Shabbos Kodesh
Sabbath readings, music, video, etc.:
"Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Awake, Gov't Cheese"
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath home page
Black Sabbath lyrics archive
Queen Shabbos Kodesh Holy Jewish Shabbat
"Friday night and the lights are low..." — ABBA
ART WARS:
All About Lilith
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Sam Peckinpah (Feb. 21, 1925)
The New Yorker Magazine (Feb. 21, 1925)
Alan Rickman, 57
Kelsey Grammer, 48
Mary Chapin Carpenter, 45
Jennifer Love Hewitt, 24
Charlotte Church, 17
This list suggests that in an ideal future life Sam Peckinpah would direct, and The New Yorker review, a prequel to "All About Eve."
Casting would be as follows:
Mary Chapin Carpenter as Margo Channing
(originally, Bette Davis)
Charlotte Church as Lilith, sister of Eve Harrington
(originally, Anne Baxter)
Jennifer Love Hewitt as Claudia Casswell
(originally, Marilyn Monroe)
Alan Rickman as Bill Sampson
(originally, Gary Merrill)
Kelsey Grammer as Addison DeWitt
(originally, George Sanders).
Since today is also the anniversary, according to Tom's Book of Days, of Schultes's identification of teonanacatl in 1939, the following classic painting, " Caterpillar's Mushroom," by Brian Froud, might be adapted for a poster for our heavenly production*, to be titled, in accordance with celestial fairness doctrines,
* A footnote in memory of publicist/producer Jack Brodsky ("Romancing the Stone," etc.), who died on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2003 — See the website Eight is a Gate for the mystical significance of the number "78" in Judaism. The New Yorker and Sam Peckinpah were born 78 years ago today.
Winteler's Tale
According to Dennis Overbye:
Einstein's parents "sent him off to a prep school [in Aarau, Switzerland, near Zurich] for a year, for a season [1895-1896].
He lived with a family, the Wintelers, a big, boisterous intellectual family, who were always arguing and bird watching and hiking, and seems to have had a wonderful time. And he got involved with one of the Winteler daughters, Marie.... Albert kept talking about her his whole life, about how he would be consumed in flames if he even saw her again."
In honor of Marie Winteler, and of the following note, which is seventeen years old today, our site music is now "When You Were Sweet Sixteen," music and lyrics by James Thornton, 1898.
Click on the above for a larger image.
Fat Man and Dancing Girl
Dance of |
Paul Newman as |
Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, portrayed in the film "Fat Man and Little Boy," died on this date in 1967.
He is sometimes called the "father of the A-bomb." He said that at the time of the first nuclear test he thought of a line from the Sanskrit holy book, the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." The following gives more details.
kalosmi lokaksaya krt pravrddho
This literally means: I am kAla, the great destroyer of Worlds. What is intriguing about this verse, then, is the interpretation of kAla by Jungk and others to mean death. While death is technically one of the meanings of kAla, a more common one is time.
Indeed, the translations of the Gita by S. Radhakrishnan, A. C. Bhaktivedanta, Nataraja Guru and Eliot Deutsch say precisely that. One exception to this, however, is the 1929 translation by Arthur Ryder. And, indeed, in a 1933 letter to his brother, Robert Oppenheimer does mention that he has "been reading the Bhagavad Gita with Ryder and two other Sanskritists." The misinterpretation, therefore, may not have been the fault of Oppenheimer or Jungk. Nevertheless, the verse does not have anything to do with an apocalyptic or catastrophic destruction, as most people have interpreted it in connection with nuclear weapons. When kAla is understood as time, the meaning is drastically changed to being a reminder of our mortality and finite lifetimes as also the lifetimes of everything else in this world (including plutonium and uranium, despite their long, long, half-lives!). It then becomes more akin to western notions of the "slow march of time" and thus having little to do with the immense destruction caused by a nuclear explosion. While the very first images that arose in the father of the atomic bomb are a somewhat wrong application of Hindu mythology, his recollection of the Bhagavad Gita may have been quite pertinent. As is well known, the Bhagavad Gita was supposedly intended to persuade Arjuna to participate in the Kurukshetra battle that resulted in the killing of thousands. Thus, Oppenheimer may well have been trying to rationalize his involvement in the development of a terrible weapon.
Source: Google cache of
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/5409/samar_bluegod.pdf
See also
http://www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=36.
"KAla" (in the Harvard-Kyoto transliteration scheme) is more familiar to the West in the related form of Kali, a goddess sometimes depicted as a dancing girl; Kali is related to kAla, time, according to one website, as "the force which governs and stops time." See also the novel The Fermata, by Nicholson Baker.
The fact that Oppenheimer thought of Chapter 11, verse 32, of the Gita may, as a mnemonic device, be associated with the use of the number 1132 in Finnegans Wake.
See 1132 A. D. & Saint Brighid, and my weblog entries of January 5 (Twelfth Night and the whirligig of time), January 31 (St. Brigid's Eve), and February 1 (St. Brigid's Day), 2003.
Midnight Flame
Fever isn't such a new thing;
Fever started long ago.
And most of the show is concealed from view.
— Suzanne Vega, "Fat Man and Dancing Girl," 99.9° F. album
See the entries of Jan. 5, 2003 and of Feb. 1, 2003.
Saint Faggot's Day
"During the European Inquisitions, faggot referred to the sticks used to set fires for burning heretics, or people who opposed the teachings of the Catholic Church. Heretics were required to gather bundles of sticks ('faggots') and carry them to the fire that was being built for them. Heretics who changed their beliefs to avoid being killed were forced to wear a faggot design embroidered on their sleeve, to show everyone that they had opposed the Church."
— Handout
| N.Y. Times Feb. 2, 2003
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Head White House speechwriter Michael Gerson:
"In the last two weeks, I've been returning to Hopkins. Even in the 'world's wildfire,' he asserts that 'this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,/Is immortal diamond.' A comfort."
— Vanity Fair, May 2002, page 162
"At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds...."
— William Butler Yeats, "Byzantium"
On this date in 1600, Saint Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy by the Roman Catholic Church.
He was resurrected by Saint Frances Yates, who went to her reward on the feast day of Saint Michael and All Angels, 1981.
Center of Time
Am I.... your fantasy girl Machine ballerina? |
From the |
"The old man of 'Sailing to Byzantium' imagined the city's power as being able to 'gather' him into 'the artifice of eternity'— presumably into 'monuments of unageing intellect,' immortal and changeless structures representative of or embodying all knowledge, linked like a perfect machine at the center of time."
— Karl Parker, Yeats' Two Byzantiums
"I wrote Fermata listening to Suzanne Vega, particularly her album '99.9° F.' It affected my mood in just the right way. I found a kind of maniacal intensity in her music that helped me as I typed. So if Fermata is attacked, maybe I can say i'm not responsible because I was under the spell of Suzanne Vega."
— Nicholson Baker, interview
For some real monuments of unageing intellect, see "Geometrie" in the weblog of Andrea for February 10, 2003.
Ideal of Hell:
The Burning of Columbia
On February 17, 1865, United States troops entered Columbia, SC.
"By midnight the whole town (except the outskirts) was wrapped in one huge blaze.... My God! what a scene! .... Such a scene as this with the drunken fiendish soldiers in their dark uniforms, infuriated, cursing, screaming, exulting in their work, came nearer the material ideal of hell than anything I ever expect to see again."
— Diary of Emma LeConte, 17, of Columbia
Happy Presidents' Day.
The Recruit, Part Deux
Walter L. Pforzheimer, one of the founding fathers of the Central Intelligence Agency, and its "institutional memory," died on Monday, February 10, 2003.
From my notes of February 10, 2003:
"... gather me/ Into the artifice of eternity."
— W. B. Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"
This poem has a sequel, titled simply "Byzantium" —
At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds....
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame....
The Emperor's Pavement
See also yesterday's note "The Recruit,"
on the CIA and what Vonnegut called
"A Duty-Dance with Death."
The Recruit
From an obituary of Walt W. Rostow, advisor to presidents and Vietnam hardliner:
"During World War II, he served in the Office of Strategic Services,
the predecessor agency to the Central Intelligence Agency."
Rostow died on Thursday, February 13, 2003, the anniversary of the 1945 firebombing of Dresden.
Like von Neumann, Rostow exemplified the use of intellectuals by the state. From a memoir by Rostow:
"...in mid-1941.... American military intelligence... was grossly inadequate....
...military leaders... learned that they needed intellectuals....
Thus the link was forged that yielded the CIA, RAND, the AEC, and
all the other institutionalized links between intellectual life and
national security that persist down to the present."
— Walt W. Rostow, "Recollections of the Bombing,"
University of Texas web page
"Look at that caveman go!"
— Remark in my entry of February 13, 2003
"So it goes."
— Remark of Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five
See also
Tralfamadorian Structure
in Slaughterhouse-Five,
which includes the following passage:
"...the nonlinear
characterization of Billy Pilgrim emphasizes that he is not simply an
established identity who undergoes a series of changes but all the
different things he is at different times."
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For a more recent nonlinear characterization, see the poem "Fermata" by Andrew Zawacki
in The New Yorker magazine, issue dated Feb. 17 and 24, 2003, pp.
160-161. Zawacki is thirty years younger than I, but we share the
same small home town.
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