Q: "What have I lived for?"
-- Last words of Larry Hart,
according to
St. Mark's Episcopal Church,
Washington, DC.
From the final New York Times of 2004:
"As the longtime aide-de-camp of the composer and producer Jule Styne,
she assisted in the fabled 1952 rebirth of 'Pal Joey,' easing the
tension between the composer, Richard Rodgers, and the book writer,
John O'Hara."
-- A Force Behind
the Broadway Scenes
The Dark Door
From Log24.net, Dec. 22, 2003:
"One,
two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant
in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody
we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door.
Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen."
-- Dylan Thomas,
A Child's Christmas in Wales
"The day after Christmas
turned out to be a living nightmare."
-- Arthur C. Clarke, Dec. 27, 2004
Adapted from the logo of the
Arthur C. Clarke Foundation:
Dabo claves regni caelorum. By silent shore
Ripples spread from castle rock. The metaphor
For metamorphosis no keys unlock.
-- "Endgame," Steven H. Cullinane,
November 7, 1986
8:00:00
For related iconology, see Star Wars and
Show Business according to Fritz Leiber.
Geometry Update
Added a new section,
"How the MOG works," to
Geometry of the 4x4 Square.
The Longest Night
This year's longest night (either Dec. 20-21 or Dec. 21-22, I don't know which) is over. (See Frost's famous poem describing that night.) No notable news to report, although it seems a good sign that many churches held a "Longest Night" ("Blue Christmas") service around this time. Elvis would be pleased.
Today's New York Times on a rabbi who died in Jerusalem on Sunday, Dec. 5:
"In the 1950's, he was a vocal advocate for the relaxation of New
York City's blue laws, which forbade many kinds of commerce on Sundays
but not on Saturdays. The laws were repealed in the 1970's. Solomon
Joseph Sharfman was born on Nov. 1, 1915, in Treblinka, Poland; his
family immigrated to the United States five years later. His father,
Rabbi Label Sharfman, worked as a shochet, or ritual slaughterer...."
Saturday's lottery numbers from Pennsylvania, the State of Grace:
A Sunday Sermon:
Related material:
(See Song in Red and Gray
and The Dot and the Line.)
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
-- Wallace Stevens,
"The American Sublime"
"At a glance, or from a distance, her work looks
like nothing at all. Square canvases are so palely touched with colour
they might almost be blank. Considered slowly and carefully and
close-up, however, the whole surface comes alive."
"The restraint and formal regularity of Martin’s
work has led her often to be grouped with the Minimalists. She shares
something of their self-effacing rigour and their concern with the
material qualities of art, but she herself preferred to be seen in the
context of the Abstract Expressionist painters who were her own
contemporaries and early artistic models. Like them she may have seen
abstract art as the means to a distinctively American sublime...."
"Taos had been a magnet for artists since the
last years of the 19th century. D. H. Lawrence famously spent time
there in the 1920s. 'Never shall I forget the Christmas dances at
Taos,' he wrote, 'twilight, snow, the darkness coming over the great
wintry mountains and the lonely pueblo.'"
From today's New York Times:
Agnes Martin, Abstract Painter, Dies at 92
Background: entry of 7 PM Wednesday.
Nothing Nothings
(Again)
Background: recent Log24 entries (beginning with Chorus from the Rock on Dec. 5, 2004) and Is Nothing Sacred? (quotations compiled on March 9, 2000).
From an obituary of Paul Edwards, a writer on philosophy, in this morning's New York Times:
"Heidegger's Confusions, a collection of Professor Edwards's scholarly articles, was published last month by Prometheus."
Edwards, born in Vienna in 1923 to Jewish parents, died on December 9.
Some sites I visited earlier this evening, before reading of Edwards's death:
'Nothingness itself nothings' -- with these words, uttered by Martin Heidegger
in the early 1930s, the incipient (and now-familiar) split between
analytic and continental philosophy began tearing open. For Rudolf
Carnap, a leader of the Vienna Circle [Wiener Kreis] of logical empiricists and a
strident advocate of a new, scientific approach to philosophy, this
Heideggerian proposition exemplified 'a metaphysical pseudo-sentence,'
meaningless and unable to withstand any logical analysis. Heidegger
countered that Carnap’s misplaced obsession with logic missed the point
entirely."
-- Review of A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger
Judeo-Christian Heritage:
The Wiener Kreis
The meditation below was suggested by this passage:
"...
the belief that any sensible discourse had to be formulated within the
rules of the scientific language, avoiding the non sense of the
ordinary language. This belief, initially expressed by Wittgenstein as
aphorisms, was later formalized by the Wiener Kreis [Vienna Circle] as a 'logical construction of the world'...."
"Deeply Vulgar"
-- Epithet applied in 2003 to
Harvard President Lawrence Summers.
"Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge."
-- Vladimir Nabokov
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In today's Crimson:
Only moderately vulgar, with its sniggering pop-culture reference. But it should be
Frankfurter Professor of Law.
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Those seeking relief from
Judeo-Christian vulgarity may enjoy
the Buddhist Suzanne Vega's
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"Mercilessly tasteful"
-- Andrew Mueller
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