From today's New York Times:

Robert Quine, 61,
Punk Rock Guitarist,
Philosopher's Nephew,
Dies

By BEN SISARIO

Robert
Quine, a noted guitarist of the New York rock scene of the 1970's and
80's who played with Richard Hell, Lou Reed and others, died last week
in his home in Manhattan. He was 61.

He
was found dead by the police on Saturday, said James Marshall, a friend.
The police found a note and said they believed the death was a suicide
but are awaiting a medical examiner's report.  Mr. Marshall said he
believed Mr. Quine died on May 31.

In the loud world of New York punk,
where crude simplicity trumped most conventional notions of musical
skill, Mr. Quine stood out as a stylish
virtuoso....

"He was an extraordinary
mixture of taste, intelligence, and rock 'n' roll abilities, coupled with
major technique and a scholar's memory for every decent guitar lick ever
played under the musical sun," Mr. Reed said....

Mr.
Quine was an anomaly in the punk scene. Older than most of his fellow
musicians, he had a law degree and was nearly bald, and wore button-down
shirts and sport coats and described his appearance as that of a
"deranged insurance salesman."....

His uncle, the philosopher W. V. Quine, died in 2000.

"D'exterieur en l'interieur entre

Qui va par moi, et au milieu du centre

Me trouvera, qui suis le point unique,

La fin, le but de la mathematique;

Le cercle suis dont toute chose vient,

Le point ou tout retourne et se maintient."

-- Marguerite de Navarre

Bordered version
of the sigil

The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark
lines and about as big as a silver dollar.  An X superimposed on a
plus sign.  It looked permanent....

... "Here is how it stacks up:  You've bought your way
with something other than money into an organization of which I am an
agent...."

"It's a very big organization," she went on, as if warning
me.  "Call it an empire or a power if you like.  So far as you
are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist.  It has
agents everywhere, literally.  Space and time are no barriers to
it.  Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to
change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future,
but also the past.  It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and
is merciless to its employees."

"I. G. Farben?" I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at
humor.

She didn't rebuke my flippancy, but said, "And it isn't the
Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black
Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name."

"Which is?" I asked.

"The Spiders," she said.

That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly.  I
expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and
leap at me -- something like that.

She watched me.  "You might call it the Double Cross,"
she suggested, "if that seems better."

Juliana said, "Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?"

"You have a disconcertingly superstitious way of phrasing your
question," Hawthorne said. But he had squatted down to witness the coin
throwing. "Go ahead," he said; he handed her three Chinese brass coins
with holes in the center. "I generally use these."

She began throwing the coins; she felt calm and very much herself.
Hawthorne wrote down her lines for her. When she had thrown the coins
six times, he gazed down and said:

"Sun at the top. Tui at the bottom. Empty in the center."

"Do you know what hexagram that is?" she said. "Without using the chart?"

"Yes," Hawthorne said.

"It's Chung Fu," Juliana said. "Inner Truth. I know without using the chart, too. And I know what it means."

From

The Book of

Ecclesiastes

Proteus in the House of Mnemosyne (which is the fifth chapter of the
Third Book) relies entirely on familiarity with Vergil's Aeneid (even
when the text shifts from verse to prose). The statement, "Proteus is,
absolutely, that one and the same subject matter which is transformable into
all images and resemblances, by means of which we can immediately and
continually constitute order, resume and explain everything," reads less clear
than the immediate analogy, "Just as from one and the same wax we awaken all
shapes and images of sensate things, which become thereafter the signs of all
things that are intelligible."

When I was your student, you never mentioned the  Homeric parallels in discussing Joyce's Ulysses  But
you did supply "special information" in introducing many of the
masterpieces: a map of Dublin for Ulysses....  Would
you be able to suggest some equivalent for your own readers?

Joyce
himself very soon realized with dismay that the harping on those
essentially easy and vulgar "Homeric parallelisms" would only distract
one's attention from the real beauty of his book. He soon dropped these
pretentious chapter titles which already were "explaining" the book to
non-readers.  In my lectures I tried to give factual data only. A
map of three country estates with a winding river and a figure of the
butterfly Parnassius mnemosyne for a cartographic cherub will be the endpaper in my revised edition of Speak, Memory.