Hamlet Meets Young Frankenstein:

 Putting the
X
in Xmas

-- C. S. Lewis

Apparently they teach them nihilism, empty rhetoric, and despair, as reflected in Borges, Baudrillard, and Benjamin, according to the art review below from today's New York Times.  Let us hope that the late Peter Boyle, who died on Tuesday, Dec. 12, has moved beyond these now-- singing "Heaven, I'm in Heaven," rather than "Puttin' on the Ritz."

Black, White, and Read All Over by Randy Kennedy in The New York Times Friday, Dec. 15, 2006 "In one of Jorge Luis Borges's best-known short stories, 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,' a 20th-century French writer sets out to compose a verbatim copy of Cervantes's 17th-century masterpiece simply because he thinks he can, originality perhaps not being all it's cracked up to be. He manages two chapters word for word, a spontaneous duplicate that Borges's narrator finds to be 'infinitely richer' than the original because it contains all manner of new meanings and inflections, wrenched as it is from its proper time and context...." [An artist's version of a newspaper is].... "a drawing of a copy of a version of what happened, holding a mirror up to nature with a refraction or two in between.  In a way that mixes Borges with a dollop of Jean Baudrillard and a heavy helping of Walter Benjamin, the work also upends ideas...."

The Work:

Pennsylvania Lottery
December 2006
Daily Number (Day):

Borges, Menard's Quixote, and The Harvard Crimson	Mon., Dec. 11: 133
Baudrillard (via a white Matrix)	Sun., Dec. 10: 569
Benjamin and a black view of life in "The Garden of Allah"	Sat., Dec. 9: 602

Click on numbers
for commentary.

"There is nothing new under the sun. With the death of the real, or rather with its (re)surrection, hyperreality both emerges and is already always reproducing itself."  --Jean Baudrillard

"To Be,"

"The Transcendent Signified,"

and...

Postmodern Religion


.

Thursday, December 14, 2006  6:06 AM

Click on picture
for details.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006  9:29 AM

Christmas in Heaven and Hell

 Best Wishes for a
C. S. Lewis
Christmas

 

Image of Lewis from Into the Wardrobe

"What on earth   is a concrete   universal?" -- Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance For one approach to an answer, click on the picture at left.

Update of 4:23 PM:

The Lewis link above deals with the separation of Heaven from Hell.  The emphasis is on Heaven.  A mysterious visitor to this website, "United States," seems to be seeking equal time for Hell.  And so...

Tuesday, December 12, 2006  11:22 AM

For Sinatra's Birthday

The State of Grace,
Author of Hamlet

Today's Harvard Crimson:



The texts in question are said
to be manuscripts of
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,"
and "The Library of Babel."

The latter deals (like
"The Mountains of Pi")
with literature that can
be seen as the result
of a random process--
such as the lottery in
another story by Borges.

A less sinister lottery
is that of Pennsylvania--
known to some as
"the Keystone State."
I prefer to think of it as
"the State of Grace."



Click on picture for details.

The "NITE" number 108 leads us
naturally to 1/08:

Monday, December 11, 2006  7:20 AM

Notes for Chile on...

SINGER, ISAAC:
"Are Children the Ultimate Literary Critics?"
 -- Top of the News 29 (Nov. 1972): 32-36.
"Sets forth his own aims in writing for children
 and laments 'slice of life' and chaos in
children's literature. Maintains that children
like good plots, logic, and clarity,
and that they have a concern for
'so-called eternal questions.'"

-- An Annotated Listing of Criticism
by Linnea Hendrickson

"She returned the smile, then looked
across the room to her youngest brother,
Charles Wallace, and to their father,
who were deep in concentration, bent
over the model they were building
of a tesseract: the square squared,
and squared again: a construction
of the dimension of time."

-- A Swiftly Tilting Planet,
by Madeleine L'Engle

For "the dimension of time,"
see A Fold in Time,
Time Fold, and
Diamond Theory in 1937. 

A Swiftly Tilting Planet is a fantasy for children set partly in Vespugia, a fictional country bordered by Chile and Argentina.

For a more adult audience --

In memory of General Augusto Pinochet, who died yesterday in Santiago, Chile, a quotation from Federico Garcia Lorca's lecture on "the Duende" (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1933):

"... Philip of Austria... longing to discover the Muse and the Angel in theology, found himself imprisoned by the Duende of cold ardors in that masterwork of the Escorial, where geometry abuts with a dream and the Duende wears the mask of the Muse for the eternal chastisement of the great king."

The Escorial

Perhaps. Or perhaps Philip, "the lonely
hermit of the Escorial," is less lonely now.

Sunday, December 10, 2006  9:00 PM

Beyond Geometry, continued:

The Librarian
on Nobel Prize Day

"Time and chance
happeneth to them all."
-- Ecclesiastes  



Timeline Index:



The number 048
may be interpreted
as referring to...

A Miniature
Rosetta Stone:



"Function defined form,
expressed in a pure geometry
that the eye could easily grasp
in its entirety."

-- J. G. Ballard on Modernism
(The Guardian, March 20, 2006)

"The greatest obstacle to discovery
is not ignorance --
it is the illusion of knowledge."

-- Daniel J. Boorstin,
Librarian of Congress,
quoted in Beyond Geometry

Sunday, December 10, 2006  12:00 PM

Nobel Prize Day, 2006

Sunday, December 10, 2006  9:00 AM

A First Class Degree

The Librarian

"Like all men of the Library,
I have traveled in my youth."
-- Jorge Luis Borges,
The Library of Babel

"Papá me mandó un artículo
de J. G. Ballard en el que
se refiere a cómo el lugar
de la muerte es central en
nuestra cultura contemporánea."

-- Sonya Walger,
interview dated September 14
(Feast of the Triumph of the Cross),
Anno Domini 2006

Sonya Walger,
said to have been
born on D-Day,
the sixth of June,
in 1974

Walger's father is, like Borges,
from Argentina.
She "studied English Literature
at Christ Church College, Oxford,
where she received
    a First Class degree.... "

--Wikipedia

"... un artículo de J. G. Ballard...."--

A Handful of Dust, by J. G. Ballard

(The Guardian, March 20, 2006):

"... The Atlantic wall was only part of a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.

Death was what the Atlantic wall and Siegfried line were all about....

... modernism of the heroic period, from 1920 to 1939, is dead, and it died first in the blockhouses of Utah beach and the Siegfried line...

Modernism's attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic. Bertolt Brecht, no fan of modernism, remarked that the mud, blood and carnage of the first world war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled bathroom. Architects were in the vanguard of the new movement, led by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus design school. The old models were thrown out. Function defined form, expressed in a pure geometry that the eye could easily grasp in its entirety."

"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason...."
-- John Outram, architect 

(Click on picture for details.)

 

-- The Left Hand of God, by Adolf Holl

Related material:

The Lottery of Babylon
and
the previous entry.

Sunday, December 10, 2006  6:00 AM

In the Garden of Allah

See also



Diamonds

Saturday, December 9, 2006  4:00 AM

ART WARS continued

Death on the Feast
of Saint Nicholas



Quotation from Log24 on
September 14, 2003--

Skewed Mirrors:

Readings on Aesthetics for the
Feast of the Triumph of the Cross:

"We're not here to stick a mirror on you. Anybody can do that, We're here to give you a more cubist or skewed mirror, where you get to see yourself with fresh eyes. That's what an artist does. When you paint the Crucifixion, you're not painting an exact reproduction."

— Julie Taymor on "Frida" (AP, 10/22/02)

"Saint Francis Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent [above], painted by Francisco Goya (1746-1828) in 1788, is one of the most astonishing works in an oeuvre replete with remarkable images. In the decade and a half since its inclusion in Robert Rosenblum's survey* of nineteenth-century art, this canvas has become widely known among scholars and their students. Rosenblum, following a line of interpretation that dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, uses this painting to support a symptomatic reading of Goya's art, which he describes as 'the most sharply accurate mirror of the collapse of the great religious and monarchic traditions of the West.'" -- Andrew Schulz in The Art Bulletin, Dec. 1, 1998 * 19th-Century Art, by H. W. Janson and Robert Rosenblum, 1984

Rosenblum died at 79

on Wednesday,
the Feast of St. Nicholas.

For more on
St. Francis Borgia, see
In Lieu of Rosebud.

Friday, December 8, 2006  9:00 AM

At the Crossroads

Kate Beckinsale, adapted from
poster for Underworld: Evolution
(DVD release date 6/6/6)

Thursday, December 7, 2006  3:30 AM

From Here to Eternity

In his honor,
"one brief shining moment"--
namely,

"3:30:30,"

the time of this entry.


 
30

The Image

That which is bright rises twice:
The image of Fire.

Wednesday, December 6, 2006  3:15 AM

ART WARS continued

Mathematical Imagery

From the current
American Mathematical Society
"Mathematical Imagery" page:



From today's New York Times:

"Rosie Lee Tompkins, a renowned African-American quiltmaker whose use of dazzling color and vivid geometric forms made her work internationally acclaimed despite her vehement efforts to remain completely unknown, was found dead on Friday at her home in Richmond, Calif. She was 70." --Margalit Fox, NY Times 12/6/06

Tompkins was found dead
on December 1, 2006.

 From Log24 on that date:

That entry contained an excerpt from
Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word--

"What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, 'to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.' I read it again. It didn’t say 'something helpful' or 'enriching' or even 'extremely valuable.' No, the word was crucial...."

Related material:

Diamond Theory
 
and a politically correct
1995 feminist detective novel
about quilts,

A Piece of Justice.

From a summary of the novel:

The story deals with "one Gideon Summerfield, deceased." Summerfield, a former tutor at (the fictional) St. Agatha's College, Cambridge University, "is about to become the recipient of the Waymark prize. This prize is awarded in Mathematics and has the same prestige as the Nobel. Summerfield had a rather lackluster career at St. Agatha's, with the exception of one remarkable result that he obtained. It is for this result that he is being awarded the prize, albeit posthumously."  Someone is apparently trying to prevent a biography of Summerfield from being published.

The following page contains
a critical part of the solution
to the mystery:

Meanwhile, back in real life...

It is said that the late Ms. Tompkins
liked to work while listening to the
soundtrack of "Saturday Night Fever."

"It's just your jive talkin'
you're telling me lies, yeah
Jive talkin'
you wear a disguise
Jive talkin'
so misunderstood, yeah
Jive talkin'
You really no good"

These lyrics may also serve
to summarize reviews
of Diamond Theory written
in the summer of 2005.

For further details, see
Mathematics and Narrative.

 

Tuesday, December 5, 2006  5:01 AM

Anno Domini

Joan Didion, The White Album:

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live....

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling."

An Alternate History
 
(based on entries of
the past three days):

"A FAMOUS HISTORIAN:

England, 932 A.D. --
 A kingdom divided...."

-- Introduction to "Spamalot"

A Story That Works "There is the dark, eternally silent, unknown universe; there are the friend-enemy minds shouting and whispering their tales and always seeking the three miracles -- that minds should really touch, or that the silent universe should speak, tell minds a story, or (perhaps the same thing) that there should be a story that works, that is all hard facts, all reality, with no illusions and no fantasy; and lastly, there is lonely, story-telling, wonder-questing, mortal me." -- Fritz Leiber in "The Button Molder"

Monday, December 4, 2006  11:01 AM

A Christmas Carol:

Descent of the God



Related material:

All Hallows' Eve,
2005:

Multispeech



as well as

C. S. Lewis,
That Hideous Strength,
Chapter 15,
"The Descent of the Gods,"

and
Charles Williams,
"The Carol of Amen House":

Beauty arose of old
And dreamed of a perfect thing,
Where none shall be angry or cold
Or armed with an evil sting;

Where the world shall be made anew,
For the gods shall breathe its air,
And Phoebus Apollo there-through
Shall move on a golden stair.

(For the musical score, see
The Masques of Amen House.)

See also
A Mass for Lucero.

Monday, December 4, 2006  2:45 AM

Umkehrung (Spin)

Sunday, December 3, 2006  2:22 AM

Kennedy Center

Washington hosts
Hollywood elite
for Kennedy Honors

The Kennedy Center Honors weekend was to conclude on Sunday with Bush hosting an afternoon reception at the White House followed by an evening performance at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The show will be broadcast on the CBS television network on December 26."

From "Today in History,"
by The Associated Press:

On this date (Dec. 3):

In 1925,
"Concerto in F,"
by George Gershwin,
had its world premiere
at New York's Carnegie Hall,
with Gershwin himself
at the piano.

In 1947,
the Tennessee Williams play
"A Streetcar Named Desire"
opened on Broadway.

In 1953,
the musical "Kismet"
opened on Broadway.

In 1960,
the musical "Camelot"
opened on Broadway.

Related material:

Yesterday's entries--

Monroe and the Kennedys
and

Monroe and the Kennedys,
Part II.

Click on the picture
for further details.

Saturday, December 2, 2006  12:00 PM

Monroe and the Kennedys, Part II

"Emilio Estevez still doesn't know why, but one day in 2000 he and his brother Charlie Sheen found themselves doing a photo shoot at this city's long-closed but still infamous Ambassador Hotel. It was where Senator Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot the night he won California's crucial Democratic presidential primary in 1968.

The site made little sense for the film they were promoting, 'Rated X,' a feature about the real-life San Francisco pornographers Jim and Artie Mitchell....  he [Estevez] and Sheen co-starred as the Mitchell brothers.

'It wasn't something I had requested,' Estevez says today of the photo shoot's location. 'It was perhaps the photographer. I never got to the bottom of it, but there I was.'

To him, it was one in a series of 'divine interventions' that gave him the inspiration to write and direct the new film 'Bobby,' which opened Thursday [Nov. 23, Thanksgiving Day 2006]."

Brothers
Bobby Kennedy and
John F. Kennedy

Brothers
Charlie Sheen and
Emilio Estevez

"We keep coming back
and coming back to the real:
To the hotel instead of
the hymns...."

Saturday, December 2, 2006  1:29 AM

Monroe and the Kennedys

In honor of
the film "Bobby,"
now playing.

("Venus at St. Anne's"
is the title of the final
chapter of
the C. S. Lewis classic
That Hideous Strength.)

Symbol of Venus
and
Symbol of Plato

Related symbols:

Click on pictures
for details related tp
the Feast of St. Anne
(July 26).

Friday, December 1, 2006  4:07 AM

ART WARS continued

From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

crucial - 1706, from Fr. crucial... from L. crux (gen. crucis) "cross." The meaning "decisive, critical" is extended from a logical term, Instantias Crucis, adopted by Francis Bacon (1620); the notion is of cross fingerboard signposts* at forking roads, thus a requirement to choose.

"... given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial-- the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify."

-- Hilton Kramer in The New York Times, April 28, 1974

"I realized that without making the slightest effort I had come upon one of those utterances in search of which psychoanalysts and State Department monitors of the Moscow or Belgrade press are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium: namely, the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta, the words in passing, that give the game away.

What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, 'to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.' I read it again. It didn’t say 'something helpful' or 'enriching' or even 'extremely valuable.' No, the word was crucial....

The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato's cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word."

-- Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

For some related material from the next 30 years, 1976-2006, see Art Wars.

* "Note that in the original Latin, the term is not by any means 'fingerpost' but simply 'cross' (Latin Crux, crucis) - a root term giving deeper meaning to the 'crucial' decision as to which if any of the narratives are 'true,' and echoing the decisive 'crucifixion' revealed in the story."