From the journal of Steven H. Cullinane...
2007 November 01-30
Thursday, November 29, 2007
12:00 PM
For Gennie DeWeese:
A Long Story | From today's online NY Times:
Obituaries in the News
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: [Wednesday]
November 28, 2007
Filed at 11:10 p.m. ET
Gennie DeWeese BOZEMAN, Mont. (AP) -- Gennie DeWeese, an artist known for her landscape paintings and woodblock prints whose works are displayed at museums across the Northwest, died Monday [November 26, 2007]. She was 86. DeWeese died at her studio south of Bozeman. Dahl Funeral Chapel confirmed her death. Her first oil painting was of her dog, done when she was 12 years old. In 1995, DeWeese received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Montana State University, and she received the Montana Governor's Award for the Arts. |
Robert M. Pirsig in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
(April 1974)--
| "The rhetoricians of ancient Greece were the first teachers in the history of the Western world. Plato vilified them in all his works to grind an axe of his own and since what we know about them is almost entirely from Plato they’re unique in that they’ve stood condemned throughout history without ever having their side of the story told. The Church of Reason that I talked about was founded on their graves. It’s supported today by their graves. And when you dig deep into its foundations you come across ghosts." I look at my watch. It’s after two. "It’s a long story," I say. "You should write all this down," Gennie says. |
Quod erat
demonstrandum.
For more information,
click on the black monolith.
Related material:
In the Details
and
Deep Beauty.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007 4:07 AM
But seriously...
Sunday, November 25, 2007 1:44 AM
Pen Envy at the...
Saturday, November 24, 2007 12:06 AM
Culture Wars continued:
Standards
"The undermining of
standards of seriousness
is almost complete."
--
Susan Sontag
Doonesbury 11/23/07:
For standards of comedy,
see
Angels in Arabia.
For standards of
tragicomedy,
see Molly Ivins on the owner
of
Condé Nast Publications:
"Thousands have impersonated Elvis Presley over the
years. Now, Bill Murray offers his own indelible tribute to the king of
rock 'n' roll-- on the cover of Condé Nast's new music/movie
magazine,
Movies Rock.
The magazine, which covers music and its impact on filmmaking, launches
in November as a supplement in the December subscriber issues of 14
Condé Nast publications."
Friday, November 23, 2007 5:24 AM
Through the Looking Glass:
Another Pattern
"It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern,
and ceases to be
a mere sequence...."
-- T. S. Eliot, Harvard '10
Quoted in Log24 on
November 11, 2003
A search at the New York Times
for the subject of
the previous entry
reveals another aspect of that date:
What Happened
Before the Big Bang?
"...trying to imagine how the universe
made its 'quantum leap from eternity into time,' as the physicist Dr. Sidney
Coleman of Harvard once put it. Some physicists
speculate that on the other side of the looking glass of Time Zero is
another..."
Thursday, November 22, 2007 4:44 AM
Harvard's Pauli
Aspects of Symmetry
A comment at Peter Woit's weblog today:
T says (3:43 AM today)
I still don’t quite understand what *EXACTLY* Sidney
Coleman contributed that merits such deep reverence for him after his
demise; was he like Weinberg - i.e. a very intuitive and thoughtful
field theorist - or Feynman - a highly creative and original thinker;
or simply a good teacher who taught at (world-famous) Harvard - and
hence his stature?
My reply (4:26 AM today, awaiting moderation):
T: The following quotes may be of interest.
"Sidney Coleman comes as close as any active physicist to assuming the
mantle of Wolfgang Pauli as a trenchant critic of research and as an
expositor of ongoing developments in theoretical physics." –Book review of Aspects of Symmetry
"He has… played the role of Wolfgang Pauli of his generation; he liked
to disprove ideas, and he was also a genius in explaining things to
others." –Lubos Motl
|
Related material:
Faust in Copenhagen
and
Kernel of Eternity
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 1:44 AM
Requiem for Rabinowitz:
Death on a Friday
and the
Magic of Numbers
Above: PA Lottery on
Friday, November 16th,
the date of death
for noted leftist attorney
Victor Rabinowitz
"Mr. Rabinowitz was a member
of the Communist Party
from 1942 until the early 1960s,
he wrote in his memoir,
Unrepentant Leftist (1996).
He said the party
seemed the best vehicle
to fight for social justice."
--
The New York Times,
Nov. 20, 2007
Related material:
7/17,
4/19,
and
Friday.
From the Harvard
Crimson on Friday:
"Robert Scanlan, a professor of theater
who knew Beckett personally,
directed the plays....
He said that performing Beckett as part of
the New College Theatre's inaugural series
represents an auspicious beginning."
From Log24 on 4/19--
"Drama Workshop"--
a note of gratitude
from the Virginia Tech killer:
"Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ,
to inspire generations of the weak
and the defenseless people.''
"It's not for me. For my children,
for my brothers and sisters...
I did it for them.''
-- Manifesto of Cho
Party on, Victor.
For further drama, see
The Crimson Passion.
Monday, November 19, 2007 2:56 PM
Back to the Future, continued:
Lament for a DJ
In memory of Philadelphia DJ Hy Lit,
who died on Saturday at 73:
"Chuck Berry didn't need prompting to insert, in his 'Sweet Little
Sixteen,' the lines 'Well, they'll be rockin' on Bandstand,
Philadelphia, P.A.' I remember 'Bandstand' before it was 'American...'
It started in 1952, when Walter Annenberg,
whose Triangle Publications owned the WFIL radio and television
stations, suggested an afternoon TV dance party...."
-- Richard Corliss, TIME magazine, July 14, 2001
Related material: Back to the Future (Log24 on Sunday)
Sunday, November 18, 2007 2:02 AM
Back to the Future
For Martin Scorsese
on his birthday, from
the New York Lottery:
Words and Music
Words:
In the Details
"It was only in retrospect
that the silliness became profound.
The players were becoming possessors
of 'a truth with implicit powers
of good and evil,' Gino Segrè writes
in Faust in Copenhagen...
And 'the devil... was in the details.'"
-- George Johnson of
The New York Times,
quoted in Log24 on 6/23.
Music:
A Black Berry
"Her wallet's filled with pictures,
she gets 'em one by one...."
Chuck Berry, quoted
in Log24 on 2/13.
Related material:
Yesterday's Log24 entry...
Saturday, November 17, 2007 5:24 AM
Happy Birthday, Martin Scorsese
Friday, November 16, 2007 4:07 PM
ART WARS continued:
Sacralizing the Place:
Love, Age, and a Face
Yesterday evening was, according to today's
Harvard Crimson, "the opening night of three usually
neglected works by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. The three plays,
originally produced in April 2006 to commemorate what would have been
Beckett's 100th birthday, were part of the inaugural series
for the New College Theatre. Robert Scanlan, a professor of theater who
knew Beckett personally, directed the plays.... He said that performing
Beckett as part of the New College Theatre's inaugural series
represents an auspicious beginning. 'I personally think it sacralizes
the place to perform Beckett here,' he said."
"The first play, 'Words and Music,' displayed the frustrations of the
creative process: a writer, Joe, and Bob, a character personified by
[a] musical trio, worked with and against each other to create art.
The duo first tried to capture love through words, but Joe's attempts
quickly descended into clichés.
Then, Joe and Bob tried to capture age, but they failed there too.
Finally, they tried to capture 'the face'-- a vision of a lost love.
While they were able to achieve some meaning, this soon came to an
abrupt end when the elderly man who'd been leading their creative
endeavor simply stood up and walked away."
-- BONNIE
J. KAVOUSSI
Sunday, November 11, 2007 4:00 PM
Reflections on Symmetry:
Wednesday, November 7, 2007 12:00 PM
For 11/7...
Aesthetics for Jesuits,
continued from
St. Ignatius Loyola's Day --
"Highly instructive and readable"
--
Description of Dorothy Sayers's
The Mind of the
Maker on page 106 of
Joyce and Aquinas, Yale University
Press paperback, 1963, by William T. Noon, Society of Jesus
Related material:
Tuesday, November 6, 2007 12:25 PM
ART WARS continued:
The Third Person
The New York Times
November 6, 2007
More on the Career of
the Genius Who Boldly
Compared Himself to God
By MICHIKO
KAKUTANI
"Picasso... once said...
'... No wonder his [Picasso's] style is so
ambiguous. It's like God's. God is really only another artist. He
invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style.
He just keeps on trying other things. The same with this sculptor....'
The comparison to God, like the use of the third person, was
deliberate, of course."
Of Modern Poetry
The poem of the mind
in the act of finding
What will suffice ....
... It has
To construct a new stage.
It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor,
slowly and
With meditation, speak words
that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear
of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it
wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible
audience listens,
Not to the play, but to
itself, expressed
In an emotion as of
two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.
The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark....
-- Wallace Stevens in
Parts of a World, 1942
Of Modern Metaphysics
"For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly
trinity to match the heavenly.
First, [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration]
there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole
work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image
of the Father.
Second, there is the Creative Energy [or Activity] begotten
of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat
and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the
image of the Word.
Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its
response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling
Spirit.
And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work,
whereof none can exist without other: and this is the image of the
Trinity."
-- Concluding speech of St. Michael the Archangel in a 1937 play,
"The Zeal of Thy House," by Dorothy Sayers, as quoted in her 1941 book The Mind of the Maker. That entire book was,
she wrote, an expansion of St. Michael's speech.
Related material:
Sunday, November 4, 2007 3:00 AM
Talking of Michelangelo:
High Concept
On this date in 1948, T. S. Eliot
won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Non ha l'ottimo artista in se alcun
concetto,
Ch'un marmo solo in se non circoscriva
Col suo soverchio; e solo a quello arriva
La man che ubbidisce all'intelletto.
(The best artist has in himself no concept
in a single block of marble not contained;
only the hand obeying mind will find it.)
-- Michelangelo, as quoted
Idea: A Concept in Art Theory
Saturday, November 3, 2007 2:00 PM
After Dia de los Muertos:
