Month: December 2004
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Zen and the Trinity
(See entries of December 6, 2002.)
Zen: The time is now 3:00:00 PM.
The Trinity: "Three illustrations will suffice."
- 3:00 pm
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Chorus from
The RockAuthor Joan Didion is 70 today.
On Didion's late husband, John Gregory Dunne:
"His 1989 memoir Harp includes Dunne's early years in Hartford and his
Irish-Catholic family's resentment of WASP social superiority: 'Don't
stand out so that the Yanks can see you,' he wrote, 'don't let your
pretensions become a focus of Yank merriment and mockery.'"-- The Hartford Courant, August 4, 2002
From a Hartford Protestant:
The American Sublime
How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?
When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
Blinking and blank?
But how does one feel?
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.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?
-- Wallace Stevens
A search of the Internet for "Wallace Stevens" + "The Rock" +
"Seventy Years Later" yields only one quotation...Log24 entries of Aug. 2, 2002:
From "Seventy Years Later," Section I of "The Rock," a poem by Wallace Stevens:
A theorem proposed
between the two --
Two figures in a nature
of the sun....From page 63 of The New Yorker issue dated August 5, 2002:
"Birthday, death-day --
what day is not both?"
-- John UpdikeFrom Didion's Play It As It Lays:
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how
everything goes. I watch a hummingbird, throw the I Ching but
never read the coins, keep my mind in the now.
-- Page 8From Play It As It Lays:
I lie here in the sunlight, watch the hummingbird. This morning I
threw the coins in the swimming pool, and they gleamed and turned in
the water in such a way that I was almost moved to read them. I
refrained.
-- Page 214
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
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X, continued... From Midnight, Dec. 28, 2002:
Kylie
Our site music for today is Ravel's classic, "Bolero."
For bolero purposes, some may prefer Kylie Minogue's rendition of "Locomotion."
Related material:
From a synopsis of Cinderella:
"Cinderella is in the Palace garden and is found by the Prince, who is
dejected at the lack of success in the quest and throws the slipper
away. Happily the Godmother (hidden in the bushes) catches it and
replaces it on the bench next to the Prince, just as he remembers he
should try it on Cinderella.- 3:00 pm
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Crimson
on St. Cecilia's Day"... from the Age that is past,
To the Age that is waiting before."
-- Samuel Gilman, "Fair Harvard"Published by The Harvard Crimson
on Monday, November 22, 2004:Dylan Performs
for Sold-Out CrowdBy KATHERINE CHAN
Harvard Crimson Contributing WriterShouts of "Make way! Moses is here!" filled a restless crowd as
legendary musician Bob Dylan closed off his College tour last night
jamming in front of a sold out audience of Harvard undergraduates and
Cambridge residents....The turnout for last night's two-hour show was greater than many of the
student audience members anticipated...But despite the legendary hits and massive crowds, several students said they were disappointed with the show.
"I love Bob Dylan. I just don't know what he’s saying," said Alexander A.C. De Carvalho '08.
From an entry of October 29, 2004:
"Each epoch has its singer."
-- Jack London, Oakland, California, 1901"Anything
but the void. And so we keep hoping to luck into a winning combination,
to tap into a subtle harmony, trying like lock pickers to negotiate a
compromise with the 'mystery tramp,' as Bob Dylan put it...."
-- Dennis Overbye, Quantum Baseball,
New York Times, Oct. 26, 2004"You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp,
but now you realizeHe's not selling any alibis
As you stare into
the vacuum of his eyesAnd ask him do you want to
make a deal?"-- Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone
From The New York Times today:
"It's official, I guess. Forty years after he recorded it, Bob Dylan's
'Like a Rolling Stone' was just named the greatest rock 'n' roll song
of all time...."- 2:56 pm
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Triple Play
(See entry of All Hallows' Eve, 2004.)
On December 3...
In 1947, the Tennessee Williams play "A Streetcar Named Desire" opened on Broadway.
In 1953, the musical "Kismet" opened on Broadway.
In 1960, the musical "Camelot" opened on Broadway.
-- AP, Today in History
- 1:09 pm
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Flores,
Flores Para los Muertos(See entry
of Nov. 22 with this title.)In San Juan Ixtayopan, Mexico,
Wednesday, a procession from a church
to the site where two federal policemen
were lynched on Tuesday, Nov. 23.
1.
2.
3.
4.- 2:01 am
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The Poem of Pure Reality
"We seek
The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation,
straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object,
to the object
At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is...."-- Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" IX,
from The Auroras of Autumn (1950)
(Collected Poems, pp. 465-489)I have added new material to Geometry of
the 4x4 Square, including links to a new
commentary on a paper by Burkard Polster."It is a good light, then,
for those
That know the ultimate Plato,
Tranquillizing with this jewel
The torments of confusion."-- Wallace Stevens,
Collected Poetry and Prose,
page 21,
The Library of America, 1997
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