Quarter to Three

"You've got to be true to your code."
-- Frank Sinatra

In memory of Webster Young,
who died on Saint Lucia's day,
December 13, 2003 --

From my entry of 12/16/03,
Jazz on St. Lucia's Day:

"Now you has jazz."
- High Society, 1956

Webster Young was a jazz trumpeter.

In 1957, Young was featured on
saxophonist Jackie McLean's albums
"A Long Drink of the Blues" and
"Makin' the Changes."

-- Adam Bernstein,
Washington Post, Dec. 18

"One for my baby,
and one more for the road."
-- Frank Sinatra

For St. Emil's Day

On this date in 1962, Emil Artin died.

He was, in his way, a priest of Apollo, god of music, light, and reason.

The previous entry dealt with permutation groups, in the context of a Jan. 2004 AMS Notices review of a book on the mathematics of juggling.

It turns out that juggling is, in fact, related to Artin's theory of "braid groups."  For details, see Juggling Braids.

For more on Apollo, see my entry of

1/09.

Happy Birthday, Helmut Wielandt
(wherever you may be)

Cover illustration,
AMS Notices, January 2004

In light of my entry on change-ringing of this date last year, the above AMS Notices cover may serve to illustrate what Heidegger so memorably dubbed the

 "Geheimnis des Glockenturms."

For details on the illustration,
click here and scroll down.

(Wielandt was an expert
on permutation groups.)

Christmas Concert

"And now what you've all
been waiting for... Wagner!"

-- Conclusion of the film "Cosi"

Related material:

The Ring and the Rings: Wagner vs. Tolkien, by Alex Ross, in The New Yorker, current (Dec. 22-29) issue.

Tolkien, Wagner, Nationalism, and Modernity, from a 2001 Seattle Opera House conference.

Saint Louis

Today is the feast day of Saint Louis Untermeyer, who died on December 18, 1977.  Here are some links in his memory:

His anthology, Modern British Poetry,

his anthology, Modern American Poetry,

and

a brief biography at http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/.

I grew up with a paperback Untermeyer anthology that I loved.  He may have been middlebrow, but he taught me more than many more refined authors.

Any religion that says Untermeyer is not a saint can go, as far as I am concerned, straight to Hell.

Fighting Chance

"Give faith a fighting chance."
  -- Lee Ann Womack

On this date in 1959, the film "On the Beach" opened worldwide.

From a site on Nevil Shute, author of the book on which the film was based:

The New York Daily News (December 18, 1959) condemned the film:

"This is a would-be shocker which plays right up the alley of a) the Kremlin and b) the Western defeatists and/or traitors who yelp for the scrapping of the H-bomb. ... See this picture if you must (it seems bound to be much talked about), but keep in mind that the thinking it represents points the way toward eventual Communist enslavement of the entire human race."

Another film, based on an author who certainly opposed Communist enslavement, opens worldwide today: the final installment of Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings."

To give, as Lee Ann Womack recommends, this author's theological views a fighting chance, see a Christianity Today article, Saint J. R. R. the Evangelist.

Personally, I have come to believe that Tolkien's religion, Roman Catholicism, is more like Grima Wormtongue's than like Gandalf's.

Material related to this view may be found in my journal archive for March 2003.

For some philosophical remarks that avoid the lunacy of Christianity, see Faith.

Another admirable work by the author of these eminently sensible remarks, Richard Robinson of Oriel College, Oxford, is one of the best books I have ever encountered:

Definition.

Moulin Bleu

Kaleidoscope turning...
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure...
-- Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat   

See, too, Blue Matrices, and
a link for Beethoven's birthday:

Song for the
Unification of Europe
(Blue 1)

Jazz on St. Lucia's Day

December 13, Saturday, was
the feast day of St. Lucia.

Lauryn Hill
at St. Lucia

Log24 entry for December 13:

Kaleidoscope turning...
Shifting pattern
within unalterable structure...
Was it a mistake?
There is pain with the power...
Time's friction at the edges...
Center loosens, forms again elsewhere...

-- Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat

Washington Post, Names and Faces,
Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2003

"A Christmas concert at the Vatican may not be the best place to criticize the Catholic Church for the sexual abuse scandals that have plagued it for the past few years. Or maybe it's the perfect place.

Musician Lauryn Hill did just that while performing there Saturday night. The Grammy winner read a statement during the concert that scolded the church and its leaders....

La Repubblica newspaper quoted her as saying, 'I realize some of you may be offended by what I'm saying, but what do you say to the families who were betrayed by the people in whom they believed?' ...

The Vatican said Sunday it had no comment."

"Now you has jazz."
- High Society, 1956   

Related entries:
9/28/03, 8/29/02.

Hell to Heaven

From Hotel Point:

On a novel, Dow Mossman's
The Stones of Summer --

Evidence of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The Dow Mossman character (Dawes Williams) sitting in the Rio Grande tearing pages out of his notebooks. (We get the pages, reproduced somewhat tediously in near-agate type.) Somewhere the ex-Consul Geoffrey Firmin gets mention. Mythic drinking and death in Mexico, vaguely “Jungian.”...

“The first time he had noticed it, language, was in the fourth grade when Miss Norma Jean Thompson, his teacher, turned against the whole class and said:

‘All Americans eventually go to heaven.’

‘By sweet Jesus,’ Ronnie Crown had said that afternoon, sitting on Dunchee’s wall, waiting for Dawes Williams to come tell him about it, ‘that’s about the God Damn dumbest thing I ever heard.’

Dawes Williams had agreed immediately that the message was insipid, but he thought for years that the syntax was inspired. In fact, the first time Norma Jean Thompson had said, ALL AMERICANS EVENTUALLY GO TO HEAVEN, was also the first time Dawes Williams had ever noticed the English sentence."

From Norma Jean Thompson:

"... the Town House Restaurant on Central and Morningside [in Albuquerque]:  'It's like going backwards in time to the late 1950s; you'd think you'd meet Frank Sinatra in there.  You can drown in the big red leather booths, and if you're lucky, they'll take out their private family stock of brandy.  Wonderful Greek salads, steaks and potatoes for lunch or dinner.  Time stops in there, right off Route 66.' "

From wcities.com:

On the Town House Lounge & Restaurant in Albuquerque:

"Try the three-inch Baklava and feel like you have died and gone to heaven..."

AMEN.

See, too, the film "Stone Reader"
and the previous Log24 entry.

Riddle

From Robert Stone's Damascus Gate:

"God... that Great F---ing Thing, the Lord of Sacrifices, the setter of riddles."

(See the Web site "Stone, not Wood.")

Christianity may be a religion of lies, but it sometimes has a certain charm.  If in fact there is a heaven, part of it must strongly resemble Paris in the 1890's, as suggested by the picture below.

From today's New York Times:

"The Very Rev. Sturgis Lee Riddle, dean emeritus of the American Episcopal Cathedral in Paris, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was 94.

His death was reported on the cathedral's Web site."

From the cathedral's Web site,
a Christmas card:

Après l'Office à l'Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Noël 1890
(After the Service at Holy Trinity Church,
Christmas 1890) Jean Béraud

"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."
-- Ernest Hemingway,
   Death in the Afternoon, Ch. 11

"There is never any ending to Paris...."
-- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

See, too, my Paris-related entry for December 9, the date of Riddle's death, and recall that in Wild Palms, "the much sought-after Go chip [is] the missing link in the Senator's bid to be immortal, 'like Jesus.' "

Scene from Wild Palms