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Month: June 2007

Annals of Theology:

Where
Entertainment
is God

November 2004--

Controversial
"Desperate Housewives"
ad on "Monday
Night Football"

"Desperate Housewives"... ranks No. 5 among all prime-time shows
for ages 12-17. ("Monday Night Football" is No. 18.) This may explain
in part why its current advertisers include products like Fisher-Price
toys, the DVD of "Elf" and the forthcoming Tim Allen holiday vehicle,
"Christmas With the Kranks."

Those who cherish the First
Amendment can only hope that the Traditional Values Coalition,
OneMillionMoms.com, OneMillionDads.com and all the rest send every
e-mail they can to the F.C.C. demanding punitive action against the
stations that broadcast "Desperate Housewives." A "moral values"
crusade that stands between a TV show this popular and its audience
will quickly learn the limits of its power in a country where
entertainment is god.

-- "The Great Indecency Hoax," a New York Times column by Frank Rich quoted in Log24 on Nov. 26, 2004

The entertainment continues. A rabbi's obituary in today's New York Times (see previous entry) served as ad-bait for "Joshua," a Fox Searchlight film opening July 6.

A search for a less sacrilegious memorial to the rabbi yields the following:

Project MUSE link on Rabbi Abraham Klausner

The "Project MUSE" link above
works only at
subscribing libraries.

It seems that here, too,
the rabbi is being
used as bait.

For a perhaps preferable
reference to bait, in the
context of St. Peter as
a "fisher of men," see

the Christian "mandorla"
or "vesica piscis,"
a figure hidden within
the geometry of Rome's
St. Peter's Square--
which, despite its name,
is an oval:

Mandorla and ovator tondo in St. Peter's Square” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For the geometric
construction of the
Roman oval, see
"ovato tondo" in
Rudolf Arnheim's
The Power of the Center.

For a less theoretical account
of the religious significance
of the mandorla, see
the 2001 film
The Center of the World.

Father Figure

An Evening Star

for Rabbi Abraham Klausner,
a "father figure" according to

The New York Times.
The Times says Klausner
died at 92 on

Thursday, June 28, 2007:

(Click to enlarge.)

Klausner was a rabbi
in Yonkers until his
retirement in 1989.
The evening number in
the New York Lottery
on the reported date of
Klausner's death
was 514.

As in the previous entry,
this number may be
interpreted as the date 5/14.

A Log24 entry with that date:

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Today's birthday: George Lucas,
creator of the mother of all battle epics.

STAR WARS continued:

	March 29 eclipse
	Star of Venus (See March 26-29)

In the details:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070630-Detail.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Clicking on "Joshua" will take you
to a site on a film opening
July 6. That site describes

the title character as follows:

"Joshua is no ordinary boy....

He’s exceptionally intelligent and frighteningly precocious.

He has an angelic politeness and an easy cool that belie his young age....

Is
it all a series of eerie coincidences or are they in the midst of an
unimaginably evil mind? And could it be Joshua who, like his Biblical
namesake, is bringing the house tumbling down around his family?"

The "Biblical namesake" is the
Joshua of the Old Testament--

source of the deeply flawed

"tumbling down" analogy.

In the New Testament,

there is of course also
a rather famous Joshua.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070630-FoxLogo.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"And the serpent's eyes shine
as he wraps around the vine...."

-- The Garden of Allah

Professor Eucalyptus again--

Real Numbers:
An Object Lesson

(continued from
Anti-Christmas)

A Cornell professor discusses a poem by Wallace Stevens:

"Professor Eucalyptus in 'Ordinary Evening' XIV, for example, 'seeks/
God in the object itself,' but this quest culminates in his own
choosing of 'the commodious adjective/ For what he sees... the
description that makes it divinity, still speech... not grim/ Reality
but reality grimly seen/ And spoken in paradisal parlance new'...."

-- Douglas Mao, Solid Objects:
Modernism and the Test
of Production,
Princeton University Press,
1998, p. 242

"God in the object" seems
unlikely to be found in the
artifact pictured on the
cover of Mao's book:

I have more confidence
that God is to be found
in the Ping Pong balls
of the New York Lottery.

These objects may be
regarded as supplying
a parlance that is, if not
paradisal, at least
intelligible-- if only in
the context of my own
personal experience:

Journal entry dated 5/14:

Journal entries dated 3/09:

Queen's Gambit,
Symbols, and
Is Nothing Sacred?
Happy Birthday, Mel Brooks
Christianus
Cornelius Uhlenbeck

Oct. 18, 1866 - Aug. 12, 1951

"... born at Voorburg near The Hague in Holland, and
studied philology at the University of Leiden.... Though he would
actually have preferred to graduate in Basque, Uhlenbeck in 1888, when
only 22 years old, took his doctor's degree in Dutch. It must be
here noted that for this degree the requirements in comparative
philology were very considerable...." --International Journal of American Linguistics, Jan. 1953

From Uhlenbeck's A Manual of Sanskrit Phonetics (1898):

"The Indogermanic family of languages. The great family of languages, in which Sanskrit belongs, is called the Indogermanic, Indoceltic or Aryan.... The word Indogermanic
dates from a time, when it was not yet proved, that the Celtic dialects
also make part of our family of languages, and indicates by the
combined name of the utmost branches, Indian and Germanic, the whole
territory of speech, to which they belong. Now that it is certain, that
Celtic also is a member of our family, it would be accurate to replace
the word Indogermanic by Indoceltic, because not Germanic, but Celtic is the utmost branch in the Occident. The name Indogermanic however is generally adopted and it would be impossible to supplant it by another. By the word Aryan
is generally understood a certain subdivision of the Indogermanic
family, viz. the Indo-Iranian, and therefore it would seem unsuitable
to use this name also for the whole Indogermanic family."

An unsuitable Santa:

A Santa understudy:

Transcript of
"Miracle on 34th Street"--

KRIS: Bye. Merry Christmas!

Well, young lady,
what's your name?

MOTHER: I'm sorry.
She doesn't speak English.

She's Dutch. She just came over.

She's been living
in an orphans home...

in Rotterdam ever since...

We've adopted her.

I told her you wouldn't
be able to speak to her...

but when she saw you
in the parade yesterday...

she said you were
"Sinter Claes"...

and you could talk to her.

I didn't know what to do.

KRIS: Hello. [Speaking Dutch]

[Speaking Dutch]

[Singing in Dutch]

DORIS: Now do you understand?

Related material:

Pope Approves Wider
Use of Latin Mass,

(Click on image for details),

and

Seminar für Klassische Philologie

der Universität
Basel--

Sprachwissenschaft

Indogermanistische Bibliothek.
Juneteenth Revisited--

A Long and Strange Day

Time and chance
yesterday:

Pennsylvania Lottery

June 26, 2007--
Mid-day 040
Evening 810

040:

A discussion of the work of Ralph Ellison:

"... why do you think he did not finish these novels? He wrote on
them for many, many years-- 40 years, I think."

"Yes, he worked for 40 years."

See Ellison's novel Juneteenth (New York Times review, 1999)

810:

August 10 (8/10), 2004 --

"But all things then were oracle and secret.
Remember the night when,
    lost, returning, we turned back
Confused, and our headlights
    singled out the fox?
Our thoughts went with it then,
    turning and turning back
With the same terror,
                into the deep thicket
   Beside the highway,
                at home in the dark thicket.

I say the wood within is the dark wood...."

-- Donald Justice, "Sadness"

John Baez, Diary, entry of June 22, 2007:

"On Tuesday the 19th....

I hiked down the completely dark but perfectly familiar gravel road with
my suitcase in hand, listening to the forest creatures. But then, I couldn't
find my parents' driveway! It was embarrassing: I could see their house
perfectly well, off in the distance, but it was so darn dark I couldn't
spot the driveway. It felt like a dream: after a long flight with many
delays, one winds up walking to ones parents house, lost in a spooky forest....

... I sort of enjoy this kind of thing, as long as
there's no real danger. It's also sort of scary. The well-lit grid of
civilization slowly falls away, and you're out there alone in the night...

Anyway: I considered hiking straight through the woods to my parents'
house, but I decided things were already interesting enough, so instead
I called my mom and ask her to drive down the driveway a bit,
just so I could see where it was. And so she did, and then it was obvious.

So, I got home shortly before midnight. A long and strange day.
My dad was already in bed, but I said hi to him anyway."

Related material:

Juneteenth through
Midsummer Night

For Anti-Christmas:

Object Lesson

"... the best definition
I have for Satan
is that it is a real
spirit of unreality."

M. Scott Peck,
People of the Lie

"Far in the woods they sang
     their unreal songs,
Secure. It was difficult
   to sing in face
Of the object. The singers
   had to avert themselves
Or else avert the object."

-- Wallace Stevens,
"Credences of Summer"

Today is June 25,
anniversary of the
birth in 1908 of
Willard Van Orman Quine.

Quine died on
Christmas Day, 2000.
Today, Quine's birthday, is,
as has been noted by
Quine's son, the point of the
calendar opposite Christmas--
i.e., "Anti-Christmas."
If the Anti-Christ is,
as M. Scott Peck claims,
a spirit of unreality, it seems
fitting today to invoke
Quine, a student of reality,
and to borrow the title of
Quine's Word and Object...

Word:

An excerpt from
"Credences of Summer"
by Wallace Stevens:

"Three times the concentred
self takes hold, three times
The thrice concentred self,
having possessed

The object, grips it
   in savage scrutiny,
Once to make captive,
   once to subjugate
Or yield to subjugation,
   once to proclaim
The meaning of the capture,
   this hard prize,
Fully made, fully apparent,
   fully found."

-- "Credences of Summer," VII,
by Wallace Stevens, from
Transport to Summer (1947)

Object:

From Friedrich Froebel,
who invented kindergarten:

From Christmas 2005:

Click on the images
for further details.

For a larger and
more sophisticaled
relative of this object,
see yesterday's entry
At Midsummer Noon.

The object is real,
not as a particular
physical object, but
in the way that a
mathematical object
is real -- as a
pure Platonic form.

"It's all in Plato...."
-- C. S. Lewis

At Midsummer Noon:

Raiders of
the Lost Stone

(Continued from June 23)

Scott McLaren on

Charles Williams:

"In Many Dimensions (1931)

Williams sets before his reader the

mysterious Stone of King Solomon,

an image he probably drew

from a brief description in Waite's

The Holy Kabbalah (1929)

of a supernatural cubic stone

on which was inscribed

'the Divine Name.'"

Related material:

Solomon's Cube,

Geometry of the 4x4x4 Cube,

The Klein Correspondence,
Penrose Space-Time,
and a Finite Model
Primitive Roots:

Midsummer Night
in the Garden
of Good and Evil

"I Put a Spell on You"
-- Nina Simone,
title of autobiograpy

"The voodoo priestess looked across the table at her wealthy client, a man on trial for murder: 'Now, you know how dead time works. Dead time lasts for one hour-- from half an hour before midnight to half an hour after midnight. The half-hour before midnight is for doin' good. The half-hour after midnight is for doin' evil....'"

-- Glenna Whitley, "Voodoo Justice," The New York Times, March 20, 1994

Last year on this date:

Zen and the Art:

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974:

"But what's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought... occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like... because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences."

"I'm not sure what you mean by classical reason."

"Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You've never had to understand it really. It's always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I'm talking about. Some people still condemn it because it doesn’t make 'sense.' But what's really wrong is not the art but the 'sense,' the classical reason, which can't grasp it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art's more recent occurrences, but the answers aren't in the branches, they're at the roots."

Related material:

D-Day Morning,
Figures of Speech,
Ursprache Revisited.

See also
the midnight entry
of June 23-24, 2006:
"Let the midnight special
shine her light on me."
Nina Simone
Tales from the Bully Pulpit:

Raiders of
the Lost Stone

continued from March 10, 2006

The Roman Imperial Eagle
and, according to
C. B. DeMille in 1932 --

The above photo is courtesy of
the Cecil B. DeMille Collection

at DVD Beaver.

HARVARD CRIMSON/ ALEX R. LEVIN

Sharon Stone lectures at
Harvard's Memorial Church
on March 14, 2005...

"Ready when you are, C. B."

Related material --
Log24, Oct. 26, 2002 --

Midnight in the Garden,
starring

Nina Simone
In the Details, continued...

Faust in Copenhagen:

A Struggle for
the Soul of Physics

By Gino Segrè

Illustrated. 310 pp.
Viking. $25.95.

Review in the June 24

New York Times Book Review:

"As though their knowledge of the quantum secrets came with the power of
prophecy, some three dozen of Europe's best physicists ended their 1932
meeting in Copenhagen with a parody of Goethe’s 'Faust.'....

It was only in retrospect that the silliness became profound. The
players were becoming possessors of 'a truth with implicit powers of
good and evil,' Gino Segrè writes in 'Faust in Copenhagen,' his
inventive new book about the era. And 'the devil... was in the
details.'" --George Johnson

Related material:

This week's entries
on Pauli and Faust,
the entries of

June 3 through June 6,
and the five entries
ending on April 7, 2005,
with "In the Details"