"No matter how it's done, you won't like it."
-- Robert Redford to Robert M. Pirsig in Lila

"The evening before Harriet injures Roy,
she asks him, in a restaurant car,
whether he has read Homer."
-- Oxford website on the film of The Natural

"Brush Up Your Shakespeare"
-- Cole Porter lyric for a show that opened
on December 30, 1948

Judy Davis as Harriet Bird

                                        

Thine eyes I love...
Shakespeare, Sonnet 132

"Roy's Guenevere-like lover is named Memo Paris,
presumably the face that launched a thousand strikes."
--  Oxford website on the film of The Natural 

Nicole Kidman
as Memo Paris

"Iris is someone to watch over Roy."
-- Oxford website on the film of The Natural 

Kate Winslet as young Iris Murdoch

From the second-draft screenplay for The Sting,
with Robert Redford as Hooker:

HOOKER
(shuffling a little)
I, ah...thought you might wanna come out for a while.  Maybe have a drink or somethin'.

LORETTA
You move right along, don't ya.

HOOKER
(with more innocence than confidence)
I don't mean nothin' by it.  I just don't know many regular girls, that's all.

LORETTA
And you expect me to come over, just like that.

HOOKER
If I expected somethin', I wouldn't be still standin' out here in the hall.

Loretta looks at him carefully.  She knows it's not a line.

LORETTA
(with less resistance now)
I don't even know you.

HOOKER
(slowly)
You know me.  I'm just like you...
It's two in the morning and I don't know nobody.

The two just stand there in silence a second.  There's nothing more to say.  She stands back and lets him in.

Iris Murdoch on Plato's Form of the Good,
by Joseph Malikail:

"For Murdoch as for Plato, the Good belongs to Plato's Realm of Being not the Realm of Becoming.... However, Murdoch does not read Plato as declaring his faith in a divine being when he says that the Good is

the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and the lord of light in the visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which [one who] would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eyes fixed (Republic...).

Though she acknowledges the influence of Simone Weil in her reading of Plato, her understanding of Plato on Good and God is not Weil's (1952, ch.7)*. For Murdoch,

Plato never identified his Form of the Good with God (the use of theos in the Republic... is a facon de parler), and this separation is for him an essential one. Religion is above the level of the 'gods.' There are no gods and no God either. Neo-Platonic thinkers made the identification (of God with good) possible; and the Judaeo-Christian tradition has made it easy and natural for us to gather together the aesthetic and consoling impression of Good as a person (1992, 38)**.

As she understands Plato:

The Form of the Good as creative power is not a Book of Genesis creator ex nihilo ... Plato does not set up the Form of the Good as God, this would be absolutely un-Platonic, nor does he anywhere give the sign of missing or needing a real God to assist his explanations. On the contrary, Good is above the level of the gods or God (ibid., 475)**.

Mary Warnock, her friend and fellow-philosopher, sums up Murdoch's metaphysical view of the Vision of the Good:

She [Murdoch] holds that goodness has a real though abstract existence in the world. The actual existence of goodness is, in her view, the way it is now possible to understand the idea of God.

Or as Murdoch herself puts it, 'Good represents the reality of which God is the dream.' (1992, 496)**"

*Weil, Simone. 1952. Intimations of Christianity Among The Ancient Greeks. Ark Paperbacks, 1987/1952.

**Murdoch, Iris. 1992. Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals. London: Chatto and Windus. 

From the conclusion of Lila,
by Robert M. Pirsig:

"Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer over the fence that ended the ballgame."

This midnight's site music is "Solace: A Mexican Serenade," part of which was used in the film "The Sting." George Roy Hill, the film's director, died Friday, Dec. 27. He turned 81 on Friday, Dec. 20. See my note of that date,

"Last-Minute Shopping."

Zen meditation: "Kylie Eleison!"

(For evidence that this is a valid Japanese religious exclamation, click here.)

"To die will be an awfully big adventure."
-- Peter Pan

See also my note "Last-Minute Shopping"
of December 20, 2002, and my note
"An Anti-Christmas Present" of June 25, 2002.

On the bright side: Berrie joins comedians
W. C. Fields and Charlie Chaplin,
who also died on Christmas Day. 
"Dying is easy; comedy is hard." -- Unknown source.
See my note on Santa's last words.

Today is the feast day of St. Hoagy Carmichael, who was born on the feast day of Cecelia, patron saint of music. This midnight's site music is "Stardust," by Carmichael (lyrics by Mitchell Parish). See also "Dead Poets Society" -- my entry of Friday, December 13, on the Carmichael song "Skylark" -- and the entry "Rhyme Scheme" of later that same day.

Tonight's site music is for Stephen Dedalus and Miss Quinn, courtesy of Eithne Ní Bhraonáin.

"Heaven is a state, a sort of metaphysical state."

-- John O'Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938

In memory of soldier-priest Jose Morelos,
producer Darryl Zanuck ("Viva Zapata!"),
and actress Helene Stanley ("Holiday in Mexico"
and action model for "Cinderella"), each of
whom died on a December 22, tonight's midnight
midi is "A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes."

See also

Heaven, Hell, and Hollywood and
 
Trifecta.

A white horse comes as if on wings.

See also Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

"The oral history of Los Angeles
is written in piano bars." 
-- Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Tonight's midnight music in the garden of good and evil is a shamelessly romantic classic from a site titled simply Piano Bar.

De Rêve En Rêverie
(Lyrics by Eddy Marnay)

Tu es le pianiste
Et moi je suis ton encore.
Un feu de joie pour deux
Tombe sur nous d'un ciel amoureux.
Toi, toi qui m'as tout appris
Moi, dans l'ombre de ta vie
Je vis,
Je vis de rêve
En rêverie. 

 Washington Square Press paperback, 1981, page 222 

Introduction

"There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling...

... is it of the Virgin's silver beauty,
All fish below the thighs?
She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;
When, with her right hand she crooks a finger, smiling,
How many the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.

Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?"

-- Robert Graves, "To Juan at the Winter Solstice"

Illustrations

The Virgin's Beauty 

 On the Beach

A Maiden's Prayer

Answered Prayer

Dialogue

Act III Scene ii:

Quotations

"Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember nothing?" 
-- T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"

"At the still point, there the dance is." 
-- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

"I know what 'nothing' means...."
-- Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays

"How do you solve a problem like Maria?"
-- Oscar Hammerstein II

"...problems can be solved by manipulating just two symbols, 1 and 0...." 
-- George Johnson, obituary of Claude Shannon

"The female and the male continue this charming dance, populating the world with all living beings." 
-- Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess,
    Penguin Arkana paperback, 1999, Chapter 17,
    "Lingam/Yoni" 

"According to Showalter's essay*, 'In Elizabethan slang, 'nothing' was a term for the female genitalia . . . what lies between maids' legs, for, in the male visual system of representation and desire.... Ophelia's story becomes the Story of O -- the zero, the empty circle or mystery of feminine difference, the cipher of female sexuality to be deciphered by feminist interpretation.' (222)* Ophelia is a highly sexual being..."

-- Leigh DiAngelo,
   "Ophelia as a Sexual Being"

S. H. Cullinane: "No shit, Sherlock."

*Showalter, Elaine. "Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism." Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford. Boston: Bedford Books of St.Martin's Press, 1994. 220-238.

Denouement

Is that nothing between your legs or are you just happy to see me?

Tonight's site music in the garden of good and evil is "Hooray for Hollywood," with lyrics by Johnny Mercer:

Hooray for Hollywood.
You may be homely in your neighborhood,
But if you think you can be an actor,
see Mr. Factor,
he'd make a monkey look good.
Within a half an hour,
you look like Tyrone Power!
Hooray for Hollywood!

From Pif magazine:

Nightmare Alley (1947)
Directed by Edmund Goulding
Reviewed by Nick Burton

"Edmund Goulding's film of William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel Nightmare Alley may just be the great forgotten American film; it is certainly the darkest film that came from the Hollywood studio system in the '40s....

A never better Tyrone Power stars as Stan Carlisle, a small-time carny shill....  Stan shills for mind reader Zeena.... The... pretty 'electric girl'...   tells Stan that Zeena... had a 'code' for the mind-reading act... Stan... decides to seduce... Zeena in hopes of luring the code from her."

The rest of this review is well worth reading, though less relevant to my present theme -- that of my 

Sermon for St. Patrick's Day,

"Imagine this: A spectator is invited to take a readable and 100% examinable, 400 page, 160,000 word novel, open it to any page and think of any word on that page. Without touching the book or approaching the spectator, you reveal the word in the simplest, most startlingly direct manner ever! It truly must be seen to be believed.

The ultimate any-word-on-any-page method that makes all other book tests obsolete....

All pages are different.

Nothing is written down.

There are no stooges of any kind. Everything may be examined....

 'Throw away your Key. This is direct mindreading at its best.'"

Hooray.

Mercer's lyrics are from the 1937 film " Hollywood Hotel."  For a somewhat more in-depth look at Hollywood, hotels of this period, and mind-reading, see

Shining Forth.

In celebration of today's nationwide opening of Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" --

See also my Sermon for St. Patrick's Day. 

This contains the following metaphysical observation from Mark Helprin's novel Winter's Tale:

"Nothing is random."

For those who, like the protagonist of Joan Didion's

Play It As It Lays,

feel that they "know what nothing means," I recommend the following readings:

From Peter Goldman's essay

Christian Mystery and Responsibility:
Gnosticism in Derrida's The Gift of Death --

The gift made to me by God as he holds me in his gaze and in his hand while remaining inaccessible to me, the terribly dissymmetrical gift of the mysterium tremendum only allows me to respond and only rouses me to the responsibility it gives me by making a gift of death, giving the secret of death, a new experience of death. (33)"

The above-mentioned sermon is a meditation on randomness and page numbers, focusing on page 265 in particular.

On page 265 of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce,  we find the following remark:

"Googlaa pluplu." 

Following Joyce's instructions, and entering "pluplu" in the Google search engine, we find the following:

"Datura is a delusional drug rather than a hallucinatory one. You don't see patterns, trails, or any cool visual effects; you just actually believe in things that aren't there....  I remember holding a glass for a while--but when I raised it to my mouth to take a drink, my fingers closed around nothingness because there was no glass there....

Using datura is the closest I've ever come to death.... Of all the drugs I've taken, this is the one that I'd be too scared to ever take again."

-- PluPlu, August 4, 2000

 
For those who don't need AA, perhaps the offer of Ed Harris in the classic study of gangs of New York, "State of Grace," is an offer of somewhat safer holiday cheer that should not be refused.

In keeping with Irish themes in the Mark Helprin novel Winter's Tale (see yesterday's entry with that title) and in the new Martin Scorsese film "Gangs of New York," as well as in observance of Maud Gonne's birthday today, our site music returns to the theme of October 17, "Lament for Kilcash." 

The title is that of a novel by Mark Helprin.

On this date in 1903, the Williamsburg Bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan was opened to traffic.

From the opening of Helprin's 1983 novel:

"The horse.... trotted alone over the carriage road of the Williamsburg Bridge, before the light, while the toll keeper was sleeping by his stove and many stars were still blazing above the city."

See also Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.

"The Forms are abstract but real."

-- Rebecca Goldstein on Plato

This midnight's site music is in honor of Sinatra's first recording session for Reprise on December 19, 1960 (which included "Ring-a-Ding-Ding").

See also The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers, and this applet for devising your own peal of changes.

Those who prefer Disney may go to this web page and click on the title "The Bells of Notre Dame" for a different midi.  For Mary Gaitskill's more mature approach to Victor Hugo's classic, click here.

On this midnight in the garden of good and evil, our new site music is "Nica's Dream."

From a website on composer Horace Silver:

"Horace Silver apparently composed Nica's Dream (1956) for Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter-Rothschild, an English aristocrat and a very dear friend of his. She was known to the New York press as the Jazz Baroness and to the black musicians for whom she was something of a patron, simply as Nica. Her apartment in the fashionable Hotel Stanhope on Fifth Avenue became a 'hospitality suite for some of the greatest jazz players of the day, whom she treated generously.' (Jack Chambers, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis, University of Toronto Press, 1985, 1:248)

This music is not unrelated to the work of Thomas Pynchon.  From an essay by Charles Hollander:  

"There are some notable parallels between Nica and the woman Stencil knows as V., who started her career with '...a young crude Mata Hari act.' (V.; 386)....  Not that V. is Nica in any roman a clef sense: she is not. But the resonances are powerful at the level of the subtext. Nica is a Rothschild whose life reflects the issues Pynchon wants us to attend in V.: disinheritance, old dynasty vs. new dynasty, secret agents and couriers, plots and counter-plots, 'The Big One, the century's master cabal,' and 'the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name' (V.; 226)...." 

See also my journal entry for the December 16-17 midnight, "Just Seventeen."

I need a photo-opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard
-- Paul Simon

From The New York Times, Dec. 16, 2002

(See yesterday's notes) --

Durga

Today's site music* is in honor of a memorable date. *© 1963 Northern Songs. Quiet may be restored by using the midi control box at the top right of this page.  Please let me know if your browser is not showing this control box.

Veronica

From a June/July 1997
Hadassah Magazine article:

"Plato is obviously Jewish."

-- Rebecca Goldstein

Readings on the Dark Lady  

From a July 27, 1997
New York Times article
by Holland Cotter:

"The single most important and sustained model for Khmer culture was India, from which Cambodia inherited two religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, and an immensely sophisticated art. This influence announces itself early in this exhibition in a spectacular seventh-century figure of the Hindu goddess Durga, whose hip-slung pose and voluptuous torso, as plush and taut as ripe fruit, combine the naturalism and idealism of the very finest Indian work."

From The Dancing Wu Li Masters,
by Gary Zukav, Harvard '64:

"The Wu Li Masters know that physicists are doing more than 'discovering the endless diversity of nature.' They are dancing with Kali [or Durga], the Divine Mother of Hindu mythology."

"Eastern religions have nothing to say about physics, but they have a great deal to say about human experience. In Hindu mythology, Kali, the Divine Mother, is the symbol for the infinite diversity of experience. Kali represents the entire physical plane. She is the drama, tragedy, humor, and sorrow of life. She is the brother, father, sister, mother, lover, and friend. She is the fiend, monster, beast, and brute. She is the sun and the ocean. She is the grass and the dew. She is our sense of accomplishment and our sense of doing worthwhile. Our thrill of discovery is a pendant on her bracelet. Our gratification is a spot of color on her cheek. Our sense of importance is the bell on her toe.

This full and seductive, terrible and wonderful earth mother always has something to offer. Hindus know the impossibility of seducing her or conquering her and the futility of loving her or hating her; so they do the only thing that they can do. They simply honor her."

How could I dance with another....?

-- John Lennon and Paul McCartney, 1962-1963  

This entry is in gratitude for Rebecca Goldstein's
excellent essay
in The New York Times of December 16, 2002.

She talks about the perennial conflict between two theories of truth that Richard Trudeau called the "story theory" and the "diamond theory." My entry of December 13, 2002, "Rhyme Scheme," links the word "real" to an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that contains the following:

"According to a platonist about arithmetic, the truth of the sentence '7 is prime' entails the existence of an abstract object, the number 7. This object is abstract because it has no spatial or temporal location, and is causally inert. A platonic realist about arithmetic will say that the number 7 exists and instantiates the property of being prime independently of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on. A certain kind of nominalist rejects the existence claim which the platonic realist makes: there are no abstract objects, so sentences such as '7 is prime' are false..."

This discussion of "sevenness," along with the discussion of "eightness" in my December 14, 2002, note on Bach, suggest that I supply a transcription of a note in my paper journal from 2001 that deals with these matters.

From a paper journal note of October 5, 2001:

Added 12/17/02: See also
the portrait of Rebecca Goldstein in
Hadassah Magazine
 Volume
78
Number 10
(June/July 1997).

For more on the Jewish propensity to
assign mystical significance to numbers, see
Rabbi Zwerin's Kol Nidre Sermon.

For the significance of "seven" in Judaism, see
Zayin: The Woman of Valor.
For the significance of "eight" in Judaism, see
Chet: The Life Dynamic.

For the cabalistic significance of
"Seven is heaven, Eight is a gate,"
note that Zayin, Seven, signifies
"seven chambers of Paradise"
and that Chet, Eight, signifies
the "gateway to infinity."

For the significance of the date 12.17, see
Tet: The Concealed Good.

"Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132, is one of the transcendent masterworks of the Western classical tradition. It is built around its luminous third movement, titled 'Holy song of thanksgiving by one recovering from an illness.'

In this third movement, the aging Beethoven speaks, clearly and distinctly, in a voice seemingly meant both for all the world and for each individual who listens to it. The music, written in the ancient Lydian mode, is slow and grave and somehow both a struggle and a celebration at the same time.

This is music written by a supreme master at the height of his art, saying that through all illness, tribulation and sorrow there is a strength, there is a light, there is a hope."

--  Andrew Lindemann Malone

"Eliot's final poetic achievement--and, for many, his greatest--is the set of four poems published together in 1943 as Four Quartets.... Structurally--though the analogy is a loose one--Eliot modeled the Quartets on the late string quartets of Beethoven, especially... the A Minor Quartet; as early as 1931 he had written the poet Stephen Spender, 'I have the A Minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.'"

-- Anonymous author at a
Longman Publishers website

"Each of the late quartets has a unique structure, and the structure of the Quartet in A Minor is one of the most striking of all. Its five movements form an arch. At the center is a stunning slow movement that lasts nearly half the length of the entire quartet...

The third movement (Molto adagio) has a remarkable heading: in the score Beethoven titles it 'Hymn of Thanksgiving to the Godhead from an Invalid,' a clear reflection of the illness he had just come through. This is a variation movement, and Beethoven lays out the slow opening section, full of heartfelt music. But suddenly the music switches to D major and leaps ahead brightly; Beethoven marks this section 'Feeling New Strength.' These two sections alternate through this movement (the form is A-B-A-B-A), and the opening section is so varied on each reappearance that it seems to take on an entirely different character each time: each section is distinct, and each is moving in its own way (Beethoven marks the third 'With the greatest feeling'). This movement has seemed to many listeners the greatest music Beethoven ever wrote. and perhaps the problem of all who try to write about this music is precisely that it cannot be described in words and should be experienced simply as music."

--  Eric Bromberger,
Borromeo Quartet program notes 

In accordance with these passages, here is a web page with excellent transcriptions for piano by Steven Edwards of Beethoven's late quartets:

The 16 String Quartets.

Our site music for today, Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Opus 132, Movement 3 (1825), is taken from this web page.