“It’s still the same old story….”
– Song lyric

The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6:

“An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through.”

There is a link to an article on St. Olaf College in Arts & Letters Daily today:

“John Milton, boring? Paradise Lost has a little bit of something for everybody. Hot sex! Hellfire! Some damned good poetry, too…” more»

The “more” link is to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

For related material on Paradise Lost and higher education, see Mathematics and Narrative.

Sympathy for Baird Bryant

“Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game”

– The Rolling Stones

“‘Don’t you want to
hear him call your name
when you’re standing
at the pearly gates?’
I told the Preacher ‘Yes, I do,
but I hope he don’t call today.’”

— Kenny Chesney, song at the CMA Awards on Wednesday, November 12, quoted here at 9:00 AM on Thursday, Novermber 13

Related material:

LA Times obituary for the experienced bohemian writer and filmmaker Baird Bryant, who died at 80 on Thursday, November 13. Bryant filmed parts of “Easy Rider” in 1968 and of the Altamont concert in 1969. He was apparently a member of the Harvard College Class of 1950.

A more complete account of Bryant’s life

Thirty references to the Devil in a book by Bryant

Solace With Interruptions

(Log24 entries for November 12, 13, and 14 — the day before Bryant’s death, the day of his death, and the day after)

Observations suggested by an article on author Lewis Hyde– “What is Art For?“–  in today’s New York Times Magazine:

Margaret Atwood (pdf) on Lewis Hyde’s
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art –

“Trickster,” says Hyde, “feels no anxiety when he deceives…. He… can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation.” (71) As Hyde says, “…  almost everything that can be said about psychopaths can also be said about tricksters,” (158), although the reverse is not the case. “Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists.” (159)

What is “the next world”? It might be the Underworld….

The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning to join, to fit, and to make. (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart.

For more about
“where things are
joined together,” see
 Eight is a Gate and
The Eightfold Cube.

From Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a fictional Communist on propaganda:

“It is necessary to hammer every sentence into the masses by repetition and simplification. What is presented as right must shine like gold; what is presented as wrong must be black as pitch.”

Thanks for this quotation to Kati Marton, author of The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World (Simon & Schuster, paperback edition Nov. 6, 2007). One of Marton’s nine was Koestler.

From another book related to this exodus:

“Riesz was one of the most elegant mathematical writers in the world, known for his precise, concise, and clear expositions. He was one of the originators of the theory of function spaces– an analysis which is geometrical in nature.”

– Stanislaw Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

And from Gian-Carlo Rota, a friend of Ulam:

“Riesz’s example is well worth following today.”

Related material: Misunderstanding in the Theory of Design and Geometry for Jews.

For a different approach to ethnicity and the number nine that is also “geometrical in nature,” see The Pope in Plato’s Cave and the four entries preceding it, as well as A Study in Art Education.

(Here CNAC stands for “China National Aviation Corporation,” an organization that in World War II, as part of the Army Air Transport Command, made high-altitude flights over the Himalayas.)

Related material on poetry:

• Red Dragon

Related material on space machines:

• St. Augustine’s Day, 2006,
• My Space, and
• The Number of the Beast

From a review of José Saramago‘s new novel, Death With Interruptions:

“The church has never been asked to explain anything,” the cardinal assures the prime minister. “Our specialty, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralization of the overly curious mind through faith.”

Related material:

Sept. 7, 2006- Birthday of Elizabeth I
Sept. 7, 2007- Madeleine L’Engle is Dead
Sept. 7, 2008- From the Finland Station

For some mythology relevant to the first two of these three dates, see “Damnation Morning” and The Big Time. For some non-mythology related to ballistics, faith, and the third of these dates, see Rudy Ratzinger vs. Joseph Ratzinger.

Riverrun
 
(The first word in Finnegans Wake.
See also the Log24 entries following
the death of Pope John Paul II.)

At Inside Higher Ed, Margaret Soltan (“UD”) discusses…

“moments of clarity [cf. related essay (pdf)] that seem, when you look at all of them together late in the day, to disclose our life’s otherwise hidden pattern, meaning, and flow.

‘Not far downstream was a dry channel where the river had run once, and part of the way to come to know a thing is through its death. But years ago I had known the river when it flowed through this now dry channel, so I could enliven its stony remains with the waters of memory. In death it had its pattern, and we can only hope for as much.’”

– A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean, a story about trout fishing and grace

Related material:

Maclean’s fellow author Kilgore Trout and the story he is said to be most proud of, about Bunker Bingo.

See also yesterday’s entry, Bob’s Country Bunker, and On Linguistic Creation.

Quantum of Solace

Lottery Numbers
for November 11, 2008:

PA midday 007, evening 628
NY midday 153, evening 069

Experienced readers of this journal will have little difficulty interpreting these results, except for 153. For that enigmatic number, see Object Lesson.