Month: December 2004

  • 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."

  • Chorus from
    The Rock

    Author 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 Updike

    From 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 8

    From 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.


    One heart will wear a Valentine.
    -- Sinatra, 1954
     
  • 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:

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041204-Scope.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    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.

  • X

    At midnight: A letter for
    "a complete unknown" --

    "Once upon a time
    you dressed so fine..."

  • 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 Crowd

    By KATHERINE CHAN
    Harvard Crimson Contributing Writer

    Shouts 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.

    Recommended reading

    for Harvard students:

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041203-Lyrics.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

    Click on picture
    for details.

    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 realize

    He's not selling any alibis

    As you stare into
        the vacuum of his eyes

    And 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...."

  • 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

  • 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.

    The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041203-Ixtayopan1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.


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    4.

    -- Cuartoscuro.com

  • 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