Types of Ambiguity

1.  Oscar: military phonetic for the letter ‘O’

2.  “… this symbol among the Greeks was more circle than dot, but among those in India, more dot than circle.”

– Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is:
A Natural History of Zero

3.  A bindi is an auspicious mark worn by young girls and women. Bindi is derived from bindu,
the Sanskrit word for dot.  It is usually a red dot made with
vermilion powder which is worn by women between their eyebrows on their
forehead.  Considered a symbol of Goddess Parvati, a bindi
signifies female energy….

– Indian Customs & Traditions

4.  Sometimes I feel so reckless and wild
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
I gave nobody life, I am nobody’s wife
And I seem to be nobody’s daughter
So red is the color that I like the best
It’s your Indian skin and the badge
On my chest
The heat of my pride
The lips of a bride
The sad heart of the truth
And the flag of youth
And blood that is thicker than water

– Shawn Colvin of Vermillion, SD,
    “The Story” lyrics

5.  Hamlet  Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia  I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet  That’s a fair thought to lie between maid’s legs.
Ophelia  What is, my lord?
Hamlet   Nothing.

6.  Macbeth  ”…. a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

7.  Enter a Messenger.

Vita Brevis

“In many ways, the arts are the highest achievements of man.”

– Harvard President
   Lawrence H. Summers,
   Feb. 26, 2004 

”We intensively train children in the Arts and ritual because deep down we know that these are the only things that really MATTER. This is what we must share first with the young, in case they DIE.”

– Lucy Ellmann, Dot in the Universe,
   quoted in today’s New York Times

Inner Truth
and Outer Style

Inner Truth:

Outer Style:

Joan Didion

“Everything I learned,
I learned at Vogue.”

– Joan Didion, Nov. 2001 interview
with Amy Spindler.

Spindler died on Friday, Feb. 27, 2004.

For related material, see

Truth and Style: ART WARS at Harvard

and

blogs.law.harvard.edu/m759/.

Truth and Style

From today’s New York Times obituary for Amy M. Spindler, former fashion critic of The New York Times and style editor of its magazine, who died yesterday at 40:

“Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, whom Ms. Spindler regarded as a competitor when she became style editor of The Times Magazine, in 1998, said: ‘She took criticism in a new direction. She wasn’t afraid to tell the truth.’ “

“I don’t believe in truth. I believe in style.”
– Hugh Grant in Vogue magazine, July 1995

Again from Spindler’s obituary:

“In a front-page article on Sept. 5, 1995, she [Spindler] noted a new piety on parade, marked by store windows and catalogs full of monastic robes, pilgrim’s boots and dangling crosses. Perhaps, she wrote, ‘the financially strained fashion industry is seeking salvation from above.’ “

Perhaps.

Amy M. Spindler

See also
Strike That Pose (August 1995)
and the two previous log24.net entries
on art and religion at Harvard.

For even more context, see
Truth and Style: ART WARS at Harvard.

ART WARS at Harvard

From today’s Harvard Crimson:

“The VES [Visual and Environmental Studies] department is still recovering, both internally and in public perception, from the firing of former chair Ellen Phelan in spring 2001. Phelan, a distinguished painter who brought in top New York artists, was replaced by Kenan Professor of English Marjorie Garber, an English scholar with no formal background in the practice of visual arts.”

Here’s more on Phelan and art at Harvard (rated R for colorful language).

See also Strike That Pose.

The Oscar for best picture goes to…

“… And when at last one has arrived at San Sepolcro, what is there to be seen? A little town surrounded by walls, set in a broad flat valley between hills; some fine Renaissance palaces with pretty balconies of wrought iron; a not very interesting church, and finally, the best picture in the world.

The best picture in the world is painted in fresco on the wall of a room in the town hall….  Its clear, yet subtly sober colours shine out from the wall with scarcely impaired freshness….  We need no imagination to help us figure forth its beauty; it stands there before us in entire and actual splendour, the greatest picture in the world.

The greatest picture in the world…. You smile. The expression is ludicrous, of course.”

Yet not as ludicrous as the following

Cheesy Consolation

Doonesbury 2/26/04:

Maureen Dowd on
The Passion of the Christ:

“I went with a Jewish pal, who tried to stay sanguine. ‘The Jews may have killed Jesus,’ he said.  ‘But they also gave us ‘Easter Parade.’ “

– New York Times, Feb. 26, 2004

For a truly cheesy Easter parade at Harvard University, see

The Crimson Passion.

Modernism as a Religion

In light of the controversy over Mel Gibson’s bloody passion play that opens today, some more restrained theological remarks seem in order.  Fortunately, Yale University Press has provided a framework – uniting physics, art, and literature in what amounts to a new religion – for making such remarks.  Here is some background.

From a review by Adam White Scoville of Iain Pears’s novel titled An Instance of the Fingerpost:

“Perhaps we are meant to see the story as a cubist retelling of the crucifixion, as Pilate, Barabbas, Caiaphas, and Mary Magdalene might have told it. If so, it is sublimely done so that the realization gradually and unexpectedly dawns upon the reader. The title, taken from Sir Francis Bacon, suggests that at certain times, ‘understanding stands suspended’ and in that moment of clarity (somewhat like Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time,’ I think), the answer will become apparent as if a fingerpost were pointing at the way.”

Recommended related material –

By others:

Inside Modernism:  Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative, Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook, Yale University Press, 1999

Signifying Nothing: The Fourth Dimension in Modernist Art and Literature

Corpus Hypercubus,
by Dali.  Not cubist,
 perhaps “hypercubist.”

By myself: 

Finite Relativity

The Crucifixion of John O’Hara

Block Designs

The Da Vinci Code and Symbology at Harvard

The Crimson Passion

Material that is related, though not recommended –

The Aesthetics of the Machine

Connecting Physics and the Arts

The Crimson Passion

Solving for X

Frederick Morgan
in 2001

On the Hudson Review, whose longtime editor Frederick Morgan died on Friday, Feb. 20, 2004:

“The first issue featured… poetry by Wallace Stevens….” — NY Times 2/23/04

A search on “Wallace Stevens” “Hudson Review” yields a reference to

Jarman, Mark.
“Solving for X:
The Poetry and Prose
of Wallace Stevens.”
The Hudson Review,
51.1 (Fall 1998): 250(7).

A further search on “Mark Jarman” leads to

The Excitement,
by Mark Jarman,
The Hudson Review,
 55th Anniversary Issue,
Spring 2003,

a poem in which X himself makes an appearance:

The years into old age and death
    were set then.
And I have often thought
    about those years.
For this was the peak moment
    in family history,
The Lord come unto Granddad….

We may imagine Granddad as played by the recipient of last night’s Screen Actors Guild lifetime achievement award:

“This is the peak for me.”
– Karl Malden, Feb. 22, 2004

Invariants

“What modern painters are trying to do,
if they only knew it, is paint invariants.”

– James J. Gibson in Leonardo



(Vol. 11, pp. 227-235.
Pergamon Press Ltd., 1978)

Those who have clicked
on the title above
may find the following of interest.

Also perhaps relevant: