Celebrity
War Room
"What would bug the Taliban more than seeing a gay woman in a suit surrounded by Jews?"
-- Ellen DeGeneres at the 2001 Emmy awards
How about seeing Judy Davis
in a sequel to The Hot Rock....
Afghanistan Banana Stand
Month: August 2002
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History, said Stephen....
-- To really know a subject you've got to learn a bit of its history....
We both know what memories can bring;
They bring diamonds and rust.
All sorts of structures that can be defined for finite sets have analogues for the projective geometry of finite fields....
Clearly this pattern is trying to tell us something; the question is what. As always, it pays to focus on the simplest case, since that's where everything starts.
In the beginning was the word....
-- The Gospel according to Saint John
The anonymous author of John makes liberal use of allegory and double-entendre to illustrate this theme.
Born yesterday: Logician John Venn.
Venn considered three discs R, S, and T as typical subsets of a set U. The intersections of these discs and their complements divide U into 8 nonoverlapping regions....
-- History of Mathematics at St. Andrews
Who would not be rapt by the thought of such marvels?....
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versus
One year ago today, Lorenzo Music, the voice of Carlton the doorman on Rhoda, died. His eulogy from Valerie Harper:
"Valerie's heart is breaking, but Rhoda is certain that Carlton the doorman is giving St. Peter at the gate a run for his money."
Today's birthday: Logician John Venn.
Appearing for the story theory...
Flannery O'Connor:
"In the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or statistics, but by the stories it tells. Fiction is the most impure and the most modest and the most human of the arts."
Appearing for the diamond theory...
Mary McCarthy and G. H. Hardy:
From the Hollywood Investigator:
On October 18, 1979, Mary McCarthy said on PBS's Dick Cavett Show: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"
Don't forget "a," as in "a people is known" --
"Greek mathematics is permanent, more permanent even than Greek literature. Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not."
-- G. H. Hardy in A Mathematician's Apology
And a closing rebuttal from the story theory...
Martin Heidegger and Dean Martin:
Words of wisdom from Martin Heidegger, Catholic Nazi:
"The nature of art is poetry. The nature of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth.... In the work, truth is thrown toward... an historical group of men."
-- Poetry, Language, Thought, page 75, translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper & Row paperback, 1975
And from Dean Martin, avatar of anti-art :
- Artist: Dean Martin as sung on "Dean Martin's Greatest Hits"
- Capitol 4XL-9389
- peak Billboard position # 2 in 1953
- from the movie "the Caddy" starring Dean, Jerry Lewis, and Donna Reed
- Words and Music by Harry Warren and Jack Brooks
(In Napoli where love is King, when boy meets girl, here's what they say)
When the moon hits your eye like a big-a pizza pie,
That's amore!
When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine,
That's amore! -
Miss Sauvé
for the Sunday following Corpus Christi Day, 2002:
The part of her fiction that most fascinates me, then and now, is what many critics referred to as “the grotesque,” but what she herself called “the reasonable use of the unreasonable.” [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, eds. (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1969)]
A modest example comes to mind. In a short story .... the setting sun appears like a great red ball, but she sees it as “an elevated Host drenched in blood” leaving a “line like a red clay road in the sky.” [Flannery O’Connor, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” from A Good Man is Hard to Find (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971)]
In a letter to a friend of hers, O’Connor would later write, “…like the child, I believe the Host is actually the body and blood of Christ, not just a symbol. If the story grows for you it is because of the mystery of the Eucharist in it.” In that same correspondence, O’Connor relates this awkward experience:
I was once, five or six years ago, taken by [Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick] to have dinner with Mary McCarthy…. She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went and eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say…. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [McCarthy] said that when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable. [Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor (Vintage: New York, 1979) 124-125]
....There is, of course, something entirely preposterous and, well, unreasonable, almost grotesque, about the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. We claim, with a perfectly straight face, to eat the body and drink the blood of the Eternal Word of God, the second person of the Most Holy Trinity who, according to some, shouldn’t even have a body to begin with. But therein lies precisely the most outlandish feature of the Eucharist: namely, that it embodies the essential scandal of the Incarnation itself.
-- Friar Francisco Nahoe, OFM Conv.
From James Joyce
A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man
Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?
-- Here he is! Here he is!
From The Gazette, Montreal,
of Sunday, August 20, 1995, page C4:
"Summer of '69," a memoir by Judy Lapalme on the death by accidental drowning of her 15-year-old younger brother:
"I had never tasted pizza until Jeff died. Our family, of staunch Irish Catholic stock with more offspring than money, couldn't cope with the luxury or the spice.
The Hallidays, neighbors from across the street, sent it over to us the day after the funeral, from Miss Sauvé's Pizzeria, on Sauvé St., just east of Lajeunesse St. in Ahuntsic. An all-dressed pizza with the hard hat in the centre....
I was 17 that summer and had just completed Grade 12 at Holy Names High School in Rosemont....
.... Jeff was almost 16, a handsome football star, a rebellious, headstrong, sturdy young man who was forever locking horns with my father.... On Friday, Aug. 1, Jeff went out on the boat... and never came back....
The day after the funeral, a white Volkswagen from Miss Sauvé's Pizzeria delivered a jumbo, all-dressed pizza to us. The Hallidays' daughter, Diane, had been smitten with Jeff and wanted to do something special.
My father assured us that we wouldn't like it, too spicy and probably too garlicky. There could not be a worse indictment of a person to my father than to declare them reeking of garlic.
The rest of us tore into the cardboard and began tasting this exotic offering -- melted strands of creamy, rubbery, burn-your-palate mozzarrella that wasn't Velveeta, crisp, dry, and earthy mushrooms, spicy and salty pepperoni sliding off the crust with each bite, green peppers.... Bread crust both crisp and soggy with tomato sauce laden with garlic and oregano.
It was an all-dressed pizza, tasted for the first time, the day after we buried Jeff....
The fall of 1969, I went to McGill.... I never had another pizza from Miss Sauvé's. It's gone now -- like so many things."
Ten thousand places
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889
American Literature Web Resources:
Flannery O'Connor
She died on August 3, 1964 at the age of 39.
In almost all of her works the characters were led to a place where they had to deal with God’s presence in the world.
She once said "in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or statistics, but by the stories it tells. Fiction is the most impure and the most modest and the most human of the arts."
Flannery OConnor - Southern Prophet:
... When a woman wrote to Flannery O'Connor saying that one of her stories "left a bad taste in my mouth," Flannery wrote back: "You weren't supposed to eat it."
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Death of a Cut-up
The dark philosopher William S. Burroughs died five years ago today. Part of his legacy is the "cut-up" technique. See William S. Burroughs and Cut-up, where it is noted that
"the Cut-up technique was inspired by the collage technique used by artists and photographers,"
and Cut-ups and the Internet, where it is noted that
"The cut-up (or 'cutup') is a method of juxtaposition where a work (usually text) is cut into pieces and the pieces rearranged in a random order, similar to the montage or collage technique in painting."
The idea of hypertext (the "ht" in "http://," for "HyperText Transfer Protocol://") is not unrelated to the concept of the "cut-up"...
See Time Line and Contents at The Electronic Labyrinth.
Also from "The Electronic Labyrinth":
At Swim-Two-Birds
The question of beginnings and endings--how many of them to have and where to put them--has troubled many authors. Indeed, some have seen the singular linear path of traditional literature as cause for consternation. This is expressed by the narrator in Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1968):
One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with.
See also the writings of Eric Olson on the collage method of psychotherapy, the subject of "Aesthetics of Madness," my July 30, 2002, web journal entry below.
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Double Day... August 2, 2002
"Time cannot exist without a soul (to count it)." -- Aristotle
The above quotation appears in my journal note of August 2, 1995, as an epigraph on the reproduced title page of The Sense of an Ending, by Frank Kermode (Oxford University Press, 1967).
August 2, 1995, was the fortieth anniversary of Wallace Stevens's death. On the same date in 1932 -- seventy years ago today -- actor Peter O'Toole was born. O'Toole's name appears, in a suitably regal fashion, in my journal note of August 2, 1995, next to the heraldic crest of Oxford University, which states that "Dominus illuminatio mea." Both the crest and the name appear below the reproduced title page of Kermode's book -- forming, as it were, a foundation for what Harvard professor Marjorie Garber scornfully called "the Church of St. Frank" (letters to the editor, New York Times Book Review, July 30, 1995).
Meditations for today, August 2, 2002:
From page 60 of Why I Am a Catholic, by Gary Wills (Houghton Mifflin, 2002):
"Was Jesus teasing Peter when he called him 'Rocky,' naming him ab opposito, as when one calls a not-so-bright person Einstein?"
From page 87 of The Third Word War, by Ian Lee (A&W Publishers, Inc., New York, 1978):
"Two birds... One stone (EIN STEIN)."
From "Seventy Years Later," Section I of "The Rock," a poem by Wallace Stevens:
A theorem proposed between the two --
Two figures in a nature of the sun....
From page 117 of The Sense of an Ending:
"A great many different kinds of writing are called avant-garde.... The work of William Burroughs, for instance, is avant-garde. His is the literature of withdrawal, and his interpreters speak of his hatred for life, his junk nihilism, his treatment of the body as a corpse full of cravings. The language of his books is the language of an ending world, its aim... 'self-abolition.'"
From "Today in History," by The Associated Press:
"Five years ago: 'Naked Lunch' author William S. Burroughs, the godfather of the 'Beat generation,' died in Kansas City, Mo., at age 83."
Part of the above statement is the usual sort of AP disinformation, due not to any sinister intent but to stupidity and carelessness. Burroughs actually died in Lawrence, Kansas. For the location of Lawrence, click on the link below. Location matters.
From page 118 of The Sense of an Ending:
"Somewhere, then, the avant-garde language must always rejoin the vernacular."
From the Billie Holiday songbook:
"Good mornin', heartache."
From page 63 of The New Yorker issue dated August 5, 2002:
"Birthday, death-day -- what day is not both?" -- John Updike
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Stephen King's Seattle Rose
From http://www.janeellen.com/musings/quakerose.html:
On February 28, 2001 (Ash Wednesday)....
At a shop called Mind Over Matter in Port Townsend, Washington, people had been playing with a sand pendulum throughout the morning. At 10.55 am local time a 6.8 magnitude earthquake, the strongest in over 50 years, rocked Seattle and the surrounding area.... In the midst of chaos, something strange and wonderful happened. The seismic activity caused the sand pendulum to create rippling waves in the sand, which as the shaking ceased, resembled a solitary flower in the midst of devastation: a rose.
From http://archives.skemers.com/2200/nl2130.txt:
Subj: Re: SKEMERs Letter #2124 (Rose Red, HIA DVD, Insomnia Editions)
Date: 2/1/02 3:18:24 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: ChopperKozmo@aol.com
Hi, something has been bothering me a bit, what is that song they played in [the Stephen King TV miniseries] Rose Red? I need the tune, it's been bothering me since the end of the movie.
Thanks -Kozmo/Curt (Chopperkozmo@aol.com)
The one they played most (even at the end) was Theme From a Summer Place. It's from a movie called (tada) A Summer Place, released in the late 50s. I've never seen it, but the song is familiar.
~Chris
- Performed by: Percy Faith
- Words by Mack Discant, music by Max Steiner
- From the 1959 film, A Summer Place, starring Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue
- #1 hit instrumental for Percy Faith in 1960
- Lyrics as recorded by The Lettermen in 1965 --
There's a summer place
Where it may rain or storm
Yet I'm safe and warm
For within that summer place
Your arms reach out to me
And my heart is free from all care
For it knows
There are no gloomy skies
When seen through the eyes
Of those who are blessed with love.
See also http://autumn.www1.50megs.com/sunset.html:
This site offers a sunset reflected in gently rippling water, with "Theme from a Summer Place" playing in the background.
Complete lyrics to "Summer Place" and "A Lover's Concerto" (discussed below) are collected along with other "Songs of Innocence" at
http://www.geocities.com/lyricalmusings/60s.htm.
The reader may supply his own Songs of Experience...
My own personal favorite is the fictional rendition, in the recent novel The Last Samurai, of "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" in the style of Percy Faith.
This note was suggested by a search for quotations from the composer Igor Stravinsky that ended at Jane Ellen's collection of quotes on music and the arts at http://www.janeellen.com/quotations.html.
Roll over, Stravinsky.
- Performed by: Percy Faith
Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.
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