From the journal of Steven H. Cullinane...
2009 July 01-15
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 11:09 AM
But seriously...
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 4:01 AM
ART WARS continued:
DETAIL
of obituaries page,
New York Times,
Monday
morning:
Detail of arts page,
New York Times, Wednesday morning:
(Click ad for more on the Monday night
death of Dash Snow.)
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Hurt yet?
_________________
Update of 5:01 AM:
Lavery Hits
Literary
Jackpot
From the top right of
this morning's online
New York Times front page:
Click on voodoo doll
for further details.
See also...
1.
Monday's
link to a
Wallace Stevens poem,
"
Snow
and Stars"
2. The conclusion of this
morning's
Times
obituary
for artist Dash Snow, which
gives his daughter's name...
"Secret."
3.
David
Lavery's excellent
analysis of the classic
Conrad Aiken story
"
Silent
Snow, Secret Snow."
Tuesday, July 14, 2009 6:29 PM
Also for Bastille Day:
Herschel's Onion
The Herschel Chronicle, by Constance A. Lubbock, Cambridge
University Press, 1933, page 139:
"Sir John Herschel has recorded that his father [astronomer
William
Herschel, 1738-1822], when observing at Datchet, 'when the waters
were out round his garden, used to rub himself all over, face and hands
&c., with a raw onion, to keep off the infection of the ague, which
was then prevalent; however he caught it at last.'"
Herschel and his onion appear in a large illustration on the cover of
next Sunday's New York Times Book Review. A review,
titled "Science and the Sublime," states that Herschel and his sister
"spent endless hours at the enormous telescopes that
Herschel constructed, rubbing raw onions to warm their hands....'"
Clearly the anti-ague motive makes more sense.
A
quotation from the book under review, The
Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and
Terror of Science (published today, Bastille Day, 2009):
"The emphasis of on [sic] secular, humanist (even
atheist) body of knowledge... was particularly strong in revolutionary
France."
This, apparently, is the terror part.
A
related quotation from Publishers Weekly:
"It's an engrossing portrait of scientists as passionate adventurers,
boldly laying claim to the intellectual leadership of society. Illus.
(July 14)"
On its front page next Sunday, The New York Times Book Review
boldly lays claim to intellectual leadership with the following opening
sentence:
"In this big two-hearted river of a book, the twin energies of
scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate on every page."
The sentence begins with an insult to Hemingway and ends with a cascade
of vulgarized-science bullshit. Its author, Christopher
Benfey, has done better, and should be ashamed.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009 8:00 AM
Mathematics and Narrative, continued:
For Galois on Bastille Day
Elements
of Finite Geometry
Some fans of the alchemy in
Katherine Neville's novel
The
Eight and in Dan Brown's
novel Angels
& Demons may
enjoy the following analogy--
Note that the alchemical structure
at left, suited more to narrative
than to mathematics, nevertheless
is mirrored within the pure
mathematics at right.
Related material
on Galois and geometry:
Geometries of the group PSL(2, 11)
by Francis Buekenhout, Philippe Cara, and Koen Vanmeerbeek. Geom.
Dedicata, 83 (1-3): 169–206, 2000--
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Monday, July 13, 2009 9:00 AM
Finite Jest:
Monday, July 13, 2009 7:00 AM
Annals of Entertainment:
For those who prefer
the less tasteful:
Vega's more recent album
and this morning's
New York Times:
(Click to
enlarge.)
Note
the story
on the July 11 death of boxer Arturo Gatti in Brazil,
apparently
possibly not [updates of July 18 and 30] at the hands of his
wife,
a
former exotic dancer.
Connoisseurs of tasteless prose will appreciate the following:
"Vega writes from a perspective of memory and maturity... applying a
musical Brazilian wax to 'Pornographer's
Dream'...."
-- Review
of Suzanne Vega's album "Beauty &
Crime" by Don McLeese
Sunday, July 12, 2009 3:17 AM
Annals of Politics and Religion
In honor of
William York Tindall
(yesterday's
entry):
A Literary Symbol
for Boyne
Day
Mary Karr was "an unfashionably bookish kid whose
brain wattage was sapped by a consuming inner life others didn't seem
to bear the burden of. I just seemed to have more frames
per second than other kids."
Saturday, July 11, 2009 7:28 AM
Vega Turns 50:
Friday, July 10, 2009 10:15 AM
Annals of Religion, Part II:
Friday, July 10, 2009 10:00 AM
Annals of Religion, Part I:
Friday, July 10, 2009 7:59 AM
Annals of...
Light History
Before the Screwing
"Very impressive, Herr Tesla,
but let's not forget the
little man in the boat."
Courtesy of Wired.com:
1895: Charles Proteus Steinmetz receives a patent for a "system of
distribution by alternating currents." His engineering work makes it
practical to build a widespread power grid for use in lighting and
machinery alike.
Friday, July 10, 2009 12:00 AM
Midnight in the Garden continues...
In Memory of
Leonard Shlain
From Shlain's website,
some news I had not
heard before: Shlain
died on May 11, 2009.
Also from that site:
"A celebration of Leonard’s
life will be held on Friday,
May 15th, at 1:00 PM at
Sherith Israel Synagogue...
San Francisco...."
In his memory, here is
a link from this journal
on
the date, May 15,
of his memorial:
Log24, Jan. 1-15, 2006.
See also the tribute film
"
A Good Life," by
Tiffany Shlain.
Thursday, July 9, 2009 8:00 AM
Annals of...
Thursday, July 9, 2009 12:00 AM
Midnight in the Garden continues...
An Aleph for Pynchon
Part I:
A California Sixties version
of Heaven's Gate:
Aleph
Sanctuary, by Mati Klarwein
Part II:
Log24
entries of April 29, 2009
(esp. the link to Anastasia
Ashley)
Part III:
Inherent Vice,
a novel by Thomas Pynchon
to be published in August 2009
"The serpent's eyes shine
As he wraps around the vine..."
--
Don
Henley
Wednesday, July 8, 2009 11:07 PM
Mathematics and Narrative, continued:
Tuesday, July 7, 2009 10:10 PM
A Memorial...
From Log24 on
Nov. 12, 2005:
"'Tikkun Olam, the fixing of the world,' she whispers. 'I've
been gathering up the broken vessels to make things whole again.'"
" Tikkun Olam, the gathering of the
divine fragments, is a religious activity.... How do we work for the
repair of the world? If we live in a humpty dumpty world, how do we get
it all put back together again?"
-- A
Sunday Sermon
for Yom
Kippur
by the Rev. Joshua Snyder
on Oct. 5, 2003
[See also Log24 on that date.]
"... the tikkun can't start until everyone
asks what happened-- not just the Jews but everybody. The strange thing
is that Christ evidently saw this."
-- Martha Cooley, The
Archivist
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Monday, July 6, 2009 11:59 PM
Midnight in the Garden continues...
Monday, July 6, 2009 3:09 AM
Annals of Philosophy:
Art and Faith
Virginia Woolf, The
Waves, Harvest Books paperback, 1950, pp. 248-249:
"On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points;
who whispers as he whispered to me that summer morning in the house
where the corn comes up to the window, 'The willow grows on the turf by
the river. The gardeners sweep with great brooms and the lady sits
writing.' Thus he directed me to that which is beyond and outside our
own predicament; to that which is symbolic, and thus perhaps permanent,
if there is any permanence in our sleeping, eating, breathing, so
animal, so spiritual and tumultuous lives."
Up to the first semicolon, this is the Associated
Press thought for today.
Related
aesthetic philosophy from The Washington Post:
"Varnedoe's lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in
the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious
faith in itself, a church of American pragmatism that deals with the
material stuff of experience in the history of art. To understand these
lectures, which began promising an argument about how abstraction works
and ended with an almost medieval allegory of how man confronts the
void, one has to understand that Varnedoe views the history of
abstraction as a pastor surveys the flock."
Sunday, July 5, 2009 9:00 AM
ART WARS continued:
Saturday, July 4, 2009 2:00 AM
From a Clean, Well-Lighted Place:
Friday, July 3, 2009 6:00 AM
Religion according to Fritz Leiber:
Damnation Morning
continued
"The tigers of wrath are wiser
than the horses of instruction."
-- Blake
"... the moment is not
properly an atom of time
but an atom of eternity.
It is the first reflection
of eternity in time, its first
attempt, as it were, at
stopping
time...."
-- Kierkegaard
Todo lo
sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.
--
Rubén Darío
Related material:
The deaths of
Ernest
Hemingway
on the morning of
Sunday, July 2, 1961,
and of Alexis
Arguello
on the morning of
Wednesday, July
1, 2009.
See also philosophy professor
Clancy Martin in the
London Review of Books
(issue dated July 9, 2009)
on AA members
as losers--
"the 'last men,' the nihilists,
the hopeless ones."
Thursday, July 2, 2009 9:29 PM
For Clancy Martin*
Meditation
on a joke by George Carlin,
a passage by Kierkegaard,
and the death on this date
12 years ago
of
actor
James Stewart
The Catholic
Carlin:
"Thank you, Mr. Twain. Have your people call my people."
--George Carlin on learning he had won the Mark Twain award. Twain's
people were Protestant, Carlin's Catholic.
The Protestant
Kierkegaard:
"... the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom
of eternity. It is the first reflection of eternity in time, its first
attempt, as it were, at stopping
time....
Once here in Copenhagen there were two actors who probably never
thought that their performance could have a deeper significance. They
stepped forth onto the stage, placed themselves opposite each other,
and then began the mimical representation of one or another passionate
conflict. When the mimical act was in full swing and the spectators'
eyes followed the story with expectation of what was to follow, they
suddenly stopped and remained motionless as though petrified in the
mimical expression of the moment. The effect of this can he exceedingly
comical, for the moment in an accidental way becomes commensurable with
the eternal."
Catholic tableau
(with Vivien Leigh
representing the Church)
of
Salvation
by Works --
Protestant tableau
(with James Stewart
as Protestant Pilgrim)
of
Salvation
by Grace --
Click on either tableau
for a (much) larger image.
* Thanks to University Diaries for
an entry on
Clancy Martin, a
philosophy professor in the "show me" state, and his experiences with
AA. For a sample of Martin's style, see
a piece he wrote
on Fabergé Easter eggs. For other Easter egg material, see this
journal and (via a link)
The Harvard Crimson,
Easter
2008. A valuable philosophical remark by Martin in a
recent
interview:
"An unscrupulous jeweler will swap diamonds for cheaper
ones when jewelry is dropped off to be sized or repaired, he said.
'It happens all the time,' Martin said. 'Nobody’s watching.'"
Thursday, July 2, 2009 12:00 PM
Hieron Grammaton, Part III*
The Old Man
and the Light
In memory of
Ernest Hemingway,
who died on this date
in 1961, a story
in three parts:
Fermata
Leonard Baskin, detail of
cover
for Jung's
Psyche and
Symbol
Detail from the story
"
Raven Steals the
Light"
Midrash:
"To the earnestness of death belongs precisely
that capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery
which, detached from the thought of the
eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the
thought of the eternal is just what it should be...." --Kierkegaard
* For Hieron Grammaton, Parts I and II, see the
five Log24 entries from 6:29 PM Tuesday, June 23, to 1:00 AM
Sunday, June 28.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009 11:07 PM
The Midrash Jazz Quartet presents:
Diamond Life
"Diamond life, lover boy.
We move in space
with minimum waste
and maximum joy.
City lights and business nights
When you require streetcar desire
for higher heights.
No place for beginners
or sensitive hearts
When sentiment is left to chance.
No place to be ending
but somewhere to start."
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Wednesday, July 1, 2009 9:00 PM
In Memory of Karl Malden:
Wednesday, July 1, 2009 12:00 PM
Annals of Journalism:
