting, March 26-29, 2009, at Harvard. Mazur’s talk is scheduled for March 28.
Comments Off on Saturday March 14, 2009