Natural Hustler (jpg, 283 KB)

Jews on Fiction

See Tony Kushner and E.L. Doctorow in today's New York Times, Rebecca Goldstein's talk from last summer's Mykonos conference on mathematics and narrative, and Martin Buber on the Bible.

"Wherefore let it hardly... be...
thought that the prisoner... was at his best a onestone
parable... for... pathetically few... cared... to doubt... the
canonicity of his existence as a tesseract."

-- Finnegans Wake, page 100, abridged

"... we have forgotten that we were angels and painted ourselves into a
corner of resource extraction and commodification of ourselves."

-- A discussion, in a draft of
    a paper (rtf) attributed
    to Josh Schultz,
    of the poem "Diamond"
    by Attila Jozsef

Commodification of
the name Cullinane:

See the logos at
cullinane.com,
a design firm with
the motto

(Note the 4Cs theme.)

To adapt a phrase from
Finnegans Wake, the
"fourstone parable" below
is an attempt to
decommodify my name.

Fourstone Parable:

(See also yesterday's "Logos."
The "communicate" logo is taken from
an online library at Calvin College;

available picture of a tesseract
(Coxeter, Regular Polytopes, p. 123),
and the other two logos
are more or less original.)

For a more elegant
four-diamond figure, see
Jung and the Imago Dei.

Logos
 

Alvin Plantinga	Philosophy logo
Harry Plantinga	CCEL logo
Madeleine L'Engle	Tesseract logo

"Wallace Stevens's remarkable oeuvre is a quasi-spiritual quest for the
supreme fiction, for a poetry that 'must take the place / Of empty
heaven and its hymns' and thus help modern man find meaning in a
godless world. The poet's role, for Stevens, is that of high priest of
the imagination: it is the poet who 'gives to life the supreme fictions
without which we are unable to conceive of it.' ....
... Stevens's hallmark 'imagination-reality' complex... is pursued
almost obsessively in his poetry and prose of the 1940s. Parts of a
World, published in 1942, and the poem-sequence of the same year,
'Notes toward a Supreme Fiction' ('Notes' was subsequently collected in
Transport to Summer in 1947), comprise a prolonged meditation in a time
of war on poetry and the poet's role, in the face of what Stevens, in
his essay 'The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,' terms 'the pressure
of reality.' Parts of a World is riven by its competing vocabularies. A
discourse of desire, of process, of the poet's contemplation of the
mind in the act of finding what will suffice, is elaborated in 'the
never-resting mind' of 'The Poems of Our Climate' and in 'The Well
Dressed Man with a Beard,' in which 'It can never be satisfied, the
mind, never' [occurs]. A very different idiom, that of the 'hero' or 'major
man,' the figure of capable imagination, dominates and directs such
poems as 'Mrs Alfred Uruguay,' 'Asides on the Oboe' and 'Examination of
the Hero in a Time of War,' where

    Summer, jangling
         the savagest diamonds and
    Dressed in its
         azure-doubled crimsons,
    May truly bear
         its heroic fortunes
    For the large,
         the solitary figure."

-- Lee M. Jenkins,
    University College Cork,
   "Wallace Stevens,"
    The Literary Encyclopedia,
    9 Dec., 2004.

For some related serious, but less solemn, remarks, click on the above date.