Dinner Theater?

“Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something
a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday….”
– Bernard Holland in the New York Times of Monday, May 20, 1996

From an entry of last Monday,
“Lynchburg Law” – 

Critic Frank Rich in Wednesday’s Times on a recent televised promotion:

“… it was a manufactured scandal, as over-the-top as a dinner theater production of ‘The Crucible.’ “

From a Friday, Nov. 19, entry:

“the Platonist… is more interested in deriving an abstraction
of the object into a universal….”

– Radu Surdulescu, Form, Structure, and Structurality

From El Universal online today:

“Meanwhile, [Mexico] continued to deal with
the savagery of Tuesday night’s televised lynchings, with some saying
the media had exploited the occurrence.

‘This is a new and
worrisome phenomenon,’ security analyst José Reveles said in an
interview… ‘It’s like the evil offspring of all the violent
exploitation in the media.’ 
‘It was Fuenteovejuna,’ he said, referring
to the work by the Spanish golden age playwright Lope de Vega in which
an entire town covers up the slaying of a corrupt official.”

Frank Rich has the last word:

“A ‘moral values’ crusade that stands between a TV show this popular and
its audience will quickly learn the limits of its power in a country
where entertainment is god.”

Habeas Corpus

From St. Nicholas Versus the Volcano:

“The day begins with Yvonne’s arrival at the Bella Vista
bar in Quauhnahuac. From outside she hears Geoffrey’s familiar voice
shouting a drunken lecture, this time on the topic of the rule of the
Mexican railway that requires that  ‘A corpse will be transported by
express!’ (Lowry, Under the Volcano).”

In honor of a particular corpse, from last Friday, November 19, here is part of a Log24 entry from that day:

“The meaning of the poem is
‘the full organized body of all the extension and intension that we can
find in it.’ “
– Allen Tate

A corpse will be transported by express!

The corpse in question is that of a children’s book
illustrator.  The following screenshot from today’s online New
York Times illustrates both extension and, in light of the
Lowry quotation above, intension.

Lynchburg Law

From today’s New York Times:

The Times’s photo (above) of books
on the Bible and the law,
apparently at Lynchburg, suggests a related book
that may be of considerable value to the legal scholars there:

Charles Williams on the
Salem witchcraft trials:

“The afflicted children continued to testify; there entered into the
cases what was called ‘spectral evidence,’ a declaration by the witness
that he or she could see that else invisible shape before them, perhaps
hurting them.  It was a very ancient tendency of witnesses, and it had
occurred at a number of trials in Europe.”

– Witchcraft, Meridian Books, Inc., New York,
1959 (first published 1941), page 281

From Four Quartets:

And the pool was filled
with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light…

Related reading:

From a review at Amazon.com
of All Hallows’ Eve, by Charles Williams:

“How many other books do you know in which one of the two main
characters is dead, in which the dead and living can communicate almost
as easily as we do every day, in which magic is serious and scary?
Mainstream books, that is, not Goosebumps, with an introduction by T.S.
Eliot, with the whole thing to be understood as at least feasible if
not truth. This is unusual. And yet, and yet, the whole thing works.”

Pictures at 11

From today’s Maureen Dowd column:

“Trapped in their blue bell jar,
drowning in unfulfilled dreams,
Democrats are the
‘Desperate Housewives’ of politics.”

Sam Dean for The New York Times Law and Religion The Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University is part of a movement around the nation that brings a religious perspective to the law. Go to Article

Click on picture for details. Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird: “She’s… broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with.“

Friday’s entries included a cross-burning in honor of the late Protestant activist Bobby Frank Cherry and of a 1963 bombing in Birmingham, Alabama:

Click on picture for details.

The following honors today’s 30th anniversary of other bombings, apparently by Catholics, in another Birmingham – in England.

” ‘Caritas‘ is a Latin word which means love, charity and compassion. The international symbol of Caritas is a flaming cross, symbolising Christ’s burning love for his people.” – Catholic Lay Organisations of Darwin, Australia For Gerry Adams and all the Catholics of Ireland,  here’s a hunka hunka burnin’ love: Click on picture for details.

Trinity and Counterpoint

Today’s Roman Catholic meditation is from Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army:

“I certainly regret what happened and I make no bones about that,” Adams said on the 30th anniversary of pub bombings that killed 21 on Nov. 21, 1974, in Birmingham, England.

Those who care what Roman Catholics think of the Trinity may read the remarks of St. Bonaventure at math16.com.

That site also offers a less holy but more intelligible trinity based on the irrefutable fact that 3 x 8 = 24 and on a remarkable counterpoint between group actions on a 4×2 array and group actions on a 4×4 array.

For a Protestant view of this trinity, see a website at the University of Birmingham in England.

That site’s home page links to Birmingham’s City Evangelical Church.

Today’s Sermon:
Canonization

The title of Cleanth Brooks’s classic The Well Wrought Urn comes from a poem by John Donne:

We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes;
As well a well wrought urne becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombes.

– The Canonization

“A poem cannot exhaust reality, but it can arrest it: by manifesting
a vision of experience available in no other way. This is only possible
because, like a physical urn, it is a distinct substantial object: only
by its difference from human experience can a poem represent that experience,
even as the urn can be a metaphor for a poem only if it is not itself a
poem. The alternative to ‘crystalline closure’ is not, then,
an endless and chaotic ‘repetition and proliferation,’ but a
structured relationship of significance.”

– The Old New Criticism and Its Critics, by R. V. Young, Professor of English at
North Carolina State University

Related reading: At War with the Word, by R. V. Young.

Canon:

“A musical composition in which the voices begin one after another, at
regular intervals, successively taking up the same subject. It either
winds up with a coda (tailpiece), or, as each voice finishes, commences
anew, thus forming a perpetual fugue or round.” — Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary

Canonization:

The process of making a musical theme into a canon:

“The phrase continues almost uninterrupted and unvaried until the canonization of the theme….”

– Program Notes for
   Greater Dallas Youth Orchestras,
   Sunday May 18, 2003, by Erin Lin
   on Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 78,
   by Camille Saint-Saëns

For more on this concept, see the Log24.net entries of July 16-31, 2004, and in particular the entries of July 25.

See, too, Theme and Variations, with its midi of Bach’s

Fourteen Canons on the First Eight Notes of the Goldberg Ground.

From Tate to Plato


In honor of Allen Tate‘s birthday (today)
and of the MoMA re-opening (tomorrow)

“For Allen Tate the concept of tension was the
most useful formal tool at the critic’s disposal, as irony and paradox were
for Brooks. The principle of tension sustains the whole structure of meaning,
and, as Tate declares in Tension
in Poetry (1938), he derives it from lopping the prefixes off the
logical terms extension
and intension
(which define the abstract and denotative aspect of the poetic language and,
respectively, the concrete and connotative one). The meaning of the poem is
‘the full organized body of all the extension and intension that we can
find in it.’  There
is an infinite line between extreme extension and extreme intension and the
readers select the meaning at the point they wish along that line, according
to their personal drives, interests or approaches. Thus the Platonist will tend
to stay near the extension end, for he is more interested in deriving an abstraction
of the object into a universal….”

– from
Form, Structure, and Structurality,
   by Radu Surdulescu

“Eliot, in a
conception comparable to Wallace Stevens’ ‘Anecdote of the Jar,’ has suggested how art
conquers time:

        Only by the form,
the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.”

– F. O. Matthiessen

   in The Achievement of T.S. Eliot,

   Oxford University Press, 1958

From Writing Chinese Characters:

“It is practical to think of a character centered within an imaginary square grid….
The grid can… be… subdivided, usually to 9 or 16 squares….”

These “Chinese jars”
(as opposed to their contents)
are as follows:

Various previous Log24.net entries have
dealt with the 3×3 “form” or “pattern”
(to use the terms of T. S. Eliot).

For the 4×4 form, see Poetry’s Bones
and Geometry of the 4×4 Square.