Rummy, here's your
"war of ideas" —
The Hunt for Red October

Today is the anniversary of the triumph of Lenin in the October Revolution.

General background on the two sides:

News
    Politics
        Conservative
        Progressive and Left

In today's news: March on Washington

War of Ideas

Toby Ziegler
of West Wing

Click on the above picture for
my Aug. 17, 2003, entry,

A Thorny Crown of Ideas.

For the details of a rather famous religious text that shows Rumsfeld to be lying, see my note of July 31, 1997,

Vacation Bible School.

(The detail that makes Rumsfeld's statement a lie is the word "all," which is contradicted by the religion of Orthodox Judaism.  Another detail of interest is the word "Joshua" in the Vacation Bible School entry.  Recall that this was the real name of the Jew now known as Jesus, and that many of his followers may have hoped he would star in a bloody sequel to the Book of Joshua.  Hence the "thorny crown" phrase in the West Wing link above.)

For the Dead of
St. Ursula's Day

In the spirit of Southie...

"To admirers, Mrs. Hicks
spoke the truth
to liberal power
in simple declarative sentences."

-- Mark Feeney, Boston Globe

"The time had come for him
to set out on his journey westward.
Yes, the newspapers were right:
snow was general all over Ireland."

-- James Joyce, "The Dead"

Saint Ursula's Day

"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"

-- Saying attributed to 
   Saint Ursula K. Le Guin
   (10/21/1929 – )

For St. Gwen Verdon:

Enter Dancing

From Daily Quotational Lattice:

The story of the day is "Dance in America," about a dancer who has dinner with some friends.  Take note if you're a dancer: Ariel, a bona fide dancer, deems the quotes about dancing to be "very powerful."

"I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom.  I tell them it's the body's reaching, bringing air to itself.  I tell them that it's the heart's triumph, the victory speech of the feet, the refinement of animal lunge and flight, the purest metaphor of tribe and self. It's life flipping death the bird.  I make this stuff up."

"I am thinking of the dancing body's magnificent and ostentatious scorn.  This is how we offer ourselves, enter heaven, enter speaking: we say with motion, in space, This is what life's done so far down here; this is all and what and everything it's managed--this body, these bodies, that body-- so what do you think, Heaven?  What do you fucking think?"

-- "Dance in America," by Lorrie Moore

Happy Birthday, Arthur Miller

Miller, the author of "The Crucible," is what Russell Baker has called a "tribal storyteller."

From an essay by Baker in The New York Review of Books, issue dated November 6, 2003 (Fortieth Anniversary Issue):

"Among the privileges enjoyed by rich, fat, superpower America is the power to invent public reality.  Politicians and the mass media do much of the inventing for us by telling us stories which purport to unfold a relatively simple reality.  As our tribal storytellers, they shape our knowledge and ignorance of the world, not only producing ideas and emotions which influence the way we live our lives, but also leaving us dangerously unaware of the difference between stories and reality."

-- Russell Baker, "The Awful Truth," NYRB 11/6/03, page 8 

Here is a rather similar view of the media:

"Who Rules America?".

The attentive student of this second essay will have no difficulty finding a single four-letter word to replace both of Baker's phrases "rich, fat, superpower America" and "politicians and the mass media."

Baker's concern for "the difference between stories and reality" is reflected in my own website The Diamond Theory of Truth.  In summary:

"Is it safe?" -- Sir Laurence Olivier

Cursing the Darkness

From my entries on this date last year...

"...we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God's grace shall never be put out."

Thought for today:

Render unto Rome that which is Rome's.

See also my remarks of January 29, 2003,
on the opening in New Zealand of
Cullinane College.

The One Culture

Today's birthdays:
Friedrich Nietzsche and C. P. Snow.

Recommended reading--

The Two Cultures Today, by Roger Kimball, which begins with a quotation from Nietzsche:

"It is not a question of annihilating science, but of controlling it."

Saint Leonard's Day

From a review of Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton lectures at Harvard:

The truly emblematic twentieth-century composer is Mahler, whose attempts to relinquish tonality are reluctant and incomplete, and whose nostalgia for past practice is overt and tragic. Mahler's Ninth Symphony, his "last will and testament," shows "that ours is the century of death, and Mahler is its musical prophet." That is the "real reason" Mahler's music suffered posthumous neglect--it was, Bernstein says, "telling something too dreadful to hear." The Ninth Symphony embodies three kinds of death--Mahler's own, which he knew was imminent; the death of tonality, "which for him meant the death of music itself"; and "the death of society, of our Faustian culture." And yet this music, like all great art, paradoxically reanimates us.

-- Joseph Horowitz, New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993

Hello, Columbus

"Dunne is to Irish Catholics as
Philip Roth is to Eastern European Jews,
and True Confessions is Dunne's
Goodbye Columbus."
-- Amazon.com review