Allure
at the New York Times

and Bad News and Good News
for Tish b'Av

Today is, until sundown, Tish b'Av, a Jewish holy day.

Bad News:

"Tish b'Av is traditionally held by Jews around the world as a day of mourning for the loss of the First and Second Temples, as well as for the other tragedies which occurred on this day, such as the expulsion of the Spanish Jewry in 1492. As one of the two major fast days of the year, and in the middle of the hot summer, the day has taken on a character unique in the Jewish calender: dark, painful, and intensely sad."

-- Meditation on Tish B'Av 

Good News:

"It is passed down that the Messiah will be born on Tish b'Av.... The day, then, has an intrinsic meaning of transformation and hope, and can be seen as an opportunity to give birth to the messiah in each of us."

-- Meditation on Tish B'Av

Today's birthday:  Billie Burke, Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz.

Glinda (at left)  and Adam Moss

Some Jews may, in view of her birth on this date,  regard Burke as the Messiah... Among this sect is perhaps Adam Moss, who has just been appointed features editor of the New York Times.

The picture of Moss above is from
Party Photos: Gay Journalism Panel.

"Mr. Moss's appointment was announced [August 5] by Bill Keller, executive editor.

In his new position, Mr. Moss, 46, will oversee coverage of the arts and style, as well as weekly sections including the magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Travel, Real Estate, Circuits and Escapes.

'It is past time for our magnificent coverage of culture and lifestyles, so essential to our present

 allure 

and to our future growth, to get the kind of attention we routinely bestow on hard news,' Mr. Keller wrote in an e-mail message to the staff."

-- New York Times, August 6, 2003

Morning Flight

"I'm working on a morning flight to anywhere but here....

It's not the way you say you hear my heart
when the music ends
I am just learning how to fly away again"

-- Nanci Griffith on KHYI.com, 6:45 AM

Click on the above yantra for deeper meditations from May 24 and 25, 2003.

See entries of June 10-14, 2003, for more on the symbolism of the above figure's central two triangles, which represent Shiva and Kali united.  For the symbolism of the eight petals, see the eight-ray star of Venus in my Oct. 23, 2002, entry.  This is one interpretation of the eightfold "Spider" symbol

which plays a major role in the Changewar stories of Fritz Leiber (my favorite mythology).  This symbol, like the two-triangles symbol at the center of the eight-petal lotus above, represents "Shiva and Kali united in love," according to Leiber. (See my journal note "Biblical Proportions," written on this date in 1997.)

For a Christian perspective on the Spider symbol, see Quine in Purgatory.

For a different religious perspective on the two-triangles symbol in the lotus, see

You Don't Look Buddhist,

Suzanne Takes You Down, and

Satori at Pearl Harbor.

Postmodern
Postmortem

"I had a lot of fun with this audacious and exasperating book. ... [which] looks more than a little like Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, a 'secret history' tracing punk rock through May 1968...."

-- Michael Harris, Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu, Université Paris 7, review of Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought, by Vladimir Tasic, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, August 2003

For some observations on the transgressive  predecessors of punk rock, see my entry Funeral March of July 26, 2003 (the last conscious day in the life of actress Marie Trintignant -- see below), which contains the following:

"Sky is high and so am I,
If you're a viper -- a vi-paah."
— The Day of the Locust,
    by Nathanael West (1939)

As I noted in another another July 26 entry, the disease of postmodernism has, it seems, now infected mathematics.  For some recent outbreaks of infection in physics, see the works referred to below.

"Postmodern Fields of Physics: In his book The Dreams of Reason, H. R. Pagels focuses on the science of complexity as the most outstanding new discipline emerging in recent years...."

-- "The Semiotics of 'Postmodern' Physics," by Hans J. Pirner, in Symbol and Physical Knowledge: The Conceptual Structure of Physics, ed. by M. Ferrari and I.-O. Stamatescu, Springer Verlag, August 2001 

For a critical look at Pagels's work, see Midsummer Eve's Dream.  For a less critical look, see The Marriage of Science and Mysticism.  Pagels's book on the so-called "science of complexity" was published in June 1988.  For more recent bullshit on complexity, see

The Critical Idiom of Postmodernity and Its Contributions to an Understanding of Complexity, by Matthew Abraham, 2000,

which describes a book on complexity theory that, besides pronouncements about physics, also provides what "could very well be called a 'postmodern ethic.' "

The book reviewed is Paul Cilliers's Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems.

A search for related material on Cilliers yields the following:

Janis Joplin, Postmodernist " ...'all' is 'one,' ... the time is 'now' and ... 'tomorrow never happens,' .... as Janis Joplin says, 'it's all the same fucking day.' It appears that 'time,' ... the linear, independent notion of 'time' that our culture embraces, is an artifact of our abstract thinking ... The problem is that 'tomorrow never happens' .... Aboriginal traditionalists are well aware of this topological paradox and so was Janis Joplin. Her use of the expletive in this context is therefore easy to understand ... love is never having to say 'tomorrow.' " -- Web page citing Paul Cilliers

"That's the dumbest thing I ever heard."

-- Ryan O'Neal in "What's Up, Doc?"

A more realistic look at postmodernism in action is provided by the following news story:

Brutal Death of an Actress Is France's Summertime Drama By JOHN TAGLIABUE The actress, Marie Trintignant, died Friday [Aug. 1, 2003] in a Paris hospital, with severe head and face injuries. Her rock star companion, Bertrand Cantat, is confined to a prison hospital.... According to news reports, Ms. Trintignant and Mr. Cantat argued violently in their hotel room in Vilnius in the early hours of [Sunday] July 27 at the end of a night spent eating and drinking.... In coming months, two films starring Ms. Trintignant are scheduled to debut, including "Janis and John" by the director Samuel Benchetrit, her estranged husband and the father of two of her four children. In it, Ms. Trintignant plays Janis Joplin. -- New York Times of Aug. 5, 2003

" '...as a matter of fact, as we discover all the time, tomorrow never happens, man. It's all the same f...n' day, man!' --Janis Joplin, at live performance in Calgary on 4th July 1970 - exactly four months before her death. (apologies for censoring her exact words which can be heard on the 'Janis Joplin in Concert' CD)"

-- Janis Joplin at FamousTexans.com

All of the above fits in rather nicely with the view of science and scientists in the C. S. Lewis classic That Hideous Strength, which I strongly recommend.

For those few who both abhor postmodernism and regard the American Mathematical Society Notices

as a sort of "holy place" of Platonism, I recommend a biblical reading--

Matthew 24:15, CEV:

"Someday you will see that Horrible Thing in the holy place...."

See also Logos and Logic for more sophisticated religious remarks, by Simone Weil, whose brother, mathematician André Weil, died five years ago today.

More excellent poetry from KHYI.com:

Candyland, by James McMurtry.

Another Texas-related link, this one for poet Conrad Aiken's birthday:

Politics of Hell and Honorary Waco Wacko.

Venn's Trinity

Today is the birthday of logician John Venn.

From the St. Andrews History of Mathematics site:

"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 non-overlapping regions, the unions of which give 256 different Boolean combinations of the original sets R, S, T." 

Last night's entry, "A Queer Religion," gave a Catholic view of the Trinity.  Here are some less interesting but more fruitful thoughts inspired by Venn's diagram of the Trinity (or, indeed, of any three entities):

"To really know a subject you've got to learn a bit of its history...."
-- John Baez, August 4, 2002

"We both know what memories can bring;
They bring diamonds and rust."
-- Joan Baez, April 1975

For the "diamonds" brought by memories of the 2⁸ combinations described above, consider how the symmetric group S₈ is related to the symmetries of the finite projective space PG(3,2).  (See Diamond Theory.) 

For the "rust," consider the following:

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt...."
-- Matthew 6:19

The letters R, U, S, T in the Venn diagram above are perhaps relevant here, symbolizing, if you will, the earthly confusion of language, as opposed to the heavenly clarity of mathematics.

As for MOTH, see the article Hometown Zeroes (which brings us yet again to the Viper Room, scene of River Phoenix's death) and the very skillfully designed website MOTHEMATICS.

Resurrection

The previous entry, on Christian theology, does not imply that all religion is bad.  Consider, for instance, the following from a memorial web page: 

"Al Grierson's song Resurrection was sung by Ray Wylie Hubbard, on his outstanding Dangerous Spirits album. The song is awesome, and fits right into Ray Wylie's spirit 'and an angel lay on a mattress and spoke of history and death with perfume on her lingerie and whiskey on her breath . . . he's loading up his saddlebags on the edge of wonder, one is filled with music and the other's filled with thunder.' Wow."

Amen.
Grierson died on November 2, 2000
-- All Souls Day, Dia de los Muertos.

My own favorite resurrection story is "Damnation Morning," by Fritz Leiber; see Why Me? 

For more on the Day of the Dead, see Under the Volcano.

These are, of course, just stories, but may reflect some as yet unknown truth.

By the way, thanks, Joni, for leading me to KHYI.com on the day of the Toronto Stones concert.

A Queer Religion

August 4 headline:

Gay bishop on way to win

This suggests the following theological meditation by a gay Christian:

"I can't resist but end by pointing out the irony of the doctrine of the Trinity as seen by gay eyes. Please don't take what I say next too seriously. I don't believe that gender is very important or that it is any more present in God than is 'green-ness,' however, I simply can't resist. The Trinity seems to be founded on the ecstatic love union of two male persons; the Father and the Son. If one takes this seriously it is incestuous pedophilia. There is no doubt that this union is generative (and so in the origin of the meaning 'sexual') in character, because from it bursts forth a third person: Holy Spirit; neuter in Greek, feminine in Hebrew! Whereas Islam detests the Catholic idea that the Blessed Virgin was 'impregnated' by God, as demeaning to the transcendence of God, the internal incestuous homosexuality that the doctrine of the Trinity amounts to should really offend more! Any orthodox  account of the inner life of God is at best highly uncongenial to the paradigm of the heterosexual nuclear family. Amusingly, the contemporary Magisterium fails to notice this and even attempts to use the doctrine of the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son to bolster its conventional championing of 'male-female complementarity' and the centrality of procreation to all authentically 'self-giving' relationships. Absurdities will never cease!"

Amen to the conclusion, at least.

The author of this meditation, "Pharsea," is a "traditional Catholic" and advocate of the Latin Mass -- just like Mel Gibson.  One wonders how Gibson might react to Pharsea's theology.

As for me... I always thought there was something queer about that religion.

Dancing at Lughnasa

"The place outside the cosmos where I and my pals do our nursing job I simply call the Place. A lot of my nursing consists of amusing and humanizing Soldiers fresh back from raids into time. In fact, my formal title is Entertainer...."

-- Fritz Leiber, The Big Time

"And he sang:
'Dance a little closer to me,
Dance a little closer now,
Dance a little closer tonight.
Dance a little closer to me,
    hey it's closing time,
And love's on sale tonight
    at this five and dime.' "

-- "Love at the Five and Dime,"
written and sung by Nanci Griffith 

"Going up." -- Nanci Griffith

Late Night Grande Hotel

"I feel like Garbo in this late night Grande Hotel
 'Cause living alone is all I've ever done well"

-- Nanci Griffith, Song lyric

"...the thought of those dark three
Is dark, thought of the forms of dark desire."

-- Wallace Stevens,
    "The Owl in the Sarcophagus" 

"I am not as romantically entrancing as the immortal film star... but I have a rough-and-ready charm of my own."

-- Fritz Leiber, The Big Time

"But she that says good-by...     stood tall in self     not symbol, quick And potent, an influence felt     instead of seen." -- Wallace Stevens, "The Owl in the Sarcophagus"

Nanci Griffith

Thank you, KHYI.com, for playing Nanci Griffith on this, the feast day of Presbyterian saint Wallace Stevens.  She is not Garbo or Marie Trintignant (see previous entry), but she will do.

 "Beauty is momentary in the mind --
     The fitful tracing of a portal;
     But in the flesh it is immortal."
     -- Wallace Stevens,
     Peter Quince at the Clavier

Dark Desire

Film star dies after fight
with rock boyfriend

"...they seemed destined to become France's golden couple: the fragile and gifted film actress from one of the country's great theatrical families, and the radical rock star-poet with a genuine social conscience.

But yesterday Marie Trintignant died in Paris of a cerebral haemorrhage, while her boyfriend, Bernard [sic] Cantat, lead singer of France's most popular rock band

Noir Désir

was in jail... suspected of landing the blow that plunged her into a coma from which she never emerged.

-- Jon Henley in Paris
    Saturday August 2, 2003
    The Guardian 

The Details:

"Trintignant... was rushed to hospital at 7.30 on Sunday morning.... 

The singer, adored in France as much for his militant and public stands on issues such as racism, globalisation and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as for his powerful lyrics and charismatic stage presence, was admitted to hospital shortly afterwards with acute alcohol poisoning and a suspected overdose of prescription drugs.

He had allegedly waited more than five hours since the midnight struggle before sounding the alarm...."

Last Sunday's site music, for the entry Catholic Tastes, was...  

Nous Voici Dans La Ville - A Christmas song from 15th century France (midi by John Philip Dimick).  

It will serve as a memorial song for Marie.

As for Cantat, see the 
four entries that preceded
the Catholic Tastes entry.

These deal with substance abuse and postmodern French philosophy.

The song I would recommend to memorialize the role of Cantat in this affair is American rather than French...

 

"Pukin' in the Parkin' Lot."

Religious meditation for today:

As remarked in my
obituary for Sam Phillips,
Father of Rock and Roll,

"If there's a rock and roll heaven,
Well you know they've got
a hell of a band."