December 11, 2006

• Notes for Chile on…

  Geometry and Death

  J. G. Ballard on “the architecture of death“:

  “… a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried
  line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the
  surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had
  survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind
  by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.”

  – The Guardian, March 20, 2006

  Edward Hirsch on Lorca:

  “For him, writing is a struggle both with geometry and death.”

  – “The Duende,” American Poetry Review, July/August 1999

  “Rosenblum writes with

  absolute intellectual honesty,

  and the effect is sheer liberation….

  The disposition of the material is
  

  a model of logic and clarity.”

  – Harper’s Magazine review

  quoted on back cover of
  Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art,

  by Robert Rosenblum

  (Abrams paperback, 2001)
  
  
  

  SINGER, ISAAC:
  “Are Children the Ultimate Literary Critics?”
   – Top of the News 29 (Nov. 1972): 32-36.
  “Sets forth his own aims in writing for children
   and laments ‘slice of life’ and chaos in
  children’s literature. Maintains that children
  like good plots, logic, and clarity,
  and that they have a concern for
  ‘so-called eternal questions.’”

  – An Annotated Listing of Criticism
  by Linnea Hendrickson

  “She returned the smile, then looked
  across the room to her youngest
  brother,
  Charles Wallace, and to their father,
  who were deep in
  concentration, bent
  over the model they were building
  of a tesseract: the square squared,
  and squared again: a construction
  of the dimension of time.”

  – A Swiftly Tilting Planet,

  by Madeleine L’Engle

  

  For “the dimension of time,”
  see A Fold in Time,
  Time Fold, and
  Diamond Theory in 1937. 

  A Swiftly Tilting Planet is a fantasy for children set partly in Vespugia, a fictional country bordered by Chile and Argentina.

  For a more adult audience –

  In memory of General Augusto Pinochet, who died yesterday in
  Santiago, Chile, a quotation from Federico Garcia Lorca‘s lecture on “the Duende” (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1933):

  “… Philip of Austria… longing
  to discover the Muse and the Angel in theology, found himself imprisoned
  by the Duende of cold ardors in that masterwork of the Escorial,
  where geometry abuts with a dream and the Duende wears the mask of
  the Muse for the eternal chastisement of the great king.”

  
  
  The Escorial
  

  
  

  Perhaps. Or perhaps Philip, “the lonely
  hermit of the Escorial,” is less lonely now.

  
  

  • 7:20 am
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