The Word in the Desert

Sunday, July 13, 2003

Ground Zero Today's birthday: Harrison Ford is 61.              From The Gag Seven - Eleven Dice  Throw a seven or eleven every time. Set consists of a pair of regular dice and another set that can't miss. A product of the S. S. Adams Company. Make your friends and family laugh with this great prank!  New York State Lottery: 7-11 Evening Number: 000. From the conclusion of Joan Didion's 1970 novel Play It As It Lays:  "I know what 'nothing' means, and keep on playing." From a review of the 1970 film Zabriskie Point: "The real star of Zabriskie Point... is the desolate, parched-white landscape of Death Valley...." For Harrison Ford and Zabriskie Point, see Harrison Ford - Le Site En Français The Harrison Ford of the 1970 film Zabriskie Point and the "Harrison Porter" of the 1970 novel Play It As It Lays may not be completely unrelated. For the religious significance of the names "Porter" and "BZ" in Play It As It Lays, see both the devilish site A Wake-Macbeth Intertext: "Both 'porter' and 'belzey babble' operate as textual 'grafts' and 'hinges' ..." and the Princeton site Macbeth, Act II, Scene 3 {Enter a Porter. Knocking within} PORTER: 1. Here's a knocking indeed!     If a man were porter 2. of hell-gate he should have old     turning the key.{Knock within} 3. Knock, knock, knock. Who's there,     i' th' name of 4. Beelzebub?

6:13 AM

Sunday, July 13, 2003

ART WARS, 5:09 The Word in the Desert For Harrison Ford in the desert. (See previous entry.) Words strain, Crack and sometimes break,     under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Will not stay still. Shrieking voices Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering, Always assail them.     The Word in the desert Is most attacked by voices of temptation, The crying shadow in the funeral dance, The loud lament of     the disconsolate chimera. — T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets The link to the word "devilish" in the 6:13 AM entry above leads to one of my previous journal entries, "A Mass for Lucero," that deals with the devilishness of postmodern philosophy.  To hammer this point home, here is an attack on college English departments that begins as follows: "William Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, which recounts the generation-long rise of the drily loathsome Flem Snopes from clerk in a country store to bank president in Jefferson, Mississippi, teems with analogies to what has happened to English departments over the past thirty years." For more, see The Word in the Desert, by Glenn C. Arbery. See also the link on the word "contemptible," applied to Jacques Derrida, in my Logos and Logic page. This leads to an National Review essay on Derrida, The Philosopher as King, by Mark Goldblatt.  A reader's comment on my previous entry suggests the film "Scotland, PA" as viewing related to the Derrida/Macbeth link there. I prefer the following notice of a 7-11 death, that of a powerful art museum curator who would have been well cast as Lady Macbeth: Die Fahne Hoch, Frank Stella, 1959 Dorothy Miller, MOMA curator, died at 99 on July 11, 2003. From the Whitney Museum site: "Max Anderson: When artist Frank Stella first showed this painting at The Museum of Modern Art in 1959, people were baffled by its austerity. Stella responded, 'What you see is what you see. Painting to me is a brush in a bucket and you put it on a surface. There is no other reality for me than that.' He wanted to create work that was methodical, intellectual, and passionless. To some, it seemed to be nothing more than a repudiation of everything that had come before—a rational system devoid of pleasure and personality. But other viewers saw that the black paintings generated an aura of mystery and solemnity. The title of this work, Die Fahne Hoch, literally means 'The banner raised.'  It comes from the marching anthem of the Nazi youth organization. Stella pointed out that the proportions of this canvas are much the same as the large flags displayed by the Nazis. But the content of the work makes no reference to anything outside of the painting itself. The pattern was deduced from the shape of the canvas—the width of the black bands is determined by the width of the stretcher bars. The white lines that separate the broad bands of black are created by the narrow areas of unpainted canvas. Stella's black paintings greatly influenced the development of Minimalism in the 1960s." From Play It As It Lays:    She took his hand and held it.  "Why are you here."    "Because you and I, we know something.  Because we've been out there where nothing is.  Because I wanted—you know why."    "Lie down here," she said after a while.  "Just go to sleep."    When he lay down beside her the Seconal capsuled rolled on the sheet.  In the bar across the road somebody punched King of the Road on the jukebox again, and there was an argument outside, and the sound of a bottle breaking.  Maria held onto BZ's hand.    "Listen to that," he said.  "Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it."    "It would be very pretty," Maria said.  "Go to sleep." I smoke old stogies I have found...     Cigar Aficionado on artist Frank Stella: " 'Frank actually makes the moment. He captures it and helps to define it.' This was certainly true of Stella's 1958 New York debut. Fresh out of Princeton, he came to New York and rented a former jeweler's shop on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side. He began using ordinary house paint to paint symmetrical black stripes on canvas. Called the Black Paintings, they are credited with paving the way for the minimal art movement of the 1960s. By the fall of 1959, Dorothy Miller of The Museum of Modern Art had chosen four of the austere pictures for inclusion in a show called Sixteen Americans." For an even more austere picture, see Geometry for Jews: For more on art, Derrida, and devilishness, see Deborah Solomon's essay in the New York Times Magazine of Sunday, June 27, 1999:  How to Succeed in Art. "Blame Derrida and his fellow French theorists...." For those who prefer a more traditional meditation, I recommend Ecce Lignum Crucis ("Behold the Wood of the Cross") THE WORD IN THE DESERT For more on the word "road" in the desert, see my "Dead Poet" entry of Epiphany 2003 (Tao means road) as well as the following scholarly bibliography of road-related cultural artifacts (a surprising number of which involve Harrison Ford): A Bibliography of Road Materials

5:09 PM

Saturday, July 12, 2003

Before and After From Understanding the (Net) Wake: 24 A. "Its importance in establishing the identities in the writer complexus....will be best appreciated by never forgetting that both before and after the Battle of the Boyne it was a habit not to sign letters always."(114) Joyce shows an understanding of the problems that an intertextual book like the Wake poses for the notion of authorship. G. H. Hardy in A Mathematician's Apology: "We do not want many 'variations' in the proof of a mathematical theorem: 'enumeration of cases,' indeed, is one of the duller forms of mathematical argument.  A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way. A chess problem also has unexpectedness, and a certain economy; it is essential that the moves should be surprising, and that every piece on the board should play its part.  But the aesthetic effect is cumulative.  It is essential also (unless the problem is too simple to be really amusing) that the key-move should be followed by a good many variations, each requiring its own individual answer.  'If P-B5 then Kt-R6; if .... then .... ; if .... then ....' — the effect would be spoilt if there were not a good many different replies.  All this is quite genuine mathematics, and has its merits; but it just that 'proof by enumeration of cases' (and of cases which do not, at bottom, differ at all profoundly*) which a real mathematician tends to despise. * I believe that is now regarded as a merit in a problem that there should be many variations of the same type." (Cambridge at the University Press.  First edition, 1940.) Brian Harley in Mate in Two Moves: "It is quite true that variation play is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the soul of a problem, or (to put it more materially) the main course of the solver's banquet, but the Key is the cocktail that begins the proceedings, and if it fails in piquancy the following dinner is not so satisfactory as it should be." (London, Bell & Sons.  First edition, 1931.)

6:23 PM

Wake From my entry of Epiphany 2003, Dead Poet in the City of Angels: Certain themes recur in these entries.  To describe such recurrent themes, in art and in life, those enamoured of metaphors from physics may ponder the phrase "implicate order." For an illustration of at least part of the implicate order, click here . On this, the day when Orangemen parade in Northern Ireland, it seems appropriate to expand on the two links I cited last Epiphany. For the implicate order and Finnegans Wake, see sections 33 and 34 of Understanding the (Net) Wake. The second link in the box above is to the Chi-Rho page in the Book of Kells.  For a commentary on the structure of this page and the structure of Finnegans Wake, see James Joyce's Whirling Mandala.

7:00 AM

Father, Son, and Holy Coast Here are some religious meditations for the holy day 7-11: As the website Hollywood Jesus perceptively points out, defending the story theory of truth, "Images that carry universal truths move us from the mundane to the sacred.  Jesus knew this when he spoke in parables." Here is a parable about my own name. The Hollywood Jesus site tries to connect the cross of Christ, "holy wood," with Hollywood by claiming that the words "holly" and "holy" are cognate. See Hollywood and the Cross. From the Online Etymology Dictionary:  holly - O.E. holegn, from P.Gmc. *khuli-. holy - O.E. halig "holy," from P.Gmc. *khailagas. Adopted at conversion for L. sanctus. Primary meaning may have been "that must be preserved whole or intact, that cannot be transgressed or violated," which would connect it with O.E. hal (see whole). This shows that the holly-holy connection is, pace Neil Diamond, like nearly every other Christian claim, a damned lie. Connoisseurs of junk culture may enjoy a midi of Neil Diamond as background for this Hollywood Jesus. Here is a different Hollywood etymology that may be somewhat truer. From the RootsWeb.com archives: Re: CULLINANE-HOLLYWOOD-holly tree "Cullen in Irish is Ó Cuillin (holly tree). ...  This astonishingly simple name has worked its way through an astonishing number of variations including Cullion, Culhoun, MacCullen and Cullinane. ... In a message dated 6/5/01 8:24:18 PM Pacific Daylight Time, lawlerc@aol.comnojunk writes: 'I do not have the surname in my family, but while looking at the Old Age Pension applications for the Barony of Strabane Upper, in the County of Tyrone, there was a notation that the English equivalent of the surname CULLINANE is HOLLYWOOD.' "

10:23 PM