"In September [2005], she had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at
Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence outside Rome. She had criticized
John Paul II for making overtures to Muslims, and for not condemning
terrorism heartily enough, but she has hopes for Joseph Ratzinger. (The
meeting was something of a scandal in Italy, since Fallaci has always
said that she is an atheist; more recently, she has called herself a
'Christian atheist,' out of respect for Italy's Catholic tradition.)
Last December, the Italian government presented her with a gold medal
for 'cultural achievement.'"

ART WARS continued:

The Krauss Cross

Rosalind Krauss in "Grids":

"If we open any tract-- Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World,
for instance-- we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not
discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of
matter.  They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. 
From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and
they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.

Or,
to take a more up-to-date example, we could think about Ad Reinhardt
who, despite his repeated insistence that 'Art is art,' ended up by
painting a series of black nine-square grids in which the motif that
inescapably emerges is a Greek cross.  There is no painter in the
West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape
and the Pandora's box of spiritual reference that is opened once one
uses it."

Rebecca Goldstein on
Mathematics and Narrative:

"I don't write exclusively on Jewish themes or about Jewish characters. My collection of short stories, Strange Attractors,
contained nine pieces, five of which were, to some degree, Jewish, and
this ratio has provided me with a precise mathematical answer (for me,
still the best kind of answer) to the question of whether I am a Jewish
writer. I am five-ninths a Jewish writer."

Jacques Maritain,
October 1941:

"The passion of Israel
today is taking on
more and more distinctly
the form of the Cross."

E. L. Doctorow,
City of God:

"In the Garden of Adding
live Even and Odd."

Octobers for Fest

In memory of Joachim Fest, a noted biographer of Hitler who died on 9/11 at age 79--

A link from 5/27, 2005 (a date mentioned in Monday's Log24 9/11 entry):

"the four corners of the horizon."

A search on this inelegant phrase from Sartre's Being and Nothingness leads, surprisingly, to remarks by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain said to have been published in the month of October in the fateful year 1941.

According to Telegraph.co.uk today, Fest was "the most celebrated historian and the most distinguished journalist of the post-war generation in Germany."

The Telegraph says he 

"aroused
the envy of professorial rivals, none of whom could match the incisive
elegance of his writing. Equally important was his flair for
controversy. He was determined to prevent the wrong lessons being drawn
from the past by the Left-wing establishment that had dominated German
intellectual life since the 1960s.

Conservative in politics and
Catholic by upbringing, Fest stood out among his contemporaries for his
rejection of the influence of the Marxist sociologists of the Frankfurt
school on the historiography of the Third Reich. Fest saw the Nazi
phenomenon not as a product of capitalism, but as a moral catastrophe,
made possible by the abdication of responsibility on the part of
educated Germans."

For a view of Christian politics closer to that of the Frankfurt school, see a review by Charles Isherwood in the 9/11 New York Times of a play, "The Man Himself."

Related material:

A Log24 entry
from October 29, 2002:

 and Echoes
(August 11, 2006).

A Sermon for Sartre

A sequel to
Les Mots:
Les Nombres

 "Words and numbers
are of equal value,
for, in the
cloak of knowledge,
one is warp
and the other woof."
-- The princesses
Rhyme and Reason
in The Phantom Tollbooth,
by Norton Juster, 1961

"Time and chance
happeneth to them all."

-- Ecclesiastes 9:11

Hermeneutics:

The numbers may be regarded
as coordinates in a map
of one spatial dimension
(a road dimension:
394 - Chautauqua, NY)
and of three
temporal dimensions
(birthday dimension 6/28,
Sartre dimension 5/27,
religious dimension 9/16).

This interpretation is of course
rather arbitrary, but so are most
interpretations.

Related material:
Sontag and Sartre this morning
and Sontag on Sunday.

Update of 1:29 AM 9/12:

 
"HASS-D"-- Click here.

Sontag's Sermon
continued from yesterday

Conclusion:

"My image of myself since age 3 or 4-- the genius-schmuck. I allow one to pay off the other. Develop relationships to satisfy principally one or the other....

Sartre (cf. 'Les Mots') the only other person I know of who had this 'certainty' of genius. Living already a posthumous life, even as a childhood. (The childhood of a famous man.)

A kind of suicide-- with the 'work' of genius you know you'll do when adult your tombstone. The most glorious tombstone possible.

Sartre was very ugly-- and knew it. So he didn't have to develop 'the schmuck' to pay off the others for being 'the genius.' Nature had taken care of the problem for him. He didn't have to invent a cause of failure or rejection by others. As I did, by making myself 'stupid' in personal relations. (For 'stupid,' also read 'blind.')"

-- Susan Sontag in The New York Times Magazine yesterday

Meanwhile, back at MIT:

Doonesbury 9/11

Related material

from MIT's School of
Humanities, Arts,
and Social Sciences
(SHASS),

and Log24 on
Sunday morning:

The Moralist:

"'For the modern post-religious man,' Susan Sontag wrote in a 1961 essay, 'the religious museum, like the world of the modern spectator of art, is without walls; he can pick and choose as he likes, and be committed to nothing except his own reverent spectatorship.'"

-- "The Moralist," by Scott McLemee, The Boston Globe, July 16, 2006

The Moral:

The last words from the people in the towers and on the planes, over and over again, were 'I love you.'  Over and over again, the message was the same, 'I love you.' .... Perhaps this is the loudest chorus from The Rock:  we are learning just how powerful love really is, even in the face of death."

-- The Rev. Kenneth E. Kovacs

ART WARS
continued:

Sontag's Sermon

Sources:
This morning's Log24 entry,
today's New York Times Magazine,
and today's Doonesbury.

Related material:

My Life among the Deathworks:
Illustrations of the
Aesthetics of Authority,
by Philip Rieff,
Sontag's ex-husband.

See also Nicole Kidman in
the 2004 remake of
The Stepford Wives.

And the
"Meet Max Black"
Award goes to...

"For the Aeron and other designs,
Mr. Stumpf won this year’s
National Design Award
in Product Design,
which is to be presented
posthumously on Oct. 18
by the Cooper-Hewitt
National Design Museum
in Manhattan."

-- Today's New York Times

Stumpf died on August 30,
the date of the Log24 entry
"The Seventh Symbol."

Related material:

From
Geometry of the I Ching,
a chessboard:

From the
 National Design Museum:

 From Log24 on the
date of Stumpf's death,

The Seventh Symbol:

Pictorial version of
Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)

See also
Fearful Symmetry
and
Symmetry Framed.

The Board

On chess and fiction:

"As Boileau-Narcejac* admirably said: 'The creator invents the chessboard, the serial writer invents the moves.'" --Moez Lahmedi 

* Quoted by Marc Lits in Pour lire le roman policier, Bruxelles-Paris, De Boeck-Duculot, 1989, p. 7. 

The Moves

 "Problems are the poetry of chess.
 They demand from the composer
 the same virtues that characterize
 all worthwhile art:
 originality, invention,
 harmony, conciseness,
 complexity, and
 splendid insincerity."

-- Vladimir Nabokov