Thursday, September 30, 2004 6:25 PM
Out for Blood
____________________
Dedication added on
Oct. 4, 2004, 2:10 PM:
To Jacques Levy,
who died on Sept. 30, 2004.
Levy directed "Red Cross,"
a Sam Shepard play that is
said to be about
"the vampire quality
of language."
_____________________
Kerry "shouldn’t be looking to score
technical points like this is
Harvard-Yale debate society."
-- Chris Lehane, quoted in
today's Washington Post
From today's Harvard Crimson:
Ben and Jerry:
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"I know I'm in the minority,
but I like Bush."
-- Jerry Bruckheimer,
quoted in the
New York Daily News
of April 11, 2004
Thursday, September 30, 2004 2:14 PM
Related reading:
Related viewing:
Today is the birthday of
Deborah Kerr and also
Translators' Day.
Thursday, September 30, 2004 12:00 AM
Midnight in the Garden
"With a little effort,
anything can be shown
to connect with anything else:
existence is infinitely
cross-referenced."
-- Opening sentence
of Martha Cooley's
The Archivist
|
Woe unto Isaiah 5:20 |
As she spoke |
The world Cole Porter |
Example:
Mozart's K 265,
the page number 265,
and a story by George MacDonald.
Wednesday, September 29, 2004 7:11 PM
Hounded
7:11:08 PM
"Scalia said he made the decision to stay on the case based on past practice. 'Not a single case was brought up in the motion to recuse, it was based on nothing other than newspaper editorials, and I'll be doggone if I'm to get hounded off the case by newspaper editorials.'"
-- Boston Globe, Sept. 29, 2004
Entries related both to the previous entry and to the above (in style, if not in substance):
The Black Queen and Amores Perros.
Wednesday, September 29, 2004 11:02 AM
A Tune for Michaelmas
Wednesday, September 29, 2004 1:00 AM
Romantic Interaction,
continued
From Karl Iagnemma:
From Log24.net, March 3, 2004:
"No se puede vivir sin amar."
-- Malcolm Lowry,
Under the Volcano
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 3:33 PM
3:33:33 PM
Romantic Interaction, continued...
The Rhyme of Time
From American Dante Bibliography for 1983:
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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):
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"... 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.
Monday, September 27, 2004 3:00 PM
Romantic Interaction
continued...
(See previous entry.)
From today's Harvard Crimson:
"Pudding Show Features
Wild West Theme"
From yesterday's entry,
a tribute to Olivia Newton-John:
"At the still point,
there the dance is."
-- T. S. Eliot
Xanadu (1980)
For related material, see
Balanchine's Birthday (1/9/03)
and Deep Game (6/26/04).
Sunday, September 26, 2004 1:11 PM
Romantic Interaction
(See previous entry.)
"At the still point,
there the dance is."
-- T. S. Eliot
For Olivia Newton-John
on her birthday,
at 1:11:11 pm EDT
"Keep me suspended in time with you;
Don't let this moment die.
I get a feeling when I'm with you
None of the rules apply.
But I know for certain
Goodbye is a crime;
So love if you need me,
Suspend me in time."
-- Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu
Saturday, September 25, 2004 5:30 PM
Writings for
Yom Kippur
Thirsty for knowing what God knows,
Juda Loew devoted himself to permutations
of letters and complex variations
New York State Lottery,
evening, Sept. 24, 2004: 185
and finally said the Name which is the Key...
New York State Lottery,
midday, Sept. 25, 2004: 673.
On 185:
See Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (PI), section 185, on the nature of rules.
On 673:
See the following works:
Moral of these writings, thanks to Gregory Chaitin:
"Mais quand une regle est fort composée, ce qui luy est conforme, passe pour irrégulier."
[But when a rule is extremely complex, that which conforms to it passes for random.]
--- Leibniz, Discours de métaphysique, VI, 1686
See also the previous entry, High Holy Hexagram, and Pi continued.
Friday, September 24, 2004 6:49 PM
Readings for
Yom Kippur
The film Pi is, in part, about an alleged secret name of God that can be uttered only on Yom Kippur. This is my personal version of such a name-- not an utterance, but instead a picture:
6:49:32 PM
Sept. 24, 2004
The Details:
Synthemes and Spreads (pdf)
(Appendix A of
"Classification of
Partial Spreads in PG(4,2),"
by Leonard H. Soicher et al.)
Friday, September 24, 2004 1:06 PM
Time and Chance
"Time and chance happeneth to them all."
-- Ecclesiastes 9-11
"With the passage of time, everyone participated in the ever-increasingly secret lottery."
-- Summary of Borges's Lottery
The winning evening lottery number for Sunday, September 19, 2004, and for Thursday, September 23, 2004, in the State of Grace (Kelly) was
408.
See a 9/20/04 story about 408
and a 1/4/03 story about Grace and jazz.
From the latter:
Now you has jazz.
— Cole Porter, lyric for "High Society,"
set in Newport, Rhode Island, 1956
Note that yesterday's entries dealt with "the jazz church" and that Sunday, Sept. 19, 2004-- the first of the "408" days above-- was the date of death of Ellis Marsalis Sr., patriarch of a family of jazz musicians. The second of the "408" days above-- yesterday-- was Ray Charles's birthday.
In Ray We Trust
June 28, 2004 cover
by Eric Palma
(See New Gold Standard: Cultural Capital)
Thursday, September 23, 2004 2:00 PM
Aluminum, Your Shiny Friend
(Continued)
| Vital Statistics: Location: New York, NY Completion Date: 1977 Cost: $175 million Height: 915 feet Stories: 59 Materials: Steel Facing Materials: Aluminum, reflective glass |  for larger image. |
"From the very beginning, the Citicorp Center (today, the Citigroup Center) in New York City was an engineering challenge. When planning for the skyscraper began in the early 1970s, the northwest corner of the proposed building site was occupied by
The church allowed Citicorp to build the skyscraper under one condition: a new church would have to be built on the same corner, with no connection to the Citicorp building and no columns passing through it.
How did the engineers do it? They set the 59-story tower on four massive columns, positioned at the center of each side, rather than at the corners. This design allowed the northwest corner of the building to cantilever 72 feet over the new church."
Source: PBS, Building BIG.
Citigroup (NYSE:C) is said to be the largest financial services conglomerate in the world.
For more on the close relationship between churches and banks, see the works of T. S. Eliot and a description of the City of London,
For more on Eliot, architecture, and another Harvard man, use links in the previous entry.
Thursday, September 23, 2004 3:00 AM
Church Architecture
In memory of Harvard-trained
architect Edward Larrabee Barnes
From Martha Cooley's The Archivist,
April 1999 paperback, page 301:
For related design issues
at Harvard, click here.
Wednesday, September 22, 2004 2:38 PM
Tribute
In memory of Russ Meyer, who "made industrial films for Standard Oil and lumber companies before making his own films," a picture that might aptly (see Pi continued) be titled
.
By the same designer:
Click on picture for details.
Object of game:
Connect the devils
with their tail ends.
Manufacturer:
Click on logo for details.
Related material:
The Crimson Passion
Wednesday, September 22, 2004 1:17 PM
Tuesday, September 21, 2004 10:25 AM
First Idea and Last Night
In memory of Saint Norman Cantor, an author of "stunning
a link to Log24.net entries of that date.
Give 'em Hell, Norman.
Above: recommended videos
from the date of Cantor's death
"Dante's hell was intended to be a shocking literary device. The Divine Comedy is not a work of theology or a spiritual treatise any more than James Joyce's Ulysses is a sociological study of Dublin."
-- Norman F. Cantor
Hollywood, Florida
Monday, September 20, 2004 12:00 PM
Pi continued:
(see 9/15/04)
Renegade mathematician Max Cohen (Sean Gullette, left) and the leader of the Kabbalah sect, Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman) have a chance encounter on a Chinatown street corner.
The Magic Schmuck
"Confucius is said to have received only one inappropriate answer, i.e., hexagram 22, GRACE -- a thoroughly aesthetic hexagram. This is reminiscent of the advice given to Socrates by his daemon -- 'You ought to make more music' -- whereupon Socrates took to playing the flute. Confucius and Socrates compete for first place as far as reasonableness and a pedagogic attitude to life are concerned; but it is unlikely that either of them occupied himself with 'lending grace to the beard on his chin,' as the second line of this hexagram advises. Unfortunately, reason and pedagogy often lack charm and grace, and so the oracle may not have been wrong after all."
-- Carl Jung, Foreword to the I Ching
Yesterday, class, in keeping with our morning German lesson, our evening (5:01:22 PM ET) entry was Hexagram 22, Pi (pronounced "bee"). The Chinese term pi may be translated in various ways... As ornament, as adornment, or as in a German web page:
| I-Ching 22 | Pi | Der Schmuck |
The Wilhelm translation of pi is "grace." This suggests we examine yesterday's evening lottery number in the State of Grace, Pennsylvania:
408.
As kabbalists know, there are many ways of interpreting numbers. In keeping with the viewpoint of Ecclesiastes -- "time and chance happeneth" -- let us interpret this instance of chance as an instance of time... namely, 4/08. Striving for consistency in our meditations, let us examine the lessons for...
4/08 2003 -- Death's Dream Kingdom --
and 4/08 2004 -- Triple Crown.
From the former:
"When smashing monuments, save the pedestals; they always come in handy."
From the latter:
"The tug of an art that unapologetically sees itself as on a par with science and religion is not to be underestimated.... Philosophical ambition and formal modesty still constitute Minimalism's bottom line."
In keeping with the above, from
this year's Log24.net
Rosh Hashanah service...
A Minimalist
Pedestal:
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For a poetic interpretation
of this symbol, see
Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View).
Sunday, September 19, 2004 5:01 PM
5:01:22
Sunday, September 19, 2004 11:00 AM
Sunday Shul
From this date last year:
Today's Hebrew lesson:
From Wikipedia--
"In the Bible, Gershom (גרשם "Expulsion"...) was the firstborn son of Moses and Zipporah."
He was circumcised by Zipporah, hence saving Moses from God's wrath.
This article is a stub."
A search for information on circumcision by zipper yields the following gem:
"Doctor Paul M. Fleiss, MD, MPH, is assistant clinical professor of Pædiatrics at the University of Southern California Medical Center. He is the author of numerous scientific articles published in leading national and international medical journals. Paul M. Fleiss is a Jewish Intactivist — one who promotes genital integrity of children while opposing genital mutilation of children. He is also a convicted felon, having been convicted in connection with his daughter Heidi Fleiss's activities in running a prostitution ring."
-- Wikipedia
Today's German lesson:
Properties of an image
on a German web page:
| Location: | |
| Width: | 160px |
| Height: | 220px |
| Size of File: | 12.5 KB |
| Alternate text: | Schmuck |
Saturday, September 18, 2004 2:56 PM
The First Idea
From aldaily.com,
a service of
The Chronicle of
Higher Education:
New Books"Mr. Oppenheimer, given what has happened since, would you again accept to develop the bomb? Even after Hiroshima?” “Yes”... more» The foundations of civilization are but modest: consider for instance games of peekaboo and patty-cake... more» |
Peekaboo:
Wallace Stevens on "The First Idea"
Patty-cake:
"A specialist in Homer's Odyssey and early Greek lyric poetry, Joseph Russo is the only American classicist among six international scholars to provide commentary for Oxford University Press' three-volume edition of the epic poem."
-- Introduction to an inaugural lecture, "Language, Poetry, Philology, and 'The Stateliest Measure,'" at Haverford College given by Joseph Russo on Feb. 26, 1999
Saturday, September 18, 2004 2:56 AM
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
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Exhibit C:
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Log24.net, Thursday, Soul and "In the fullness of time, |
Click on pictures for details.
Saturday, September 18, 2004 12:12 AM
Playing God
Interview in TIME Magazine, issue dated Sept. 6, 2004:
"Ellen DeGeneres has been cast as God in a remake of the 1977 George Burns film Oh, God!...
TIME: What do you think God's house is like?
DeGeneres: There's a coffee table with two magazines — Teen People and Guns & Ammo."
... and a TV with two videos:
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Click on pictures for details.
Friday, September 17, 2004 3:57 PM
3:57:09...
Time is a Weapon
In memory of rock star and NRA member Johnny Ramone, who died on Wednesday, Sept. 15:
"You've got to ask yourself a question."
-- Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry
"At the end, when the agent pumps Neo full of lead, the agent is using a .357 Magnum. That gun only holds 9 bullets, but the agent shoots 10 shots at Neo. I don't know where he got that gun."
-- Jesse Baumann,
The Matrix: The Magic Bullet
Manufacturer:
Ta'as Israel Industries,
Ramat Hasharon, Israel
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Fearful Meditation
"The Max D. Barnes-penned title track, with its stark-reality lyrics, is nothing short of haunting: 'Time is a weapon, it’s cold and it’s cruel; It knows no religion and plays by no rules; Time has no conscience when it’s all said and done; Like a beast in the jungle that devours its young.' That’s so good, it hurts! Price’s still-amazing vocals are simply the chilling icing on the cake." -- Lisa Berg, NashvilleCountry.com O fearful meditation! — Shakespeare, Sonnet 65 Clue: click here. This in turn leads to my March 4 entry Fearful Symmetry, which contains the following:"Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery...." -- Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game "How strange the change from major to minor...." -- Cole Porter, "Every Time We Say Goodbye" |
Friday, September 17, 2004 12:00 PM
God is in...
The Details
From an entry for Aug. 19, 2003 on
conciseness, simplicity, and objectivity:
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Above: Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard professor of psychiatry, demonstrates the use of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale "block design" subtest. Another Harvard psychiatrist, Armand Nicholi, is in the news lately with his book The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life.
For the meaning of the Old-Testament logos above, see the remarks of Plato on the immortality of the soul at For the meaning of the New-Testament logos above, see the remarks of R. P. Langlands at |
On Harvard and psychiatry: see
The Crimson Passion:
A Drama at Mardi Gras
(February 24, 2004)
This is a reductio ad absurdum of the Harvard philosophy so eloquently described by Alston Chase in his study of Harvard and the making of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski's time at Harvard overlapped slightly with mine, so I probably saw him in Cambridge at some point. Chase writes that at Harvard, the Unabomber "absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) 'there is no logical justification for morality.'" I was less impressed by Harvard positivism, although I did benefit from a course in symbolic logic from Quine. At that time-- the early 60's-- little remained at Harvard of what Robert Stone has called "our secret culture," that of the founding Puritans-- exemplified by Cotton and Increase Mather.
From Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise:
"Our secret culture is as frivolous as a willow on a tombstone. It's a wonderful thing-- or it was. It was strong and dreadful, it was majestic and ruthless. It was a stranger to pity. And it's not for sale, ladies and gentlemen."
Some traces of that culture:
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A web page
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A contemporary
Click on pictures for details. |
A more appealing view of faith was offered by PBS on Wednesday night, the beginning of this year's High Holy Days:
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Armand Nicholi: But how can you believe something that you don't think is true, I mean, certainly, an intelligent person can't embrace something that they don't think is true — that there's something about us that would object to that. Jeremy Fraiberg: Well, the answer is, they probably do believe it's true. Armand Nicholi: But how do they get there? See, that's why both Freud and Lewis was very interested in that one basic question. Is there an intelligence beyond the universe? And how do we answer that question? And how do we arrive at the answer of that question? Michael Shermer: Well, in a way this is an empirical question, right? Either there is or there isn't. Armand Nicholi: Exactly. Michael Shermer: And either we can figure it out or we can't, and therefore, you just take the leap of faith or you don't. Armand Nicholi: Yeah, now how can we figure it out? Winifred Gallagher: I think something that was perhaps not as common in their day as is common now — this idea that we're acting as if belief and unbelief were two really radically black and white different things, and I think for most people, there's a very — it's a very fuzzy line, so that — Margaret Klenck: It's always a struggle. Winifred Gallagher: Rather than — I think there's some days I believe, and some days I don't believe so much, or maybe some days I don't believe at all. Doug Holladay: Some hours. Winifred Gallagher: It's a, it's a process. And I think for me the big developmental step in my spiritual life was that — in some way that I can't understand or explain that God is right here right now all the time, everywhere. Armand Nicholi: How do you experience that? Winifred Gallagher: I experience it through a glass darkly, I experience it in little bursts. I think my understanding of it is that it's, it's always true, and sometimes I can see it and sometimes I can't. Or sometimes I remember that it's true, and then everything is in Technicolor. And then most of the time it's not, and I have to go on faith until the next time I can perhaps see it again. I think of a divine reality, an ultimate reality, uh, would be my definition of God. |
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Thursday, September 16, 2004 3:57 PM
The Fullness of Time
"In the fullness of time,
educated people will believe
there is no soul
independent of the body,
and hence no life after death.''
-- Francis Crick
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PARAPHRASE OF THE PROSE after Walter Benjamin You live alone in -- Gershom Scholem, |
